Stephen took off his flight gloves, tucking them into his belt. Nerves, he told himself as he stretched his fingers, glancing over at the setting sun. Simply nerves. My father won’t get any deader, and I’ve been there before—I should be able to find a city the size of York in a night flight easily enough.
A chime sounded in mid-air, and Stephen groaned aloud. “What now?”
“Come immediately to Castle Lancaster.” It was the voice of his granduncle Robert. “I repeat, come immediately to Castle Lancaster. I repeat a third time, come immediately to Castle Lancaster. It is urgent.”
“More urgent than ensuring my sister does not put my father’s body to the torch?” Stephen snapped back at the empty air. For a moment, he felt foolish to shout back when his granduncle could not hear; then Stephen decided it was a good thing that his granduncle hadn’t heard. He stood for a long moment, then another chime sounded. “John has you on a crystal ball now. Minutes count—London is burning, I need you here now, make haste.”
Stephen muttered under his breath, his fingers dancing; then he soared into the air. He grabbed his flight gloves off his belt as the wind whistled past his ears, sticking the left glove between his teeth as he donned the right glove.
London has a fire service—several of them. Why would the city be aflame?
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With a nervous twitch of her fingers, Petronilla Mallory swept her fingers through the bowl of still water, ripples occluding the moonlit form of Stephen de Lancaster. He was flying north, she could see that much—farther away from her. But there was another watcher already invisibly present on the other side of the reflection, and she didn’t want to be caught scrying on Stephen.
If it got back to Stephen that she’d been scrying on him, she would feel greatly embarrassed; he would surely take it as a sign that Petronilla was obsessed with him rather than merely possessed of mild interest and friendly curiosity. Worse, if Stephen’s sister learned—Sabine could utterly destroy her reputation from Lancaster to London with just a few well-placed rumors. Stephen’s beautiful blonde sister was known to be totally ruthless in the pursuit of her own interests.
So, rather than letting the surface of the water settle to reestablish the connection, Petronilla dumped out the bowl and stood, smoothing down a mud-stained wool dress that would have looked yellow in daylight, bare feet feeling the chill of the lintel stone. She turned her gaze to the cloudy sky, the stars obscured from her sight. On the one hand, she could have used some astrological guidance at the moment, but on the other, if the upper reaches of the sky were beyond her sight, she was out of sight of things flying high in the sky.
Was there a dragon somewhere up there? Had she really seen a dragon, glittering gold and flying right over the henge? Petronilla shook her head. If it had been another of Thurston’s illusions, the man would have shown up by now. There were precious few master illusionists haunting the countryside, and creating an illusion of that size and maintaining it for long enough that it seemed to fade naturally from sight would be, well, more impressive than anything she’d seen from Thurston, and the young lord was ranked as a master. He and Stephen had shared many of the same professors.
Additionally, the fear that had swept through her when the shadow of the dragon swept over her had felt nothing like an illusion. It hadn’t started in her mind; it had started in the depths of her body, a bone-deep terror that gripped her guts and set her heart to racing before she looked up to see if it was a raincloud that had suddenly shaded the field.
Then she’d frozen still, not moving a muscle while she watched it fly out of sight and then long after for what seemed like an entire bell, feeling vulnerable, alone, and bite-sized. It was one kind of dangerous thrill to chat with a nobleman who ranked her socially, topped her by a head of height, and looked at her as though she was a glass of wine on the other side of ten miles of dry desert sand; it was another sensation entirely to look upon a creature large enough to use her as a toothpick, knowing it was likely impervious to anything less than an archmage.
She’d read about dragons. She’d even seen a small one in the distance, once, and in Oxford, she’d gaped at the skeleton of one, mounted in a bipedal position and looming ten feet tall. But the shadow of the golden dragon had covered the entire circle of Stonehenge, a size that would have seemed utterly implausible to her until she’d seen it.
She shook her head, shaking away her daytime memory and jumping off the stone lintel, her dress flaring as she bounced in the air, folding her legs to tuck her cold feet into the creases of her knees to warm them up. While she couldn’t get any real altitude yet with her present flying skills, she didn’t want to go very high in any case. Not with what she’d seen in the sky—beautiful and majestic, but totally terrifying.
For the first time in her life, she briefly wished she’d never left home to pursue her studies of magic. As delightful as it had been to try to learn about every kind of magic and as eager as she’d been to learn the mysteries of Stonehenge, at that moment she wished she hadn’t taken the path in her life that left her standing on an old pile of rocks on a cloudy night, her skirt filthy and her feet cold, a small pit of lingering fear still sitting in her stomach like a rock.
Petronilla could have simply stayed home, continuing to learn from books and tutors. She probably wouldn’t have met Stephen or Thurston, though whether she was sure she wanted either of them in her life seemed sometimes an open question. Her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t even eaten dinner, and her imagination wistfully drifted back. If she had stayed home—if she was home right now, she could be sitting the warmth of her mother’s kitchen, eating a home-cooked meal, rather than flying through the darkness with cold muddy feet, worried about both dragons and the possible destruction of her reputation within polite society.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
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Bella’s mother laid the plate down in front of her. “Here you go, dear.”
Bella yawned sleepily. “Thanks, Mom. But what are you doing serving breakfast? Where’s Susanna?”
The Taylor matron shook her head. “I gave her the morning off. With Delia having left to work for the Hirst household, I’d rather handle the trickier part of preparing dinner myself than risk embarrassment—Susanna lacks experience in butchery. The roast is already in the oven, and I fried up some of the off-cuts for breakfast.”
