Lana Baker is Aldgate’s finest scribe, with a sharp pen and an even sharper wit.
We’re thrilled to share the first three chapters from Kelly Robson’s High Times in the Low Parliament, a lighthearted romp through an 18th-century London featuring flirtatious scribes, irritable fairies, and the dangers of Parliament—available from Tordotcom Publishing.
Lana Baker is Aldgate’s finest scribe, with a sharp pen and an even sharper wit. Gregarious, charming, and ever so eager to please, she agrees to deliver a message for another lovely scribe in exchange for kisses and ends up getting sent to Low Parliament by a temperamental fairy as a result.
As Lana transcribes the endless circular arguments of Parliament, the debates grow tenser and more desperate. Due to long-standing tradition, a hung vote will cause Parliament to flood and a return to endless war. Lana must rely on an unlikely pair of comrades—Bugbite, the curmudgeonly fairy, and Eloquentia, the bewitching human deputy—to save humanity (and maybe even woo one or two lucky ladies), come hell or high water.
1
Lana Baker was the finest scribe in Aldgate, but it won her little praise. Certainly none from her mother or sisters, who would have preferred another strong hand at the ovens. She was excused from keeping the books for their busy East London bakery, because though she could pen numbers in columns straight and square, she was a dunce at sums. Always had been. She took great care never to improve.
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High Times in the Low Parliament
When forced, she wrote her mother’s letters. Ran errands for her sisters in exchange for favors. Stayed out late, slept later, and thoroughly enjoyed her role as family despair.
Many, if not most afternoons, Lana could be found at the Twin Pumps, holding shop with a cup of ale at her elbow. If you wanted a pretty letter, it cost a penny a page, but for a promise, a favor, or a compliment, Lana might be persuaded to pick up her pen and write you a note. She wouldn’t write curses, not for any money, but she’d put your name on a scrap for free. Always happy to show off her collection of pens and inks—especially if the girl was pretty.
The girl sitting across from her on a fine spring morning was very pretty, but she’d had some hard luck recently. A livid bruise bloomed across her jaw and nose, and her right hand was bandaged into a stump at the end of her smooth, plump arm.
“I wish I could pen the response myself,” Cora said. “But I never learned ambi-hand, and if a scribe can’t write her own letter, oughtn’t she have someone truly skilled do it?”
Lana pretended to blush. She reached for the letter Cora had placed on the table.
“May I?” she asked.
Cora set down her cup of wine and leaned close, making the most of her big brown eyes. Did she flutter her lashes? Must be some trick of the light, for who could flirt the day after breaking a hand and bashing her face in? But then, perhaps it was a swindle, the bruise a beetroot stain. No matter. As long as Lana wasn’t the mark, it was no business of hers.
“This is nice paper,” Lana said, enjoying the texture of the thick, smooth sheet between her fingers.
Lana released the crisp folds and scanned the letter. A fairy summons, in an ornate uncial script inked by a skilled hand and, as with everything fairies touched, scattered with glittering scales that clung to everything. The wording was officious, with a short deadline for reply and too many official stamps to count.
Cora sighed.
“It’s an honor to be summoned to Parliament. I do so wish I could go.” She looked about to cry. “But it’ll be months until I can hold a pen again.”
Swindle or no swindle, Cora was pretty and also a fellow scribe, so to Lana that meant only one thing: the opportunity to show off. She flipped open the lid of her writing kit, selected a piece of her finest paper, and lined it with a few light passes of charcoal along her ruler. She dipped her favorite pen in a noggin of ultramarine ink.
Lana had a connoisseur’s taste for admiration, but Cora laid it on a bit thick, leaning over the table and making admiring noises over every stroke of the pen. Lana could hardly fault her; she was awfully handsome, after all. But when Lana had finished the letter, stamped the corner with her mark, folded it close into a tight package, and addressed it with a flourish, that’s when the price came.
“Would you run it along to Ludgate for me?” Cora laid her good hand on Lana’s wrist and leaned close. “As a favor, one scribe to another?”
“Well, now,” Lana said. “I might be persuaded.”
“I’ll make it worth your time.”
Cora slid round to Lana’s side and slipped her fingers featherlight up Lana’s thigh. A lengthy negotiation followed, flavored with wine and cushioned with lips soft as promises. Heat rose on Lana’s cheeks, neck, breast, and elsewhere. One of the reasons she didn’t hold shop at the Twin Pumps more often was that the benches were too hard, but suddenly, they didn’t seem hard at all. She was prepared to sit there till doomsday, if possible, kissing Cora. Then a wet rag hit her in the side of the head.
“Go outside or take her upstairs,” the landlady said. “Nobody buys pies while you’re turning their stomachs.”
Cora pulled away. She grazed her lips across Lana’s cheek and nibbled her earlobe.
“Take it to Ludgate, yes?” she whispered.
She didn’t wait for an answer. When Lana opened her eyes, the hem of her short skirt was just disappearing out the door.
