The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry Read online

  Delly raised her eyebrows. “Eight householded daughters, is it? Sounds—lovely.” Loud is what she’d been thinking.

  “Oh, it is,” Mrs. Totham said, gently beaming. “When I was a young girl, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to have children exactly as my school friends did, but I used to dream about growing up and being householded by a handsome man with a big mustache and living with all of our householded children in a house with lace curtains at the window. My own dear mother was the best woman on earth—God grant her easeful relivings!—and I wanted to be just like her. And now I have a wonderful husband, and eight wonderful daughters, so all of my dreams came to pass, almost exactly as I imagined them, until my poor Mr. Totham’s trouble with his health.”

  “Oh,” Delly said, trying and failing to prevent a sense of wistfulness from falling upon her. Just the thought of having a mam who’d wanted her there. She did her best to keep conversing, as that was the sort of thing she’d heard that nice respectable ladies did. “And did you become a nec—body scientist just for the sake of finding work?”

  “Oh, no,” Mrs. Totham said. “Gracious me. It’s a craft that takes many years to develop any skill in. I began to study body science when I was still a young woman. My mother brought me to a local body scientist when I was a girl in order to address some delicate matters regarding my person, and I was so impressed by her abilities to explain the issues that had so troubled me and soothe my worries that I resolved to take up the study myself so that I could attend to such personal problems on my own in future. And then, of course, it was very useful to me when I became a mother and could easily address all of the usual bumps and bruises.”

  “Oh,” Delly said again. That word seemed to be turning into the extent of her fucking conversational abilities. A mam who’d be able to really and actually kiss away the bumps and goddamn bruises of childhood. “You sound like the sort of mother any girl’d be lucky to have, Mrs. Totham.” She snuck a peek at Ermintrude, just to see if the lass was as impressed by her own circumstances as Delly was, and caught the lass mid–eye roll, pupils cast boldly heavenward. Then Ermintrude caught Delly’s glance, and the eye roll crystalized into a very distinct glare.

  Delly slipped her a wink, which seemed to soften the lass’s fury a mite, or at least confuse her enough to smooth the glare into a small smile. Delly decided right then that she ought to speak to this girl alone, later. Not as a prospect, for tit’s sake—Delly had barely wanted anything to do with girls of seventeen when she was a girl of that age her own self—but by way of making sure she had allies in all corners for the next two weeks. If Delly had ever learned anything from a childhood of sleeping in whatever poorhouse would take her, it was that you’d best endeavor to make yourself agreeable to all and truly known to none, lest you have your belongings all stolen and your confidences broken before you made it to breakfast.

  The topic of conversation turned to gossip then—turned out that Mrs. Totham was a keen observer of both interesting birds and the society papers—and they passed the time with that for a span until the pretty house cat and the high-quality woman with the braids walked in. Delly, of course, didn’t remember a damn one of their names, so she spent a few minutes smiling politely and trying her best to listen in on their conversation to see if they might see fit to say their own names aloud. They didn’t. Delly was resigning herself to never addressing either of them directly for the next two weeks when Miss Cynallum came breezing through the room in a crisp green riding habit and said, “Hello again, all! Would anyone mind dreadfully if I went around asking everyone’s names again? I’ve got a mind like an absolute sieve.”

  No one expressed any objections out loud, at the very least, so Cynallum went around asking everyone’s name again. The beautiful quality woman with the braided hair was Bawa Usad, and the pretty pussycat was Abstentia Dok. Then Miss Cynallum came around to Delly and favored her with a big bright grin. “You’re Miss Wells,” she said. “I remember you.”

  “And you’re Miss Cynallum,” Delly said, tilting her head up to look at her. “I remember you back.”

  “You may call me Winn,” Miss Cynallum said. “If you’d like to, that is. I won’t try to make you call me something that you wouldn’t like to call me. Unless you’d like to call me something that wasn’t my name, I suppose, which wouldn’t really be regulation hammerball, what?” Then she stopped and looked pained.

