Chapter One Simran #2
Sparks of fire snapped through the air. One of the destriers lurched, rearing in panic—a fatal flaw in a warhorse, surely. On its back, its knight drew his sword, a vast and gleaming length of steel.
Vina’s gloved hand shot forward and grasped her wrist. There was metal on her gloves and strength in her hand, and the vise of it stung. The witch snapped her fingers once more before Vina could close her fist over her fingers, sparks bursting anew into the air.
“Stop,” Vina said, and the wildness of her eyes had deepened. “Godsblood, woman. I know you.”
The witch wrenched her hand toward her own body and Vina stumbled clumsily into the fairy ring. The trap sprang. Vina shuddered to a stop as webs of smoke snared her. Water, moonlight, and strings of sinew held her fast.
The second knight drew his sword.
“Draw closer and you’ll have to cut through her to reach me,” the witch pointed out.
Quite reasonably, she thought. But the two knights on their horses obviously did not agree, and trembled with rage as motes of fire spat and singed the air around them, and made the eyes of their destriers roll wildly.
“One bottle of ink,” the witch said again, meeting Vina’s eyes. “Then I let you go.”
“Lower your hood,” Vina begged. “Let me see you so that I know you’re not—not—”
It was not the witch’s magic that made the motes of fire gather above them like a shared halo, cutting through the glamour of shadows beneath her hood. It was the tale that demanded it. Stories were selfish. They used anything they could grasp to feed them.
The knight was meant to see the witch’s face. And the witch had been fool enough to give the knight firelight to see by.
“Isadora,” Vina gasped. The name lurched out of her mouth. “No.”
The name wrenched at the witch like a plier pulling a tooth. The wrench echoed through her body, snaring her. She was a puppet on strings. For a brief, awful moment she was frozen. Then she found her voice once more.
“That isn’t my name,” the witch said sharply.
She stepped into the fairy ring, her cloak brushing the knight’s armor.
Her own trap could not hurt her, but the knight within it could by simply being the knight.
The woman could smell apples, earth. The great clang of a mirror rang in her ears, and a memory of the cold scent of snow tickled her nose.
A great tale was closing its vise around them.
She’d known that stealing from knights was a dangerous business, although she had not expected this danger.
She’d planned for a swift escape. She wore a bracelet of thread on her right wrist, bound in place with a knot stained in ashes from her home’s hearth.
It was a spell slumbering, waiting to be quickened.
All it needed was blood, and that she could provide easily.
She raised her hand between them and saw Vina’s eyes widen, fixed on both the witch and the witch’s bared wrist. For a moment the knight was vulnerable, distracted, and that was enough.
With her left hand, the witch reached into the knight’s satchel as she bit her own lip, blood flowering up, and pressed her mouth to the knot at her wrist.
The spell ignited. The witch sucked in a breath, threw herself forward—
—and fell with a thud onto Limehouse docks.
The Thames roared around her, briny, stinging her face with its fetid rot and salt. Her wrist ached. Her heart was beating wildly. She wasn’t sure if she was breathing until the salt and sewage scent of the Thames hit her lungs and set her coughing.
She clambered to her feet. Her limbs were her own again. The ink rattled in her pocket, the bottle still whole. She’d plucked it easily from the satchel. It hadn’t been hard, once she’d been close enough to touch. Limni ink wanted to be stolen.
She stomped across the dock, the wood creaking beneath her kidskin boots.
They were wet. If she didn’t dry them with care they’d rot, and she had no coin for new ones.
An easy thing for her to be angry about; to worry over even as her compass spun and spun in wilder circles, seeking a knight’s blood, the knight’s blood, like a hungry gull.
The witch from Elsewhere began unbuttoning her long sleeves before she’d even made it to the road.
Her arms, bared to the bitterly cold air, were covered in ink-black scrollwork that writhed and pulsed, flitting across her skin.
At her wrist, it was winding into desperate tangles of thorns and roses.
The bracelet had crumbled to dust, burned to a husk by magic.
She’d known there was a tale wending down Cloth Fair. She hadn’t feared it. She’d waited for it.