“Kisses will be your downfall,” the landlady said.
“Never.” Lana laughed. She capped her ink and squared away her kit. “Kisses are life.”
“And death, too,” said the landlady. “Only such as you think it’s a fair way to go.”
* * *
A stroll through East London on a warm evening. What could be better? The city burbled with activity, much of it pointed in her direction. Lana could stop at the inker’s, test the newest formulas. She could nip into a penmaker’s, ogle gracefully turned shanks and shiny nibs, then pop next door to the papermaker’s and get treated like a hero for the price of one full sheet. The city was hers, and she was the city’s. The finest scribe. Her mother’s happiest and most despaired-of daughter. Benevolent and undemanding surveyor of all.
At the bakery on Wood Street, Lana bought a cream bun before turning up Ludgate. As she ascended the hill, the sun dipped to setting, throwing amber light cross the chimney stacks. Children hid from their mothers, sweethearts clutched each other in doorways, and Lana bit into her snack.
The baker was generous with her cream, far more than Lana’s mother, and the bun left a dab on her nose. If only she had a friend nearby who would offer to lick it off, but no. She flicked it with her forefinger and dropped the drip on her tongue. Maybe tomorrow, Cora would offer more thanks for favors rendered. Or her childhood friend Felicia might decide to cross the street and claim some kisses. Or if the burly brewer’s assistant newly hired at the Twin Pumps hadn’t already found an admirer for her broad shoulders and thick wrists, Lana might console her for an evening.
Lana pondered these happy thoughts all the way to Ludgate. High atop the watchtower that bordered Newgate and New Change sat a pink fairy, small as a toddler and half as wide, if you didn’t count her peony-colored butterfly wings. She had her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands.
“Good evening, beauty,” Lana caroled. She swung her fingertips to her eyebrow in a sloppy salute.
The fairy returned the gesture, not in kind, not even in spirit: two fingers shaped into horns, hooking in the rudest of gestures. It was only to be expected. Fairies were nasty. A girl could go begging for a kind word.
“And a good night to you, too, beauty,” Lana sang as she passed.
On the crest of the hill, a great bloom of sunset illuminated London’s fairy palace. A famous sight, commemorated in the window of every second print shop, its crystal arches and towers made only more stunning by contrast with the coalfield it sat upon. Two hundred and fifty years hadn’t cleaned the evidence of conflagration from the ground below. The rest of the city might be renewed six or eight times since the great fire of 1666, charred beams and blackened foundations long cleaned away or built over, but at Ludgate, the ground hadn’t changed. Neither had the fairies that came to live there. They remained as sour as ever.
Lana climbed up to the palace’s rose quartz eastern door. No knocker to bang on, no porter to greet. She stood tall and lifted Cora’s letter.
“I have a missive. Who will take it from me?”
A spy hole grated open. A tiny face poked through. Delicately etched features, arching brows, narrow eyes of topaz, and skin of watered silk. And teeth: sharp, bared.
“Damn you, legger,” the fairy said. “Should we all come running when you call? Tell me who it’s for.”
“Let’s see.” Lana tipped the letter and read the direction. “Most Bounteous Beauty Masterwort, Director Legate of the Low Parliament Delegation from Angland.” Lana shrugged. Fairies liked their titles. It was nothing to her. “Director Masterwort is resident in London, I believe. May I leave the letter with you, beauty?”
“Cool your heels, waster.”
Lana flipped the tails of her coat and sat. The palace steps offered a view over the chimneys and water towers down to the river, where masts danced in a gentle tidal swell. A tidy view. Not one misrepaired or unsightly building—the fairies wouldn’t stand for it. No tanneries or fishworks across the river, either, just the vast Bankside farms that grew flowers for the palace.
Lana could just make out a flower barge loaded full to tipping with tulips and making a diagonal toward Pauline Wharf. Depending on how long the fairies kept her waiting, she might see a mountain of flowers loaded onto the chain and dragged on rails into the palace’s receiving gate. That would be a sight.
When the crystal door finally opened, a large apricot fairy flew out to hover at the top of the stairs, wings ablur. Her mouth was screwed up as if ready to vomit.
“I’m Masterwort. Give me the bloody damned letter,” she said, her voice like crisp, rustling autumn leaves.
Lana offered the letter with a grin and a bow. It would be wrong to say she loved a challenge, for she certainly didn’t, but she liked to keep genial while others brewed storm clouds. And she’d had a lot of practice.
Masterwort ripped the letter open. She sighed as she read it, then groaned and beat the heel of her fist into her forehead. Her wings shed apricot glitter. The breeze picked it up and blew it onto the coalfield, gilding the ashes.
“Damn it!” the fairy yelled. “Damn you, damn everyone!”