  Delly let her smile go wider. She was no kind of beauty, she knew, but she had good thick hair and a decent set of tits, and when presented to an audience generously inclined toward thickly behaired and generously betitted gulls, she’d been told that she could charm the fleas out of a mattress. Miss Winn here struck Delly as a more generous audience than most. Delly said, “Then I guess you can call me Delly, Winn.”

  Winn, to her credit, didn’t stammer this time. She just smiled, and the two of them were spared from having their moment of flirtatious success running aground on the rocky shoals of continued conversation by the entrance of a stranger into the room.

  She was tall and slender, but everything else about her was a mystery: she wore an enormous round hat with a thick white veil that obscured her face entirely. A seclusionary veil, that’s what it was: Delly’d never seen one in the very cloth before. It all looked pretty bathtub brewed to Delly, but considering how often Delly herself had gone out into the world with great flapping holes in her dress, she thought that she probably didn’t have much room for lobbing critiques. Especially critiques aimed at her betters, which Delly figured this girl must be. She figured that even harder when she saw Misses Usad and Dok dip into little curtsies as the stranger walked through the room. Delly nearly hit the ground trying to give a deeper one. A girl like Delly couldn’t grovel too much around quality types, as a rule. Out of the corner of her eye she caught Winn contenting herself with a small inclination of her head, which astounded Delly into practically toppling over onto the floor. What the hell kind of a prospect was Winn? That accent said she had a clan name, sure, and being part troll probably meant she came from a family with money, but only giving a nod to a woman a bunch of high-quality women were curtsying to meant more than just a respectable clan. It meant something closer to the headmanship.

  Fuck Delly’s eyes straight out of her head, was this ever a prospect.

  “They’re all here now, Miss Wexin,” Miss Dok said.

  “Thank you, Abstentia,” said Miss Wexin. Her voice, at least, sounded like the voice of a lady who might need a whole passel of ladies to protect her from brigands. A soft, high, butter-dipped sort of voice. A voice with cream and sugar in it. “And thank you, ladies. I will be brief. My family has hired you to protect me for the next two weeks because we have very good reason to believe that attempts may be made on my life by persons who, for reasons unknown, wish to prevent my marriage. Several such attempts have already been made, and I am afraid that my attackers may only grow more violent as the wedding date approaches. If any one of you is not prepared to face danger within the next two weeks, please speak now and you will be freed of your contractual obligations.”

  Delly, for a moment, seriously considered freeing herself from her contractual obligations. She’d been hoping for a couple of weeks of protecting some hothouse flower from imagined enemies, and she didn’t particularly relish the thought of having to dodge actual bullets in the defense of some gull wearing a great white bucket on her head. Then she thought of her mam with her pinhole eyes, sleeping in that collapsing woodpile of a house, and reined herself in. Not that she’d be too eager to put herself between a bullet and her mam, either, but if things stayed as they were now, Delly’d be stuck scraping her out of gutters and dragging her to hospitals until Mam finally rejoined the unfortunates of the releft. That was to say nothing of the mostly-on-the-face pustules that would be Delly’s unavoidable fate if she didn’t keep this job, get her money, and pay her fatherprodding rent. That in mind, Delly kept her filt
hy biscuit-chewer clamped firmly shut.

  Everyone else did, too. A few seconds ticked by in silence. Miss Wexin inclined her head. Either that or the bucket had just slipped a bit: it was hard to tell. “I thank you for your bravery,” she said. Delly suppressed an indelicate snort. Miss Wexin said, “I am afraid that you will see very little of me over the next few days, as I will be spending most of my seclusion in prayer and meditation. I will be riding in my own carriage with Miss Usad and Miss Dok as my companions. I hope you will not think me churlish for not engaging with you further as I prepare for my marriage. Might I shake your hands?”

  No one objected to this proposition, so Miss Wexin moved about the room to shake each of their hands. Then she left the room with Miss Usad, while Miss Dok led the rest of them after her a moment later.

