New Amsterdam

Again, Sebastien's dining-room table was pressed into service as a workbench, and again, Garrett improvised her altar from a linen handkerchief and whatever else she could borrow from the kitchen or dig from her carpet bag. Her hands shook as she lit the candles and poured the wine. Her hands shook as she laid out her tools, the paddereen and Mr. Priest's list of names.

Sebastien let her hear him coming, the careful scuff of his boot on the carpet as he paused where her line of salt would have been, if she had cast one. "Shall I roll up the rugs for you, Abby Irene?"

She straightened the black handle of her silver knife. "That would be very kind, Sebastien. Thank you."

She rummaged through the carpet bag and found the sack of sea-salt, gritty and gray-white, sticky-damp from the rain. She crunched it in her palm while Sebastien stripped up the rugs, and when he withdrew to a

corner of the room, she cast a circle around the table, only leaving open a

gap wide enough for one to pass. "Would you bring me the cat, please,

Sebastien?"

He arched an eyebrow, but sidestepped and vanished through the door. "You were about to tell me something," he called back. She brushed salt from her fingers into the bag, and some of it scattered the floor.

"The Duke tendered me an ultimatum today," she said. Sebastien didn't answer, but she heard the clucking noises as he coaxed the cat. Apparently, the animal's name would remain el Capitán, for when Sebastien reappeared, he cradled seventeen pounds of marmalade tomcat.

"How shall you keep him in the circle?" Sebastien asked. "I would rather you did not touch him."

"No, that would be unwise. Just put him within the line; animals understand protective circles."

Sebastien did as she instructed, and Garrett closed the circle before the cat identified the gap. Whiskers trembling, it began a slow circuit of her improvised workspace, inspecting the line on the floorboards. But as she had predicted, it respected the barrier, and having made one and a half circuits, sat down beside a table leg and began to wash a forepaw, pretending vast unconcern.

With tongs held in gloved hands, Garrett lifted the paddereen and touched it to the tip of the cat's tail. The cat twitched its appendage aside, but on the second try, Garrett managed to make good contact. She spoke three harsh, ancient words of Aramaic and a fragile green-blue aura stretched like cobweb from the cat to the rosary bead, coiling around the latter and tearing free. The cat stared over its shoulder at her with greatly affronted dignity. Garrett lifted the tongs, holding the paddereen up to Sebastien with a chuckle of triumph.

"Should I be seeing something?"

"Only if you were a sorcerer," she said, and laid the glowing rosary bead gently in an empty watch glass. "If you were trained, or very powerfully gifted, you would see that the bead has, through contagion, become the receptacle for the entirety of the sundered spell, and is now exhibiting a typical luminescent quality which we may term limerence."

She took up the lint-padded envelope she'd laid on the table and placed it near the watch-glass. It was, as Sebastien had noted, covered in pencil sketches, rather good ones. For a moment, Garrett permitted herself a frown at the waste of talent, though she could not say if it was because artistry was wasted on a maid, or because an artist was wasted as one.

She sketched circles and diagrams around each one with the silver-bladed knife, connecting them with straight and wavy lines. And then she calmed her mind, and with her knife in her left hand and her wand in her right, crossed them over envelope and bead and spoke a word.

With a whisking sound, the rosary bead shot back into the envelope. "Well," Garrett said. "I'd say that was conclusive. The address is block-printed, though. I fear we've no hope of a handwriting match."

She put the bead back in the watch-glass and set the envelope aside.

"So," Sebastien said, "Tell me about the ultimatum."

She smoothed Jack's list beside the watch-glass, weighing the corners with copper pennies and dome-shaped beads of tempered glass. "Sebastien, you will have to flee."

And that was all. She heard him shift—he let her hear him shift—and she knew in that gesture that he understood the Duke's threat, and her decision, as plainly as if she'd laid the whole thing out for him, point by point.

"Not for the first time," he said. "I can't leave Jack."

