The Damsel and the Daggerman

.4.

“So what do you know about Marco Taresque?”

The three girls around the table giggled behind their hands, telling Jacinda exactly what she wanted to know: he’d had absolutely nothing to do with any of them.

“He just showed up one night,” the bearded girl breathed, woolly cheeks in her gloved hands. “Materialized out of the smoke like he was part of the fire.”

“Everything was smoky that night, Abi. He just happened to walk out at exactly the right moment.” Demi rolled her eyes. “And honestly, he showed up that afternoon. Marched across the moor like anyone else who’s vaguely suicidal. You just didn’t see him because you were asleep in your wagon. It was far less dramatic then.” But the girl’s eyes went misty anyway, betraying her feelings about the mysterious stranger.

“Master Crim said he’s dangerous, and that’s good enough for me.” Cherie shook her blond curls, her mouth in a prim line. “Honestly, he looks like a wastrel. Like he did what the papers say he did.”

“Oh, he was in the papers?” Jacinda asked.

Abi leaned close, her beard wagging excitedly and dipping into her oatmeal. “Master Stain don’t like us to read about the cities, but the audience drops a paper every now and then. There was a drawing, and there’s a price on his head.”

“Down south, they call him the Deadly Daggerman,” Cherie whispered.

“I’d like to see that story. Do you have it still?”

Demi blushed. “Crim found us with it and took it away. Said it was just another case of a money-grubbing journalist making a sensation out of hearsay and ruining a man’s life in the process.” She raised her eyebrows and stared at Jacinda as if daring her to continue the line of questioning.

Jacinda knew when an interview was headed downhill. She would find a better time to talk to the girls about their own stories when they weren’t on the offensive—or packed together in a giggling gaggle.

With a warm, professional smile, she stood, tucking her notebook under her arm without a single word written on the page. This interview had been doomed from the start, but she had learned more than she anticipated. Now she knew why Marco wouldn’t talk to her. And she also knew that he hadn’t been breaking hearts among the young and easily breakable. He went up a notch in her estimation, considering how very easily he could have preyed upon these moon-eyed girls. It shouldn’t have mattered, as she was simply a journalist gathering facts. And yet . . . it mattered.

“Thank you all so very much for your time.”

“But what do you know about Marco?” Demi asked, her eyes almost pleading. “Did he really do it?”

Jacinda reached out to pat the contortionist on the shoulder, forgetting for a moment that the girl was bludded and seeing only a tender young soul filled with longing, as she herself had once been. “That’s what I’m going to find out, dear,” she said.

She moved across the dining wagon to a booth shared by the bookish couple she recognized from her earlier encounter with the clockwork bird. They sat hip-to-hip on the same side, their heads together as they shared a joke. She cleared her throat, and they both looked up, suddenly going silent.

“Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?” She held out her notebook and pen with an inviting smile. Without a word, the man slid out of the booth, tipped his hat farther over his eyes, and disappeared.

“You’ll have to forgive Mr. Murdoch,” the lady said, moving over as if trying to absorb whatever warmth he’d left behind. “He’s very shy of strangers.”

“And I’m as strange as they come.” Jacinda picked the woman’s looks apart with professional interest, noting her pretty face, owlish costume, shabby gloves, and guarded copper-colored eyes. “Are you part of the circus?”

The woman chuckled softly to herself. “I don’t look much like a caravan act, do I? Not at all bright and flashy. I run the butterfly circus, you see. And Mr. Murdoch is the caravan’s artificer, who invented my equipment and all the clockworks. I’m Imogen, by the way.”

“Jacinda Harville.”

“And you’re a reporter?”

“A journalist, yes. I’m here to write a book about the caravan.”

“Oh, that sounds fascinating. The city folk will just gobble it up, won’t they?”

Jacinda grinned. “That’s what I’m hoping. Are you from the city, then?”

Imogen blushed and looked down. “Yes. London. And it was just as dreary as the penny dreadfuls make it sound. I’d be glad to show you the clever intricacies of my butterfly circus sometime, if that will help your story.”

A flutter of color caught Jacinda’s eye, and she noticed a small orange butterfly slowly flapping dotted wings from its perch on Imogen’s hat. Her breath caught.

“Is that . . . real?”

Imogen chuckled. “Of course not. Everyone knows butterflies are extinct. Mr. Murdoch is very talented, you know, with his machines.”

Jacinda’s face didn’t change, as she knew how to mask her emotions—unlike Imogen, who couldn’t lie worth a damn. The keen-eyed journalist would have bet everything in her conveyance that the butterfly on her companion’s head was indeed real, but judging by the way Imogen was wringing her hands and glancing nervously at Jacinda’s notebook, she would have to change course soon or lose the meek woman’s trust forever.

“What I’m really curious about is the new knife thrower. Do you know anything about him?”

Imogen sucked air through her teeth. “He’s a bit of an enigma, that one.”

“Have you seen the papers?”

