Tiffany Trent: The Unnaturalists

The boy slips the pipe back into his patched coat and comes closer. He takes a few coins out of the driver’s purse. He stoops to take Charles’s. After he takes Father’s, Father kneels next to Charles, checking his breathing.

The boy stands in front of me. I glimpse dark eyes under even darker tousled hair. I hold my purse out toward him, and he undoes the strings with a deft twist of his fingers.

As soon as the purse strings fall open, regret sours my mouth like preservative acid. Nestled amid the coins is my little jade toad, the only thing left that belonged to my mother. Father gave it to me when I was five, as a reminder of the mother I never knew. There are no portraits of her, only this, a thing she carried with her for luck just as I carry it now. I wish fiercely that I had never gotten in the habit of carrying it with me everywhere. I’m not really a sentimental sort of girl, but it’s the one thing (aside from books and the displays I’ve made at the Museum) that I hold dear.

Its carnelian eyes wink at me and I want to snatch it away as the boy inspects it.

“I wouldn’t take coin from a lady,” he says. “But I’ll have this toad here for my troubles, if it’s all the same to you.” His eyes meet mine. I catch a glint of gold in all that dark. I’m taller than him and I do my best to seem as formidable as possible.

“It isn’t,” I say through gritted teeth. I see the leader and his chain out of the corner of my eye, the way some of the other men point their weapons so casually in our direction.

“Good,” the boy says. He plucks the toad from its small nest of coins.

“Syrus!” the leader calls.

The boy grins at me and returns to the Tinkers before I can do more than splutter my protests.

Then, Syrus and his people melt away into the Forest. Charles sits up with Father’s help, clapping a hand to his swelling neck. His tongue is mercifully too thick to talk.

At last, we climb back into the carriage—bereft of all, it seems, but our box and whatever it contains. I shake my head again at what the Tinker leader said. Impossible. Nothing can contain the Waste.

Two resolutions fill my mind as the carriage crawls back into the city.

I will have that toad back.

And I will find out what is in that box.

As the carriage departed, Syrus’s clan gathered round to see his haul. They exclaimed over the coins and his cousin Raine announced proudly that this was dowry enough for her to marry her sweetheart for certain.

Syrus laughed. “Who said I was giving any of it to you?”

Raine slapped him on the head and stomped away, pouting.

Rubbing his crown, Syrus gave everything over to Granny Reed, as she would distribute the wealth among her clan as she saw fit. Granny touched the toad with her forefinger and frowned at her grandson. “You shouldn’t have taken that, boy,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked. “Bring a good price in the hexshops, I’ll bet.”

“We don’t deal in this sort of thing no more. Best get rid of it quick,” she said. “It’ll bring bad trouble, if you don’t.”

“What do you mean, Nainai ?” Syrus asked.

Granny smiled at him, her wooden dentures almost invisible in the dark. “You get to Gather tonight, for starters,” she said. Gathering Night came before Market Day. Some unlucky soul was chosen to gather whatever he could find of value in the Forest to take to the City markets the next day.

Syrus’s shoulders slumped, but he knew better than to complain out loud. He’d really hoped to be rewarded for bringing in such loot—getting to sleep a full night closest to the potbelly stove, for instance. Instead, he’d now be up until the wee hours, digging in the cold forest loam for night-blooming phosphors, midnight morels, whatever he could find that the Tinkers could sell.

While it was true that he was one of the best Gatherers, it certainly wasn’t something he enjoyed doing in the cold.

Granny rounded up everyone else, including the still-pouting Raine. They said quiet farewells before they disappeared back down the road toward the trainyard. Tonight, he knew there’d be roasted apples and dancing. Granny would probably tell one of her clan stories by the light of the stove as everyone bedded down for sleep. A story of the World Before or how the Manticore stole the Emperor’s Heart or . . . maybe even the story of how Granny had found him floating in the river, which Syrus thought was the best story of all. He kicked at a white pebble and sent it skittering off into the dark.

Then he sighed. Best get started. Perhaps if he hurried he could get back early.

He sang a soft calling song in the old language and soon Truffler appeared. The hob’s nose was the real reason Syrus was such a good Gatherer. He could sniff out the best mushrooms from miles away.

Syrus trudged along, complaining to himself about the dew-dampness, the necessity of wandering mostly in the dark, the possible things that might eat him without anyone knowing what had happened to him. “When you’re wailing ’cause I’m nowhere to be found,” he grumbled to his absent Granny, “then you’ll change your tune about sending me off at night.”

Truffler turned and made a hissing noise to silence him. The hairy little hob alternately walked or crawled over the ground, his giant nostrils flaring like a bellows. Sometimes he resembled a dog or pig, but was never clearly one thing or the other. Often, though, the outline of his big nose was all Syrus could see of him in the dark.

Truffler turned and pointed at the dirt. Syrus dug in with his rusty trowel and thrust the morels Truffler had discovered into his sack, except for a few which he gave to the hob as payment for his work. Syrus also always made sure to leave behind a bit of whatever it was he took. Greed didn’t pay the Gatherer, so Granny said.

The mid-autumn chill stiffened his fingers as they worked their way to the river’s edge. Virulen Forest snaked in a long tentacle between the wreck of Tinkerville, where Syrus and his people lived in the ancient trainyard, and the River Vaunting that slid from under the Western Wall of New London. Beyond the Wall, the City Refinery coughed out streamers of phlegm-colored smoke, and the river that rolled past it was slick and shiny as snot. Syrus never swam here, but it was narrow enough that it would have been easy to cross had it not been so very swift and deep.

Something caught Truffler’s attention on the other bank. “Bad. Things,” he said in his halting, gritty voice. The hob crept back toward the trees.

“Wait,” Syrus said.

Truffler stopped, crouching in the cattails at water’s edge and clapping his hands over his ears.

Syrus heard the song before he saw the singer. A prison carriage bearing a Harpy between iron bars and drawn by iron horses rattled toward a gate in the wall. Like most things from New London, the horses were powered by myth , the mysterious dust that provided the city with heat and light, among other things. The Cityfolk claimed there were myth mines far to the north in the Myth Mountains from which the dust took its name. Raw myth was brought to the Refineries, which then distributed power via steam conduits or delivered blocks of refined myth throughout the city.

Or so they said. Granny Reed said that the story of myth itself was a myth. That somehow the Cityfolk captured the souls of Elementals and bound them to their iron or ground them into dust to power their infernal machines. Syrus couldn’t believe anyone could be so cruel, so blatantly unaware of the sacredness of all life, especially that of the Elementals. And yet he knew that the City Lords still occasionally hunted and ate what Elementals they caught. He knew there were places where Elementals were held as curiosities for the Cityfolk to look upon, as though they were lower than beasts.