I Accidentally Caught a Falling Goddess - Ash on the Water

“You’re leaning into the shaft with your stomach, boy,” Master Sona wheezed from his three-legged stool by the draft-kiln. The old man was wrapped in three layers of greasy flannel, his knuckles swollen to the size of walnuts from forty winters in the damp. He tapped a brass-rimmed spectacles case against his knee with a dry, rhythmic clack. “Use the pivot of your pelvis or your lumbar will give out before you’re old enough to take a wife. Look at me. I piss rust three mornings out of seven because I hauled timber with my spine instead of my legs.”

Corin set his jaw, shifted his left boot two inches into the slippery lime-dust on the floorboards, and pulled the birch blade through the steaming mash again. “The wool is catching on the bottom rivets, Master Sona. The cooper didn’t countersink the copper bolts.”

“The cooper was drunk on turnip gin, which is how every honest tradesman in Skan-Tor spends his saint’s days,” Sona muttered, clearing his throat and spitting a dark glob into the ash-pan. He tucked his spectacles into his sleeve and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Sit down for two minutes before you drop into the kettle. The steam’s made your cheeks look like tallow.”

Corin wiped his forehead with the crook of his elbow, leaving a dark blue smear across his brow. He walked to the water butt, dipped a chipped tin cup into the surface scum, and drank two swallows of cold, metallic river water.

“I went by the municipal registry this morning,” Sona said, watching him through rheumy, half-closed eyes. “Old Master Vane is retiring to his son’s pig farm in the lowlands. They need an assistant copyist for the parish grain dockets. Five silver groats every third Saturday, clean dry paper, and a charcoal brazier between your knees. I gave the district deacon my word that you have a legible hand and don’t steal the wax sticks.”

Corin stared down into the murky bottom of his tin cup. “My father didn’t rot in a ditch on the Thanecroft border so I could scrape ink off parish tax rolls, Master Sona.”

The old man made a sharp, wet clicking sound with his tongue. “Your father was a sergeant of the municipal muster who followed General Beric Salmond into a muddy gorge because he was told there was honor in keeping the wheat wagons from being burned. He came home in an unplaned spruce crate with six pounds of wet lime poured over his belly to keep the maggots from eating him before your mother could sign the pension voucher. Honor doesn’t buy firewood in January, Corin.”

“I know what it buys,” the boy said softly.

He remembered it clearly enough. He had been nine years old, standing on the split-timber sill of their third-floor garret in the Alley of the Coopers, watching the southern army march back through the Iron Gate. The rain had turned the streets into a brown paste of horse dung and crushed marigolds. General Beric Salmond had ridden at the head of the column on a grey stallion that stepped high over the gutter sludge, his gilded brigandine gleaming even under the leaden sky, his long yellow hair tied back with a strip of black silk. Behind him, Emperor Pierre the Sixth had walked out beneath the portcullis without an umbrella, raising his gold-ringed hands to bless the regiments while the mob screamed itself hoarse.

Beside him on the garret sill, his mother Suzanne had not screamed. She had held Corin by the nape of his neck with fingers so cold and tight they left bruised crescents in his skin. Her apron had smelled of the laundry tubs and the bitter vinegar she used to rinse out soldiers’ woolens. You don’t let water run out of your eyes, Corin, she had whispered, her jaw trembling against his hair. A man who carries a spear for the Pontine Empire does not get mourned with female blubbering. Your father died on his feet.

Then had come the winter he turned twelve, when the twin cinder-drakes came down from the jagged crags of the northern ridge.

They had dropped through the low cloud cover like two falling towers of burning pitch, landing squarely upon the timbered gables of the Grand Merchant Brandon’s riverside mansion. The cedar roofs had gone up in a wall of orange fire that turned the canal water to steam within thirty heartbeats. A squad of city archers had formed up by the flour wharf, drawing their yew bows until the strings hummed against their leather bracers, but before the first volley could clear the eaves, the brood-mother had turned her long, scaly neck and exhaled a single gout of whitehot vapor. The archers, their bows, and twenty feet of oak decking had simply ceased to be; where twelve men had stood, there remained only a smoking, glass-slick crater in the granite riverwall.

