ASH ROW

The Grand Duke of Vandermere, Tamsin discovered on a gray Thursday morning, looked entirely ridiculous in a knitted cap.

It was a brown wool one, a size too small, with a bobble at the crown, and Dorian Pike had produced it from the pocket of his greatcoat with the air of a conjuror drawing out a rabbit. Soren had accepted it in silence and pulled it over his black hair, and it sat there above his sharp aristocratic face like a teapot cozy on a statue. He had exchanged his tailored overcoat for a coarse gray jacket borrowed from one of the grooms, and a scarf wound twice around his throat, and he stood in the carriage yard with his gloved hands clasped behind him, regarding his reflection in the window of the hired hackney with an expression of profound and dignified despair.

"Not a word," he said, as she pressed her lips together.

"I wouldn't dream of it, Your Grace."

"You are shaking."

"It's the cold." Her voice cracked. "It's very cold this morning, and I'm sure you'll agree that it would be unkind to laugh at a man who has gone to such lengths to be inconspicuous."

"I thought," said Dorian, with great seriousness, "that the bobble was a nice touch."

Lila, standing between them in a plain gray coat and a woolen bonnet that Tamsin had borrowed from a laundry maid's daughter, gave a delighted snort and clapped both hands over her mouth. Soren looked down at his sister, and the corner of his mouth moved in a way that suggested he was struggling and losing.

"Get in the carriage," he said, "all of you."

…

It had been Tamsin's idea, in the end, though she had not expected him to say yes.

She had put it to him in the Archive, on the evening after the log of the Waterworks Commission, in the dry tone she used for proposals that she expected to be refused. A tutor was entitled to take her pupil on a field trip, she had said. Lila had never seen a real garden, only the tamed and glazed version in the Winter Garden at Vandermere. It would be educational for her to visit the Highmark Botanical Conservatory, and to see the plants of the Silverwater in their natural arrangement. And since the Duke had said he wished to learn the truth about the Blighted, it would be equally educational for the Duke to see how the Blighted actually lived, rather than reading about it in the Chancellor's reports.

"You wish me to visit the slums," he had said.

"I wish you to go for a walk, Your Grace. What you see on the way is a matter of coincidence."

He had considered her for a long moment, and she had braced herself for the rebuke. Instead he had said, very quietly, that he would arrange the carriage.

The hackney rattled down the winding road from the cliff-top, through the Gilded quarter with its tall red-brick townhouses and railed gardens, past the Imperial Mint and the clock tower of the Exchange, and out onto the broad avenue that ran along the river. The city was waking in the gray cold. Newsboys shouted headlines on the corners. A street sweeper pushed a heap of coal ash across the cobbles, and a line of trolley cars rumbled by, packed with clerks in bowler hats. Tamsin sat with her hands in her lap and watched Lila's face, which was pressed so hard against the glass that her nose had gone white.

"Everything is so big," the Princess whispered. "I thought it would be smaller."

"It usually is," said Tamsin gently. "But that's because we're not used to looking."

…

The Highmark Botanical Conservatory stood on a green terrace overlooking the river, a great crystal palace of iron and glass built by the grandfather of the present Emperor. It had a central dome two hundred feet high, with wings that curved away on either side like the arms of a swan, and the glass was clouded with condensation so that the whole structure glowed softly white, like a lamp wrapped in muslin. A crowd of well-dressed visitors was queuing at the entrance. Tamsin kept her head high and her ash-ribbon visible, and the attendant at the turnstile glanced at it, glanced at the party, and decided after a visible struggle not to ask.

Inside, the air was warm and wet and filled with the green perfume of a thousand growing things. They walked beneath palms that rose like fountains of feathers, past ferns as big as umbrellas, through a tunnel of climbing roses that dripped with rain from the sprinklers. Lila walked slowly, her hands clasped behind her back, her head tilted up, her mouth open. She had stopped talking entirely.

"You may touch the leaves," Tamsin murmured, bending close. "The sign says not to, but I think we can excuse ourselves from the sign."

The Princess hesitated, then reached out one finger and brushed the tip of a tree-fern frond. It uncurled at her touch with a soft, papery rustle.

Tamsin saw it a moment later than she should have. The frond was not alone. All along the path ahead of them, in a widening ripple, the plants were stirring. Ferns were unfurling in their wake, and a cluster of orchids on a mossy log turned their faces slowly toward the child like pale moths turning toward a lamp. The roses overhead shivered and let down a gentle shower of petals, and tiny shoots of green came pushing up between the paving stones where Lila's feet had passed.

A woman in a plum-colored hat, a few yards off, said "Oh," in a voice of vague surprise, and turned her head.