  Delly lagged toward the rear of the pack and was pleased when Winn lagged right beside her. “Bit odd, what?” Winn murmured.

  Delly cast her eyes a foot or so upward to look at her. “How’d you mean?”

  “Well,” Winn murmured, keeping her voice very low, “if that Miss Wexin is meant to be who I think she is, I’ve met her.”

  “Fuckin’ truly?” Delly said, and then cleared her throat. “Pardon. What do you mean, who she’s meant to be?”

  “Just what I said,” Winn said. “I met a girl named Mayelle Wexin when I was thirteen. I hadn’t gotten so tall by then, and I was with my pop, so she probably hadn’t taken much note of me.” The corners of her mouth curled up then. “Most gulls don’t take much note of me when I’m with my pop. But anyway, she would have been about sixteen then, which would make her about the age to get married now, and the Wexin clan is one of the only clans I know in the headmanship that still practices seclusions.”

  “So what’s funny about it, then?” Delly asked. “Begging your pardon.”

  “Don’t beg my pardon,” Winn said. “My mother always says that it wastes time. And the funny thing is, when I met her, I remember thinking what a nice low voice Miss Wexin had for a human girl.”

  “And this girl had a voice like a field mouse,” Delly said. They were both whispering now, and Delly had the fleeting thought that engaging in some intrigue could only serve to fan any romantic flames she might be producing with her prospect. “Sakes. You figure she’s some kind of imposter?”

  “I don’t know,” Winn said. “Maybe. Or maybe there’s another daughter I’ve never heard of rattling about in the backs of the Wexin cupboards behind all of the stacks of reprobate younger sons. I’ve only heard of the one Wexin girl of the right age, but I haven’t been in society much, these past few years. Any excuse to be out of it, really. You linger too long at the punch bowl at a society party and the next thing you know you’re engaged to a fellow with a squint and a stamp collection.” Then she gave Delly a big grin. “Soon we’ll be examining the mud under the windows for footprints and questioning members of the underworld about their connection to the entire mysterious wheeze. Nice to have something interesting to engage the old mental whatsit while at work, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve got a particularly long-standing interest in being interested, myself,” Delly allowed. Then, to her enormous alarm, the teakettle of her curiosity boiled over. “You’re, ah, in society, you said?”

  Winn gave a dismissive wave with one big hand. “Mother is head of clan Cynallum, and Pop works for the government,” she said. “It’s a very small clan, though. More of a biggish family, really. And in Hexos all you need to get a government posting is to be friends with the Lord-Mage, and Mother and Pop have known Uncle Loga for ages.”

  “Sakes,” Delly breathed, still whispering even though they weren’t talking secrets anymore and had emerged out onto the streets, where whispering suddenly seemed much more ridiculous than it had when they were in a dim and rich and atmospheric interior. She cleared her throat and said in a normal voice, “Greatest wizard I ever met was a fella who pulled beans out of folks’ ears on the corner of Eagle and Wren Streets.”

  That got a laugh from Winn, who said, “And speaking of wizards, Miss Wexin isn’t the only one about who’s hiding her face. Miss Usad’s got a bit of the old veil of wizarding illusion on her. Jolly nice little thing—I wouldn’t have noticed it if I wasn’t trained in illusions. I think she might be covering up that she wears spectacles.”

  “Sakes,” Delly said again, admiringly. “High-quality ladies really are exceptional creatures, ain’t they?” She was so absorbed in the consideration of the freaks of high-quality ladies—using up all that magic just so no one would see your specs!—and of the cleverness of Winn for having figured out the trick that it took her a moment before her eyes registered the horrible sight before her and her whole body gave a startled writhe backward, as if she were an eel being shown a plate of mashed potatoes and a bottle of vinegar. “Are those horses?”

