The Unnaturalists (23 page)

“Place this in the palm of your left glove. It’ll work. You’ll see.” I entrust the rose petal to her with far more confidence than I actually feel. I’ve no idea whether what I’m doing is right or not. What if it doesn’t work? Will she have me sent to the Waste on principle?

“It had better,” she says.

She flounces back to her own rooms without further comment, and the maids descend again upon my hair. I look into my own eyes and I don’t like the haunted look I see there.

Hours later, steamed, plucked, scented, coiffed, and trussed like
some sort of high-class chicken, I critique myself in the mirror. The maids fuss here and there over a stray curl or a ribboned sleeve, but I’m as perfect as they can make me. I hardly recognize myself. My hair glitters with everpowder and is so tall I’ve no idea how I’ll get through the door. I feel guilty and repulsed to know that sylphid bones have been dusted all over my hair, but there’s not much to be done about it. I hope Piskel will forgive me.

Silver feathers swirl across my silk skirts. The Strix mask we saw in the shop is finished, festooned with onyxes and owl feathers. Part of me feels ridiculous, but another part cannot believe that this person I see is truly me. I hardly recognize myself in this deadly dangerous gown with its beguiling mask. Would anyone else? Would Hal? I lift my chin. He hasn’t seen fit to contact me. So much for his reassurance that he would come find me. Perhaps tonight I will meet my future husband.

I don’t like the hitch in my heart as I think of that possibility.

The maids leave me at the foot of the staircase, and I’m looking around bemusedly at the gold-framed portraits of Virulens gone by when I hear a flutter at the top of the stairs. Lucy comes down and her Phoenix-feather gown is so blue it nearly blinds me.

“I must say,” Lucy says, “you turned out even more handsomely than I hoped.”

Unsure what else to do, I curtsy deeply.

“Oh, stop that, you ninny. You do that to the other duchesses, not to me.”

“Yes, my lady.” I smile.

Lucy wags a gold-gloved finger at me. “Come along then, my dear Strix!”

Lucy takes my arm and draws me toward the waiting carriage.

“Lord Virulen . . .” I say, looking back over her shoulder as if the house will disgorge him at any moment. I’ve never actually seen him, though I’ve heard he’s quite hideous. He barely survived an attack from the Manticore while hunting in his youth. He killed the Manticore’s offspring, but lost his hand and his handsomeness in the process, if rumors are true.

“Is already at the Hall with the other Lords, drunk as a hoot owl, like as not,” Lucy says. That wicked smile plays about her lips, the one I both like and dread.

“Ah.”

The carriage pushes through the mad crowd. Lucy slides her fan case to the edge of the curtain so she can peer out. “Oh my,” she says, covering her mouth with her silk-gloved hand.

“Here, look.” She nods toward my end of the curtain, and I pull it away so I can peek out too.

A few Carnival revelers have gotten early into the wine, it seems. Or else they had only imagined putting on their party clothes. They dance down the streets naked, as unconcerned as if no one is watching.

Lucy laughs at my expression.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen the Uptown version of Carnival before, have you?” she asks. “It can get rather wild.”

“Can’t say as I have,” I say, dropping the curtain. “Nor that I want to, if that’s the way it’s going to be.”

Lucy laughs again and taps my knee with her fan case. “I can see we have much work to do with you.”

I’m afraid to know exactly what kind of work she’s talking about.

“Is this your first Ball? You almost looked too young to be out in Society that day we met.”

“Not quite my first.” I don’t want to recount last summer’s horrid Pre-Debutante Ball. I managed to rip my dress by catching it under a chair leg to my shame and Aunt Minta’s everlasting horror.

“This, I’m sure, will be the most interesting one you’ve attended yet. I’m not sure what Carnival will be like in the Tower; honestly the Imperial Balls tend to be terribly dull. And the clocks that woman has all over the palace! She’s insanely obsessed with them.”

“Clocks?”

