A/N: Written for the Writers Anonymous Alternate Format Challenge. This is a collection of one-shots in varying styles, telling a single overarching story. All comments and concrit are hugely appreciated.
Please note that this story contains some mild sexual content.
The Hand Once Dealt
Imagine, if you will, a deck of cards. I dare say this will not be a difficult task for you, since you have the look of an inveterate gambler; the hand life has dealt you has cast a shadow of ruin over your face. Ah, you frown. I beg your pardon, but you'll see in time. Perhaps it has not happened yet, but the hand once dealt cannot be undealt.
Imagine the major and the minor arcana, dog-eared and well-used, clutched in the filthy hands of a man to whom we emphatically do not belong. His name is Vinculus and his untrimmed nails are black with grime. He leaves an indelible grease smear on the face of my sister, L'Impératrice, as he plays a hand of solitaire with rules impenetrable to all but this book of magic made flesh. He is a trickster and a fraud, who spends most of his time trying to tup the scullery maid, a slatternly, lazy thing, with sly bright eyes, who knows more of magic than he ever will.
The hand she has been dealt is a strange one, full of joy and heartache and power and weakness. Worse than yours, although who can truly reckon these things? Lives cannot be weighed and measured as an apothecary might measure his wares, each blessing balanced against each sorrow.
He sits in the parlour of Dr Foxcastle's house. The rain strikes against the window in sheets, and yet the room is warm, if beset by shadows, chief amongst them the maid who watches, hidden from his view. She has escaped from the kitchen, where the cook has been bewitched into scouring the pans herself, never questioning why. Vinculus is unaware of her presence, unaware of anything but his game, the rules of which he makes and unmakes according to whether or not he is winning.
Only when he hears a tread behind him – not the maid, but another man – does his attention shift from his game. And still he does not turn, continuing to count out my brothers and sisters as if by random, until at last he turns my face upwards and the man behind him pauses, his eyes narrowing. He is disreputable-looking, this man, with long ragged black hair which he wears tied back. His name is Childermass, and in this moment all his attention is focused on a forgotten memory, like the flicker of a minnow in the depths of a murky pool.
A twisted hawthorn in a landscape of snow and mist. A touch upon his eyes, his lips, his heart, his hand. A flock of ravens dark against a sky the colour of bone.
There for an instant, then gone.
We belong to Childermass, in as much as we can ever belong to anyone, my brothers and sisters and I. He created us, copied from the cards of a sailor in Whitby, and he's fool enough to believe that makes us his. As if anyone could own us, we who are a mirror upon a world where the Raven King once again strides the dark, rain-swept hills, where the sun gutters in its dying embers, afraid of the wolf.
He is a clever man, but destined to ever be on the outskirts of greater men, to serve and to observe and never anything more. He has some knowledge of magic, and he has seen the writing written on the world, but he cannot read it. He knows enough magic to walk wreathed in shadows, although not quite so well as the maid, who watches him now with interest, challenging him to see her.
He cannot.
"Those are mine, I believe," he says to the rogue.
Vinculus sweeps the cards together. He handles us roughly, and thrusts us wordlessly over his shoulder. Childermass takes the pack, and vanishes from the room.
And once she is certain he is gone the maid slips from her seat and moves towards Vinculus, who still seems unaware of her presence. His neckerchief is loose around his grimy neck, and a faint mark can be seen beneath it. It might be taken for a birthmark if you do not look too closely. I advise you not to. Her finger brushes against it and only then does Vinculus stir. More than a little drunk, he pulls her onto his lap.
The maid lets him kiss her. He has new clothes now, but still wears his old filthy rags. The housekeeper cannot understand it, for no matter how many times she throws his old clothes onto the fire, every time she turns around that ragged filthy coat is back, never so much as singed. The maid's clever fingers seek out a hidden pocket no one but he should have been able to find and pulls me free. She regards me thoughtfully, turning me over in her long slender fingers. For a scullery maid her hands are remarkably smooth and white.
I bear the image of a hanged man, sketched on the back of an old tedious letter and pasted onto card. The writing can still be seen, faint words visible over the hanged man's face. Vinculus kept me back from the rest of the pack when he returned it to Childermass, but if the maid suspects why she does not seem to care.
She bends her head and begins to whisper into his ear. Her hand slips beneath Vinculus's shirt to rest on his greasy back. She imagines she can absorb the meaning of the writing on his skin through touch alone. She hopes this is true, for no one ever took the trouble to teach her to read. But she is sly and can slip about the house unseen. She knows men more learned than her cannot decipher the language of the King's Book written on the vagabond's back. She has as much right as them to try.
