Her Ladyship's Curse

I left the hateful pink gown and accoutrements in Rina’s bedchamber as she dressed, and then followed her down to the kitchen, where Almira had two steaming plates of eggs, bacon, and fry bread waiting for us.

“Someone’s worked a charm on poor Liv,” the cook told Rina. “She says she can’t feel her bum.”

Rina sat down and dug into her food. “That’s because she sits on it too much.”

“I smacked her bare with a switch meself to test it. Drew blood, but she didn’t even flinch.” Almira glanced at me. “Maybe someone could make herself useful while she’s dawdling here?”

“My eggs will get cold,” I complained.

She whisked my plate out from under my fork. “I’ll keep them on the stove.”

I turned to Rina, who shrugged. “All right, where’s poor Liv?”

“Purple door, third floor.” The cook beamed at me. “You’re a good lass, Kit.”

“I’m a deprived lass. I’m a starving lass.” I tromped back up the stairs to the third floor, found Liv’s purple door, and knocked on it. “Liv? It’s Kit, Mrs. Eagle’s friend from uptown. Let me in.”

I heard breathing, and then two strangled words: “I can’t.”

I propped a hand against the door frame. “Why not?”

More breathing, and choking. “Can’t . . . move.”

I tried the knob, which jammed at first and then opened. Inside I found Liv, wide-eyed and naked on the floorboards. I knelt beside her. “What’s all this, then?”

“Magic,” she gasped, as if she were having trouble taking in air. “Killing me.”

I looked her over, reached down, and slapped her face. “Come on. Snap out of it, there’s a good gel.”

She shook her head wildly, and then her eyes bulged as she gulped in a huge breath.

“Oh, sweet Jesu.” She panted as if she’d been running for miles. “I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t . . .” She stared at the hand she had lifted to her face and then at me. “How did you do that?”

“I walloped you.” I helped her up from the floor and wrapped her in a robe. “Sit before you fall back down.” When she did, I looked around her room. Aside from the usual female fripperies, I noticed nothing out of the ordinary. “What have you been using?”

“Nothing. I swear. Mistress doesn’t allow it.” Liv huddled in her robe. “Thank God you came, miss. I thought for sure I was going to die.”

I knelt down beside her bed, lifted the skirt, and looked under it. A small brown box lay among the drifts of dust, and when I pulled it out, Liv saw it and uttered a shriek.

“It’s just a box.” I tugged open the string and poured the contents into my hand, which turned out to be six polished green stones. “A box of rocks.”

“No,” Liv whispered. “Someone put them there. Someone bespelled them to kill me. Take them away.” Her voice rose to a screech. “Take them.”

“They’re rocks, Liv, not magic.” As she shouted more nonsense at me, I went to the window and tossed them out. “There. They’re gone. Stop screaming.”

Liv staggered to her feet and collapsed against me to give me a trembling hug. “Thank you,” she sobbed. “You saved me life.”

What was it about me that attracted so many tearful females? “I didn’t do anything.” I set her at arm’s length. “You should go see the physick today, though. You might have picked a bad spider bite or something.”

She wrenched away and hurried over to her dresser. “I have to leave the city. Right away, before they try again.”

“Stop by the physick’s first,” I suggested, before I let myself out and returned downstairs.

Rina had finished her breakfast and drank some juice as she watched me eat mine. “Well?”

I swallowed a mouthful of bread. “Hysteria, or maybe a spider bite. I found a box of green rocks under her bed. She’s fine.” I glanced at Rina. “She’s also packing her bags. Sorry.”

“Probably staged it. The lazy tart never could turn more than two johnnies a night.” Rina didn’t seem dismayed. “So much for her numb bum. Thanks, Kit.”

“My pleasure.” I noticed Almira staring at me. “She’ll be all right. I only gave her a little slap.”

“Green stones are said to be spellbinders,” the cook said. “That’s rotten magic, Miss Kit.”

I exchanged an amused look with Rina. “Is there any other kind?”

Chapter Three

I left the Eagle’s Nest with Wrecker in one of Rina’s carris. She insisted on giving me a ride to my flat as repayment for disenchanting poor Liv, but the truth was she despised the city trolleys—“damn cattle carts” according to her—as well as my fondness for riding them.

“Wrecker can ferry you up the Hill at four,” she advised me. “Have him wait for you, too. Walsh’s so high-necked he won’t bridle a half-dead nag for a poor cousin, not even if you offered to ride it to the glueworks for him.”

