Delilah Dawson - The Damsel and the Daggerman

“Put that device back where it goes, madam. I can’t have you mucking about, destroying my work.”

She waved the disruptor under his nose, her finger hovering over the red button. “How do I get by, then?”

He harrumphed. “I suppose we’re stuck with you for a while, at least until you finish your blasted tell-all book. Look, they’re guards. You see? Keep the rabble out of our private space. You want in, you walk up to this clockwork—this bird only—and say, ‘posthumous orangutan grotesque.’ He’ll freeze for a minute, and you can squeeze through. Do you understand, or has your career choice corrupted and shriveled your brain?”

At his three peculiar words, the bird stopped its strange dance, freezing in place. Jacinda leaned closer, listening for the telltale ticking of machinery. It was faint, and Mr. Murdoch smirked at her, waiting for the questions she was sure to ask and he was sure to dodge. Instead, she struggled to hold her tongue until the bird began to gyrate again.

“Posthumous orangutan grotesque,” she said clearly, and it froze. She nodded and ducked around its tail. “Thank you, Mr. Murdoch.”

“You’re not going to interrogate me?” he asked. “I was fully prepared to evade you.”

She looked him up and down from behind the mechanical bird, taking in the hat, the goggles, the layers of clothes, the leather mask that hid much of his face. “I know a closed book when I see one.”

Leaving Mr. Murdoch chuckling in her wake, she trod the same path she’d taken yesterday toward the heavy thunk ing of blades in wood. There was a steady, powerful laziness to the sound. Not rushed. Not unsure. Perfectly measured, every time. Along the way, she greeted the carnivalleros she’d met by name, introduced herself to others. She shook hands, laughed at jokes, and avowed she couldn’t wait to learn everyone’s story. And it was true, which made them like her even more. She’d begun her career as Liam’s assistant on a desert caravan and was proud of her knack for fitting in with new cultures and people, no matter how bizarre they might at first appear. It seemed the clockwork caravan would also soon be under her spell.

As a little girl, she’d been a voracious reader and daydreamer. But she’d never guessed what would happen at age eighteen when she enrolled in a cultural anthropology course, much against her parents’ wishes. On the first day, she’d fallen in love—with Egypt and the dashing young professor. After she had seduced Liam with her body and her brain, he had seduced her with the wide, wild world beyond academia. He never would have thought to study something as geographically available as caravans in Sangland. And yet Jacinda was fascinated by the people here, curious about all their histories.

But the enigma came first. And the enigma in question was watching her walk toward him as if trying to decide whether to run away or swallow her whole.

The daggerman’s posture was almost smug, the curve of his back suggesting a sleek jungle cat, asleep with one eye open. His dark hair was pulled back today, except for the bits that fluttered around his face. A beard shaded his cheeks and dusted his upper lip, enhancing the cut of his jaw. At first, Jacinda thought he used kohl on his eyes as the Bludmen did, but as she stepped closer and stopped about ten feet away, she thought it must be dark eyelashes. But then—no, it was both, the bastard. He blinked, long and slow, his arm never stopping as it flicked knives lazily at a spinning target. A human shape was painted over the red and white bull’s-eye, which spun with the nearly silent ticking she’d come to associate with Mr. Murdoch’s clockwork machinery.

“See something you like?” he asked.

“The surface isn’t what intrigues me, Mr. Taresque. It’s the truth I’m looking for.”

He chuckled and flicked his eyes at the bull’s-eye. Faster than Jacinda could follow, a knife thunk ed into the target, right in the middle of the outlined figure. Right where its heart would be.

“The truth. You want the truth?” She nodded, and he jerked his chin toward the knife sunk in the wood. “Some things are better left buried, don’t you think?”

Jacinda knew well enough when someone was trying to scare her. With a toss of her hair, she marched to the target, her boots crunching over the broken blades of grass. Wrapping both of her gloved hands around the knife’s handle, she managed to tug it out as neatly as possible, considering the blasted thing was rotating slowly with the wood. She held it up, testing its weight, her fingers carefully pinching the leaf-shaped blade.

Marco grinned at her, hands on his hips. “Don’t cut yourself, sweetness.”

Jacinda snorted, raised her arm, and let the knife fly in a black and silver blur to quiver in the ground a few inches from Marco’s boot. He didn’t move. “Even I know throwing knives aren’t sharp, Mr. Taresque.”

His grin widened in appreciation and surprise, and Jacinda’s cheeks flushed with sudden heat. “The tips are sharp enough. If you threw with any spirit, you could strike me down from there.”

Tension rose as they considered each other. Jacinda felt rooted to the earth and yet as if she might fly free at any moment. His violet eyes went a shade darker, which didn’t seem possible. Finally, Jacinda winked, knowing he would go on staring forever, trying to impose his will on her. Let him try. She knew his type well enough. She walked to him, then yanked the knife from the dirt and wiped it on the folds of her brown skirt. Holding it out, she risked looking at his face again, suspecting he would think the dimple in her cheek silly and frivolous. Not that she cared.

“You say I could strike you down, and yet you didn’t budge.”

He chuckled. “I never budge.”

“And I do everything with spirit. I want an interview.”

“I don’t.” He took the knife from her glove, his kid-swathed fingertips dragging over the crease of her palm—the love line, as an old gypsy woman had once told her. Jacinda shivered in spite of herself.

Her palm burning, she pulled out her notebook and pen. “I have influence. The truth could exonerate you. Surely you’d like the world to know you’re innocent?”

Marco stepped closer as he slipped the knife back into a loop on his vest with a whisper of metal on cloth, a strangely intimate sound. From far away, he’d seemed a normal-sized man, but up close, the tips of his blades winking inches away from her body, he seemed large and solid and made of rocks and vines and wildness barely held together by his indigo waistcoat.

“What do I care about the world so long as I know the truth myself?” he said, barely loudly enough for her to hear. It seemed impossible, that his voice could be nothing more than a breath, a warm breeze on her jaw.

She swallowed hard. “You would have freedom. Your good name.”

His glove cupped her cheek, his thumb stroking hot over her jaw as she struggled to hold still. “I always have freedom. I don’t need a good name to know who I am. You, on the other hand . . .”

He released her, but she was frozen in place, chin up where he’d last held it. He walked around her, a few simple steps, but it was as if the polarity of the planet reversed and she was suddenly the moon, something cold and foreign and powerful in itself. Something caught in uncontrollable orbit.

“I know who I am, thank you very much.”

“But you’re not free.”

She shook her head, her mouth open in surprise. “Really?”

His eyes were oddly soulful, gazing into hers, belying a peculiar sort of sorrow she didn’t care to contemplate. “You think you’re free. But something holds you back.”

“Do not toy with me, Mr. Taresque. I’m a widow, not one of those giddy girls by the fire, mooning at you. I know what you are.”