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Chapter 35

Nora

“You still look rich.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice.”

Nora and August were making their way toward the docks through the early evening crowd. The curfew was firmly in place across the whole city, and all around them, gaits seemed hurried as people rushed to get home before nightfall. Every few blocks, they passed a small scattering of police officers keeping their eyes on the crowd and their hands on their weapons. Nora was wearing her glamour, but there was nothing she could do about her clothes. She hadn’t had time to go home and change.

“Here.” August shucked off his heavy brown coat and handed it to her.

The coat was too large, but it was pleasantly warm from August’s body. It smelled of shaving cream and what she had started to recognize as newspaper ink.

Without the coat, he stood out starkly against the water and warehouses that surrounded them in his white shirt, suspenders carving dark lines across his tall narrow body. Nora stuck her chilled hands in the pockets as August rolled down his sleeves from where they were bunched up around his elbows. Shop fronts turned to warehouses and sidewalks turned to wooden docks, and the crowds began to thin.

“This is really how you want to spend your evening?” August said, fastening his cuff. “Isn’t there some party you could be at?”

She was meant to be at Angelika Bamberg’s party. She and Lotte had made a plan to break in and continue the hunt for Lotte’s father this evening. But this might be her only chance to get to Isengrim. And if she did, then she could shrug off this guilt too. She didn’t need to help Lotte find her father and sell the information to a gangster.

“There are many parties I could be at,” Nora said evasively. “But I read in Modern Mode that to snag a man you should occasionally take a night off from your usual routine and try new hobbies. And I’m going to assume that also applies to snagging men that you’d like to see spend the rest of their lives in jail for murder.” Let the papers miss her. Let them speculate over where she was and who she was with. They’d never guess she was crashing a Grim rally. Getting Isengrim to admit to what he had done.

Nora was glad August was here with her. The only times she found that her mind wasn’t worrying at the trials, like a dog at a meatless bone, was when she was with him. When he was challenging her, not succumbing to her too easily.

Truthfully, she probably should be thinking only of the trials. Waiting for them, preparing for them. But August’s world seemed so far away from hers, she had a hard time imagining any trials coming to find her this far downtown.

Each dock was painted with bright white letters along the wooden slats. As they got closer, Nora noticed others emerging from the streets and between the piled crates that marked where the water began. Couples trying to feign casualness, as if they were just taking a stroll arm in arm at the docks at sunset…while there was a curfew. Or young men moving quickly, their hands deep in their jackets, walking with purpose in the hopes no one would stop and ask what that purpose was.

All of them slowly but surely veering toward the warehouse doors marked with 112 . Nora let a young woman go in front of them, watching as she pressed toward the entrance and passed through the darkened door into the shadows beyond.

Nora didn’t like walking into a party without knowing what was on the other side.

“It’s not too late to turn back,” August said, echoing her own uncertainty. “We might still get answers from tracking down your mother’s ring.”

“We both know that’s a dead end without Oskar Wallen’s help.” Nora fought the impulse to slow her steps as the warehouse doors loomed closer. She checked the charms on her jewelry. “Besides, I’m used to rooms full of people who hate me—I have a family.”

The warehouse was packed wall to wall, with even a handful of children sitting on shoulders to see over the heads of the crowd. There was a makeshift stage at the front with a large zungvox set up on it to project Isengrim’s voice to his assembled admirers. Nora and August maneuvered their way toward the front, until the crowd was too packed to pass any farther, and they stood wedged off to one side.

A woman bumped into them, jostled by the restless crowd around them. “Sorry,” she said, gripping the worn felt hat that covered her pale blonde hair. “I’m so sorry. I’m so nervous. I’ve never been to something like this before. Have you?” She was babbling, and she didn’t wait for an answer. “My husband got arrested for striking. They’ve been holding him for weeks, and we can’t pay for a lawyer to get him out. And then my neighbor told me about the Isengrim code and I just thought…some days it seems like the only way he will ever come home is if we bust open the doors of the prison ourselves.”

The woman was as slight and delicate as a feather, and her voice was sweet and singsong and breathy. Nora couldn’t exactly imagine her wrenching open a prison door. “Why are you here?”

“We heard rumors the LAO factory is getting rid of all its employees,” August piped up before Nora could invent a lie. “My wife and I need those jobs. We’ve got little ones to feed. Can’t have poor baby Chastity starving.”

The woman smiled and nodded along at August’s ridiculous story, the crowd around them shifting her away after a moment.

Nora shot August a look. “Moving a little fast, aren’t we? Seems like just yesterday we were eloping in a pawnshop, and now we’re married and raising a child.”

He shrugged ruefully. “That was five whole days ago; our relationship has evolved.”

“Well, we’re not calling our daughter Chastity.”

August glanced sideways at her. “ Don’t you have a cousin named Modesty?”

“Exactly, and look at her .” She shifted from one foot to another, keeping her eye firmly on the stage, waiting for the appearance of Isengrim. The man who might be able to answer all her nagging questions about her mother’s murder.

“How about Prudence?” August asked.

“No, she’ll get called Pru . That’s an old woman’s name.”