As I waited in the alley for Wrecker to come round, I spotted a gleam of dark green on the cobblestones and picked up one of the rocks I’d tossed out Liv’s window. Idly I tossed it in my hand and then dropped it in my pocket as Wrecker wheeled the carri around the corner.

Carris came into being out of necessity after the horse plagues of ’66 emptied most of the coach houses in the city. I still remembered the first ones bouncing along the streets, causing women to cower and scream, and men to chase after them. From a distance they had looked a bit like burning, runaway carts, at least until the smoke cleared enough for one to see the grinning fool tonner sitting behind the great wheel.

In the twenty years since the first carri rolled off the assembly line, much had been done to improve the horseless coaches. The first big, wooden-spoke wheels had been replaced by wider, iron-rimmed rounders coated with a thick pad of gray-brown rubber. The mechs in the Chester factories had also whittled down the carri’s boxy sideboards and clad them in thin, black-painted plates of copper. When the paint wore, it flaked in rows, which exposed red-gold streaks that young turks seemed to like. They would sometimes scrape off long strips to speed the process so they could boast of driving a “streaky.”

Only the oldest carris still had one flat bench seat in the back and two box perches in the front; these days everyone changed them out for the custom horsehide seats. None of the newer carris used coal burners anymore; the latest were fitted with keroseel steam tanks that didn’t belch black smoke or have to be refilled as often.

Wrecker pushed on the brake and reached out to give me a hand up. “Fancy a ride through the park, Miss Kit?”

He liked driving through Center Park, both to show off his mistress’s carri and to worry his way through the noontime parade of tonners on horseback. So did I, but there was no time for a joyride. “I’ve a job to get to, sorry. Another time, Wrecker.”

He nodded and glanced at my lap to see I was belted in before he let off the handbrake.

Before the gold rush days had brought every scrabbler and digger from the eastern provinces to the west coast, Rumsen had belonged to the Fleers, who had crossed the plains rather than give in to Church and state. When I was a kid, some bone hunters had dug up the foundation of the only prayerhouse the Fleers had managed to build before the army caught up with them; from the number of scorched skeletons they’d uncovered, it appeared to have burned to the ground with most of the Fleers inside.

The governor had issued the usual statement about what a tragedy it was to learn that the fugitives had accidentally torched themselves in their illegal place of worship, mainly to remind us all that for Torians it still was Church or nothing, and if any of us were to break the faith laws, the same sort of accident could happen again.

I’d once visited the site of the old prayerhouse, over which a merchants’ exchange now stood. I didn’t see any ghosts floating around the building, but when I’d looked up at the second floor, every window I saw slowly turned white with frost.

All trace of the Fleers had been wiped away by the Occupancy, which had established Rumsen as a troop station and trading post, although it really was more of a dumping ground for the misfits and malcontents in the service. The Crown began sending over the deserters, upstarts, and failures from the ranks; if they survived the trek through native lands, they remained in Rumsen on permanent assignment.

In those days, the only females to be had as bedservants were native, and common practice was to capture and defile them before they could be recovered by their kin. Some of the old, crude cabins the surly troops had built for themselves and their squawks (named for the way they’d screech when stolen from their tribes) still stood on the fringe of the city. Rina’s people could trace their line back to a randy captain and a squawk who had borne him six children before finally cutting his throat one night while he slept.

I lived in one of the oldest sections of the town, in a small goldstone nestled among the slaterows and clopboard mercantiles. My flathouse had once been a granary, and on hot days the walls, which had once housed tons of seed wheat, still gave off a scent like that of bread baking.

Wrecker conveyed me straight to my door and even shut off the engine to jump out, come round, and hand me down like a fine lady. “Be back at half past, then?”

“That’ll do.” I pressed a couple of coins into his ham-size hand. “There’s a decent pie shop two blocks south. Tell the counterlass that I sent you, and she’ll fix you up with a special.”

I let myself in through the front door, locking it behind me. Although there were seven flats in my building, I was presently the only tenant. Over the years I’d quietly bought up the leases for the other flats, and then offered for the building. At first the former owner, a hatchet-faced pork trader named Billings, had flatly refused to sell to me. “Females can’t manage property,” he’d informed me. “You’d do better to bank your funds and find yourself a nice young man, miss.”