“Yes, both. Always both. I imagine it’s much the same way you feel about me, really, and don’t think the irony is lost on me. But I was never cruel to you, the way our rulers were.” Now his tone turned almost anxious, as if he were afraid one or both of us might not quite believe him. “I never made you do anything against your own interest. But in Ifrinn they used us, like soldiers use bullets. It was too damned cold to live clanless and hungry, but we might have tried anyway if it weren’t for the Birthright.”
I heard the capital B pressing up through Locke’s sentence, casting a bulbous shadow behind it, but didn’t understand it.
“I should’ve started with the Birthright. I’ve gotten it all jumbled up.” Locke dabbed sweat from his lip. “This storytelling rubbish is harder than it looks, eh? The Birthright. Around sixteen or seventeen, a very few children in Ifrinn manifest a, ah, particular ability. It’s easy, at first, to mistake the children as bullies or charmers. But they possess something much rarer: the power to rule. To sway men’s minds, to bend their wills like smiths bend hot iron… And then there are the eyes, of course. The final sign.”
Locke leaned toward me and widened his own ice-pale eyes for my inspection. Softly, he asked, “What color would you call them? We had a word for it that English doesn’t supply, which referred to a very particular kind of snow that has fallen and refrozen, so that there’s a gray translucency to it…”
No, I thought, but the word felt weak and distant in my head, like someone calling for help a long way away. A broken grass-stem poked into the bare arch of my foot; I pressed down against it, felt it peel away a semicircle of skin, felt the prickle of raw skin in the open air.
Locke’s face was still close to mine. “You already know all about the Birthright, of course. Such a willful little girl you were.”
Like smiths bend hot iron. I saw myself briefly as a piece of worked metal glowing dull orange, hammered and hammered—
Locke straightened again. “The Birthright was an invitation to rule. We were expected either to challenge our present chieftainess in a battle of wills, or skulk off and form our own miserable clan. I challenged her as soon as I could, the old bitch, left her weeping and broken, and claimed my Birthright at sixteen.” His voice was savage with satisfaction.
“But nothing lasted in that world. There were always new clans, new leaders, new wars. Challengers to my rule. Dissidence. There was a night raid, a battle of wills, which I lost, and I ran away and… You know what I found, of course.”
My mouth moved, soundless. A Door.
He smiled indulgently. “Quite right. A crevice in a glacier that led to another world. And oh, what a world it is! Rich, green, warm, populated by weak-eyed people who cave to my slightest suggestion—everything Ifrinn was not. It took only a few hours before I returned to the fracture and smashed it to rubble with my bare hands.”
I gasped, eyes wide, and Locke scoffed. “What? You think I should’ve left it wide open, so some Ifrinn bastard could sneak out after me? Could ruin my lovely, soft world? No.” He was strident and principled, like a priest trying hard to save his sinful flock. Except there was something else panting beneath the preaching, something that made me think of cornered dogs and drowning men, a kind of clawing terror. “This is what I’m trying to tell you, January—you call them ‘doors,’ as if they were necessary, everyday sorts of things, but they’re quite the opposite. They let in all manner of dangerous things.”
Like you. Like me?
“I found a town big enough to grant a little anonymity. Clothes and food were easy for a Birthrighted man to acquire. So was a rather nice home, and an obliging young woman to teach me the language.” A smug smile. “She told me stories about great winged snakes that lived in the mountains with hoards of gold, and how you must never look them in the eyes lest they steal your soul.” A fond chuckle. “I confess, I’ve always liked nice things—what is Locke House if not a dragon’s hoard?”
Locke began to pace in irregular circles, fishing a half-chewed cigar from his coat pocket and gesticulating against the noon-blue sky. He told me about his early years spent studying language, geography, history, economics; his travels abroad and his discovery of additional aberrations, which he plundered and destroyed at once; his conclusion that his new world was still plagued by all manner of mess and malcontent (“First the Americans, then the damned French, even the Haitians! One after the other!”) but was steadily improving under the guidance of orderly new empires.
I listened, with the sun pulsing against my skin like a hot yellow heartbeat and the words be still circling inside my head like harpies. I felt twelve again, being lectured at in his office and staring at his Enfield revolver in its glass case.
He joined the Honorable East India Company in 1781. He rose through the ranks quickly, of course—“And it wasn’t all my Birthright, either, don’t look at me like that”—made himself a largish fortune, pursued business ventures of his own, retired and rejoined the company several times to allay suspicion about his age, built himself homes in London, Stockholm, Chicago, even a green little estate in Vermont in the 1790s. He alternated between his homes, of course, selling and repurchasing them half a dozen times.
For a long time, he’d thought it would be enough.
But then in 1857 a certain group of mutinous colonial subjects rose up, set a few British forts aflame, and ran victorious through the countryside for almost a year before being brutally subjugated once more.
“I was there, January. In Delhi. I went around to every mutineer I could find—which wasn’t many, as the captain had been firing them from cannons—and all of them told me the same story: an old Bengali woman in Meerut had slipped through a strange archway and returned twelve days later. She had spoken with some sort of oracular creature that told her she and all her people would one day be free from foreign rule. And so they’d taken up arms against us.”
Locke’s hands rose into the air in remembered outrage. “A fracture! A damned door, lurking beneath my very nose!” He exhaled forcefully and tucked his thumbs behind his belt, as if willing himself calm. “I came to realize the urgency of my mission, the importance of closing the fractures. I took it upon myself to recruit others to my cause.”
And thus was the Society formed, a secretive association of the powerful: an old man in Volgograd who kept his heart in a little velvet box; a wealthy heiress in Sweden; a fellow in the Philippines who transformed into a great black boar; a handful of princes and a dozen members of Congress; a white-skinned creature in Rumania who fed on human warmth.
Now Locke spiraled back to face me in his pacing, snagged my eyes with his own. “We have done our work well. For half a century we’ve labored in the shadows to keep this world safe and prosperous—we’ve closed dozens of fractures, maybe hundreds—we’ve helped build a stable, bright future. But, January”—his gaze intensified—“it isn’t enough. There are still murmurs of discontent, threats to stability, dangerous fluctuations. We need all the help we can find, frankly, especially now that your father is gone.”
His voice fell to a rumbling whisper. “Help us, dear child. Join us.”