Magic! Murder! Shipboard romance!
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from A Restless Truth by Freya Marske, the second installment in the award-winning Last Binding trilogy that began with A Marvellous Light. A Restless Truth is available from Tordotcom Publishing on November 1st.
Maud Blyth has always longed for adventure. She expected plenty of it when she volunteered to serve as an old lady’s companion on an ocean liner, in order to help her beloved older brother unravel a magical conspiracy that began generations ago.
What she didn’t expect was for the old lady in question to turn up dead on the first day of the voyage. Now she has to deal with a dead body, a disrespectful parrot, and the lovely, dangerously outrageous Violet Debenham, who’s also returning home to England. Violet is everything that Maud has been trained to distrust yet can’t help but desire: a magician, an actress, and a magnet for scandal.
Surrounded by the open sea and a ship full of suspects, Maud and Violet must first drop the masks that they’ve both learned to wear before they can unmask a murderer and somehow get their hands on a magical object worth killing for—without ending up dead in the water themselves.
1
Elizabeth Navenby was known for three things: needlework, talking to the dead, and an ill temper at the best of times.
These were not the best of times. Seasickness had taken rough shears to the edges of that temper. And being subjected to well-meaning jabber about the stateroom’s furnishings, and how the handkerchief-waving crowds lining the New York docks as the Lyric pulled away looked exactly like a flock of doves—didn’t she agree?—had hardly helped.
So Elizabeth had ordered the talkative Miss Blyth, who had truly disgusting amounts of energy for a girl her age, off to explore the ship.
“Finally,” said Elizabeth to the empty interior of the cabin. “I could do with some quiet.”
It was not truly quiet. But the buzz of the ship’s engines was no more difficult to ignore than the normal noise of a Manhattan afternoon. And the stateroom’s furnishings, now that she turned her attention to them, were… adequately luxurious. If rather modern. Green glass lamps like mildewed snowdrops hung from the brass arms of the chandelier. The chairs were upholstered in a paler green. Dorian’s cage sat upon a low bureau whose drawers had inlaid patterns of tulips with long, looping stems.
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A Restless Truth
“I suppose you’d approve of that, Flora,” said Elizabeth. “You always did like your outdoors to decorate your indoors.” Another wave of nausea was joined by a dull ache like something had taken her knee between blunt-toothed jaws. Elizabeth had serviceable dry-land knees. They weren’t used to exerting themselves to steady a body against the sea.
She wobbled to sit in the nearest chair and cradled a warmth-spell. The yellow light of it shimmered dimly, reflected in the polished wood of the bureau, then vanished as she applied the magic to her knee. Heat seeped into her bedevilled old joint.
“And I won’t hear a word about how I should be using a stick,” she said.
One of the senior stewards had descended simperingly upon them as soon as they set foot off the gangplank. She’d suspected him of wanting to make calf’s eyes at Miss Blyth, but instead he’d given Elizabeth some damned condescending twaddle about how difficult the crossing could be for the elderly and infirm, and how the White Star Line prided itself on its little comforts for first-class passengers, and if she had any need of extra pillows—some warm broth or ginger tea to soothe her stomach—a walking stick—
At which point Elizabeth had called him an imposing busy-body and strode past, leaving Miss Blyth making apologies in her wake. Pointless. Men would never learn to behave if you apologised at them.
“Infirm!” she muttered now. “The cheek.”
“Cheek,” said Dorian.
Though it sounded more like cheat, which Elizabeth had taught him to say after she caught that boring old fart Hudson Renner trying to wear wooden rings at her poker table. There was no excuse for using illusions at a civilised gambling party, no matter how much of your fortune you’d frittered away on investments that anyone could have told you were foolhardy bordering on idiotic.
Elizabeth creaked to her feet. Her knee felt better. Her stomach did not.
“I simply didn’t expect to be making voyages in this stage of my life. Though I will allow”—grudgingly—“the last time I crossed the Atlantic, I remember the seasickness being even worse.”
The last time had been in the other direction, when she and her husband left England behind in search of a different life in America. That ship had been far smaller. Nothing like this enormous liner.
Elizabeth snorted in reminiscence. “Poor Ralph. He spent the first day rubbing my back and emptying basins before I was well enough to remember that I had packed one of Sera’s stomach-calming tonics, and that dried chamomile from your garden—”
Grief’s jaws were not blunt of tooth. They snapped shut like a poacher’s trap.
