The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry Read online

  Delly lay facedown in the dirt for a while in quiet consideration of the choices that had led her to this juncture. She imagined that most of them had been very grievous sins indeed. She lay there through the growlings and bangings and shoutings of the battle, until she heard a particularly loud shriek and the crunch of ripping and tearing wood, and reluctantly hoisted her weary corpse skyward to have a look around.

  It wasn’t looking as if things were going all that relefting well. Winn was reloading her pistol, and Ermintrude—or the pig that had previously been Ermintrude—was creating a terrible din by tearing at the spider’s metal legs with her tusks, as the creature itself clambered into the coach through the splintered door and the coachman frantically endeavored to convince the panicked horses to drag the coach forward on a clearly broken wheel. Then there was an almighty boom, and a flash of light, and the spider-thing was blown through the air, landing about twenty feet from the coach and sending Ermintrude tumbling head over trotters. A moment later, Miss Wexin came stumbling out of the coach and sent another bolt of white light after the creature before she collapsed to the ground.

  It was seeing this that finally spurred Delly into action. Battles with eldritch wizard-made abominations were all very well, but not when they threatened to kill the woman whom Delly was meant to be guarding before Delly had been paid. So she took off running toward the spider-thing, which was attempting to right itself by wriggling its great long wriggly legs about in a truly horrible manner. Delly ran up until she was close enough to grab ahold of one of the legs, focused her entire self upon the task, did her best to rattle off the right parameters to keep from setting her dress on fire, and melted.

  She had melted largish metal things before, but nothing quite this large, and nothing at all that gave her such a nauseous, twisted-up feeling to touch. It was wrong, this thing, a bunch of healthy ordinary metal scraps infused with something that shouldn’t exist, and after Delly finished melting all the way through the center of the thing where the evil was the most thick and clotted, its horrible legs finally stopped wriggling, and Delly stepped back and fell to her knees and was sick right on top of its wicked metal corpse.

  Someone called out, “Couldn’t you have done that a bit sooner, Wells?” Delly opened her mouth to object, but only croaked a bit.

  “A little less of that, Dok,” Winn said from close at hand. “Blinking bad form to criticize a gull when she’s just saved your skirts from peril and then been sick.” There was something cool and wet and refreshing at the back of Delly’s neck for a moment, and then Winn was crouching down next to her and offering her a canteen of water and a wet handkerchief. “We all owe you our thanks,” she said. “We’d all be in a dense thicket now without you.”

  Delly found herself blushing. She wasn’t at all accustomed to having done the right thing at all, let alone to being so kindly tended to and complimented about it. She attempted to make herself less repulsive with the water and wet handkerchief, then allowed Winn to help her to her feet. She thought that despite her embarrassment over having just vomited all over a dead spider-thing she might take this opportunity for a bit of romantic squinting up into Winn’s eyes. It was the sort of thing that seemed to work for gulls in bad plays, at least. It wasn’t to be, though: Winn’s attention was somewhere else.

  Delly followed her gaze and saw what she was looking at. Miss Wexin, still unconscious, with her veil removed, was being cradled in the arms of Miss Usad, who looked . . . different. Not just bespectacled, which she was, but different altogether: younger and fresher, the cheeks a bit rounder and the eyes larger. Delly abruptly realized why her beauty had struck her as so uncomfortable: whatever glamor had been on her had been forcing observers to look away before anyone noticed anything unusual about her.

  “But you’re Mayelle Wexin!” Winn said suddenly to Miss Usad. “You look just like how I remember you. And she doesn’t look like you a bit,” she added, nodding toward the woman in Miss Usad’s—Miss Wexin’s—lap. This, at least, was obvious. The imposter was pale, redheaded, and very ordinary-looking: without the veil, a drunk bat would have been able to tell them apart. Winn looked a little cross. “Who in the blazes is she?”

  “My householded younger sister,” Miss Wexin said. Her voice was just as low as Winn had described it. She also looked a bit sheepish. “Her name is Ainette. She’s the one who’s the student at Weltsir. I’m afraid that I don’t have a drop of magic in me.”

