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Oleander Jones knew the rules for lady adventurers, and she broke them all. Now she’s got a reward on her head bigger than the Logressan national debt. The New Dominion Territorial Militia, the full detecting might of Falchion Apprehension Services, and every no-good one-eyed snake who can read a wanted poster are on her tail. And there’s only one way to get where she needs to go–through the killing ground of the biggest, meanest, man-eating, avian monster Roche County has ever seen. Dead across Siren Bridge.

Strudel, anyone?

Chapter One

The enormous ruby glistened under the electrified chandelier of the governor’s study like a bite-sized jam tart served in a bezel of pure buttery gold.

Oleander Jones’s mouth watered. A part of her hadn’t dared to believe the jewel was really in the capital of the Logress’s New Dominion Territories, so many thousands of miles from its home, until she saw it dangling from Lord Helford’s stubby fingers by its equally scrumptious, yellow gold chain. The Heart of Gruende, the single most important, most valuable gem in the Gruende royal treasury. You couldn’t crown a Gruen monarch without it.

And she was going to steal it. Under an official government contract issued by the Grand Chancellor of Gruende, Osto Kriekstan, himself. Her insides wiggled with glee.

“Miss Fitzclare!” Helford barked.

It took Ollie a moment to remember the alias she’d chosen for this job. It took still longer to wrench her gaze from Gruende’s candy red Heart to the scowling face of its current owner. Despite his pedigree, his striped silk vest and the custom-tailored frock coat padded in the shoulders and lengthened in the sleeves to lend him an illusion of height, Harcourt Pencastle-Hinge, Fourth Lord Helford, Baron of Montcalm and Governor General of the New Dominion Territories, reminded her of nothing so much as a pompadoured frog. He hopped across the sofa cushions until his trousers crowded the skirt of her cotton dress. Their sartorial proximity defied all Territorial notions of propriety. The daughter of actors, Ollie found those notions rather quaint.

Her Fitzclare persona thought otherwise. She shrank against the arm of the sofa, palm braced against the prickly velvet upholstery. Her other hand pawed the sofa-side drink cart as if the seltzer bottle was all that stood between her virtue and certain ruin. In fact, the metal canister was too heavy for what Ollie had in mind. What she needed was something along the lines of the square-sided crystal whiskey decanter. She slicked her tongue over her lips.

Helford’s eyes held a glint as predatory as any of the snarling animal heads that punctuated the room’s burled walnut wainscoting and veal-tinted plaster walls. He struggled to maintain his frown, but his serious demeanor kept sliding into a smug, toad-like grin.

“Now, now, you can’t afford to be faint-hearted.” From the way he brayed, you’d think she was sitting across the room instead of close enough to smell what he drank for lunch. “Your job is at stake. The typing on a governor’s letters has to be perfect. If you can’t bring your typing in line, the Secretarial Office is gonna have to let you go.”

“I know, sir,” Ollie replied in her persona’s breathy, little girl voice. “I appreciate that you’re trying to help me. And I really need this job. But you didn’t say anything about hypnotism.”

“Is that what’s got your knickers in a knot? You think I’m gonna make you cluck like a chicken or stand on one leg?”

She nodded. Given the eye lock he had on the buttons straining to contain her artfully heaving bosom, she didn’t expect him to notice. But he chuckled. The wet snorts had a distinctly amphibian quality.

“Carnival tricks. The Jewel of Compulsion—I mean, this here jewel doesn’t work like that. It only helps you achieve your full feminine potential, as it were.”

“Will it hurt?”

He snorted some more and squeezed the top of her knee with his free hand. The magic engineered into the ceiling-mounted spellfans was strong enough to keep the room pleasantly cool despite the summer heat and the ostentatiously unseasonal fire blazing in the hearth. But they were no match for Helford’s overheated blood. The sweat on his palm soaked through her calico skirt, her double petticoats, and cotton stockings, all the way down to her skin.

“I wouldn’t dream of hurting a pretty little thing like you. Now just relax.”

She cringed dramatically. Her right hand curled over the stoppered top of the whiskey decanter.

