scrivespinster (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scrivespinster) wrote2020-08-17 11:35 am
scrivespinster) wrote2020-08-17 11:35 am
WIP: Valkyrie Bags a Legend, Chapter 4
Chapter 4
Note: There are a couple of scenes at the end of this chapter that have not been posted previously - though they’re a little rough.
.
I wasn’t expecting company on the path back, unless you counted roving predatory fungus, but as I passed my lantern beam across the fungal thickets outside the Tracker’s cottage, I saw that I wasn’t alone.
A woman in sturdy boots and mud-spattered nun’s garb was leaning against the stalk of a towering mushroom not far away, idly twirling an unlit cigarillo between two fingers as she watched the door. Her skin was dark as them from the Presbyterate, though I learned later that it was elsewhere she came from, and though her face was young, almost cheerful, her eyes were sharper than Jack’s best knives. The grey cat curled around her ankles, purring, and allowed her to bend down and offer a scratch between the ears. She smiled fondly at it, like someone greeting a old friend, but I didn’t get the sense that I escaped her attention for an instant, and both those things worried me. I had known I wasn’t the only one who might ask a cat to share their secrets, but it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could care about mine. If I was going to do this, I realized, I should probably stop assuming that; this woman might have been a nun, but she moved with a casual grace that suggested she was also dangerous.
“Excuse me,” I asked, “but what are you doing here?”
“I might ask the same of you,” the nun said. “You could always claim you’re just here to raid the place, but the cat says otherwise.”
I hesitated. I didn’t think there was any lie I could tell that she would believe, and I didn’t fancy my chances fleeing, either, though my size would work to my favor in this tangled marshland. But she’d done nothing to harm me yet, and whoever she was, friend or adversary, she knew something. Maybe if I dealt honestly, I could learn it too.
“I’m hunting something,” I started, but the nun cut me off with a brusque shake of her head.
“We know what you’re hunting.”
It was difficult to say what she thought about that, standing there looking down at someone half her size who presumed to take on a legend. Unimpressed, I thought, but not mocking. Waiting, with judgment held in reserve.
“Before you say anything,” I told her, “I know that the Vake will kill me.”
“Then you’re already a step ahead of the rest,” she said. It wasn’t kindness in her voice, exactly, but I was suddenly certain that whoever’s side she was on, it wasn’t the monster’s.
This time, I didn’t ask whether the Vake could be killed. I asked, “How do I kill it first?”
She laughed long and loud, sounding more like a zailor than a nun.
“You really would have to be mad to try.”
“That’s not an answer. How?”
The long, searching look she gave me wasn’t an answer either, but I got the sense there were a few answers behind it, and that cagey though she was, she didn’t actually want to keep silent.
“There’s something you want to tell me, isn’t there?” I said. “What is it?”
“Nothing now,” she said. “When you’re older, if you still mean to throw your life away, come and find us. You’ll be able to, if you’ve got half the skill that’s needed to face the Vake and die well. Until then – hang on to this.”
She held something out to me: a bit of metal, a steel rosary that glinted knifelike when it caught the light. I opened my palm to take it, and the chain pooled in my hand, cold and smooth against my skin. If I closed my fingers around the crucifix, I’d slice my hand open – a message, maybe, in a language I wasn’t quite sure how to read.
Only it wasn’t a crucifix, precisely, but a pair of crossed lines with a sort of loop at the top. It wasn’t hardly a Christian symbol, I thought, but the legends that had taught me who I was, those weren’t hardly Christian either.
I slipped the chain around my neck and tucked the rosary beneath my shirt, hidden away against my skin; it would be wise, I knew, to be wary of those sharp edges.
“Do you know what he was like?” I asked. “The man who owned this place?”
The nun blinked down at me, and once again, I felt that she was taking my measure according to some standard I couldn’t guess. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, though it was clear by then that she meant me no harm.
“Why do you want to know?” she asked.
“Because heroes shouldn’t be forgotten.”
“And what if he wasn’t a hero?” she asked. “What if he was just some bravo with his eye on four million echoes?”
I didn’t think that was true, but even if it was...
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He shouldn’t die unremembered. No one should.”
For what felt like a very long time, there was no response but the rustling not-quite-silence of the marshes. Then she nodded like something had been decided, and her demeanor shifted again towards cordial.
“I didn’t know anything about him,” she said, “but I’ll tell you this much. It’ll be some time before I go forgetting you.”
She said it like a joke shared between the two of us, but as she lifted a hand in farewell and disappeared back into the marshes, the grey cat following at her heels, it seemed to me that there was something too much like sadness hiding around the edges of her smile.
I shrugged it off. It wasn’t the first time someone had decided my death was a foregone conclusion.
.
