Alun Madder took a step forward and extended his hand to her. They shook and he said, “I only wish you’d take a minute when you need it the most. Think things through.”
“I have thought this through,” she said.
“Then that might just save us all. Good luck to you.” Alun Madder searched her face, finding, she knew, her determination. Mr. LeFel might know she was a witch. But he most certainly did not know she was a witch like no other. Vows and curses came to her as easy as drawing a breath. And Mae didn’t need any weapon greater than that.
Alun stepped away and Mae realized he had pressed a pocket watch into her palm. It was warm, as if an ember lay coiled within it. No, not an ember—glim. She had seen glim once, from a man who tried to sell just a drop of it to her when she and Jeb were traveling out this way. She would know the feel of it anywhere.
She had no idea how a pocketful of glim would do her any good, though it was said the glim could give strength to anything it was set upon. She tucked the watch away in her coat, and turned back to face Mr. Shard LeFel.
“Let Rose Small go.” Mae took a few good-faith steps toward the matic, then stopped, waiting.
Mr. Shard LeFel worked the levers in the monstrous metal beast. “Yes, of course. Let us make good on our promise, Mr. Shunt. Let the girl go.”
Mr. Shunt pushed Rose so hard she flew several feet before landing on the ground.
And just as quickly, Mr. Shunt suddenly appeared in front of Mae.
She sucked in a gasp. Before she could exhale, he had cut the straps of her satchels and packs. They dropped in a thump to the ground. He wrapped at least two arms around her, another clutched to the brim of his hat.
And then the world became a blur. Ground sped by, the side of the matic pulled up beneath her as Mr. Shunt scaled it nimbly as a spider climbing a wall.
Once over the edge of the cab, Mae was shoved, facedown, and pressed into the leather cushions behind Shard LeFel’s throne. Mr. Shunt pressed his knee in her back with a punishing weight.
She couldn’t move if she wanted to. Steam pounded the air and jolted the matic into action.
Facedown with Mr. Shunt’s wide, hard hand clamped against the back of her head and his knee digging at her spine, Mae could still tell the matic moved faster than anything she’d ever known, faster than trains or ships.
And she had no idea where they were taking her.
Rose Small hurt from her bonnet to her boots. More than feeling bruised and scraped, she was angry. She pushed up and staggered to her feet, but it was too late. The matic thundered off over the field faster than a racehorse on Sunday.
“Stop!” she yelled, which did absolutely no good.
“They can’t hear you,” Alun Madder mused. “All those gears and steam deafen.” He tapped at one ear for good measure.
Rose turned on the Madder brothers. She knew she shouldn’t, but she had so much anger boiling up inside of her, she thought she’d about go insane from the noise of it. “You should have stopped him! How can you just let that, that Shard LeFel take Mae? He’s going to kill her!”
Bryn Madder was down in the collapsed tunnel, handing up packs, gear, and a crate or two. Alun and Cadoc took each load from him, spreading the barrels and crates out, then digging in their packs. They were paying no attention to her.
“You promised me you’d help me save Mae,” Rose said. “Help me get her out of town and out of harm’s way. Have you always been liars, Mr. Madder, or were you saving it all up for today?”
Alun Madder, who was crouched next to a pack, sniffed and looked her way, his arms resting along his knees, his weight balanced on the toes of his boots. “We’re so much as liars as we’ve always been, I suppose.”
He turned back to the pack, digging away, just as his brothers were digging through crates and boxes. “However,” he said, “if Mr. LeFel had wanted to kill Mrs. Lindson, he would have simply had Shunt cut her heart out. He is more than happy to do such things.” He pushed that pack aside, stood up to pry the lid off a crate, and began digging.
The brothers were spreading out a collection of metal and gears and plates of wood and copper and glass. They scattered them on the ground like a strange puzzle or game, occasionally glancing up at the sky as if gauging the distance, the stars, or the wind that pushed them.
“So we sit here and wait until he tires of her company and then kills her?” Rose looked around. “And build a . . . a barn? No. I’m going after him.”
“Ah!” Alun said, and his brothers stopped rummaging through their packs to look over at him. “Here it is.” He pulled out his pipe, dusted the dirt off it, and clamped it in his teeth with a satisfied grunt.
Rose made a frustrated sound. The brothers had gone completely mad. Fine, then. She would save Mae on her own.
She picked up Mae’s tinkered shotgun and started walking. Got about a dozen steps away before Alun called out.
“By the way, Miss Small. We’ll need that locket of yours,” he said.
She turned, hands on her hips. And nearly lost her grip on the gun when she saw what the brothers had built.
In the short stomp she’d taken, they’d assembled the pieces of wood and metal into a perfectly square basket of some sort, large enough for six people to stand within it. Rising up at each corner was a lattice and attached to that were ropes. Spread out behind the basket was what looked like a huge blanket, white in the moonlight, and fine enough that the slight wind rippled the material.
Bryn Madder knelt beside the basket, using a ratchet to tighten a bolt on a fan or small windmill blade attached to the side of the basket. Cadoc Madder finished straightening the material over the ground and walked toward the basket, one finger up as if testing the air, a tuning fork pressed to his ear.
“What is that?” she asked.
Alun Madder held a lit wick to the bowl of his pipe, puffed several times, then exhaled smoke. “Just a little gadget we made.”
“What does it do?”
“It takes us faster than feet can travel.”
“How?”
“Steam and wind.” He frowned over at the basket, where Bryn was feeding coal into a firebox set up high in the middle of it. He had sparked and turned the tinder uncommonly quickly into flame and poured water from his canteen into a small keg set atop the tinderbox. “Mostly,” Alun added.
He grinned, clamping his teeth on his pipe. “Let’s have the locket, girl.”
“No.”
Alun’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “No?”
“You heard me.”
“Means something to you, does it?”
“More than to you.”
He gave her a considering gaze. “Well, then, let’s have you use it. Come on. Time’s a-wasting.”
Cadoc Madder stopped pacing and was now pointing the tuning fork northwest like a compass needle. “The rail,” he breathed. “They’re headed to the rail.”
“Nice of them to make it easy,” Alun said. “Just a hop and a skip.” He shrugged on his backpack, then pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of a crate and attached it by tubes and lines to his backpack before climbing into the basket.
Bryn Madder finished tinkering with the two windmillblade contraptions on either side of the basket. He pulled a squatbodied blunderbuss and a sledgehammer out of his pack before getting into the basket next to Alun. “Coming with us, Miss Small?” he asked.
“Where?” she asked. “How?”
“The rail, apparently,” Alun Madder said around the stem of his pipe. “And as for the how, you’re looking at it.”
Rose glanced over her shoulder toward the way the matic had left. She couldn’t catch it on foot. And even though the Madders were clearly not in their right minds, she wasn’t sure what choice she had other than to run to town and get a horse. And she had no time for that either.
She gathered up her skirt and tucked the hem of it through her belt beneath the heavy coat she wore.