Godspeed Read online

  Copyright 2013 February Grace

  * * *

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

  Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

  Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

  No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

  Inquiries about additional permissions should be directed to: [email protected]

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  Cover Design by Greg Simanson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

  PRINT ISBN 978-1-62015-149-5

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-245-4

  For further information regarding permissions, please contact

  [email protected].

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013942794

  For those I love, both present and absent.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  MORE GREAT READS FROM BOOKTROPE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My heartfelt gratitude and affection goes out to everyone at Booktrope…especially those on my team who have worked so tirelessly and rapidly to launch this book.

  Thank you, Katherine Sears and Kenneth Shear, for believing in my story exactly as I wrote it.

  Thank you, Jesse James Freeman, for endless patience and the putting out of many and various fires.

  Thank you to Greg Simanson, for patience and incredible attention to detail in design.

  Thank you, Adam Bodendieck, for going above and beyond and helping so much where my eyesight failed.

  Thank you, Victoria Wolffe, for making my words look so beautiful.

  Thank you, amazing Wendy Logsdon, for being the Book Manager of my dreams. I will forever count myself lucky that our paths crossed.

  Thank you, to my dear Jennifer Gracen, not only for the extraordinary skill you showed in copy editing this book but for believing in it, and in me, enough to make magic happen. I am so grateful.

  I must also thank my friends, family, and those who have believed in my writing enough to publish it in the past.

  Thank you again to Jennifer Gracen, also Paul Brand, and especially Matthew Irvine, without whom Godspeed would still be a file on my computer.

  …and thank you to Jarrod, for making it possible for me to do what I can day in and out, whatever that may be on a given day. I know it isn't easy. I am grateful.

  My love to all,

  FG

  CHAPTER 1

  I WAS RAISED in and among the beautiful, well-tended gardens just beyond the city of Fairever, though the residence in which I lived was never mine.

  My earliest memories are of spring… of days spent contentedly hiding amidst graceful, gossamer willow branches as they curtsied in the afternoon breeze.

  As I grew older, I was often included in activities taking place around me, even to the point of being educated by a proper governess. Not once, however, in all my life, was I allowed to forget or exceed the limits of my station. Never were the consequences of doing so clearer than they became on one particularly freezing Tuesday afternoon, late in my seventeenth winter.

  It was on that day, and in a single instant, that life as I'd known it broke into thousands of glimmering pieces, destroyed beyond recognition to the accompanying sound of shattering glass.

  My hands shook with such ferocity they slipped from the tray, and the resultant noise proclaimed more clearly than any words that I would pay for my show of weakness.

  The slap that followed came as a surprise, but it was no shock. Nastasia Argent glared at me with such disregard — no, a deep, loathsome hatred — that I realized she had wanted to strike me for some time. It was only then she found a reason that would excuse her from the burden of politeness and feigned regard expected of her by society, and imposed upon her as lady of the house.

  She shrieked. Fingers barbed by sharpened claws grasped desperately at silk. Finally, she held up the dripping wet skirt of her dress.

  The decanter of brandy had bled out its contents after crashing to the ground, spattering them upward across the front of her imported gown, and leaving stains no easier to remove than the lifeblood she seemed to wish she could wring from my shivering form.

  “Idiot!” she cried. “Look what you've done!”

  My heart raced and throbbed so that it seemed to cease any understanding of how to function. I was dizzy, and I wobbled upon unsteady knees. Not here, not now, I thought. Not in front of such important guests…

  In that instant, I experienced for the first time what it felt like to die.

  My heart stopped just long enough to deprive me of consciousness. The last thing I heard before I fell to the ground was the sound of her shrill voice, as she growled through gritted teeth and twisted my name as a knife in my back.

  “You are worthless, Abigail Courage, and you no longer have any place here.”

  * * *

  Slowly, I opened first one, and then a second drooping eyelid. The room faded in and out of focus as my mind tried to connect to some sound, some fragment of an image that it could understand. I barely remembered the moments that led up to such unwelcome sleep, and had no idea how much time had elapsed since I had drifted into it. To me, it seemed merely seconds.

  Soon I would learn that it had been more than a day.

  A short, round figure of a man hovered over me, and startled me when my mind finally cooperated with hazy senses to complete my return to the present.

  “Hello, Miss,” the old man said, craning his neck to look me over. “I didn't think I would ever see those eyes open again. Such sweet eyes.” He moved closer with great effort, huffing a little. “They've always put me in mind of cornflowers.”

  I recognized the face and voice as belonging to the Argent family physician, Trevor Andrews. He had been called in on many cold and snowy nights in the past, most often during my childhood, when I thrashed and burned with fever. He always had a kind word and a smile for me, and even though I was nothing more than the butler's daughter, he never treated me any differently than the children who rightfully called the estate home.