"In a moment I'll be ready to set him right." She feigned confidence; he'd know she was pretending, but that was fine. "He's not in danger."

Sebastien harrumphed. "And in any case, this is his house. I am but

a lodger."

Garrett refrained from pointing out that she had guessed correctly, contenting herself with a quiet gloat. She spoke words over the paddereen and made a little heap of iron filings in the same watch glass, then sketched runes and sigils in the air with the tip of her wand. Real sorcery was not particularly spectacular, despite the flash and gunpowder one might see devoted to making ritual convincing when it came to stage plays.

She tapped the glass once, twice, a third time, and blew across the filings in the general direction of Jack's handwritten list. If the name of the sorcerer appeared there, and if she'd done everything correctly, the iron filings would wing through the air, clump and stick and find themselves attracted to it, as if by magnetism.

They flew, all right. Past the paper, out of the scope of the altar, past the startled cat, and into the open top of Garrett's carpet bag.

She almost dropped her wand.

"Abigail Irene?"

She crouched, her corset biting into her hips, and reached gingerly into the blue velvet satchel. Her gloves protected her fingers, but she still felt iron grit against paper.

She drew forth the envelope with her earring in it. Her name was perfectly outlined in the metal filaments.

But of course, they hadn't found just the name of the mage who cast the spell. They'd found an even tighter correspondence of identity to cling to: the handwriting of Seamus Gallagher.

"Shit," she said, who was a lady and who never swore. "Sebastien, shall we go upstairs to Mr. Priest? I think I know how to take the spell off him, now."

* * *

And it was as simple as that in the end. A few snapped meta- thaumaturgical threads, and Jack Priest blinked muzzily, tried to sit up under the heavy blankets and comforters that Garrett had heaped upon him, and fell back against the pillows, shivering so violently that Garrett was eventually obliged to climb up on the bed beside him and hold him in her arms, sharing body warmth until Sebastien could make shift to bring a pot of tea.

By the time Sebastien returned, Garrett had Jack laughing weakly.

She decided to leave it up to Sebastien to explain about the Duke's

ultimatum.

* * *

Garrett marshaled her evidence and wrote up three copies of a deposition and report. She'd have them notarized along the way to the Duke's house and deposit one copy with the Colonial Police, as it was still, impossible though it seemed, within business hours.

She set out with a kiss to Sebastien's cheek. Before she went, he placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.

And that was all. No confessions, no promises, no tokens, no sundered rings.

She might never see him again.

* * *

It was an odd thing, to find one's self greeting a murderous sorcerer by name, making casual conversation while he helped one off with one's coat and escorted one to the usual place. The study was gray with the rain and with evening darkening the sky. She could not make herself sit on the couch where she and Richard, on occasion, had done somewhat more than kiss, and so she set her carpet bag on the Duke's blotter and stood beside it, having availed herself of the excellent brandy.

Richard, for once, was prompt. She said nothing but the barest greeting, handed him her deposition, and fixed herself another brandy while he seated himself and read.

She hadn't eaten all day. The liquor went straight to her head, and she welcomed it—its warmth, the disassociation that it brought. Abby Irene, you pathetic old drunk.

When Richard lifted his eyes from the paper, she felt the stare upon her back. She finished her brandy, discarded the glass, and turned to stare him down.

"I think you may find when the Fenians are questioned that the ultimate source of their funding is French," she said, as an opening gambit. "Any enemy of the Commonwealth is a friend of the Frogs, after all."

"It's the French that concern me," he said. "Phillip can worry about the damned Fenians. If this is true—"

She saw him formulate the question and dismiss it. Of course Seamus wouldn't have acted against the Duke. The Fenians didn't give any more of a damn about the colonies than the colonies gave about the Fenians; Richard might be a useful source of information, but killing or compromising him wouldn't ensure home rule in Eire. They'd take money from the French. They'd take money from anyone, but they were a one-issue revolution. Meanwhile, the French would support anything that might drain British colonial resources.