  “Only every other excellent quality,” Miss Dok said stoutly. It seemed pretty clear that she’d been in on the secret, at least.

  Miss Wexin gave her a brief smile, then continued. “She came up with the idea of switching places with me during the journey because as a wizard she’d be able to defend herself better than I could if we were to be attacked.” Her expression slipped a bit then, from embarrassment to what looked like genuine worry. “I’ve never seen her faint from doing magic before. It couldn’t be the swoons, could it?”

  Mrs. Totham climbed down from her donkey—she’d kept sensibly out of the fray—and carefully knelt down at Miss Wexin’s side to lay a hand on Ainette’s forehead, then her chest. Ermintrude, who remained a pig, trotted quietly up to her mother’s side. “It isn’t the swoons,” she said. “She’s only exhausted herself. She’ll come around in a moment, poor dear. Miss Wells, dear me, don’t you look a sight. Come here at once, dearie!”

  Dellaria, to her own bemusement, went there at once, and obediently held her torn-up hands out to be inspected. Just moving her fingers a bit hurt. Mrs. Totham seized her gently by the wrists, and there was . . . a change. Not that her hands were exactly as they’d been before she fell, but the pain stopped, and her palms went from looking raw and wet to looking more . . . crusted over. “And your poor nose,” Mrs. Totham said, and touched Delly’s face, and after a sharp jolt of pain, Delly could breathe properly again. “I’m afraid you’ll still be a bit bruised, dear,” she said.

  Delly prodded gently at her working nose with one of her working fingers and beamed. “You’re a blessing from God, Mrs. Totham,” she said, meaning every bit of it. She was completely delighted, but there was also, for some reason, some illogical corner of her that wanted to cry. She couldn’t make any sense of it, so she ignored it, which was by way of being her usual mode of doing things. Thinking too much about wanting to cry had never done her a damn bit of good, and actually crying had done her even less of it. Maybe crying was of use to the Fine Misses, but it’d only ever served to make Dellaria’s sleeves damp.

  Mrs. Totham beamed. “I’m very glad to be of any help that I can,” she said. “It’s lovely to be appreciated.” Then she leaned forward and added, in a conspiratorial sort of way, “If only my own daughters appreciated my efforts so much!”

  Ermintrude, at this, grunted and pushed at her mother with her snout. Mrs. Totham looked down at her and patted her head. “There’s no use in your getting annoyed by my paying attention to other people, young lady. You always do get cross when I offer to help you with a cramp.”

  Delly eyed Ermintrude, who was presently rubbing her tusks in the dirt. “How long are you planning on staying like that, then?”

  Ermintrude gave a scornful grunt.

  Winn frowned. “I don’t know if that’s quite etiquette, what?”

  Delly frowned back. “If what’s quite etiquette?”

  “Asking how long someone’s going to be a pig,” Winn said. “Seems a very personal question. Like asking a lady her age.”

  “I think it’s a fu—very well relevant question,” Delly said, indignant. “How’re we going to get her back onto a horse if she’s a pig?”

  “We could strap her on, I suppose,” Winn said, though she looked doubtful about it.

  “Oh, there’s no need for that, she’ll run along on her own,” Mrs. Totham said cheerfully. “She can achieve quite remarkable speeds on her own trotters.” Then she added, “And she
generally doesn’t understand most questions that are posed to her while she’s in this state, I’m afraid. She mainly responds to the tone.”

  “Oh,” Delly said. Winn walked over to speak with the coachman then, and after a moment she lifted up the coach a bit, casual-like, so that he could finish getting the broken wheel fixed back in its place. Sakes. Not something Delly minded seeing, in a gull.

  Miss Dok was giving Delly a speculative look. “Are you trained at all as a wizard? That was an impressive bit of work you did just now.”

  “Thank you,” Delly said, her whole face gone hot. She gave a moment of consideration to the thought of lying, and then gave the thought up: she wanted these people to trust her, and any wizard paying close attention was likely to figure it out eventually, or at least a part of it. “I was one of that class of Lord Rett’s students at Weltsir five years back.”