I wasn’t certain what I would learn when I lit a candle that night and sat down to read the Steadfast Tracker’s journal. I was hoping, I admit, for easy answers, and fearing no answers at all. What I found was the pieced-together record of someone who knew less than I did at the start, not even certain his quarry was real, painstakingly fitting his scraps into some kind of order. It began with what seemed like a series of meaningless tasks: collecting shrieks, digging marsh mud, finding a singing teacher for a mandrake. In the stories I knew, even the most peculiar things were done for a reason, but what in the name of Storm and Salt was the purpose of – I stopped, the page forgotten beneath my hands. Outside the window, I could hear the rattle of cart wheels and the sound of a small dog barking, but in my mind, I was back in the midnight streets of Wilmot’s End, listening to a chorus of distant voices rising to the sky. Music. There was something about music, and that meant that whatever was in these notes held some truth.
I read late that night, as my candle burned low and shadows crept in from the corners. I found nothing about nuns there, nor any mention of that strange symbol I still wore, but what I did find – it did seem, I thought, like something out of a legend: music for a lure, black liquor brewed from blood, a weapon crafted from the tooth of the beast it was meant to slay. Perhaps it was myth. Perhaps it was truth. But I heard the echo of Slivvy’s words in the back of my mind as I read, and I could see a way forward where before there had been only thicket and mire.
Not yet, a voice of warning told me. Not yet.
And I did listen, though my hand came up to grasp the spiked rosary beneath he fabric of my shirt; I was young, and no fool. But I would learn what I could from what the Tracker left me, and if there was a way, there or elsewhere, I would find it.
.
The first job I set myself to, after that trip to the marshes, was learning what I could about the nun and her sisters – a task made more difficult by the fact that some instinct warned me against showing that rosary to anyone I wasn’t sure I could trust. The Tracker’s journal made no mention of anything like it, so I took to taverns again, doing the sort of odd jobs that urchins do, sweeping sawdust and hawking cigarettes and other work where I might go unnoticed and listen.
It was slow going, even after patrons grew drunk enough to start trading tales they wouldn’t mention sober. After I slipped in a mention of seeing a formidable abbess run off a pack of marsh wolves with only an umbrella, a grey-bearded captain claimed in turn that a pistol-brandishing nun had saved his crew from a flock of Milliner Bats when they wrecked off the coast of Varchas – but though I listened with all the wide-eyed wonder I could muster, he couldn’t tell me what might have become of her after they parted ways. A few zailors spoke of a fortress-convent, in the same way they spoke of all the impossible lands they found at zee: colorful, fleeting as a dream, and thanks to the Treachery of Maps, every bit as difficult to find if you didn’t know the way. I might to take to zee in search of it myself when the time came, but the more I heard, the more I doubted I’d learn anything more than tantalizing hints from eavesdropping in taverns, so I withdrew again to focus on putting together what I knew.
First, I thought, the nuns were dangerous, and they were martial, with a particular interest in the Vake – enough that even I’d caught their attention, young though I was. Second, they were based outside of London, but they had agents here, feline or human and watchful enough to catch anyone seeking out Vake-stories up in their net. It was those agents that I’d need to track down, I suspected, if I wanted any hope of finding the convent. And as I looked down at the little tray of matchsticks and tobacco that I’d been using as part of my disguise, a thought occurred to me: if I wanted someone well-placed to listen to hunter’s gossip while drawing little suspicion on themselves, it wouldn’t be another hunter I chose. It would be a publican or a street food vendor, the owner of a gambling den, or perhaps a lady or gentleman of ill-repute. I’d traded secrets a time or two with a few of Flowerdene’s scarlet-stockinged molls, and one of the things I’d heard from them was that when hunters and soldiers and ruffians let their guard down, they talked. A lot.
With that thought, I stopped; something hovered at the edges of my mind, slipping away when I tried to put a name to it. I shook my head, frustrated by the sense of something obvious just out of reach – but try as I might, I couldn’t catch it, and I couldn’t let myself sit there running in circles when there was work to be done. It might be that a conversation with one the ladies of my acquaintance would shake my memory loose. Might be it wouldn’t, but I’d be able to learn something all the same.
I knew better than to bother one of Jenny’s lot while they were working, but I also knew that a girl who called herself the Vienna Rose – Rosie to friends and anyone else she wouldn’t rob blind given half a chance – though she’d never in her life set a foot out of London. She liked to take tea each afternoon at one of Spite Market’s streetside shops, and might be persuaded to part with information if the price was right. I didn’t have that kind of money, but I did have secrets, and those were often more valuable.
It was a short journey home to write down what I meant to share – mostly scraps I’d collected here and there, with a few choicer pieces of information pertaining to the plans and habits of certain constables. Then I was off again, down from the rooftops to a street lined with stalls and push-carts and costermongers hawking every imaginable ware. I ducked through jostling crowds with their baskets of roots and fungus, past the wheels of carriages stalled in traffic, until I found Rosie in her customary spot, watching the market with a mug of steaming tea in front of her and an unlit cigarette tucked behind one ear. She lifted an eyebrow as I hopped onto the bench beside her, but didn’t tell me to get lost, so I figured she was in a mood for talk.