Elizabeth stood with her hand clenched around her silver locket and kept painfully behind her teeth the urge to curse the dead for dying. She wanted to hurl magic at those green lamps for the pleasure of watching something shatter. Memory plagued her, gutted her, snarled at her heels. Flora had wrapped magic like gossamer around her chamomile as it grew. She’d whispered to it until even the flowers’ subtle scent on the edge of a breeze was a soporific charm, like fingers laid on the eyelids.
Slowly Elizabeth’s grip on the locket loosened. She checked her palm, as if she might have pressed the pattern of sunflowers into her skin.
Surely the size of this pain was out of proportion to all reason. She and Flora had spent the latter halves of their lives on different continents. They were old enough that death might well be expected to come knocking.
None of that made any difference to the way Elizabeth had been scooped out, left desolate and raging, when Miss Blyth had first shifted her feet on the carpet and blurted out the news of Flora’s death.
Their age made it worse. It was absurd. Elizabeth was too old to go around avenging murders.
She would do it anyway, of course. Even if her bones felt too brittle to hold the anger that drove her forward.
“I know, I know,” she muttered. “As long as I’ve life, I can choose what to do with it.”
Elizabeth Navenby talked to the dead not in the general, but in the particular.
More than that, she had talked to her particular dead person since long before the descriptor applied. Ever since leaving England, she’d talked as if Flora Sutton were there—as if the locket linked them in more ways than the metaphorical. As if they’d found a way to overcome the limitations of magic at vast distances, and any words she spoke would truly be carried back across the ocean and into Flora’s ears.
She’d refrained in front of Miss Blyth. Her tongue felt crammed full of things that had been building up unsaid. Now that she could let them out in peace, the weightiest ones were rolling forward.
“I thought I would know the exact moment,” said Elizabeth Navenby to her absent dead. “I truly did. I thought—oh, I’d sit up in bed with my heart aflutter. Be stopped in the street by a moment of dread. No—I had to be told to my face, months after you were in the ground. Had to sit there gaping like a fish, and realise that even after—even—nobody thought I might appreciate a damned telegram—”
Another surge of angry grief. As if sensing it, Dorian gave a long croak of a sigh.
No. The wretched bird was not empathetic, merely passive-aggressive; he resorted to the pathos of croaking as a hint that he wanted attention. Or lunch.
Elizabeth removed the bowl from his cage and filled it with fresh water. Hopefully Miss Blyth would remember, during her exploration, to ask the stewards about food for him. Unlikely. The girl was magpie-brained. They’d be lucky if she remembered her way back to the cabin.
“If you were here, you’d be telling me not to trust the girl at all.” A laugh tried to huff its way out. “You always were a paranoid creature, Flora. Never fear. Not a word has passed my lips about my piece of the contract. We don’t tell—not until there are no other options. We promised.”
She replaced the brimming bowl. Dorian nipped her finger in approval as she withdrew.
They’d promised. And yet the paranoid Flora herself had by all accounts given her part of the contract to her unmagical great-nephew—had laid secret-bind on him, sent him to his death, and taken her own life in turn to keep from betraying it—because there were no other options.
Because after all these decades of keeping the Last Contract safe, keeping its three pieces separate and unable to be wrought into a weapon that would pull power from every magician in Britain, a net was closing on the Forsythia Club. On the women who’d been arrogant and curious enough to drag that weapon into the light in the first place.
“Hubris,” said Elizabeth, as if the word were a charm. It tasted bitter on her lips.
She shook herself. Never any point dwelling. Look to the next thing.
Something to quell this nausea, perhaps. She’d sewn a helpful charm into a shawl for a niece suffering a difficult pregnancy— couldn’t recall the exact spell she’d used, now, but piecing it together would be a distraction.
Her sewing kit was in one of the trunks. On her way to rummage, the ship gave a particularly queasy shift. Elizabeth gritted her teeth.
After a few moments she admitted the futility of trying to beat sickness with stubbornness, and went to retch unpleasantly over a basin in the stateroom’s small bathroom.
Someone chose that idyllic moment to knock on the cabin door.