"Your Highness," said Tamsin, a little too brightly, and took the child's hand. "I believe I see a particularly interesting specimen of Silverwater sedge in the next gallery. Shall we go and investigate? Captain Pike, would you be so good as to engage that lady in conversation about the humidity?"

"With the greatest pleasure," said Dorian, and strolled off with his hat in his hand, saying something about the remarkable climate of the tropics.

She drew Lila rapidly out of the crowd, around a screen of bamboo, and into a quiet corner of the hothouse where a stone bench stood beside a small lily pond. The petals and fronds slowly stilled behind them. Soren had followed, and he stood a few feet away with his knitted cap pushed back, looking at the green shoots that had pierced the stones. His face was quite pale.

"It was not the damp," he said in a low voice.

"No," said Tamsin.

"The plants all moved for her as she passed," he said.

"I saw it as well." She knelt in front of Lila, who was gazing at her hands with wide, shining eyes. "Your Highness, did you feel anything strange just then?"

"It was warm," whispered the Princess. "It was like when I laugh, only quieter. Like the plants were saying hello." She looked up. "Is that bad?"

"It's not bad," said Tamsin. She put an arm around the small shoulders and felt the frail body trembling like a leaf. "But I would like it very much if we could keep it as a secret, just between us, for a little while. Can you do that?"

Lila nodded gravely.

Over her head, Tamsin met Soren's eyes. He did not speak, but the look on his face was a question, and she knew that he had begun to put the pieces together. She shook her head, very slightly. Not here, and not yet.

…

It was Tamsin who suggested Ash Row, in the end, and she was not sure which of them was more surprised.

It was early afternoon, and the sky had thickened to the color of dirty slate. They had eaten a picnic of bread and cheese on a bench overlooking the river, and Lila had fallen asleep against Tamsin's shoulder. Dorian was whistling softly some distance away, with his back to them, scanning the crowd. The wind had risen, smelling of snow.

"There is something I'd like you to see," she said. "I think you should see it before you decide anything else. It's not far, and it won't take more than an hour."

Soren looked at her, and then at his sleeping sister. "Is it safe?"

"Not particularly," said Tamsin. "But it's real."

Ash Row lay at the bottom of the city, where the cliff ran down to the water. The hackney carried them there through a maze of narrowing streets, past warehouses and coal wharves and rows of grimy brick tenements, until the cobbles gave way to packed black mud and the driver pulled up with an air of relief at the edge of a high wire fence. Beyond it stretched a long, curved lane of ramshackle wooden houses, leaning against each other like drunks. The planks were silvered and rotting. The roofs were patched with tarpaper and flattened tin. Smoke crept sullenly from crooked chimneys and lay along the ground in a gray veil, and the air smelled of coal tar, boiled cabbage, and damp.

"This is where they put us," said Tamsin.

She had not intended her voice to sound so flat. She climbed out of the carriage, lifted Lila down, and waited while Soren stepped to the ground, with his cap in his hand. He stood quite still in the mud and looked at it all. A wire gate stood open at the end of the lane, with a Warden's hut beside it, and over the entrance a painted board read ASH ROW — QUARANTINE DISTRICT NO. 3 — AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY. A pair of bored Wardens in gray coats glanced up from a game of cards, took in Dorian's uniform, and looked away.

They walked in.

…

Nothing she had told him had prepared him for it, and Tamsin could tell, because he stopped speaking after the first hundred yards.

The lane was narrow and dark, closed in by the leaning walls. Children sat in the doorways in ragged clothes, too quiet and too still, their faces gray with soot. Some were coughing, a thin dry rasp that rose from every house and blended into a kind of dreadful chorus. A woman sat on an upturned crate with a sick baby at her breast and a ribbon of ash-gray cloth tied around her arm, and she watched the strangers pass with a flat, wary, hopeless look. At a corner, an old man in a wooden chair, with a blanket across his knees, was fastened to the post of a fence by a long iron chain. A tin cup stood on the ground beside him, and a placard hung around his neck. For the safety of the public.

"He wanders," said a girl, seeing Soren stare. She was perhaps twelve, with a cracked voice and a face that was already old. "He had a fit last winter and walked into the river. The Wardens said they would chain him up for his own good. That was the winter before last."

Soren said nothing. A pulse was beating in his temple, and his gloved hands were clenched.

They walked farther. A line of women stood at a standpipe in the middle of the lane, filling buckets from a thin trickle of gray water. A boy of nine or ten was coughing into his sleeve in the doorway of a lean-to, and the sleeve was dark. A man at the side of the road was boiling a pot of rags over a tin stove. Everywhere there was the smell of wet ash and sickness and a patient, ruined, tireless poverty that looked at Tamsin with faces she knew.

I grew up in a place like this, she thought. I grew up in a place worse than this, but with a better view.