“You’re a mite young to be looking for business, girl,” she said. “Which means there’s something else you’re after. So get on with it, then, cause I ain’t made of patience.” But she smiled as she said it, not entirely sharply, and I got the sense that I’d neither intruded nor offended.
“What I’m looking for,” I said, “is anyone in your line of work with an ear for hunters’ tales.”
Rosie sipped her tea slowly, peering at me over the rim of the mug.
“And why might that be?” she asked – suddenly cagey, it seemed to me, but perhaps no more than she should be, and either way, I thought it best to be honest. After all, I needed her help. She didn’t need mine.
“I’m hoping they’ll be able to point me in the direction of someone I’m trying to find. I mean no harm to ‘em. I’m looking for help with a bigger hunt than I can manage alone.”
I slid a small notebook across the table towards her. She snatched it up, flipped through the pages – I saw her eyes widen once, infinitesimally – and gave me a sleek smile as it vanished into some hidden pocket in her voluminous skirts. Offering accepted, it seemed; dealing with the Vienna Rose wasn’t that much different from dealing with a cat.
“Well,” she said, “I can’t tell you what you need to know, but I’m sure you’ll find your way to it on your own. You’re a bold little brat, ain’t you? And fortune favors the bold.”
She drained the dregs of her tea and stood in a flurry of ruffled petticoats, leaving me looking down into my own cup, no more certain than I had been before. But she’d taken my pay, and Rosie wasn’t known for dealing falsely, which meant she’d told me something she thought I needed to know.
Fortune favors the bold, I thought, turning the words over in my mind, and all at once, that thing I’d been trying to remember clicked like a picked lock falling open: an old campaign poster plastered to an alley wall, peeling at the corners, with that slogan printed along the bottom. Above it, the profile of Sinning Jenny in her nun’s habit, smiling like every single one of your secrets was hers to peruse at leisure – and wrapped around her folded hands, a golden rosary that might have been cast from the same mold as the one I held.
I felt myself grinning, giddy with victory. Even if I hadn’t found my agent, I’d found a lead.
.
Of course, following that lead was hardly so simple as arranging myself a place in Sinning Jenny’s appointment book; the Parlour of Virtue was as far out of my reach as the false stars, and even if it hadn’t been, the proprietress herself was not so easily approached. But Sinning Jenny had a finishing school too, and one that might be far less well-guarded – if I was lucky – than an establishment that relied on wealth and discretion to stay on the Ministry of Public Decency’s good side.
It was easy enough to locate the place – a stately manor in Ladybones Road, its brick walls still covered with the withered remnants of ivy – though in this part of London, where the lamps were bright and the constables made regular patrols, I had to take care not to be seen. From my perch on a rooftop opposite, I watched students and teachers come and go: the young daughters and sons of the nobility and the streets, some richly dressed and some shabby, many peculiar. It was clear that they were learning more in there than courtesies; on occasion, I heard sounds like dueling drift from the floors below, and once a resounding explosion blew out a window on the ground floor. And I noticed that the candles were lit in an office near the top, and the desk occupied by a nun who sat with a stack of books and documents, seemingly lost in concentration. I wasn’t close enough to see whether it might be Jenny beneath the shadow of that wimple – and in truth, I’d never seen her before at all, except on campaign posters and at a distance – but one nun was as good as another, to my purposes.
I had just about made up my mind to pay her a visit when the roof creaked behind me, so faintly I almost didn’t hear it at all. I didn’t waste time looking. I leapt to the side, hit the roof in a clatter of tiles, and as I scrambled to my feet, I glanced back to see a young nun land lightly behind the place where I’d been sitting. Her arms closed on empty air, and she spun to face me, stalking forward as I held up my hands.
“I’m not here to steal,” I said. “I need to talk to Sinning Jenny, that’s all.”
The nun did not seem convinced, but she didn’t seem ready to throw me off a rooftop, either, and that was better than I could have hoped for. She looked me over, trying to decide, I thought, whether I was more nuisance or threat – which was interesting, considering that most folk dismissed me as the former without so much as a moment’s doubt.
“Luckily for you,” she said, “Sister Jenny wants to see you too. I’ll let her decide what to do with you... though if it turns out you’re spying, I’ll string you up for Vake-bait myself, and I don’t care what she has to say about it.”
Which is how I found myself being hauled unceremoniously up to Sinning Jenny’s third floor office with a nun’s hand clamped around my wrist, though at least my would-be captor trusted me enough to let me descend the building under my own power. She herself climbed as easily as an urchin, despite the encumbrance of robes; I watched her swing silently from gargoyle to windowsill and down sheer brick, and if I hadn’t been sure before that I’d found the right trail to follow, I certainly was then.
