Beneath Ceaseless Skies #162 Read online

  Or a brick of solid gold.

  I’m afraid I was inattentive with Miss Aneta after they left, going through the motions of quieting her and feeding her without my mind on the tasks. I had actually spooned a little of the rosewater with which I bathed her temples into her mouth before I noticed what I was doing—some people make cooling ices of rosewater, in my defense, and it would do her no harm, but still, it was all I could do to keep my mind closely enough on my work that it wouldn’t be noticed.

  I had seen how to transmute.

  I had no idea how to use this. But I knew I had to use it.

  The gold bricks would be too much, of course. I couldn’t smuggle them out without someone seeing, and even if I could, where would a maid of my station or an old woman of my grandmother’s get a brick of gold? We’d be arrested for thieving right away, and the Mistress would be the first to swear we’d gotten the gold from her household.

  I felt sure she believed that anything Miss Aneta transmuted was rightfully hers, and that she made the whey-faced crew pay dearly for it.

  On the other hand, I couldn’t let my Gran continue to live as she was, even in our improved circumstances, if I had the opportunity to learn how to do magic that could improve our lot so concretely.

  Then there was Miss Aneta’s state. She was clearly agitated, distressed or uncomfortable or something after each time she transmuted. Was that because she didn’t like the people she was doing it for, didn’t like the tasks she was being asked to do in specific, or because it hurt her, made her uncomfortable? I couldn’t say that I wouldn’t do it at all if Miss Aneta didn’t like it, but I’d grown a bit fond of her in the time I’d worked for her, even though she’d never spoken a word, and I couldn’t just... couldn’t use her, causing her discomfort without at least thinking of it. Without taking it into account.

  I didn’t sleep well that night, and in the morning, after I’d gotten some of the thin porridge into Miss Aneta, I made my first try with a scrap of fabric torn from the inner hem of the cloth I used to wipe her brow. I positioned her like the whey-faced people and did what I’d seen the day before.

  And there was the snap, the spark I’d felt, and suddenly I had a heavy, ragged-edged scrap of gold.

  I tucked it away in my shoe and went on with my day. Miss Aneta, much to my shame and chagrin, did not like it any better coming from me than from the others. I think there was a part of me that had hoped she would not object if she knew it was to make my life better, or if it was someone who cared for her a bit. It didn’t make my questions about what to do about Miss Aneta easier, or my day. Dabrowski the housekeeper gave me extra at lunch, for the “hard week” that she saw we’d been having, the miss and me, and that made me feel worse.

  When I’d got home in the evening and finished with dinner, I must have shown that there was something bothering me. Our landlady Mrs. Kaczmarek looked from me to Gran and back again, smiled with none of her teeth showing, and picked up her sewing. She found somewhere else to be, I think the kitchen. Once we were alone, I pulled out the scrap and showed Gran.

  She looked at me hard. “That’s real gold.”

  “We made it together, me and Miss Aneta. I learned how to channel her transmutation.”

  Gran sucked her teeth, which were mostly still good, considering what she’d been through. “Does the Mistress know?”

  I flinched back. “Perish the thought.”

  “Does anyone?”

  “No.”

  Gran thought about it some more. “Can you only do gold?”

  “Gran, I’ve only just done it today.”

  “Well, think about what else you can do.”

  “I know copper would be more useful. I asked the Mistress if they’d tried to transmute Miss Aneta’s sick tissue to healthy, but—”

  “Oh, good girl,” said Gran softly. “That’s my Kasia. That’s how I raised you, poor but honest.”

  “The thing is,” I said, swallowing, “I don’t think she likes to do it. I don’t feel right about it. I don’t feel right about asking her to do more, and I don’t know that I even feel right about leaving her there for her mother to make others make her do it, if it—well, I don’t know if it hurts her. But the rest of the day she thrashes and kicks and—a person’s a person, Gran,” I said all in a rush. “Whether they can talk or not. They can let you know something’s going on. I just wish I knew whether she didn’t like gold or didn’t like transmuting or—I wish we could get more out of her.”