When Childermass returns, he finds the parlour empty. The room is suddenly much brighter, although the rain still strikes against the glass. The shadows have gone, and with them Vinculus and the maid.
Do you wonder how an ignorant, ill-educated young girl could snatch away the sole remaining book of magic from under the long noses of a society of magicians? Well, how does a young woman with nothing but her wits and her youth achieve anything? With guile and persuasion and the harbour between her legs.
But perhaps when you consider the tedious Learned Society of York Magicians, who devote more of their time to bickering amongst themselves than to the pursuit and practice of magic, is it so hard to believe a young girl with dark eyes could tempt away a man like Vinculus?
Harder to believe, perhaps, that she would want to.
(And here my sister, Tempérance, interjects to remark she does not understand why the society worried so; it wouldn't be long before the young girl realised her mistake and tried to give him back.)
There is uproar when Vinculus is discovered missing. Much outrage and pointing of fingers and apportioning of blame, most of it aimed at Childermass. But he has his supporters, every bit as vocal, who point out that without Childermass the King's Letters (a fancy name, by which they mean Vinculus) would never have been brought to the attention of the Learned Society of York Magicians in the first place. "He could," one young man says, "have kept the fellow to himself and none of us would ever have known."
A rather more timid man attempts to speaks up. He clears his throat several times before anyone bothers to shut up and listen. "C-can a person truly be stolen in England?" he says, his eyes darting about the room, never quite seeming to settle on any one place. "A book can be, it is true, but it seems to me this Vinculus fellow is a... a man first and a book second. If he chooses to leave, then perhaps... then perhaps..." By now almost every face has turned his way and this makes him more uncomfortable than being talked over. His face twists as if he doubts his own words. "...Perhaps we should let him?"
At this more outrage, more shouting, more chaos. And in the midst of it all, Childermass sits, with less than half an ear on the proceedings. He is accustomed to the noise and bluster of magicians and knows it's seldom worth listening to a good seven-eights of anything they say. He thinks of a room filled with shadows, of dark glittering eyes that watch him with interest. And of the kitchen where it feels like someone is missing.
Not even pretending to listen to the discussion now he pulls the remainder of the pack from the pocket of his coat and begins to lay out the cards. One card in particular, my sister, La Lune, draws his eye. This one he copied from memory – a dog and a poorly drawn wolf howl at the scowling moon. He is being addressed, but he does not notice. He gathers the pack and slips it into his pocket, before leaving for Dr Foxcastle's house, and in particular the kitchen.
It takes him a while to tease out the memory of the sly little scullery maid. He himself cannot remember when he last saw her doing any actual work, which is odd, because the scullery maid is usually the most put-upon member of the household. But this one he only ever seemed to see slipping about the house like a shadow.
Like a shadow.
"Who is she? Where did she come from?" he asks, and no one seems to know the answer. She turned up one day like a stray cat, and no one thought to ask her what her references were or whether she belonged. They gave her food and a bed to share with Grace, one of the parlour maids, but Grace soon found that the way the moonlight fell through the window cast such peculiar shadows across the wall she was quite unable to sleep. She did not ask herself why the moonlight never troubled her before the new maid came. So the new maid had a bed to herself and no one questioned it for a moment.
He asks her name and no one knows that either. Grace thinks her name Mary, Mary thinks her name Grace. The footman believes she might be called Cathy, and the cook insists her name is Jane or Janet. Perhaps Judith. Something of the sort, anyway, and since she always answers to whatever she is called, it hardly seems to matter.
Childermass knows they are all wrong. He fingers La Lune, which he seems unable to put down. Every time he slips it back into his pocket, somehow he always finds it in his hand again. Because her name is... her name is... A strange thing, this; he cannot remember.
But he could never forget those eyes, or so he thinks. And he knows this strange sly little maid with her glittering eyes and her dark hair, who might be called Cathy or Janet or Jane or anything at all, she is the one who has stolen Vinculus away. And Childermass is the one who will get him back.
I will not describe in detail Childermass's exhaustive search of the length and breadth of the county of Yorkshire. How he chases rumours from the East Riding to the West Riding and back again. Through towns and villages and cities, until finally he finds himself drawn to North Yorkshire, where the desolate moors lie beneath a sky bruised with slate-coloured clouds.
He knows he is close when the country lanes he rides along start to twist in on themselves and he finds he has circled back on himself.