“You’d think you were deaf, girl. I said nothing bad is gonna happen.” Helford swung the gem in a lazy arc. “Look at the Jewel. How could anything so pretty be anyway bad?  Look at it, Miss Fitzclare—how red it is and how shiny, how it catches the light.”

Under normal circumstances, she would’ve been hard-pressed to look anyplace else. But the combination of his breath, his musky cologne, and the fug of dead cigars clinging to his clothes wasn’t doing her stomach any favors. To avoid casting her accounts, she let her gaze drift to the floor…which may have been a mistake. The preserved head and pelt of a saber cat splayed across an Ishterran carpet the color of fresh blood. With a mental start, she realized the pelt didn’t have a ruff. The sabercat was female, like the running vixen in the large diorama mounted over the fireplace. Like all the mounted trophies she could see. Were all the animals he bagged female? What kind of trophies did he take from his two-legged prey? She swallowed against the sudden sourness in her mouth.

“That’s it,” Helford panted. “Almost there, almost there.”

The egotistical pimple can’t tell the difference between appalled and enthralled.

“Yes!” he hissed, looming over her. “The spell is set. From this time forward, the power of the Jewel will compel you to make my wish your command, no matter what your momma taught you or what you learned in school. Your personal inclinations won’t mean a thing. You belong to me—and only me—until I say differently. Now, my little pouter pigeon, show your master those tits.”

Ollie smashed the decanter against the side of his head. The blow knocked him into the back of the sofa. Dazed, he groped for her. She jumped to her feet. Still holding the stopper in place, she clocked him again.

The bottle broke, spraying liquor and fumes. Eyes watering, she stumbled. Her skirt caught the drink cart. Cart, bottles, and tumblers crashed onto the sabercat.

When her galloping heart slowed to a canter, she gingerly lowered the neck of the bottle to the carpet. The front of her dress was soaked, and she smelled like the inside of a bourbon barrel, but she wasn’t bleeding. Nothing else mattered. If the governor’s wizards found her blood, they could find her. And worse.

But it was all right. She hadn’t cut herself. She forced her shoulders to relax.

She was tempted to leave the base of the decanter where it was, caught between the governor’s melted pompadour and his sodden shoulder pad. But she couldn’t risk him slicing his own throat. A charge of murder would be bad enough, but governors didn’t get murdered, they got assassinated, which whipped the proponents of law and order into the kind of frenzy a smart woman like Ollie strove to avoid.

The ruby lay on the carpet a few inches from the governor’s nerveless fingers. Using her handkerchief to guard against splinters, she retrieved it and held it up to the light.

The heft of the gem, its rich scarlet color—like a bottomless draft of cherry cordial—couldn’t be faked without using an enchantment that would trigger every spell-sensitive security device in the Palace, including the thumbnail-sized gold spellcatcher pinned to the governor’s lapel. But this job was too big to trust her instincts. She squinted at the jewel. The small, heart-shaped flaw that gave the ruby its name was right where it was supposed to be, at the twelve o’clock mark directly below its V-shaped mount.

She flipped the ruby over her fingers. Unlike modern pendants, the back of the gem was robed in gold. The first line of St. Theagarden’s Prayer, “Compelled by naught save the merciful heart”, was inscribed in Old High Gruen around the rim. The inscription originally circled the ancient shield of Gruende, but Helford had stamped his family crest over the Gruen boar. He must have mistaken it for a sow.

Grinning jauntily at the governor’s stupidity, she unbuttoned her bodice and dropped the ruby between the rolled socks she’d used to create the top-heavy figure he so admired. The jewel settled against her breastbone, still warm from his clothes.

Her smile curdled into a moue. Still, she glanced at the fox dying in perpetuity over the fireplace, it could be worse. At least she didn’t have to fish his keys out of his trouser pocket. The vermeil chain hooked to his belt loop worked just like a fishing line.

The magically enhanced security systems installed in public buildings such as the Governor’s Palace seldom lived up to their manufacturers’ promises. Unlike enchantments attached to royal reliquaries, you couldn’t bind a government security system to a specific person or bloodline. Government employees—including Territorial governors—could be reassigned, disgraced, removed, and replaced without warning. Therefore, the spells, keys, and combinations used in the Governor’s Palace had to work for everyone, thieves included. Ollie hadn’t gotten where she was in her profession by ignoring so blatant an invitation.

