Chapter 31 Vapor and Smoke
VAPOR AND SMOKE
KINGFISHER
THE FOX SMELLED like wild winter and frost-bitten mornings. I held him tightly under one arm, humming a lullaby that my mother had sung to me as an infant quietly under my breath.
Not to the fox.
I wasn’t humming to the fox.
That would have been weird.
I just liked the song, and I had a feeling he did, too. There was nothing wrong with that.
Ana drowan, doyath drowan, teyra drowan cal su marn. Massurith, massurith, kalminan tu dan shay . . .
One fish, two fish, three fish in the tub. Around they go, around they go, swimming off to sea . . .
Onyx didn’t so much as wriggle as I transported him through the palace. He didn’t growl at the high bloods we passed. He didn’t study the cold, unwelcoming surroundings he found himself in. He fixed his eyes on me, nose twitching, and he listened to me sing.
My magic was useless here—a source of unending frustration.
I should have been able to ward Saeris’s chambers against unwelcome visitors, but even that was beyond me here.
Tal had been the one to take care of that task.
He’d made sure I would have access to her rooms whenever I wanted, but the knowledge that it was his magic that provided an extra layer of security to her rooms and not mine chafed horribly as I made my way through the double doors to her bedroom.
The fox sat patiently in my arms as I carried him over to her bed.
Hris drowan mayth tair, hris drowan brin gilterrith, ayen hris drowan farh miniethh loss . . .
The first fish drowned, the second fish froze, and the third fish swallowed them all . . .
I ended the song with a flourish, setting the fox down onto the bed. He blinked up at me, eyes glassy and black as jet, not really sure what to make of my performance, it seemed.
“I’m sorry, little one. Now that I think about it, that isn’t a very happy song, is it? Do you like fish? I bet you do, huh?”
The fox blinked.
“I bet you’d like some now, huh? Some tasty trout?”
His ears pricked up. I would have sworn to all the gods that he was smiling hopefully.
“Okay, okay. Let me see.” My illusions were real as long as they were observed.
A bath could be real. Clothes. But not food.
It just didn’t work like that. I had to pull that kind of magic from somewhere else, and that took concentration.
I reached . . . reached . . . and grunted with the effort as I reached into my small magic, into a different place entirely, and I drew a silver bowl containing half a smoked piece of trout.
Right about now, a barmaid at the Shag’s Nest in Western Dow was wondering where in all five hells the order of smoked trout she’d just been carrying had disappeared to.
It was no matter, though. I’d make sure to go there and pay them for the meal soon enough.
I set the little bowl down and then watched with straight-faced satisfaction as the fox hopped down from Saeris’s bed and promptly scarfed the lot. The fish was gone in moments.
“All right, little one. I have to go now. Don’t be causing any trouble while you wait for your mistress, okay?”
Onyx looked up at me, pink tongue licking his lips as he savored the taste of the meal I’d stolen for him.
“Go on. Go take a nap or something.”
The fox yawned and then turned and darted under Saeris’s bed.
I was at the door, hand on the knob, when I heard his soft whine.
“What is it, hm?” Glancing back over my shoulder, I watched as the little white fox popped his head out from under the bed and then came trotting over to me with purpose.
When he reached me, he ducked his head, and something small and brown hit the rug.
It was a pine cone.
One of the smallest—and most perfectly formed—I had ever seen.
Onyx nudged it with his nose, huffing, then looked up at me expectantly.
I stared down at the fox and the pine cone, hand still on the doorknob, not sure what to do. “Is that . . . for me?”
Onyx nudged the little spiked pine cone, butting it with his nose again, until it rolled and hit the toe of my boot. It was for me.
A gift.
I bent and collected it, tucking the memento into the inside pocket of my leathers. Before I turned and left, I scratched the little fox between his black-tipped ears, trying and failing to pretend that I was unmoved by the gesture. “Thank you, little one.”
The library was deserted.
Lamps dotted the length of the clerk’s table, their pale green glow forming small pools of light. Books were gathered in five neat stacks, ten tomes high each, at the far end of the table. The place was as silent as the grave.