He frowns with the mist thickening around him, and for the first time he tastes magic on the air. There is a labyrinth laid on this road. Perhaps he should have noticed it earlier, but this is more subtle and artful than the magic worked by Strange and Norrell. Not as strong – he breaks the spell with ease – but had he not been looking for it he would never have known it was there. The magic of a woman, he thinks, one who knows only wild magic. He wonders how powerful she could be now that she has Vinculus, and he hardens his heart against her, redoubling his determination to return the book to its rightful place at his side.
And he rides on along a country lane bordered by a centuries-old hedgerow, but his sturdy horse shies, and he senses something following him. A musky stink thick in the air, and the sound of something very large and very hungry breathing.
Childermass calms his horse, and he tells himself it is just the mist playing tricks on him. As he rides on something crosses the country lane ahead of him. It is a large black dog, the size of a small horse, and it turns its shaggy head, regards him with burning eyes. And he freezes, his breath mingling with the mist.
An illusion, he tells himself, set to scare him. And as he thinks this, the dog vanishes so completely he might almost believe he never saw it at all.
The tiny village he comes to is called Whitcross, a handful of cottages which huddle in a valley, sheltering from the biting wind that rages down from the moors. The place seems desolate and empty. At the crossroads stand a mournful cross of white stone, and an inn, but no stable-boy appears to take his horse. He dismounts, leads his horse to the stables himself, where he finds the boy sleeping in the straw, a hand flung carelessly across his face. No amount of shaking will rouse him.
Inside the inn is comfortable, but all here are sleeping too. A man slumbers at the bar, his cheek resting in a puddle of spilled wine. In the corner sit a man and his wife, propped against one another, while a fat spider weaves its web in the gap between their necks.
More magic.
And he can feel the weariness settling upon him. It tugs gently at his eyelids, whispers in his ear how tired he is, how long and far he has journeyed. He should simply sit for a while and rest his eyes. Just for a moment or two.
He sinks down, and the chair beneath him is quite the most comfortable chair he's ever had the good fortune to come across. He rests his cheek against his hand, but something pricks at his cheek. He holds a card in his hand, my sister. La Lune.
He stares at her. And I know I said he was a clever man, but at this moment he is sleepy and sluggish and half-bewitched. He does not see.
Perhaps, he thinks distantly, if he simply closes his eyes for a few moments, everything will become clear. His eyes close.
A crack from the fire interrupts his rest. His eyes snap open, and the spell is broken. He stares at my sister once more, slips her back into his pocket.
She is here.
The air is still thick with magic, but now he has broken the spell, it has no power over him. In the corridor, he stops outside the door, beset by a sudden fear that the barghest, the black dog he saw in the lanes, will be waiting for him within with its burning eyes. Instead, what he finds inside is far more terrifying.
Vinculus lies on the bed, naked and snoring and asleep like the others. Beside him sits the maid whose name he cannot remember, dressed only in a shift pulled up to her thighs. Her legs are bent and she's leaning forwards, her breasts pressed against her knees. It takes him a moment to realise she is copying the marks from Vinculus's body onto her own. Her arms, her legs, her chest, all are scrawled with thick black ink.
He's never given the little scullery maid much thought before. Perhaps, if he'd thought at all, he might have pictured her angry to have been tracked down. But when she looks up, his resolve falters. He finds himself thinking the theft of a book cannot be such a terrible thing after all.
"I can't do it," she says, and there is something lost and frightened in her voice.
Slowly he steps inside the room. The expression in her eyes shifts from naked heartache to something more guarded. Childermass moves to the table by the fire where he finds me waiting. He is already reaching inside his coat pocket for the rest of my pack.
Childermass sits and lays out a hand, turns the cards one by one. The air in the room seems thick with fear and magic; he finds it hard to think. Again the same cards: La Lune, Le Pendu, L'Amoureux. A soft sound as she draws closer, and why, he wonders, does the sound of her movement make him think of ravens?
"What does it mean?" she murmurs. A hand reaches over his shoulder. Her fingers hover above La Lune. Interesting that she would be drawn to that one, he thinks. He glances at the markings on her arm, and he feels the same shivery sensation he feels when he looks at the King's Letters on Vinculus's body. She may not be able to read or write, this thieving little magpie, but she is a fine copyist nonetheless.
