Winterspell (29 page)

“Clara, Anise is now not the only half-breed in Cane. Your father is John Stole, yes, and he is a human. But your mother . . .” Godfather's eyes softened, as they always did when he spoke of Hope Stole. “Your mother was a mage. Her blood runs in your veins. You have magic in you, Clara. And Cane is waking it up.”

I
n the aftermath of his words, a crash sounded from around the corner, answered by a peal of drunken laughter. Briefly Clara thought she would cry. Then she began to laugh along with the unseen merrymakers.

“You see,” Godfather began cautiously, as though
she
were the mad one, “long ago there was a rather sour young girl named Leska—”

Leska?
So her mother had taken a new name for herself in New York, a new identity. Leska in Cane, Hope in New York. Had everything been a lie? Would she rescue her father to find him one of Godfather's clockwork toys disguised with human skin?

“Are you going to sit here in the alleyway and tell me my mother's life story?” Clara said incredulously. “All right. Yes. Let me find a comfortable seat. . . .”

Godfather was watching her as if the wrong word would make her combust. Perhaps he wasn't too far off; Clara felt a bit like a spinning top teetering at the table's edge.

“It's true, love,” he said. “Leska was a mage once, a true Lady of the North. And a powerful one.”

Despite herself Clara burned with fascination at the idea of this Leska. A sour, powerful young girl. A Lady. Would her mother have looked the same here as she had in New York? Had she known she would someday leave Cane, meet a Beyond man, and have little Beyond children?

“What I don't understand,” she said, forcing evenness into her voice, “is why you kept this information from me for so long. Along with you being a mage, along with the cause of her death. How could you do it?”

“First and foremost, always, to keep you safe,” he said firmly. “Second, it was your mother's wish. Clara, she left here for a reason. She wanted a new life, and she certainly didn't want her girls becoming caught up in a past rife with violence and treachery.”

“Spare me your poetry. To keep me safe, to please my mother—I'll buy that, to a point.” She turned on him, fighting tears of astonishment. “But what about when Mother died, and Father buried himself in drink and Concordia, and Felicity came to me with nightmares, and I came to you? Even then you wouldn't give me an explanation, allow me some peace?”

“Oh, it would have given you peace, eh?” Now Godfather laughed. “To know that your mother was a witch and had been killed by monsters? Yes, surely that would have quelled the nightmares.”

Clara turned away. She did not want him to see her face crumpling, or see her steal glances at her arms, where gooseflesh prickled like needles piercing her skin. Maybe this conversation was deluding her senses, but her skin seemed grayer than it had a moment before. She wanted to laugh, but she was now too exhausted for it—and, if she were honest, too frightened. What did it mean, to be a mage? And was she
actually
contemplating this as truth?

As she stared at her increasingly alien hands, a thought came to her with the weary weight of one revelation too many, the puzzle pieces of the past few days clicking into place.

“Anise had the mages here killed,” she said dully. “Or did it herself, I suppose.”

Godfather was so quiet, so unearthly still. “I had wondered as much.”

“She killed Mother, too. Didn't she? Anise.”

“Not with her own hands, perhaps. But the loks obey her every
command, as does Borschalk.” He seemed disgusted. “No, it was him, with his pack of beasts. Him, at her command.”

I could kill her for it.
She thought of Nicholas, whispering of hate in the dark. She felt a sudden, passionate empathy for him.
I could kill them
all
for it
. The thought exploded through her, and the answering electric shock across her skin made her jump. She leaned hard against the wall, heaving.

Godfather held her up, murmured reassurances that came to her through a fog.

“You'll massacre Karra's handiwork,” she mumbled dizzily.

“What?”

In answer she laughed, gasping through the pain in her belly. She had heard of terrible sicknesses killing a person from the inside out, shutting down their organs, making them bleed out their orifices. Would this happen to her? She would bleed ice instead of blood.

“It has started, hasn't it?” Godfather whispered. “You've felt the charge of it, like electricity. You've noticed the cold, the wind.”

