After a moment to ensure he couldn’t hear anyone inside, he put his hand on the latch. Lifted it. The door swung open, surprisingly silent, given its weight. Nicholas took a steadying breath. His eyes were drawn to the crackling fire at the far end of the room, hidden by a large red velvet chair.
This room, too, had been resurrected to its previous life, when Ironwood had first owned it. Nicholas remembered the patterned rug, smugly imported from across the world. The forbidden leather-bound volumes that lined a small bookshelf had tormented him with their unknowable words. Even the bed seemed to have been carved out of his memory, with its plain white linens and tall posts strung with toile curtains.
He shut the door softly, still gripping the dagger in his hand as he moved across the room. The rhythmic pounding of feet and clapping from the dancers below broke up the silence, their voices dulled to a low rumble as they passed up through the cracks in the floors.
It seemed to him that the best, and possibly only, place to hide was behind the screen in the corner. Even the bed was too low to the ground to slip beneath and wait. Nicholas crossed the room, softening his steps, but was caught by the sudden, sweet smell of tobacco.
He stilled.
Nicholas had initially dismissed the smoke as escaping from the fireplace; as he stepped past the chair, he saw how deeply mistaken he was.
Ironwood’s fine dress coat lay over his lap like a blanket, despite the old man’s position directly in front of the fire. Under Nicholas’s gaze, his grandfather relinquished the powdered wig he’d been toying with to the carpet, where it kicked up a small white cloud.
The man kept his attention on the small book in his lap, his hooded eyelids masking his expression. The way the firelight brightened his round face gave him unmerited warmth, and almost masked the way his cheeks seemed to hang like jowls. One of his fingers rubbed at the notched tip of his chin.
“‘—But there’s a tree, of many, one, / A single field which I have look’d upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone,’” the old man read. “‘The pansy at my feet / Doth the same tale repeat: / Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’”
Nicholas remained as still as stonework, as if he’d been run through the heart with a blade. His every last thought fled.
“Wordsworth,” he explained, setting the small volume aside. “I find I don’t have the patience for merrymaking these days, but there is comfort in reading.”
He rose to his feet and laid his coat over the chair. Nicholas took an instinctive step back, both at the suddenness of the movement and the weary tone of Ironwood’s voice. The old man brushed past Nicholas as if he weren’t holding a dagger in his hand, and moved toward the corner of the room where he kept his whiskey.
Move, Nicholas ordered himself as the man poured two glasses. Move, damn you!
Without a word, Ironwood offered one glass to Nicholas, and, when he didn’t take it, drank it down himself in one swift gulp.
“How does this house speak to you, I wonder?”
That jostled Nicholas out of his stunned silence. It was impossible for the old man to know his thoughts—he recognized this—but the other implication seemed worse; their minds followed similar tracks. Their hearts spoke the same language.
“It speaks to me of regret,” Ironwood said, pressing the rim of his glass to his temple. And this was the precise moment Nicholas began to feel the hair prickle on the back of his neck; for Cyrus Ironwood was a great many things, but none of them were maudlin or sentimental.
Drunk? Nicholas wondered, fingers tightening around the hilt of the dagger. He’d seen the man drink three bottles of wine himself and remain sober enough to take business meetings. In fact, Nicholas had always assumed it was a carefully cultivated skill, this tolerance for alcohol, meant to disarm rivals and potential business partners who hadn’t a prayer of keeping up.
Every aim, every word, every action from this man was meant to disarm his opponent. This false sentimentality was surely the weapon he’d picked to rattle Nicholas, and, all at once, he was furious with himself for falling for it.
“I wasn’t aware,” he heard himself say, “that you were acquainted with a feeling like regret.”
“Ah,” Ironwood said, saluting him with his glass. “And yet, I’ve regrets enough to paper the walls of this house.”