  It’d been a real sort of sensation, when it happened. In the papers and all. After it got out that the old Lord-Mage of Hexos had been some kind of street urchin, and his successor a clanless girl from Daeslund’s North Country who’d gotten rejected from Weltsir—probably because she was a clanless girl from the relefted North Country—this prick named Lord Rett had gone all ingenious and decided he was going to prove that magical educations were best kept for the upper classes by getting his associates to pull a few magically inclined kids out of the sewer, bring them to Weltsir, and see whether or not they’d be able to learn to be wizards. He’d won all the bets he placed, sure enough. Most of the kids had left after a day or two: couldn’t understand what in the world the lecturers were going on about. Delly’d hung on a year. A whole entire tit-sucking year she’d made it through, and then got kicked out after a senior student found her passed-out drunk in the library. One year. She’d learned some, sure. There was a reason she was the best fire witch in Leiscourt. She hadn’t learned enough to keep herself in long enough to graduate, though. Just like that Lord Rett had figured. Blood told in the end.

  Miss Dok’s eyebrows were up near her hairline. “You’re one of those,” she said. “That makes sense.”

  Delly’s whole body went hot. Then, suddenly, Winn was standing there. “Steady on, Dok,” she said. “Not really the blinking sort of thing, is it? Not in line with Elgar’s sacred whatsit of respect to your fellows, saying that someone’s one of those.”

  Delly felt her innards unknot a bit. Miss Dok gave her pretty dark eyes a roll. “I only meant that I’d never heard of a fire witch who could direct heat like that, just onto one discrete target. She’s obviously had some training in academic magic.” She looked at Delly then. “What sort of parameters do you use for that?”

  “Uh,” Delly said. “Modified Reclid’s channel. I had to write it up myself, a bit, since they don’t got, uh, any kind of established parameters for fire witches. Once I’d used it a few times, it turned into a kind of—habit, I guess. I don’t need to incant for it.” That wouldn’t make any sense to an academic wizard, but she’d accept it from a fire witch. They were supposed to be incorrigible gutterwitches, untrainable and instinct-driven, like alley cats. And dangerous, when they were as powerful as Delly was. Not that many people were.

  “How clever,” Miss Dok said. The way in which she said it made it hard to tell whether she was sincere about it. Probably not. Academic wizards were never impressed by gutterwitchery, no matter how clever and inventive it might be. “You must tell me about how you altered the Reclid’s, sometime. I should be very interested to learn more about your . . . methodology.” Then she gave a little smile and walked off a few steps to rejoin Miss Wexin. The imposter looked like she was waking up.

  “Don’t move about too much, Ainette,” said the elder Wexin. Mayelle, who had previously been the beautiful Miss Usad and who was now revealed to be the equally beautiful Miss Mayelle Wexin, future Lady Crossick. Some people, Delly reckoned, must have to buy extra luggage for carrying all of their luck around with them. “You’ve just fainted.”

  The younger Wexin—Ainette, it was—cracked one eye open. It was a very bright blue. “What happened? Is it dead?”

  “Miss Wells melted it,” said Miss Mayelle. “We’re all perfectly safe.” Then, without looking up, “Boggs? Have you put the coach right?”

  “Yes, miss,” said the coachman in a very respectful tone. “As best as I could, miss. With the help of Miss Cynallum, miss.”

  Delly, for all that she ought to be used to it, was struck by how different the bowing and scraping looked from this new angle. From the vantage point of the miss instead of the you, girl. There was no time to stew in it, though. People were clambering back up into the carriage, and Winn was galloping off to retrieve Delly’s ass from the field it was presently standing in, eating grass. They were, in short order, on the road again, with Delly’s ass trailing after Winn just as if nothing at all had happened.

  “You were right,” Delly said after a while. “She was an imposter.”

  Winn gave her a quick smile. “I have a decent bit of space in the old brainpan for remembering people I met at parties as a mere slip of a six-foot-odd young girl,” she said. “And it looks as if it all has a perfectly reasonable explanation to it, what?”

  “It does look like that,” Delly said. They went quiet then, for a while. Delly was developing an increasing awareness of every ache and pain in her body that hadn’t been resolved by Mrs. Totham’s quick work. She was thinking about that spider-thing and the horrible way she’d felt when she’d touched it. Wrong. It had been wrong.

