Mechanica (20 page)

The workshop soon grew too small, and besides, looking at the collected parts reminded me too much of the whole that I still insisted on thinking about only in the vaguest of terms. I visited the forest nearly every night, bringing out springs and wheels and joints and panes of glass that were either too big for the workshop or too intimidating for me to look at.

So it was that Fin found me one evening pushing a large wheel through the shed door. I was struggling; between smithing, glass blowing, all my chores, and heaving parts out to the forest, I was the strongest I’d ever been, but the wheel was an awkward, cumbersome height and the door was narrow.

“Hello, Nick,” he said, nodding his head in an almost-bow. He grabbed a spoke as he greeted me, and with his help, it rolled inside easily, as if of its own free will.

I hadn’t expected him to be quite so strong, so I’d over-estimated how much I still had to push. I tripped after it, losing my balance, the wheel rolling away from us both, where it came to a wobbling, slanted halt on the other side of the shed. For a moment, I felt only relief that the wheel hadn’t dented somehow—it had taken several nights’ work to make it—and then I realized that Fin had caught me as I stumbled.

It was horribly embarrassing, looking up into his face with his arms around me. Since the moment I’d met him, I’d wanted him to think me capable, stable. And since that moment, I’d felt as if he’d only seen me at my most incompetent.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to say, looking into his eyes, not sure what I was apologizing for.

He shook his head, but didn’t let me go. His mouth played with the beginnings of a smile.

Then . . . oh, I had no business doing it, but I thought of the sculpture he’d given me, all his kindness and help, the warmth of his arms as he held me up—all the conversations I’d had with him in my mind . . . I kissed him.

I kissed him.

His lips were warm, warmer than his hands, and softer than I’d thought a man’s lips would be.

For a sweet moment, he kissed me back.

Then I felt his arms turn stiff, and he let me go, almost dropping me after all. He was still looking at me, but I couldn’t read his face. “Nick . . .”

“I’m sorry!” I said, knowing exactly what I was apologizing for this time.

“No, I . . .” He stepped forward. He looked at me with those dark eyes.

There was nothing I could do but look back.

He stepped closer, and with the careful steadiness of someone performing an experiment, he touched his lips to mine again.

His kiss was thoughtful now, and curious, and his arms wrapped tentatively around my waist.

I brought my hand to the back of his neck and leaned into him, sliding my fingers into the curls at his nape. His arms clasped tighter around me. I sighed just a little against his mouth, feeling that it was almost too much, all this newness, this feeling that there was space and light inside me I was only just learning to notice. Every part of me down to my fingertips felt like warm glass, melting into some new shape, my edges beginning to glow. I wanted to do nothing but change this way, pressed against his body, his warmth and goodness, forever.

Fin pulled away.

He looked down at the snow that had scattered over the floor. “I . . . I brought the supplies you asked for,” he said, motioning toward a large oilcloth sack leaning against the shed door. “And Caro said to—Caro, she—” He glanced outside, his face unreadable. “I have to go,” he said. “I won’t be able to come back for . . . a while. I’ll see you at the Exposition.” He looked at me again, finally, and offered me a smile that was too quick and bright.

Then he turned and left, almost running, and the dark woods hid him from me.

I should have called after him, spoken with him, so that maybe we could have come to understand each other, before everything that happened later. But I was still standing there, shocked, probing the empty space in my heart and wondering if I could fill it with anything but Fin.

I had gone somewhere far away. When the shadow of an owl swept suddenly across the ground, I blinked and the world around me came back into focus. I had been looking somewhere else, somewhere inside myself, and at the same time, I had gone back to the palace with Fin, had wandered with him through the cold, snowy forest, where so few people are permitted to walk.

But I could not walk back through the forest with Fin, even if he had wanted me to, even if he hadn’t pushed away from our second kiss.

And even if (the most important reason, I reminded myself) I didn’t have work to do.