  “Well, perhaps if you can transmute her to health, it won’t be a problem any longer.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. I didn’t know what to think, how to look at it. When I had asked the Mistress about Miss Aneta, about transmuting her to health, I thought all the fine people knew how it worked, and here I was, with enough to eat, a glimmer of thought, on my way to being one of the fine people myself.

  Or possibly on my way to throwing it all away.

  There was plenty of wood in their fireplaces, plenty of coal for their stoves, but the house of the fine people, with all its transmuted gold and steel, still chilled me the next morning. I brought Gran in to sit by the kitchen fire with a mumbled excuse. Dabrowski was kind, not the sort to turn away a girl’s old granny, especially knowing as she did that I wouldn’t ask for more than a day of it. Especially when the girl’s old granny set to shelling peas right away without being asked, for no greater price than the warmth of the fire.

  Late in the morning, I had my chance to smuggle Gran up to help me hold Miss Aneta, and I tried to see my way to transmuting her sick tissue to healthy.

  It was a lot harder than transmuting cloth into gold.

  A lot harder.

  I was dimly aware that my gran was no longer holding Miss Aneta, that she had gotten up to tend the fire in the middle of it, that Miss Aneta had gone still and was no longer fighting. I didn’t think there was anything ominous with her stillness. If I had to guess, I’d have said she was curious, but I knew by then how easy it was, when someone lay so still, to pretend that your own desires were hers. And I had wanted to think that she would like to transmute gold for me, for someone who had cared for her, and she had not done so. Perhaps she wasn’t curious at all. Perhaps the flicker I thought I felt wasn’t her health improving. Perhaps there was nothing.

  I was absolutely certain, as morally certain as I’d been of anything in my life, that I’d heard a negative response from her.

  “Miss Aneta?” I said aloud.

  “Is that you?”

  “What would you like, Miss?”

  “Would you like anything?”

  Oh. Oh, sweet saints, I’d done it, I’d done it, I’d done...

  The tiniest bit of it imaginable. The very smallest part of healing that I could think to give her.

  “Is it—” I had to get out the question, though I feared the answer. “Is it that you can only manage to get across yes and no? Is that all we’ve gotten from what we did together today?”

  The Mistress’s voice sounded behind me, harsh as a parrot. “What is this?”

  I jumped to my feet. “Oh, Madam!”

  “Who are you, beldame!”

  I turned to try to shield my gran and Miss Aneta behind me at the same time; Gran did her part to help, scrambling to join me. “This is my gran, Mistress, who came to help out today—she won’t be wanting any wages, we just had hope—we just had hope that we could try to cure a bit of what ails Miss Aneta, and so—”

  “You? You? Could cure my daughter? With what? What have you given her, goose grease and prayers?”

  Gran looked the Mistress dead in the eye. “My goodwill has never once harmed a mortal soul, be she never so fancy, nor will it ever. Begging your pardon.”

  The Mistress, to her credit, flinched. “Well, girl?”

  I saw how it would be, and I saw that I would do myself no credit if I mentioned that I, too, could use the transmutation ability. “Miss Aneta—”

  And the Mistress did not appear
to hear a word.

  “Miss Aneta seems entirely calm now,” I said as smoothly as I could, bobbing a curtsey. “I’ll take my gran down to the kitchens and get her settled for the night.”

  The Mistress frowned. “Have Dabrowski give you the last of your wages when you’re done settling the young mistress in. You ought to know by now what’s appropriate, and dragging your relations in off the street is most certainly not.”

  “Please, Mistress,” started Gran, but I held up a hand.

  “No, Gran, it’s all right, we’ll find something.”

  The Mistress sniffed and left the room.

  If I had a daughter as poorly as Miss Aneta, I’d never leave her with someone I’d just treated the way the Mistress treated Gran and me.

  If I had a daughter as poorly as Miss Aneta, I’d have at least tried to get her powers to work on healing her. And we’d managed something—even yes and no would give us so much more to go on, and—

  I realized, with a start, that I had no intention of leaving Miss Aneta.