“Yes, it’s quite bizarre. Clocks. Everywhere. Usually all telling the wrong time. And the ticking!” Lucy rolls her eyes. She snaps open her fan and her bergamot perfume fills my nose.

“I’ve never been.”

Lucy rolls her eyes again. “Believe me, it will be quite the education! Just pray to the saints that the Empress doesn’t decide to hold every function in the Tower from here on out!”

The wild Carnival revelers dance everywhere, making offerings to the saints where their effigies sit in state at the Uptown Square. An audience crowds around a group of performers as they act out the Pageant of Saint Newton and the Apple, but the carriage turns up Tower Hill before I can see the apple actually hit the saint on the head.

The way up is steep and so narrow that only one carriage can pass at a time. The city falls away behind us. Only the Imperial Refinery’s yellowish-green plumes of smoke are visible above the dense thorn hedge that chokes the Hill.

Finally, we top the Hill and come under the Tower’s great battlements. A contingent of Raven Guards lines the courtyard, watching silently as we disembark and are shown toward the Tower’s Grand Entrance. Their cousins, the tower ravens, perch all along
the rooftops, watching them with eyes as eerily empty and yet dangerously alert as the Guards’. The stench of moldering guano almost overpowers me; the walls of the inner buildings are streaked white with it.

My lungs compress, as if filled with dark, damp feathers.

“Can you feel them?” Lucy says. “The nullwards?”

I nod and hurry her inside.
Yes
. I will soon faint if I don’t stop feeling it. Now that I know I’m a witch, I know why nullwards make me feel so odd.

We join a long line of partygoers being searched by the Guard and security wights for weapons. Although the women aren’t searched as thoroughly as the men, even we don’t escape scrutiny. When one Guard attempts to lift Lucy’s skirts with a stick to see if she’s hidden anything under her voluminous blue layers, she fluffs them at him like an offended ostrich and takes my arm in hers.

“Really! Of all the nerve!” she says loudly enough for everyone to hear.

The Raven Guard steps back, expressionless as always. But his head swings to follow us, the white membrane shuttering his flat eyes in a way that makes me shiver.

Lucy is about to say more, but I drag her along past the cloakroom door. “Enough,” I murmur, even as I see my first clock.

Then I look down the corridor. She’s right. Clocks are
everywhere
. Cuckoo clocks, grandfather clocks, water clocks, clocks so ornate I’m not sure how they work. They fill the hall with a whirring hum that trembles below the rise and fall of conversation. When they all strike the hour, I wonder if anyone’s eardrums will survive intact.

Lucy makes a little growling noise under her breath, but lets
me lead her into a vast room of arched, marble gables and circular chandeliers that blaze like wheels of light. It looks more like an ancient chapel than a ballroom, and it’s filled to bursting with people in Carnival dress. And there are yet more clocks.

My mouth goes dry as the herald announces us, and the room falls momentarily into silence save for the time-ticking hum.

Lucy barely notices. She’s seen people she knows and saunters toward them. I follow, glimpsing the empty throne at the end of the hall, flanked by gilded candelabras fitted with antique black candles.

It is the Companion’s duty to be her lady’s eyes and ears at any public function,
the
Companion Primer
had said.
Thus should she hang as gracefully in the background as a spray of flowers, present, beautiful, and yet not calling undue attention to herself.

Lucy maneuvers through the crowd, while I keep a wary eye on everyone who meets her, half afraid the Guard will haul her away for her earlier impudence out in the hall. There are several young suitors, some more graceful about their intentions than others, but none of them are the Heir to Grimgorn. What if he isn’t here?

Apparently all the highest-ranking nobles are missing. After Lucy manages to get rid of the most recent gawker, she says behind her fan, “These are the ones who couldn’t get into the smoking rooms with the other Lords. Wait until Father gets here. Then we’ll see something, I wager.”

“The Heir to Grimgorn, perhaps?”

