Page 34

Chapter 28

Nora

Honora Holtzfall was born into two inheritances.

On her mother’s side, she came from worthy woodcutters with good hearts and virtues stretching back generations. People who had carved this whole city out of the woods, one tree at a time.

On her father’s side, she came from royalty and industry.

Mercy Holtzfall owned the city, but her other grandmother, Leyla, powered it.

In the marble entranceway of the house, Nora could feel the hum of magical energy through her slippers. She ran her fingers across the tiles until she found the small concealed handle embedded in the floor. She pried it open, revealing the staircase into the underground passage.

“A ladder wouldn’t be simpler?” Theo asked.

“You’ve known me since I was six. Have you ever seen me climb ?” It was easy to fall back into bickering like siblings with Theo. And then her eyes dropped to where his hand had been gripping Lotte’s a second before.

She reminded herself she couldn’t trust anyone’s loyalties. “Last person down, close the hatch.”

Nora’s grandmother, her other grandmother, had shown Nora the tunnels as soon as she was old enough to keep a secret. Leyla Al-Oman had been forced to run before. It made her into the sort of woman who always had an escape route. She had built these tunnels in secret while digging to make room for the power lines that fueled the city. Sure enough, the huge silver and bronze coiled wires met them at the bottom. Wires like these stretched all the way from the woods into the enormous magimek generator at the center of the LAO factory, and then back out across Walstad. They hummed with the pure magic that was being drawn out from the woods.

Leyla Al-Oman, the exiled desert princess, had been a fascination when she had first arrived in the city. A young noblewoman fleeing the revolution with a newborn in her arms. Everyone had wanted to hear her stories of princes and djinn in far-off lands. They invited her to salons to tell the sweeping romantic saga of her mother, a Gamanix-born woman, stolen away into the harem of the handsome young sultan, Leyla’s father. Seductive stories of her youth in the colorful gardens in the midst of the desert, safe behind walls. And then the tragic tale of how the sultan, her father, had been usurped by a band of rebels led by his own son, a treacherous radical prince.

Leyla had indulged them because it meant gaining their ear. And once she had that, it was easy to turn the conversation to other subjects, like their money. She called it an investment so that she could do what she did best: invent, create, build.

She started with an invention she had brought from the desert. A light that could run without oil or fire—on magic alone. In a matter of months, every wealthy home in the city had magimek glass lights. It had earned her investor, Roland Bittencourt, millions.

And it had got Leyla the attention of Mercy Holtzfall.

Which was what she had been after all along.

They were both young women then. Neither of them had seen thirty yet. But they each had lifetimes behind them already. Mercy had won her trials and stepped in as head of the family when her own father died young. Leyla had been cast out by her country and rebuilt her life in a new one. Nora knew that it was rare for either of her grandmothers to meet an equal. And they had hated each other as much as they needed each other.

The Holtzfalls represented the history of Walstad. But Leyla represented the future. With or without Holtzfall backing, Leyla would soon become one of the most powerful people in the world. Mercy could either become an ally in Leyla’s rise—or her rival.

And the Holtzfalls only survived so long as the city needed them more than they needed anyone else.

So Mercy Holtzfall came in while Leyla still needed something—a way into the woods. Leyla wanted access to the bottomless well of magic that coursed through that most ancient part of the world. And Mercy Holtzfall, who had a way in thanks to the Huldrekall’s original ring, could give her that access.

More than three decades later, both sides of Nora’s family were stitched into the fabric of what made Walstad tick.

The tunnel sloped up gently at the end, leading straight into the main industrial floor of LAO Headquarters. In the factory, brick and metal rose three stories high, housing monstrously sized machines. Half-finished automobiles and other magimek creations littered the factory floor.

And, in the midst of it all, there was Leyla Al-Oman. The most brilliant woman in the city, sitting on the floor, machine parts scattered around her, a huge glass magnifying her work. They called her the inventor princess. The silk-stockinged magnate. The blue-blooded industrialist. Nora mostly called her Grandmother.

“You should have a coat on, little princess.” Her grandmother spoke in her native Mirajin without looking up. “You will catch sick.”

As usual, Leyla’s office was kept at a temperature that Nora could only describe as lobster-boilingly hot. The exiled desert princess didn’t tolerate the cold well. Finally she looked up, her eyes dashing across the scene in front of her, Nora, in nightwear, trailed by a knight and a rogue cousin. She had likely read about Ottoline in the papers, but Leyla had never been able to tell Nora’s blonde cousins apart at the best of times. So Nora was a little surprised when, again, in Mirajin, she nodded at Lotte and asked, “She is the new competition? I could kill her if you want.”

“No,” Nora answered in Gamanix. She understood her grandmother’s native language well enough, but she knew she spoke it like a child learning their letters. “I don’t want you to kill anyone.”

Leyla Al-Oman made a noise at the back of her throat as she jutted her chin toward a wall strewn with cushions in the corner. A signal to Theo and Ottoline to get out of her way. They took the hint.

“What are you fixing?” Nora asked as her grandmother turned her attention back to her work.

“A problem.” Her grandmother gestured angrily with a wrench in the general direction of the front of the building. “Those people with the signs.” There was no word in her grandmother’s native language for strike . “I caught two of them trying to steal from me. Trying to steal plans for the charms in the woods. To sell to my competition, no doubt. So I fired them. And now the ones I didn’t fire are angry. And now they have signs. People with signs lead to terrible things, you know. Things like democracies.” Nora didn’t remind her grandmother that Gamanix was a democracy. Just not a foolish democracy like in Miraji or Ionia, where every person got just one vote. “If they don’t want to work, I will replace them. I will make machines that can work for me.”

Now that she looked, she could see it. Pieces that might fit together to make a jointed mechanical hand.

Nora’s eyes flicked quickly over the design. “You’d have better results if you used a different charm sequence for the thumb than for the four fingers.”

Her grandmother paused, her eyes only needing to dance over her work for a moment to see the truth of what Nora was saying. She started to recurve the circuitry on the thumb joint.

“Your mind is wasted on their endless revelries, little princess,” her grandmother said in her gravelly accent. “Perhaps it would be better if you lose these foolish trials. You could be here more.”

There were few people that Nora would allow to lie to her out of kindness, but her grandmother was one. The truth was, they both knew what happened if Nora lost the heirship for good.

Nora found out about her parents’ marriage when she was a child. From Modesty, of course, who had heard it from her mother in a moment of pique and wine.

Thank goodness my mother didn’t win her trials. Modesty had stuck her nose up in the air on one of those many occasions where Nora was being given something the rest of them weren’t. Or she would have had to marry your foreign father .

From there, Nora had learned the truth. Mercy Holtzfall might have given Leyla Al-Oman a way into the woods, but she was not one for sharing power. They had struck a deal the night before Grace and Verity were due to enter the woods for the final trial: Leyla’s only son would marry Mercy’s Heiress, whichever daughter that might be.

Verity Holtzfall emerged from the woods with the ax. And a year later, Nora’s birth was the final seal on the contract between the two women.

Nora watched her parents closely after that. Even as a child, she’d been able to see that they didn’t love each other like the people did in the stories and movies. But they were kind to each other, and they laughed together, and until the day her father died, they would sit together every night and talk about what they had done that day. And her father would smile when her mother spoke about hers. They were friends, if nothing else.

And they both loved her.

And when she inherited, she would be the one to bring LAO into the Holtzfall empire.

Or she could also be the reason it all fell apart.