Elizabeth gripped the basin edge and refused to answer. Let them think her asleep. She would not be coddled by stewards. She’d conjure a nest of thorns and hurl herself into it before she accepted an offer of broth. She would deal with this herself.
Once her stomach stopped trying to clamber up the inside of her lower ribs.
The lock clicked. The main door creaked gently open. Miss Blyth, then, already bored with exploring. Elizabeth scowled at the porcelain and waited fatalistically for the flood of bright chatter to resume.
Nothing.
And into the nothing, footsteps. Too heavy to be Miss Blyth’s. Too slow. Cautious.
Alarm flooded in. It managed to shove aside some of the nausea. Elizabeth straightened. The bathroom door, swung ajar, hid her from the main room.
The stunning-spell she prepared was one of Flora’s, built with a single hand and a firm will—leaving the other hand free to hoist a nice solid candlestick, they used to jest, in case the spell missed. Magic filled her palm like snow.
Elizabeth took a deep breath.
She shoved at the bathroom door with her free hand. The damn thing creaked, robbing her of a chance at surprise. A curse slid between her teeth. She had only a brief glimpse—a man, lifting his head sharply from where he was bent over the dresser, pawing through her effects—before she flung the spell at him.
The creak had been enough warning. He dodged. And—oh, hell, he was cradling himself, now. A magician.
She had to try again. Another spell, fast. Blast her stiff old hands. She could hear Flora telling her, as if finally picking up her half of the conversation: You still rely too much on those cradles, Beth, I’ve always said so.
Flora was right. Damn her, Flora was always right. But Elizabeth was bound by her own weaknesses now. The spell struggled to form between her shaking fingers.
I’m sorry, Flora. I did so want to kill them for you.
Her heart shook even more, bounding half out of her chest with fear and fury. It rendered her light-headed and shaken even before the moment when hot-smelling magic sprang from the man’s hands and engulfed her senses like the crash of lightning.
I’m sorry.
2
Maud knew Mrs. Navenby was dead as soon as she opened the door.
She wasn’t sure how she knew, precisely. She’d never been in the same room as a corpse before. It was not a situation that a baronet’s daughter might frequently expect to encounter in the course of her life.
Nevertheless, certainty hit her like a pail of flung water.
Mrs. Navenby lay sprawled on the floor. Her eyes were open and the look on her waxy, unmoving face was not something that Maud wanted to look at for more than a few seconds.
“Oh my heavens,” Maud heard herself squeak, and sagged back against the door.
She felt a ludicrous pang of disappointment. Firstly, that she had squeaked. Secondly, that she hadn’t seized the opportunity to say Fuck. She’d never been game enough on any lesser occasion, and surely this was the most obscenity-deserving situation she would ever find herself in.
“Whaaaat?” said Dorian.
A giggle like a mouthful of vinegared wine spilled from Maud.
“My thoughts exactly,” she told the parrot, and that broke the cold bind that held her paralysed against the door.
Maud flung herself across the room. She promptly tripped and caught herself on one knee as the floor shrugged and one shoe caught in her skirt. Her sea legs hadn’t returned yet, and the captain had told them to expect a choppy start to the voyage.
She felt for a pulse. She had no idea if she was feeling in the correct place. There were no marks on the visible skin, and no blood—Maud winced, feeling gingerly at the back of the dead woman’s head—in the hair. She could have died of a sudden apoplexy. Her heart could have given out.
But a few hours ago, Mrs. Navenby had been hale and well.
And magic didn’t have to leave marks when it killed.
At a Suffragette meeting in London, Maud had once met a Miss Harlow, who was studying medicine at the Sorbonne and who told vivid tales of gory injuries and learning anatomy from examining the dead. Maud, much as she longed to attend university, did not think her stomach was lined with the exact sort of grit required of a physician. Miss Harlow had passed around a human skull. Maud had run her fingers along the sockets of the eyes and wondered what colour those eyes had been in life, and then she’d felt queasy and passed the skull on to Liza.
And when her parents died, it was in a motorcar accident. There had been no question of Maud being asked to identify the bodies. Robin had done that, while Maud shut herself in her bedroom so that nobody would see her failing to cry. All their lives Robin had done the unpleasant things so that Maud didn’t have to worry about them. All their lives he’d protected her and had never failed her.
And now she’d failed him, at the one enormous vital thing she’d sworn to him that she could handle.
