Chapter Twenty-Six Patrick
On Patrick and Polly Prescott’s first meeting, she’d been face down on a pier, her nose bent and bleeding against the sodden wood.
She’d been grateful to see him that time, and doubly grateful for the bullets in her two assailants.
As he recalled, she was conscious as he rolled their sorry bodies off the docks and into the wash. They would catch in the nets, or else curl bloated against the pylons, he told her. She didn’t need to worry.
He saw her brand then, the whorls of Idia’s hair fanning out beneath the hem of her sleeve, and he helped her to her feet.
She’d been just as rattled then as she was now: eyes wide as a deer’s, her breaths escaping in tiny gasps. Patrick had guessed she was moments from collapse. “What’s your name?”
“Polly,” she’d murmured. “Prescott.”
He’d pitied her. How could he not? Artisan or no, there was a certain place in hell for a pig who used his body against an innocent. “And what breed of swank are you, Polly Prescott?”
It was there in the paper cuts lacing her fingertips, in the mere fact that she was in Dorser, too far east of the river for any lady with a brand on her arm.
And he couldn’t simply leave her there on the docks or dump her in some Dorser hovel, could he? Patrick was hardly a gentleman, but he was no devil, either.
Besides, he thought Kenton could use a Scribbler.
And she had been useful. Far more so than even he’d bargained for.
Before Polly, messages were sent via Otto and Scottie, through the tunnels.
It could take days to send a warning, a week to settle a deal.
With Polly, the raided towns received necessary bluff sooner.
Betrayals were caught in the wind and silenced quickly.
The coppers in Kenton sent their missives by Scribbler to the National House, and no one came to see what had become of their quiet parish in a continent booming in bullets and smoke.
That is, until Polly had sold them to the slaughterhouse in a single scribble.
Until she’d undone an entire rebellion.
Now here she was, dressed in high fashion, gambling in Morland—the prize for setting Kenton Hill alight and bringing the House a living, breathing Alchemist.
Patrick breathed deeply. In their line of business, the last man standing was the one with all his cards still pressed to his chest. When rage found him, he’d learned to temper it.
Right now, he was the dark void of a serpent’s mouth. He was filled with venom, lined with teeth.
Polly sat tied to a chair in The Mistress.
Tamir’s apartment was lit by candle, turning his trinkets orange and morbid.
He was pacing in the periphery, his hands together in prayer, mumbling apologies, curses, a growl of profanities in a foreign language.
Every so often, his eyes strayed to the window, as though he expected a barrage of coppers to break through it at any moment.
Tamir would have to run, too. Patrick would need to find a new Union member to take over the establishment, to keep ears and eyes on Morland.
As though Patrick had said it aloud, Tamir yanked a large bag from beneath the bed and began filling it at random.
“He’s flighty, ain’t he?” John said from where he lounged in a kitchen chair, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “Calm down, Tammy. Coppers don’t work that quick. They won’t be round for a while yet.”
“And I suppose you’ll just shoot them when they arrive?” Theodore asked.
John winked. “You’re a quick fuckin’ learner, kid.”
Theo had his back pressed to a wall. “They were lowering their guns,” he said bitterly. He had a soldier’s look about him, the light all burned out. “We could have walked out of there.”
“Aye, well, that all went to shit when the lady here decided to start a fuckin’ earthquake.”
Patrick thought Nina on the brink of starting another any moment. Like him, she was wire-taut, set to trip.
They were, each one of them, the head of a pointed spear, glancing off the other. How long before the hostility pierced through? And who would lunge first?
There was only one thing tying them together, and it was the book clenched in Patrick’s hand.
Polly looked at them all in turn, her eyes shaking in their sockets. Patrick tried not to see the flames of Kenton reflected there.
There was no tulleyroot. Theo had dumped it all on the way back. If not for him, Polly’s tongue would be decaying before his eyes.
“Do you read Verian Script?” he bit out. Sometimes he made his voice quiet to incite fear. Tonight, he couldn’t find the wherewithal.
Polly blinked at him in surprise. “I—s—some,” she allowed.
“Are you a descendant of Stewards?” he asked next. He saw no benefit in dancing around the point.
She paused, frowned in earnest. “My grandfather believed we were,” she said eventually, twisting her hands together.
“He’s the one who taught me the language.
But… my father didn’t like it, and my mother was an Artisan.
Mention the Stewards around any Artisan, and they’ll react as if you’ve told a joke in poor taste. ”
“But your grandfather is a Craftsman,” Patrick said, leading her. “And he believes.”
