Entwined (The Entwined Duology #1)

Chapter 1

The smuggler was, in my not uninformed opinion, certainly a mage.

His eyes were too keen in the night, his movements too quiet.

When he cast a long look across the black gloss of the river, I could have sworn I glimpsed silver markings on his throat, between his high collar and unruly reddish-brown beard—silver that appeared only in the thin light of the moon perched above the warehouses and chimneys at our backs.

A lone mage in a disreputable line of work. Worn, laborer’s clothes. No Guild ring on his finger, no partner in sight, in a city that would string a mage from a lamppost without the slightest provocation.

A Separatist? A Rogue?

I discreetly tilted my head, feeling the reassuring brush of my high collar, and stopped before him.

“Mr. Harden?” I inquired.

The smuggler flicked his cigarette into the water beside the quay, where it joined a lapping line of refuse. “Who’s asking?”

“Miss Fleet, associate of Mr. Stoke. You have an item for us?”

“Ah. Illing’s girl.” Mr. Harden appraised me down the length of his nose as the wind gusted between us, cold as the coming winter. He had a fine nose, I noted, statuesque, in a face that looked to be perhaps thirty. “Your boss is late.”

“He will be along presently,” I assured him. “In the meantime, you may show me. Where is it?”

The smuggler shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels, nonchalant and self-assured.

“I’ll not be doing that. What are you, to our dear Detective Stoke?

‘Associate’ being rather vague, you understand.

Daughter? Secretary? Bodyguard? Lewis sends his regards, by the way.

I offered to pass on a kiss, but he declined.

Now, if you’d like to send him one, I won’t be back south for some time, but a good, solid kiss will keep. ”

“I am the detective’s secretary,” I interrupted. I considered him dryly for the span of a few lapping waves before the thought of Lewis made me ask, “Did Lewis seem well?”

The way Mr. Harden eyed me made me feel utterly transparent. I suspected Lewis had told him far more about me, about us, than he’d told me about Harden—first and foremost, that the man was a Guildless mage.

I trusted Lewis, but that did not sit well.

Mr. Harden said, “As well as anyone is, down there. Times are not what they were.”

I pressed my lips into a thin twist of agreement.

The sound of footsteps drew our attention down the riverside. There, a shadow separated from an alleyway and moved purposefully towards us, walking stick carried brusquely in one hand.

“Harden,” Mr. Stoke, my employer, greeted the other man.

In his late fifties with a well-tended moustache, slightly melancholy eyes, and a decidedly average frame, his voice was his most notable quality.

It was low and smooth and gentle, turning Harrow’s clipped, bitter dialect into a soothing rumble.

“Good to see you again. I’ve your money, and apologize for my tardiness. Where is it?”

“Detective.” Harden tugged his forelock. “Follow me.”

With that he moved off down the walk, his strides long and easy. Mr. Stoke and I followed, falling into step with one another.

“You should have waited for me,” Mr. Stoke murmured, keeping his gaze on Harden’s back. “Do not tell me you walked at this hour.”

“I took a hackney,” I soothed as Harden stopped by a large warehouse door, barely a pace from the river’s edge and shadowed by block and tackle for unloading the long, narrow riverboats.

Mr. Stoke’s lips momentarily flattened into a line. “Please wait for me, in the future.”

Future. The word burrowed under my skin, stinging with guilt, as we followed Harden into the warehouse and the light of a pungent oil lamp. If electricity had reached this quarter of the city, the warehouses’ owners had yet to take advantage of it.

The space was large and vaulted, evidenced by the echo of our footsteps, but so dark and packed with crates, bundles, and barrels that I could not see far. I eyed gaps and shadows, all too aware of how many enemies could be hidden just out of sight.

“This is it,” Harden said, dividing my attention. He wove his way to a long worktable, gouged and smoothed by decades of use. A nondescript crate sat atop, with a waiting crowbar. “The latest spoils of revolution. Lewis assured me this is what your patron requested.”

My employer fished into his pocket for an envelope and relinquished it. Harden glanced inside, then tossed the envelope on the table and shoved the crowbar under the crate lid.