Lana kept a straight face as the fairy flew in circles, ripping the letter to bits. An entertaining sight, and Lana wasn’t the only one enjoying it. Attracted by the fuss, the neighborhood had assembled to watch—mothers, girls, and children stood in the doorways of the printers’ shops and bookstores, and hung out of the windows of their homes above. They smiled and whispered, though nobody dared laugh. A fairy tantrum might not be rare, especially for those who lived near the palace, but it was always a sight to see. Better than a street fair or a night at the theater.
When the fairy began to calm down and the entertainment was over, Lana saluted and hopped down the steps.
“Wait,” the fairy said. Lana turned on her heel, smiling widely. Masterwort brandished a tattered scrap of letter. “Are you a scribe? These scribbles are your hand?”
“I’d hardly call them scribbles, but yes.”
The fairy buzzed close and pointed at Lana’s nose.
“And is this your face?”
“Same as my mother grew it, beauty.”
“You speak Fairy well enough. Anything else?”
Lana tried to look modest.
“I learned Anglish at my mother’s knee. I’m from Aldgate, so I speak Flemish and Français. I have a bit of Gael and Cornish, and a smattering of Suomi, which I picked up from some obliging girls last—”
“Shut up.”
Lana bit her lip to keep from laughing. But what the fairy said next took all humor out of the moment.
“You’re going to the Low Parliament in Cora’s place, legger.”
“Oh no, I don’t think so,” Lana stammered. “My mother—”
“Lana Baker, Scribe Aldgate.” The scrap of letter in the fairy’s hand had Lana’s stamp, iris purple on paper turned golden in the light of the setting sun. “I know your kind. Your mother’ll be glad to be rid of a burden.”
“I’m her favorite.” A lie, and a desperate one.
“You?” Masterwort gnashed her teeth. “You’re nobody’s favorite anything and never will be. Pack your bags. Go to Parliament and rot.”
The fairy darted into the palace, and the door slammed behind her. Lana looked around for help. The neighbors were still watching, but Lana saw no friends there. Not that they could do anything, but a little sympathy would have been nice.
“Don’t try smashing your fingers to get out of it,” the fairy yelled through the spy hole. “You’ll go to Parliament even if I have to send your corpse.”
Lana trudged beside the glassed-over drain coursing down the middle of Cheap, watching the filthy water rush to the sump at the foot of Cornhill. Now her ambitions were going the same way. What ambitions, one might ask? Well, Lana might have dug some up eventually, given soft soil and a sharp enough spade.
The landlady of the Twin Pumps had been right, after all. Kisses had doomed her. And romantic as she was, Lana couldn’t pretend they’d been worth it.
2
Lana never made it home. She found a tavern on Fish Street and got sodden. Normally in such a situation, some mother would exercise her authority and send her to bed while she could still walk, but Fish Street was just uphill from the bridge, the haunt of travelers and strangers, and authority was loosely applied. Mothers didn’t waste their time there, and the landlady was a happy old girl whom nobody had dared send to bed for decades.
The tavern claimed to never close. Lana proved it by drinking till dawn, and when her sister Olive found her, she was still carousing. Pens scattered. Bits of paper soaking up splashes of beer and spirit. Rude sketches flapping from the nailheads of the wall she leaned on. Lana had a pencil in her teeth and one last groat to spend.
“I’m not going nowhere,” she slurred.
Olive didn’t reply. She corked the inks, gathered up the bits and pieces, and tossed it all in Lana’s kit. When she wound Lana’s arm around her shoulders and lifted her from the bench, Lana didn’t have the strength to resist.
“Will you miss me?” Lana asked, her head lolling against her sister’s neck.
“Sure,” Olive said. “Especially on winter nights. You’re warm.”
“That’s all I am to you?”
Olive pursed her lips, pondering.
“You make us laugh, I’ll give you that.”
A syrupy giggle escaped from Lana’s throat. She pulled away and tried walking on her own, then collapsed back into her sister’s arms.
“Nobody’s laughing right now, though,” Olive said.
When they got home, everyone was busy ignoring her. Mother at the ovens, sisters kneading dough, raking coals, and sweating in the scullery.
Someone had nailed the Low Parliament summons on the pantry door next to the inventory list as if Lana were a tub of lard or jar of honey, but she made no complaint. She sat on a stool and made no fast moves until everyone’s backs were turned. Then she grabbed her kit and soft-footed upstairs to her mother’s room.
Quietly, quietly, she slid a leather-buckled chest from beneath her mother’s bed and flipped the lid open. Inside was a wooden bowl sprouting with grains of dry yeast. Quick as she could, considering her fingers were shaking with fatigue and clumsy from drink, she screwed the decorative finials from the shafts of her pens and filled the center hollows with golden yellow grains.
This batch of yeast was the family’s finest treasure, but Mother would never miss what Lana took. Yeast multiplied; that’s what it was for. Lana lowered her head to the bowl and blew. One sugary breath would be enough to keep it budding until the next time her mother came to fetch a cupful.
When she was done, Lana slipped downstairs. She sat on her stool like she’d never left and announced her intent to go to Parliament with dignity.