First I checked to make sure my runaway wheel hadn’t done any damage. Thankfully, it had continued the trajectory I’d given it before Fin joined in, and it had rolled to the shed’s far wall to join its twin. I inspected each wheel, running my hands over their rubber rims, testing the resiliency of their steel spokes. These wheels each came up to about the height of my shoulders; while light for their size, they had still been a challenge to roll up the cellar stairs and out to the ruins. I was glad that the next time they moved, they’d be attached to an axle and carrying
me
instead of the other way around.

There were two other, smaller wheels next to these that didn’t even come up to my hips. I’d been able to carry them easily, hoisted over my shoulders, and I only checked them again now to make sure the cold atmosphere in the shed hadn’t done them any harm. But they, too, were sound; I’d have been a poor designer if I hadn’t considered changes in temperature. Mother had told me so in one of our very first engineering lessons.
Nothing exists in your mind the way it does in the real world,
she’d said.
One must always account for the vagaries of truth.

But I had. I had designed these wheels to survive fire or flood, drought or blizzard. She had taught me well, and I had done both of us proud.

I settled into the work, trying to pretend that my skin wasn’t still glowing with remembered warmth, that it didn’t matter that Fin had kissed me like that and then left. It was hard, at first, but the physical effort of joining the wheels to their axles and the axles to each other, and then hammering on the base of the carriage frame, soon distracted me well enough. This was still something I wanted more than I wanted Fin.

The bottom of the carriage’s steel frame unfurled between the wheels like a spiny gray flower. I had to step into it to finish the top, and it felt strange to do so; I had never been
inside
one of my creations before. There was an intimacy about it, an intimacy with my own dreams that I hadn’t quite expected. Even though there was only the darkness of the shed around me, I could almost see the admiring crowds, and through the silence of the forest, I heard their whispered murmurs of appreciation, their applause as I swept by. I lifted a hand to wave back at them, and I started to smile; then I laughed at myself and returned my hand to the steel spacer I was trying to place.

Finally the frame was complete, the skeleton of a sphere. The next step would be to install the curved glass panels I’d started forging the other day. I had at least one more trek out of the forest and back before my day would be over.

I hopped out of the carriage frame and made for the door—but a thin brown package on the floor caught my eye. It was too small and light to be one of Fin’s sculptures, to be anything but a letter. . . . What if he’d written to tell me about his feelings for me? To tell me he was dreaming up stories about us, just as I was? I told myself I was being foolish, but even so, as I unfolded the letter, my heart gave a quick leap. . . .

And then I recognized Caro’s handwriting. After all, I chided myself, when had Fin ever left me more than a brief, businesslike note? Foolish indeed.

Still, holding Caro’s letter was like holding her hand, the hand of a friend, and even in my disappointment, I found myself comforted. I couldn’t stand in the light of her friendship without feeling warm.

This was a much shorter missive than her usual:

Nick—

I’ve finally managed to scrape together what I think is enough money for a course of lovesbane, and I’m going to the Night Market to try for a bargain. Come with me? The Night Market is a sight to see, and safer by far for two girls together than one alone.

I won’t have time to check for your reply, so meet me here Wednesday night at ten if you can. We’ll have lots to talk about too, I’m sure.

—Caro

Wednesday; that was tonight. I tried to consider the work before me, everything I still had to do if I wanted to get to the Exposition in a few short weeks. But as soon as I read Caro’s note, I knew that I would go; I’d wanted to see the Night Market ever since Fin had mentioned it. Fey goods and magic trinkets, trading with Faerie going on right under the King’s nose, in Esting City? It sounded marvelous, and who knew what helps to my inventions I might find there. Why, I might even find out what the Ashes really were. . . .

And I could go with Caro, my new friend who felt like someone I’d known all my life, my friend who was almost the sister I’d longed for. That reason was the best of all.

When I returned home, I counted the money I’d been able to save from my Market earnings: I had fifty-two crowns and an odd assortment of the smaller silver half-crowns and brass pennies.

Though it was nothing to what Mother used to make, I felt shockingly wealthy. I allowed myself a brief daydream about the kinds of wonders I might buy at the Night Market; perhaps there would be something that could inspire my next project, after the Exposition was over. I put thirty crowns—a hefty sum, but this was a rare opportunity—in a bag and tied it into my sash, where it rested with a pleasantly heavy weight against my hip. I tucked ten pennies in another part of my sash and tied it again. After I’d wrapped myself in hat, shawl, and coat, the evening had darkened to night, and it was time to leave.