  “Gran,” I said very quietly. “I’m going to examine the backstairs to see how we can get her out, whether we can find a cart that we can drag without a donkey or something. If we can wrap her in a rug or, I don’t know, we just have to find a way—”

  “No one will ever believe she’s our kin,” said Gran. “Just look at her, how delicate, how well cared for.”

  I hated to admit it, but Gran was right. Even in the months with enough food and warmth, without the worst of our labors, our hands and faces proclaimed us to be what we were, a couple of women the barest step above indigence, and hers... poor thing, even with her illness, the meanest intellect could tell she had never picked jute a day in her life, never trodden a mill, never scrubbed... well, anything.

  “In a donkey cart without a donkey, or even with!” Gran snorted.

  “I’ll have to look,” I said stubbornly. “We’re taking her.”

  “Yes. See? See? She says yes.”

  “What do you mean, she says yes?”

  I took a minute to explain, and once I did, Gran immediately agreed. “If you’re the one who can hear her, of course we can’t leave her behind. We’ve gotten somewhere! And her mother not even willing to try with—”

  “Not even willing to try with what?”

  And there was Dabrowski the housekeeper in the door behind us. We stared at her as though we’d been caught pilfering the silver, which I suppose we had, but worse.

  “And don’t try to sneak,” continued Dabrowski, “because unless I mistake myself rather thoroughly, your grandmother is saying that you can hear Miss Aneta.”

  I stammered incoherently.

  “Whom I have known since she was a babe in arms,” continued Dabrowski, “who used to beg raisins from me, who ate my honeycakes for her every birthday before this dread disease felled her, when I was still cook as well as housekeeper. My young mistress.”

  “Oh no,” I said, collapsing on the floor and starting to cry. “Oh, Miss, oh no.”

  “I should tell Dabrowski.”

  So I did.

  Dabrowski joined me on the floor crying, but just for a moment, because Dabrowski and my Gran and me, we were none of us raised in circumstances were you get to have time for that, much though you may need it. “Oh, my lass, my lass,” said Dabrowski, wiping her eyes, and for a minute I thought it was me she meant, but she smoothed away a nonexistent strand of hair from Miss Aneta’s brow.

  “Well,” she said briskly in another voice completely. “I have a sister who lives out, we can keep her there a time. We’ll get her in the marketing cart.”

  “You’ll lose your position,” Gran said. “Someone will see you and tell—they’ll be sure to, they’ll have everything to gain by it—and you’ll be out in the cold. And we won’t be able to keep her, the Mistress will just fetch her back.”

  I had a thought. “Those fancy faces who come, in their fancy clothes. Do you know their names, Dabrowski?”

  She made a face. “I do, all too well. They present a card every time they come, though it’s always the same buggers.”

  “Do you think they—” My throat stopped.

  Gran finished for me. “Do you think they could protect us from consequences if we rescued the young miss from her mother? If we promised to transmute things for them from time to time?”

  No. Yes. Long pause. Yes.

  “Miss Aneta thinks it’s a good idea,” I said. It had been a long time since Dabrowski had been able to hear that and believe it, know it nearly for certain. She wavered, and then her face set. She went to get the card.

  We found carriage rugs to wrap her in, quickly, quickly. She almost looked like a carpet, all swaddled like that, but while I had hoped we would find that the healing was progressive somehow, that Miss Aneta would get better as we went, her limbs were as limp as ever, her head as floppy as a newborn’s.

  The upstairs maid gawked at us until Dabrowski snapped at her, “Your eyes’ll pop out of your head! Unless you want to lend a hand?” And then she scurried off, no doubt to tell the Mistress, but not fast enough, because we got Miss Aneta into the marketing cart and away to Dabrowski’s sister.

  I left Gran and Dabrowski in charge of her and went to talk to the toffs just myself, thinking that if it all went wrong and they handed me over to the city police it should just be me, that someone should stay with Miss Aneta, although once I was on the doorstep I thought we should have sent Dabrowski instead, since I could communicate with Miss Aneta at least a little, and Dabrowski looked more respectable. But that’s the sort of thing you think of later, not in the moment when you’ve got a sick girl in a marketing cart and a Lady Thisich to meet.