Lucy snaps her fan shut and taps me hard on the arm with it. “Shhhhh.” A miniature version of that wicked smile plays about her lips. “The rumors are already smoldering. No need to set them fully alight!”

I nod.

“And speak of the devils,” Lucy says, nodding toward one of the many arched doorways. “Here they come.”

The Lords enter in wreaths of drifting cigar smoke and bright frock coats, like a bevy of peacocks shooed before a heavy fog.

The last of them limps along with the help of a wolf-headed cane, and, unoriginally, wears a silver wolf-mask to match it. His clothing is fine, but rather plain for one of the most powerful peers of the Empire—black with a bit of lace trim and silver embroidery here and there.

He halts for a moment before spotting us.

Silver glints between the lace of his cuff and his leather glove. Rumors are true. The hand that grips the cane is not flesh but
myth
work.

“Father.” Lucy curtsies.

I quickly follow suit.

A single steel blue eye rakes me from behind the wolf-mask. The edge of a thick scar snakes above his left temple between the mask and his wig and the left eyehole is completely dark. “And this is the one you hired for your Companion?” he says. His voice is gritty, as though the inside of his throat is also scarred.

“Yes, Father.”

“Isn’t she a bit young?”

I try not to bristle. I shouldn’t expect him to treat me like anything more than a servant; that’s what I am to him, after all.

Lucy looks over at me and pulls me as close to her side as her feathered skirts will allow.

“She’s a good deal more talented and intelligent than most older women I’ve met, Father.”

He stares at me again. “As long as the forms are met,” he says finally.

Whatever other scorn he wants to heap upon my head is interrupted by a blast of the herald’s trumpet.

“Her Most Scientific Majesty the Empress Johanna and the Imperial Heir Olivia!
Scientia et Imperatrix Vincit!
”

Everyone stops what they’re doing. If they’re seated, they stand. If they’re already standing, they drop their masks and put their right hands over their hearts.

It’s difficult to see much from a curtsy, but my first impression is of a tiny woman swallowed by her black gown, carrying a gnarled staff on which a large white raven sits. Its red eyes sweep the room and lock with mine for a moment. I shiver and bow my head even lower.

When the Empress sits, she signals that we may relax, candlelight winking off her beringed fingers. Her high collar keeps her head stiffly upright; I’m reminded of forbidden pictures of the ancient queen of Old London. Her face is peculiarly mannish; I can’t help noticing her uncannily close resemblance to her ancestor, First Emperor John Vaunt.

Next to her throne stands a fair-haired girl perhaps the age of the Tinker thief—Olivia the Imperial Heir. She’s an anemic flicker compared to her royal mother’s smothering darkness.

And when the candles dance just right . . . I try not to stare too hard, but it looks as if something binds the princess’s lips and hands. Dark threads that only I can see. Someone doesn’t want her to speak. I can see how I might unravel the end of the thread and free whatever’s being held on her tongue. The urge to unbind her is so powerful, I lift my hand before I realize what I’m doing.

Then I see a Guard pass outside the door. And the red eyes of the ghost raven. Right here, right now, it’s far too dangerous.

Something about the spell wards people away from her. No suitors come to court her; no courtiers flatter her. She stands quite alone in the hall of clocks and Carnivalgoers as if she belongs to another world and has been momentarily frozen here for display.
Like an Elemental in the Museum
. I feel a terribly sympathy for her.
Is she a witch, too? And who has bespelled her?

Musicians tentatively begin the first waltz. Lord Virulen murmurs to Lucy and nods to me before replacing his mask and stumping off to where a crowd of other nobles stand. I’ve not yet seen Master Grimgorn. I must have missed him in the crowd.

As soon as her father leaves, young lordlets rush to find space on Lucy’s dance card. Underneath it all, the clocks hum, inevitably ticking toward the symphony of sound that will deafen us at the top of the hour.

“Vespa!” Lucy says, snapping my gaze to her face. She’s looking at me with a mixture of annoyance and impatience; clearly, she’s tried to get my attention before now.