That night, Caro and I walked up to a moldy-looking pub door on the outskirts of Esting City. Caro lifted one hand, clad in red fingerless mitts that were badly frayed, up to the moldy wood. She knocked four times.

A voice, seemingly close enough that the speaker’s lips could have brushed my ear, whispered in a low, menacing grumble, “What are you?”

Beside me Caro shivered; the voice must have sounded too close for comfort to her as well. She squeezed my hand, and we answered in unison, “Friends of the Fey.” The words seemed somehow to hang in the air after we spoke them, to echo and twist as if they were being tested.

Finally, the disembodied voice spoke again. “Then enter.” I had to try hard not to wince away from the closeness of it, the way it seemed to linger and caress my ears, my neck. It took me a moment to notice that nothing had happened; I’d expected that the door would open after we spoke the password Caro had told me in the woods, or at least that we would be given further whispered instructions.

I looked to Caro, but she simply nodded and strode forward . . . straight through the wooden door.

Our hands still clasped, I felt myself being dragged, and I followed her. I had just enough time to wonder if the door was an illusion before my hand entered the wood and I felt a curious squeezing sensation, one that slithered up my arm and over my whole body as I struggled to stay with my friend. I felt hundreds of large, blunt splinters digging into my shoulders, my legs, my hips, my face. The smell of mold and crumbling wood overwhelmed me, and the pressure reached my torso, pushing the air from my lungs. As I gasped, my mouth and nose filled with dry, tasteless dust.

I coughed and sputtered, but suddenly the dust vanished, and the squeezing, splintery feeling passed to my back and was gone. I could breathe again, and I did so in frantic gasps.

As my eyes adjusted to the low light, I looked down the dark, crowded passageway before me; it seemed to go on forever, receding into blackness. The air was hot, almost oppressively so, and everywhere there were sounds of people chattering and of laughter, some friendly, some incredibly sinister. I coughed again.

I saw that Caro was watching me. I thought I must look ridiculous, gasping and coughing to rid myself of invisible dust, and that she would laugh. But her face was concerned.

“Hold your breath next time,” she said. “Sorry, I should have told you. The last time it was under a bridge, so there was no need.”

“When you went through it like that, I thought . . .”

“That it wasn’t real? Fin thought the same thing when I first brought him. It’s real enough, just with a passage charm put on it. Goes a bit funny when there’s a solid door instead of just a space. Not sure how they work, myself, but they’re none too pleasant, anyway.”

I managed a chuckle. “That’s one way to describe them.”

Now that I could breathe again, excitement at seeing the Night Market welled up inside me, drowning out the brief panic I’d felt. Everywhere I looked there were memories, things Father used to trade before the quarantine: paper patterned with flowers that blossomed and wilted and blossomed again; Fey wines and food and drink that Mother used to order, even clary-bush tea; small lights in glass spheres that thrummed like heartbeats; teapots, platters, and plates that held heat indefinitely; glamours for beauty and wisdom and luck. A small distance away, I saw a small booth covered entirely in narrow vials filled with viscous, whiskey-colored liquid: ombrossus oil. It was shockingly expensive.
Thank you, Mr. Candery,
I thought, eyeing the sign that priced the oil at fifteen crowns a gram. I wondered if I’d ever finish learning the extent of what he’d done for me.

There was a heavy, sweet smell of sinnum in the air, spun through with traces of yeast and burnt sugar. I looked around for sinnum buns like Mr. Candery used to make, although it wouldn’t have surprised me if at least some of the dark, spicy scent was coming from the ombrossus booth or from a potion already in use. Everyone at the Night Market had something to hide.

I thought I should probably help Caro look for a lovesbane vendor, or at least try to find some Ashes, but it had been hours since my meager supper, and the scent memory of sinnum was overwhelming: the soft round buns, spice-flecked and tender inside, and coated with a dark, bitter caramel glaze . . . but even if they were here, they could never be as good as Mr. Candery’s. . . .