Chapter Sixteen Nina
I awoke in increments.
I saw first a parade of hovering faces, then intervals of nothing.
I blinked back stubborn clouds of film again and again but felt mired in them.
I woke briefly when they changed my clothes and had the wherewithal to cover my breasts with my hands.
I woke again to a nurse tipping something noxious down my throat.
I was terrified of my uninhibited body lying just beyond the fog, where I was unable to defend it.
I imagined hands roaming over my stomach, ink slithering into my nostrils and pooling in the corners of my eyes.
Moments or hours or years later, I was being shuffled downstairs on leaden legs, strong hands encasing my arms. Then there were the cobbles rising up to meet me, tripling my nausea.
I blinked up at spires and vine-entangled gutters to see the sun, somehow still there, and had the wherewithal to ask, “Where’re you takin’ me? ”
I sounded like a child.
“In you get” came the answer, and light dimmed, sound condensed. The bench seat beneath me felt solid and anchoring.
The voice that met me through the fog did not.
A figure sitting across from me. We were closer together than I wanted, our knees touching, walls either side, and a ceiling too low. A coach, I realized. And sharing it with me was a man I knew.
“Miss Clarke,” Lord Terrence Shop greeted, his neck taut, face pinched. “Forgive the interruption to your sleep.”
I blinked. Gripped the wall. “Wh—where?”
“Where are we going?” the lord finished on my behalf. He moved his cane to the side, looked pensively out a window. “Tending to some business,” he said. “My first as Head of House, in fact.”
A dull throb pulsed at my arm, and I looked down to see both wrists bandaged, both shackled.
And the rest came rushing back.
The noose and the rain and the lever. The snap and my mother’s white lips, her frozen terror. The stampeding sorrow. A bone-breaking anguish.
Earth rising, rising, and then devouring.
Bloodlust.
It coated my mouth again, and I was freshly ravenous. “Did you do this?” I whispered, voice sapped. I was a husk now, I realized.
They’d bled me dry. All of them.
The lord took stock of me over his spectacles with an air of distaste. “You did this,” he said simply. “No one wrapped your finger around that trigger, Miss Clarke, did they?”
“Harrow.” My voice was a tremor, rippling out into the space between us. Did he hear my wrath knocking at his chest? “Where are you taking me?”
“You are to help me repair some of the fractured tensions between our people,” he answered.
I couldn’t make sense of it. Couldn’t see where I had been led, like a tethered dog. I only knew that I felt the rope at my neck, always pulling.
A sob climbed my ribs.
Here I was, shackled by the newest Head of House—the last one already forgotten, easily replaced—speaking to me of my duty to help him.
And I was so tired.
His voice droned on, just like Tanner’s. “It is the very least you can do. Do you understand? You can humble yourself before your countrymen, pray to Idia for forgiveness.”
But if Idia existed, she had frayed every last thread of me, and God was a villain.
“I advise you be gracious from here onward, Nina,” Terrence Shop said, my newest puppeteer. “Be thankful I didn’t order your throat sliced along with your wrist.”
I laughed, a new kind of hysteria in it. I could have hurled myself from the coach or simply closed my eyes and slept forever, right there on the carriage floor. “Kill me, then,” I said, then I leaned as far forward as I could, offering him my neck.
But long moments passed, and he did nothing. By the time I rolled my face back to his, he seemed sallow, strained, as though just now smelling the madness in me. “You and your fuckin’ ministry,” I said slowly, so that he could hear every rasp. “You wouldn’t kill me even if I begged you.”
And he seemed caught off guard to hear my voice was no longer that of a child’s, and that the world hadn’t stripped away my spine.
He righted himself. Crossed his legs. “The theatrics are not necessary, Miss Harrow,” he said. “But, where your life is concerned, you happen to be correct. I’ve brokered a compromise with the other lords to spare your life. If not for me, you’d be hanged this day.”
More deals. More bargains. My eyes rolled skyward. A school of fish had been painted on the carriage ceiling. “Do you fear death, my lord?”
He was quiet. Contemplative.
The fish swam in a mindless circle. “I find those who fear death have something to live for.”
Lord Shop shifted uncomfortably. “I’d hoped you’d see this as an opportunity to renew yourself. Fulfill your purpose. There is much we can achieve together.”
For the millionth time, I reimagined the siphoning ceremony, wherein I never made myself the world’s only earth Charmer. “Then you might as well take me to the gallows, my lord. I don’t care for my purpose, and I no longer fear death.”
