Stormbringer

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  Stormbringer is dedicated to all who dream of a better, fairer world and, more important, to those who work with great passion and conviction to see that dream become reality.

  Acknowledgments

  There are always so many people to thank throughout the course of a series and I worry I’ll leave someone out. The reality of publishing is that every book is the result of a team effort, starting with the agent who shops a story and the editor who acquires a novel and helps develop it into even more than the author imagined it could be. So I’m going to introduce you to my team. Many of them have been thanked in my previous novels, but each new book usually means a small change in the makeup of the team.

  Stormbringer comes to you from: my beta readers, Patty Locatelli and Karl Gee, who ask the right questions and encourage most of my choices and listen when I rant or worry; my agent, Richard Curtis, who always makes himself available and answers all of my strange questions with great tact and vast quantities of knowledge; my editor, Michael Homler, who has a knack for making me reexamine my work so that it evolves; my cover designer, Ervin Serrano, who comes up with lovely images that encourage readers to give my books a try; Elaine Rothchild and Loren Jaggers, who do marketing and public relations and give great advice on what to try and what to avoid; my production editor, Lisa Davis, and my copyeditor, Christina MacDonald, who both make my stories stronger through their hard work and vision.

  There are many others along the way who help make my novels successful: my fans worldwide (I’d be nothing without your support), bloggers, other readers, and reviewers who love what I do, booksellers, librarians, and event coordinators—I cannot thank you often enough for what you do (not only for me, but to get books into the hands of people who will appreciate them and question or grow as a result of them).

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: 1844

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Also by Shannon Delany

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue: 1844

  The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  Philadelphia

  “I am not quite myself of late,” Lady Cynthia Astraea, once ranked Fifth of the Nine, complained to her head servant, Laura. Not that a great variety of servants remained for a lady to choose from, as there were currently many better households to find oneself aligned with. Yet Laura had a mission and a mission was enough to keep someone rooted when others fled.

  “Not quite,” Lady Astraea murmured, running a fingertip along her cheekbone and down the curve of her jaw to stop at the very tip of her chin, the whole while staring into her vanity’s mirror from her place on its matching cushioned seat. Her more elegant dressing table had been sold and replaced following her daughter Jordan’s seventeenth birthday party. Certain similar sacrifices had also been made since that disastrous evening.

  Granted, the party had been what most hosts wished their events to be: memorable. But not in the way the Astraea household hoped.

  No party was more talked about on Philadelphia’s Hill than that at which Lord Morgan Astraea, a leader in the country’s Council, was accused of Harboring a Weather Witch: his youngest daughter, Jordan. The Astraeas’ most recent event, society demanded it be their last.

  Harboring a Weather Witch was one of very few things that resulted in a complete loss of rank and cut a household from the Hub—the centralized source of power lighting Philadelphia’s fine homes, government buildings, and fanciest storefronts, all via stormcell technology.

  It was a technology fed by the only magick the United States government allowed, and only allowed because it remained firmly within government control. The council knew by “making” Weather Witches they could do more than call storms. But how the Making happened—that was a secret to nearly all but the Witches and the Maker himself.

  Cut from the Hub and shunned by respected society, Lady Astraea sacrificed things like the dressing table and the set of china that had come with her dowry as well as the family’s fine silver tea service bearing Paul Revere’s hallmark. Whereas Lord Astraea’s investments abroad might secure the family home and property on Philadelphia’s prestigious Hill a while longer, perhaps Lady Astraea looked toward the future of those still living within the estate’s rambling brick and fieldstone walls. Laura hoped that was why her ladyship parted with such possessions.

  But hoping something was true and something actually being true did not always coincide.

  “Please shutter the windows and draw tight the curtains,” Lady Astraea said. “I chill much more easily now.” She tugged at her shawl.

  Laura adjusted the shawl’s finely woven fabric so it lay snug around her lady’s shoulders before moving to do as she bid. Her ladyship raised a pale but commanding hand. “Wait. Light the candles first, please. But carefully.”

  Laura glanced toward the window. It was only now nearly dusk, and she imagined the lights of the Hill and the sprawling buildings at its stony foot would soon begin to rival the glowing summer sun edging toward evening.

  Yet, with a polite bend of her knees, Laura curtsied and changed directions, knowing quite well that Lady Astraea had recently become particular about both light and flame.

  Once the lady would have demanded the windows be open and the curtains thrown wide so she might watch the sun slip slowly down the face of the sky. Once she would have stepped to the window late at night to wish on falling stars. And once she would have kept a much different servant as her favorite.

  But Chloe had been hanged.

  And there weren’t many ways to undo something as final as death.

  Not many.

  As she reached for a modest tin of lucifers, Laura’s gaze drifted to the crystals peeking out of the shawl wrapped tight about her ladyship’s neck. Beneath that shawl lay a sparkling system of jewels hanging like spiderwebs decked with fresh dew. The stormcells twinkled, nestled in her lady’s hair, dangling from her ears, adorning her throat, her wrists, and even her ankles.