“Benevolence?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” It was a pointless game to play with August. Even if she felt anything other than constant annoyance for him, what world existed where an heiress married a journalist? Not the world of Mercy Holtzfall, certainly, and not the world of Isengrim either. “Benevolence is a boy’s name.”

Suddenly the chatter around them died down. Something was happening onstage, the first sign of movement. And then through the darkened door behind the zungvox appeared a slender figure in a gold-painted deer mask. Behind her was a man in a boar’s mask, then a fox. A bear. A falcon. A hare. A doe. A hound. They crowded onto the stage like animals coming out of their den, flanking either side of the stage protectively. Dozens of them in their snarling gold masks. And finally, behind all of the lesser beasts of the wilderness, came the wolf.

It was as if a bomb had gone off in the room. Everyone broke into rapturous applause at the sight of Isengrim. Except for Nora.

Her body ran cold at the sight of him.

He was just a man, she reminded herself. A man in plain work clothes and a ridiculous wolf mask that was more fit for games at a garden party than a stage. But the crowd reacted as if he were a hero of old returned to life. A savior from…what? Their poverty? Her family? The way the world was doomed to work?

August nudged her in the side, bringing Nora back to herself. Clap , he mouthed. Nora realized she had been staring fixedly while everyone around her cheered and stomped.

Begrudgingly, she put her hands together for the man who might have ordered the murder of her mother.

“I heard he wears the mask to hide his scars,” a man said loudly behind them. “The ones he got from the wolves that killed his family.”

Oh, I’m sure that can’t possibly be apocryphal . Nora bit her tongue against the words. That’s why the police haven’t identified him yet, too many men with disfiguring claw marks across their face in this city.

Isengrim raised his hands, gesturing for silence as he leaned toward the zungvox. “People of Walstad!” His voice was distorted through the machine. Nora couldn’t tell if his accent was Northern or Southern, if he was old or young. He could be anyone. “You glorious people, who have been mistreated too long. Stepped on, looked down upon, not seen or heard by those who think they are so high above us! Know that I have heard you.” The crowd roared, and Nora could feel it. The desperation in their voices. The urgency, the yearning for someone to help them. For someone to save them. And Nora felt a swell of anger mingled with purpose that she couldn’t wholly put her finger on.

“Tomorrow they will trot out the pantomime of an election for all of us once again. Pretend that we have a choice as the victor celebrates before the polls even close because our votes are not counted.”

Was the election tomorrow? Nora had forgotten completely. She hadn’t even decided what she was going to wear to the victory celebrations.

“The voices of the rich matter to our governors! Ours do not, so we will make them heard another way!”

The crowd around them cheered. Nora listened, hackles rising. Grim protests always ended the way they had yesterday, broken up by the police, with violence, injuries, death. Isengrim was leading them into a battle he knew they couldn’t win. Into another losing fight like the riots. Sure, they’d smashed up some windows. But it meant hundreds in jail cells, several dead. If Isengrim thought any governor would flinch at the idea of citizens of Walstad beaten down in his name, he was wrong. And the people here were cheering in his name. They were willing to march into a losing fight for him.

She imagined the blonde girl being dragged away to join her husband in prison. The governor would watch it through the window of his mansion, bragging to Mercy Holtzfall how effective he was at keeping the peace. And meanwhile, nothing was being solved. They thought Isengrim was offering them freedom, but he was only offering violence.

Even as Isengrim spoke, Nora’s eyes moved to the door behind the stage. Isengrim would have to leave that way. There had been a brief time in their history where the Holtzfalls had ruled like kings. Where they were the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Nora would be a fair judge. She would follow Isengrim, and she would make him admit what he had done to her mother. And then he would take Lukas Schuld’s place on the executioner’s block.

And when the wolf’s head was cut off, the body would die. She could end the Grims. She could end this war in the streets of her city. She could find another way for them.

But right now, Nora and August were hemmed in on all sides by the crowd.

Nora nudged August, gesturing with a tilt of her head. Together, they moved to their right, pushing past people, around to the side of the stage, Nora’s heart hammering as they went.

They were halfway there when there came a noise like a sledgehammer cracking against wood, loud enough that it carried over the zungvox. Isengrim’s words faltered, the crowd turning toward the wall where the noise had come from.

A noise like a battering ram slamming into the warehouse wall.

And then it came again. And again.

An uneasy mutter ran through the crowd. “The police?” someone near August and Nora wondered aloud. No, Nora knew the weapons the police used. They came from her grandmother’s factories. Those would elegantly disintegrate a wall. This bashing was crude and primitive.

With a shattering noise, a section of the wall exploded, and the crowd erupted into screams, pushing backward, trying to move away, though the crowd was too dense for them to gain much room.

Nora pushed forward heedlessly, and as the dust cleared, she saw what had broken through.

It was an arm. Too large to belong to anything human. It was immense and rough and gray, like a stone brought to life. It withdrew through the hole it had created, and in the gap there appeared an eye, the corner of a face. And then came a roar so deep and guttural it shook the walls.

The crowd erupted into chaos. But Nora stayed rooted.

It was a troll. Made of sidewalk , from what Nora could tell.

Of course it was. Because a Veritaz Trial by troll was exactly what Nora needed right now.