She draws in a sharp breath as he seizes her wrist to study the marks. They smudge at his touch, but even smudged they thrill with power. They whisper to him, scratching at the inside of his skull. He has tried copying out the King's Letters before, but on paper they lose their meaning, are nothing more than marks. Yet here, etched upon her skin, they itch at him with the promise of magic.
"Did you do this?" he demands, twisting to face her. Her eyes are wide and frightened, yet defiant. He cannot tell how old she is. Sometimes she seems in her twenties, sometimes eighteen, sometimes as young as fifteen. But all the while her eyes are dark and glittering and fearful, fixed on his, her thick brows drawn down in a scowl. She is afraid of him, he realises and he loosens his grip, reluctantly, as if he fears she might turn into a bird and escape up the chimney.
"I tried to."
"Why?"
"Why does anyone do anything?" she asks, bitterly. "Because I wanted to. Others take what they want. Why can't I?"
"Can you read it?"
She shakes her head. "I thought I might be able to learn if I had a copy," she says, and glances at him sharply as if he might be laughing at her. He isn't. "I would've brung him back. Eventually."
(And here my sister Tempérance interjects once more. I shall not bore you with details of her lengthy diatribe, but her meaning could be boiled down to a single phrase: I told you so.)
"How–" The question catches in his throat. "How did you manage such a thing when the foremost society of magicians in England could not?" He follows the writing up her arm. And she stands mutely, letting him examine her. She obligingly, if resentfully, pushes aside her hair so he can see the back of her neck. There the writing fades into a meaningless tangle. She has done the best she can with a mirror, but the markings are distorted, many of them reversed, their meaning lost. Like a book, he thinks, with pages missing. And dismay prickles at him, that a book should remain incomplete. He feels a stab of lingering guilt at his part in the destruction of Jonathan Strange's book.
"You can take him and go," she says, her voice suddenly weary. "I was a bloody fool to think this'd work."
"It has worked," he says. "These are the King's Letters, but I do not know how you have managed it."
She looks at him with sudden ferocity. "I can't finish it. It's no good if I don't finish."
"Then let me help you." He speaks without knowing what it is he's about to say, and a moment later he feels a strange shivery sensation, as if this is the reason why he has chased her across Yorkshire and back again: not to bring Vinculus home, but to help her finish.
And while he is thinking this, her eyes linger on his face. She thinks that she does not quite like the look in his eyes. He has barely looked at her in the past – she has learnt to hide too well – and she has never seen this hungry light in his eyes. It does not suit him.
It is the book he wants. But she intends to make the book part of her, to have its magic sink deep beneath her skin, as deep as the marrow in her bones, and if he takes the book he'll have to take her too. And he could. Of all the magicians she has met in York, he is the strongest. And he is a Yorkshireman; he belongs to the Raven King.
"Why?" she finally asks. "Why would you want to help me? I stole him from you."
"Well..." This is not a question Childermass knows how to answer, so instead he echoes her own words back at her. "Why does anyone do anything?"
It seems to satisfy her. Or so Childermass thinks, at least.
They work for hours, while Vinculus snores on the bed beside them. Magic and firelight and the shadows weave around them, casting a spell of their own. Her back bared, she sits on her haunches, the dirty soles of her feet turned up towards him in supplication. Her skin is translucent like the finest paper waiting naked for the ink. Each time Childermass pauses to check the letters on the vagabond's back, he notices how her even breathing seems to stop each time he touches the nib of the quill to her skin once more.
He etches a series of tiny markings around the nape of her neck, each one the size of a ladybird. He has to move closer, his hand gently resting on her upper chest to hold her still and all the while the magic in the room seems to build, seems to press harder on him with each passing moment.
(If you are observant, you might have noticed that in fact time does not seem to be passing. The tallow candles gutter in a non-existent draft, but they have burned down not a fraction more than when Childermass first entered. But Childermass, who normally is an observant man, has not noticed. His attention is fully occupied.)
As he copies whorls and spiralling phrases around the the nubs of her spine, he pushes aside the bunched fabric of the shift an inch at a time, bearing more of her back to the firelight and to his quill. And now he pauses, stares at the mark he has just made in the small of her back.
"What is it?" she says, startling him. It is the first time either of them has spoken since she bared her skin to him. "You've stopped."
"There is something..." He hesitates, leans across to Vinculus and studies the mark he has just copied. Then he moves back to the corresponding mark on her skin.
It is different.
The mark on Vinculus resembles an upturned letter 'J', with a dot beneath the overhanging arch. On her skin, it has been turned sideways and the dot is now a series of three dashes, piled precariously one above the other. He has made a mistake, although he cannot see how such a thing could have happened. And the closer he looks the less certain he is that this is a mistake, but something meant.
