The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry Read online

  He smiled. “Just so long as you don’t.”

  Jok insisted on escorting her back up to the house, which Delly thought was all right of him. She gave his hand a squeeze and said, “Keep your chin up,” for want of anything better to say, then found her way up to her room.

  It was a room for guests, not for servants, and was probably one of the nicest rooms Delly’d ever set foot in, let alone been inside of while taking her clothes off. She got herself all cleaned up and ready for bed, and put her shoes out into the hallway—she’d seen other pairs out there and figured she might as well give it a whirl just to find out if someone would put chocolates in them overnight—and then fell into bed and immediately fell asleep.

  She was shaken awake by Winn at some incomprehensibly early hour of the morning. It took her a while to focus her eyes. Then she said, “Huh?”

  “Your turn to keep watch,” Winn said. “Turn right when you leave our room, head down the hall, past the staircase, second-to-last room on that end of the hall. I’m dead on my stumps,” she added, and fled to bed.

  Delly grunted, still half-unconscious, and went through the motions of dressing herself and heading out the door before she realized, to her befuddlement, that her shoes had vanished. Well, hell. Maybe they put out the ones that they wanted thrown away. Nothing to be done about it now, though: she trudged her way down the hall in her stocking feet and settled herself outside the door, passing a few very stern and intimidating axe-wielding suits of armor as she went. There she waited, with perhaps less anxiety than the situation might have warranted, for someone to attempt a vicious murder.

  6

  Wherein Things Go to Hell and Come to Light

  There were, unfortunately, no attempted murders in the night. Instead there was only a very contemptuous-looking lady’s maid sweeping past Delly and into the room with a tray of tea and toast, and a bleary Dellaria unpeeling herself from her position like cheap wallpaper and stumbling back toward her own room, wondering vaguely whether or not there might be tea and toast for the working classes. When she got back to her room, she blinked: her shoes had been returned to her, looking cleaner than they’d been the day she bought them. “Sakes,” she murmured, and picked them up to carry them inside.

  Winn was already there, sitting at the desk in the corner of Delly’s room in a dressing gown, writing a letter. There was a steaming pot on the table and the smell of coffee in the air, good and strong enough to make Delly ready to weep. Winn looked up when Delly walked in. “No exciting developments, then?”

  “None other than my shoes being cleaner than I’ve ever seen ’em,” Delly said, and let herself thump down onto the edge of the bed with a sigh.

  “Well, that’s something, at least,” said Winn, with a kind of teeth-baring good cheer. “Boosts the spirits to have tidy-looking shoes, what? Suppose we’ll just have to be on our toes, waiting for grisly death for the duration! Might as well be looking our best! Coffee?”

  Delly eyed her. “Didn’t get much sleep, then?” she asked, in what she hoped was a delicate fashion. She started inching sidelong toward the coffeepot, with the general thought that if things began to plummet downward she could always snatch up the coffeepot and canter off. “Just a small cup, if you don’t mind.”

  Winn poured until the cup was filled to the very brim, sloshed a bit onto her hand, said, “Blinking relent!”—there was, Delly thought, something a bit lamentable about polite replacements for a bit of good strong, healthy bad language—and then mopped everything up with a handkerchief, handed the coffee over, and said, “Awfully sorry, old thing. I’m afraid that all of this has been working on the nerves a bit. You’d think that a murderer from the upper classes would have the decency to get their murdering done on some sort of appropriate schedule, what?”

  “Well,” Delly said after a moment. “That sort of old-fashioned adherence to schedule is something we would like to think that we could expect from our better class of murderers, but you know how standards are, these days.”

  “In the blinkin’ privy,” Winn said gloomily, and they sipped their coffee in silence for a while, the room cloaked generously in despond. “I suppose we might as well go down for breakfast, then.”

  “Oh, is there breakfast?” Delly said, enormously relieved. “I thought that perhaps it was just toast and tea and self-denial, for the gentler classes.” It would explain a lot about the publicly displayed attitudes of members of the assemblage, if they were making laws and generally jerking about the nation under the influence of starvation-induced headache.

