Chapter 11 Hangover

Elodie Vane woke at dusk on the couch in the long room with a fur over her, a smile on her face, and no idea how she had got there.

That alone was unusual. In a hundred and eighty years she had woken in a great many places, some of them very strange, but she had always known how she arrived. She did not lose time. She did not lose anything. She had a memory like a cathedral vault, vast and cold and orderly, with every candle in its place.

She lay still and tried to find the last candle.

The fog. A lane. A young man in an oilskin coat who smelled like a storm coming over a hill. She had told him to be still, and he had asked if she was all right.

And then.

She sat up. The fur slid to the floor. The long room was dark, the way she liked it, all the curtains drawn and the fire laid but unlit, and through the curtains came the last of the sunset, a thin strip of it on the carpet.

It was red.

Not grey. Not the colour of ash in a grate, which was the colour of everything and had been for longer than she cared to count. Red. A deep, ripe, ridiculous red, the red of cherries and blood and a girl's ribbon. Elodie stared at it. Then she got up off the couch and went to the window on legs that did not feel entirely her own, and pulled the curtain aside, and the sunset hit her full in the face.

It hurt, a little. It always did. But the sky over the rooftops of the third ring was on fire with colour, orange and gold and a long smear of violet over the river, and she stood there with her hand on the curtain and her eyes stinging and laughed out loud.

"Pellam!" she called. "Pellam, come here. Come and look at the sky."

Pellam came. He had been with her for sixty years and his face had long ago set into the expression of a man who has seen everything twice and filed it. He stood beside her at the window and looked at the sky.

"Very fine, Madam."

"It's orange, Pellam."

"So I am told, Madam."

"I haven't seen orange since the old Queen's jubilee. Not properly. I'd forgotten it was so..." She waved a hand. "Orange."

Pellam waited a respectful moment.

"Madam may wish to know," he said, "that the young man who carried her home last night asked me to tell Madam to drink some water in the morning."

Elodie turned round.

"He what?"

"Water, Madam. He said it helps."

"He carried me home."

"Up Lantern Row, Madam. Through the gold gate. Past the Watch, who will be speaking of it for some time." Pellam's face did not change. "He was walking, Madam. Quite steadily. He declined payment."

Elodie sat down on the windowsill, which she had not done since she was a girl, in the year the old King's grandfather was crowned.

"His name?"

"Tobin Marsh, Madam. Widow Ostry's, Candle Lane." Pellam paused. "He seemed a very pleasant young man."

* * *

The first day was colour.

She went out at full dark, alone, on foot, which she never did, and walked the city like a girl up from the country. Everything was new. The yellow of the lamps in the second ring. The green of the copper dome on the Guild hall in moonlight. A fruit stall in the night market with oranges piled up in a pyramid, actual oranges, glowing, and she bought one, though she could not eat it, and carried it home in her hands like a jewel.

She noticed food, too. She had not noticed food in a century. She stood outside a bakery at three in the morning and breathed in the bread and thought, quite clearly, of a young man's throat.

That was the second day.

The second day was the craving, and it came on slowly and then all at once, like a tide over sand. She was at the opera, in the Vane box, as was proper, with the Duke of Harle's widow beside her prattling about her nephew. Down below, the soprano was singing something by Ferrante that Elodie had heard perhaps two hundred times. And all at once the smell of everyone in the theatre was intolerable. Perfume and fear and boiled cabbage, and sweat, and old money, two thousand people all smelling of exactly the same grey nothing, and she could not bear it for another moment.

She left in the middle of the second act. The Duke's widow would talk about it for a month.

She went home and did not feed. She had a footman, a willing one, who was paid very well for the privilege, and she sent him away untouched. She lay on the couch in the long room with the curtains open, watching the colours come back into the sky at dawn. She was waiting to feel tired, and did not.

She thought about bread and lightning. About the morning after rain. About a pair of brown eyes in a fog-wet lane, looking down at her, worried.

You all right, miss?

Nobody had asked her that in a hundred and fifty years. People asked her if she was satisfied, or if she required anything, or if she would be so kind as to spare their lives. Nobody asked if she was all right.

The NovelPhoenix site carries the author's published chapter, but this copy was made without their permission and reading there supports their writing.

The third day was music.

She heard it at dusk, waking. A blackbird in the garden, which she had heard every evening for sixty years and never once listened to. Now she lay there and listened to all of it, every turn of it, and when it stopped she wept. She had not wept since the war. She was so astonished by it she sat up and touched her face and looked at her wet fingers like they belonged to someone else.

Then she rang for Pellam, very sharply, and told him to burn the oranges.

* * *

On the fourth day the colours started to go.

She woke at dusk and the sunset on the carpet was pink. Not red. Pink, and fading. By midnight the lamps were straw instead of gold, and the night market was going grey at the edges, and she stood in front of the fruit stall where the oranges were and watched them turn, slowly, back into the colour of old teeth.

Then a cart went past on the far side of the square, and the lamp on the back of it was the colour of nothing at all.

"Well," said the Countess Elodie Vane, to the empty market, "fuck."

She went home and sat in the dark for a long time.

"Pellam," she said at last.

"Madam."

"I have been thinking. About the young man."

"Yes, Madam."

"He is clearly some sort of anomaly. A curiosity. A medical curiosity. There may be something in his blood. A tonic, or a rare humour, or something left behind by some country witch. These things happen in the provinces."

"They do, Madam."

"And if it is something that can be studied, it would be irresponsible not to study it. Scientifically. I owe it to," she cast about, "to my peers. To the College. Imagine if it could be bottled."

