Chapter 8
The joke was on her.
The home Melodie thought she’d had for the last six years was all an illusion.
She had been too traumatized and young to notice anything off when she’d first moved in, and she’d been grateful to Vinest and happy to follow his wishes.
She’d enjoyed learning to be a gold and silversmith, using the skills her metalsmith father had taught her, but on a more delicate scale.
It was only now that she chose not to accept Vinest’s rules that she saw the conditionality of their relationship.
Her father would be devastated that the friend he trusted would treat her this way.
And she had no way out.
No obvious way out, anyway.
She was on the second floor, and there was no convenient tree or roof top for her to shimmy down near her window. It was a straight drop down to the paved back yard.
She stood at the window and looked down anyway, mulling over her options.
She could wait until morning, when Theo would arrive to fetch her. She had no doubt he would not go away quietly if Vinest hadn’t let her out by then. But she didn’t want the ugliness of that, and she didn’t want Vinest to win.
She pulled out the box she kept her design sketches in, taking them out and stacking them in a neat pile, and then lifted the false bottom up.
She had bought this box at the market, because she knew that her room had been searched more than once. She thought it was Betts, looking for something to chastise her about, but now she wondered if it was Vinest.
It didn’t matter. Neither of them had found what she didn’t want found, which was her collection of magical items. She set them out on the bed.
She had destroyed way more than she’d kept, and she had anonymously gifted others to those who needed them. Besides the ring she wore on her finger, there was a blackened silver brooch, which had magic too faint to work out. She had thought she would smelt it and fashion it into a new piece when she understood exactly what it did.
Then there was a remedies book that fell open to the correct recipe for whatever illness you spoke. She had found it three weeks ago, and she planned to give it to the right person, but that kind of obvious magic made many uncomfortable, and she had yet to pass it on.
The final item was a handkerchief. It had a tiny, beautifully made embroidery on the corner, and it reminded her of someone she’d once known.
It protected a specific wearer, not anyone else, and she only kept it because it was no use to anyone, and the feeling of it when she touched it reminded her of a time when her father was alive, and they were not so alone.
It wasn’t much—she didn’t like keeping anything she wasn’t going to use—and they fit easily into her bag. Only the paints were left.
She sat down at her desk and touched the box with her fingertips.
It was so spell infused, her fingers tingled at the contact.
She opened the box, studied the colors.
She was proficient at drawing—she had learned from her father to always draw before she made anything—but the more she stared at the inside of the box, the heavier the weight of possibilities seemed to grow.
If she drew something with these paints, it would be significant.
She had seen many types of spell work. The golden light of a spell-worked rope that fed from its victim’s energy. The twine around Theo’s neck that acted like a cage. The bead in the center of her ring that felt protective to her, but this . . . this felt like she could draw something and bring it into being.
She had no fresh paper—it was all downstairs in her workshop—but the pile of her old designs sat near her elbow, so she flipped them over. She took out the brushes she’d bought in the market, poured a little water from the jug on her nightstand into a bowl, and thought of something simple.
She drew a key on the back of a used sheet of parchment.
It wasn’t in her to do a sloppy job, so she took some care in crafting it.
When she was done, she sat back and watched it dry, and the moment it did, the paper turned blank, with a real key weighing it down.
She touched it much like she’d touched the box earlier. Gingerly, with her fingertips.
It felt cool and solid.
She picked it up and walked to the door. Hesitated, and then thrust it into the lock.
It didn’t fit.
She withdrew it, tried again. But it wasn’t going to open the door for her.
So this magic was specific.
She had come across few items in her time that weren’t.
Protection as a spell was usually as broad as it got, and even then, she got the sense of armor over the person, not a general protection against everything.
So what, specifically, could she draw?
She looked at the hinges on the door, thought about drawing some kind of lever. But it wouldn’t be a silent effort, and it would bring both Betts and Vinest running.
She would rather leave quietly and without their knowledge, and if it wasn’t going to be through the door, then it would have to be out the window.
She walked over to it, studied the drop.
She needed rope.
She returned to the desk and looked down at the paper that had produced the key. Would using the same sheet again work?
She drew a coil of rope, using the color there was the most of—orange. She considered drawing it like the key, from a bird’s eye view, but she usually drafted her jewelry designs as three dimensional images, and she experimented with drawing the rope the same way—a coiled pile of it.
It took longer to dry than the key, and it might not work, but in case it did, she got up and looked for something to tie it to.
She settled on the leg of her bed, which was close to the window, and when she turned around, the image was still on the paper.
The paint was dry, it just hadn’t worked.
Sighing, she took another piece of paper and drew rope from the center of the page, turning it as close on itself as she could. With its capacity to hold her weight in mind, she made it as wide as she could, as narrow as she dared.
When she was done, she put the page carefully aside and quickly started a new one.
She would need a few pages to draw the length of rope she needed.
When she was done with the second page, the first had dried, and the rope had shimmered into being.
She tested it, and it seemed to hold strong. She tied knots into it at various intervals, because she would need them to help her down.
After she tied one end to the bed, she fed it out the window and saw it fell about a quarter of the way.
As she turned back to her desk, she saw the rope lying on top of the page disappear, and with a sound of disbelief, turned to look at the rope she’d tied around her bed.
It was gone, too. And so was the key, now she was looking for it.
She closed her eyes, feeling a hard, tight sense of hopelessness.
Then anger replaced it.
She would not give up.
She thought back to how long she’d been fussing around with the rope before it disappeared. At least ten minutes.
She understood there was a time limit now, and she knew she had to move quickly.