“Aren’t you having any?” Bella asked, taking in the empty table. It was the first she’d heard that Delia was gone rather than simply on furlough, but the surprise was that her mother wasn’t insisting on having a family breakfast.
“I already ate, dear. A perk of being the cook for the day,” her mother said. She was holding a creased piece of paper with a noble’s waxen seal stamped on the lower right-hand corner as a signature. “There’s quite a bit to do around the house. I shouldn’t wait for your laggardly self to wake to break my fast.”
Bella looked down at the meat and eggs on her plate, accompanied by a slightly singed piece of toast. “Thanks, Mom,” she said, spearing the largest of the irregularly shaped chunks of meat with her fork and popping it into her mouth. As she chewed, she could not help but notice differences. It was tougher, chewier. Mom just isn’t as good of a cook, she thought to herself. Though I can hardly say as much, it’s not polite.
As she chewed the tougher meat, though, she noticed the difference between this morning’s breakfast and her recent meals. This meat was leaner, gamier, and overall, more intensely flavored. It was from a person clearly altogether different from Ivette and Gelle, and from past experience, she felt she could guess the principal underlying cause of the differences. Bella swallowed as she finished her process of comparison and deduction. “You picked this up whole just the day before yesterday, right? Since Daddy’s not here to object, can I have the—”
“No!” Bella’s mother said sharply. After a moment of composing herself, she continued, switching to a consoling tone as her left hand unconsciously drifted across her abdomen, paper still clutched in her hand. “Maybe another time, dearie. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have more to do in the kitchen—and then I must visit the banker to try to settle some accounts.”
Bella shouted after her mother’s retreating back. “Next time? When will that be, six months?” They’d been eating well lately, but Bella knew that had more than a little to do with a combination of good fortune, the aftermath of the attack on the Golden Fleece, and a desire to impress prospective business partners during a critical juncture in her father’s business dealings. Plus, special occasions usually meant that others—guests that Daddy wanted to impress—were already present, and with guests to impress, she was usually served either last or near to it out of anyone around the dinner table.
Bella’s mother turned. “Maybe sooner than you think. There was another gas attack, and it left behind many dead. The morgue is glutted, and with the coroner under close ducal supervision, many of those bodies will sit under preservation for some time.”
And so, Bella ate her breakfast alone. She wondered which of her father’s business partners would take the lead on trying to negotiate for corpses—surely if there was a sudden glut at the morgue, the York Textile Company would buy, especially with the fresh influx of capital brought in by Lord Guilbert. The Lancastrian baron was very rude, and his son even more so, but Bella could forgive that of a man who’d put a smile on her father’s face after months of near-constant anxiety and concern.
There was a simple lesson there: If you were important enough, you could afford to be rude. Once I am a duchess, Bella thought to herself as she chewed on a particularly tough piece of meat, I will be as rude as I like, and nobody will object for fear of getting on my bad side.
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“Madame Taylor, it is a Cumbrian letter of credit,” said the bespectacled man. “Your household is known to bear debt, and the Matthews collection policy is not to offer cash on a foreign letter without collateral at hand. The York Textile Company is dissolved, the regular Taylor family account is frozen by order of the duke, your manor is already up as collateral to the dwarves—yes, I spoke with Master Lew this morning—and your farms are on long-term lease from the d’Ivry estate, not owned.”
Madame Taylor blew out a slow breath, then unfastened her necklace, placing it on the desk. “Could I offer personal collateral, then?” A pair of bracelets followed, then three rings, one from her finger and two from a box tucked away in her purse.
“All put together, those would be—what, at most one hundred fifty, perhaps two hundred pounds?” The bespectacled man shook his head.
“Can I—could I list myself down as collateral as well to make up the difference?” Madame Taylor ran her hands over her body. “My bones are solid—I know that bodies are always dear.”
The bespectacled man sighed. “You are indeed desperate. I doubt Baron Matthews would approve of taking a living body on as collateral, but in any case, the market is in a sudden glut. You are healthy but fine-boned, and even for a zombie of the Scottish style—as a respectable woman of the gentry, I doubt you have any muscle memories anyone would be interested in for specialty work. Even before today—well, to be very blunt, the only reason your body might be valued above market by that much would be sheer sentimentality. Your husband is dead, your brother-in-law is broke, and your kin are elsewhere, are they not?”
Madame Taylor nodded slowly. “Yes. Cheshire, mostly, though my sister moved to London.”
“If the collateral you offered was worth even half of the sum listed on that letter, perhaps I could take on the risk myself personally on account of my own soft sentimentalities, Madame Taylor, but it simply is not.” The bespectacled man shook his head. “Especially not now. If you want more than half of face value on the letter, you will have to look elsewhere. Probably in Cumbria itself. It’s not a long trip, you could be there in less than a week, a single day if your brother-in-law William can fly you—he is a master wizard, is he not?”
Madame Taylor shook her head. “Flying isn’t necromancy—he told me he could if it was a real emergency, but I have my doubts.”
The bespectacled man nodded. “Even if it takes a week—speaking in my alternate capacity as a barrister, nobody can press any legal action in the interim, regardless of whatever you may need the money so urgently for. All of York is in mourning today—my condolences on your husband, by the way—and the duke’s wedding day will be a holiday. I doubt he will hold court for at least a week, and by that time the backlog will be substantial.”
Madame Taylor sighed. “I suppose I shall have to travel to Cumbria, then. Beatrice can stay out of trouble for a few days, surely—her cousins are visiting, and that should put her on her best behavior.”