He finally looked at Nicholas, studying him in the room’s relative darkness. “From the moment you entered, I wondered why—I have always known there would be a when, but the why of it, that was the mystery. Because of your status when you lived in this house? Because your mother received Augustus’s unwanted attentions and was sold away? Because you felt slighted by the family? Because you broke our contract, and knew that this was the only way out of it? Or is it, Samuel, simply for the satisfaction?”
Nicholas knew by the gleam in the man’s eye, by the use of his birth name, that he’d laid out all of these strikes the way a chef would lay out his knives, debating which one was best to use to make a cut.
“Or…is it because you’ve come to take revenge for her?”
Nicholas swung the dagger around, tracking the man’s movements. Rather than go toward the chest of drawers or his bedside table, he went toward the trunk at the foot of his bed.
“No,” Nicholas said, knowing full well that he could be hiding a flintlock or rifle in it. “Take a step back.”
“Of course,” the man said, with mocking graciousness. “If you’ll retrieve the package inside. I have, after all, been keeping it for you.”
Nicholas recognized this bait for what it was, but he was disarmed by the man’s demeanor. Ironwood was never more truthful than when he was trying to inflict a mortal wound on another person’s heart.
Keeping his eye on Ironwood, keeping his dagger out, Nicholas bent to retrieve a flat parcel, wrapped in parchment and tied with string. It looked as if it had come a great distance, whether that was miles or years.
“Go on, open it,” Ironwood said, clasping his hands behind his back.
And, God help him, Nicholas did. He tore into the paper with one hand. Even before he saw the fabric—the sheer gömlek, the emerald chirka—he smelled jasmine; he smelled the soap-sweet scent of her skin.
And he smelled blood.
The feeling in his hands was gone. His pulse began to pound at his temples. So much blood, the fabric was stiff with it. It flaked off as he ran his fingers across the delicate embroidery, moving along the seams of the jacket until they snagged at the ragged hole at the shoulder, where she’d been shot.
“A guardian sent these to me weeks ago,” Ironwood said. “As proof of Etta Spencer’s death. Her father claimed her body, but I thought you might want the reminder of her personal effects.”
This is what remains….
Memory would fade from him, her footprints would be washed away—this was all he was to have of Etta Spencer now.
“You did this….” He breathed out, his gaze snapping up. “You—”
“Yes,” Ironwood said, his face drawn, as if—as if he cared. As if he felt sorry for this. Nicholas’s fury overwhelmed him, and he slashed out with the dagger, catching the man across the chest. Ironwood leaned back in time to avoid being gutted, but a gash of red extending from his shoulder to his hip began to ooze. Nicholas felt frantic, sloppy, like he was damn near to clawing his own face off to try to release the boiling anger and grief. He did not want to collapse onto his knees. He did not want to scream himself hoarse.
“All because you want one blasted thing, when you already have everything! You aren’t satisfied with the destruction you wrought; you need the tool that will make it complete,” Nicholas seethed, knowing full well that the man’s guards would be coming in, that they’d kill him where he stood. And yet, Ironwood didn’t move, didn’t taunt, didn’t defend himself.
Kill him—just finish him! his mind was bellowing, but he couldn’t move from that spot.
“What you feel n
ow,” Ironwood said, “I have felt every day of my life, for forty years.”
“Don’t say another word,” Nicholas said. “You know nothing of me or what I feel. Nothing.”
“Don’t I?” Ironwood said carefully, glancing over at the portrait by his bedside. Minerva. His first wife. “I can see how badly you wish to stick that dagger in my heart, and I cannot blame you.”
“You don’t have a heart,” Nicholas snarled. “If you did, you never would have dragged Etta into any of this. She wouldn’t be—”
He couldn’t bring himself to finish, coward that he was.
“And if Rose Linden hadn’t betrayed us and hidden the astrolabe, if her parents hadn’t fought as hard as the rest of us to control the timeline, if our ancestors had never used the astrolabes to begin with—do you see how futile this line of reasoning is, Nicholas? We can live in the past, but we cannot dwell there,” Ironwood said. “What you cannot seem to grasp is that the astrolabe isn’t a tool of destruction, it is one of healing. It can right wrongs. Save lives.”