She hadn’t realized it was her own. If she had, she would have run, ink be damned.
The witch from Elsewhere was named Simran Kaur Arora.
It said so on her arrival papers, the illuminated scroll with a facsimile of her face in silver ink, the one that had marked her as an immigrant on the hundred-and-twelfth voyage of a ship that occasionally, sullenly threatened to take the shape of the Golden Hind.
Her silver image was a perfect re-creation of her at ten years old: tight looped braids with trailing ribbons, a round face, a belligerent mouth.
What her arrival papers did not share was how the journey had felt: the lurch of the cabins, heaving their bodies to and fro. Her father, rubbing the scar that bisected his throat, already forgetting where he’d gained it.
By the time she had been on the ship from moonrise to sunrise, her memory of home had smeared and faded too, like light and shade through glass.
But she remembered fear—muddied brown water, and the sulfur of gunshot.
And she knew what her mother had promised her, as she’d oiled Simran’s hair on their first moonrise on the ship, her fingers drenched with the luster of night, starlight, and jasmine oil.
We’re going to a land of stories, her mother had said. Angrezi stories. Nothing can touch us there. We can start again.
Why climb on a ship that shouldn’t exist, and cross a shining sea to an alien and magical land, if not for that?
Safety. A future. You cannot be hurt by stories that do not own you.
You can live among them, a stranger and an outsider, the birth tales that made you fading like ash, and you can survive.
But Simran, breathless with wonder and too curious for her own good, had clambered onto the deck, the cold spray pricking her cheeks, and seen a woman soaked to the bone drinking a bottle of wine, her body angled precariously against the barrier rail, her blond hair long enough to snake against the boards.
The woman had turned and smiled at her. Lips green as algae.
Glitter of salt on her cheeks. Simran had felt something slot into place, as if a golden key had slid its way neatly into a lock that lay in her heart.
And Simran had known, with a hurtling, falling-through-yourself kind of knowing, that she was changed forever.
Perhaps it had not been so before she had boarded the ship, but now the woman was her, and she was the woman, and she knew she had been born and lived and died on the Isle a hundred times, a thousand times.
There would be no safety on the Isle. It would be, horribly, home.
“Oh,” the woman had said. “It’s you. I’m finally dead.”
She’d sounded pleased.
There was a tangle of streets near the docks where Elsewhere folk lived.
Simran’s flat was on Amoy Place, where the air was always full of the fumes of the laundries: astringent lye, lavender, sweat, soap.
It was late enough that nearly all the laundries were shut, and the café where most of the laundry employees bought tea and bowls of dumplings in broth was closed too.
The café’s glass windows were cloudy, dusk colored.
Simran rented a flat above the café. The stairway at the café’s left—a winding, narrow spiral that led to her door—was lit by a single paper lamp floating by itself above the first step.
The paper was blue and the light seeping through it glowed green.
The light fluttered as she approached, flickering like wing-beats, like welcome.
Her trembling heartbeat settled at the sight of it. This was her shelter. Nothing could hurt her here.
She leaned down and grasped the lantern, then held it aloft and used its light to guide her up the narrow stairs.
She closed the door of her flat and immediately wrenched off the cotehardie, tugging the last of the infinitesimal rows of tiny buttons at her front and her sleeves until she slithered free.
She was naked, shivering under the spill of moonlight at the window.
The lantern glowed coldly, painting her inky skin deep blue.
Around her, the scriptorium was peaceful.
The cat Maleficium was sleeping on a pile of open books on the table.
Three clocks were ticking out of sync on the mantelpiece, and Simran’s needles and inks were still locked away in their wooden boxes, the latches shaped to open only to her fingers—which they did immediately when she crossed the room and reached for them, pressing her fingers to their thumb-shaped grooves.
She slid the bottle of ink into her little casket of dyes—her blues and reds, her ichor black and serpent green.
Then she tucked away her bone compass, watching the needle perform a wild spin, then still.
The bedroom door was open just a crack to give Maleficium the permanent access she demanded, but the room within looked dark. Hari was probably sleeping like the dead in there. That was fine. Simran had no plans to rest tonight.