  Winn, as it turned out, had the right idea. There was all manner of breakfast, a whole vast sideboard covered in enough food for an army regiment. Delly started out pleased about it, and filled up her plate, and ate her fill, and then was so struck by the excess of it—all of that food that no one would eat, that would probably be fed to the dogs—that she pushed her plate away, disgusted, and turned to Winn. “What’s our schedule, then?”

  It wasn’t the worst schedule that Delly had ever been induced to follow—though, to be evenhanded about it, the last time she’d been on a schedule she’d been living in a charitable house for wayward girls. Their schedule at the manor included considerably less scrubbing and praying, and considerably more cards and teas and reading books and long, aimless walks on the manor grounds. Delly marveled at it: at the long, easy laxness of the days, at the almost wizardly effortlessness that came with money. There was food before you realized that you were hungry, clean clothes when you’d barely dirtied them, hot water, endless gaslight. Even breathing was effortless when someone else had already carried away anything that might make a stink. Stink was left to places like the ones that Delly had grown up in. Her childhood memories all seemed much worse now, and people who’d grown up with something better seemed like something other than ordinary people. Like trees, maybe, or tigers, or creatures that lived at the bottom of the sea. The sort of creature that wouldn’t have any reason to know how human beings went about their long, stupid, grasping little days.

  Winn noticed Delly’s sour mood a bit but chalked it up to nerves over what might happen next. The murderer had been quiet. There hadn’t been any attempts since they’d arrived at the manor. It did, Delly had to admit, wear on one. There was something distinctly unnatural about sitting about in a nice parlor, or walking through a garden, or eating a lovely dinner, and all the while thinking, Will it be now? What about now? Is this when another one of those creatures will leap at us from the dark?

  It might have been the lack of sleep that was starting to wear on her. She kept going to see Jok to gallop the nerves out, and then she’d get to her bed at midnight and snatch three hours of sleep out of the jaws of nervous jitters before returning to her post at Miss Wexin’s door. After the second night like this it occurred to her that her very presence might, in fact, be preventing the thing that she was worrying about. It would take a bold murderer indeed to sail past the disgruntled fire witch standing at a fine lady’s doorway, murder the lady in question in complete silence, and then sail back out again while remaining entirely undetected by said fire witch. A canny murderer would be much more likely, she thought, to see said fire witch and head back to her own warm bed, probably whilst shaking her fist toward the ceiling and vowing eventual vengeance against her sworn enemy, Dellaria mostly-on-the-face Wells.

  Delly had hauled herself through five full days of this unending and relentless ass-up-headery when, at breakfast, the Miss Wexins announced a treat. “An excursion,” Miss Mayelle said, “to a renowned local beauty spot overlooking a gorge.” Whatever the fuck that meant.

  Winn, who had been eating toast and sausages with infuriating serenity, looked only mildly interested in this announcement but pulled Delly aside as soon as the meal was over and the young ladies had retreated to change into their walking clothes. “If you were a murderer,” she said, “what d’ye think you’d make of an opportunity
to take an excursion to a renowned local beauty whatsit overlooking a blinkin’ gorge with your intended victim?”

  “I’d figure I had a real prime opportunity to shove a well-bred young lady into a gorge, that’s what I’d make of it,” Delly said.

  Winn tapped her finger against her temple in a very knowing way. “We’d best keep her in our sights, I’d say.”

  “Heard and affirminated,” Delly said, with a feint toward briskness, and went off to pretend that she had clothes to change into that were any more well-suited for walking than the ones she was currently wearing.

  This useless exercise continued for half an hour or so, after which all of the young ladies and lady-adjacent personages trundled down to the drive and clambered into one big open carriage and two contrivances that Winn and the Miss Wexins referred to as dogcarts, despite the fact that the carts were pulled by horses and entirely unendoginated. Winn, to Delly’s great astonishment, positioned herself in the driver’s seat of one and gestured for Delly to sit beside her. “So you’re a coachman now as well, then?” Delly asked, once she’d managed to clamber atop the thing.

