A Breath of Frost (17 page)

“Murderer!” she squawked, shoving back at him. “I didn’t kill anyone!” But hadn’t she told Cormac that Margaret’s death was her fault? Wasn’t she the one who’d broken her mother’s
spell bottle? Even unwittingly, had she opened the way for a murder? Did that make her culpable?

The cage loomed, lightning flashing off the hinges. Three shackled witches huddled near the door, hissing at her.

Not culpable enough to let herself be dragged away in chains, she decided.

She looked over her shoulder at Cormac, who stalked behind Emma and the Keeper. The rain fell in shining gray sheets, like windowpanes falling from the sky and shattering on the stones. “Cormac, please.”

“Don’t make me ask you again.” The man gripped the back of her head, fingers knotting in her rain-tangled hair. She cursed and elbowed him in the nose. He let go, howling as his blood dripped onto the ground. She’d never admit she’d hit him accidentally. And when he grabbed for her, she decided that while she didn’t have Gretchen’s skills with a sword, she might just be a biter. Her teeth scraped deeply enough to draw blood. One of the witches slapped her iron manacle to the bars like iron applause.

Cormac stepped in front of her, knocking the other Keeper aside. “Mind yourself, Orson.”

“She broke my ruddy nose! And then she bit me! Bind her!”

“No hope for it now,” Cormac told her quietly. He was gentle but unyielding. He might not let her be hurt or insulted.

But he also wouldn’t save her.

He forced her up the steps and into the cart, the gate clanging shut. She felt it in her teeth. The rain stopped. “Told you she was making it rain,” one of the women muttered.

A man reclined in the back corner as if he was at his club. Water ran off the brim of his beaver hat. “It’s useless to fight the Greybeards on the bridge, lass,” he said.

Emma shivered, curling into herself. “I thought they were Keepers?”

“Greybeard’s a nickname,” he explained. “After the gray witch bottles they use to trap us.”

Emma swallowed. That didn’t sound encouraging. “Where are they taking us?” she asked as the cart rumbled into motion, clattering down the lane. Cormac kept pace on a huge brown horse. Behind them the bridge filled with people again, emerging warily from shops and alleys. Goblins ran behind, tossing rotten fruit at the cart. Sweet moldy pulp burst under the wheels.

“To the ship, where else?” one of the women snapped. She was barefoot and there were little silver bells on a chain around her ankle. They sang out when she moved and when she noticed Emma looking, she snarled. “Mind yourself, morsel.”

Emma drew back. She could have sworn she felt lightning crown her head like the antlers of the stag in the park. The cage pressed on her, as if she was wearing manacles and a collar like some of the other prisoners. Faces watched them pass through shop windows. She thought she saw a gargoyle crouched over a gutter move.

When they reached the end of the bridge, the air shimmered. As the horses pulled them between the carved gateposts, Emma felt a strange pressure in her head. Behind her, London Bridge looked the same as it always did, crowded with fine carriages, farmers’ carts coming into the city with baskets of early
onions, radishes, and strawberries, and boatmen shouting insults at one another on the river below. The smell of strange flowers and fruits and wild creatures became ordinary water, fish, and horse droppings. It was like any other late morning, rain clouds breaking apart and crowds coming together.

Just as Emma was hoping a passerby on the street would come to the aid of people locked in a cage, the Keeper sitting next to the driver draped them in thick gray wool. The last thing she saw was Cormac’s dark, inscrutable gaze. He seemed to be trying to tell her something, but she was encased in stuffy shadows before she could figure it out. They rattled back and forth on the hard wooden benches as the horses moved onto rougher roads. She tried to wriggle her hand through the bars to catch the end of the heavy material. She only managed to force two fingers out and they cramped as she contorted them. The edge of the drape fluttered just out of reach.

“It’s no use,” the man said again, his Scottish brogue thick and unconcerned. “We’ve been charmed. Even if you managed to uncover us, all they’d see is a cart full of goats.”

