The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry Read online

  So now, after a long, damp slog up the hill, she was here. It was a rather cozy little spot, she thought, with a hidden room in it with seats and all to rest on. Narrow windows and a faded rug on the floor. It was a good feeling to be inside of it and see the sweep of the whole grounds before her. A thought plinked into Delly’s head like a raindrop into a puddle: that it would be nice, one day, to have a nook like this of her own to live in, with a view onto something pleasant. She had that thought and then was astounded with herself for having had it. “Not like you at all, Delly Wells,” she said aloud. Not at all like her to daydream about things she could never have. Still, it stuck with her as she made her way back down to the manor. A little nook with a view onto something pleasant. It was likely Winn’s fault, she thought. Spend too much time with a clanner and a girl was likely to get ideas above her station. A few clean windows, a comfortable chair, a rug on the floor. Why not?

  It was time for supper when she got back, which suited her fine: all of this marching about to scenic viewpoints and witnessing attempted murder did wonders for the appetite. Miss Dok had relieved Winn at her post, so Delly sat next to Winn for the meal and did her best to chatter with charming effect while they had their soup and sliced ham. Delly was yawning before the layer cake had even reached the table. Winn smiled at her. “Might as well take a shift at the dream workshop before your shift as a jailer, old thing. You look ready to make that cake a pillow.”

  “A bit,” Delly admitted. “Been a long day.”

  “So go to bed, then,” Winn said. “Someone will wake you when it’s your turn.”

  Delly obeyed, rather giddy over having had a Quality Young Lady gently boss her about for her own good, not because she was spending her spare time providing Aid to the Poor, but because she liked Delly personally and didn’t want her to feel badly. That was a refreshing sort of feeling, all right. She, Delly Wells, the sort of person that a Quality Young Lady might feel moved to gently boss. This must be, she thought, how people who lived in nice houses in the suburbs felt all the time: pleasantly encased in the silky glove of their own superiority.

  She fell asleep almost the instant her face found a spot to settle on and didn’t wake up again until something jolted her from sleep some few hours later. Odd. It wasn’t someone knocking on the door that had woken her. It was something else. A sort of strange thickness in the air.

  She got up and dressed and headed down the hall to the stairs. The air got heavier as she walked. She didn’t like how her throat was tightening. She didn’t like how her skin was prickling. She didn’t like how no one had come to wake her up.

  She turned the corner and was confronted by something strange. One of the suits of armor in the hall had left its proper place. Instead of standing with its back against the wall it was at the center of the hall, facing Delly. Delly thought, for a moment, of how odd that was: she had thought that the suits of armor must be attached to the wall somehow to keep them from falling over onto particularly heavy-footed types as they walked down the hall. She was still gawping at the thing and thinking these unhelpful thoughts when the suit of armor began advancing toward her.

  Her first, strange response was to feel delighted: it was as if all of her childhood imaginings about her beloved doll coming to life to play with her had come true. In the next moment these rosy-hued thoughts of dancing with Miss Pansy in fields of daffodils in sugarplum-land were rudely destroyed, as the suit of armor came a step closer and raised its axe to swing at her.

  Delly barely had the time to think, let alone formulate a plan of action. All she could do was follow her first instinct, which was to push all of the power in her body into her right hand and catch the blade of the axe with it.

  It wasn’t exactly like a knife through hot butter. More like hot butter through a knife, which was a very peculiar thing to witness. The axe was reduced in a moment to a pole with a misshapen hunk of metal stuck at the end, which, though less dangerous than a sharp axe, still struck Delly as an object with which she’d much rather not be clobbered. She was dizzy from having used too much magic at once, but she couldn’t stop for a rest now: the suit of armor was turning its empty head toward her, trying to orient itself to take another swing. So she swung first and managed to push her hot knife of a hand through the center of the thing’s breastplate.