He pressed down, encountered resistance, and tried again with a muttered curse. My gaze slipped to his throat as he adjusted his grip, but the silver threads I had glimpsed under the light of the moon had faded in the lanternlight.

I startled as the lid yielded with a crack. Harden sniffed in apparent satisfaction and stepped aside to allow us to peer into a nest of raw cotton.

I pulled off one glove, revealing the simple engagement ring on my fourth finger, and brushed the top layer away. As I did my fingers skimmed the surface of something below—hard wood, smooth and carved.

Images assailed me. Other hands, touching, placing. A bright sky, and a dark chamber hewn in stone. A familiar face with a short moustache, neat sideburns, and the canvas-clad helmet of a soldier. Lewis. My heart startled in my chest, but long practice kept my expression passingly curious.

The object I touched was now discernable as the top of a box. A symbol stared up at me, complex and arcane.

“Miss Fleet, if I may?” Mr. Stoke murmured.

I stepped back. The man took my place and lifted the box from its nest, revealing it to be a perfect cube, its wood pale and sapped of color.

Its sides were the length of Mr. Stoke’s large hands and carved with circular symbols, like the top.

There was no visible opening, though I noted the suggestion of joints. A puzzle box.

“Well.” Harden looked unimpressed. “If you’re satisfied? I’ve other business to be about.”

Mr. Stoke nodded, shifted the box under one arm and shook Harden’s hand. “A pleasure.”

“’Course,” Harden said. “Glad to help a man such as yourself. You know how to find me if you’ve more such… mutually beneficial opportunities. I’ll be about Harrow from now on. But I can make arrangements.”

Mr. Stoke nodded, touched his hat and made for the door, gathering me with a glance. I fell into step, pulling my glove back on and watching the symbols on the box disappear as the detective wrapped it in cloth.

“The same goes to you, Miss Fleet.”

Harden’s voice made me pause in the doorway. The breezy autumn night swept around me, stirring my skirts and smelling strongly of river, mildew, and coming rain.

Mr. Stoke continued a few steps before he glanced back.

“Pardon?” I looked at the smuggler with blooming irritation, but that shifted to unease as I met his gaze. He did not leer as I expected, but there was assessment in the tilt of his head, and a hint of knowing in his eyes.

“You know how to find me if you’ve any business opportunities,” he clarified. “I’m very good at finding things, as you know. Moving them, discreetly. And hiding them.”

Lewis had most certainly told him too much. I returned the man’s smile, thin and false, and hastened to catch up to Mr. Stoke.

We did not speak as we wove through the series of alleyways and yards back to the main street, both of us sequestered in our thoughts and watching the shadows.

We deftly avoided a patrol of city watchmen, standing quietly in the shadow of an awning as they passed, and reached the main street just as church bells began to toll fourth hour.

“Your landlady will not be pleased with me,” Mr. Stoke observed as he glanced up and down the street for a hackney. There were none in sight and by unspoken agreement we began to walk. “Occupying you at such a disagreeable hour.”

“My landlady can stuff it,” I declared. I did not add that, regardless of my bravado, my landlady had begun threatening to lock the doors at midnight, and thus force me to abandon whatever unholy pursuits kept me out at night.

Mr. Stoke frowned. “Perhaps I should speak to her. I can reassure her that you are respectfully employed.”

“Sir, we have, just now, met with a Silver to retrieve antiquities smuggled out of The Sarre. I am unclear how that constitutes respectful employment.”

“We were hired to recover a possession for a respectable council lord,” Mr. Stoke corrected, but there was a hollowness to his tone, and after a moment, he frowned. “Though, I will say, I have had my moments with the morality of this particular endeavor of ours, Miss Fleet.”

He seemed as though he wanted to say more, but the sound of wheels caught our attention. Mr. Stoke stepped out into the street, one arm raised to hail a hackney.

“I will speak to your landlady, Ottilie,” he informed me, shifting back to our original conversation. “You are too dear to me, I will not permit the possibility of seeing you cast out onto the street. Or snoring on my sofa.”

I produced a laugh, but guilt reared again. “Please, there is no need.”

“All the same. Hello, good man.”

