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“You,” Madam Crow pointed at him. “What are you doing here?”
“I—” he tried to fish for an excuse, a reason he was up here when he absolutely shouldn’t be — one would truly have to be spectacularly drunk to end up here by accident. And there was no way he could carry this off. Not even a panicked gasp of bathroom — a very trusty excuse he’d found in his time — would get him out of this. She was going to shout and he was going to be arrested and he would never see the sun again. Never see his siblings — even Bertram whose nose he would happily break if he didn’t detest open violence so much — ever again. Die in probably suspicious and forever unexplained circumstances.
“Please.”
He was so shocked, because that was his line, that he didn’t even register it. “Pardon?”
“Whoever you are, whatever you’re spying on the Republic for, I—” her voice dropped to below a whisper. Jupiter craned his neck to hear. “I need your help. Please.”
“What for?”
“Please come with me.” It was not a request. He knew from the look she was giving him that the second he thought about rejecting her request, she would shout and he’d be clad in irons and never seen again within the hour. She gathered her skirts and escorted him to the servant’s staircase and started climbing up.
“This is my granddaughter’s bedroom,” she said, pushing the door open very slightly. Jupiter peered inside to see a sleeping child, six or seven perhaps, with long black hair folded over the pillow. He could see the resemblance with her father immediately. And her uncle. “Her name is Morrigan.”
“Right,” he said.
“And in Republic, if she stays here by Eventide,” she said, closing the door again and striding down the hall, to a part of the house both she and Jupiter knew would be deserted at this hour. “She will die.”
“Another cursed child,” he said without thinking.
“Another?” her gaze snapped to him. “You know about my son, then?”
“I know your son,” he said, pressing a hand to his chest. “I’m in his Unit. He’s my sworn brother. That makes his family my family. That means that I will protect your granddaughter.”
Her face didn’t move a single inch but he could see the relief wash over her anyway. “Her mother was from the Free State,” she confided. “I have wondered, if it was possible to contact them—”
“I can write her other grandmother a letter,” he said. Somehow he hadn’t quite put together the connection that Meredith Darling had married Corvus Crow and Meredith Darling was Morrigan Crow’s mother. “Getting a family member to sponsor a citizenship claim would be the easiest way to settle this. When I explain the situation at hand, she’ll jump at the chance to bring her to safety.”
“I’m trusting you,” Madam Crow said. “She is… the only good thing in this house. If it were not for the curse, she could live a normal life. Grow up. Get married. Do things. Die in a timely manner. I don’t pretend to understand what happens on Eventide but I know my son survived because he left and joined your society. That’s what saved him. She needs to get across the border.”
“The curse isn’t real,” Jupiter said, repeating the promise he’d been saying for the last twenty years. “Whatever happens here in the Republic warrants investigation but this is not cursed behaviour.”
“I agree,” she said stiffly.
“Before I write to Lady Darling,” he started, already penning the letter in his head. “I would like to visit again. If it’s possible, I’d like to see Morrigan during the day. Just to see—” he put his hand up. “I don’t need to talk to her. Prefer not to actually, for safety’s sake. But I’d like to be able to paint a picture of who she is for her other grandmother.”
“Naturally,” Madam Crow said. She flexed her jaw for a minute but he could see the question poking at the seams in her mind.
“Bertram is doing well,” he said. “He’s set up his own company.”
“Good,” she said. “He’s made me very proud.” Her eyes slid to the side in a way that made Jupiter wonder if that was not true for her other son. Having met the elder brother Crow, he completely understood. He wouldn’t be surprised if the man never amounted to anything outside of local politics. He hoped not. The Wintersea Republic was a place where only the worst thrived, and if only for the sake of the little girl sleeping in the most isolated bedroom in the house, he hoped that was not the case.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said.
“Rejoin the party now,” she ordered. “And don’t make a scene.”
“Madam Crow, I would never.”
It was all over the papers. Not just the society lines, where those sorts of families usually appeared. Not just in the tabloids, where gossip and rich people “behaving badly” were usually relegated to. It was in the broadsheets. It was on the wireless. It was everywhere. Every single person in Nevermoor now knew who Meredith Darling was. And they knew because she’d defected from the Free State.