She expected the governor’s grand ormolu desk to be protected by something more particular, but the matching brass keys slid into their respective locks without so much as a jingle from the Early Bird Warning Bells mounted beside the windows and balcony doors.

Helford wasn’t much of a writer. The desk contained no personal notes or incriminating letters. But the shallow compartment under the center drawer’s woefully obvious false bottom yielded several interesting bills of sale related to other people’s gambling debts. She’d worked in the Governor’s Palace for three weeks and studied Helford for almost as long beforehand. There was no way he played well enough to win so many expensive prizes. On top of everything else, he cheated at cards. And all his moneyed friends were too stupid to notice.

Snickering, Ollie paged through the papers until she found the receipt for the Heart, aka the Jewel of Compulsion. It dated from the governor’s brief university career thirty years previous and was signed by…

The Duke of Siegertal, the King of Gruende’s illegitimate half-brother.

Below his signature—in the very same hand, so no one could say the words weren’t his—the duke had written in Logressan: “The stone wich [sic] forces the heart.”

Ollie didn’t feel her knees give way. She realized they must have when the governor’s chair met her bottom with a thump. Her thoughts flew like feathers in a turkey shoot.

Treason! That was the big one, the one ringing every claxon in her head. The king’s own brother had stolen a crown jewel to pay a gambling debt.

Why? The question was softer but more insistent. The debt wasn’t that large—not by Siegertal’s standards. The duke was supposed to be intelligent for a royal—unlike Helford, he actually passed a class or two. He could’ve given Helford a promissory note and paid him when he reached his majority at age twenty-one. Why steal a national treasure—and not just any treasure, but the one piece of Gruen regalia that could keep Crown Princess Ydditha from succeeding her father?

Ollie stared at the paper rattling in her hand. The receipt was dated seven years before Ydditha was even born. The duke had been plotting a coup while he was still in college, within a year of his brother’s accession, thirty years ago.

“Chancellor Kriekstan knew. They keep…no, it’s not there. So, past tense. Kept. He kept. She kept. They kept…” She started to giggle and slapped herself back on track, too shaken to realize she was thinking out loud. “The Heart was kept in a gold reliquary in the king’s private chapel spelled to the touch of the king’s immediate family. Nobody else could’ve taken it.

“Kriekstan knew how the jewel was being used too. Bastard said he heard a rumor Helford had it. Rumor, my ass. The Territories are full of Gruen émigrés. Helford must have tried his parlor trick on a girl from Gruende.” Clutching her sides, she rocked in the chair and moaned. “Sacrilege and treason! Kriekstan has to keep it quiet. There’ll be riots. Civil war, if the Anti-Monarchists find out. The only way to keep a lid on it will be to destroy all evidence the theft ever happened. And everyone who knew about it.”

To think she called Helford stupid! Kriekstan hadn’t hired her for her youth or feminine wiles. If she’d spared a thought for anything other than the size of her retainer, she would’ve realized Gruende had crown agents younger and prettier—women who wouldn’t need to stuff the tops of their corsets to catch Helford’s eye. But trained agents were a valuable commodity. She wasn’t, and Kriekstan rightly wagered she’d be too blinded by the sparkle of his gold to see his endgame: protecting the royal family (including the self-serving bastard who’d landed them in this mess) from all hint of scandal until Ydditha was safely on the throne. Ollie would be dead as soon as she delivered the jewel—sooner if the chancellor divined what she’d guessed.

Run! Leave the ruby to Helford and go to ground, bury herself so deep in another identity no one would ever find her.

Think! Helford’s desk faced the fireplace. He looked straight at that poor, dead fox every time he sat down, every time he signed an official document or clipped a cigar. The fox had run. It was still running, mouth open in a desperate bid for air, chest heaving, feet burning from the race instead of the pointless fire. The fact that the vixen died anyway afforded him a continuing source of delight.

With a scathing glance in Helford’s direction, Ollie lined the edges of Siegertal’s receipt with the rest. Folded together, the papers followed the Heart down the front of her corset. Where there was one political clockwork bomb, there could be more—perhaps one she could turn to her advantage. It’s worth a shot, she reflected wryly.