"What is it?" she demands, a note of fear entering her voice.
"The writing is different," he says, "but I cannot say why..." He moves between her and Vinculus, finding more places where the marks do not match. And at first he thinks it might be a trick, something to prevent the book from being copied, but the more he studies the writing on her skin, the less he believes it. This means something, the changed writing on her skin, but what? He rolls Vinculus over so roughly the man almost topples off the bed. And then moves around in front of her, examining the places where she copied the writing herself, her hand much less neat than his own. And here too some of the symbols are different.
"Mr Childermass, please."
He glances up at her, sees the fear in her eyes, how her fingers tighten on her shift. "I'm sorry."
"Have we made a mistake?"
"I do not think so," he says slowly. Although he's by no means convinced that is the case. Along with the shadows and the firelight, mistakes seem to be woven into the very air around them. He breathes them in with every breath as he puzzles it out. And then the answer comes to him. "It's you."
"What do you mean?"
He takes hold of her arm, moving it so the muscles flex beneath her skin. He doesn't notice how still she goes as she allows him to manipulate her. Her upper arm is plumper than Vinculus's, without the vagabond's ropy muscle. He thinks of the curve of her hips and buttocks, of her breasts. "I think the body forms part of the book. Skin and muscle and fat and bone, they all combine with the marks. That's why we have never been able to copy the words."
"But we are copying them now," she says.
"I do not think we have been copying at all."
She draws in a breath. "What do you mean?"
"I think I mean that when we have finished you will be another book entirely."
Their eyes meet. She is the one who breaks the silence, her voice faltering, fearful. She is afraid of the hunger in his eyes, and for the first time the shadows crowding the room frighten her.
"This was a mistake. You should take him and..." Her voice trails off. Her eyes fix on the wall. And the observant viewer might notice his hand has closed gently on her wrist.
"We cannot stop now," he tells her. "I cannot. This is the work of the Raven King."
"The Raven King," she says, her bitter gaze resting on him. "You're a Yorkshireman through and through, aren't you? John Uskglass really is your king."
"And I'm proud of it. He's your king too."
She glares at him as if he has insulted her. "I'm not from Yorkshire," she says although her heavy Yorkshire accent suggests otherwise. "I'm Irish."
"Yes, you sound it," he says, smiling a lop-sided smile.
She scowls, muttering something about how John Uskglass is not her king, that he will never be her king, because she is Irish and owes her allegiance to Conchobar mac Nessa, who is more a king than either John Uskglass or the king of England will ever be and any fool would know it. "As if you," she completes, lowering her voice to a ferocious whisper, "would recognise a king when you saw one."
"I'd recognise John Uskglass."
"Would you?"
His smile fades. Somewhere in the back of his mind a memory flickers. He realises he is gripping her arm tightly and releases her. "I'm sorry," he murmurs. She shakes her head as if it hardly matters, and there is silence again. "Can I continue?"
In reply, she picks up the quill and places it in his hand.
Now they no longer work in silence.
"Where did you learn your magic?" he asks, as he cups her breast and lifts it so he can write on the pale skin beneath. "From your master's library, I expect, while you were supposed to be working."
"Where did you learn yours?" she demands, in a voice that silences him. "And he's no master of mine."
"He paid you. That makes him your master."
"I never took a penny from him." She tilts her head. "And what are you, Mr Childermass? Servant or master or magician?" She wields the question like a knife. "You have his mark on you."
"Whose mark?" He's only half-listening, intent on his task, trying not to think about how he has her breast cupped in his hand, about how his writing encircles her nipple, about how hard it is to write on a woman's breast when the skin there seems to pucker and tighten at the kiss of the nib. He has to concentrate hard on the task at hand. As it were.
"The Raven King's," she says, and the nib stops moving, leaving a blot of ink on her skin. He dabs it with his thumb without thinking, having forgotten her nipple was there. He raises his eyes to hers as she says, "John Uskglass. Who else? You bear his mark."
"I do not."
"Aye, you do," she says, lifting her hand to his face. "Here and here." He closes his eyes as she touches her finger to his eyelids. Her finger trails down the silvery scar on his cheek to press against his lips. "And here," she says. "And–"
He catches her hand, presses it over his heart. "Here?" he asks.
She turns his hand over, circles her thumb in the well of his palm. Her touch sends rippling shivers through him. His own hand – the one cupping her breast – copies the movement of her thumb, heedless of how he smudges the ink.