Jupiter glanced at the picture on the front of the paper again. Some fancy school uniform, apparently of Devereaux Ladies’ College (a dark purple skirt, lilac blouse, and cashmere purple cardigan), was draped over a scowling teenager with badly cut blond hair and slightly strange, high eyebrows. She looked surprised but also like she wanted to punch the photographer in the face.
Tarnished Silver the headline read. Jupiter rolled his eyes. Such a cliché that it didn’t even bear printing, let alone reading. He already knew the story without reading it. It was all anyone was talking about. He’d heard it from mother, who “knew the family quite well” (said with a black mark growing across her face), and “that they were devastated and shocked”.
Jupiter didn’t know these people. He didn’t know any of the Silverborn personally, except the few he’d encountered at society fundraising events and League ceremonies they always seemed to invite themselves to, no matter how tenuous the connection. Also the time one of the heirs with an impressive attachment to his hair and ego had slipped Jupiter his room key during one of those terrible parties. But aside from those, no he hadn’t met any. And he certainly hadn’t met Meredith.
It was kind of a shame, though. None of the papers reported it but the kinds of facts being released were such that they would have come from a close acquaintance, friend, maybe even her own family. He wasn’t sure that a sibling or parent, no matter how horrible or dreadful, would have him defect to an imperialist and authoritarian state like the Wintersea Republic but he was not Meredith Darling. He didn’t have her perspective or her life. He could imagine that she had thought that it was her only way to save her life or something. Which was a shame, because Jupiter knew, with shattering certainty, that this would be the thing that ended it.
But when Bertram came by later that day, he looked at the paper Jupiter had, and if he’d had a slightly more arcane knack, fire vision perhaps, that paper would have been a smouldering pile of ashes on Jupiter’s tea tray.
“Don’t,” he said at Jupiter’s look. “Don’t do your Witnessy shit. I’m not telling you anything.”
He closed his mouth slowly. Then opened it again, “Do you want a drink?”
His face was a complete sour lemon. His head was surrounded by regret and shame. Even if Jupiter hadn’t his knack, the amount of looking at the picture of Meredith Darling on the front page would have given him away completely. “Only if we’re drinking here. I don’t want to be overheard.”
He cracked one open for his brother, then himself. “There’s not going to be a little M. Crow running around in a few months, is there?”
“Not by any definition of human development. No one should let you near an infant, Jove.” He refused to loosen up but Jupiter could see the words trying to burst out of him.
“Perhaps not,” he agreed. “I think I’d be good with teenagers. Be good, but don’t be stupid. Have fun. Et cetera.”
Bertram rolled his eyes at him. “Anyway, no. Not like that, at all. I promise.”
“Right,” he said. “So what was it then?”
He sat and listened as his brother broke down his strange happenstance friendship with Kitty Beauregard and Meredith Darling and how he’d been the source of the leak and that the Darlings had refused to try to get her back before any of this broke at all.”
“Maybe,” Jupiter started, optimism poisoning every thought rushing through his head.
“No.”
“Since it’s so public, her parents—”
“They won’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“I already went to offer.” He smiled thinly. Something like vengefulness washed over him for a moment. “They especially won’t now. I’ve ruined it all.”
“Bird. There’s always a way out.”
“Please.”
Jupiter’s thoughts travelled in a hundred directions. He was in the League, he might have the right connections. He’d seen some of his supervisors reference things that were cut off but might be a way to get to the Republic. Fix this problem. It wasn’t that it was whoever this Meredith Darling was but he’d met so many people he couldn’t save in the League and he kept trying. The fact that Bertram wouldn’t was just vile.
He voiced this and was promptly rewarded with a punch to the face. Lying on the floor, only slightly dazed, ears ringing from the lecture screamed at him before his brother had fled the scene, he’d thought it was kind of appropriate that they both had bleeding noses.
He was short, grumpy, and honestly quite rude. Jupiter tried not to flinch back from the other boy whom his patron had introduced to him as Bertram Crow’s glare but honestly he was quite off-putting.
