Chapter Three Patrick
The year he turned thirteen, Patrick and his brothers came close to death.
It was a dead winter, the most ravenous anyone could remember.
The coal ran low before frost stuck to the ground.
Influenza spread. Bluff prices rocketed.
There were many families in Kenton Hill who simply awaited death from their beds, bellies hollow, throats aflame, burning schoolbooks in the hearth to keep children warm in their final hours.
Many did not make it to spring, and there were fraught moments in which Patrick was certain he was slipping away.
Donny caught the fever first. He slowly boiled before their eyes. Their mother spooned soup past his cracked lips.
The next morning, Patrick awoke sweating, panting, barely aware of Tess Colson mopping his brow. Gunner quickly followed, all three of them abed while their mother changed their pajamas, their sheets, collected their vomit, prayed.
Patrick remembered it only in fragments—a shutter of frames.
His mother counting farthings on a wooden table, eyes tightening.
Donny’s wails. Gunner sleeping interminably, as though he were already dead.
He remembered his own body convulsing, seizing, squeezing the very last vestiges of his strength.
Patrick did not remember his father in this reel of memory.
As he recalled, John Colson had gone away to Dorser by train that winter.
The Miners Union had been in its infancy then, the support not yet far-reaching.
He traveled often in the beginning, amassing members with his speeches, establishing connections.
Always, he returned a little more invigorated than when he left, while his wife slowly iced over.
Patrick’s mother did not cry that winter, but she apologized often—every time her sons moaned, cried, vomited.
“Bluff,” he remembers begging her. And her forehead would crease so deeply it seemed it was splitting, and she’d return to those coins on the table, counting them over and over, then swearing and knocking them to the floor.
And then when it seemed Donny was at his worst, when he hadn’t woken for more than two days, hadn’t eaten for even longer, Tess Colson left them alone. Patrick heard the kitchen door collide violently with its frame.
Gunner might have held his hand, Patrick thought. There was an image in his mind, his big brother reaching out across his cot, fingers hot and limp. Patrick thought perhaps he himself cried, that he begged for their father.
His next memory was a lick of heat in his veins. Patrick had come awake with a clearer mind, to the sight of his mother leaning over him, cheeks ruddy red with the cold, a spoonful of black solution poised at his lips. “Drink, son,” she had said calmly.
The clarity of age led Patrick to surmise his mother stole the bluff, having found herself short of coin. From what household, he did not wish to know.
The Colson brothers recovered as the bottle of bluff ran dry, in time for their father to return, in time for Tess Colson to yield to her own rampant fever.
The influenza of that dead winter was later named gray fever.
It turned one’s skin red first, then purple, then ashen near the end.
Of all the Colsons struck down that season, it was Tess who came closest to death.
She was the color of storm clouds when John Colson walked back through the door, his smile wide and beard heavy with snow.
Gunner had whaled his fists against John’s chest for staying away so long.
Donny had cried. Patrick had wrapped his arms around his father’s middle, despite not having hugged his father that way since he was small.
Tess had coughed in a way that invoked death.
John Colson’s timely return, Patrick knew, was the only reason his mother still lived.
After that, even when Tess Colson seemed at her worst, Patrick had not worried for her.
He knew his father had everything in hand.
His father could fix it, could fix anything.
He’d come back with pockets full of money and vials.
It took two days for the bluff to win the battle.
Two days of Patrick and Gunner and Donny hovering uselessly by her bed, watching their mother snatch in each breath.
They held on to her bedsheets as though they could anchor her there.
“Patience, boys,” John told them. “She’s as tough as they come. Tougher than me, even.”
He was right, as he always was. Her color returned, the coughing thinned. She rose from her sick bed and yelled at Donny for running through the kitchen. But Tess Colson was never quite the same. Her lungs seemed to hoard remnants of the fever, and no amount of bluff ever snuffed it for good.
Soon after Tess recovered, John Colson hauled a sack into the kitchen and dumped its contents onto the floor. Terranium ore spilled out, blue-black and glistening.
He’d pointed one calloused finger at it. “Siphon these rocks,” he’d said to Patrick. “And your mother’ll never again lay sick in bed.”
And he had. Eventually.
It took weeks to make any progress. The idium he’d stolen from the National House had long since begun to wane.
The magic that remained in him was weak.
