Page 65 of Confounding Oaths
The armed ruffians who had been pursuing Miss Caesar stopped short.
“Go,” she told them. “You are not welcome here.”
And, unwelcome, they went.
The heart Miss Caesar did not have was beating fast, causing the light within her to flicker like a candle flame or, if you prefer a more anachronistic analogy, a strobe. Eyes glimmering like stars and wide with gratitude, she gazed up at her rescuer. “Thank you,” she said, “but … where am I?”
And the stranger smiled, and let her inside.
The building into which Miss Caesar had been led was one part temple, one part gaming hell. The walls were lined with frescoes in a range of styles from ancient to neoclassical and everywhere statues of Tyche and Fortuna gazed benevolently (and not so benevolently) down at tables where crowds of mostly men, their prospects mostly good, were playing at hazard and at games of dice as ancient as empires.
“You are here,” said her rescuer. “And it is the only place you need to be.”
Having, perhaps, decided at last that having her destiny decided entirely by mysterious women who appeared from nowhere was a suboptimal way to live her life, Miss Caesar rallied a little of her older defiance. “That is not an answer.”
“You are in the house of prosperity. The home of Isis-Fortuna.”
Miss Caesar looked unconvinced. “This seems to be little more than a den of degenerate gamblers.”
“And you seem little more than a glass doll who dances for the pleasure of others.” The stranger smiled. “Are you?”
In a more navigable world, Miss Caesar would have had an answer for that. “I am a person, not a building.” A cheer went up from a nearby table. “And the nature of your clientele is plain.”
“Three points,” called a man from another table, his accent as cut glass as Miss Caesar’s body, “and the game.”
“Our clientele are men whose hands you would smile and bat your eyelids for if you met them in a different room,” the stranger said. “All gentlemen are degenerates.”
Miss Caesar stiffened. Or at least would have stiffened, were she not already rigid. “My father is not a degenerate.”
“Your father is not a gentleman.”
“And what do you know of my family?” asked Miss Caesar, worried that the answer would beQuite a lot actually.
“I know that your mother is the youngest daughter of the Earl of Elmsley, though the first to marry. I know that your father was a Frenchman’s property, an Englishman’s war prize, and an Englishwoman’s bauble, then at last a free man in a kingdom that claims its air is freedom. Though many of us see that for a lie.”
The stranger’s accent, Miss Caesar could not help but notice, had a tendency to drift; though it was always London at its heart its register shifted from the gutter to the ballroom and back again depending on her subject.
“I know your brother is a dandy and a molly and dances in between worlds that will never accept him, and your sister, in the eyes of your society, is a bright jewel like a diamond from the Peacock Throne. And I know who you are, Miss Mary Caesar, more than you do yourself. And what you gave away to be what you are now.”
Honestly, readers, I find this kind of trickery a little gauche. It is an easy thing for mortal witches to discover the biographical details of those they wish to impress and it is, I would argue, a vulgar thingfor mortals to be impressed by such flimflammery. It bespeaks a self-regard that is unbecoming in such unremarkable beings as yourselves.
For a being like me, of course, it is a different thing entirely.
“Have you been spying on me?” asked Miss Caesar. It was the wrong question, but mortals persist in asking it anyway.
“Fate has been spying on you. I have been spying on fate.”
Miss Caesar’s eyes narrowed, white light spilling from between her fine glass-fibre lashes. “Then I should at least know your name.”
“Should you?”
“It would be polite.”
“I am a witch, child. And a woman of business. Politeness interests me only if it gets me what I want. But you may call me Amenirdis.”
Speak the name of a thing three times and it will emerge. Sometimes. But in this instance the name that conjured and the conjured entity were far less related. No sooner had Amenirdis shared her moniker (it was not the name of her birth, probably; witches and fairies wear names as casually as hats) than the door opened once more and Mr. Bygrave burst in. Ignoring the entreaties of a sharply dressed croupier trying to invite him to a gaming table, he searched the room for Miss Caesar and, finding little difficulty in the task, for she stood out like—well, like a glowing glass girl in a magical gaming hell, he pushed his way through the crowds towards her.
He had acquired, in his journey through the city, a number of scrapes and bruises. The same people who had harassed Miss Caesar would undoubtedly have tried their luck with a young and callow officer, but having a sword and no purse, Mr. Bygrave had proved uninteresting prey and survived his journey with minimal jostling.
