I spluttered, and Tish stepped in to hug me again. Then, suddenly, Mademoiselle Caprice and Cherie were walking toward Mr. Murdoch’s wheeled trunk conveyance. The twin tracks cut by our wagon caravan dwarfed it on either side as they stretched across the moors, back toward the port city of Dover. I was just about to ask who would ride first when Mademoiselle Caprice leaped up with a daimon’s grace and settled her skirts over our trunk. Cherie and I exchanged glances; walking was so unglamorous.
“Have fun, honey,” Tish said.
“Good luck, ma petite,” Crim added, slipping something into my hand. A bludbunny foot on a chain. I stuffed it into my pocket and tried not to cry and mess up my kohl again. Criminy strapped the train case of blood and Caprice’s valise on a ledge behind the clockwork box and wound the key on the back. Before I was really ready, I was walking across the moors, stumbling over tussocks of grass as I followed my own rumbling trunk.
It was the strangest good-bye of my life, but I was on my way to Ruin.
3
I intended to punish my companions with my silence, but Mademoiselle Caprice spoke enough for all three of us. As elegant and aloof as she’d been in the caravan, the daimon changed utterly once we were over the first hill. She was an endless font of dry stories, anecdotes about life in Toulouse, and tips for not getting drained by big-city gendarmes, the Franchian version of police. In Sangland, the Coppers had evolved to keep the Bludmen down, but in Franchia, the gendarmes worked to promote peace among the daimons, the humans, and the few rare Bludmen within the city walls. But they still carried seawater guns, just in case.
“Such fortunate girls you are, to have a champion like Monsieur Stain. The university is beautiful—lovely buildings and soaring windows and the very best professors. You can study art or music or dancing.”
“Or business or bone setting or law,” I added, bristling for the twentieth time since she’d opened her mouth. No matter that I’d been in Sang for more than half a decade, I still had trouble swallowing the misogyny with a polite smile. And considering that my livelihood no longer demanded that I play nice with customers, I didn’t have to take it anymore.
She laughed brightly. “Oh la la. Luc did say you were a bold little thing.”
“What’s the city like?” Cherie asked.
The trunk conveyance stopped just then, and Caprice hopped gracefully down to rewind it with arms corded with muscles. When it was ready again, Cherie made a move to take her turn. But Caprice beat her to it, hopping back up to ride sidesaddle as we took off again.
“Ruin is like all Franchian cities: built with order and loveliness in mind. White stone, stained glass, statuary. We daimons require that things be beautiful, you know. Not like those wretched Pinkies behind their walls, living lives of fear. Although I do hear the Bludmen’s cities of Muscovy and Constantinoble are equally beautiful. How fortunate that your people and mine need not grub in the dirt for sustenance.”
“Do you not eat anything, then?” Cherie asked, before blushing and looking down. “If the question is not too personal.”
Caprice flapped an elegant hand at her. “Eating is a messy business, is it not? As plants derive nutrition from the sun, so do we daimons draw energy from emotions. There are different classes of daimon, but you can’t tell by looking what a daimon requires for health. I feed on passion. Some depend on comfort, happiness, awe. The dark daimons hunger for sadness, hopelessness, rage, pain. They cannot help craving such things, but it does tend to turn them to malevolent pursuits. Unfortunate, really, but they are the exception. Most daimons feast on forms of happiness and lust, of which there is always plenty. And we do drink, as you do, to relax and cavort. Our drinks are mostly made of fermented flowers and magic. But we don’t need it. It’s more like liquor is to the Pinkies.”
“How very fascinating,” Cherie murmured, and I realized I’d never asked Luc what he fed on. Considering his lackluster skills in the bedroom and the way he followed me around mooning, it had to be comfort. Before she’d hooked up with Marco, Jacinda once told me about an affair she’d had with a daimon in Paris, and it had given me high hopes for the dancing mistress’s son. But Luc had been a complete disappointment.
I had to find one of these daimon men who fed on passion.
“So the cabarets are as much for the girls as for the audience, then?” I asked.
Caprice leaned back to gaze at the airships bobbing over Dover as they played hide-and-seek with the low-hanging clouds.
“You would think that. But they are often required to do more than they originally bargained for. The wealthiest and most powerful men of Franchia are humans, for what daimon cares for all that work and responsibility? We have ways of keeping the laws in line with our ways, but the cabaret audiences are mostly Pinky gents. And that sort of man, so accustomed to taking what he wants, will not pay to be teased again and again unless he eventually gets his reward, non?”