Again, Polly paused before answering. “He was a Craftsman,” she said, her brow lined in confusion. “But yes, he believed.”
“He passed?”
“A few years ago,” she said, looking from one set of eyes to another. “What is this about?”
Patrick took the book out and placed it on the table. He slid it across the surface to her.
“This,” he said blankly, “was supposedly written by the Stewards.”
She stared at it, then exhaled all at once, as though he’d punched a hole through her chest.
Patrick watched carefully. “You recognize it.”
Her mouth opened uncertainly. “I—yes. It was his, I think. My grandfather’s.”
“And he taught you how to read it?”
Polly hesitated. “In a manner of speaking.”
“You’ll translate it.”
She stared at the book, still trying to puzzle through something. “How did you find this?”
“It was in my father’s possession,” Theo answered.
Polly looked at Theo. “You stole it from him?” she asked, only it wasn’t accusatory. It was almost… impressed. Like she couldn’t imagine anyone crossing Terrence Shop, choosing to place such a target on their back. “Why?”
Theo shifted uncomfortably, clasped his hands at his back. “My father… There is little he wouldn’t do to get what he wants.” His eyes trailed to Nina. “I couldn’t just stand by.”
He didn’t mention his hand in getting his father what he wanted. Didn’t tell Polly that he was only here, it seemed, because Nina was here.
Polly shook her head, turned her attention back to Patrick. “Pat, I—I want to—”
Patrick slammed his fist on the table, and all the trinkets on the shelves, the clocks and windchimes and dishes, they all quaked in response.
Polly’s face crumpled. She drew herself inward, away from danger.
“You’ll translate it,” Patrick repeated, waves of wrath swelling from the cords of his neck, the tendons of his arms. “Or you’ll die here. I’ll do it myself.”
She swallowed. Her eyes flickered to Theo, sensing her one alliance among them. The only one who might still hold some sympathy.
And she might have found it there. If it weren’t for his infatuation with Nina, he’d be as much a traitor to the Union as Polly.
It was hard to say which of them Patrick despised more.
“I had to do it,” she said then, her voice breaking in desperation. “You know I had to. Tanner—”
Patrick stood. He took the chair beneath him and lifted it by its leg, hurled it at the wall behind him.
The parts splintered and scattered across the room, and though Patrick wasn’t nearly sated, the sound was enough to make an impression on Polly, enough for her to hear her own bones in the snap of the wood.
Patrick leaned against the arms of Polly’s chair, his face inches from her own.
“You don’t get to explain yourself. You understand?
” He thought she did. “I don’t want to hear how you didn’t have a choice, or how sorry you are about all those dead people and their burnin’ houses.
Their deaths are on your hands, Polly. You killed them, just as surely as if you’d set them alight yourself. ”
She sobbed, disintegrating by pieces.
“Otto survived the attack. Did you know that?” Patrick asked now, and he watched the information sink into her like a knife. “Did you care, Pol, if he lived or died? Or were you only ever dreamin’ of the day you’d sit at a card table in Morland, in your fancy fuckin’ dress?”
She closed her eyes, as though shutting out the world. “They were coming,” she said brokenly, her voice a rasp. “The infantry were coming anyway, and I couldn’t stay. I didn’t want to die.”
“You led them safely to the very middle,” Patrick said. “You know, Pol, beneath hell, there’s a place that’s worse. They save it for traitors.”
Tears shone in her eyes. “They were already coming—”
“THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE LET THEM COME!” Patrick seethed. “Let them be blown apart on the fuckin’ hills!”
“And then live as a fugitive?” she asked. “Hope the soldiers didn’t eventually make it past all those landmines? Try my hand in the brink again, alone? That didn’t work out so well the first time.”
Patrick saw the faces of those men, bearing down upon her on the pier.
“I traded Margarite’s tunnel for a chance at safety,” she said, eyes cinched shut, tears washing her face.
“And if it brings you any comfort, Pat, you should know I didn’t find any.
I wasn’t brought back to the city. Tanner ignored my scribbles, and now he’s dead.
” The shadows beneath her eyes seemed to extend.
“I was ousted, shunned as a deserter. The archives here won’t have me—I’ve already tried.
I’m sitting in swank gambling dens now, using the last scraps of the idium left in me to ink cards into aces for money.
” She looked as hollow as any factory worker.
“I promise you, Pat,” she said in a voice not more than a whisper, “you could never hate me as much as I hate myself.”