Reluctant. Most of those terranium rocks had crumbled, splitting unevenly, the bluff inside made unusable.
To this day, there are two holes in the plaster of the Colson’s kitchen, where Patrick had launched the ruined ore away in frustration.
“Easy, son,” his dad had said, over and over. “Easy does it. Be patient with it. Feel the hollow? That’s where the ink is hiding. Split it right down the middle.”
But the ore was delicate. It shattered at the slightest disruption, contaminating that which it fiercely guarded.
“Gentle with it,” John Colson had told him. “Learn control. Learn composure. Composed men do far better than the bulls.”
Patrick heard his father’s voice echoing off the stained glass windows and barren walls of the swanks’ National House.
He’d been confined alone to a strange room.
The floors here were checkered white and black, so starkly contrasting they seemed to morph, tricking him.
He thought it was likely once a small laboratory.
There was a large bench with a basin. Oak shelves and cupboards built into the walls, floor to ceiling.
Every one of them was emptied of anything but dust. The hearth was cobwebbed.
The window depicted a nude image of a man he assumed was God almighty, though he could not, for the life of him, understand why an all-powerful being would be in possession of such a small cock.
He felt much the way he had felt that dead winter when he was thirteen. He hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept. His head pulsed as though breaching his skull.
He sat on the floor, his back against the shelves, clothed in the same sorry attire he’d arrived in. Several feet away, a sack of terranium ore awaited him, just as it had in his mother’s kitchen.
He had yet to open it, to see its contents, and yet he knew what it was.
Terranium had a certain beat, a vibration.
He felt it from where he sat. They used to send Alchemists into the mines to feel out the deposits of ore, to tell the diggers what to aim for, back when Alchemists were a dime a dozen and it didn’t much matter if they were blown to pieces or buried under.
The door hadn’t opened in some time. In a moment of useless ire, he’d thrown his shoulder into it to no avail, forgetting the bullet buried in the tissue.
Tanner was due to visit any moment, Patrick thought. He’d returned regularly these past two days, flanked by guards. The most recent had been his longest stay yet.
“You worsen by the hour,” he’d said. Patrick hadn’t risen from his place on the tiles, and Tanner hadn’t ventured past the doorway. He’d nodded to the sack that remained untouched. “I’m sure some of that ore holds the bluff you need.”
A bubble of laughter climbed up Patrick’s throat, more menacing than mirthful. “And what makes you believe I intend to recover?” he murmured. The tiles distended again. He pinched his eyes shut.
“I’m afraid death is not an option, Mr. Colson. In fact, I’ve brought a gift.”
And from behind him came a middle-aged woman in Artisan blue robes with wide, fearful eyes. She stepped around Tanner hesitantly, looking back at the lord for approval.
“Letty is a Smith of lead,” Tanner explained to Patrick. “She’s here to pull that bullet from your shoulder. It may be wise to bite down on something.”
But there was no time. The woman named Letty raised a shaky hand in the direction of Patrick’s shoulder, and he immediately felt the sensation of something twisting, pulling. He hissed, cursed, his hand flying to his arm.
Bit by bit the bullet wheedled free, finally flying into Letty’s hand. The woman’s pallor turned abruptly green, and she dropped the bullet onto the floor, her hand now covered in gore. She trembled delicately at the sight of it.
“Thank you, Letty. You may go.”
Letty’s shoes clacked off the tiles as she hurried out.
Patrick’s breaths had turned rapid. He closed his eyes and waited for the throb of his arm to slow.
“You might like to know that Nina Clarke is well. All that blood was… unseemly, I know.” His nose crinkled. “But if you and Miss Clarke do as is required, there won’t be a need for any more bad business.”
“Harrow,” Patrick grunted. “Not Clarke.”
Tanner regarded him curiously. “I’m surprised you should care for her at all.”
And to that, Patrick had no argument.
“She was a fair actress in her schooling years, according to her professors,” Tanner ruminated. “I suppose she must have been rather convincing. She is uniquely beautiful, I can admit. There is an… allure there.”
Patrick tasted something horribly metallic. His jaw rolled.
“Still,” Tanner continued. “I did not imagine the feats she’d be capable of. She found her way right under your skin, didn’t she?”
Patrick pictured himself on a meat hook, his torso flayed.