Then it was into the house, up the servants’ stairs and along a polished hall, until the nun rapped three times sharply on a heavy oak door and a woman called from inside for us to enter.
The first thing that struck me was the way the nun brushed the dust from the skirt of her habit and stood a little straighter before opening the door – respect, I thought, and admiration. Not what some would expect from a nun facing a prostitute, but I imagine them that think like that have never met the woman on the other side of that door.
Second was Jenny herself, who looked up from a perilous stack of documents to greet us both with a broad and brilliant smile.
“Thank you, Sister,” she said, nodding serenely to the nun, who stood at almost military attention by my side. “I’ll take it from here, I think.”
It might have been a gentle command, but the nun didn’t mistake it for a suggestion; she released my wrist and bowed out, letting the door swing softly shut behind her.
There’s a lot gets said about Sinning Jenny, but what I remember of her, more than the rings on her fingers and the wickedly-crimson lipstick, is that she was kind – not falsely so, the way I’d learned that grown-ups sometimes are when they want something from you or want you to go away, but like someone you might want as your big sister. She told me to sit down in one of the comfortable chairs, poured me a cup of tea and let me put as much sugar in it as I wanted. And then she sat down in front of me and asked me, gently but in no uncertain terms, what precisely I was playing at.
There’s an instinct to lie, I think, that all of us urchins pick up; even I had it, despite the code I tried to uphold. Letting other people know too much about you is dangerous, and so was letting them know how much you knew about them. But Sinning Jenny wasn’t my enemy, and she was the kind of person who could spot falsehoods like a Master could spot bargains. All the same, when I answered, it wasn’t in words; I pulled the rosary from beneath my shirt, held it spinning on its chain, and then her eyes widened.
“How did you manage to come by that?” she asked, and I’d been half-expecting accusation, but right then I could hear only curiosity and, perhaps, a trace of respect.
“Was given it,” I said. “By one of your lot.” I took a deep breath, and added, “It’s them I need to find again, and I’d been hoping you might help me.”
Sinning Jenny gave me a long look, from my broom spear and patchwork clothing to the royal blue feathers I’d stuck through my helmet; her gaze seemed to linger on those feathers, and I wondered if she recognized their origin, and guessed at what they meant to me now. Maybe so. She knew a lot about the goings-on of London. Either way, what she said next, without any hint of judgment, was “It’s not faith that calls you to seek out the Sisterhood, is it?”
Not faith in God, I thought. Maybe faith in something else. I sipped my tea while she waited, and when I felt like my voice could be steady enough, I said, “The Vake took my brother.”
Sinning Jenny’s mouth tightened for a moment, subtly enough that I don’t think she meant me to notice. She steepled her fingers in front of her and leaned forward, and it wasn’t pity in her eyes, exactly, but this time her voice was kind in a way that hurt to hear. “It wasn’t the Vake that took your brother.”
I felt tears start in my eyes then, but I pushed them back, clasped my mug until my palms stung from the heat, and said, “Close enough.”
“Oh, child,” she said, with a shake of her head. “Oh, love. These aren’t intrigues you want to get involved in. But I know what you’ll say to that, and you’re not wrong, so listen.”
She took a sheet of clean paper from her desk, sketched something on it with practiced ease, and handed it to me with a care I could feel: a map of someplace out at zee called Shepherd’s Wash, and alongside it, a set of directions.
The drawing itself was not precise; there was little point to making it so, when both stars and land might shift without warning. But there are crags and shoals and islands that stay almost fixed, in relation to each other, and this map marked them all, and the paths to chart between them. More than that, a zailor would later tell me, there’s some would say it fixed them further; there’s a reason it’s easier to return to a place than travel there for the first time, and Sinning Jenny had made this journey before.
“Keep this close, little Valkyrie,” she said, and I can’t guess how she knew my name, but it didn’t surprise me. “Don’t let your enemy know you have it. And child – you won’t listen to this either, but don’t be so quick to go chasing after destiny. Let yourself be young.”
I nodded, though she was right that I didn’t mean to listen, and slipped the map inside my jacket, safe and hidden away; she’d given me something as precious as any rosary, and more of a risk for the Sisterhood. I felt the burden of her trust, and wondered what it was she’d seen in me that led her to believe it justified, but when I asked, she only smiled.
She asked, too, if I might want a meal, or a room for the night, or any other thing that an urchin might need. What I needed most was that map, but I left there weighed down by a satchel full of food to share among the the Ringbreakers, and the promise of more if we needed it. I don’t think it was because Jenny and I shared a mission, either; I think she’d have done the same for any urchin or vagabond to impose upon her hospitality at some unlikely hour.
I hurried out the window and into the dark, light-hearted, with home ahead and the future waiting. I knew the way to go, when the time came to take it. In the meanwhile, there was other work to do.