Save her.
He had not even considered that. How was it possible he had never once considered that by waiting out a year, he might travel back to the spot where she was to die, and save her, before the Ironwood men had a chance to reach her? That he could find a way to prevent Etta from being taken?
“You would risk,” Nicholas began, “orphaning countless travelers, shifting the timeline, for your own selfishness.”
“For love,” Ironwood corrected. “For her.”
There was nothing ironic in his tone, or even condescending. Nicholas shook his head in disbelief, his chest bursting at its seams with dark, humorless laughter. As if this man had any inkling of what that word entailed, the scale of it.
But he hated the softer part of him, the one that whispered, over and over, Forty years. Forty years. Forty years.
Forty years of this feeling. This unbearable tightness, of being caught in a cage of helpless rage and grief.
Because some part of Nicholas was listening. Some part of him heard the truth in the old man’s words, and was reaching, grasping for the solution presented to him. Nicholas had the oddest feeling that he was back on his deathbed, a fever wracking his brain. There was a haze about the man, an unreal quality.
“You seem to believe that I am blind to my own faults,” Ironwood said. “But I improved the world. I did my part to fix it, after years of fighting between the families. I brought us stability and order, and brought the worst of the travelers to heel. As long as the astrolabe is in play, we will never have peace.”
“Is that why you let your sons die?” Nicholas asked sardonically.
The man rasped a hand over his chin, his shoulders sagging. “I have been asked to sacrifice so much, and I have come so far, and still…still we die out, like an inferior species. I wonder from time to time what my life would have been like, had I not been tasked with this role. I think I might have been a merchant, a sailor. You’ve felt it, too, haven’t you? How vast the world is, when you cannot see anything but water on the horizon?”
“Stop it,” Nicholas said. “I know what it is you’re doing—”
“The moment I knew you had that inclination, that you were a natural…I recognized myself in you,” Ironwood said. “My father. His father. All forged in the same fire. And when you fought so hard to leave our family’s service, I knew for certain; for a true Ironwood cannot bear stagnation, or to be held against his will. You made your brother seem like nothing more than a yearling. He never had the grit he needed to manage the family—that grit which has kept me searching for the astrolabe all these long years. That which brought you here tonight.”
Nicholas startled at the word brother. As long as he had known the man, he had never heard him use that phrase, without qualifications.
“I am nothing like you,” Nicholas said. The old man rose to his full height, looking him in the eye.
“You have not yet lived a full life,” he said. “You have not accumulated the triumphs and the sorrows. When you are my age, you will look back and see a stranger, and then all you will have to your name will be your convictions.”
He believes he has done right by us all, Nicholas realized. There was nothing false or scheming about his words. He had spent years as a child cowering in the servants’ hall and shrinking back at the sight of the man as he strode through the house. Like a soldier, his swinging fists always seemed to enter the room first.
In his youth, when he traveled with Julian, he had seen a calculating emperor who demanded tribute from his followers and tribulation from his enemies. And now he saw…an inverse of himself. A warning of what might come from rationalizing the lapse of his own morals, compromising his deepest values with the false promises of just this once and never again.
“You are my true heir,” Ironwood said. “You alone. I was a fool for squandering your potential for so many years. We can begin again. I am not as young as I once was, and there are so many now who would betray me. I need your assistance in certain tasks, as a guard, as my eyes in places I cannot be.”
I cannot kill him. Sophia and Li Min were right, but their reasoning was flawed. To give over to the baser instincts of revenge would hand the old man a victory; it would undo Nicholas utterly, splinter him more and more with each year. He could not damn himself with this. There was nothing so important as being free from this man, his poisonous words and bloody legacy. If that meant his own death, then at least he might escape this man’s pull that way, and deny him an heir.