With a nod, Imogen reached to the bench beside her skirt and produced a stack of ragged newspapers, carefully folded. She shuffled through them before sliding yellowed paper across the table. “I get the one from London, although it arrives terribly late. I believe the Wanted poster is in this edition, although there’s very little actual fact. Marco and his assistant apparently disappeared on the same night, leaving behind only a blood-spattered wagon. He surfaced here, in the caravan. But no one has seen her.”

“Have you spoken to him?” Jacinda’s pen tapped against the paper.

Across the booth, Imogen ducked her head and shrugged into herself. “I spend most of my time with Mr. Murdoch. Or reading. I’ve seen Marco throw his knives. But I know almost nothing of the man himself.” She looked around the wagon, taking in two dozen people of all shapes, sizes, and species. “I suppose I should be more concerned about having a suspected murderer among us. But in my short time here, I’ve come to understand that Criminy and Letitia wouldn’t let anyone in who would bring us to harm.” She looked closer at Jacinda, perking up with curiosity. “Has she glanced on you, perchance?”

Jacinda’s skin prickled, remembering the warm, dry feel of Letitia’s palm against hers, the fingers gripping tightly as a little ripple of something passed between them.

Before she could speak, Imogen chuckled softly and said, “Of course she has, or else they’d never have allowed you in to question us. I’m sorry we can’t be of more help, Hen—I mean, Mr. Murdoch and me. Good luck.”

As Imogen swept her dishes off the table and left, Jacinda looked down at the creased old paper and unfolded it. It was the London Gazette, one of her favorites. She’d made a habit of picking it up in major cities around the world during her travels. Skimming went against her nature, but she would save her in-depth reading for another time. Instead, she flipped through until she found the Wanted poster, only a quarter of a page and clearly done by a sensationalist hack. The image looked nothing like Marco Taresque as she’d seen him.

The drawing showed a devil of a man with a cleaver in his hand, dripping black blood.

WANTED: THE DEADLY DAGGERMAN

In conjunction with the underhanded disappearance of one Petra Incanta on 22 February 1906, being a petite woman with dark hair and the knife thrower’s ill-fated assistant. Deliver to London Coppers dead or alive. Reward ten silvers.

And that was all. It didn’t even mention his name, which explained how he could perform here without being dragged off by a lynch mob. She pored over the periodical, but there was no reporting, no quotes from family, friends, or Coppers. Just the poster, sure to induce fear in the easily frightened children of London. Jacinda folded the paper and snorted. Idiots, all of them, and sloppy reporting to boot.

Journalism was more than work to her—it was a passion, a calling, one that her husband had died pursuing by her side. Although she was outgoing and accustomed to learning quickly the customs of a given society, she missed having someone insightful with whom to discuss the day’s findings over a cup of tea. All the people she had met so far at Criminy Stain’s caravan had been kind and welcoming, if not actually helpful. But she missed Liam more than ever, the way they had worked so intuitively as a team to unearth secrets and treasures and stories. He would have loved the caravan.

Try as she might, there were some things that men would only tell other men, and her late husband had been adept at sidling in with a cigar or a bottle of brandy. But he was gone now, and she was alone, and she wasn’t giving up, even if this was one story that was going to have to come straight from the bludmare’s mouth, as they said.

Standing, she took a last look around the dining car. Marco wasn’t here, which meant the story wasn’t here. Stuffing an apple into her pocket, she nodded to herself and made for the door and the weak sunshine beyond. These days, the next story was the only thing that kept her going.

This time, when she approached the clockwork bird, she found Mr. Murdoch blocking her path. She could barely see his eyes through the thick goggles that hid the rest of his face.

He cocked his head at her as if she’d forgotten her shirt. “Lose your mutt?” he asked.

“Your clockworks appear to be the only ones that don’t require recharging. Brutus sleeps more than I do.” She pulled out her disruptor, and he held up a hand covered in a thick leather glove.

“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 thunking 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 thunked 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.”

“You think I did it, then?” His voice changed as his teeth clenched, and he circled away from her, their connection broken. He pulled the knives from the target one by one, so quickly and roughly that even though she knew there was no danger, she expected to see blood. Jacinda could feel that she was losing him, would have to reel him back in with sure hands.

“I think you’re hiding something. And I want you to tell me what it is. And why.”

He spun, and his fine eyes narrowed at her, taking in her figure, her face. If those attributes would weigh in her favor, she would use them, and gladly. She let one corner of her mouth play up, slow and sly, her eyelashes lowering just a little, just enough.

But instead of softening, he stiffened, cocking his head. “Is this a game to you?”

“A game?”

“Are you as brash as you pretend to be? Or is it part of your little act?”

“My act?”

He grinned. “You’re echoing, sweetness. Might want to work on that.”

Jacinda took a deep breath, trying to focus. He unnerved her, as much as she hated to admit it. “I’m not scared of you, Mr. Taresque. The truth is not a game. And I wouldn’t say I’m brash. Simply that I don’t base my decisions on fear.”

That earned her a wide, toothy smile that made her nervous. And rightly so, considering what happened next. “So prove it.”

And he reached into his vest and held out a playing card.