Chapter 3 here.
Chapter 5 here.
Index page here.
Note: There are a couple of scenes at the end of this chapter that have not been posted previously - though they’re a little rough.
.
I wasn’t expecting company on the path back, unless you counted roving predatory fungus, but as I passed my lantern beam across the fungal thickets outside the Tracker’s cottage, I saw that I wasn’t alone.
A woman in sturdy boots and mud-spattered nun’s garb was leaning against the stalk of a towering mushroom not far away, idly twirling an unlit cigarillo between two fingers as she watched the door. Her skin was dark as them from the Presbyterate, though I learned later that it was elsewhere she came from, and though her face was young, almost cheerful, her eyes were sharper than Jack’s best knives. The grey cat curled around her ankles, purring, and allowed her to bend down and offer a scratch between the ears. She smiled fondly at it, like someone greeting a old friend, but I didn’t get the sense that I escaped her attention for an instant, and both those things worried me. I had known I wasn’t the only one who might ask a cat to share their secrets, but it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could care about mine. If I was going to do this, I realized, I should probably stop assuming that; this woman might have been a nun, but she moved with a casual grace that suggested she was also dangerous.
“Excuse me,” I asked, “but what are you doing here?”
“I might ask the same of you,” the nun said. “You could always claim you’re just here to raid the place, but the cat says otherwise.”
I hesitated. I didn’t think there was any lie I could tell that she would believe, and I didn’t fancy my chances fleeing, either, though my size would work to my favor in this tangled marshland. But she’d done nothing to harm me yet, and whoever she was, friend or adversary, she knew something. Maybe if I dealt honestly, I could learn it too.
“I’m hunting something,” I started, but the nun cut me off with a brusque shake of her head.
“We know what you’re hunting.”
It was difficult to say what she thought about that, standing there looking down at someone half her size who presumed to take on a legend. Unimpressed, I thought, but not mocking. Waiting, with judgment held in reserve.
“Before you say anything,” I told her, “I know that the Vake will kill me.”
“Then you’re already a step ahead of the rest,” she said. It wasn’t kindness in her voice, exactly, but I was suddenly certain that whoever’s side she was on, it wasn’t the monster’s.
This time, I didn’t ask whether the Vake could be killed. I asked, “How do I kill it first?”
She laughed long and loud, sounding more like a zailor than a nun.
“You really would have to be mad to try.”
“That’s not an answer. How?”
The long, searching look she gave me wasn’t an answer either, but I got the sense there were a few answers behind it, and that cagey though she was, she didn’t actually want to keep silent.
“There’s something you want to tell me, isn’t there?” I said. “What is it?”
“Nothing now,” she said. “When you’re older, if you still mean to throw your life away, come and find us. You’ll be able to, if you’ve got half the skill that’s needed to face the Vake and die well. Until then – hang on to this.”
She held something out to me: a bit of metal, a steel rosary that glinted knifelike when it caught the light. I opened my palm to take it, and the chain pooled in my hand, cold and smooth against my skin. If I closed my fingers around the crucifix, I’d slice my hand open – a message, maybe, in a language I wasn’t quite sure how to read.
Only it wasn’t a crucifix, precisely, but a pair of crossed lines with a sort of loop at the top. It wasn’t hardly a Christian symbol, I thought, but the legends that had taught me who I was, those weren’t hardly Christian either.
I slipped the chain around my neck and tucked the rosary beneath my shirt, hidden away against my skin; it would be wise, I knew, to be wary of those sharp edges.
“Do you know what he was like?” I asked. “The man who owned this place?”
The nun blinked down at me, and once again, I felt that she was taking my measure according to some standard I couldn’t guess. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, though it was clear by then that she meant me no harm.
“Why do you want to know?” she asked.
“Because heroes shouldn’t be forgotten.”
“And what if he wasn’t a hero?” she asked. “What if he was just some bravo with his eye on four million echoes?”
I didn’t think that was true, but even if it was...
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He shouldn’t die unremembered. No one should.”
For what felt like a very long time, there was no response but the rustling not-quite-silence of the marshes. Then she nodded like something had been decided, and her demeanor shifted again towards cordial.
“I didn’t know anything about him,” she said, “but I’ll tell you this much. It’ll be some time before I go forgetting you.”
She said it like a joke shared between the two of us, but as she lifted a hand in farewell and disappeared back into the marshes, the grey cat following at her heels, it seemed to me that there was something too much like sadness hiding around the edges of her smile.
I shrugged it off. It wasn’t the first time someone had decided my death was a foregone conclusion.
.