“You’d better pack, then,” her mother said, and double-fisted four loaves of bread from the oven.
What do you pack for a life of exile? Your treasures, for certain: An ancient Easter medal perhaps, the rude silver worn smooth from praying. The ribbon from your sweetheart’s hair, or a silhouette of your dear old grandmam. Maybe the flower from your conception day, tossed by a fairy from high atop the local baby shrine. Your thankful mother dried it above the hearth, but now it’s crumbling to dust in the bottom of a flimsy paper box.
Lana packed none of these. She gathered all the empty jugs she could find, stumbled over to the Twin Pumps, and asked the landlady to fill them up.
“For Mother,” she lied. “She’s making spice puddings.”
“In May?” The landlady tilted her head full sideways. She was barefoot in a short shift, white legs hairy, knees knobbed.
“It’s a special order,” Lana said.
The landlady was no fool, but she filled the jugs anyway. Spirits only, the kind that aged in barrels for years in service of getting stronger. The kind of spirits Mother kept in a locked cupboard and drank only once a week because, as she always said, a cook might taste the sauce and still make dinner, but a drunken baker burns down the city.
And a drunken Lana? She forgets that jugs are heavy when full. Conspicuous, too.
So, on leaving the Twin Pumps, instead of turning right and heading home, she turned left. Stashed the jugs in an alley behind a bale of straw and skipped home. She stuffed all her clothes into a flour sack along with her sister Bonnie’s best comb and strung it all across her chest with her scribe kit. The family followed her out onto the street. Lana tried to look noble as her sisters hung around her neck and kissed her goodbye.
“Write to us,” Olive said, and tucked a short roll of coins into Lana’s palm.
“I’ll try.”
“Try hard,” Bonnie said. “It’s not like writing is an effort.”
“You wouldn’t know.” Lana stared heroically across the rooftops.
“If you don’t write, we’ll worry,” said Angela. She was the family baby and everyone’s favorite, as well as Mother’s best chance at grandmotherhood.
“I’ll do it to please you.” Lana patted her youngest sister on her head as if she were still hip-high, gap-toothed, and not a woman grown. “If they let me, which they may not.”
Mother was stern, her jaw clamped and lips screwed into a twist so severe it looked like a fairy had taken residence on her tongue. Lana kissed her flour-powdered cheek.
She forbade them to walk her farther than the corner, making up a sentimental excuse. She recovered the jugs with no risk of confiscation and staggered downhill toward the river.
Truth was, Lana felt a little less like the master of the city than she had the day before. Heavy on her feet and light in the head as if the two halves of her body were moving in different directions. Like she’d been beheaded—that was it. And what better place than on Tower Hill, where all those old girls had their heads chopped off, back in the bad old days, when the Tower still stood, its walls drenched in blood.
“Here’s to you,” Lana told the hill’s dead. She freed a jug from her bundle and swigged it, then trudged down to the river steps.
“I’m official,” she said, flapping the summons at the waiting boats.
None of the waterwomen were impressed, but Lana didn’t need them to be. She just needed to get across the river for free. After some discussion in lowered voices, the eldest helped Lana into her tippy boat.
“If you puke, do it over the side,” the waterwoman said.
Lana knew Southwark. She’d caroused there in her youth, when getting away from Mother had been the priority of her life. She knew its taverns and hay ricks, its elderly inns and shops. In ancient days, they said, it had been a wallow. Life had been cheap and pleasure cheaper, and the nasty old churches raked profit from it all. That reputation, along with the distance from home and few resident fairies, made the area spicy, but Lana was long over it. City beer was tastier, and who needed a long stagger home?
Southwark being an old haunt, she knew where to get a mule cart south. She picked one with a load of straw so she could loll in comfort, hiding her liquor under the bales and lying atop her clothes to block the prickles.
Late afternoon, she woke, changed carts, and moved up front with the drover, who, by luck, had little taste for strong drink. All around was leafy and green, the road undulating like a ribbon between hedgerows.
“It’s like traveling to another time,” Lana said. “Angland, green and storied, where the Henrys led their armies against the fanged and horned old French.”
The drover looked at her sideways.
“Who taught you history?”
“Nobody,” Lana said proudly. “I learned it all myself.”
On either side of the wide, crystal gravel–topped road, the land was beautiful. Rolling forests and farms punctuated by tidy villages set like jewels among tilled fields. Babies slept in rocking cradles beside their weaving mothers, brats on the roadside played kickball. Above every substantial town stood a fairy tower, humming like a beehive. When the fairies came to inspect her, Lana waved her summons. The fairies spat and buzzed off.
“You could imagine that Angland had never seen strife and never will again,” Lana said.
She was fully drunk and diagonal, but in no danger of falling out because the drover had taken off her belt and strapped Lana to the seat.
“That’s Parliament,” Lana said. She punched the drover on the arm. “Parliament keeps it that way.”