  “I can drive a bit,” Winn said, as serene as ever. “Bit of a bother to always have to wait for a man and a chaperone before you can harness up the horses and have a bit of a jaunt, what?”

  “Suppose so,” Delly said. “I generally jaunt under my own power, without any animals or chaperones coming into it.”

  Winn laughed at that and performed whatever odd noises and arm-flapping maneuvers were necessary to encourage the horse into forward motion, and they were off.

  Delly found that she was, with extreme reluctance, enjoying herself. Riding in a little cart through shady country lanes with cushions under her particulars was a whole relefting span better than bumbling along a dusty highway on donkeyback. There were cool breezes and babbling brooks, chirping birds and all of the other expected Joys of Country Living furbelows. “It’s not half-bad out here,” she said after a while.

  “Glad to hear that you think so,” Winn said. “Despite the close proximity to a possibly villainous horse, what?”

  “Steady on, Cynallum,” Delly said, because that was the sort of thing that Winn generally said when she thought that someone was coming on a bit stiff, and she wanted to make Winn laugh.

  It worked. Then Winn said, “Who’ve you been flitting off to meet when you’re meant to be getting the old nine-odd reclining hours?”

  Delly felt her mouth go dry. Shit. Shit. Wasn’t this a development. The very-high-quality prospect she had every intent of slowly and deliberately cultivating over the next week had caught her out fucking a footman. She didn’t reply immediately, as she was too preoccupied with thrashing about in search of a response that would ring more pleasantly than I’ve been getting up to no good with the Gallen footman in the gamekeeper’s cottage. Winn, fortunately, spoke again before Delly’s hand was forced. “Awfully sorry, Wells. None of my blinkin’ business, is it? Not a sporting sort of question to ask a gull, what?”

  Delly’s tongue, at this juncture, unglued itself from the roof of her mouth and devoted itself to making ill-considered statements. “I could stop,” she said, “if you’d like me to.”

  The ensuing pause weighed more than the dogcart.

  “There’s no need for that,” Winn said. “No use in you altering your habits because you’re worried about the sensibilities of us—clanners, when it’s no business of ours what you do in your own free hours.”

  “It wouldn’t be because you’re a clanner that I’d give it up,” Delly said quickly. There was something very unnatural about a clanner calling herself a clanner. If Delly was in the assemblage she’d work to have the practice outlawed. “It’s because of you, particularly. I won’t flit off to meet anyone if you’d rather I didn’t.” There. She’d played her hand, and earlier than she would have liked to. She hadn’t had time to work up as much of a bond as she’d have liked. That was important, in a long game: you had to get them to trust you first before you really went in for the take. But it was too late for thinking too much now: part of running games was knowing that a mark wasn’t always going to do exactly what you expected. Winn had moved first, and now Delly would just have to try to keep up. She turned so she could try to look at her face, and pitched her voice soft and trembling. “You angry at me?”

  She didn’t look angry. She was blushing, which struck Delly as auspicious. “I wouldn’t like to—tell you how you ought to comport yourself, Delly.”

  A Delly, even. Sakes. “I almost wish you would,” Delly said. A vile lie. “Ain’t you worried about my ruination?” A little extra dirt-common color, since Winn seemed to like it when she acted like the trash she was. Thought it was romantic to be gutter-raised, probably. Delly’s mam might be offended by that, but Delly sure as shit wasn’t. Better a prospect who liked her being trash than a prospect who treated her like it.

  Winn’s eyes went wide. They weren’t very exceptional, Winn’s eyes. Just brown and medium-sized and occupying the usual positions in the head. Nothing that a gull might find herself accidentally lost in. Just as well. “I’d never call you ruined,” she said. “My mother’s a troll. She didn’t raise me to think that a gull ought to be tossed out with the bathwater for a bit of, ah. High spirits. And you needn’t worry about me gossiping. I shan’t breathe a word of it. Jolly bad form to go chattering away about indiscretions that you were too dull to get up to yourself. Only—bit jealous, I suppose.”