I wasn’t certain what I would learn when I lit a candle that night and sat down to read the Steadfast Tracker’s journal. I was hoping, I admit, for easy answers, and fearing no answers at all. What I found was the pieced-together record of someone who knew less than I did at the start, not even certain his quarry was real, painstakingly fitting his scraps into some kind of order. It began with what seemed like a series of meaningless tasks: collecting shrieks, digging marsh mud, finding a singing teacher for a mandrake. In the stories I knew, even the most peculiar things were done for a reason, but what in the name of Storm and Salt was the purpose of – I stopped, the page forgotten beneath my hands. Outside the window, I could hear the rattle of cart wheels and the sound of a small dog barking, but in my mind, I was back in the midnight streets of Wilmot’s End, listening to a chorus of distant voices rising to the sky. Music. There was something about music, and that meant that whatever was in these notes held some truth.
I read late that night, as my candle burned low and shadows crept in from the corners. I found nothing about nuns there, nor any mention of that strange symbol I still wore, but what I did find – it did seem, I thought, like something out of a legend: music for a lure, black liquor brewed from blood, a weapon crafted from the tooth of the beast it was meant to slay. Perhaps it was myth. Perhaps it was truth. But I heard the echo of Slivvy’s words in the back of my mind as I read, and I could see a way forward where before there had been only thicket and mire.
Not yet, a voice of warning told me. Not yet.
And I did listen, though my hand came up to grasp the spiked rosary beneath he fabric of my shirt; I was young, and no fool. But I would learn what I could from what the Tracker left me, and if there was a way, there or elsewhere, I would find it.
.
The first job I set myself to, after that trip to the marshes, was learning what I could about the nun and her sisters – a task made more difficult by the fact that some instinct warned me against showing that rosary to anyone I wasn’t sure I could trust. The Tracker’s journal made no mention of anything like it, so I took to taverns again, doing the sort of odd jobs that urchins do, sweeping sawdust and hawking cigarettes and other work where I might go unnoticed and listen.
It was slow going, even after patrons grew drunk enough to start trading tales they wouldn’t mention sober. After I slipped in a mention of seeing a formidable abbess run off a pack of marsh wolves with only an umbrella, a grey-bearded captain claimed in turn that a pistol-brandishing nun had saved his crew from a flock of Milliner Bats when they wrecked off the coast of Varchas – but though I listened with all the wide-eyed wonder I could muster, he couldn’t tell me what might have become of her after they parted ways. A few zailors spoke of a fortress-convent, in the same way they spoke of all the impossible lands they found at zee: colorful, fleeting as a dream, and thanks to the Treachery of Maps, every bit as difficult to find if you didn’t know the way. I might to take to zee in search of it myself when the time came, but the more I heard, the more I doubted I’d learn anything more than tantalizing hints from eavesdropping in taverns, so I withdrew again to focus on putting together what I knew.
First, I thought, the nuns were dangerous, and they were martial, with a particular interest in the Vake – enough that even I’d caught their attention, young though I was. Second, they were based outside of London, but they had agents here, feline or human and watchful enough to catch anyone seeking out Vake-stories up in their net. It was those agents that I’d need to track down, I suspected, if I wanted any hope of finding the convent. And as I looked down at the little tray of matchsticks and tobacco that I’d been using as part of my disguise, a thought occurred to me: if I wanted someone well-placed to listen to hunter’s gossip while drawing little suspicion on themselves, it wouldn’t be another hunter I chose. It would be a publican or a street food vendor, the owner of a gambling den, or perhaps a lady or gentleman of ill-repute. I’d traded secrets a time or two with a few of Flowerdene’s scarlet-stockinged molls, and one of the things I’d heard from them was that when hunters and soldiers and ruffians let their guard down, they talked. A lot.
With that thought, I stopped; something hovered at the edges of my mind, slipping away when I tried to put a name to it. I shook my head, frustrated by the sense of something obvious just out of reach – but try as I might, I couldn’t catch it, and I couldn’t let myself sit there running in circles when there was work to be done. It might be that a conversation with one the ladies of my acquaintance would shake my memory loose. Might be it wouldn’t, but I’d be able to learn something all the same.
I knew better than to bother one of Jenny’s lot while they were working, but I also knew that a girl who called herself the Vienna Rose – Rosie to friends and anyone else she wouldn’t rob blind given half a chance – though she’d never in her life set a foot out of London. She liked to take tea each afternoon at one of Spite Market’s streetside shops, and might be persuaded to part with information if the price was right. I didn’t have that kind of money, but I did have secrets, and those were often more valuable.
It was a short journey home to write down what I meant to share – mostly scraps I’d collected here and there, with a few choicer pieces of information pertaining to the plans and habits of certain constables. Then I was off again, down from the rooftops to a street lined with stalls and push-carts and costermongers hawking every imaginable ware. I ducked through jostling crowds with their baskets of roots and fungus, past the wheels of carriages stalled in traffic, until I found Rosie in her customary spot, watching the market with a mug of steaming tea in front of her and an unlit cigarette tucked behind one ear. She lifted an eyebrow as I hopped onto the bench beside her, but didn’t tell me to get lost, so I figured she was in a mood for talk.