“I’ll leave you to get acquainted,” Mr Smithereens said, striding out of the kitchen. Boxes were still on the counter. He would have to struggle through taking off his eye patch or just ask to be sure but he thought that he was still moving into this place. Or moving back in maybe? “I’ll be in my study. We’ll leave for the Wundrous Welcome in an hour.”
Jupiter nodded back at him, trying to project confidence. He’d known about this other candidate of his patron, a very little amount that his mother had mentioned to him over dinner since she was determined to work out your competition is, darling. He’d kind of hoped they could be friends. If they got into Wunsoc together then they’d be brothers. But it still didn’t make Bertram Crow take his hand when he held it out to him.
“Shake his hand,” Mr Smithereens ordered over his shoulder and, with great reluctance, he finally did, shaking loosely once, and dropping it. Jupiter wasn’t ungrateful for this. Bertram’s skin could be mistaken for sandpaper except they were also covered in more engine oil than any hand ought to be ever. He hoped it didn’t seem rude that he immediately went to wash his hands. Maybe Bertram would just think him anxious or a mysophobe. These trousers were wool tailoring and he wasn’t about to ruin them with engine oil of all things.
“So,” Jupiter said, leaning back onto the kitchen table. He still had half a cup of juice left. Bertram hadn’t drunk any of his. He wondered if he found the bright red of it too unsettling to drink. It bore a little resemblance to blood, actually. Jupiter liked that. He could pretend to be a vampire sucking on his latest victim. Maybe they’d have vampires at Wunsoc. Not at the Wundrous Welcome — not if that was a daytime garden party, as advertised — but maybe in the society itself. If he got in — when, his mother’s voice muttered in his ear — he could meet them, go to all their secret parties, learn all their stories. There were so many things he wanted to do and see, he didn’t know where he was even going to start. “Do you have a nickname, Bertram?”
“No.” Was he glaring at Jupiter or was this just the way he looked at people. Was Jupiter being sprung on him in the way that he would have been sprung on Jupiter if his mother hadn’t been so obsessive about getting him into the society?
He blew out his cheeks, trying to think of the next thing to say. “People call me Jove, sometimes. I don’t really understand the etymological link between that and Jupiter, ‘cept they both start with jai, I guess.”
“Right,” he said, chewing on his lip a little. “That’s… nice.”
“Thanks.” He grinned widely enough to cut off his own eyesight, blotting Bertram from view for a second. “I think so too.”
“Of course,” he said tightly.
“That’s not… a Nevermoor accent, is it? Are you from out of the city?” He pronounced a lot of words in the same way as Mr Smithereens, like he’d spent a lot of time with him before. Like a lot. Like years. Maybe his whole life. “Were you with Mr Smithereens in the Fifth Pocket?” His mother had been so glad Mr Smithereens had come back just in time to take him on a scholar, all the other potential patrons would have cost a lot more money to bribe apparently.
Bertram’s face was a sour lemon. “It was the Fourth.”
“Ah, sorry,” he shrugged. “Is it nice there? I’ve only been to the Third and Seventh.” Mother’s family was from the Third, though they weren’t formal members of any clan. Father’s father had come from a tiny place in the Seventh called Barclaytown. It was the most boring place in the Unnamed Realm. Jupiter had nightmares about it sometimes.
“It’s fine,” he said, matching his body language. “We stayed next to an inlet. It was quiet.” He made a face, “A little boring. But Mr Smithereens is my guardian, so.” He shrugged. Jupiter got the sense he wasn’t going to get anything else out of him after that. It didn’t matter; they had months, or a year, or maybe the rest of their lives to try to get everything out of each other.
“Sounds pretty.”
“It was, except the midges made it horrible in summer.”
“Oh, I’ve seen them in the Highlands. Like clouds over the water. I don’t know about you, Bertie, but I got eaten alive last time.”
Bertie looked at him, “Is that my nickname then?” He said the word like it was almost foreign to him.
Jupiter shrugged, “If you like. Do you like?”
“It’s… fine,” he said eventually. He made a face, straightening up, then slumping back down again. “I can tolerate it.”
Jupiter pushed back his hair so it didn’t fall so much in his eyes, “That’s just what I like to hear.”
Bertram looked over at him, a little hesitant, perhaps, but open to... something, "So what do you think of Nevermoor?"