“Goats?” she echoed. She couldn’t help but feel insulted.

“And the road under our wheels is jinxed. Any witch who knows what we are would find himself having all manner of accidents if he tried to reach us. Didn’t your mam teach you anything, lass?”

The cart came to a stop, the wheels groaning like old men on a cold winter’s night. The witch in the collar began to weep and claw at her throat, wailing. Emma clutched the edge of the bench, anxiety burning in her belly. She could smell dead fish
and muck, and from the sheer volume of voices and screeching gulls, she assumed they were at the docks. The stifling curtain fell off the bars and the sunlight pierced between the captives. She felt it.

But she couldn’t see it.

The quality of the light changed, making the inside of her eyelids pink as a seashell. No matter how hard she tried, they wouldn’t open. The rose-petal darkness was inescapable.

“I can’t see,” she squeaked. Her lids were sewn shut. She could feel the tiny stitches between her lashes with her fingertips. They didn’t hurt but panic shivered through her. Shallow breaths were torn from her like autumn leaves in a storm.

“It’s a blinding spell,” someone told her, as if she were a child fretting over imaginary monsters under the bed. “It’ll fade when they want it to.”

She bit down hard on her lower lip when it threatened to wobble. She wouldn’t show them an ounce of weakness. They wouldn’t feed on her fear and confusion like beasts. She wouldn’t be a feast. They’d choke on her first. She’d see to it.

Just as soon as she could actually
see
again.

Lifting her chin and wrapping herself in hundreds of years of aristocratic upbringing, she shuffled forward toward the cart steps. A hand closed around her elbow, guiding her to the ground.

Without warning, the blinding spell fell away.

Sunlight stabbed at her. Emma blinked back tears, waiting for her sight to readjust. The stark whiteness faded until only the edges of the river caught the light and magnified it. The
Thames was sluggish in its banks, pushing listless brown water between fine ships and tiny rowboats. Mud larks gathered on the banks, scavenging for lost shipments, coins, or the teeth of abandoned bodies.

She stood on the edge of a gangplank pressed into service as a bridge to a huge ship waiting in the middle of the river. She didn’t need to be told the ship and the gangplank were both spelled, since no one noticed them at all, except for one scrawny dog barking at them from a rowboat. The ship drifted quietly, undisturbed. It was painted dark blue and white, with floral ornamentation wrapped around scowling gargoyles. Knotted ropes of every color dangled from the rails. The sails were stitched and marked with symbols. The mermaid figure-head was carved out of mahogany and painted in painstaking detail.

“Is that a p-prison hulk?” she stammered, her throat seizing. She’d read about them in the newspaper. They were decommissioned ships used as prison facilities for criminals. Murderers. She thought of Margaret again.

“On with ye,” Orson barked, nudging her in the small of her back with the tip of a dagger. One of the witches was already crossing to the ship.

Emma stepped carefully, the wooden boards bending under her weight. It wasn’t much wider than a bench and felt considerably less sturdy. Far below, the river teemed with activity. She considered jumping into the dirty water and swimming to safety. The moment her foot touched the gangplank, her eyes snapped shut of their own accord.

It was so violent and unexpected, she jerked back and nearly toppled off. Adrenaline raced through her, making her dizzy. The sudden darkness was disorienting and she froze, swearing until she ran out of words. Orson laughed harshly before his dagger poked her again.

“Thought about jumping, didn’t you?” He chortled. “Now you’ll walk blind.”

The walk was longer and more excruciating than she could have imagined. Her steps were tiny, dragging inch by careful inch across the wooden planks. A gull’s piercing cry startled her and she slipped. The sound of water lapping at the ship’s decorated hull seemed very close. The dog was still barking. She forced herself forward, muscles tensing so hard her legs felt as if they were made of bricks. She could very well imagine the hundred ways she could die horribly by falling off the gangplank.

