In Mercy, Rain (Wayward Children, #7.5)

by Seanan McGuire

Jack Wolcott was twelve years old when she descended an impossible staircase tucked away inside her grandmother’s old costume chest and found herself in the sort of wild, magical land that people who had never once been to wild, magical lands enjoyed writing stories about. She suspected that some of those people might have had impossible staircases of their own, staircases that ended at doors entreating travelers to “be sure,” as if anyone could be sure of anything after going down so many stairs. She further suspected that none of those people had found stairways to the Moors. She’d never been encouraged to read fairy stories, or she might have known better than to open the door, but she’d grown up in a world full of them, and exposure to the background radiation of childhood had been enough to give her the basic shape of the worlds people liked to dream about, worlds where children could fly in veils of pixie dust, or grow bigger and smaller by drinking the right flasks of improperly labeled chemicals, or become royalty by stumbling out of the right wardrobe. None of those worlds looked like the Moors. Children could fly here, if they were gargoyles from the high castles, or if they had masters unethical enough to graft a bird’s wings onto their shoulder blades, where they would inevitably shred muscle and pulverize bone, but might offer a moment’s flight before that messy end. Drinking improperly labeled chemicals might cause uncontrolled growth, fungal and ceaseless, u...

He wasn’t sure, as the days turned into weeks and Jack’s arms, weak in the beginning, grew strong and dense with muscle, whether they were all going to survive the arrangement they had landed on. But the choice was the choice, and even if he’d been inclined to unmake it in favor of the experiment left unconducted, he would never have been able to get the others to agree. Jill was happy in the castle with her master, the Master was happy with his dutiful new daughter—and was, by all accounts, a doting father, perhaps having learned from his mistakes with earlier “children.” And as to Jack … Sweet Jack, who was so brutally sour in self-defense, who would one day meet the wind that whispered through the cracks in her walls and learn what it meant to soften, he could no more imagine handing her over to a monster than he could fathom slicing off his own arm for a werewolf’s supper. That he was also a monster in his own way was irrelevant. He knew he wouldn’t swallow her whole while she was sleeping. He couldn’t say the same for his counterpart. So Jack Wolcott, twelve years old and innocent of how much danger she had wandered into, grew into her proper place as a mad scientist’s apprentice. She rarely ventured anywhere without him, not out onto the cool wide spaces of the Moors themselves, not down to the waterlogged and slowly sinking town where the Drowned Gods reigned supreme, and not into the village that spread, septic and foul, at the base of the Master’s haunted, hauntin...

Just as Dr. Bleak was not the first keeper of the windmill, Jack was not the first foundling he had claimed as his own and attempted to train in the long discipline of scalpel and storm. The Moors were a place of delicate balances, every principality held by two monsters of equal power and opposing dispositions. Because the Master thrived in hunger and death, Dr. Bleak stood in austerity and in life, balancing the scales, preventing the judgment of the Moon herself from falling on their shoulders. He had never seen an out-of-balance principality with his own eyes. He’d heard the stories, of course, of what could happen when monsters were allowed to spiral beyond the Moon’s control, and knew that their fallen domains rarely, if ever, birthed anything but more death, destruction, and decay. He was happy to build the foundations of his own principality’s future on the narrow shoulders of a fair-haired girl who hyperventilated when parts of her meal touched one another. All of his former apprentices had failed their tests and trials, when the time came, and all of them had been what the small-minded would call normal in their thoughts, measured and precise in their habits, not ruled by any imbalance of the humors. Perhaps Jack, in her single-minded devotion to cleanliness, was precisely what the Moors had been waiting for. Perhaps by teaching her everything he knew, he would be able to pass the windmill along, as his own master had done for him, and rest. So Jack grew in the s...

Dr. Bleak began to think that one day, he would be afforded the dearest gift any monster of the Moors could receive: he would be able to stand aside from his duties and retire, giving his windmill and his title over to the girl who dogged his steps, her hands covered and her eyes bright. Her sight was not as keen as her gaze, and she began to fashion and mill her own spectacles, forging the frames in the stormlight glare of the flickering clouds, grinding the glass by the firelight until their concave shapes perfectly magnified the world to suit her. Glasses, a high-buttoned collar, tight-braided hair, and leather gloves became the hallmark of the mad scientist’s apprentice, marking her plainly even for those who had never met her before. Wanderers to their principality began to trust her on sight, which was for the best, as Jill was growing and changing at the same pace, and the mad scientist’s apprentice shared her face with the vampire’s beautiful daughter. As the summer of her fifteenth year in the world and her third year in the Moors broke across the horizon like a blood-specked egg, Jack felt she had found her place and her purpose. She would be the best windmill keeper the Moors had ever known. She would repair and rebuild the bodies of the citizenry, heal their ailments, and keep them as safe as they could possibly claim to be while standing in a vampire’s shadow. And when the time came for her to fight her sister, she would do that as well, with the same clinical...

Alexis Chopper had always been beautiful. It was one of the first facts she had come to know about herself, as she grew old enough to understand that she was a person distinct from her parents; her beauty informed everything she did and everything she was. Her body was large and plentiful, a feast of a girl. Her hair was lush and her smile was welcoming. She had spent enough time with her family’s flock to have acquired some of a shepherd’s resistance to scarring disease, and so her face was fair and fine. And for all of that, which might have been enough to curdle a less generous heart, she was also kind. Her kindness was as intrinsic to her as her loveliness, if not more so, for beauty can be spoilt, can change with the times, but kindness is eternal. She could tell that she’d done something wrong, that her death had upset two people she didn’t know, who helped to maintain the balance that kept her and her family safe. Slowly, she slid down from the slab, wrapping the sheet around herself in a loose gown and tying it at the waist for modesty’s sake, and then began to ascend the stairs, following after Jack.