Madame Celeste Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 12 of 24

Two nights after the market barge, the wards on Celeste's door began to hum. She rose from her workbench inside the tree-cottage. Gears ticked along the walls. She limped to the shutters on her cane and looked out at the fog. Nothing showed. But the charms on her frame did not lie. Someone was crossing the water toward her, and no ward she owned could stop a knife once the wielder stood close. Celeste knew the visitor. Akiko Stormsail wanted her dead. The pirate had seen the totem answer only its maker. Now she meant to make Celeste the corpse and the totem the prize. Warding charms turned back spirits, not steel. Celeste had built her whole defense against the dead. Against a living pirate with a sword, she had nothing. So she stopped trying to keep Akiko out. She set a trap instead. On the shelf near the door sat her carnivorous bloom, its brass jaws folded shut, its stems coiled quiet. Celeste fed it a drop of sap poison and whispered a command into the totem. She sent two spirits into the plant's metal joints. Then she snuffed the candles and sat in the dark beside her cauldron, hands on the stone. The door opened without a knock. Akiko stepped through, sword drawn, one eye bright under her hat. She moved fast for a woman with a peg leg. "You should have stayed on the barge, witch," she said. "Debts don't die. But you can." "Come take it, then," Celeste said. She did not rise. Akiko crossed the floor toward the totem on the bench. She passed the shelf. Celeste opened the valve. The spirits surged into the bloom. Its brass jaws snapped wide and its stems whipped out, seizing Akiko's sword arm and pinning it to the wall. The pirate cried out. She hacked at the stems with her free hand. The metal joints held. Sap poison dripped from the jaws onto her sleeve and ate through the cloth. "I don't want you dead," Celeste said. She stood and leaned on her cane. "I want you gone. Drop the blade." Akiko's fingers opened. The sword hit the boards. The bloom held her fast, jaws inches from her throat. She stopped fighting. Her one eye fixed on Celeste with a new kind of respect, and a colder hate. "Tell every pirate on this river," Celeste said. "The witch's house bites." She twisted the valve. The stems loosened. Akiko tore free, snatched her sword, and backed to the door, blood on her sleeve. "You've made an enemy of the whole fleet now," Akiko said. Then she was gone into the fog. Celeste barred the door. She had survived the knife. But she had traded one hunter for many. The fleet would come, and no single trap could stop a crew. To finish the master totem before they did, she needed more spirits bound, and faster.