Mrs. Navenby was dead, and that meant someone on this ship knew that Mrs. Navenby had an object of immense and dangerous potential power in her possession, and they wanted it.
The old woman had refused to tell Maud which of her belongings was her piece of the spell-made-solid known as the Last Contract. Safer that way, she’d said, in her snappish no-argument tones.
And now Maud had a corpse at her feet and a full six days of the Atlantic crossing ahead of her, trapped on a boat with at least one magician willing to kill, when Maud had no magic of her own and no idea what she was protecting, or even if it had already been taken—
Maud rubbed her hands over her face. Stupid, stupid.
She made herself focus as she looked around the room. She’d partly unpacked Mrs. Navenby’s luggage while they were still in the harbour. The room didn’t look as though it had been searched, but enough things stood half-open that it would be hard to tell.
Maud inspected the dresser through a pinkly acidic pulse of panic. Boxes of brooches and rings. Knickknacks. What was missing? Anything? There was a parlour game: one stared at a tray of objects before it was taken away, adjusted, and placed back in front of one’s eyes. Some things added. Some things removed.
Robin was excellent at that game. Maud was not.
But she’d set everything out on the dresser that very day, and then spent a good quarter hour adjusting things according to the old woman’s finicky taste, and—
The mirror. There had been a silver hand mirror in a matching set with a hairbrush, both heavy and ornate. They were missing.
Recognition calmed Maud’s heartbeat. She managed to pick out some more missing things: a bangle of beaten silver featuring elephants in an Indian design. A small silver bottle like a gentleman’s hip flask, which contained one of Mrs. Navenby’s favoured scents.
Silver. Silver. The first piece of the contract to be recovered— and then lost—by Robin and his partner, Edwin, had been three silver rings that became a single silver coin. Maud hadn’t asked if the cup, Mrs. Navenby’s piece, was made of the same substance.
Silver.
A single glance confirmed what had prickled at the back of Maud’s mind when she was lifting the corpse’s head to feel for blood. The locket was gone. Heavy and oval-shaped with a design of sunflowers on the front, Maud had never seen Mrs. Navenby without it hanging on a chain from her neck. She had noted the woman’s attachment to it and had already begun to form some private suspicions.
So. A few silver items missing, and plenty of valuable jewels left in plain sight.
It was murder, and by someone who knew precisely what they were looking for.
“Fuck,” said Maud.
“Fuck,” agreed Dorian.
***
“Are you sure we can’t fetch you some water, Miss Cutler?” asked the master-at-arms. “Or a cup of tea?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Berry.” Maud smiled weakly. “But it’s so kind of you to offer.”
The head of security for the Lyric had a sturdy figure and a kind face with a reddish moustache that was doing its best to engulf his upper lip, as though he’d inherited it from a larger relative and was waiting to grow into it. He eyed Maud with the familiar alarm of a man unsure if the girl in front of him was about to burst into tears.
He decided to err on the side of assuming that Maud was too upset and too feminine to know what she needed, and directed the nearest steward to bring a cup of tea at once.
Maud concentrated on keeping her expression neutral. “What will happen to her now?”
“I dare say it may seem morbid to a young thing like you, Miss Cutler, but the White Star Line is well prepared for tragic occurrences of this nature. This isn’t the first time one of our elderly guests has passed out of the mortal world and into a better one during the course of the voyage.” Mr. Berry touched the point between his collarbones where a cross might sit on a chain beneath his shirt and uniform jacket. “We’ll see to it she’s treated with respect, and kept where she won’t—forgive me—spoil.”
“Oh, goodness. I hadn’t thought of that.” Maud bit her tongue on asking if they had a secondary ice room set aside specifically for dead bodies, and if not, if the first-class passengers were aware that the ice used for their desserts was also being turned to such a purpose. Mrs. Navenby would have found that amusing.
“Was her passing very unexpected?”
As a matter of principle, Maud hated to lie. She was aware that to a young woman currently travelling under an assumed name and about to embark on an undercover detective investigation, this principle was as much use as a pincushion in a boxing ring.
Nevertheless. The truth was a flexible reed of a thing. One could weave it into all sorts of shapes, depending on what one needed it to be.