She was still shivering, but that wasn’t unreasonable.
She was naked and river-wet and heart-sore and the fire grate was cold.
She could fix three of those things. She tugged her robe free from the pile of unwashed clothes being steadily swallowed by her sofa, shoved her feet into a pair of slippers, then lit the grate.
Once the fire was burning merrily, she opened the single narrow window of her scriptorium and placed the lantern outside it.
The cold stung her fresh warming skin, but this couldn’t wait.
“Go on,” she said. “Shoo. Tell your mistress thank you from me.” A nudge of her hand and the lantern crinkled into the shape of a bird, rustled its blue-green wings, and flew obediently away. The window closed with a heavy thud behind it.
She thought about placing her kidskin boots to dry over the grate, but before she could do it, all the strength left her body and she landed on her rug arse first with an audible—and painful—thud.
After a pause, Maleficium mewed inquiringly from her perch.
“Ow,” Simran said flatly. “I’m not dead, you horrid creature. You can’t eat my eyeballs yet.”
A little chirp was her only response. Not a single jot of noise escaped the bedroom.
Simran let herself lie back against the floorboards. She closed her eyes, letting her own teeth chatter and chatter.
Fuck fuckity fuck.
Simran had seen the knight. She had looked into the knight’s eyes and heard her old name on the knight’s lips.
Isadora. The knight’s voice curled like fire-licked paper in her mind. Isadora.
Isadora was not her name anymore.
Isadora was a dead socialite. A merry, laughing, absinthe-bitter only daughter of a wealthy mill owner.
She’d started life wearing ribboned gowns and sitting quietly in countryside drawing rooms, and ended it wearing dresses that were sheaths of diamonds, peacock feathers in her hair.
She’d loved jewelry—garnet drop earrings, carnelian set in silver as fine as lace at her throat.
Ruby bracelets shaped like vipers. When the knight had run his sword through them both, the blood had been like a starburst against her chest—prettier than any brooch she’d ever worn against her heart.
So Isadora had said, smiling with all her pretty white teeth, lips pearling to a shade of ice.
“You’ll love him,” Isadora had said. “Oh, you’ll love him so much. Wait and see.”
Him. Isadora had been wrong about that. And Simran hadn’t fallen in love with the knight either. No bolt of love had struck her heart when she’d looked into Vina’s eyes. Instead, when the tale had closed its snare around her heart, she’d felt afraid.
With a start, Simran realized she had fallen so deep into her own thoughts that her clocks had all begun to chime, marking midnight.
Maleficium was purring insistently, pricking her throat with slightly elongated claws and licking her ear.
At some point the furry abomination had alighted from her perch in order to menace Simran’s face.
Simran scratched the cat’s ears absently.
There was a thud from her window. Simran sat up.
The lantern bird was pecking frantically at her windowpane, its paper beak bending under the pressure. Her clocks fell abruptly silent, and a chill of warning ran down her spine.
She stood, and turned to look at her door.
A second passed. Two.
There was a hard knock.
Maleficium skittered under the sofa, flattening until only her yellow eyes were visible.
Another knock.
“I should have gotten a dog,” Simran whispered viperously in the general direction of the sofa, as she hurried across the room and drew open the drawer of her work table.
She rifled through papers and books until her fingers found spells on parchment, sinewy thread, and cold, hard metal.
Her heart was pounding. Blood roared in her ears.
“A dog would have protected me but you—you protect yourself first, don’t you?
” She shut the drawer. “Stay under there,” she hissed, knowing the cat neither understood her nor had any interest in respecting her wishes.
She straightened, turned, and strode toward the front door.
She wrenched it open.
Without the flying lantern’s illumination, the staircase was dark. She could only see the shape of the stranger. Broad shoulders, a bowed head. Hand raised for a third knock, the knuckles red with blood.
As for his face, she could only see his eyes. They were like the Thames. Bleached unnaturally pale, not blue or green or gray, but the color of the sun against a distant shore, always out of reach.
“Scribe,” he said. His voice was wavering, a roiling sea, wretched and deep. “I… I’m afraid I require your help.”