“You’re a mite young to be looking for business, girl,” she said. “Which means there’s something else you’re after. So get on with it, then, cause I ain’t made of patience.” But she smiled as she said it, not entirely sharply, and I got the sense that I’d neither intruded nor offended.
“What I’m looking for,” I said, “is anyone in your line of work with an ear for hunters’ tales.”
Rosie sipped her tea slowly, peering at me over the rim of the mug.
“And why might that be?” she asked – suddenly cagey, it seemed to me, but perhaps no more than she should be, and either way, I thought it best to be honest. After all, I needed her help. She didn’t need mine.
“I’m hoping they’ll be able to point me in the direction of someone I’m trying to find. I mean no harm to ‘em. I’m looking for help with a bigger hunt than I can manage alone.”
I slid a small notebook across the table towards her. She snatched it up, flipped through the pages – I saw her eyes widen once, infinitesimally – and gave me a sleek smile as it vanished into some hidden pocket in her voluminous skirts. Offering accepted, it seemed; dealing with the Vienna Rose wasn’t that much different from dealing with a cat.
“Well,” she said, “I can’t tell you what you need to know, but I’m sure you’ll find your way to it on your own. You’re a bold little brat, ain’t you? And fortune favors the bold.”
She drained the dregs of her tea and stood in a flurry of ruffled petticoats, leaving me looking down into my own cup, no more certain than I had been before. But she’d taken my pay, and Rosie wasn’t known for dealing falsely, which meant she’d told me something she thought I needed to know.
Fortune favors the bold, I thought, turning the words over in my mind, and all at once, that thing I’d been trying to remember clicked like a picked lock falling open: an old campaign poster plastered to an alley wall, peeling at the corners, with that slogan printed along the bottom. Above it, the profile of Sinning Jenny in her nun’s habit, smiling like every single one of your secrets was hers to peruse at leisure – and wrapped around her folded hands, a golden rosary that might have been cast from the same mold as the one I held.
I felt myself grinning, giddy with victory. Even if I hadn’t found my agent, I’d found a lead.
.
Of course, following that lead was hardly so simple as arranging myself a place in Sinning Jenny’s appointment book; the Parlour of Virtue was as far out of my reach as the false stars, and even if it hadn’t been, the proprietress herself was not so easily approached. But Sinning Jenny had a finishing school too, and one that might be far less well-guarded – if I was lucky – than an establishment that relied on wealth and discretion to stay on the Ministry of Public Decency’s good side.
It was easy enough to locate the place – a stately manor in Ladybones Road, its brick walls still covered with the withered remnants of ivy – though in this part of London, where the lamps were bright and the constables made regular patrols, I had to take care not to be seen. From my perch on a rooftop opposite, I watched students and teachers come and go: the young daughters and sons of the nobility and the streets, some richly dressed and some shabby, many peculiar. It was clear that they were learning more in there than courtesies; on occasion, I heard sounds like dueling drift from the floors below, and once a resounding explosion blew out a window on the ground floor. And I noticed that the candles were lit in an office near the top, and the desk occupied by a nun who sat with a stack of books and documents, seemingly lost in concentration. I wasn’t close enough to see whether it might be Jenny beneath the shadow of that wimple – and in truth, I’d never seen her before at all, except on campaign posters and at a distance – but one nun was as good as another, to my purposes.
I had just about made up my mind to pay her a visit when the roof creaked behind me, so faintly I almost didn’t hear it at all. I didn’t waste time looking. I leapt to the side, hit the roof in a clatter of tiles, and as I scrambled to my feet, I glanced back to see a young nun land lightly behind the place where I’d been sitting. Her arms closed on empty air, and she spun to face me, stalking forward as I held up my hands.
“I’m not here to steal,” I said. “I need to talk to Sinning Jenny, that’s all.”
The nun did not seem convinced, but she didn’t seem ready to throw me off a rooftop, either, and that was better than I could have hoped for. She looked me over, trying to decide, I thought, whether I was more nuisance or threat – which was interesting, considering that most folk dismissed me as the former without so much as a moment’s doubt.
“Luckily for you,” she said, “Sister Jenny wants to see you too. I’ll let her decide what to do with you... though if it turns out you’re spying, I’ll string you up for Vake-bait myself, and I don’t care what she has to say about it.”
Which is how I found myself being hauled unceremoniously up to Sinning Jenny’s third floor office with a nun’s hand clamped around my wrist, though at least my would-be captor trusted me enough to let me descend the building under my own power. She herself climbed as easily as an urchin, despite the encumbrance of robes; I watched her swing silently from gargoyle to windowsill and down sheer brick, and if I hadn’t been sure before that I’d found the right trail to follow, I certainly was then.