  It kept moving, of course. It was a fucking empty suit of armor animated with the life force of an innocent creature: it couldn’t be killed that easily. The next few moments were one long, agonized scrap, the suit of armor managing to land stinging blows of the axe handle on Delly’s back as Delly pushed her hand over and over into the metal of the thing, trying to get it to fall, trying to ignore the sickening feeling that coursed through her every time she touched it. Eventually she managed to melt enough of one of its legs for it to list sharply to the side, then clatter onto the floor. After that it was a moment’s work to gather up the last of her strength, aim for its head, and melt the rest of it into a pile of writhing scrap.

  She stood there for a while, watching the fingers of the armor twitch. She kept watching it because it was better than looking at the other thing in the hall, just beyond that suit of armor that had been left to guard it. A pig. A dead pig. A pig that had been hacked open and bled and died on the floor.

  Ermintrude.

  Delly moved closer. There was a stink in the air like nothing she’d ever smelled before. She reminded herself, This is Ermintrude, but her mind skidded off of that and rolled away. It couldn’t be. Ermintrude was a live person, and this was a dead animal. She stepped in closer. Closer. The floor was sticky. She kept her eyes up and kept moving until she made it to the door, which was standing open.

  Inside the room everything looked ordinary. A bed, a trunk, a pretty little dressing table, a vase of flowers. A thick rug with a dead mouse on it.

  That makes sense, Delly thought distantly, as if the thought belonged to someone standing in the other room. The mouse had wandered into the room, or Ainette had lured it out. There had probably been enough power in that little body to bring the suit of armor to life just in time to cut down Ermintrude. After that it would be nothing to open the door, nothing to escape, nothing to leave in the night with a suit of armor left to guard the hall and slow down anyone who might pursue her.

  It must have been fast, at least. Otherwise the pig would have squealed the house down.

  The pig. The girl. The young girl. Ermintrude.

  She looked down at the corpse and finally saw it. It wasn’t a pig, not entirely. She had been killed in the exact moment of the change. A pig’s body, with the shreds of a frilly dress around it. A few wisps of blonde hair. A horrible, half-human, terrified face.

  Delly wasn’t really sure when exactly she started to scream.

  7

  Wherein Revenge Is Sworn, Plans Are Laid, and Dellaria Is Confronted by Elevated Opinions About Her Person

  Something strange happened to Delly after her scream. Time stopped working in the usual way. It writhed around as witlessly as an eel in a barrel, and Delly watched it and herself with amazement at how little sense it made.

  At some point, days, weeks, or seconds later, other people began running up to her in the hall. They didn’t see the body because there was a blanket over it. Delly had thrown a blanket over it before the others arrived, something that she didn’t remember doing. She just remembered screaming and then thinking that Mrs. Totham shouldn’t see her daughter like this. Then there was a blanket over the body. Then there was another blanket over Delly’s shoulders, and Winn’s hands on her shoulders, and the sound of Winn praying.

  Mrs. Totham came up then, in her nightdress and white cap. She knelt by her daughter’s body and laid her hands on where a human chest should have been, and the body under the blanket moved and twisted and shrank down to the size of a dead young girl. Mrs. Totham turned the blanket down to expose Ermintrude’s pale face. She pushed back her pale hair.

  “My poor girl,” she whispered. “My poor, sweet girl. It’s all right, darling. I’m here now. You’re safe now, sweet baby.” She kissed Ermintrude’s forehead. She was crying without making any sound. There were just tears.

  “I’ll have revenge for you, sweet girl,” Mrs. Totham said. There was a strange hum of magic in the air. “Don’t worry, love. I’ll see that bitch ruined for you, darling. Don’t worry. I’m here.”

  There was movement in the corner of Delly’s eye. The mouse on the rug in the empty room. It was moving. It was standing. It skittered its way to Mrs. Totham’s side. Its head was still twisted around wrong.

  “Ah,” Mrs. Totham murmured, looking down at the dead-living mouse. “How very silly of me not to have noticed you. You’re not meant to be alive at all, are you?”

  She held out her hand. The mouse climbed into it. She twisted its head back around the right way, then stroked it with one finger between its soft round ears. “You may come to be useful, though,” Mrs. Totham said to the living-dead mouse. “Yes, indeed. I think that I’ll keep you this way, for now.”