The hackney stopped and the driver, a small man with a large hat, greeted us in turn.

By the time we settled inside, Mr. Stoke, perhaps noticing my distraction, had set aside the conversation.

He sat the bundled box onto the bench beside him, rested his walking stick over his knees, and commenced looking out the window.

Perched across from him with the skirts of my walking suit rumpled, I followed his gaze as the city began to pass by.

More people appeared as we left the warehouse district—night workers, drunks, whores, and the displaced.

Fires burned in alleyways, surrounded by silhouettes.

The public houses were hushed and their windows dim, the boisterous companies of the early night long gone.

The lampposts were unlit and neglected, serving as little more than posterboards for chaotic layers of flyers and bills.

And, in the worst of Harrow’s traditions, gallows.

I felt the warmth leech from my face as a crowd came into sight, preceded by the jostling light of torches and lanterns and the clash of voices.

The hackney driver bellowed to clear the road, but was largely ignored.

Thus the carriage slowed, and Mr. Stoke and I were treated to a clear view of events.

A rope had been tossed up over one of the lamppost’s sturdy arms. At one end, a noose was wrestled around the throat of a wiry woman, her shrieks rising above through the shouts and cheers.

Half a dozen men seized the other end, jesting and jostling for the privilege, and before Mr. Stoke could draw breath to shout or I could close my eyes, the rope tightened and the woman swung.

Her shrieks abruptly silenced and the crowd roared as she kicked and struggled over their heads.

The hackney sped up, our driver taking advantage of the crowd’s sudden press closer to the dying woman.

Just as we passed the lamppost, someone leapt up and grabbed the woman’s legs. The sudden weight snapped her neck. I saw the panicked light leave her eyes as we trundled away—eyes that, though they saw nothing more in this world, gouged into mine.

Markings appeared on the woman’s throat, around the noose. Soft, glinting copper tendrils, like ivy, crept into wakefulness as her life faded. For a few terrible moments they stood out, pulsing with the beat of her dying heart.

The crowd roared in approval, their bloodthirsty cries only increasing as the woman’s Entwined threads faded back into her now swollen, reddened skin—marking her death.

Then we were through. Mr. Stoke slumped back on the bench, his expression pale with shock and a resigned, bitter rage. I sat straight on the edge of my own bench, staring back at the hanged woman without truly seeing her.

Instead, I saw myself. I saw my sisters. I saw that helmeted soldier, resting the carved box in a nest of cotton. I saw threat and danger, and felt a hot rush of desperation.

“It’s getting worse,” Mr. Stoke observed grimly. “Did you see the police in the crowd?”

“No,” I said tonelessly.

“There were several. They did not try to stop it. No one did.”

“They are too afraid,” I observed. “Or they agree, or they do not care. Apathy is a deadly thing.”

“Indeed.” Mr. Stoke swore under his breath and pulled his hat from his head, slapping it onto the seat next to him. His dark hair, gradually lightening with an influx of grey, was mussed. “This cannot continue, Miss Fleet. Such cruelty, such brazen violence. This is not the city I grew up in.”

“The city you grew up in was ruled by Entwined,” I commented, though my mind was tumbling away from him, the hanged woman, and even the city itself.

The guilt that had beset me earlier at Mr. Stoke’s talk of the future was gone, replaced with singular determination.

“From what I hear that was no better. The problem, I fear, is not with the differences between humans or Entwined, but that which we share—prejudice, and avarice.”

Mr. Stoke was quiet for a time, resting one hand on the box at his side. “That’s insightful, Miss Fleet.”

The words were my mother’s, plucked from a speech she had given to the Continental Guilds when I was a child, but I could not admit that.

“Thank you, sir. Should I send word to Lord Stillwell, to retrieve the artifact and settle accounts? For tomorrow evening, perhaps.” I looked back out the window, noting the quality of the darkness.

I would have enough time to get home before dawn, and the twilight that heralded it, but only just. “Or rather, that would be today.”

Mr. Stoke looked discomforted, even a little appalled that I had moved past the hanging so quickly, but whatever he saw in my face tempered him. “Yes, thank you.”

I nodded stoutly. “Very good, sir.”