She draws in a ragged breath. He drops the quill and pulls her into a kiss. There is a moment of hesitation, but whether on her part or his, I cannot tell you, but soon there are clothes being discarded and kicked aside, hands and lips and tongues and teeth on skin both clean and marked with ink, and the air of the room thickens with a musky scent older than magic itself. There are fingernails scratching up spines, and the gasping of breath, and time seems to stop altogether for first one then the other, just for an instant, before it appears to flow once more. And neither of them sees how the spilled ink forms the shape of a raven against the sheets.
(And my sister-brother L'Amoureux is looking rather smug.)
At some point one of them – perhaps both – shoves Vinculus from the bed with rather less care than ought to be shown to a book. He now lies snoring in his stupor, crumpled on the floor. Neither of them care.
The maid lies in the crook of Childermass's elbow, her face half-turned towards him.
"I've smudged you," Childermass says. "I'm sorry..." He still cannot remember her name. "...Jane?" he hazards.
He thinks she smiles, and takes that for confirmation that he has guessed her name correctly. Of course he's wrong. It is a trick of the light, a play of the shadows. She is not smiling at all, and her name is not Jane.
And he kisses the curve of her neck, smudging the last few letters there. It does not seem to matter. When he slides his hand over her skin he can feel the letters responding to his touch. Even though the writing has been ruined, the book remains. "We still have some work to do." He hesitates. "Although we should remove the enchantment from the inn. I haven't eaten since I left Skipton. You needn't worry about paying for the room. I shall take care of it."
She doesn't answer and again he takes her silence for acquiescence.
He kisses the tender skin beneath her ear. "Where did you learn your magic?" he asks. "You didn't say."
"My mother taught me."
He frowns. "Your mother knew magic?"
She shook her head. "The stones and the rain taught me magic. My mother showed me how to listen to them."
"And where did your mother learn that?" he asks, and he cannot help a touch of indulgence creeping into his voice, because he does not believe her.
"From the fairies," she says.
The tale she tells him when he presses her is rather like the labyrinth she set to trap him. Full of convoluted asides, and turnings back on itself and evasions, at least half of which are deliberate, because this tale is not something she really wants him to know. Childermass is a clever man, used to the confused logic and meanderings common in books of and about magic, and he can follow her story, but I suspect that you are not nearly quite so clever as Childermass so I shall paraphrase.
She told the story of how her mother was snatched away into one of Faerie's many kingdoms. A year and a day was how long it seemed to her mother, but when she stumbled back along one of the King's Roads, half-starved and dressed in tattered rags, every part of her shrivelled and shrunken except for the bulk of her pregnant belly, much longer had passed than a year and a day. Her world had shifted in the blink of an eye.
She was snatched from Ireland and found herself in Yorkshire several hundred years later, and it is in Yorkshire where the young maid was born. But her mother was bitter at having been stolen from her home and husband (even if she never liked either all that much before she was stolen away), and filled her daughter's head with every tale of Ireland she could remember and a good many more she invented on the spot.
And once he has heard her tale and puzzled through it, sorting out the truth from the nonsense, Childermass nods. "So you're half-fairy. Well, that explains it," he says, thinking of her laziness. Of her complete disregard for the ownership of property. Of her willingness to trick others into doing her work for her.
"That explains what?" A hint of danger in the way her body feels against him suggests that he would do well to be careful about what he says.
"Your careless heed of your duties," he says, smiling. "You were a terrible servant."
"I am not a servant at all," she hisses, eyes flashing.
Her sudden rage takes him a little aback. "There's no shame in being a servant."
"Speak for yourself. I am not a servant." Her rage vanishes as quickly as it appeared. Now there is only pleading in her voice. "My mother was a servant in Faerie. I will not be a servant. And I'm not a fairy."
"I did not say you were. I said you were half-fairy. It's not the same thing at all."
"I'm not that either. I'm not a servant and I'm not a fairy and I'm not a half-fairy and I'm not from bloody Yorkshire!"
Perhaps Childermass could be forgiven for wondering what the hell he has managed to get himself into. He kisses her brow, his tone mollifying, "You are none of those things."
"What am I then?"
He assumes it is a rhetorical question, but it's clear she's waiting for an answer. "You are a thief," he says, picking his words carefully. She nods as if such a thing were self-evident. "And a woman. And a magician."
"A 'magician'," she repeats, sounding rather dubious.