Then it was into the house, up the servants’ stairs and along a polished hall, until the nun rapped three times sharply on a heavy oak door and a woman called from inside for us to enter.
The first thing that struck me was the way the nun brushed the dust from the skirt of her habit and stood a little straighter before opening the door – respect, I thought, and admiration. Not what some would expect from a nun facing a prostitute, but I imagine them that think like that have never met the woman on the other side of that door.
Second was Jenny herself, who looked up from a perilous stack of documents to greet us both with a broad and brilliant smile.
“Thank you, Sister,” she said, nodding serenely to the nun, who stood at almost military attention by my side. “I’ll take it from here, I think.”
It might have been a gentle command, but the nun didn’t mistake it for a suggestion; she released my wrist and bowed out, letting the door swing softly shut behind her.
There’s a lot gets said about Sinning Jenny, but what I remember of her, more than the rings on her fingers and the wickedly-crimson lipstick, is that she was kind – not falsely so, the way I’d learned that grown-ups sometimes are when they want something from you or want you to go away, but like someone you might want as your big sister. She told me to sit down in one of the comfortable chairs, poured me a cup of tea and let me put as much sugar in it as I wanted. And then she sat down in front of me and asked me, gently but in no uncertain terms, what precisely I was playing at.
There’s an instinct to lie, I think, that all of us urchins pick up; even I had it, despite the code I tried to uphold. Letting other people know too much about you is dangerous, and so was letting them know how much you knew about them. But Sinning Jenny wasn’t my enemy, and she was the kind of person who could spot falsehoods like a Master could spot bargains. All the same, when I answered, it wasn’t in words; I pulled the rosary from beneath my shirt, held it spinning on its chain, and then her eyes widened.
“How did you manage to come by that?” she asked, and I’d been half-expecting accusation, but right then I could hear only curiosity and, perhaps, a trace of respect.
“Was given it,” I said. “By one of your lot.” I took a deep breath, and added, “It’s them I need to find again, and I’d been hoping you might help me.”
Sinning Jenny gave me a long look, from my broom spear and patchwork clothing to the royal blue feathers I’d stuck through my helmet; her gaze seemed to linger on those feathers, and I wondered if she recognized their origin, and guessed at what they meant to me now. Maybe so. She knew a lot about the goings-on of London. Either way, what she said next, without any hint of judgment, was “It’s not faith that calls you to seek out the Sisterhood, is it?”
Not faith in God, I thought. Maybe faith in something else. I sipped my tea while she waited, and when I felt like my voice could be steady enough, I said, “The Vake took my brother.”
Sinning Jenny’s mouth tightened for a moment, subtly enough that I don’t think she meant me to notice. She steepled her fingers in front of her and leaned forward, and it wasn’t pity in her eyes, exactly, but this time her voice was kind in a way that hurt to hear. “It wasn’t the Vake that took your brother.”
I felt tears start in my eyes then, but I pushed them back, clasped my mug until my palms stung from the heat, and said, “Close enough.”
“Oh, child,” she said, with a shake of her head. “Oh, love. These aren’t intrigues you want to get involved in. But I know what you’ll say to that, and you’re not wrong, so listen.”
She took a sheet of clean paper from her desk, sketched something on it with practiced ease, and handed it to me with a care I could feel: a map of someplace out at zee called Shepherd’s Wash, and alongside it, a set of directions.
The drawing itself was not precise; there was little point to making it so, when both stars and land might shift without warning. But there are crags and shoals and islands that stay almost fixed, in relation to each other, and this map marked them all, and the paths to chart between them. More than that, a zailor would later tell me, there’s some would say it fixed them further; there’s a reason it’s easier to return to a place than travel there for the first time, and Sinning Jenny had made this journey before.
“Keep this close, little Valkyrie,” she said, and I can’t guess how she knew my name, but it didn’t surprise me. “Don’t let your enemy know you have it. And child – you won’t listen to this either, but don’t be so quick to go chasing after destiny. Let yourself be young.”
I nodded, though she was right that I didn’t mean to listen, and slipped the map inside my jacket, safe and hidden away; she’d given me something as precious as any rosary, and more of a risk for the Sisterhood. I felt the burden of her trust, and wondered what it was she’d seen in me that led her to believe it justified, but when I asked, she only smiled.
She asked, too, if I might want a meal, or a room for the night, or any other thing that an urchin might need. What I needed most was that map, but I left there weighed down by a satchel full of food to share among the the Ringbreakers, and the promise of more if we needed it. I don’t think it was because Jenny and I shared a mission, either; I think she’d have done the same for any urchin or vagabond to impose upon her hospitality at some unlikely hour.
I hurried out the window and into the dark, light-hearted, with home ahead and the future waiting. I knew the way to go, when the time came to take it. In the meanwhile, there was other work to do.
Chapter 3 here.
Chapter 5 here.
Index page here.