A sound broke the hush ahead of them, a high thin cry, and a boy staggered out of an alley on their left and fell face down in the mud.

…

She reached him before she had decided to move.

He was seven or eight years old, a skinny child with a shock of tow-colored hair, and his body was convulsing with a harsh wet cough that came in long ripping bursts. She turned him over. His lips were blue. Blood and gray froth bubbled at his mouth, and his small chest labored under her hands like a bellows with a hole in it.

"Get back," she said to the gaping onlookers, without looking up. "Give him air. Dorian, the alley."

She dragged the boy by the shoulders into the shadow of the nearest doorway, out of sight of the lane. She was dimly aware that Soren had followed. He took up a position at the mouth of the alley with his back to her, tall and straight against the gray light, his hand on the hilt of the sword hidden beneath his coat, as though he were guarding a gate. Dorian moved to the other side. Lila stayed by the wall, with her small hands pressed to her mouth.

They cannot see us from the lane, thought Tamsin. Nobody can see us in here.

She laid both palms on the boy's chest and let go.

The green light came faster than she had expected. It rushed down her arms and out through her fingers, a surge of cool living warmth, and the walls of the alley flickered with the pale reflection of it. She felt the thick gummy film that had coated his lungs, a salt-dry crust fused to the delicate tissue, and she took it in her mind and began to melt it, a thread at a time, with a slow steady patience that was almost like tenderness. The boy's rattle eased. His blue lips pinked. He gave a long, shuddering sigh and opened his eyes, which were round and gray and astonished.

"Is my mama coming?" he whispered.

"She's coming," said Tamsin. Her own voice sounded very far away. She was aware of blood running down her upper lip, and the buzzing in her ears, and the dim sound of his mother running toward them along the lane, crying. She pulled her hands away, and the boy lay quietly breathing, and the green glow flickered and died.

She sat back on her heels and wiped her mouth. When she looked up, Soren was staring at her over his shoulder, with his hand still on the hilt of his sword and an expression on his face that she could not read.

…

She waited until they were back in the carriage, rattling out of the lane, with Lila asleep again in the corner and the high wire fence receding behind them in the dusk. She had not spoken since the boy's mother, weeping, had caught her hands and kissed them. She felt scoured out, and shaken, and furiously angry.

"This is your law, Soren," she said.

He turned from the window.

"All of it. The Acts, the Wards, the ribbons, the registers. Every bit of that lane was built by the legislation you signed, and the Council you chair, and the Crown you wear. That boy was dying of a disease that doesn't have to exist. That old man is chained to a fence because it's cheaper than a nurse." Her voice shook. "I told you at the start that I would not pretend. I won't make you comfortable about this. I would like to know whether you finally see it."

"I see," said Soren.

His voice was hoarse. He sat with his back against the squabs and his knitted cap in his hands, twisting it, and for the first time since she had known him, he did not meet her eyes. His gaze was fixed on a point on the floor of the carriage. He looked like a man who has been struck by something he did not know existed.

"I have read the reports for eleven years," he said at last, very low. "I have signed a hundred and forty orders for the Wards. I knew the figures. I knew the number of residents and the number of deaths and the cost per head of the water ration. And I never once asked what any of it looked like." He raised his head, and his eyes were bright and terrible. "I see, Tamsin. God help me, I see all of it."

The carriage lurched. Out in the gloom, between two lamp-posts, a man stood in the doorway of a warehouse with a flat black box on a tripod, and as they passed, a white flash of magnesium light blazed up, silent and sudden as a stroke of lightning. No one in the carriage noticed. The man ducked behind his camera and was gone in the dark.

…

It was nearly night when they came back through the gates of Vandermere.

Tamsin carried the sleeping Princess up the back stair herself, since Nurse Crowe had been dismissed for the evening and the footmen were at supper. She laid the child in the great yellow bed, drew the quilt to her chin, and sat in the dim room with her hands folded in her lap. She was so tired that her bones ached. The fire cracked quietly in the grate.

A small hand crept out from under the quilt and found hers.

"Miss Reed, may I go back there?" Lila's voice was drowsy and very quiet. "To that place where the boy was?"

Tamsin's throat tightened. "Why would you want to go back, Your Highness?"

"I don't know." Lila's eyes were closed. "When we walked in, I felt as if everything was humming. Like the plants did in the Conservatory. Everyone in the street had it too, only louder." She turned her face into the pillow. "I felt like I was at home."

She was asleep again within a minute. Tamsin sat in the darkness, with the small hand lax in hers, and felt a cold, slow understanding settle over her like the shadow of a bird. She knew what the humming was. She had heard it all her life in the hollows of the creek, in the voices of the old women, in the song of the water over stones. It was the sound of her own people, calling to one of their own.

She was terrified.