Spellbound Resonance

Chapter 2

The carriage was filled to the brim with children: twelve years of age, fraying socks, soot on their eyelashes and mush in their heads, I imagined. Lady chaperones in long woolen skirts and slickened faces stumbled down the aisle against inertia. One leaned across the seat and flattened the lace trim collar of my blouse without looking me in the eye.

They yelled ineffectually at those who hung over their seats, at the boys who dared take off their caps, at the girls who bunched their dresses above the knee. Sit proper! Wipe your nose! Roll down your sleeves! The pleas went unnoticed. The children of Scurry bickered and caterwauled. We were teeming and swelling and spilling over with adventure. Something new was upon us. Something vast and frightening and intoxicatingly possible.

Possible.

I clung to that word. I wasn’t swept away by the same vicious thrill as the rest. I sat quiet and still. I gripped a badly bound wad of parchment, its pages filled with profile sketches and plant anatomy. I looked dead ahead and saw the possibilities my brain conjured. It drew me pictures of white marble walls and clean canvas. Of starched white blouses and badly stained aprons, imbued with years of paints and clay and charcoal. A landscape stretched in my mind of never-ending rooftops, where the church steeples and bell towers stretched high enough that one could see all the way to the edge of the continent from their rafters.

Soon, the pictures turned to dreams. The chaos aboard ebbed and flowed. The steam chest coughed. The floor rattled atop the cranks. We were carried farther and farther away from all we’d ever known.

I journeyed all the way to the Artisan capital city without a single thought for home. There were only dreams of brilliant crimson blood that turned inky blue.

Farther north, a different train with an asthmatic whistle pulled to a stop at Kenton Hill.

A boy named Patrick Colson boarded with his breath held, wiping sweat from his hands onto the seats. He waved once to his brothers, to his mother, and silently vowed he’d return tomorrow.

The train pulled away with a jolt, and the boy sighed and pressed his back into the wooden bench, swore quietly, curled his nails into his thighs until they bit.

He watched home slip sideways through the window and felt the distance like a slow amputation. A simmer of dread that emerged at breakfast now boiled over.

Beyond the clatter of the tracks, he heard the train’s farewell whistle, and it sounded like the signal of shifts changing in the mines. His dad and older brother always worked the second shift, never the first. When Patrick returned to Kenton Hill tomorrow, he would join them.

Miner’s blood, through and through—black with soot, like his father, and all the fathers that came before. And therein, this journey was redundant for Patrick. He didn’t need the Artisans in their capital city to tell his fortune. What he needed, very badly, was to return to his mother, who waited at the bay windows of a black brick building. He needed to be among those close walls and low ceilings. Back to the yellow grass hills. To the mills and canals and the great gaping holes in the earth that swallowed men and spat them back out. He needed to be waiting by the whistle in the morning when the night shift ended and ensure his father and brother were spat out with the rest. He needed to be there if (God have mercy) none came back up at all.

At that moment, the worker’s whistle was sounding all over the continent, in dozens of different towns, while dozens of different trains battered across tracks toward the nation’s center.

Much like Nina of Scurry, Patrick ignored the frenzy of children. But the Kenton boy did not sleep. He rubbed his nose subtly to catch tears before they fell over his lip. He stifled the sick in his belly with anger, jutted his chin, stared straight ahead. He dared the bloody Artisans to try and take him away to their f*****g school.

They had everything in the world already.

They couldn’t have him.

The chaperones herded us on foot into the heart of Belavere Trench, and I became suddenly, brutally aware that I was a speck on an ever-expanding map.

Scurry had always seemed half collapsed. Even as a younger girl, when the world was supposed to seem made of giants, it had never been big enough for me. Ma used to say that my mind was big and it made the outside small. “Girls like us,” she’d say. “We’re made for bigger places, you hear me?”

I’d heard her.

I’d heard everything.

Heard all the parts she didn’t say, too. Heard the door shut when she’d left. Heard Dad crying in the night. Heard all the neighbors and their snide speculations of where she’d run off to.

I thought she was likely in a place like this—somewhere big. If she wasn’t, then she was in hell, and I didn’t care much to visit her in either place.

Belavere City—a place for dreamers and innovators. For artists. For creation. This city was the seat of creation—the very center of it, and I now stood in its heart.

I’d stolen my uncle’s Anthology of Belavere and studied every mural and fresco and blueprint and diagram. I had bothered my father with incessant questions since I’d had a mind to ask them. Are the boilers Artisan-made, or Crafter? What about the shaft pulleys? The conveyors? Surely the conveyors were invented by the Artisans? It seemed that everything of value, everything worth something, was conceived here.

The towns out in the brink were only the clogged arteries that led to the heart.

I had never seen buildings so tall, so clustered. Their red-tiled roofs and off-white facades matched perfectly with their neighbors’. The doorways were framed in arches, alcoves, steep steps to tiled landings. A girl ahead of me pointed and exclaimed at the domed roof in the distance, its fine sculpted stone decorated with gold. A man stood precariously on its top, and before him, the gold filigree morphed and changed, creating new patterns.

Flowering vines spilled from windows and off balconies. Fat-chested pigeons preened on the gutters. Wagons of coal trundled by with no one behind to push them. The women wore wide-hooped skirts, and the men wore neckties and long coats. They looked up and smiled knowingly as we children passed through. Smaller kids pulled on their mothers’ hands and pointed, lamenting the long wait until they too came of age. A man blew into his closed fist, and light appeared. It burst through the cracks between fingers. When his hand unfurled, the light flew from his palm like a dozen released doves and was captured by the lanterns that lined the street.

“Fire Charmer,” we whispered.

Here, clean water flowed streetside in tiny trenches no wider than a bucket. The residents need only step beyond their stoop to access it. I wondered at the team of water Charmers it must take to move so much water through the city.

There were Craftsmen here, too, and they were easy to spot, for their wagons and carts did not move for them unless pushed. Their clothes were hardly so fine, their brows already beaded in sweat. I supposed even a city that thrived from the minds of the most brilliant Artisans must still require manual labor, and Crafters were gifted with what the Artisans were not—superior vigor, strength, endurance.