Chapter Eleven Simran #2
“I’m not arguing with you,” Simran said. “The magic holding you will fade in a few hours. You can go back to the Palace then. Or go somewhere else, if you like. I don’t care.” She stormed off.
“Simran, wait—”
She slammed the door shut.
“Something strange is afoot,” said Lydia, when Simran joined her at the bottom of the staircase. “Not out of any kind of tale I’ve seen. Nor any you’ve seen either, I expect.” She hesitated. “My fellow cunning folk—we can’t untangle it. We need someone with darker magic to intervene.”
So this was work for a maleficent magic user. A witch like Simran, not a cunning woman like Lydia.
“You don’t have any other witches you trust?”
“No, darling.” Lydia’s eyes were sad. “Truth be told, I wondered why you took up with it—dark business over the bright, when you could easily have inked yourself with useful gifts. But now I understand why you’re like you are: The witching was your lot, your destiny.
You had no more choice than any other incarnate on this ancient land. ”
Lydia led her through Limehouse, away from the docks. They walked together under drizzling rain, two unremarkable figures among a sea of other Londoners. The walk from the Palace had been long, and Simran’s legs ached, but she ignored the discomfort.
Whitechapel greeted them in a cloud of smog. Lydia walked briskly through it, leading Simran to a familiar, discreet brick building. A molly-house. A laugh bubbled in Simran’s throat. She knew this one.
“Muff’s House? Really?”
“I usually prefer to pray closer to home, Simran, but needs must,” Lydia said, sounding long-suffering. “Come, quickly.”
Inside, the molly-house had the look of a coffeehouse, and smelled of a mix of mildew and roasted coffee, gin and juniper, bittersweet.
Lady Juliet was sitting in the entrance, desultorily unlacing her gown. She was eighteen, gangly and tall, in a dress already too small for her at the shoulders. Under the light of the lamps, her deep brown cheekbones glittered with pearl-dust.
She was usually laughing, smiling—Simran had seen her at other molly-houses, and at salons, and had never seen her without a grin on her face—but today she looked solemn.
“Auntie,” she greeted. “Simran. They’re in the chapel. But I’m warning you, it’s not pretty. You’d best brace yourself.”
“Thank you,” murmured Lydia. She gestured at Simran to follow, and went up the stairs.
“The chapel” was the name everyone used for the room in the molly-house that people went to if they wanted a little privacy. Simran had always called it the sex room, because she liked to be factual, and Hari had always called her crass for doing it.
That said, Simran could admit there was something a little sacred about that space.
The windows were covered with thick curtains; the floor was polished smooth, the walls undecorated around a single bed at the room’s center.
But there was love too, in the lit brazier, which smelled of honeyed warmth, and the roses always set in a vase above the fireplace, replaced whenever they dared wilt.
In the room was a circle of ten people, all but one of them regular visitors. The tenth stranger was an older man, gray-haired, white-skinned, and ruddy-cheeked, with his cap clutched tight in his hand. He looked like he’d been weeping.
On the bed was the body of an Elsewhere-blooded girl with the legs of a bird, a splash of feathers spread out around her waist. Simran stumbled in shock at the sight of her, then forced herself steady.
The girl’s torso was covered with a cloth, but her hair was splayed out—ink on white. Each feather fanning from her body was like flame, saffron mingled with gold. Alive, she must have been a beautiful thing.
Simran took a deep breath. The air carried the scent of what the girl had once been. A cry of birds, the scent of light. Good fortune. A sweet tale of lovers, perhaps.
An incarnate.
“Lydia,” she said. “Who is she? What is she?”
“Her name is Mary,” Lydia said heavily. “She lived near St. Anne’s Church.
I know her mother and father—they arrived alongside me on the Isle, when we were young.
” Lydia’s voice shook. “Not from my Elsewhere, but somewhere close. For a month, maybe more, before we forgot them, we had languages in common. I don’t know how she ended up here.
But she had normal legs when I last saw her, and she’s got no limni tattoo on her that would have changed her. We can’t make sense of it.”
“We don’t know who did this,” said a woman called Ella.
She was a cunning woman like Lydia, hair coiled into braids threaded with charms, magic inked into her brown throat and collarbone, revealed by her low-cut dress.
Her face was troubled. “Her spirit won’t answer, her body won’t speak.
We know she’d come into her own as an incarnate, but no more.
We’ve never heard of a tale like it. Have you? ”
“No,” Simran murmured, shaking her head.
“James here found her—he thinks she ran from the one who tried to kill her, then succumbed to her injuries.”