Corin had been running down the Fishmongers’ Wynd with his sister Lucia dragging him by his wrist, her grip slick with panic. He had wrenched himself free against a stone bollard and looked back.

He had seen General Salmond leap from the battlements of the Inner Gatehouse.

Salmond didn’t fall. Men fall. He came down in a straight line of blinding golden force that cut the soot-choked air the way hot iron wire cuts lard. The gold-armored figure had struck the bull-drake in mid-glide, a five-foot broadsword taking the beast’s neck three inches behind the jaw-plate with a sound like an axe splitting a green log. Before the headless carcass could hit the cobblestones, Salmond had vaulted off the falling wing, closed his left gauntlet around the brood-mother’s throat, and driven his right fist into her breastbone. No spell. No chanted prayers. Just the crack of it, a shockwave off the fist, shattering the monster’s ribcage from the inside, spraying boiling black gore across three city blocks as both dragons dropped dead into the burning ruins.

That was when Corin had understood the shape of the world.

The world, as far as Corin could see, came in two sorts of people: the ones whose bones could hold the furnace, and the ones who scrubbed the floorboards under their boots. His mother was the second sort. His father had been the second sort until the war made him a box.

“You’re drifting again,” Sona said, throwing an empty walnut shell at Corin’s shins. “Look at your arms. You were born seven weeks early because your mother took a spill over a beer keg in the cellar. You spent the first five years of your life coughing yellow phlegm into flannel rags. You’re thin as a rush, Corin. The Royal Academy doesn’t take skinny boys who want to play with broadswords; they take the sons of dukes who have been fed beef marrow and red wine since they cut their milk teeth.”

“The law says any boy of gentle lineage has the right to stand for the entrance trial if he brings the tuition fee and his ancestor’s patent,” Corin answered, dipping a clean wool swatch into the test-bath to check the shade.

“The tuition is a hundred gold crowns a year for a registered nobleman, and three hundred for anyone without a signet ring,” Sona said dryly. “Your mother takes in three silver groats a week mending grease-stained breeches for the carters. Your sister Lucia stands twelve hours a day behind the counter at the green-grocer’s for three silvers a month, and then runs trays of ale at the Red Boar until two in the morning. Between the three of you, you don’t see two gold sovereigns in a twelvemonth. Where are you getting a hundred crowns, boy? Are you going to dig up your father and pawn his teeth?”

Corin took the swatch out of the pot and squeezed it between two flat pine sticks. The color was coming up a dark, sullen navy—the shade worn by junior bailiffs and livery guards. “We have seven crowns in the iron pot under the hearthstone. Three from my father’s death-scrip that my mother wouldn’t spend on bread even when the wheat froze three winters back, and four we put away from the night shifts.”

Sona shook his head slowly, the loose skin beneath his jaw wobbling with a sad, heavy weariness. “And what happens when you get there? You’ve never held an edge. The boys from the Binpulos Prep School have been drilling with padded foils since their knuckles were big enough to wrap around a hilt. They’ll crack your collarbone on the first morning and throw you into the gutter.”

“Then I’ll get up out of the gutter and pick up the stick again,” Corin said.

He unhooked his leather apron, hung it on the wooden peg by the vat, and took his woolen coat down from the rafter. It was an old garment, made from thick homespun that Lucia had dyed three times to hide the worn patches on the elbows, but it was clean and the tin buttons were polished bright.

“You’re a fool, Corin Frankland,” the old master muttered, turning his face back toward the warmth of the kiln. “A stubborn, starved fool with dye under your fingernails.”

“I know, Master Sona.” Corin bowed from the waist, keeping his back straight. “Thank you for the tea.”

The street outside was already drowning in the blue dusk of late autumn. The smell of roasting chestnuts from the corner stall fought against the sour stench of the open drainage ditch that ran down the center of the Wynd. He pulled his collar up against the wet wind blowing off the lake, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and hurried toward the intersection where the timber carts came up from the south gate.