“Do you think so?” The drover kept her gaze between her mule’s ears. “Seems to me we have the fairies to thank for peace and prosperity.”
“That’s because you’re a drover. You like good weather, fast roads, and wide bridges. You don’t care about anything else. Out here, life is simple. Not in the city.”
“City girls seem pretty simple to me.”
Lana knew she’d been insulted, but she didn’t care.
“I’m going to the Low Parliament.” She gazed nobly through the trees toward the flatlands, or where she imagined the flatlands to be. “That’s where the real work happens.” She raised her fist to give the drover another knock.
“If you hit me again, I’ll drop you here. Then you can see what kind of work wolves do.”
Lana shrank back in her seat.
“You have wolves out here?”
“Bears, too. Cats as high as your hip, and boars with arm-long tusks. So if you want to talk about work, how about boar hunting? Those girls get mauled.”
The road wound down into a gully, steep bank on one side, long, bushy drop on the other. At the bottom, a village out of time, houses half-timbered with roofs of shingle, all surrounded by a high stake wall. The inn was the biggest building in town, and Lana was glad to tuck herself into bed on the top floor. When the wolves started howling, she told herself it was the local girls putting on a show, but the moon through the warped windowpanes cast eerie shadows, and Lana was far from home.
She slept fitfully and woke terribly hungover. The only cure for that was more drink and a bacon breakfast. The landlady gave her more bacon and bread, and pushed her out the door into the back of a new mule cart, with a new drover, and two mules who trotted as if eager to clear the town of her.
By the time they hit the great grass sea, Lana was unable to sit up. To admire the view, she had to prop her chin on the cart’s sideboards. But what view? High grass on either side of the road, growing taller in the sun. She could see enough of that lying flat. Birds everywhere, loud ones, but big animals? No.
“I thought there were supposed to be herds.”
The drover didn’t answer, didn’t even look over her shoulder, so Lana addressed her comments to the clouds.
“Great Doggerland herds of deer and antelope, far as the eye can see. And lions. I’d like to see a lion. A great queen with a mane and teeth like daggers.”
London had lions once, back when the White Tower stood and Angland was ruled by queens. A nasty old Henry kept a menagerie at the Tower, just a hop and a skip from Aldgate, and fed her wives to the lions when tired of them. The city still had lions, plenty of them, in wood, stone, and paint. Every third tavern was the Lion and Something. Lions, lions everywhere, but none Lana could see from the back of a cart.
Just as well. They probably missed the taste of Anglish.
Early evening on the grassy sea, and it was time to sober up. She turned her back on the lowering sun and squinted, searching for her first view of Parliament’s spires. Nothing, ages of nothing, just flat land, flocks of birds, and the deep crick and hum of insects.
“Look the other way, sweetie,” said the drover.
“So you do talk,” Lana said. “Where?”
The drover pointed to a hazy blue splotch on the horizon, shaped like a mountain, its point reaching toward the waxing moon. The mules’ long heads were up, great ears pointed at the mountain, trotting faster now.
“The mules are heading to their stable and feed,” Lana said. “That means you live there, too. Why didn’t you say?” Lana made a fist to punch the drover on the arm, but thought better of it and patted her instead.
“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“You could tell me what it’s like, for a start.”
“The stables are good. Our oats come all the way from Alba.”
Lana stopped trying. The drover was obviously one of those girls who never committed an opinion. Careful to always be measured and responsible, never risking her chance at motherhood.
As they drew closer, the haze thinned and Parliament resolved. It was like nothing Lana had ever seen. At the bottom, it was like an old castle, a girdle of walls and parapets resting on sand. High above, at the mountain’s top, the spires and towers of an abbey pierced the clouds. Between, houses large and small, snaggle-roofed and laced with windows. Picturesque, but all built from the same dull gray stone. No colorful shutters or gilded spires, not even one.
“I think I’m going to like it at Parliament,” Lana said, though she meant the opposite.
“No, you won’t,” said the drover. “For one thing, they’ll take your drink away at the gate.”
The mules broke into a canter. Lana tried not to panic.
“Well, now.” She raised her voice over the pounding hooves. “That’s no different from my mother, and I like her well enough.”
“There’s the other thing, too. But you already know all about that.”
“Probably,” Lana agreed.
A bright flash caught her eye, just a line across the horizon behind Parliament’s bulk. It flashed again and then shone a steady amber, reflecting the setting sun. The mules were galloping now, heads down, reaching for home. The cartwheels threw a rooster tail of pearly gravel behind them, and the grasslands gave way to rippled sand. Here and there were standing pools, also glowing amber.
That meant the line stretching behind Parliament was water, the whole horizon wet.
“I’ve never seen the ocean before,” she yelled.
“You’re in it right now,” the drover yelled back. “When the tide comes in, this road is used by fish.”
“I know tides. We have them on the Thames.”
