Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
Neal
It would take four train changes to make it from New Orleans to New York City.
But the tickets were booked, the porters had our luggage, and things were—for once—going smoothly.
The first few hours were a welcome respite.
Ansel talked loudly and enthusiastically about uncomfortable topics any time another passenger got too close.
I managed to situate Sorcha such that most of the other passengers wouldn’t notice her belly and such that she had easy access to a basin to vomit in when her pregnancy symptoms inevitably reared their head.
We were six hours out of New Orleans now, and my mind wandered as I traced a thumb absently over Sorcha’s knuckles and watched the monotonous landscape outside the window.
Then, as though my subconscious had been storing up the thought for a moment of peace, I remembered Andrew Merrick.
Ironmoot. Supposedly the sworn enemy of the Elves.
But friends with Ansel, willing to wake in the middle of the night to find hot water and help me break Sorcha’s fever. It didn’t add up.
Sorcha was awake. Ansel wasn’t currently actively terrorizing any of the other passengers with uncomfortable anecdotes. Now was as good a time as any to bring it up.
“So Andrew Merrick,” I said, deciding to just be blunt. If they chided me for ignorance, or inversely decided I was a traitor, best to get it over with. “Not what I was taught to expect from an Ironmoot.”
Ansel snorted then replied, “Yeah because you trained in Europe and read all the Inner Court–sanctioned histories.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“You know the feud is propaganda, right?” Ansel prompted.
I shook my head.
“You didn’t know?” Sorcha asked. She almost sounded proud of herself.
“I always thought . . .” I trailed off.
“Wait no,” Sorcha cut in, “I knew something about Elf politics that you didn’t?”
She was almost squealing now.
“Okay, so—enlighten me, you two—what actually happened?”
Sorcha leaned back, looking pleased with herself and nodded to Ansel.
“The short version?” Ansel began. “Iksura has always seen the Ironmoot as a threat. Long lived. Highly intelligent. They’re too much like us while simultaneously being culturally opposed.
Elves stand for tradition, honor, spirituality, and naturalism.
Meanwhile the Ironmoot have always valued effort, productivity, pragmatism.
And they brought out something hostile and competitive in her. ”
“And so she just lied about them? Told everyone they committed atrocities?” I asked.
“In what world would that be out of character for her?” Sorcha replied.
Ansel continued, “Fourteenth century, back before I was born, Iksura noticed that Elven influence was waning. More and more countries were converting to Christianity and throwing off the old gods—which meant Elven legends were getting less time and attention. Elven pregnancies were getting progressively more dangerous—with your wife as our lovely case in point as to how that’s progressed—which meant fewer babies.
Iksura wanted the populace to trust her, to trust the old ways.
Meanwhile the Ironmoot were thriving as the economy depended more and more on trade and mining.
So she villainized them, decided that if she could give the Elves a common enemy, then maybe they’d rally.
Return to their former glory. She started blaming tragedies on the Ironmoot without evidence—hundreds of unfounded claims published like truth.
There were dissenters. Your great-granduncle—who held the Outer Court seat then—was one of them.
But slowly the dissenters disappeared, died, were mysteriously killed by Ironmoot factions—despite not a single documented incident of violence prior. And eventually, her story won.”
“So this entire feud was about what? Public opinion?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yep,” Sorcha agreed. “Didn’t they teach you that when you were learning about Stewarding?”
I shrugged, then asked, “So I spent the last hundred-plus years of my life being an utter ass to Ironmoot for literally no reason?”
“No, you spent the last hundred plus years of your life being an utter ass to Ironmoot to boost Iksura’s reputation,” Sorcha clarified, “which really does not go along with our whole goal as a group right now. So you may want to make a quick adjustment.”
“Another damn power grab,” I muttered, slouching in my seat.
“What else is new?” Ansel replied glibly.
“Well now that it’s settled,” Sorcha continued, “I will note down the date and time that I knew something about Elven history that you didn’t, and then I’m going to go back to trying to translate our demon book.”
A gasp came from the seat behind them. And then an older, female voice, “Did they just say something about demon books?”
“It’s on Tasmanian devils of course,” Ansel shouted vaguely in the direction of the startled passengers, “since young Sorcha has taken such an interest in biology. What is it you were saying about marsupial carnivores?”
He shot me and Sorcha a wink, and she suppressed a chuckle.
After weeks fighting for our lives and sanity on the road, I had assumed the six days of rail travel would be relaxing, a reprieve. I didn’t expect boredom to generate its own anxiety.
Sorcha was busy with her book and napping often. Ansel was happy disturbing the other passengers with small talk they definitely didn’t ask for. I was just … restless.
I’d taken to noting down when and how long Sorcha slept, what she ate and drank, if and how soon after she threw it up. I needed something, anything, to keep my mind off the monotony.
After a quick stop to refuel, Ansel dumped a pile of books on our table.
“We’re getting antsy,” he said.
“So you robbed a library?” Sorcha asked in reply, starting to sift through the stack of paperbacks.
“I grabbed a dozen books from the penny bin at a thrift store,” Ansel clarified. “Some of them are bound to be decent.”
