“I don’t care if I’m sacked,” Eliza said, splashing a little water from the tap over her face. “I’m done. I’ve only come to get my things.”
Cook’s exhalation was just shy of being a snort. “Lucky to do that, too. Mrs. Fowler isn’t above confiscating a thing or two, in ‘compensation’ for you quitting.”
“I’ll hit her if she tries.” Maybe it was the gin—or just the boiling frustration of all the time she’d wasted here. Anger built with every step Eliza took up the servants’ staircase, all the more bitter for having no suitable target. She wanted to hit something, and the worst part was, one of the people she wanted to hit was herself.
She heard the voices before she made it past the ground floor. In the Kitterings’ household, where respectability was more precious than gold, someone was shouting.
And it sounded like Mrs. Kittering.
Eliza didn’t care. She didn’t want to know. But the stairs took her right past the concealed servants’ door into the drawing room; it was impossible not to hear.
“—not tolerate it any longer. Do you hear me, Louisa? I will not have it! If you persist in this manner—”
Louisa’s response was too quiet to make out. Every shred of common sense told Eliza to continue up the stairs, to get away from this family and all their troubles, but she found herself instead pressing her eye to the peephole in the door.
It gave an imperfect view of the long drawing room, but good enough to see Mrs. Kittering’s face and her daughter’s back. The missus was clothed with her customary rigidity, but Louisa seemed to be wearing a dressing gown still, with a bright green scarf thrown over her shoulders. Whatever she said to her mother, it made Mrs. Kittering go even more rigid with fury. “I will not have such language in my house. Count your days of freedom, girl; I will have you gone from London this Sunday week. There is a sanatorium… in…”
Her voice trailed off into sudden listlessness, as if she had forgotten what she was saying. Then Eliza’s breath did the same, as she saw Louisa’s left hand float up to grip her mother’s jaw.
No sound issued from the room. But Mrs. Kittering nodded three times, as if the hand on her chin were moving her without visible effort. When the third movement ended, Louisa murmured, “Now, let’s have no more of this,” and let her go.
Whereupon Mrs. Kittering turned and left the room, without another word.
Eliza still wasn’t breathing. She tried to draw air, but fear stopped the motion, as if the creature in the drawing room might hear her. Her fingers ached, pressed hard against the plain-painted surface of the door.
Not until the quiet figure moved did her own paralysis break. And then it broke to flight, for the creature masquerading as Louisa Kittering turned toward the servants’ door.
Eliza nearly tripped on the hem of her skirt, trying to take the stairs three at a time. She’d gone up another two flights before she realized the idiocy of her choice—should have gone down!—but by then she was nearly at the top of the house, with the changeling—Holy Mary, Mother of God, it really is a changeling—somewhere below. She wrenched the door handle around and stumbled through, expecting to see the servants’ garret.
She was one floor short. She’d exited into Louisa Kittering’s bedroom.
Her heart pounded, rattling her entire body, the sound pulsing in her ears. Despite the exertion of flinging herself up the stairs, she felt nothing but cold—shaking cold, that made her hands tremble like leaves. But what had been fear was turning instead to rage.
That beast. That bloody monster. It stole Louisa—like he stole Owen—
All this time, it’s been toying with me—
She never heard the footsteps on the other stair. Or perhaps there were none to hear: another faerie trick. The bedroom door opened, and the creature wearing Louisa’s face stepped through.
“Where is he? Damn you, what have you done with Owen?”
The changeling opened its mouth to speak, but never got the chance. Eliza’s fist smashed into its cheek, stopping whatever charm it might have cast. The creature staggered into the wall; then Eliza’s hands seized that green scarf and some of the dressing gown, hauling the creature up and throwing it farther into the room. She kicked the door shut with one heel and advanced on the fallen changeling, still screaming. “Bloody faerie, you’ve stolen the girl, I know you have—coming into this house, pretending to be her—you’ll tell me where she is, damn your eyes, and Owen, too, if I have to roast you over the kitchen fire—”
By now the creature was shrieking, throwing its arms up to protect its face, leaving its ribs vulnerable. Eliza kicked once, caught her shoe in her skirts, and fell to her knees. “Tell me where they are! Tell me! By all that’s holy—”
Someone caught her arm. Twisting, Eliza found that Mary Banning was trying to drag her off the changeling. It was no difficulty at all to shove her back, sending the maid onto her rump in an undignified sprawl, but the changeling crawled away while Eliza was so occupied. She flung herself after it, sending them both flat to the floor. It curled in on itself while Eliza bit and scratched; she pulled hair; she got the flailing arms pinned back, grinding Louisa’s stolen face into the floor.
Then an arm wrapped around her throat, tight enough to cut off the blood, and by that hold she was dragged back. Eliza clawed at the arm, reached back to try and catch eyes or ears, threw her elbow back into her captor’s groin; Ned Sayers cursed, and his grip wavered. Then a fist slammed into her head, and Eliza went limp.
Sayers wrestled her to the floor, holding her down with one knee in her back. Feet appeared in the doorway, maids and footmen and everyone else crowding into the room; distantly she heard Mrs. Fowler demanding to be let through. Eliza no longer fought. There was no point.
She’d lost.
She’d failed Owen.
God had given her a chance to save him, and she’d thrown it away, in a moment of blind, drunken fury.
Sobbing into the carpet, Eliza waited for the constables to come.
The Galenic Academy, Onyx Halclass="underline" June 1, 1884
Dead Rick skulked along, belly close to the ground, only half-believing he was actually making this journey. Nadrett had sent him above again; it amused the master to use a skriker, a death omen, as a courier for the dynamite he sold to dissidents above. If Dead Rick were smart, he would have stayed up there, using that safe time to replace the bread he’d lost in the collapse.
He directed his paws instead toward the Galenic Academy.
He wouldn’t have risked it, except that Cyma had vanished, and with her his one reliable connection to this place. Dead Rick hadn’t seen the faerie woman since before the earthquake. In her absence, his only way to get information from the scholars was to defy Nadrett’s orders and go to them himself.
He smelled the Academy before he got anywhere near it. A welter of chemicals and strange substances, hot metal and steam, burning in his nose. Odd sounds echoed through the corridors: buzzing and humming, clicking and clanging, like some kind of mad factory lay ahead. And voices, too, arguing in a variety of languages, most of them incomprehensible to him.
An arch of moon-silver and sun-gold marked the boundary, tossed only a little askew by the Hall’s tremors. Letters wrought into its length spelled out THE GALENIC ACADEMY OF FAERIE SCIENCES, and beneath that, SOLVE ET COAGULA. Dead Rick knew enough to recognize that as Latin, but he had no idea what it said. Something alchemical, probably; most of what they did down here was alchemy of some kind, so far as he understood it. He paused beneath the arch, searching the area around him with every sense, and only when he was as sure as he could be that nobody was watching did he shift into man form and proceed.