“Not ones like these. My mules can’t outrun them.” The drover gave her a quizzical look. “I’m surprised you’re so cheery,” she yelled. “I thought you were sorry to come here and that’s what all the drinking was about.”
“Oh no,” said Lana, putting on a brave face. “This is all fine.”
“Really? Because everyone else wants to leave. Once they squeeze permission out of the Maréchal Assemblay, they can’t run down the road fast enough.”
“Why’s that?”
“The fairies won’t stand for hung votes. Parliament has till the new moon to solve their differences. And if they won’t or don’t, that’s it.”
They were under the battlements of Parliament now. The mules slowed to a trot as they dragged the cart up a long, barnacle-encrusted causeway toward the gates. Lana expected the drover to keep talking, but she had clearly gotten lost in her own thoughts.
“Go on,” Lana prompted.
“If Parliament doesn’t get itself unhung, the fairies will call up the waves and wipe the whole place off the map, along with us and everyone else in it.”
3
Parliament’s main allée wound uphill in a steep curve. Throw in a few brick buildings and weatherboarded shacks, and it might have been any London street, but for the ancient abbey looming overhead. Lana’s head spun. The spires, towers, and buttresses above made her woozy. Even London’s greatest edifices were squat by comparison. And now it was pressing down on her, threatening to slide downhill and scrape the island bare.
A vicious hangover was setting in, but at least her load was lighter. She didn’t regret the remaining liquor the guards had stripped off her the moment she’d arrived, not while suffering from too much of it. But they’d taken her coins, too, and the little penknife she used for sharpening pencils. Lovely girls, all three of them, dressed in strapped leather and armed with humorless scowls. Flirting was traditional at gatehouses—everyone knew that—but not at Parliament, apparently. Either that, or there’d been a fairy keeping watch somewhere above, and the guards had to be careful and follow the rules.
She’d have to go back again in a few days and see if she could coax a smile out of them. After a bath, perhaps.
The houses and shops along the allée all looked prosperous enough. The street was remarkably clean and free of drains. Foot traffic only, and not much of it, but when a bass bell began to toll from on high, anxious women appeared in every door and window. Lana counted ten strokes. Ten o’clock? No, it wasn’t that late yet, the sky only half-dark. But the number clearly meant something important, because every woman’s expression turned sour. Some even broke into tears.
“Another hung vote,” said a gray-haired woman in Flemish-accented Fairy. “You’ve come at the wrong time, young scribe.”
“So they tell me,” Lana said.
“Can you swim, Anglish?” yelled a shopkeeper from the other side of the street. “I hope you sink with all your kind.”
Lana looked around. Yes, it seemed the shopkeeper was yelling at her.
“Anything to give you pleasure, grand-mère.” Lana touched her eyebrow with a respectful three fingers and continued to trudge up the darkening street.
The shopkeeper shook her fist. Not necessarily an unfamiliar scenario, but she’d only just arrived. Hadn’t even had the chance to test the strength of her credit yet, much less get into arrears.
Straight up the allée and talk to the guards at the abbey doors, that’s what she’d been told. No need to rush, though. When a gap between houses offered a view of the ocean, she put down her load and watched the tide coming in. The three-quarter waxing moon turned the water silver, and at first, Lana wasn’t quite sure what she was seeing as the sea rushed over the sands.
She thought she knew tides. The Thames rose and fell. Why would the ocean be different? Water was water, after all. But here, it flowed in rivulets that widened to streams, then spread into rivers that made islands of sand. Waves lapped at the dry margins until nothing was left, turning land into a dolphin’s playground.
Waves licked gently at the walls of Parliament. As the sky turned full dark, the wind rose, the sea turned frothy, and when waves began battering on the walls, Lana turned away.
The street narrowed and began ascending in stairs as it curved sharply to the left. The cracks and crannies of each step were lined with fairy dust, turning Lana’s route into a glittering web. But at the apex was no fairy palace, no verdant bower or treetop aerie, but the great, heavy doors of the abbey, lit by torches and guarded by a huge grand-tante.
She was built like a slab of granite, with age-dappled forearms big as prize trout. Silver hairs sprouted from the corners of her mouth like a cat’s whiskers. By the looks of her scowl, any attempt at pleasantry would bounce right off. Still, the urge to flirt was the only thing keeping Lana on her feet.
“Hey ho, grauntie. Any advice for a poor scribe newly dropped on the rock and looking for a friendly place to rest?”
“Round to the left and up the stairs,” the guard growled.
“More stairs? Have a heart. I’m about to keel.”
It was no exaggeration, but the grand-tante didn’t care, so Lana kept trudging. The path continued up and around the great edifice. Stained glass windows soared above, lit from inside, like multicolor blades pointing at the heavens. Lana climbed and climbed, the walls of the abbey on one side and solid rock on the other—so close she could brace herself with one hand on each. When finally she reached a tall and narrow door, Lana shoved it open with her shoulder and was dismayed to find more stairs—leading down this time, and lit by guttering candles.
