Chapter Fifty Theo
Theo walked as though sleep had taken hold of his limbs.
With two soldiers on his arms, he moved as one does in dreams, mindless and numb, their bones not their own.
His father walked ahead of him with the Charmers flanking his sides.
Polly was pulled along somewhere at Theo’s back.
He could not look at her without his eyes descending to her ruined hands.
They were escorted not to the coach, which had buckled beneath the fallen clock tower, but to the edge of the ramparts, a handful of soldiers awaiting them, looking reticent to have been called to duty this night.
Theo noticed that there was a certain care to the way they marched him away, as though this were a rescue and not an arrest.
He blinked at the passing streetlamps and watched photons burst in the distortion of his sight. He felt stupid, dazed, his head rattling with the effects of shell shock. He couldn’t be sure if the stars over the sea were rearranging their constellations or if he was finally succumbing to madness.
Perhaps it was best he let it come. Let sanity give way to something painless and quiet. Let him hope for less than love from this moment on.
Better that than this yawning awareness that he was utterly alone.
They were loaded hastily into a wagon under flickering lamplight while most of Lavnonshire hid itself away and the sea thrashed the cliffside. The horses were unadorned and matched the choleric officers who lifted Polly, Theo, and his father into the wagon bed.
There was no canopy, and so the braver residents watched from their high windows as the wagon was pulled away through Lavnonshire’s maze. The Charmers and officers followed behind at a leisurely pace, scowling up at the fluttering curtains until Crafters scurried back from the glass.
Theo’s father sighed tiredly. “We’re a spectacle,” he said, adjusting his gold-rimmed glasses on his nose—embarrassed, Theo imagined, to be seen on Crafter transport. “We’ll be taken on a private train to the city.”
Theo barely heard him. He leaned forward, let his face fall into his hands, and suppressed the urge to vomit.
“What you’re feeling, Theodore, is shame,” his father said bluntly. “You’ve brought every bit of it onto yourself.”
Theo had never been surer that this was true, though not in the way Terrence Shop thought.
“If you’re so ashamed of me, why not leave me in the brink?” he asked. “Why bring me back at all? Surely the House won’t let you reinstate me after I deserted.”
“But you didn’t desert the House, Theodore. You were taken hostage, and this is your rescue.” What he implied was clear. The newsprint would establish his father a hero by morning. Another win for the House.
“You can save your tantrum for the journey home, if you please. There are plenty of walls for you to thrash your head against. But you will return home with me and carry out your duty as you were meant to, whether willingly or by force.”
“Because it spares you a scandal?”
“Because you are my son!” Lord Shop said, his voice rising for the first time. “And because I did not invest every ounce of leverage I had in you only for you to squander our family name on some girl from the brink!” He said it as though there were no greater insult to him.
Theo closed his eyes and felt the invisible pressure of ever-tightening binds cinching him inward. He said the only helpful thing he could hope to say. “If your Charmers burn Polly again, I’ll drown them. There’s plenty of water at hand.”
“Interesting,” Lord Shop said condescendingly. “Have your affections changed?”
Theo looked up to see him inspect Polly with no small measure of disgust. She was cradling her bleeding hands carefully against her chest, curling into herself like she was expecting another blow.
His father shook his head, perplexed. “Truly, Theo, you are a simpleton when it comes to the female persuasion.”
But of course his father wouldn’t understand friendship. There were only ever alliances. “She needs a doctor,” Theo said. “And bluff.”
“Penance is a medicine of its own kind,” his father answered, adjusting his cane so that his hands rested atop it. His eyes pierced Theo’s. “As you’ll soon learn.”
Theo did not fear his words. In fact, he couldn’t even bring himself to disagree with them. “Is that your great plan?” he asked boldly. “To have me lashed on the citadel steps and claim I’ve been saved? Do you think the Trench will believe I’ve been cured of my beliefs?”
“And what beliefs are those, Theodore?” his father asked, his tone darkening. He tilted his head to the side. “Are you a bleeding heart for the Crafters? A Union sympathizer?”
Theo’s mouth popped open, then closed again. No, not only for the Union. There were those on both sides with whom he sympathized.
His father scoffed mirthlessly. “You have no idea of your own convictions, boy, do you?”
Theo boiled. He and his father had never come to blows. Their sparring was the verbal kind. Boxing was for Craftsmen. But Lord, how Theo wanted to belt him now.