"Imagine, Madam."

"I am not infatuated with a farmhand."

"No, Madam."

"I am a Countess of the Third Ring. I have had the blood of princes. I had a cardinal, once, during the Interregnum, and he was dreadful, but he was a cardinal." She stood. "I simply require more data."

"Of course, Madam."

"Don't say of course in that voice."

"No, Madam," said Pellam, in exactly the same voice.

* * *

Pellam had found out the rest by the following evening. He had a nephew in the Watch and a cousin who cleaned at the Guild, and he delivered the results to her on a silver tray, written out in his fine copperplate, as if they were a menu.

Tobin Marsh. Twenty-six. From a place called Thornfell, which Elodie had never heard of and Pellam had needed to find on a map. Signed up at the Guild nine days ago, at Copper rank. The Ledger Stone had read him at Level one.

Elodie read that line three times.

"Level one," she said.

"So the Guild records, Madam."

"I have had the blood of a Level four hundred Paladin of the Dawn Chapter, Pellam. It tasted like a bucket of wet coins. I have had Gold rank adventurers who tasted of nothing but ale and ambition. This one tastes like the first morning of the world, and he is Level one?"

"So the Guild records, Madam." Pellam coughed delicately. "There is more on the second page."

There was. He had brought something up out of the Weir sewers that had the Guild's auditors in a state. He had broken the registration stone with his hand. He had laid his meat cleaver on a bench in the Guild hall, and Sir Gareth Vantrell had been unable to lift it in front of half the city, and had then poured a tankard of ale over the young man's head.

Elodie put the page down.

"Gareth did that," she said.

"So I am told, Madam."

"Gareth Vantrell," said Elodie, very softly, "is a pretty little boy with a tin sword who once tried to court me at the Midsummer Ball and smelled of horse liniment. And he poured ale on my..." She stopped. "On my research subject."

"Yes, Madam."

She was quiet for a while.

"Have the Vantrell box at the opera moved," she said at last. "Somewhere behind a pillar. I'll speak to the manager."

"Very good, Madam."

She found him by following the itch at the back of her teeth.

It was not hard. He walked everywhere, and he walked like a man who had never in his life been afraid of anything in front of him, which in this city made him as conspicuous as a lantern. She watched him from the rooftops for most of a night and a day, keeping to the shadows of chimneys, keeping well back. She was not following him. She was observing. It was entirely different.

She watched him walk a dog home that would not walk with him, so he walked twenty paces behind it and it went home on its own, glancing back in terror the whole way. She watched him carry a load of bricks up a ladder for a builder whose man had not turned up, for no pay at all as far as she could tell, because the builder was old and the ladder was tall. She watched him eat a pie at a stall in the Weir with a bald sewer man who would not let him pay, and argue with him about it, and lose.

She watched him come down the Guild steps at noon, keeping to the shade of the portico herself with a veil down and a parasol up, and saw a thin young woman in a grey coat come out after him and catch his sleeve. The woman had ink on her fingers and a pen behind her ear, and she talked at him very fast for some time, holding up a sheet of paper and tapping it. He listened to all of it. He nodded in the right places. When she had finished he said something short that made her stop and look at him, and then look away, and push her hair back with her inky hand.

Elodie did not know who she was. She disliked her immediately and thoroughly, and decided that this was a scientific observation like the others.

She watched a carthorse in the Weir stop dead and refuse to go past him, sweating and shaking, until he crossed the street.

Animals knew. Of course animals knew. Elodie had seen a horse refuse to pass her plenty of times, though never so violently. This one had looked at the young man the way a mouse looks at the sky when the hawk's shadow goes over.

She lay on the slates of a roof in the Weir with her chin on her hands and watched him in the evening light, and could not work him out at all.

He was not a sorcerer. She had known sorcerers, and they reeked of it, like hot metal. He was not a saint, she was fairly sure, though she had known fewer of those. He did not walk like a fighter. He walked like a farmer, steady and in no hurry, and he looked at everything in the city with a kind of polite, patient puzzlement, like a man visiting relatives he didn't much care for.

Her compulsion had not worked on him. That had never happened. Not with the cardinal, not with the old Margrave who had worn a sacred bone round his neck, not with the Witch's own apprentice, eighty years ago, who had lasted almost a minute. Elodie Vane was Level five hundred and eleven, and the last person who had refused her when she said be still had been the King of Aldmere's own grandmother. Even she had only managed it because she was already dead.

And he had told her she'd gone a funny colour round the eyes.

Elodie put her face down on her hands on the cold slates, and made a small sound into them that nobody heard.

* * *

Candle Lane was narrow and quiet at midnight. The house at the end was tall and thin and clean, with a scrubbed step and every window dark but one, right at the top, under the roof.

Elodie did not use the door. She went up the wall like a shadow going up a curtain and crouched on the narrow ledge outside the lit window, and looked in.

He was sitting on the edge of a bed that was much too short for him, with a sock in one hand and a needle in the other, darning. The cleaver lay on the floor beside the bed within reach of his hand. There were coins on the blanket in little stacks, counted, and a scrap of paper with a column of sums on it. She counted the stacks from the ledge without meaning to. Twenty-four gold, give or take. She had spent more than that on gloves this season.

She tapped on the glass.

He looked up. He did not jump. He looked at her for a moment, crouched on his window ledge four storeys up in a gown the colour of wine, and then he put the darning down and came over and opened the window.

"Evening, Countess," he said. "Feeling better?"

Something happened in her chest that had not happened in a long time. She ignored it.

"Mister Marsh," she said, and lifted her chin. "I am here purely on business."