Wasn’t there some old tale about a rock that had to be pushed up a mountain over and over again? Clearly, this was Lana’s fate now, to drag herself up and down stairs while suffering from a banging hangover. But what if she refused to cooperate? There was an idea. She’d stay up on the landing until someone came and carried her down.
“Took you long enough, legger.”
A fairy voice from overhead, light and crisp as tinsel, sour as a moldy lemon. Lana waved the words away. She was done for, not one scrap left to coddle a fairy. She closed her eyes and leaned on the wall, throbbing from head to toe.
“Downstairs,” the fairy yelled. “Move your clumsy feet. Don’t make me come sand get you, because you won’t like it.”
Lana rooted herself. The fairy’s threats grew louder and louder until that lovely, vicious little voice howled in her ear. Then: pain. Two jolts like hornet bites on her neck and shoulder.
“Move!” the fairy screamed.
Lana moved. Only her grip on the stairway’s rope kept her from falling. The fairy rushed her along, heckling, until Lana—famous in her family for having no temper at all—was ready to spin and start swinging.
Before she was driven to that extreme, the stairs ended. The world expanded into a vaulted library lit with glassed-in candelabras. Cozy armchairs scattered among the stacks. Leather-topped desks in well-lit nooks. The scent of warm wood, ink, paper, wax, and dust. Lovely. Here, a scribe would feel her skills properly valued.
“This is fine,” Lana murmured.
The fairy dropped in front of her. She was large—tall as Lana’s hip, with hornetlike wings in acid yellow and pistachio green. The most remarkable feature on her round, homely face were wide-spaced eyes the color of honeycomb. Her black hair was shorn jagged, and piss-yellow whiskers sprouted from her temples, each frond battered, kinked, and split at the ends. She wore a black-laced bodice over a ragged net petticoat.
“When they said I was getting a new Anglish waster, I told them not to bother. Parliament doesn’t need any more of your kind. But you’re here now, worse the luck.”
The fairy led her to an alcove, where a librarian with pencils in her hair made good-natured, welcoming noises. She issued Lana a crimson robe and cap, and an Anglish version of the Guide to Parliament. It was stained and fly-spotted, spine snapped, loose pages tattered.
The librarian apologized for the book’s condition.
“The Office of Engravers and Printers has been promising a new edition for ten years,” she said kindly. “I’ll try to find you a better copy.”
“Won’t need it,” said the fairy. “You’re all drowning soon.”
The librarian stuck her fingers in her ears.
“La la la,” she sang. “I can’t hear you.”
The fairy harrumphed. She laid both hands on Lana’s back and steered her through the room and up a spiral staircase at the back of the library. Beyond, passages led to a gallery high above the abbey’s nave. In the old days, it might have been a choir loft, but now it was a scriptorium. Six crimson-robed scribes lounged in various poses of boredom. Two reclined on the back bench, sleeping together in a clinch. Another was snoring on the front bench—not loud, just a faint and rhythmic whistle against the background of casual chatter coming from the great hall below.
“Make room, Raina Estrella,” the fairy said, and pushed Lana in beside the snoring girl in the front row.
Lana slipped her baggage off her shoulders and collapsed onto the hard oak seat. She couldn’t help but notice that Raina Estrella was sitting on her crimson cap. Lana pulled hers from her bundle, flipped back the tails of her coat, and stuck the hat under her rump. She tightened her ponytail and ran her palms over her hair, trying to tame the mess. Not the kind of first impression she wanted to make on her new colleagues, but nothing to be done.
“So,” she said, trying to regain her suavity. “Are we doomed or aren’t we?”
“You mean dissolution of Parliament?” Raina Estrella asked. Oh, she was pretty. Luminous skin, very brown. Curly hair barely restrained by a buttery leather cord. A scrumptious armful. “No, it’s real. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
A pale scribe at the far end of the bench groaned.
“Shut up. Nobody wants to hear it.” She scrambled to her feet and moved to the back row.
“Syrene is more comfortable believing it won’t happen,” said Raina Estrella. “But the deputies do. The evidence is clear. Anyone who can leave, does. More and more go missing every day.”
Raina Estrella pointed her pen at the Assembly Hall below, where politicians in purple robes and great mushroom caps chatted and shuffled papers while red uniformed pages ran back and forth, pursuing errands. Along the green leather benches, many spaces sat empty. Horsehair stuffing puffed out of the rents in the seats like open wounds.
“How do they manage leaving?” If there was a way of getting out of Parliament, Lana needed to know about it.
“If I knew how politicians wheedled out of their responsibilities, I’d be home in my mother’s kitchen right now.”
The fairy dropped down from the rafters, wings buzzing.
“It’s no secret, Raina Estrella. Their loving mammies write heartfelt letters to the Maréchal Assemblay.” The fairy pitched her voice low in a parody of human lingo. “Commodo, commodo. If you would be so good to send my lieblingstochter chez moi. Obrigado and much obliged. Estoy muy enfermo, and I must have her nurse me. Would you deny a mother comfort in her final days?”