  “Are you all right, Delly?” Winn asked. “You’re shaking.”

  “I ain’t shaking,” Delly said, and gripped harder at the pommel.

  “All right,” Winn said. “Well. If you do start shaking, let me know so that I can help. I wouldn’t like to see you falling off again.”

  Delly didn’t know what to feel about that. Maybe she was meant to feel grateful, but she didn’t feel fucking grateful. She felt worn-out and aching and sick to her damned stomach, and sicker of having to mind herself around these rich high-class gulls. Sick to death of it, and it had barely been half a day since this entire venture had gotten started. She groaned under her breath, then tried to steady herself a little. It was just two weeks, that was all. Two weeks, and a big fat pile of cash, and she’d be living easy until the next time she managed to approach the smooth-running train of her life and herd a flock of sheep onto the tracks.

  Delly stopped paying attention to the world around her for a while, finding herself trapped instead in the hot, crowded room of her body. Her hands ached, and her head pounded, and the afternoon sun heated the top of her head and the back of her neck until she imagined that if she dunked her head into a pond the water would hiss and sizzle. The atmosphere around her was enduring a process of ongoing endonkeyfication, until she began to imagine that even the rare cooling winds blowing in from the east smelled of hot barnyard. She kept thinking about how that thing had felt as she’d melted it. It was wrong. It was wrong. It shouldn’t exist.

  She didn’t notice herself sliding off of the donkey’s back until she found herself suspended, briefly, in midair, before Winn carefully planted her back into the saddle. “Not quite time for bed yet,” Winn said with an alarming degree of jolliness. “Just another hour or so and then it’s nothing but wine, song, and goose-down pillows, what?”

  “If you say so,” Delly said, rattled. “Thanks for keeping me out of the dirt.” She’d never been a fainting sort of gull in her life, not even when she’d lived for days on nothing but gin fumes and spite. She pinched the inside of her elbow by way of delivering a stern warning to her own rebellious carcass, and kept pinching herself at intervals until they finally, finally came to a halt, just as the sun was starting to go down.

  Winn had to help her down off of the donkey, Delly’s stinking old corpse having gone rigid over the course of the past few hours. Then there was all of the bother of hav
ing to get the sinful-minded animal all fed and watered and bedded down for the night, until Delly was finally able to hobble her way into the dark, cramped little pub where they’d be spending the night.

  There was food at least, once they were inside: a choice of kidney pie or an oxtail-and-vegetable stew. The Misses Wexin—the younger now deveiled and ambulatory—gave their regrets and hurried off to their room to dine alone. Delly, for her part, settled down at a table in the dining room to have a big slice of kidney pie. She also ordered and received a beautifully frothing pint of beer to go with it, which she hoisted aloft in order to toast Miss Cynallum and the rest of the assembled ladies. “To our continued survival, then.”

  Miss Dok, who had deigned to dine with the inferior elements this evening, pursed her lips. Winn gave Delly a smile. “I’ll have a swallow to that,” she said, and ordered a bottle of hock and a siphon.

  That was enough to set off the rest of them: Miss Dok consented to a glass of wine, and even the Tothams had a little nip of sherry each. Soon enough, though, they’d all packed themselves up into their rooms like heavy woolens put away for the summer. Then it was only Delly and Winn left, as cozy as could be in the nook they’d claimed for themselves in a corner, drinking and looking at each other. They’d be sharing a room tonight: hadn’t even had to check with each other before they reached for the same key when Miss Dok handed them out. Maybe Winn had just figured that the Tothams would be with each other and Miss Dok would bunk with the Wexins. She hoped it was a bit more than just that, though.

  “Don’t your parents worry about your gallivanting?” Delly asked eventually. She hadn’t any experience in having parents who’d fret over her gallops and gallivants, but she’d heard, at least, that it was something over which parents of young ladies might work themselves up into a real briny foam. “Not the sort of thing that young ladies do, is it, shooting horrible big metal spider-things with pistols,” she said, and then immediately started trying to reel her words back down her gullet by adding, “That is what I imagine might be the opinion of many parents, I mean, and not the opinion of myself.”