As I crossed the entryway of the library, headed for the steps that led up to the stacks, a small black cat made of shadow appeared out of my shadow, taking me by surprise.
Plenty of shadows had come from me before—that went without saying.
But they’d done so at my behest, and none of them had ever solidified into something living afterward.
The cat dug its claws into the rug as it stretched, peering up at me with bloodred eyes.
“Where did you come from?” I asked it.
The shadow cat sniffed my leg curiously, tiny nostrils flaring.
“What can you smell?” I asked. “A fox? I don’t know if the two of you would get along.” As if it knew what I was saying, the shadow cat butted its head against my shins and began purring loud enough to wake the dead.
I stooped down to pet it, and the damned thing darted away, making for the stairs. On the bottom step, it paused, glancing over its shoulder as if to say, Well, then. Are you coming?
Saeris’s scent hung in the air, faint but detectable, as I crossed the library and headed up the stairs.
I lost her as I entered the stacks, following the feline, who trotted on ahead, occasionally looking back to make sure I was still there.
I had always made it a rule to follow a cat.
Particularly a black cat. This one was the darkest shade of midnight there was—an absence of light I knew all too well.
My senses were on high alert as we wound through the high stacks, left, then right, then straight ahead for two rows.
Magic hung thick in the air here, as the rows grew closer together and the light grew dim, veiling the titles of the hundreds of books that we passed.
The cat’s feet barely seemed to touch the ground as it padded softly ahead.
It rubbed its side against the corner of a shelf as it waited for me to catch up, its long, dexterous tail swaying side to side like a blade of tall grass on a breeze.
Once I was close enough for its liking, it took a left, disappearing into a walkway (or more of a tunnel, perhaps), constructed entirely from dusty old books.
Golden light flickered at the end of the tunnel.
When I exited the tunnel, I found myself in a high-ceilinged section of the library that felt very different from the rest of it.
A table. A chair. In the far corner: a bed, half-concealed behind a maroon velvet curtain edged with a golden tassel fringe.
The walls were made of the stacks themselves, which had been arranged to form a sort of internal sanctuary, separate from everything else.
The rug underfoot was threadbare at the entrance to the snug. Threadbare also along the section before the large hearth on the far wall, in which a fire crackled merrily in the grate; the bald spots in there indicated many hours during which someone had paced, lost in their thoughts.
In the center of the cloistered space was a large table, on top of which sat a contraption made of cogs and long, spindled arms with shining brass balls attached at their ends.
The arms were still, but over time, they would move.
It was an orrery. A beautiful one, too. Once, there had been one in my father’s study.
As a Faeling, I’d been fascinated by the complex workings of it.
My parents had sat at the device, studying it at length.
They’d shown me the planets as they were represented by the globes of inlaid silver and copper—how they danced around one another, all spinning around the much larger golden sun at its center.
This orrery was very different from the one in my father’s study. The alignment and the number of the planets were different. It was beautiful to be sure.
If there were time, I would have stayed and appreciated the craftsmanship of the device a little longer—orreries were notoriously difficult to make—but I had come in search of its owner, and I had a feeling I would find him among the real stars.
A rolling ladder had been bolted to the wall to the right.
Twenty feet up, a small window stood open, the heavy curtain that was partially drawn across it billowing on a cold breeze.
The cat sat at the bottom of the ladder and looked up at the open window, its meaning clear: Your friend is waiting for you up there.
So be it.
At the foot of the ladder, the cat meowed, blinking slowly at me. It did a turn, the way cats do when they’re about to lie down and nap, but when this one stretched its front paws out, it became a thing of ink and darkness again and disappeared into the long shadow I cast across the moth-eaten rug.
“All right, then,” I muttered to myself.
I felt no different. Aside from having just seen it happen with my own two eyes, I had no evidence that the cat had just merged with me somehow.
I shrugged and climbed the ladder. The window was three feet tall and only two feet wide.
I had to fold myself considerably and angle my shoulders to slide through and out onto the narrow walkway beyond.
A low parapet ran around the domed roof, providing minimal protection from the three-hundred-foot drop that fell away on the other side of it.
Above, the stars rioted, blistering and brilliant.