Raina Estrella giggled. The fairy bared her fangs.
“Laugh if you can, but your mama wouldn’t pick up a pen to beg for you.” The fairy jabbed her finger into Lana’s sternum. “And yours don’t care about you, neither.”
“She cares.” Lana rubbed her chest. “But not much and only on alternate Tuesdays between two and four in the afternoon.”
“Prime nap time,” said Raina Estrella under her breath.
The fairy snapped a finger against Lana’s ear. Lana flinched, but the flick hit home.
“Let that be a lesson,” the fairy said, and hopped to the back of the gallery to harass the napping scribes.
At first, Lana’s ear barely stung. Then it ached. Soon, it throbbed fever-hot.
“Horrible beast.” Lana fingered her swollen ear. “Thought I was rid of her.”
“Hush. You want to stay on her good side,” Raina Estrella said. “Bugbite is the scribes’ whip.”
Lana turned her attention to the goings-on down in the Assembly Hall. The great-grandmother in the golden throne on the altar, that would be the Speaker. She slumped, elbows on the padded armrest and head in her hands. A ruby-red fairy sat casually on the throne’s high back, poking at her gums with a toothpick. More fairies ranged high, playing in the cathedral arches or perching on buttresses and plinths. Two sat on the arms of the Hanging Man, an ancient gilded-wood icon that hung over the Speaker, twice the size of life and ten times as gory. At the edges of the room, lamplighters were finishing the last of the dozens of lamps and candles that dispelled shadows and gloom from the great vaulted hall.
A pair of deputies approached the Speaker. The heavy sleeves of their purple robes dragged on the black-and-white tiled floor. The three politicians conferred for a long time, frowning and shaking their heads. Finally, the Speaker groaned audibly and waved them away.
“What’s happening?” Lana asked. “Shouldn’t they be shouting at each other?”
“There’s been lots of shouting,” Raina Estrella said. “They’ve called a break to catch their breath and will start up again soon enough.”
Lana spread her scribe’s robe over her knees and rested her pounding temple against Raina Estrella’s obliging shoulder. When she had a problem, a nap was never out of order. Usually, the problem was gone by the time she woke.
Her eyes drifted shut. How could anyone be expected to stay awake here, with so many voices rising from below? It was like being a child again, warm and cozy in the family nursery, listening to the hum of conversation from the kitchen, while deathwatch beetles played ticktock in the rafters above.
Then the Speaker slammed her mace on the clerk’s desk, and Lana lurched to attention along with the other scribes. Pages fluttered as they opened their journals, and steel nibs began scratching over paper.
Lana craned her neck to see what Raina Estrella was writing. Bugbite landed by her shoulder, little feet in grimy pink slippers gripping the back of the bench.
“Take a book from inside the desk, and scribble everything they say down below,” Bugbite shouted in Lana’s ear as if she were a century old and gone hard of hearing. “Don’t get into a bother if you don’t understand nothing but Fairy and Anglish, or if a word’s too big for you. Nobody expects much from a scribe. That’s why we keep a gaggle.”
Lana was offended.
“My vocabulary is top-notch, thank you very much, and I know quite a few languages.”
Bugbite’s expression sweetened.
“What a clever tongue you must have,” the fairy said, clearly impressed. “Can I see it?”
Lana smirked and let her tongue loll seductively from between her lips. The fairy’s hand flashed. Lana snapped her jaws shut—too late. Her tongue smarted as if burned.
“When you don’t understand the big words, just leave a blank,” Bugbite said, and buzzed away.
“I’m afraid you asked for that,” said Raina Estrella.
So, Lana’s first hours in Parliament proceeded with a throbbing ear and a swollen tongue. Raina Estrella had been right about the shouting—and when that shouting was in a language she didn’t understand—Russky, Polski, Magyar, Elliniká—she used the time to compose a letter to her mother.
Dear Mama, she penned on a fine sheet of her own best paper. You were quite correct as always in your infinite wisdom to send me to Parliament, where I have learned much and mended my rash and unheedful ways. A note from you to the—
Lana tried to recall the authority Bugbite had mentioned.
—Maréchal Assemblay will bring me home because you are of course quite terribly ill and require my kind hand to nurse you. I do so vow and promise that no more will you be disquieted by the lively behavior of your most engaging and devoted daughter.
Mother was terribly hearty and never ill. She would undoubtedly catch the hint, but would she understand how essential this was? Lana added a postscript.
Perhaps you have not heard that Parliament is about to undergo the ultimate proroguing. I do not mind to die and indeed would call it an honor to meet the end you chose for me. They say drowning is a kind death.
Too much? Too little? She added another postscript.
I am not exaggerating. xoxo
Excerpted from High Times in the Low Parliament, copyright © 2023 by Kelly Robson.