She shook her head wearily against the wall. “I don't know. . . .”

“You won't be able to hide yourself forever here. Imagine—imagine if you suddenly saw a demon prancing down the streets of New York. Something feared, something
unclean
.”

“An abomination,” she choked out.

“Not that
I
think you are one—far from it, dear Clara—but others will. You'll be torn apart. You'll be used. Come back to New York with me. I can keep you safe, help you through it. And perhaps if you leave Cane, it will halt the change. You needn't endure it. It could be painful.”

“No. No. I must find Father. . . .” Oh, it was
surging
through her, like someone had injected her with ice. “I have to help Nicholas.”

Godfather was beside himself. “Oh, yes? Help him do what, exactly? Rally the rebels? Reclaim his throne? Does he promise to help find your father? Clara and Nicholas, fighting for family and justice, side by side? Don't be a fool, Clara. He is a politician. You should know what
that means more than most. He will say anything to win your loyalty, and he is biding his time because he
knows
, Clara. He is waiting for your blood to change, for your abilities to manifest. And then he will use you.” He shook her gently. “He will
bind
you, and he will use you to fight.”

She could not hide a flicker of recognition at the word.

“He's spoken of binding, has he?” He looked a bit sorry for her, and that was worst of all. “Lovely, diplomatic process. We help the humans, and the humans help us. But binding is a one-way street. The humans own us. We have no power over them. Nicholas used to be able to tell me what to do, and I'd have no choice but to do it. My blood would
compel
me.”

He would cut things open, Nicholas had said.
And Drosselmeyer was bound to do it, as were the rest of the Seven.
Could Godfather's awful theory be true? No. Nicholas wouldn't do that. Hadn't he been kind to her? Hadn't he held her as she'd recovered from her nightmare?

Her nightmare. Clara's heart dropped, colder than her freezing skin. She had told him. She had told him of her blood turning to ice, and he had sat with her, patiently watching her face. For clues? For a sign that she did indeed have mage blood, as he so desperately hoped? And she was to go underground with him the next day. Trapped, like a patient being observed for signs of worsening disease.

Her head spun. She needed to get out of this cold. The skies were darkening, the trains howling.

“Come back with me.” Godfather took her hands in his. “I'll keep you safe. We'll wander the world. We'll take Felicity with us. I promise you.”

She stared at him, uncertain. She could go with him, and he
would
keep her safe; he always had. But something kept her rooted—a desire to confront Nicholas herself? An unwillingness to abandon her father?

Maybe—and this was a startling thought—to see where the ice in her blood would take her.

A sudden sharp light shone down upon them from above. A fat-bellied flying apparatus, like a mechanical balloon, hovered there, whirring.

“You!” Another light, from the end of the alleyway, and three slender figures.

Faeries.

Godfather cursed. “They've found me.”

“They've been following you?”

“I did not have the happy distraction of a train crash to get me through the wall. Only my own two hands and patchy magic.” He waved at the approaching faeries. “Hello there!”

Clara grabbed his arm. “Are you mad?”

“Do you know, I think I might be. But I also love you, Clara.” He kissed her forehead, and his eye shone. “Think of that, and think of what I told you.”

“Godfather?” He was frightening her. “What are you doing?”

“And remember, light on your feet, stay two steps ahead of them.”

“Godfather, please don't—”

“Run.”

He shoved her with one hand, and with the other he pulled a tiny clicking mechanism from his pocket. Clara recognized it as one of the failed experiments cluttering the shelves in his shop. Failed experiments with faery magic, that, as a mage, was not his to use.

He tossed the device at the faeries, and it exploded, spewing foul-smelling gas that set them coughing, and Clara, too. But it was enough of a diversion for her to slip past their grasping limbs—
light on your feet, stay two steps ahead
. Left, and another left, past the card tables where the sugared watched her progress with bleary disinterest. She heard the crack of faery spears behind her. Another explosion burst at her back, and cold was nipping at her heels—but the spear cracks overwhelmed everything else. She imagined them: nets of blue encircling Godfather, burning him.