  I did ask for Lady Thisich, but it was her brother I got. He was dressed all in orchid, but honestly I could not tell whether he’d been the one all in orchid before or whether they all had different colors and changed round.

  “I cannot think what your business with my sister would be,” he said, “nor can she, as she does not know how anyone of your description would have obtained her card. So you may state it quickly and then—in all likelihood—see yourself out.”

  “I am the representative of Miss Aneta Czarnecki,” I said in my most careful voice. “I am here to discuss you giving her your protection.”

  “You are the... I beg your pardon?”

  “I am Miss Czarnecki’s servant, and her voice,” I said. “I have transmuted some of her sick tissue to healthy. She can approve and disapprove things through me. She has approved her removal from her mother’s care to—we hope—yours.”

  “What an extraordinary claim. What on earth would make you think I would believe even the tiniest piece of this?”

  I held out what remained of the scrap of gold cloth I’d transmuted, hope receding. Of course we could show her to him. But if they tried to take her—if they returned her to the Mistress and she turned me out or, worse, took me to the city guards—I tried to keep my voice steady. “You’ll not want to care for a young woman as sick as she is, and I’m practiced at it, me and my Gran and—another of the servants. Easier to have us than to train another.”

  He turned the bit of gold over in his hand, looking at the fraying as Gran had done. “What’s this cut side here?”

  “We’re not rich, sir,” I said. My voice was getting steadier as I talked. Good. Perhaps this would work after all. “We needed some to go on.”

  “You are resourceful, I see.”

  “We try our best for our young mistress.”

  “You claim that she can approve and disapprove things, through you.”

  “She can, sir, whether you believe the claim or not.”

  He put on a pince-nez and looked at the gold more closely, then at me. “Young woman, this is the most extraordinary tale.”

  “I have seen you work with Miss Aneta before, sir. I was in the room when you came, you and your brothers and sister. To make the gold bricks. We could do that for you, Miss Aneta and me. W
hen she is ready.”

  The pince-nez was not entirely an affectation, but I saw that Lord Thisich was using it and the orchid clothing to make people underestimate him. “And we would provide...?”

  “A little house, sir. For Miss Aneta and the three of us. And protection from her mother. We want—” I took a deep breath. “I want to try to continue to heal her.”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  There it was on the table. I thought he might not. “That’s very cruel of you, sir.”

  “No, it’s very sensible. If Miss Czarnecki is well, she is a free woman and may transmute what she pleases. As ill as she is, she is dependent on those who support her, who keep her alive, and must transmute as they please. I am perfectly willing to take that role over from her mother. But you must not try to heal her any further.”

  “Certainly not, sir,” I said, without batting an eye. “If you don’t wish it, I—I have been poor, sir. If we have a house to live in, my gran and me, and protection, well... Miss Aneta can’t very well heal herself, sir, and we’ll take care of her.”

  He relaxed. “Sensible girl, you’re a credit to your mistress. We’ll get you some better things.”

  Are they stupid, the rich? Does the money stuff itself in their ears and tie a blindfold over their eyes? Two days in the workhouse, two days, and you learn to say, “No, master, you didn’t give me the crust for my gran yet,” as smooth as the butter you never see any more. If he’d had more magic, perhaps he could have bound my word. If I’d had more money, he’d have known he had to try. But I stood there, a servant girl with the biggest wealth of the city about to drop in his lap, and he decided to let me hand it to him.

  We would reward him for that. But not nearly so richly as we would have if he had agreed to let us work freely to heal Miss Aneta. We would remember.

  It was late into the evening when they had us settled into the little cottage on their estate, sending down a bit of the servants’ dinner for the three of us and provisions for us to cook up for ourselves for the next day.

  “I suppose I’d best make Miss Aneta’s gruel,” said Dabrowski. “I’ve instructed new cooks in it enough.”