  Delly’s rusty old heart gave a clang. She was going to be rich. She was going to be householded into the headmanship. She was going to be the heroine of the sort of novel that nice young ladies like Winn didn’t read. “Jealous?” she asked, like she was a great dizzified dolt and didn’t know what Winn could possibly mean by the word.

  “Dreadfully sorry,” Winn said quickly. “Demmed forward of me. Forget that I said it.”

  “I’d rather not,” Delly said, doing her best to look coyly at her from the corners of her eyes. “Forget, I mean. I’m—ever so flattered, Winn.” She was immediately disgusticated with herself. Who the fuck said ever so flattered when they weren’t running a game?

  Winn didn’t seem to have noticed. “Really?” she asked, and went pinker. “Well—I’m wretchedly blinkin’ glad to hear it.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know if—I know what the proper way to declare my intention to court you would be if, ah. If we’d been at school together. Might have to consult the old etiquette manuals, though, when it comes to you.” The dogcart had come to a stop: the horse was having a bit of a graze on the path in front of it. Winn shook herself and beseeched it to move by means of more arm shaking and odd noises. Once they were in motion again, she said, “I do chatter on dreadfully, don’t I? Like a runaway train. Oughtn’t be thinking about any of this until our posting here’s over, what? Got to stay the course and defend the lady from brigands before we can set ourselves to—the lighter side of life.” She looked pained. “Blinkin’ fates, won’t you say something and spare me from myself, old thing?”

  Delly laughed, and that suddenly broke the spell a bit, snapped the tension that had been winding tighter between her shoulder blades. It was just Winn, that was all. No reason to act like she was talking her way out of the gallows. She had her mark well and truly netted already, but besides that, she liked Winn. She generally tried not to let herself get fond of a mark—defeated the whole purpose, really, if you liked them too much to cheat them out of a few sen—but this was, after all, different from taking a mark for the cost of a casual bet on a card game. It occurred to Delly all at once that this was a game that, if she played it right, could last the rest of her mortal span, which was a fair span longer than she could keep up a grateful simper. If she liked Winn, that was only an excellent development, and one that might increase her chances of success.

  “I think you’re right,” she said finally. “It’s nothing we should wo
rry about right now. And I figure I’ve got the fortitude to wait a week before the—lighter topics.”

  “Oh, well. Jolly good, then,” Winn said, and then cleared her throat again and urged the horse forward.

  They chatted a bit about nothing in particular—about nothing in par-theater, specifically: Winn had seen a few plays on opening night that Delly had seen two years after, in the washout-actor productions they held in Dogbite Alley. They praised the good ones—Delly could tell when the writing was good, even if the actors were slurring their ways through the production—and mocked the bad ones, and generally acted like two people who weren’t locked in an agonizing spasm of discomfiture until they reached the point of their jaunt where they were meant to leave the dogcart and walk.

  This, fortunately, meant that they could mingle amongst the other ladies and were no longer forced to painfully associate exclusively with the object of their filthy un-Elgarite intentions while perched atop an irritatingly romantical dogcart. Winn walked with her equals, Miss Dok and the Miss Wexins, while Delly went with the Tothams. After a few moments, Delly could only feel pity for the quality ladies: Mrs. Totham was in absolute raptures over all of the birds evident in the surrounding foliage, and her joy in observing and commenting upon them was irresistible. Delly did her best to contribute to the dear old thing’s delight and peppered her with asinine questions on the various birds, and their plumage, and their individual habits, just for the pleasure of witnessing Mrs. Totham’s uncomplicated happiness over responding.

  After what struck Delly as an inordinately long walk—she had worried that the enormous breakfasts of the better classes might have endowed them with legs powerful enough to withstand endless miles of casual jaunting—they arrived at the Renowned Local Beauty Spot. It was, it turned out, less a spot than a stripe: a whole long, winding path along the edge of a horrible drop above a deep, rocky gorge lined at the bottom by a blue-and-white ribbon of river.