She exited onto the main thoroughfare, remembering at the last moment that it would be best to appear unruffled. Stumbling to a stop, she dragged a shaking hand through her hair, made sure to display the band on her wrist. Bystanders stared at her, including a stern-looking pair of faery soldiers.

“Bad night,” she said, shrugging, and even when the faery soldiers hurried past her into the alleyway, spears at the ready, even when an explosion from behind her shook everything on the street, Clara continued on, past the muttering crowd and in the direction of Pascha House.

It was there, once through the grate and in the lonely passageway to the doxy quarters, that she allowed herself to relive the sound of Godfather's screams echoing down the alleyway as she'd fled. The world fell away beneath her feet, and she sobbed there, alone in the dirt.

* * *

Nicholas found her. Hours later, maybe? Impossible to tell.

“Clara.” He cursed softly, helping her up. “What happened to you? Where did you go?” Quietly: “We've been frantic, Clara.”

She shrank from his touch as if she were back on the terrace, with Nicholas pressed against her and Pascha watching.

Nicholas released her at once. “It's all right. I'm not touching you. I won't touch you.” He peered closely at her. “Would you like to go to your bed?”

Bless him for not asking questions. There were many things Clara did not know in this moment—whom to trust, for example, and whom to believe, and what was happening to her still-churning insides—but she did know that she would not tell Nicholas about Godfather. Not that she had seen him, not what he had told her of binding. Not that he was most likely dead now.

“I would,” she said quietly, and Nicholas was true to his word. He did not touch her on the way to their room. He waved away Afa, Bo,
and Karras, and when poor Glyn, looking beside herself with remorse, tried to apologize, Nicholas's glare was enough to silence her.

Clara was grateful. She did not want to be grateful to him, to feel anything toward him but pragmatic distrust—at least not until she determined how much of what Godfather had said was true. Still, when Nicholas turned to leave their room, she sat up in surprise.

“Where are you going?”

“To the common room,” he said. “I thought you might like—”

“I wouldn't.” She flushed, furious and confused, drowsy with grief.
I can keep a closer watch on him if he's in here.
That was reasonable enough. “Please stay.”

His face was so tender in that moment, and when they both lay in their beds, he stretched out his hand into the space between them. An offer of comfort? An apology.

She took it gladly. Pragmatic distrust could wait, at least until morning.

T
hey spent the next day preparing to leave, and most of it was spent in silence. Nicholas seemed to sense that Clara wanted it that way. A combination of nightmares—some about her bones being picked clean by a cold wind, and some about Godfather covered in ash—had kept her awake most of the night. It felt good to occupy her thoughts with mindless, menial tasks: packing food, cleaning her daggers, letting Karras—mournful that he would no longer get to dress her—fit her for traveling clothes.

Clara worked, letting the sounds of Afa and Bo's arguing about whether or not Bo would accompany them wash over her. Bo insisted that Clara and Nicholas needed a proper guide, and few knew the underground better than she did. Bo knew a couple of the people they would be traveling with, but she still wouldn't
trust
them, not with this. Afa, unmoved, declared it out of the question.

The two sisters left Clara and Nicholas alone together only once. Nicholas was sharpening his sword—
Godfather's
sword, Clara reminded herself, with a pang of silent despair. After a few minutes of this, he put down the sword and whetting stone, and turned to her.

“I have to say it. I know you probably don't want to talk about it, but if I don't say something, I'll tear myself to pieces.”

Despite herself Clara was touched by the earnestness of his expression. “All right,” she said carefully.

“Clara, I'm sorry.” He seemed ready to reach for her hands, but he stopped himself and knelt before her, tense and distraught. “You must know—
please
know—that I didn't want to kiss you like that. I would
never
force you to kiss me or touch me, or do anything you didn't want to. It was torment, pushing myself on you like that. I hated every second of it.”