After all, what remained that I should live for?
The lord chewed on his own tongue for a long moment. A sinister satisfaction seemed to come over him. “As I feared,” he said quietly, turning his gaze away. “You’ll take the whip on the citadel steps for assassinating the governing leader of this country.”
A dull dread rippled up my sternum.
“It will be… quite severe. We need to send a clear message that murder is not tolerated—”
“If it is an Artisan who is murdered, it is not tolerated.”
“—and that the punishment for sedition is grave.”
The coach swayed from side to side. The horses out front whinnied and shook their great heads in protest. Somewhere beyond, the city grew limescale and lost its glimmer by degrees. The Artisans scratched at their useless brands and paced their drawing rooms, purposeless, just like me.
For what was left for me here? Certainly no friends or family.
All were dead or believed me a traitor. Patrick screamed to mind, and I shut my eyes to stem the onslaught of him.
There was no me and Patrick. No Kenton Hill.
Nothing to fight for but remnants of my dignity, to be promptly lost on those citadel steps.
Clanging in the hollows of my mind, the shell of my mother said, God only wants my sufferin’. Tears ran past my self-restraint.
The coach jostled violently then, alarmingly so. The horses wrenched sideways. Lord Shop gripped his cane and turned to look through the window. “What in God’s name—”
But the sound of his voice was cut off by a sudden buckling of wood, an almighty crunch, and we were both thrown sideways as the coach toppled, as though an axle had been snapped in two.
My head hit the wall of the coach, and I groaned, the world now on its side. Lord Shop’s body had half collapsed over mine, and he roared indignantly, cursing as he tried to right himself.
Voices beyond the coach called out. The driver barked orders to the runaway horses. The sky spilled in as the door was finally wrenched open from above, and the driver’s blotched face appeared, distress making his eyes wide. “Everyone all right, my lord?”
Lord Shop seethed. “Get us out!”
“Bloody wheel snapped in two,” the Craftsman said, reaching one arm down to pull the lord free. “Like someone took an axe to it.”
I watched then as a knife appeared at the driver’s throat and pressed against his airway.
Another face blocked out light. This one was bearded, sported a bowler, and gave a long, low whistle. “Scuse the interruption, my lord.” His voice was thick, heavily accented. He smiled, stained teeth glinting. “They don’t make these swank carriages the way they used to.”
Lord Shop’s eyes blackened. His lip peeled back in fury, and he tried to find his footing. “Colson. You Godforsaken fool—”
“Uh, uh, now,” the man I took to be John Colson said, and suddenly, a piece of splintered wood levitated, carved itself with rapid precision into a stake, and then hovered out of reach above Terrence Shop’s head, its tip pointed at his cranium.
Patrick’s father seemed euphoric. There was a fervor in his eyes that I was sure I’d seen before. “ ’Fraid I’ll have to renege on our deal, Shop,” he said, and then to me, “Up you get, darlin’.”
He was shoved aside then, his face and that of the driver’s replaced by one that, after everything, seemed heavenly.
Patrick held one arm out to me, something pained crossing his expression. “Come on,” he said, urgency marring every line of his face. “Hurry.”
I lifted my injured arms, and he grasped them. If the wounds split, or fresh pain tore free, I didn’t feel it. I only felt his sure fingers, circling around my wrists, hauling me free of the wreckage, out into open air.
“You scum!” Shop spat from below, the stake still hovering threateningly above him. “Half the city’s policemen are moments behind!”
“Them coppers ran into a spill some ways back” came John Colson’s elated voice once more. He still had the Craftsman by the throat, still grinned as though this were sport. “Fuckload of barrels toppled onto the road and blocked ’em in. Horrible luck.”
“Patrick,” Shop now appealed, turning his attention away from John Colson. “If you run now, you remove the last hope of amnesty for your people. I will burn every town, every Craftsman in the brink to ash.”
Patrick looked down at the lord as though he were a plague. “Pray to God we don’t meet again, Terrence,” Patrick said, voice murderous. “Next time you see me, I’ll be the one puttin’ a bullet in that empty chest.”
We left Terrence Shop in the buckling carriage on an empty street, the windows of buildings above overcrowded with onlookers pressing their noses to the glass. Patrick jumped from the remaining rear wheel and turned to reach for my waist, and I went to him as one turns to the sun.
He caught me as though I weighed nothing, and then my feet were on the ground, and he was turning me around, urging me onward. “Run,” he insisted, gripping my hand beneath the shackles. “As fast as you can manage.”