“She was badly hurt,” James, the gray-haired man, said gruffly. “Very badly hurt, young miss. I did all I could. Didn’t know where else to bring her.”
Simran could use blood, or the girl’s bones to seek answers. Her stomach roiled, but she kept her face calm. This was ugly business, but she was fit for it.
She drew back the shroud on the girl’s face. She was tanned, her Elsewhere features similar to Lydia’s own. Thick black hair, a rosebud mouth. And her face—
Simran didn’t need to use any dark arts after all.
There was a circle carved into the girl’s forehead.
“I know who did this,” Simran said softly. Him. The stranger with his pale eyes, his hair like silver. He’d killed this strange, feathered incarnate, just like he’d killed Bess.
She wasn’t even going to use magic to kill him. She was going to gut him with her own two hands.
Let’s see him come back to life without his heart in his chest. I’ll rip it out myself.
She closed the girl’s eyes with her fingertips.
“The man is hunting incarnates,” said Simran. “He came after me, Lydia. He was the one in my flat. He murdered another friend of mine. He took Hari. He’s murdered many others. I failed once, but I still mean to find him and kill him.”
She thought suddenly of Vina. Vina, whom she’d left alone and magically bound, unable to protect herself from the stranger and his knife. Fear curdled in Simran’s stomach.
Shit. She was going to have to go back for Vina. She had no choice.
“You think you can?” Lydia asked.
Simran focused on her, forcing thoughts of Vina away.
“What’s the point of being a witch if I can’t take a life that deserves to be taken?” She wasn’t going to tell them what the knight had told her. Let them think she was just driven by confidence.
If the fae thought she could end the stranger’s life, then she’d do it.
“What holds you back?” Ella asked, eyes sharp. “Why have you not disposed of him yet, if you have the means?”
“He’s strong and wily and old,” Simran said. “He doesn’t believe he can die, and since I shot him and his body spat the bullet back out, I expect he’s right.”
A hiss from her watchers.
“That can’t be.”
“I’ve never heard the like.”
“Doesn’t sound…”
“Believe what you like,” said Simran. “But it’s true. I know where to find him.” He’d told her himself. The mountains of copper, witch. Come to your ancient tor. Meet me there, before the winter solstice. Tell me my name, and tell me why I cannot die, and you may have him back whole and alive.
Even without the archivists, she’d wend her way to the Copper Mountains eventually.
Her tale would demand it. They were the place she was destined to die.
“But there’s knowledge I need to fight him, and I’ve no way of getting it yet.
” She looked from Lydia to Ella, to the other thoughtful, wary faces of cunning folk and queer folk lining the room.
“Perhaps,” she said carefully, “you can help me. Everyone says you know all there is worth knowing in London, Lydia. I bet you other cunning folk are no different.”
They exchanged looks. One of the younger folk slipped from the room, giving Simran a look as they went.
Simran waited for their judgment.
She’d been welcomed by Lydia, but there had always been an—edge—to other cunning folk.
They liked her limni ink well enough; they paid decently for their tattoos, scribed on the cheap but with all the care Simran could give them.
She was no Harley Street scribe, but she knew magic.
But a witch was a witch, and not welcome among kindlier magic users.
Now something had turned. One of Lydia’s own people had died—an Elsewhere girl, Limehouse-raised, murdered. And cunning folk protected their own.
“Tell her,” an older gent said eventually. His voice quavered. He adjusted his lavender cravat with shaking fingers. “Tell the witch about the library.”
“That doesn’t seem wise,” said Ella. “She’s a witch.”
“She’s trustworthy,” said Lydia firmly. “But I’ll defer to the group when it comes to this.”
There was a knock at the door, and another figure entered.
Lady Juliet was gone, carefully wiped away—there was just Oliver, in his crisp shirt and breeches, a little faded lip stain still at his mouth.
“Auntie Lydia,” he said, with a respectful nod.
“I’ll take Mary to the embalmers. Me and some of the girls.
We’ll see her safely put to rest, quiet like. No one will know.”
“You’re a good boy, Oliver,” Lydia said gently.
“I’ll help,” Simran said. It sounded like the cunning folk needed to talk, and corpses didn’t frighten her.
Carefully, she and Oliver transported the body down the stairs on a cot. A few girls were waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “We can manage from here,” Oliver said. Hesitated. “I heard your rotten news, Simran. I’m sorry you’re going to die.”
No one had said it so simply before. It was almost a relief to hear it. She was going to die, after all.