She found no secret catches on the diorama. The only controls in the vicinity of the fireplace were the damper valve and the speaking tube array on the adjacent wall. The solitary mouthpiece, multiple switches, and dials marked it as a spell-enhanced model, permitting the speaker to address any combination of rooms in the Palace. No wonder Logress was pushing so hard for Territorial electrification. The Crown must be spending a fortune charming the governor’s spellcatchers, Early Birds, and other anti-Uelph security measures to play nice with the Palace’s spell-based utilities. The thought of all that wasted money stiffened her spirit.

Over the sideboard to the right of the desk, a fine old Ban Vieck depicting a steeplechase (the prize of yet another university card game) concealed a shallow wall safe. The safe contained Lady Helford’s so-called better jewels. Nothing worth fencing. The center compartment of the sideboard beneath it housed a Pultney-Brown combination safe stuffed with bags of gold dust, bearer bonds, bank drafts, and a small fortune in Logressan gold crowns. It was a sad commentary on her situation that she feared they’d only slow her down.

The wainscoting and matching dado rail lay flush against the walls, which were the exact dimensions of the plans in the Territorial Archives. Nothing hiding there, except the wall safe she’d already found. Nothing under the cushions of the sofa or the chairs facing the game table. No valuables hiding in the game table, either. No holes in the carpet under the pelt. The carpet itself was weighed down by too much furniture to cover anything important. That left the bookcase behind the game table and the glass-fronted cabinets flanking the balcony doors.

The seven-foot-tall bookcase displayed hunt cups, barware, and no books whatsoever. The cabinets flanking the glass doors behind Helford’s desk held presentation pieces and Sure-Kill firearms. Sure-Kills were prohibitively expensive, custom-crafted guns enchanted to pierce the heart of any shooter-defined target in their range. It figured Helford owned the entire line. He cheated at sex. He cheated at cards. Of course, he cheated in the field.

But this time she wasn’t complaining. She needed a weapon, something more intimidating than the lady’s garter gun currently drifting in the nether space of her patent magic carry-all saddlebags. That peashooter couldn’t kill a squirrel unless you shot it in the eye. The smallest of Helford’s guns could kill anything, including a charging elebeast.

She lifted an ivory-handled revolver from its stand. It weighed almost as much as an elebeast, and it wasn’t even loaded. Speaking of which, where did Helford keep his ammunition? She didn’t have time to search.

Besides, firepower wasn’t everything. You needed the right weapon for the job. She returned the gun to its shelf.

A smallsword spanned the shelf beneath it. It wasn’t labeled, which meant it was one of Helford’s personal possessions, not a gift to the office. The runes inscribed on its steel scabbard proclaimed it a fire sword, a blade spell-forged to burn as it cut.

Her mouth went dry. Now there was a treasure. Her hand shook as it hovered over the wards. Their aura tingled against her skin. Reverently, she removed the blade from the cabinet and tested the draw. The blade parted smoothly from its scabbard. The heat of the spelled steel was precisely confined within the edges of the sword. Mindful of the Early Birds’ specifications and the possibility of spellcatchers she didn’t know about, she resisted the urge to complete the blade’s release. But she couldn’t deny the temptation to properly test it was strong.

Where had the sword come from? This little beauty wasn’t listed in Helford’s bills of sale—and “little” was the operative word. Sheathing the blade, she measured it against her leg. Helford in his shoe lifts wasn’t much taller than Ollie in flats. He must’ve spent a fortune to have a fire sword made to measure.

Made to her measure now. Her lips skinned back in a vulpine grin. She didn’t need an illusion to hide the sword. All she had to do was tie it under her skirt.

“They’re so big,” the governor groaned. “Like melons. Gotta squeeze.”

The fingers of his left hand twitched in anticipation.

Ollie knew Helford was thick-headed, but this was ridiculous. Based on the weight of the decanter and the double-whammy she’d given him, the pestiferous carbuncle should’ve still been unconscious. He remained prone, but he’d roused enough to turn a soggy grin in her direction. Her grip on the sword tightened as she marched to his side.

“That’s it, my little pouter pigeon. Come to…”

Excerpted from Siren Bridge, Falstaff Books, 2022