And Richard being Richard, he wouldn't bother asking a question he already thought he knew the answer to.

Instead, his thumbnail caressed the notary's embossed seal. "Tell me this is the only copy."

She lowered her voice. You never knew who might be listening at keyholes. "So you can deal with Seamus quietly, yourself?"

He stood and came to her, towering over her, his height and breadth no longer the comfort she had been used to find them. His voice was cold and tattered as mist on the Hudson of a morning. "It would be nice to think you'd allow me the privilege."

Garrett would not allow him the triumph of forcing her to step away. She drew herself up and lifted her chin. Good she'd set her snifter down, or the clench of her hand would have broken the stem. Her head spun from the liquor; she could still taste it up her sinuses.

"It's on deposit, Richard. Your servant is in the pay of the Fenians, who I believe are in the pay of the French. I've provided a copy of my findings and of the list of names provided by Don Sebastien's agent"—and how strange, now, to dismiss the old-eyed, magnanimous young Mr. Priest with that cold description, as if he were no more than Sebastien's extended hand—"to the Colonial Police."

And as her comment was interrupted by the sound of the door knocker, she concluded, "I rather expect that's them now."

And the wonder of it was, Richard stepped back. "Abby Irene, this will ruin me."

"Nonsense," she answered. "You're unsinkable."

But he was always so clever, so ruthless. And this was no exception. "We can salvage this," he said. "If you'll say that you left out the Lord Mayor's part in the plot under duress, under threat or ensorcelment, and testify that Seamus is Eliot's agent, we can still salvage this."

One may, Garrett mused, flee an island nation for colonial shores and leave a handsome prince behind. One may set one's self well back from the centers of power—or as far back as one's temperament and inclination will allow. One may limit one's options and remove opportunities for conflict,

for temptation.

It will find one anyway.

She had been here before, metaphorically speaking. She knew the signs of a tipping point as well as she knew anything: the damp palms, the cold across her neck. She was intoxicated, perhaps not the best state in which to be making life-altering decisions, but she'd never let that stop her.

She said, "Not without an order from my King."

* * *

In the small hours of the morning, Garrett answered a tap on her front door. Mary was long abed, and Garrett had been drinking that night, rather than sleeping.

She swayed as she pulled the handle, but managed the operation with only a little awkwardness. Say what you would about the Crown Investigator; she was a lady who could hold her liquor. She chortled at the thought: most unladylike, which made her laugh the more.

At the top of her stair, cloaked against the night's deep chill and with a hood drawn over his bright hair, stood Mr. Priest.

"Oh," she said. "Mr. Priest. Come in."

A moment later, she remembered to stand aside to let him enter, but

he remained where he was. "I'm just here to deliver a message," he said. "Against my counsel—not, please, that I do not think you can be trusted—Sebastien sends to tell you that a letter may find him in Boston at the home of Mrs. Phoebe Smith. Under the name of Nast. Will you remember that, Crown Investigator?"

"I'm drunk, young man, not incapacitated." Her show of indignation was admittedly somewhat undermined when she was obliged to clutch the doorframe to stay upright.

He smiled, a cherub with a wicked secret. "Also, he sent this." He held out a gloved hand with the back toward the sky, something concealed in the palm. When she reached, he laid a crisp, green-bloomed red apple in her grasp. A van den Broeck, grown in New Amsterdam since the first Dutch settlers brought over seeds sewn into their petticoats.

She closed her fingers over the cool, waxy globe and lifted it to smell. Tart, sweet. The aroma cleared her head a little.

Comfort me with apples, she'd said, quoting the Song of Solomon—

and had Sebastien answered in kind? My beloved spoke, and said unto me, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away." "Was there a message with it, Mr. Priest?"

The young man shook his head. "He said you'd understand. And please call me Jack, Abby Irene."