  “Come on,” Winn murmured into Delly’s ear. Delly jumped. Winn steadied her. “Come on, Delly. You ought to sit down.”

  Time skipped. The night wore out. Delly came back to herself as the sun came up. The things she had seen before seemed less real, and the things before her now solidified at the edges. She was in the small parlor, which was crowded with people trying to figure out where Ainette might have gone to. They all seemed very interested in that, though Delly was struggling to understand why. Everyone else seemed very interested when Miss Dok sat back in her chair, her forehead glistening with sweat, and said, “She’s gone.”

  Jok, standin
g nearby, made a disrespectful gesture just outside of Miss Dok’s range of vision. He and his fellow footmen had searched the grounds on foot from just past midnight to just before dawn and come to the exact same conclusion, but Miss Dok had insisted on enlisting Winn into helping her to temporarily lower the magical walls of the manor in order to search for Ainette’s presence on the grounds with the use of some set of parameters recently published by the Lord-Mage of Hexos. It was more magic than a couple of young ladies really ought to be performing unsupervised, and it had wrung both of them out like wet mops. Delly, for her part, was exempted from any exertion for the morning. It was a bit embarrassing, really. They’d all seen her in the night, when the text of reality had bled like wet newsprint.

  Mrs. Totham was in the room now. She was sitting, like Delly, with a blanket around her shoulders and a cup of hot tea in her hands. The dead-alive mouse was on her knee. A strange atmosphere hung around the thing. No one seemed quite able to look directly at it, or, by extension, at Mrs. Totham. Their eyes skipped right over her and straight to anything else.

  It seemed unfair, Delly thought, when Mrs. Totham was mourning. A bit cruel. So she moved her chair a little closer, cleared her throat, and asked, “How are you, Mrs. Totham?”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Totham said in her softest twitter. “How kind of you to ask, Miss Wells, how very kind of you. I’m as well as can be expected. I believe that word has been sent to my family?” She was stroking the alive-dead mouse with her fingertip.

  “I’m sure that it has been,” Delly said, though she wasn’t sure at all. “I’m sure someone will be coming here to collect you and bring you home any day now.”

  “Oh, no,” Mrs. Totham said, in a tone of the very mildest and powder-scented surprise. “I won’t be going home with anyone. I’ll be going after that Wexin bitch.”

  Delly coughed tea all over her lap. Then she cleared her throat, wiped her mouth, and said, “Pardon me, Mrs. Totham, but how exactly are you planning on doing that?”

  “That doesn’t concern me, at the moment,” Mrs. Totham said. “My first responsibility will be to find people to accompany me in the endeavor.”

  She had a very suggestive look on her face. Delly frowned and started casting around for an excuse. I think I’m coming down with a head cold probably wouldn’t fit the occasion. “I wish that I could help,” she said, “but I promised my own dear mother that I would take the money I made at this job and use it to help her find a more salutary place for her to stay and resolve some difficulties in which she has unfortunately and recently found herself.” There. That sounded good—like her nice, genteel mam had just been the mark of a man selling imaginary tracts of vineyard in Mendosa and lost all of her money in the scheme—and was a respectable reason to not want to go off on a revenge-driven quest to kill or capture a magically accomplished murderess.

  “Ah, yes, your dear mother,” Mrs. Totham said. “She’s also a user of the drug that brought the Wexin girl to this point, isn’t she?”

  Delly’s face went hot and her hands went fishbelly. “Who the fuck is telling you things like that about my mam?”

  Mrs. Totham gazed placidly back at her. “Of course, I could never allow my daughter to be in the presence of so many strangers without looking into their backgrounds first. Certainly not, goodness me. I ought to have found out about the Wexin girl’s habits, but no one had heard about her in my circles. They’d heard about Dellaria Wells and her mother, though.”

  Delly could slap her, the miserable old cow. Putting on her sweet face, and all the while she was digging into Delly’s secrets. Finding things out about her mother. Delly could spit. “What are you talking about my mother for?”