“You let them go,” Theo said in a voice that seethed. “Why?”
His father looked back at him drolly, as though even this disappointed him. “As punishing as it has been of late to be your father, I do not wish for us to be at odds. I know you care for the girl. You’ve made that abundantly clear to me.”
“No. That isn’t all of it,” Theo pressed. “There’s something else.”
“There’s always something else, Theodore,” Lord Shop intoned.
“Decisions like these take time. Careful planning. My aim was simply to retrieve The Stewards’ Testament, the translator, and of course, you.
The Alchemist and the earth Charmer are desperate and young and rash.
I didn’t much want to incite the kind of gunslinging that would surely have ensued once the rats realized they were cornered. ”
Polly breathed through her nose like a bull, hands shaking.
It didn’t make any sense, or perhaps the intricacies were now beyond Theo’s capability. “You had enough fire Charmers to take them all hostage. Enough leverage to tip your hand. Why wouldn’t you have them arrested?”
Lord Shop considered Theo as though he truly could not fathom what had become of his son.
He crossed his legs and looked up into the expansive sky.
“You know, the thing about rats is that they’re entirely difficult to catch.
One might set up a hundred traps with the most enticing bait, and they’ll find a way to steal the bait and slip through the cracks.
They’re smarter than they seem. For though they might be vermin, they are… determined when properly motivated.”
Theo tried to follow the words, tried to see what lay between them. This was how an Artisan spoke. In encryptions and mazes and tightening spirals.
Lord Shop spoke on. “One might drive themselves to insanity trying to eradicate an infestation for good. The better thing to do is wait. The rat in the walls soon runs out of bait to eat. It grows frantic, it eats its young, its own foot. Soon, the rat dies. It does the work for you.”
Theo stood, despite the moving wagon, eyes wide and wild.
“We’ve arrived,” his father announced suddenly, and the wagon came to an inelegant halt.
Theo staggered and nearly fell.
With that, Lord Shop gestured to the opening of the wagon, where the uniformed men waited with their sullen faces.
The train station was empty and still but for the steaming plume of a train engine, and the soldiers who waited on its small platform.
“Don’t be stupid, Theodore,” Lord Shop said, rebuttoning his coat. “Your moment of rebellion is over. Do you understand me?”
As though following some invisible summons, the soldiers waiting at the end of the wagon gripped the handles of their batons.
Theo clenched his teeth, tasting blood. He nodded stiffly.
The train, empty but for them and a contingent of soldiers who walked like wraiths between the compartments, labored full-tilt from the moors into marshlands.
Wide stretches of water passed, and though it looked glassy and picturesque in the late light, Theo knew the depths were murky, full of eels and whiskered fish and beady-eyed mud-dwellers.
Water was sometimes deceptive and sometimes not.
Sometimes it rolled and crashed and warned a man of its true nature.
But mostly, it reflected something far calmer than what waited beneath the surface.
Lord Shop poured him and Polly a cup of tea. He took up his own and looked out the window of their private compartment, apparently taken with the view. His cane rested beside him. He spoke as though Theo were accompanying him to the countryside for the weekend.
“I often wonder why our ancestors did not build a city further south. The winters are far more pleasant here. I’m afraid you’ll be returning home to a freeze.”
Theo ignored this. He watched his father’s face for its tells. He knew something thrashed beneath the surface.
Polly, however, did not know to wade in carefully. “Where will you take us?” she said, her sobs giving way to something more fierce, as though she’d finally been divested of her fear.
“You’ll speak when spoken to, Scribbler,” Lord Shop said around the lip of the teacup, but in a voice that radiated danger. “Though I daresay you cannot help it, can you? Entitlement is such a scourge upon your generation.”
Theo bid himself to stem his anger, to watch.
“My father would rap the back of my head with his cane when I spoke out of turn. This very cane in fact.” The lord gestured to the cane in question.
“I chose a less tempestuous approach with my own son, though I’ve come to see that as an error in judgment.
” His eyes finally came to rest on Theo’s.
They were heavy-lidded, so as to be discreet.
It was difficult to read a man who only showed you half his eyes.
This was what he wielded in lieu of a cane.
“Where are you taking us?” Polly repeated. She looked at Theo’s father with the kind of flint Theo had never quite managed.