Near the limestone gateposts of the Binpulos Preparatory Academy, three students were standing beneath the eaves of a closed saddler’s shop.

They wore the dark green wool cloaks of the high preparatory school, with polished silver clasps shaped like falcon wings at their throats. Two were boys with the broad, well-fed shoulders of the nobility, their leather riding boots scrubbed to a high shine. The third was a girl with a mass of thick, copper-red curls that tumbled out from under her velvet beret. Her uniform coat had clearly been altered by an expensive seamstress; the waist was nipped in tight enough to show the curve of her ribs, while the bust was cut so close the silver hooks strained against the dark green cloth.

Corin looked at her twice. He was eighteen, his blood was warm, and he had spent six hours staring into a kettle of boiling lye; the sight of clean skin and bright red hair was hard not to notice.

He lowered his chin, intending to slip past on the far side of the gutter stones.

“You,” a girl’s voice snapped, sharp and loud as a whip cracking over a mule’s ears. “Stand where you are.”

Corin stopped with his right boot half-poised over a puddle of greasy carriage wash. The street was empty between the saddler’s awning and the corner alehouse; the call had been aimed directly at the back of his neck.

He turned around slowly.

The red-haired girl was pointing a gloved forefinger straight at his nose, her chin tilted at an angle that suggested she was looking at something scraped off the bottom of a drayman’s shoe. “Over here, boy. Don’t make me shout through the fog.”

Corin stayed where he was, four paces out on the wet cobblestones. In the capital, commoners were required by city ordinance to touch their caps and drop their eyes when addressed by a person bearing an embroidered coat of arms, but the Frankland lineage had held an imperial patent since the second year of the old emperor. It was a decayed patent, worth less than five bushels of dried oats in the market, but it remained in the parish registry.

“Is there an issue, mistress?” he asked, keeping his voice level.

The silver-haired boy to her right took half a step forward, his hand dropping to the brass hilt of the dress dagger at his belt. “Insolent cur. You address Lady Annabel, daughter of Earl Logres of the High Treasury. Take your hat off and drop to your knees before you speak to your betters.”

The second youth, a dark-haired boy with narrow, pig-like eyes, snorted into his fur collar. “Don’t waste breath on an alley rat, Alec. He probably thinks an earl is just a fat butcher with more pigs than usual.”

The silver-haired one—Alec—raised two fingers and drew a quick, sharp circle in the damp air. A tiny whirring spark of violet light crackled between his knuckles, humming with the distinctive, dry ozone scent of an offensive cantrip.

Annabel put her gloved palm against Alec’s forearm, pushing his hand down with an irritated click of her tongue. “Put the spark away, Alec. If you scorch his coat, we’ll have the district bailiff asking for two silver groats for street-cleaning, and I’m not waiting around in this mist while you argue with an unwashed sergeant. We have twenty minutes before the prep-master locks the archive door.”

She turned her attention back to Corin, her green eyes raking over his faded homespun coat and dye-stained knuckles. “You go to that filthy vocational school across the ditch, don’t you? The one where they teach peasants how to saw planks and stitch shoe-leather?”

“I attend the Municipal Skill College, yes,” Corin said.

“Then you know the gardener’s brat, Roddie. The boy with the crooked front tooth and the squint.”

Corin’s chest tightened slightly. Roddie sat two benches ahead of him in the practical arithmetic class; his father looked after the rose beds and boxwood hedges at several of the larger estates along the High Promenade. “I know him. What about him?”

“The little thief stole something from my private study while his father was dragging flower tubs into the conservatory yesterday evening,” she said, her voice dropping into a hard, venomous register. “We waited outside his classroom for an hour, but the doors are barred and the watchman said the students were dismissed at four. Where does he hide when he isn’t shoveling horse manure?”

Corin knew perfectly well that Roddie had not been in class all day; the boy’s seat had been empty since the morning bell. But the way the girl spoke—as if Roddie were an animal that had wandered into her larder—stirred a sour, heavy heat in his throat.

“He was still inside when I left through the back yard,” Corin said smoothly, his face entirely blank. “He was carrying a mop bucket toward the basement storerooms.”