"A powerful one," he says, "Or you would be, I think, if you took the time to learn."
"More powerful than you?"
"Yes," he admits, reluctantly. "You could be."
She thinks about this for a moment, thinking about all the magicians she has met in York. "Do they always argue so much?"
"You mean magicians?" he asks, and she nods. "In my experience, they usually argue a good deal more."
"I don't think I want to be a magician. It seems like a lot of work." She yawns, stretching out her body, and he watches the firelight playing over her skin, thinking how like a fairy she is. Changeable and dangerous and fundamentally indolent.
"You're wrong, you know," she says, running a hand down between her breasts. "I don't think this is the work of the Raven King."
"No?" He kisses her shoulder. "Whose is it then?"
"Yours."
He goes still. "'Mine'," he repeats. He feels a longing he has never quite been willing to admit, not even to himself, a dream of becoming more powerful a magician than either Mr Strange or Mr Norrell. A strange expression shifts across his face, and she watches him, wondering what she has done by bringing them both here. Then his expression clears and he smiles his twisted sideways smile. "Ours," he corrects, and kisses her again.
"My mother told me a story once," she says. "I think it was the only story she told me that had nowt to do with Ireland. She said two magicians'd change England forever."
"She meant Mr Strange and Mr Norrell," he tells her, although he wonders if this is true. He thinks how she has left her mark on him already. The ink-stains on his fingers, his stomach, his thighs, where his skin has pressed against hers. We are two magicians, he thinks. Perhaps...
But that is a thought he cannot let himself finish.
Outside, a dog howls. She stiffens. "It's nothing," he says. "Just a dog."
She wriggles free and goes to the window, stepping over Vinculus's sleeping form. "There are no dogs," she whispers. "They're all asleep."
"Your barghest then." His eyes are closed so he does not see how she stares at him. "I forgot to ask how you did that. Was it an illusion or something more? It put me in mind of a summoning spell in The Language of Birds."
"I set the labyrinth," she says, and something in her voice makes him open his eyes. "And I set everyone in the inn to sleeping, but that's all I did."
He swallows. "The barghest... wasn't you?"
Slowly she shakes her head. Outside the barking howl of the dog comes again, and he thinks of a shape in the mist. He mutters a word he normally would never have used in the presence of a woman. She is trembling with fear, and he stands, crosses to her, wraps his arms around her. Something moves in the courtyard below. She shudders, presses her face against his chest.
"It's come for me," she says. "He's sent it to bring me back. Please, Mr Childermass, I don't want to go."
And through his weariness and fear, he thinks that since he knows every inch of her body and more besides, that she should probably stop calling him 'Mr Childermass' and call him 'John' instead, but it does not seem to be something he can articulate.
"Who has sent it?" he asks, and she snorts.
"Emperor Buonaparte," she snaps. "Who'd'you bloody think?"
A chill ripples through him. A twisted hawthorn tree. A touch upon his eyelids, his mouth, his heart, his hand. "Jane–"
She glares up at him. Her eyes are glittering and dark and contemptuous. "That is not my–"
The window shatters inwards and the shadows writhe. He grabs for her, telling himself that he's afraid for her safety.
Her breast presses against his hand as she struggles against him and he shifts his grip, tells her that she's safe, while the shadows flutter up the wall. They look exactly like ravens.
She plants her hands against his chest and shoves. "You bloody fool," she spits like an angry cat, but he won't let go. She attempts a knee to his private parts but he's fought dirtier fighters than her and he evades her easily. Still it's enough to allow her to escape his grasp. The fire seems to cast shadows rather than light, and she vanishes between them, hidden from view.
"Jane..."
"You're his," she says. "You were always his, and you're too blind to see it."
And she's gone, the shadows rippling and swarming with her. He starts towards the door, freezes as a hot stink envelops him. There is something else in the room, something great and hulking and monstrous, and he can smell its musk, its hot stinking breath. It is the barghest, the monster that has walked out of the nightmares of his childhood, out of the stories his mother would tell about the huge, hungry dog that stalked the streets at night and ate naughty little boys who weren't brave enough to do as their mothers told them.
He thinks of a dog with burning eyes. Then he thinks of the maid, stumbling across the moors dressed in nothing but– well, nothing but her skin and the words of a book neither of them can understand.
He grabs his coat and follows her, pulling it on as he leaves the room and stamps down the stairs.