“Ansel, this is a romance novel,” Sorcha said, pushing one of the books in his direction. “And this one is in Portuguese. Do you speak Portuguese?”
“No,” Ansel admitted, “but what better opportunity to learn?”
Ansel’s fascination with the books lasted all of fourteen hours.
He skimmed the romance novel—I tried to tease him for it but found Ansel’s unending self-confidence made that near impossible—then flipped through a book on train engineering and another that seemed to be about canning fruit.
And then he was back to incessant small talk.
Sorcha had taken Ansel’s suggestion of learning Portuguese seriously and was immersed in what seemed to be a book about agricultural methods from southern Brazil.
She had a few other texts spread out in front of her—one in Spanish, one the old Cajun French journal from Father Andrew, and the Vulgate Psalms and Proverbs she always kept in her pocket—that she was using to cross-reference for words she couldn’t place.
I attempted to read, remembered I generally wasn’t a book person, and remained bored out of my mind.
Ansel returned to our seats late one evening, beaming ear to ear.
“See him?” Ansel asked, pointing down the aisle to an older, clean-shaven man in an expensive black suit with a heavily padlocked crate in the seat beside him. “Fascinating. Utterly insufferable.”
“Oh?” Sorcha looked up from her books.
“Antique dealer,” Ansel said. “Found some ancient and glorious urn in a back-alley thrift store in New Orleans. He’s trying to sell it for over a thousand.”
“And you care, why?” Sorcha asked, disappointment and disinterest clouding her features instantly.
“Because nothing is actively trying to kill us and I have to stay sharp,” Ansel muttered in response.
We stopped in Richmond and went to disembark in search of food and somewhere to wash our faces before boarding again in a few hours.
Sorcha was lagging. The train didn’t upset her stomach as badly as the boat.
But she’d also been sleeping sitting up for four days now and I could tell—from the tension in her shoulders, the way she held herself—that her back and hips were bad, that the nausea was getting harder to cope with.
I helped her off the train and onto the platform and watched a panicked look briefly cross her face before she vomited directly onto the polished shoes of a porter loading luggage in front of us.
“I am so sorry,” Sorcha said immediately, shoving her handkerchief toward the startled young man like it would somehow actually help.
I sighed, raking a hand over my face and taking her arm.
I was ready to be done traveling. I handed the porter a dollar coin, and the young man’s face went from horrified to placated in an instant.
A quick “thank you” and the boy was back to his work.
I looked around for Ansel, wondering if we could just get back on the train and pretend this had simply never happened. But, per his usual, Ansel had disappeared into the crowd and was nowhere to be seen.
A cluster of friendly, older women gathered around and started offering Sorcha every conceivable anti-nausea remedy.
One shoved a lavender sachet in her direction.
Another suggested candied ginger, digging through a carpetbag that could have easily concealed a full-grown longhorn.
A third suggested smelling salts. Sorcha accepted the lavender and politely but firmly declined the other suggestions.
“That helping?” I asked. Sorcha nodded, pressing the bag of flowers close up against her face.
“The smell,” she mumbled, gesturing vaguely at the coal-fired steam engine, then at the rows of food stalls reeking of grease.
“I know,” I said gently. “I’m sorry. I wish I could fix it.”
Sorcha just shrugged, taking deep breaths of the lavender. Then I heard whispering behind me.
“Is she . . .” a young woman’s voice trailed off.
“Expecting?” An older woman’s voice this time, laced with a mixture of judgment and utter shock. “I do believe she is.”
“And she’s traveling?” the younger woman nearly shrieked.
“Can I help you?” I asked, figuring a direct approach was best and turning around to face our commentators.
A young woman in a pale blue traveling suit stood beside a middle-aged woman in a much-less-expensive set of tweeds. A socialite and her chaperone, I surmised.
“Has she any family?” the older woman asked.
“I’m her husband,” I assured them.
“And are you two expecting?” The young woman whispered the last word like it was a curse.
“We’re going to visit my father,” I said.
The women looked skeptical.
“The baby was an unexpected surprise,” I lied.
The two women looked ready to faint.
“Married and pregnant, what is the world coming to?” I mumbled, attention going back to Sorcha.
I brushed a strand of sweaty hair back from her forehead, noted that her color looked far better now that she had the lavender, and made to take her hand and get back onto the train.
But then I was profoundly distracted by a middle-aged man in a topcoat sprinting in our direction, brandishing a bottle and a rag like weapons.
“She’s ill!” the man exclaimed. “And I’m a doctor.”
“You are?” I tried to keep my tone civil, but my patience was wearing thin. I missed the mountains, the desert, the solitude.
“Chloroform.” The man shoved the proffered bottle farther toward us. “She’ll sleep right through until your next stop. No more fuss.”
Sorcha looked justifiably horrified. And with that my patience wore clean through to nothing.
I bent to glare at the doctor on eye level and snapped, “If you say one more word about giving chloroform to my pregnant wife you will be drinking that entire bottle right now just to see how you like the suggestion. Am I understood?”
The doctor blinked, swallowed hard, and retreated.
Sorcha tugged on my sleeve. “Come on. Ansel will find us. Let’s wash up then get back on the train. Before we make even more of a spectacle than we have already.”