And the thousands of ways she could die horribly if she made it to the ship.

Ursa Major, the Plough, Orion the Hunter, Hydra
. She recited star constellations to herself until her heart didn’t feel quite so much like a ripe strawberry about to burst on the vine. She was afraid she’d run out of stars.

Sweat curled her hair by the time she reached the ship and blinked her sight back. The first thing she saw were clear glass wine bottles set close together like fence posts. Each held a floating eyeball that bobbed in seawater, always watching.

Keepers waited on the deck, stern-faced and armed with swords, pistols, and strange silver nets. Green glass balls filled with bits of colored string and herbs hung overhead. The wind
snapped the sails like dragons’ wings. The other captives were led away into the shadows of the deck.

She never thought she’d miss their company until she was marched down a set of steps into the dark heart of the ship, alone.

She was taken to a room lit
with oil lamps glinting off bottles of every size and description. Elegant wine bottles, squat jam jars, and lamp globes hung from hooks, interspersed with hundreds of clay jugs with long necks and curved handles. They were locked in birdcages, wooden chests, and baskets, and secured to the wall in box-like shelves. They were filled with bird bones, hair, brightly colored threads, rowan berries, silver needles, what looked like tiny withered hearts, and iron nails. When the lamplight flickered, she could have sworn she saw ghostly faces pressing against the glass from inside the clear bottles. One jar was packed with teeth, floating in some kind of green liquid. The clay bottles shook and trembled when she stared at them too hard.

Orson gave the bottles a wide berth as he stepped up to bow at three men waiting behind a carved mahogany screen. They were hidden in a shallow alcove and she could only see enough
of them through the openings in the carving to know they were old, with white hair, except for the one in the middle, who didn’t have any hair at all. Orson shoved her roughly to the middle of the room. “Kneel in front of the magisters.”

“I think not,” Emma burst out. Kneeling was the last straw. You could only steep in fear so long before you began to feel numb to it.

He forced her down until her knees hit the witch knot painted in white on the floor. Iron shavings stood in mounds around her, like glittering ant hills. She felt weighed down, with a pressure in her head, the way she did before a particularly vicious storm.

The magisters were stern and silent until Emma couldn’t help but shift from one knee to the other. Her hair was damp and stuck to her neck, her walking dress streaked with mud and stained with fruit pulp. She’d never felt less like an earl’s daughter.

“Emma Charlotte Day, daughter of Theodora Lovegrove.” They used her mother’s maiden name and didn’t mention her father at all. They also hadn’t technically asked her a question so she stayed stubbornly silent. Sometimes fighting petty was better than not fighting at all, whatever Cormac might have to say about it.

The magisters exchanged disapproving glances. The bald one drummed his fingers on the table in front of them behind the screen; another made notes on a sheet of parchment. She heard the scratch of the quill. She knew what they were doing. They wanted to intimidate her into babbling like a child or dissolving into tears. But she’d made her curtsy to the queen in a ballroom full of pompous courtiers. She faced debutantes on
a daily basis. She’d even sat through a three-hour supper with her father once. She wouldn’t crack so easily.

“You flout our rules. You would be an oathbreaker like your mother?”

“My mother’s ill, not an oathbreaker.” She frowned. “And what rules?”

Cormac’s warnings sounded in her head again.
Don’t lie. Don’t fight
.

Her own warning battled his:
Don’t trust Cormac
.

Someone in the confines of the ship screamed. The bottles shivered at the sound. She cleared her throat so her voice would sound stronger than she felt. “I don’t know your rules enough to break them.” But she was feeling decidedly in favor of learning them for the express purpose of demolishing them.

Fear, apparently, made her contrary.

“Then know this.” The magisters were still lecturing her. She probably ought to pay attention. “Ignorance will not save you from the consequence of the witch bottle if you do not answer truthfully.”

It was clearly a threat, even if it didn’t make sense to her.