“You tried to kill my child,” growled the comte. His crimson shadow stretched and slid, an oily ribbon, across the white marble floor.
“No, please!” the midwife pleaded, but the comte’s bloodshadow seized her shadow by its neck and shook her like a terrier with a rat.
With a flick of his wrist, the comte flung the woman across the birthing chamber and onto the balcony. She struck a pillar with a resounding crack and then lay still.
Too late, Jean-Claude said, “Excellency, stop! Ah, we should have questioned her, found out if she was working with others.”
“Time enough for questions later,” the comte said. “Have I a son?”
“A daughter,” Jean-Claude said. At least until they discovered her peculiarity, and then they would be thanking the dead midwife for her initiative and discretion. Perhaps they would affix a memorial plaque to the pillar where the comte had smashed her.
The artifex reached for the child. “Allow me to inspect—”
“Let me see her,” snapped the comtesse, “I must claim her.”
“Of course,” Jean-Claude said automatically, even while shielding the girl from the artifex with his body, delaying the inevitable. These folk would give this poor helpless scrap to the sky, and there was nothing Jean-Claude could do to defend her.
And then the squalling stopped with a hiccough. The babe opened her eyes. Blue eyes. Blue as the crystal cold sky of the uppermost heights, pale, translucent, and deep as the heavens.
Her pudgy left hand reached up and touched Jean-Claude on the nose. There was a rushing in his ear and he felt as if he were falling, as if he’d finally managed to fling himself off a tilting skyship.
“Hand her over.” The comte’s voice seemed to come from a very long way off, but it was no less menacing for that. He would murder the child.
Over my cooling corpse.
But Jean-Claude had no authority in this. The girl needed a greater champion.
But the only man who could effectively lay his hand in protection over his smallest subject was Grand Leon, and he was not here, at least not in person. Jean-Claude’s gaze strayed to le roi’s picture on the chair. It was not a current likeness. It showed Leon XIV in the prime of his life, with broad shoulders and a head of dark ringlets that hung past his shoulders, not heavy jowled with hog fat around the middle as Jean-Claude had last seen him.
But Jean-Claude was le roi’s eyes and ears. Why not his mouth and tongue? Except, he hadn’t been given permission to speak in Grand Leon’s name … or had he? “Do not let des Zephyrs’s line perish from the world,” seemed to authorize nearly any action to protect this child.
Yet, if Jean-Claude dared invoke le roi’s name, he would be called to account, and he knew damned well Grand Leon cared only for this child’s value as a political pawn. Le roi would not be pleased to have an abomination so close to the royal blood … unless Jean-Claude phrased his explanation very carefully. The Comtesse des Zephyrs was le roi’s maternal cousin, and her mother had helped lever le roi onto the Célestial throne against the wishes of the Omnifex. I feared your dear aunt’s blood should fade entirely … a favor to her that she should be eager to repay … Yes, that had the right ring to it. I was only thinking of you, Majesty.
What are you thinking, boy? You can’t lie to Grand Leon!
Well, not a lie as such. He would leave certain things out of his report, edit it for brevity. There had been an entire class at, l’école dedicated to herding aristocrats. It had been deceptively titled Proper Obeisance. As it was listed as an elective, the academy’s noble scions had ignored it like a bad smell. Jean-Claude had found it … instructive.
You are the Breaker’s own get, mongrel, and you are going to get yourself killed.
“Give her here, you idiot,” the comtesse demanded.
A wicked humor twisted Jean-Claude’s cheeks into a smile. Perhaps he would rue this day, but if so, it would be for defending a child, not for abandoning her.
“Of course, Your Excellency,” he said. “But first, her name. As the duly appointed representative of His Imperial Majesty, le Roi de Tonnerre, Leon XIV, I present you with”—the name had better be a good one. Le roi’s beloved mother perhaps? Yes. May she rest in peace—“Princess Isabelle.”
CHAPTER
Two
“Hurry up!” Isabelle called over her shoulder as she skipped and slid down the steep, narrow alleyway between the hostelry and the warehouse. She leapt over piles of garbage washed up from the last rain and squelched through slippery slicks of some nameless slime. Her house slippers were not meant for this sort of use, but when she slipped away from the nannies, handmaidens, and other handlers in the manor house in order to have an adventure, she took the shoes she had on. In the future, she would make sure to stow some outdoor shoes with her other secret treasures in the old millhouse.
“Slow down!” Marie protested, picking her way down the treacherous slope behind Isabelle. She had gathered her skirt so as not to muddy its hem and was trying to walk on pointe like a ballerina so as not to muddy her slippers.
Of all the noble girls her father surrounded her with—“As befits a princess,” he’d said—Marie was the only one to have earned the title of friend. She liked horses, didn’t cry at skinned knees, didn’t get all green at the sight of Isabelle’s wormfinger, and didn’t ever snitch.
Marie asked, “Why are we going this way? Why can’t we take the road?”
“This way is shorter,” Isabelle said. The road was made for horses and carts and meandered ever so gently from the docks, up a series of switchbacks, to the bluffs above the town. Taking the road took forever. “There’s a race-built frigate in the harbor. It’s supposed to be amazing.” This was entirely true, if not the entire truth.
“Oh,” Marie said, slowing down still further. “You’ve been reading mathematics again, haven’t you?”
“What makes you say that?” Isabelle asked, surprised and a little alarmed at her friend’s insight.
“You’re never in this much of a hurry unless you want to try something philosophical, and that means you’ve been doing math. Besides, if you’d just wanted to see the ship, you could have just asked, and we could have taken a coach.”
Isabelle clutched her shoulder bag to her side with her right arm. Her wormfinger twitched in response to her agitation. After several false starts, she thought she’d managed to distill some aether from the air and capture it in an aetherglass phial, but she wouldn’t know for sure until she tossed the phial off a sky cliff to see if it fell or floated.
Isabelle didn’t want to fight with Marie over this, but she didn’t want to lie to her either, so she said, “So what? Math’s fun.”
Her little brother, Guillaume, said math was hard and that’s why girls weren’t allowed to do it.