Annabel’s eyes widened with sudden, predatory triumph. “Which building?”

Corin stepped toward the intersection, turned, and pointed down the narrow, unpaved alley that ran behind the municipal school, directly toward a squat, whitewashed stone shed that served as the communal latrine for the south quadrant. “The low stone one with the wooden vents near the roof. He cleans the drainage troughs every Tuesday after the tradesmen go home.”

“Finally, some useful information from a clod,” Annabel muttered, not bothering to look at him as she gathered the skirts of her green cloak and marched down the alleyway.

The two boys followed her, their boots squelching in the greasy muck. As Alec passed, he didn’t look at Corin either, but his left hand flicked a sharp, downward gesture toward the cobbles.

A sudden, sharp eddy of condensed air hit Corin directly beneath his kneecaps. The pressure was small—no more than the kick of a yearling calf—but it was sudden enough to whip his feet out from under him. He came down hard on his tailbone and left elbow, the icy mud soaking through his trousers with a sick, squelching thud.

Down the alley, Alec glanced back over his shoulder, his pale lips parted in a brief, contemptuous smirk before he vanished around the corner of the latrine wall.

Corin sat in the mud for five seconds, breathing through his nose. His elbow throbbed where it had struck a granite curb, and the damp cold was already seeping through the linen lining of his breeches. He didn’t swear. Swearing was what draymen did when their horses threw a shoe; it didn’t mend the iron or dry the wool.

He pushed himself up with his uninjured hand, wiped the grey sludge from his thigh with a handful of dead leaves, and started walking toward the East Ditch.

He didn’t go home. Instead, he took the narrow back paths through the tanners’ quarter, skirting the open lime-pits, until he reached the low brick tenements where the municipal laborers lived.

The door to the gardener Bandoras’s hovel was standing half-open, hanging from a single leather hinge.

Inside, the room was a wreckage of broken pine furniture and overturned flour sacks. An iron kettle lay on its side in the cold hearth, its greasy water soaked into the dirt floor. Roddie’s mother was sitting on a three-legged stool near the partition, rocking back and forth with her apron pulled up over her ears, her grey hair falling in greasy strands across her face.

“Mistress Bandoras,” Corin called softly, stepping over the split fragments of a laundry tub.

The old woman flinched as if struck with an iron rod, dropping her apron to reveal red, swollen eyes. “He isn’t here! The bailiffs took the master at noon! They said… they said if the boy doesn’t bring the book back to the Earl’s lodge by sunrise, they’ll send my husband to the salt mines on the southern coast! But Roddie hasn’t come home! He took his winter boots and ran before the sun was up!”

Corin knelt beside her, picking up an overturned clay bowl and setting it on the bench. “What did he take from the estate, mistress?”

“I don’t know!” she wailed, her thin chest heaving. “A bundle of paper wrapped in waxed cloth! The master found it in the bottom of the flower hamper after they unloaded the jasmine roots! Roddie said a man in a black cloak at the tavern offered him three silver groats to carry it past the estate turnpike, but then the bailiffs came with the warrants… Oh, goddess, they’ll break his legs in the garrison cellar!”

Corin spent twenty minutes helping her sweep the spilled flour back into an earthen crock, spoke a few quiet, useless words of comfort that tasted like dry ash in his mouth, and then slipped back out into the freezing fog.

By the time he reached his family’s tenement in the Alley of the Coopers, the streetlamps had been lit. He slipped into the scullery, washed his hands and face in the icy water of the wash-bucket, and ate two cold, hard barley biscuits with a slice of pickled turnip. His mother was still out at her evening sewing post, and Lucia would not be back from the tavern until the small hours.

At eight, he took his wool cap and walked three miles south to the grand dye-house near the timber docks, where he spent five hours stirring twenty-four boiling vats of oak-gall dye under the eye of an overseer who smelled of cheap gin and brandished a knotted leather strap.

It was past midnight when he finally clocked out at the gatehouse.

The fog had settled into a dense, freezing drizzle that slicked the cobblestones like lard. Corin walked with his head down, his arms pulled tight inside his coat to preserve the little heat his body had retained from the steam-kettles.