What Maud needed was for nobody else to be conducting a murder-robbery investigation in any official capacity. That would stir up alarm and get in her way and put Maud’s enemies— who at this moment were likely congratulating themselves on their success—on their guard.
Besides: Maud read detective stories. She had discovered the body; if there was a whiff of foul play in the air, she would be questioned, and she was, after all, travelling under an assumed name. If someone started doing inconvenient things like telegraphing back to New York or on to London with enquiries, there was a risk of said someone discovering that Mrs. Navenby’s distant and impoverished cousin, Miss Maud Cutler, was a complete fabrication.
“Mrs. Navenby was very aware of her age. She wanted to come home, to England, as a matter of some urgency.”
Mr. Berry nodded. He’d seen illness in the shape of those sentences, and it suited him.
“Even so.” He patted Maud’s shoulder. “No matter how expected, losing those close to us is always a blow.”
Maud’s eyes filled with hot tears. It was a waste. It was a bloody stupid waste, and she had failed her brother, and Mrs. Navenby should be alive. People should not be allowed to kill other people simply because they got in their way, as if they were no more than things.
The master-at-arms opened his mouth and was interrupted by an outraged squawk. The returning steward had bumped Dorian’s cage in passing. Everyone present winced. Dorian gave another squawk, this one softer, and went to the floor of the cage to plunge his head indignantly into his water bowl.
“Mrs. Navenby was very attached to her bird,” said Maud in apology.
“Charming creature, I’m sure,” said Mr. Berry. “Now, perhaps you’d like to retire to your own room and have a lie-down. I’m sure we can arrange—ah, there we are, the tea. Rogers, send word to the kitchens that Miss Cutler will take her meals in her cabin for the next few days.”
“No,” said Maud quickly.
Eyebrows rose. To cover, Maud took a fortifying sip of the tea. Now she needed to truth-weave her way out of any expectation that she would stay languishing in her room when what she needed was to be out looking for answers. And murderers. And the stolen piece of the Last Contract.
“That is—thank you for your concern, but I think some bright, cheerful company will do me good. Distract me. I must confess, Mr. Berry, I didn’t know Mrs. Navenby very well. I’d spent only a short time as her companion, and she was not the easiest of employers.” Maud gazed down into the saucer, where some tea had sloshed. She called up not Mrs. Navenby’s short temper and acerbic tongue, but a memory of her own mother. Whose tongue had never been anything but sweet, even as the words that dripped from it settled in your mind and choked there.
Maud said, “You must think me awfully callous.”
“Not at all,” said Mr. Berry at once, and the hovering steward made a distressed noise of assent. Maud peeked up at him from beneath her lashes. Rogers was not much older than herself, with a prominent neck and a spotted chin, and he turned pink when he met her eyes.
“Thank you both so much,” she said meekly. “I shall go and lie down until dinner.”
Her adjoining room was smaller than the main chamber, with a narrow bed tucked against the wall and less distinguished furnishings. Many of the staterooms had such arrangements, for families with children or those travelling with personal servants. Maud’s own role of companion was a step up from servant, but not by much.
She closed the door between the rooms and leaned against it. In the sudden quiet, the lack of eyes upon her, the sway of the ship found her again. This time Maud planted her shoes and imagined herself an anchor lodged in the sand of the seabed, among the weeds.
She had failed. She was alone. But she would not return home to her brother, in six days’ time, and have that be the story she told him.
Maud went to her trunk and retrieved the notebook from where it was wedged between two books near the bottom. She flicked through the pages scattered with short paragraphs in Robin’s careless writing, with occasional annotations in Edwin’s neater hand. At the centre of the book was a sketch of a woman’s face: a long nose and a decided chin, the fairness of her hair obvious in the dearth of pencil lines in the top half of the page.
There were some advantages when one’s older brother had visions of the future.
Maud grasped her anchorness. She would make things right. She would find the magician—or magicians—on this ship and discover which of them had killed Mrs. Navenby. She would get those stolen objects back, every one of them. She would find those people who didn’t yet know that they were her allies, and she would enlist their help.
And she would step off the ship in Southampton in triumph, and Robin would be proud of her, and it would be the first important and worthwhile thing that Maud Blyth, baronet’s daughter and baronet’s sister, would have done in her entire short useless life.
Excerpted from A Restless Truth, copyright © 2022 by Freya Marske.