  They were, in fact, horses. Eight of them, if one demanded prissy exactitude about it: four attached to a coach that Misses Wexin, Usad, and Dok were climbing into, and four more just—standing about, being held by the leady leathery mouth bits by some likely-looking lads. Plotting, probably, was what they were doing. Delly didn’t at all like the look of them. She’d watched a man be dragged almost to death by a horse once, when she was a small girl, and she’d never seen fit to enter into conversation with once since. Uncanny things, they were, with eyes on the sides of their heads.

  “They look like horses,” Winn said, in a slightly doubtful tone. “One never really blinking well knows, though, with wizards about. Why? Not a keen rider?”

  “Never so much as touched one of the beasts,” Delly said, keeping a wary eye trained on the nearest of the creatures.

  “Oh,” Winn said, looking suddenly much more concerned than she’d ever looked while they were discussing their employer’s being a potential imposter. “Jolly bad luck, when we’re heading off on a two-day ride.”

  Delly thought for a moment to ask where the hell she’d been when everyone else was learning about the two-day ride on horseback, then realized a moment later that the answer was likely In the room, but not paying any attention to what was being said. Instead, she gave a groan of desperation. “What in the releft am I supposed to do, then? The creature’ll drag me to death after two minutes.”

  “Oh, none of that, you won’t be dragged to death,” Winn said briskly. “We’ll sort it all out, what? Come along,” she said, and went striding off toward the nearest of the horse-holding lads, likely to bend his ear over some equestrian topic about which Delly had absolutely no spirit of bright-eyed curiosity. She dragged herself after Winn and stood a few steps behind her, glowering at the air. Some sort of conversation was held amongst the lads that Mrs. Totham also suddenly, and without warning, intruded herself upon. A moment after that, the lads started leading off two of the horses. Delly blinked. “Am I being left behind, then?”

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Totham, stepping toward her. “I really must thank you, Miss Wells! A long ride on a big spirited animal like that would be very unsuitable for me, at my age, dear me. Fortunately, those nice young men say that they have just the thing for us to have a more comfortable journey. It really is true, what they say about how the headmanship can manage to hire such superior servants! My girl back home really is quite impossible. She breaks dishes as if a bit of crockery once caused one of her ancestors to stumble into sin and repeat his reliving. Why, just the other day—” Here she began to embark upon a very long and tedious story about poor hapless Mesteria doing something that Mrs. Totham found inexcusable to a batch of strawberry jam. Delly nodded and said, “Really! Shocking, that!” at what she thought might be the right intervals, until the two stable lads returned with two new great brown creatures. The closer of the two beasts eyed her. Delly eyed it right back, bold as she could manage. She figured that horses were probably more likely to attack if they sensed nerves. This one didn’t attack, though: just flicked its long
ears about and sighed.

  “That’s a funny-looking horse,” she said after a moment.

  “They’re donkeys, my dear,” said Mrs. Totham. “Nice, sensible creatures. Very unlikely to bolt.”

  Winn, nearby, was covering her mouth with her hand. Delly felt her cheeks heat. “I don’t know how to ride this one, either,” she said, rather more loudly than she had intended.

  Winn pulled her hand away. She was still smiling, sure enough, but it didn’t look to have any sharp edges in it. “That’s perfectly all right,” she said. “It’s easy as can be. Come on,” she said, and brought Delly over to the beast and tried to talk her through climbing onto it. When Delly still hadn’t managed to get her ass up after a third try, Winn said, “I’ll just give you a bit of a boost, that’s the ticket,” and Delly found herself perched atop a donkey and extremely astonished about it. The donkey itself betrayed nary a whiff of astonishment, and only carried on eating bits of grass from between the cobblestones as if it thought it’d been brought out from the stables for this express purpose. Winn, now on horseback herself—it hadn’t taken her three tries—beamed. “There we are! We’ll have you at the steeplechases, next!”

  Delly craned her neck to try to see what her donkey was about, then felt off-balance and gripped hard at the saddle, then sat up straight again and looked about herself. Everyone was looking at her. Her face went hotter, and she looked toward Winn. “How do I make it go?”