As he turned the blind corner behind the old cooperage, a figure slammed into his chest with the force of a runaway handcart.

Corin stumbled back, catching the rough brickwork with his shoulder to keep from falling. The other boy bounced off him, landing hard on his knees in the gutter, gasping for breath like a landed carp.

“Roddie?” Corin hissed, grabbing the boy by the shoulder of his greasy sheepskin jerkin. “What in the seven hells are you doing out here? The bailiffs have your father in the precinct watch-house!”

Roddie looked up, his face wild and pale as lard, his teeth chattering so violently he could barely shape the words. “Corin? You… you know?”

“Your mother is half-insane with fear,” Corin said, pulling the boy to his feet by his coat collar. “Go to the watch-house and give the Logres people whatever it was you took! It’s a theft charge, Roddie—they’ll give you ten lashes and thirty days on the road-gang, but they won’t hang you! Your father is an old man; he won’t last two weeks in the salt pens!”

Roddie’s eyes darted toward the mouth of the alley. He shoved his hand inside the lining of his sheepskin vest, yanked out a square, flat package wrapped in dark brown oilcloth, and shoved it violently against Corin’s ribs.

“Hold it,” Roddie choked out, his voice cracking with pure panic. “Hold it for two days, Corin! Just two days! The man with the black hood… he’s behind me! He isn’t a bailiff, Corin! He isn’t a bailiff!”

Before Corin could thrust the package back, Roddie tore himself free with a desperate, animal wrench, turned, and bolted down the wet cobbles toward the lumber wharves.

“Roddie! Wait, you idiot!” Corin shouted, but the boy’s boots were already splashing into the dark.

Corin stood under the eaves, the square parcel heavy and cold against his palms. It felt like a book—thin, stiff, with bevelled corners and the distinct, faint odor of old leather and dried rose leaves.

A sudden, sharp drop in the air temperature made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

It wasn’t the natural chill of the winter mist. It was a greasy, suffocating cold that carried the distinct smell of stagnant pond water, dried blood, and rotten turnip greens.

A shadow drifted past the mouth of the alleyway.

It did not walk; it skimmed three inches above the wet stones, wrapped in a voluminous cowl of coarse black wool that swallowed the pale yellow light of the distant oil-lamps. It moved with a smooth, terrible silence, following the trail of Roddie’s wet footprints down toward the timber yards.

Corin shoved the oilcloth package deep into the inner pocket of his coat, pressed his back flat against the wet brick wall, and followed.

The lumber yard was a maze of ten-foot stacks of cured pine and spruce logs, smelling of wet resin and rotting sawdust. The river fog hung in grey, tattered sheets between the alleys of timber.

Halfway down the central aisle, a high, choking scream ripped through the mist.

It was cut short with a wet, bubbling sound that made Corin’s stomach drop straight through his boots. He dropped to his hands and knees, crawled beneath a low stack of cedar planks, and peered around the edge of a hemlock pile.

Ten yards away, in the clearing by the saw-pit, the hooded figure stood with its back to him.

At its feet lay Roddie, his legs twitching violently, white froth bubbling from the corners of his blue lips.

Before Corin could move, a sudden, blinding sphere of white flame exploded directly above the saw-pit, lighting the stacks of timber with the harsh, silver glare of midday.

High atop a sixteen-foot stack of spruce beams, four figures stood outlined against the night sky.

In the center stood a man in his thirties, wearing the dark blue, silver-braided tunic of an imperial judicial investigator, a bare steel broadsword in his right hand. Beside him stood Annabel, Alec, and the dark-haired youth from the afternoon.

“So,” the investigator called down, his voice ringing like an iron bell across the silent timber yard. “The hound who set the gardener’s boy to steal from the Earl’s library finally crawls out of his ditch. Drop your cowl, warlock, before I burn the marrow out of your bones!”

The hooded figure did not look up.

He simply raised his right arm, and three spinning orbs of oily, coal-black vapor detached themselves from his wool sleeve, hissing through the cold air toward the timber stack with the silent, terrible speed of striking vipers.