Outside he bellows her name, takes a moment to roundly curse every damned magician he's ever had the misfortune to meet, starting with Mr Norrell and ending with himself. Then he sees a patch of the moor which seems darker than the rest. He runs after her, a chill mist on his skin. He hopes she has not set a labyrinth to trick him again. Tired as he is, he's not sure he would be able to break it. Her first attempt was half-hearted; if she really tries–
But she does not try. She is naked and the night is cold and he has forgotten how lazy she is. He finds her hunched with her arms wrapped around herself, her cheeks wet with tears. He shrugs off his coat and wraps it around her shoulders, kisses her forehead when she leans against him, shivering.
"I'm sorry," she whispers.
"It's all right. We'll go back to the inn," he says. "You'll lift the enchantment, we'll eat and then we'll finish the book."
"It's too late for that, Mr Childermass," she tells him, and he opens his mouth to tell her she should call him John when he sees the King's Road, half-hidden in the shadows of an over-hanging rock. One of John Uskglass's roads, which lead between this world and his kingdom in Faerie and all the worlds in between.
And she is pulling away from him, the little maid. She slips through his grasp as if she were made of shadows, and each step takes her further away from him until she stands on the road.
Then she stops, and glances back at him, thin and pale, clad in nothing but his coat. And perhaps it is a trick of the light, how before she vanishes he sees a man standing at her side, his hand resting on her shoulder. Childermass is almost certain he has seen him before, but for some reason he cannot place his face, which is thin and handsome and as pale as hers.
But he knows he will never forget her face when she glances back at him, how her pleading eyes are filled with sorrow, and how they make his heart ache.
And then she is gone.
By the time he returns to the inn, he has forgotten her completely.
The inhabitants now sleep a natural sleep, and it seems unlikely that they will be entirely sanguine if they wake up from an enchanted slumber to find an ill-tempered and completely naked Yorkshireman in their midst. The female member of the sleeping couple is already batting irritably at the poor innocent spider clinging onto her nose in desperation.
In his room he is confused by a loud snorting which seems to be coming from nowhere. It takes him a few moments to identify the source: Vinculus, curled up asleep by the side of the bed. The window has been shattered, the heavy curtains barely stirred by the wind. The bed's covers have been thrown back, and the sheets are filthy, smeared with what looks like ink.
He finds more ink stains on his body when he dresses, on his chest, his thighs and various other unexpected places. As for the ink stains on his fingers, well, they are not so remarkable, although it is odd to find them on his left hand as well as his right. He cannot see the stains on his lips and tongue, and by the time he checks his reflection in a mirror, they will have worn away. He will never even know they were there.
Stranger still he cannot seem to find his coat. This irritates him more than anything. He liked that coat. It was a very good coat, with plenty more wear left in it, and he glares at Vinculus as if he is entirely to blame for the wreckage of the sheets and the shattered window and the puzzle of the ink stains on his skin and his missing coat. Vinculus snorts, scratching at his belly in his sleep.
Childermass turns away in disgust, and sits at the table. He reaches for the pocket of his coat, remembers with a curse that he isn't wearing it. He feels a sense of something having been stolen from him. The cards, he thinks, but that doesn't seem quite right.
No, he realises. It was a book.
But he must be thinking of Vinculus who stole himself away. Only that doesn't seem quite right either. He remembers something soft against his hands, remembers ink smearing beneath his fingers, and someone's breath warming his skin.
He wishes he has his cards. He has been left only one, a single card lying face-down on the table. He stares at it.
Vinculus gives a final explosive snort and wakes up. "You've found me then," he says, rather peevishly.
"I have."
"And you've come to take me back to York?"
"I have."
Vinculus considers this, then gives a heavy sigh. His gaze wanders around the room, lingering on the ruined sheets. He casts a crafty thoughtful eye at Childermass's back. "Where's she gone?"
"Where's who gone?"
Vinculus pauses. "I must have been dreaming," he says, scratching his grubby neck. Then he frowns. "Why am I naked?"
Childermass ignores him. He turns over the card, the last remaining of his lost deck, and if you are cleverer than I take you for you might be able to guess which one it is.
My sister La Lune, in which a dog and a poorly-drawn wolf howl at the scowling moon. And if the dog appears larger and blacker than before, Childermass barely notices. All his attention is focused on the face of the moon, half-turned towards him. He has an impression of heavy brows drawn low over dark glittering eyes, but the look in those eye is at once pleading and frightened and sly and bitter. It is a face he feels he knows. Perhaps someone he knew in his youth and has forgotten?
It can't be. He would have remembered those eyes. He's certain of that.