Page 107 of Confounding Oaths
Mr. Caesar did not appear convinced. “She’s a fairy. You can’t trust them.”
“Actually,” the steel-fingered woman replied, “I’m as human as you. Or perhaps more pertinently as human as your sister.”
The response silenced Mr. Caesar momentarily, but Captain James stepped, as he was so often wont to do, into the breach. “What do you know about Miss Mary?”
“What say you answer my questions first, and then I consider yours?”
“What say,” replied the captain, “we answer your questions first and then youanswerours?”
The steel-fingered woman drummed her claws together with afaint rattling sound. “That seems a bad deal. I know much more than you do.”
“Then we’ll take our friend and go.”
Whether by instinct or experience, Captain James had played his hand well. My people—and those mortals who live long amongst us—are insatiably curious beings, and we will agree to all manner of inadvisable things if the alternative is to let something go unknown. “Why was I being followed?” the steel-fingered woman asked.
“No idea,” replied the captain. “Is that all you wanted to ask?”
Miss Bickle, who was less cautious about such things and so less inclined to keep to the letter of a bargain, tried to be helpful. “Perhaps we might be able to tell you more if you explain who was following you. And perhaps also when they were following you and maybe what exactly you’re talking about.”
“A girl,” the steel-fingered woman explained. “Slender, pretty, dressed as Arachne. She was … hovering the whole ball but never actually approached me.”
“That was Maelys,” Mr. Caesar explained. “My cousin. Whatever she was doing I assure you she meant no harm.”
The steel-fingered woman glared. “You will learn that such assurances mean little here. Tell me who sheis.”
Although not wholly without empathy, Mr. Caesar was finding himself at something of a loss to think his way into the mindset of a metallically augmented woman who had lived for an unknowable duration in the midst of an inhuman court. “She is the lady who achieved a little notoriety last year as a consequence of a curse levied by Sulis Minerva?” he offered. “And presently she is a close friend and associate of the Duke of Annadale.”
“The Duke of Annadale,” the steel-fingered woman replied, “is dead. That much I know well.”
Mr. Caesar internally reprimanded himself. He had tried to stop using the nickname for Miss Mitchelmore’s sake. “Of Lady Georgiana Landrake,” he clarified.
The steel-fingered woman blinked once. Her eyes, like her fingernails, were brushed steel, bright but cold. “Neither name means anything to me.” This, like so much else in the world, was a lie. “But you have answered, and so I shall return the favour.”
Captain James gave a sharp, no-nonsense nod. “Good, where’s the girl?”
“With the queen, in the Dancing Hall.”
“Which is where?” asked the captain.
They had answered one question and had a single answer in response. Nobody in Titania’s court would have counted it at all amiss if the steel-fingered woman had considered the debt paid and taken off on her wings.
But she did not.
“Follow me.”
To my surprise, they did. To my still greater surprise, I did also. And to my greatest surprise of all, it did not turn out to be a trap.
Despite her wings, the steel-fingered woman kept to a pace that the Irregulars, Miss Bickle, and Mr. Caesar could easily match, and led them through the hazards of Titania’s land with remarkable good faith. Frankly it was enough to make any native of the fairy realm suspicious, because we as a rulenevertreat so straightforwardly. Of course, the steel-fingered woman was human by birth and so she perhaps had human frailties still holding her back.
The Dancing Hall was located in the beautiful, impossible palace at the heart of the realm. From the angle at which the Irregularsapproached—for the palace, like most everything in the Other Court, varies dramatically depending on how you reach it—the building was a cascade of delicate spires, as though a rainstorm had been frozen in time and built by some artful magic into a dwelling-place. And for all I know that was exactly what had happened. Titania would certainly have been capable of such things.
Although she had been more helpful than was strictlynecessary,the steel-fingered woman had not wholly abandoned the instincts that had let her survive the past decade or so in the Other Court. So she did notenterthe palace, but she led the party as close to it as she could manage. “There”—she pointed at a silver-white archway leading into the halls themselves—“take only right turns, follow the sound of music, and when somebody tells you to leave, do what they say.”
“Are yousureabout that?” asked Mr. Caesar. “It doesn’t sound entirely … intuitive.”
Captain James seemed inclined to agree. “You’ve been helpful, but if you’re trying to fuck us at the last minute—”
“Ohno.” Miss Bickle rallied at once to the steel-fingered woman’s defence on the basis of no evidence. “These areexactlythe kinds of instructions that one must follow in this sort of place. I expect, for example, that some way into the castle we will encounter a passage with only a left turn, and we will be required to walk down it backwards. Or else there will be a junction and there will be the sound of music coming from the left passage and we will be required to turn right through”—she made a brief, not entirely silent calculation on her fingers—“four hundred and twenty degrees in order to find ourselves facing in the right direction.”