  “Oh, dear me, I certainly didn’t mean any insult,” Mrs. Totham said, and suddenly her round brown eyes went bright with tears. “I do hope that you aren’t angry at me, Miss Wells, when you’ve been so very kind to me, so very kind. I only meant that the same wicked drug that turned the Wexin girl to hurt my dear Ermintrude has seized your mother as well. I do hope that you might feel some pity for a poor mother who has lost her own sweet girl, and find it in your heart to help avenge her?”

  Delly stared at her. She was talking a bunch of nonsense, of course. Temporarily moon-addled with grief. She’d get over this revenge business once she’d had a night or two to sleep on it. She’d come to her senses and realize that the wicked and well-connected only got their just deserts in improving books for children, and that she’d be better off going home to her village and finding solace in her surviving daughters than she’d be trying to find justice for the dead one.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, and took a sip of her tea. It had gone cold. She wasn’t really sure how long it had been in her cup for. “I think I ought to go to bed,” she said. Her eyes ached.

  She took herself to bed. Took her clothes off and got under the blankets. She kept thinking of the agonized half-pig face and the mouse standing up with its head on backward. They were there when she closed her eyes, but there when her eyes were open, too. Dug into the back of her skull, maybe. Caked under her fingernails. Pumping through her body along with her heartbeat.

  She wanted to sleep. She needed to sleep. She told herself to sleep.

  She just drifted, instead. She floated until the leaky little ship of her mind struck against something horrible, and that woke her until she settled, and drifted, and it happened all over again. She was almost grateful when Winn shook her awake, even though she screamed and tried to leap away in the moment.

  Winn winced and squatted down next to the bed to make herself smaller. “Sorry, old thing,” she murmured. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” She reached out like she wanted to touch Delly, then dropped her hand again before she did it. “Miss Mayelle is asking for us to all gather round for a meeting. If you’re feeling as if you’re quite up for having a venture downstairs, that is.”

  “Suppose I ought to be,” Delly said. “Can’t just lie in bed all day, can I?” She climbed out of bed in an illustrative fashion.

  “You can, I think,” Winn said. “It’s not every day that a gull finds a dead body.” She was watching Delly drag her dress back on. “You really ought to rest, Delly,” she said. “I can tell you whatever she says down there. Probably nothing important, anyway.”

  “Can’t rest,” Delly said shortly. “Keep on seeing horrid things every time I try to close my eyes. Might as well do something useful instead of lying around like I’m already a corpse myself.” She regretted that last part as soon as it left her mouth. It was awful. She shivered. Ermintrude. Had she chosen to wear those frills, or were they her mother’s doing? Too late to ask now.

  “All right,” Winn said after a moment. “But then after the meeting you ought to have something to eat and then try to lie down again.”

  “Will you sit with me?” Delly blurted out. Then her face went red. “Sorry. I don’t know what got into me. Must be the effect of unanticipated corpse sightings.”

  Winn gave her a look. “Of course I’ll sit with you. You shouldn’t have to be alone, after what you’ve been through.”

  “I haven’t been through anything,” Delly snapped. “Ermintrude went through something, which is probably what this fucking meeting is about. Maybe Miss Wexin wants to take up a collection for her funeral expenses. Now, let’s go, before we’re late.”

  “All right,” Winn said softly. “All right, Delly.” She was speaking in the voice people used when they thought you’d lost the plot. Delly hadn’t, though. She was holding on to every last sentence of the plot with all of the strength in her body.

  They went down to the small parlor. It was nice and sunny in there, on a fine afternoon. The windows were open and a breeze was blowing in. There were vases of flowers on the tables. Miss Mayelle was sitting on a little velvet settee, looking fresh and lovely in a pretty light-green frock. That was a funny thing, Delly thought. How someone might be a beautiful young woman, about to be a bride, with the whole world lying at her feet, both before and after someone had been murdered in her own house. One would think she might have the consideration to look a bit uglier until Ermintrude was under the ground, at least.