Page 15 of Court of Shadows
I balked. “Nobody helped me, I did it on my own.”
“Indeed. And with what materials? There are no Gaelic dictionaries in the library, to my knowledge....”
“It doesn’t matter how I did it,” I shot back, irritated. “I want to meet him. Can you arrange it?”
At last he relaxed a bit, sitting back in his chair and fixinghis hair with a snort. His cravat was askew and he addressed that, too. “I’m afraid, little bird, that it does matter. You tell me how you managed to translate the letter and I will arrange this revenge for you.”
“It isn’t revenge,” I spluttered, looking at my feet.
“It obviously is, Louisa, and there is nothing at all wrong with that. Just as you stated, he owes you a debt, just as you owe me an explanation.” Mr. Morningside lifted both dark brows and nodded toward the letter. “How.”
He probably could have just as easily guessed how I managed it, but I obliged, slapping the torn letter onto the desk amid his terrible mess. “With my powers. I’m a Changeling, so... so I changed it.”
His golden eyes narrowed dangerously. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Leaning back farther, he rubbed his chin and studied first the letter and then me. Finally, his eyes slid to the journal opened just in front of him. “That’s remarkably advanced for someone so newly awakened. You’re absolutely certain nobody helped?”
I nodded, growing impatient.
He slapped the journal on his desk and chuckled, looking boyish, even excited. “How badly do you want to meet this man? How badly do you want to enact theseplans?”
“Badly,” I replied, feeling again that surge of anger and thedetermination that came with it. Croydon Frost owed me a different life and I would not soon forget it. “Very, very badly.”
Mr. Morningside tented his fingers and peered at me over the top of them, giving me a cat’s languid smile. “Very, very badly, is it? Badly enough to make a deal with the Devil himself?”
Chapter Ten
Remember, my girl, my drunk of a father used to tell me.Every man has his limits. From the smallest to the tallest, they all have a weakness. You have to know it, girl, but you have to know yours, too. See the wall before you crash into it.
Surely this was my wall, standing before the Devil while he offered to strike a bargain with me. I looked at the birds behind him, and they all stared back at me, the little liquid beads of eyes trained on me. They were silent to a one. It felt like a bad omen, as if even these animals couldn’t believe that I was seriously considering saying yes.
But I was. I did not know if I was in control or out of it, but at least it was a feeling besides regret and loneliness. I had a purpose now, one I saw clearly: I would meet this Croydon Frost and punish him for what he did to me and my mother, punish him for the punishment of the father I had actually suffered, and most of all, punish him for cursing me with this Changeling’s body.
And if I could rob him of some of his riches and use them to escape all the strangeness I had come to know, then so much the better. Better still, I could help my friends out of employment that forced them to murder.
Mr. Morningside’s eyes glowed, as bright and enticing as embers on a cold night. Still, I was not reckless enough to loseall sense of caution or propriety. I tucked my hands behind my back and rocked on my heels, choosing my next words very carefully.
“May I know the terms before I agree to them?” I asked.
“You may,” he said at once. “I’m only making a modest request.”
I nodded and took a deep breath. “All right, then; what is it that you want?”
He sat back down and reached for a brandy decanter hidden under a mountain of creased papers. Pouring himself a drink, he sipped it slowly and tipped his head back, regarding me down the length of his thin nose.
“I’ve been struggling to make sense of a rather important journal,” he said. At once, my attention fell on the scribbly pages in front of him. “Yes, that. I won it for a dear price at auction. Cadwallader’s of London. Funny old place; they only deal in rare goods from our side of things.”
“The Unworld,” I murmured.
“And the Upworld, and anything but the mundane,” he explained, taking another drink. “Had a lovely trio of shrunken heads that day, but my real interest was in this journal. Cadwallader knew it, too; said an odd fellow gave it to him for a song, thought it was an old bit of junk.”
Mr. Morningside put down his cup of brandy and flipped the leather cover on his desk, closing up the journal. He then nudged it toward me. I came up flush to the desk and leaneddown slightly to get a better look. It was yellowed with age and some of the pages had suffered badly from water. A strip of leather dangled from the edge, a means to wrap up the journal and tie it shut. There was nothing at all written on the cover.
“Honestly, it does look like an old bit of junk. It looks perfectly ordinary to me,” I said.
“There’s nothing ordinary about it,” Mr. Morningside replied with a chuckle. He opened the cover and turned it, showing me the scribbles more directly. They were rows and rows of minuscule pictures. I picked out a bird and what looked like a wibbly line, possibly a wave. There were larger drawings, too. A long blue snake filled the bottom half of the page. “It belonged to a young man I’m very interested in. There are languages similar to what he used, but this journal is written completely in a shorthand of his own devising. I’ve been unable to translate anything but a few stray words here and there.”