His grip on the dagger tightened, until he felt the dragon on its hilt imprinting its shape into his skin, lending its ferocity.
“You say these things like you know where to find the astrolabe,” Nicholas said.
“I do. It’s found its way into the Witch of Prague’s hands,” the old man said. “I received the invite to the Belladonna’s auction only yesterday. We only need to bid now and it’s ours—I have far more secrets to tempt her than anyone else who may come.”
The words swept over Nicholas’s skin like fire, blistering through the layers of muscle and bone. The Witch of Prague, indeed. What a fool he’d been. If he’d known at the beginning of their appointment that she was the original bad penny, he would have parsed her words more carefully. In the last report I received, yes, a Thorn was still in possession of the astrolabe….
So precisely phrased. If he hadn’t been blinded by his own desperation he might have been able to dissect what she didn’t say. In the last report. Not presently.
The woman was a fearsome creature, choosing and evaluating her words with the mind a jeweler would pay to buying precious stones. Loathsome, of course, but there was no denying her cunning; if it hadn’t been for the fact that she’d poisoned him, he might even respect her for it, just that small bit. No wonder she had survived Ironwood’s rule. She was that rare, dark thing that thrived by tricking the light into passing over it, that fed only on shadows and deceit.
“You need time to think on this, I know,” Ironwood said. “But we haven’t any. You—I must tell you something, and it cannot be shared outside of this room. I will not have panic in our ranks, and I know logic prevails for you as it does for me.”
Our. Our ranks. Of course, to Ironwood, Nicholas’s acceptance was a given.
“I’ve had a great rival for the astrolabe these many years—”
“The Thorns,” Nicholas said, interrupting him.
“No,” the old man said. “He who has no name, but has lived generations. I believe him to be one of the original time travelers, for there has never been record of him apart from legend. He has found the other copies of the astrolabe, drained them of their power. He cannot have this one, too.”
Nicholas, again, listened to the tale of the alchemist and his children, forcing his face to remain as stone. On his hand, the ring burned.
“Why does this…Ancient One seek it?” Nicholas asked at the end. “And why should it matter beyond your persona
l gain that he take it?”
Ironwood lowered himself onto his bed, staring into the fire. “There is an incantation, a spell of sorts, I’m sure of it, that bleeds the power of the astrolabes and feeds him, extending his life beyond its natural years. But it must destroy the astrolabe itself, leave it as an empty shell. And that cannot happen.”
“Why is that?” This was in line with what Remus Jacaranda had explained to them, but there was a thread of worry in the old man’s voice now that made him wonder if there was something more to this. Something worse.
“Because, if the legends passed down within our family hold true,” he said, “destroying the astrolabe will not just revert the timeline back to its original state…but it will also return every traveler to their natural time, and seal the passages forever.”
The dagger slipped from Nicholas’s hand. His mind was adrift in the storm of possibilities that tore through it.
He lies. He lies with every breath. He wants you to help him. He will do anything to have it.
But the fear—the slick, sweaty coating of it over the old man’s words—that painted a portrait of truth, because if there was one thing the old man had never been in Nicholas’s eyes, it was afraid. Or vulnerable.
Late at night, while at sea, Hall would sometimes wake Chase and Nicholas and bring them up on deck to learn to read the stars and navigate by them. Once, while he’d been stretched on his back, the sails flapping sweetly above them, the sea rolling beneath them, he’d seen a star fall from the sky, scorching the air with its speed and brilliance.
His next thought occurred to him in much the same way. He does not want the astrolabe destroyed, because it would dismantle the traveler life. It would ruin him. Break his rule.
It wasn’t enough to take this man’s life. This was the problem with these traveler families, their history. Another cruel man or woman would step up their own savagery to fill the void he left behind, and they would all be thrown into further chaos. Better to end this, once and for all—to spare the families, the world, the kind of grief he felt now.