  But the most important stormcell crystal of all was the one Lady Astraea did not even realize she wore, the one slipped beneath her skin and as near her heart as the Reanimator could easily place it.

  The soul stone.

  If Laura had known where to find the Reanimator, she would have had some questions for him. First, regarding the fact her ladyship had trouble maintaining body heat. And what of her coloring—her complexion—which seemed a wee bit different if one saw her in a certain light?

  And then, there were other things she would ask the Reanimator. Stranger and darker things regarding changes in her ladyship’s attitude, her likes and dislikes. Both big and little things: a favorite dress was despised now for being a dreadful color and her favorite food no longer suited her taste. Would Lady Jordan recognize her own mother upon her return?

  The question twisted and evolved in Laura’s head, becoming Would Lady Jordan return?

  Witches never came hom
e. No one talked about it. Discussions of Witches and Weather were deemed petty things unworthy of discussion. The same way slavery was deemed a nonissue.

  Laura struck a lucifer and lit the nearest candle.

  Unless you were a slave.

  Or an abolitionist.

  John had been a slave and he talked about that far less than the night he brought Lady Astraea home from the Reanimator’s—just this side of death.

  Besides, the Reanimator might know more about the prophecy people whispered in quiet corners, about the Stormbringer—the Witch who would unite all the ranks and bring an end to the Wildkin War. According to the rumors she’d heard and the odd details she wheedled out of John, the Reanimator was precisely the sort of man to know the answers.

  Another wick trimmed, another candle lit—soon the room would glow against the coming dusk and eventual creep of night.

  Yes, Laura would have quite the list of questions for the Reanimator had not her coconspirator, John, kept the man’s location from her.

  For her safety, John insisted.

  Still, Laura knew the Reanimator lived in the section of the Below that Philadelphia’s Hill referred to as the Burn Quarter: the one populated area the battling fire companies would let burn if it ever sparked. Nothing and no one worth saving in that shambles, they claimed.

  The Burn Quarter was no place for a girl to go looking for something. Unless she was looking for trouble.

  Her back to her ladyship, Laura was still lighting candles (and missing the steady, clear intensity of stormlight) when Lady Astraea made her next request.

  “Yes, ma’am, what else did you require?” Laura asked, turning to face her.

  Lady Astraea’s features pinched and sharp, her eyes narrow and lips thin, she spat her next words out, forcing them between her teeth. “Why must you be so tiresome? When I say hand me the brush, I do not mean for you to stand there gawking, but for you to hand me the brush!”

  Trembling, Laura snatched up the brush sitting by her lady’s elbow and snapped it into the woman’s upturned palm.

  Astraea straightened on the seat, pulling the brush up and behind her head to hit the girl, and Laura ducked, raising her arms against the coming blow. “You little bi—” But the insult stopped, the last word dying in the woman’s throat as something changed in her eyes, left as fast as it had come. Some flame there extinguished, some flicker of hate snuffed itself out.

  The brush clattered to the floor and, resting her palm flat on the dressing table, Lady Astraea struggled to catch her breath, her other hand on her chest and not far from the soul stone. “I … I do not know what happened just then. I am so dreadfully sorry,” she whispered, her eyes soft, sad, and seeking Laura’s. “I was going to say something that was quite uncalled-for. Something quite appalling.” She shook her head. “Forgive me, Laura, I am not quite feeling—”

  “—yourself,” Laura said with a determined press of her lips. Her jaw set as her ladyship nodded. The strange malady brewing within Lady Astraea yielded the same complaint so frequently Laura regularly completed her ladyship’s words for her.

  No longer did Lady Astraea say, “Something ails me,” or “I am not feeling well,” but always it was “I am not feeling myself.” It seemed an accurate assessment. There were many days Laura thought had it not been for the physical trappings of her ladyship’s body, the familiarity of both face and form, she might have believed herself employed by some sharp-tongued stranger.

  There were times, increasing steadily in number, when Lady Cynthia Astraea simply was not quite herself. With a care born of wariness, Laura shuttered the windows, pulled the curtains tight, and realized she too chilled more easily now.

  Chapter One

  Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization …

  —CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

  Aboard the Tempest

  Rowen Burchette stood in the belly of the airship Tempest, his hands pressed flat to the glass of a window as cables hissed and zipped free of the bulbous boat, falling slack against Holgate’s Western Tower and slapping as loud as cannon fire. The airship drifted slowly up and away from its place at the docks, carrying Rowen farther from his goal of rescuing Jordan Astraea.

  He balled his hands into fists and slammed them against the window’s wooden framing. It did him no good and it definitely smarted, so, thinking better of the action, he stopped.