She lined two pages up, got everything ready, and began to draw as fast as she could, fitting as much rope onto each page as possible.
As soon as the first page dried, she tied the rope to the leg of her bed, rushed back and tied the second rope to it.
She shoved the blank pages into her bag, along with the box of paints, the small bowl and the brushes, went to the window and tossed the rope down.
It didn’t reach all the way to the ground, but it was close enough. She could free fall for the last bit.
She had only opened the window a little way to throw the rope down, but she needed it wide open to get herself and her things out. It stuck, and she pushed it. Hard.
It opened on a shriek loud enough to wake the dead.
She didn’t have time to worry or retreat, she scrambled over the window sill, grabbed the rope, and set her feet on the wall, then began walking down the side of the house.
“Melodie.”
The voice sounded so close, she almost let go of the rope.
She glanced quickly across—all she had time for—and saw Vinest staring at her from his own open window.
She didn’t respond, just kept going down.
“Melodie, you’re going to kill yourself.”
She decided that keeping him talking meant he wasn’t racing to her room, trying to pull her back up.
She could slide down and talk at the same time.
“This is on you, Vinest.” Her foot slipped on the moss that grew on the side of the house, and with a jerk, she was suddenly dangling from the rope. Her arms took the strain, and she scrabbled her feet, and finally found purchase.
She didn’t have long. She was sure of it, so she began moving even faster.
“You nearly fell there. And you say I’m making you climb down the side of the house?” Vinest had gone silent when she’d slipped, and now his hiss of outrage was itself enraging.
She looked up again, saw he was leaning as far out of his window as he could. “You locked me in my room. Like a prisoner. Shame on you, Vinest. My father would be devastated.”
That remark hit hard. She saw him flinch back.
“You were trying to leave me. To break free,” he said, waving the hand that wasn’t clutching the window sill.
“So? Again, only prisoners need to break free.”
“I need you. Your designs are the signature of the business.”
She knew it, but he had never admitted that to her before.
“If you’d paid me fairly and given me my independence, I would have kept working for you,” she told him. “Now, no matter what, your behavior tonight is the end of things.”
She was nearly at the bottom, and suddenly the rope disappeared. She cried out as she fell, stumbling and then landing hard on her side on the slate paving stones that covered the back courtyard.
She looked up, felt the hot prickle of fear down her arms as she saw the extent of the drop, and got to her feet.
At the sight of her standing on the ground below, Vinest suddenly seemed to realize she was out of his reach.
“Stop. I’m sorry I locked you in. It was a poor decision.” His voice was wheedling.
The kitchen door banged open, and Melodie turned to see Betts, wearing a dressing gown and a scarf on her head.
She stayed in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest, mouth a thin line. “How did you get down?”
Melodie couldn’t help the laugh that exploded out of her. “Interesting question.”
“Well, get off with you, if you’re going.” Betts half-turned back into the kitchen, dismissing her.
“Goodbye, Betts.” There was truly nothing else she could say. It was sad, but it wasn’t on her. She turned for the back gate, hitching her satchel across her chest.
“Wait a minute. What are you taking with you?” Betts called after her, voice harsh.
Melodie glanced over her shoulder, and another laugh of disbelief escaped her throat. “You’ve searched my room often enough, I’m sure you have a good idea.” Melodie opened the back gate, stepped into the alley that ran behind the house, and pushed it shut behind her.
She heard Vinest raise his voice, shouting at Betts to stop her, but Betts wasn’t so inclined.
The sound of their argument faded as she increased her pace. She reached the road and crossed another two parallel streets before she turned toward the bridge.
Vinest would not simply let her go.
He was probably throwing on clothes right now, and he’d go to the bridge to stop her. He suspected Theo was her inspiration for leaving, and the Kassia and Cervantes soldiers barracked on their own side of the river.
He might go to Jackson first, though, and check the forge just in case she was merely changing residences and had decided to move to the smithy for a while. But in the event he went to the bridge first, she began to jog.
The square and the streets around the river were swirling with fog when she reached them. And she decided that was a good thing for her.
She stumbled a few times before she got to the bridge itself, but no one tried to stop her, and there was no sign of Vinest.
There used to be guard gates at both ends of the bridge, but that had fallen away as the compact between Kassia and Cervantes and Grimwalt settled into a long-term alliance.
Now there was a booth at the midway point of the bridge, to record the names of those who came across.
She reached the sentries, one for each country, and gave her name, looking back toward the square, although it was almost impossible to see anything but the swirling white of the fog.
“Someone chasing you?” The Kassian and Cervantes soldier asked her, perking up from his sleepy slump.
She glanced at him. “Maybe.”
The Grimwaldian soldier came a bit more to attention, too. “Who?”
“My former boss.” She turned to the Kassia and Cervantes soldier. “Do you know the lieutenant who came over the bridge earlier?”
He gave a slow nod.
“Did he go to the barracks?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“All done.” The Grimwaldian said, lifting his pen with a flourish.
“Thank you.” She set off at a jog, with a last look over her shoulder.
“Melodie!” Vinest seemed to burst out of the fog.
“Keep going. We’ll sort it for you.” The Kassia and Cervantes soldier murmured to her.
She ran.
Behind her, she heard the Grimwaldian soldier stop Vinest.
“Sir, you have to give your name.”
“Melodie, I won’t do it again. I swear. Just come back.”
“And what is it that you did?” one of the soldiers asked, a sudden chill in his voice, and then the fog swallowed them, and she reached the end of the bridge.
It felt like reaching freedom.