  He needed a strategy to get from this ship to the other. He needed a strategy to get to Jordan (whom he most certainly was not in love with, no matter what people suggested). He had a mission: he would rescue her and set things right in Philadelphia for both their families.

  He needed a strategy that would give them all their happily ever afters.

  But strategy was not his strong suit. His brother Sebastian was far superior in all things strategic. Sebastian could have outwitted the chess-playing automaton the Turk itself if he’d had the opportunity to play it! Rowen would have more likely sat across the chessboard from the mechanical man wondering who his tailor was.

  Rowen’s fists opened and closed again and he leaned forward, resting his forehead on one. He needed a plan. But planning was also Sebastian’s strength.

  Blood pounded in his ears.

  He needed … to gather his thoughts.

  He needed an achievable goal.

  His focus at the window changed and he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection. He backed up, swatting at his beard, trying to lessen the unkempt way it taunted him. No use, it still stuck out from his face like his jaw was covered in the ends of frayed ropes. He tugged a hand through his hair and got most of the blond mess to go in the general direction he hoped.

  Most of it.

  Dammit. The things he was known most for—his dashing good looks and ability to dress for any occasion—were also beyond his grasp.

  How did one dress for abduction via pirate ship, anyhow?

  He’d been forced into the hold of the Tempest by a group of large (and powerfully-smelling) men. Not that he couldn’t have taken at least a few of them down in a brawl, but he submitted when watchmen appeared on the Western Tower’s dock.

  The watchmen had been, after all, looking for him.

  So he let himself be jostled inside the rocking airship, because sometimes what seemed like losing was only a quiet way to win.

  The men searched him without even a “by your leave, good sir,” found little of interest upon him (having neatly disarmed him in the dark room beyond the Tower’s base), and then they disappeared, locking him inside.

  Piles of wooden boxes, crates, and trunks, most of them rough-hewn and similar in dimension, nearly surrounded him. The ceiling here was not much beyond Rowen’s own height and the interior was spartan with only wood beams, floors, and walls held together by metal strips and broad flat-headed nails. Copper pipes ran overhead, snaking across the ceiling, crawling down the walls to the floor, and disappearing into each.

  This was not a place one kept people, but things. Here the only noises were the creaks, groans, burbles, and hisses of a ship rising slowly into the atmosphere.

  He peered out the window again, marking well the name of the opposing ship. The Artemesia.

  It was a liner—larger than the ship he rode within, and far more fashionable with its sleek finishes and elegant trim. A generously endowed figurehead embraced part of its balloon, her wooden arms permanently thrown back as if against an oncoming wind, her skirt and hair flowing out and around the front of the balloon, its shape looking to him a bit like an egg tipped on its side. His stomach growled at the thought of food but he focused to scrutinize the Artemesia, wanting to be able to identify her easily again. Behind the figurehead’s wooden shoulders hinged the great ship’s folded wings, and in their current upright position he noticed wings painted onto the balloon’s fabric as well—a stunning blend of technology and art. Cabins were integrated into the design of her long skirt, their wi
ndows flashing in the waning light.

  At the Artemesia’s back sat her rudder and at the balloon’s very top … Rowen squinted.

  A door whined open and someone snapped, “You!”

  Rowen whipped around, giving the approaching redheaded woman a wary look as he spread his feet and crossed his arms to better appear imposing.

  It did nothing to slow her progress.

  He doubted much could.

  But she suddenly paused, saying, “Ugh. I cannot stand the parading about of supposedly modern women dressed in these—these…” She grabbed the wide flounces of her skirts and pulled at them as if making war with her outfit. “—skirts so broad, so cumbersome…” She reached for the belt buckle that bit into her clothes just above her hips and Rowen stepped back as she gave the buckle a twist and with a pop her skirts fell in a puddle of fabric about her feet.

  Beneath the skirting she wore tight leather leggings—indecently tight for a woman—and a pair of tall black boots. She wiggled the belt down across the broadest bit of her hips, declaring, “That is a great relief!” Kicking the skirts to the side, she stared at the newest addition to her crew.

  Rowen swallowed.

  The woman, a few years older than him if the lines edging her eyes and curving by her upper lip were any measure, pulled an etched flask free of her belt and took a long swallow of its contents. Her eyes lost focus a moment and the ship bucked slightly upward. She reattached the flask to her hip, licked her lips, and her eyes, a startling green, snared him again, brighter and fiercer.

  She wore a strange necklace of slender rope that wove in and out making a knotted pendant with three loops. Removing an old-fashioned tricorne leather hat, its sides pinned up with gadgetry, she leaned over at her waist, shaking out the longest mane of coppery hair Rowen had ever seen. Sighing, she swept it back up with her hands and knotted it at the nape of her neck, its ends fanning out at one side like a golden pheasant’s feather caught in the knot.

  Straightening, she donned the hat once more, and loosened the front of something that was at once as form-fitting as a corset and as masculine as a waistcoat. Again she sighed.