  As the years went by, I had learned to read his features, to gather from his expression just how sick I was. As a younger child, this always brought reassurance that the fever would pass, and I would soon be walking again among the flowers in the garden, helping to weed the beds, even as I imagined taking my coloring pigments to paper and recreating each petal, each leaf, each ray of sun shining down from cloudy blue heavens.

  That look of reassurance was markedly absent this time. Just as it had been the first day, not long before, when the worst
fever I'd ever known seized me and refused to relent.

  It came upon me after I tended to the Argent children for a day, in place of the stricken governess. Within hours of watching their oldest son, Liam, wither and crumple to the ground with his schoolbooks still in his hands, I too was taken to bed, and heard through my delirium the hushed whispers of those who expected that this would carry us all to an early grave.

  No one had expected that it would first take my father, instead.

  It was now three months since, and with the exception of my father, all survived. Two of us never fully recovered, however.

  Dread Fever, the great plague of our time, left its mark upon Liam and I in completely different ways.

  It left me weak and prone to fainting spells; from Liam it claimed his sight.

  It had done so in a most curious way, dimming it to the point of near uselessness, though his family refused to accept it. My heart ached at the sight of his pained frustration, more deeply engraved into his countenance day by day. Such sadness and overwhelming helplessness as he strained to see even in the brightest of light, often injuring himself as he tried to navigate the house with all its ornate furnishings and fine, fringed rugs.

  The loss of his sight made his impairment from Fever obvious to all but those most determined to deny it.

  My problems were much more difficult for anyone to dismiss. At least Liam, sightless as he was, continued breathing without being aware of the effort.

  The fatigue would overcome me, and soon the world would begin to spin as if thrown into a reverse course on its axis. My eyes would dull, my hearing would diminish, and my chest would ache. Finally, I would feel an unearthly sensation far beneath my ribs before I succumbed to overpowering darkness.

  At first, I thought my suffering was the result of sheer grief over the loss of my father. The doctor told me that it was ‘purely a malfunction of the pump within my chest’. A physical, mechanical disconnect, as he asserted that it was impossible for one to ‘truly die of a broken heart’.

  I heard my name now and looked up. It was not the doctor who was speaking, nor was the person who had said my name addressing me directly. It was the master of the house. He and his wife were standing in the dimly lit doorway of the room, and as their quarrel heated, I could not help but overhear.

  I was the subject of the argument.

  He wished her to be merciful; she would have none of it.

  I closed my eyes, and as I felt the inescapable clutches of exhaustion overtake me again, I knew that my fate in this house was sealed.

  Soon I would be leaving, and I had no idea where on Earth I was meant to go.

  CHAPTER 2

  THOUGH I CAN ONLY VAGUELY REMEMBER the moment that I was torn from my old existence, I will never forget what happened the instant I awoke to the reality of my new one.

  The very day I left the Argents’ home, I was swept up into a world so brazen, so ahead of its time in thought and progression, that working class men and women cowered and prayed to their gods for deliverance from its sweeping changes.

  Mine was a lonely life lived in a strange time, one in which the Earth itself appeared to be at war with the laws meant to govern it. The world seethed with unnatural energy, determined to rip free its moorings; insistent it must hurry on to the next stage in its inevitable, mechanical evolution.

  This struggle between past and future was nowhere more evident than in the architecture of the city I viewed from the window of the train, as it squealed and lurched into the station.

  Stonework angels inhabited trim of historic buildings with large metal sculptures in their courtyards — modern renderings of steam locomotives and all manner of clock face and gear work.

  These chiseled representations of heavenly bodies seemed so much sadder than I imagined statues could; as though they were weeping bitter, silent tears over the convoluted, unholy mess that mankind had constructed below.

  I wished I could cry, too.

  * * *

  I trudged onward through the slippery, shining streets of central Fairever with one small, weathered suitcase in my hand. My coat was too thin to adequately protect me from the strength of the chill, or the driving cold of misting rain that began to gather upon my hair and eyelashes as a thick, descending dew.

  I shivered. I felt frozen clear through. I was lost, and had no one in the world I could turn to for aid.

  I stumbled backwards with fright as Tower Clock struck its first harmonious, resonant chime. I raised my eyes up in an attempt to ascertain just how late in the evening it was, and thereby figure out how long I'd been wandering. Instead, I found the clock face obscured by the hovering shadow of a bright white airship. It was the first time I'd actually seen one, and my lips parted in amazement at the sight. The incessant whirr of propellers drowned out all other sounds around me, and echoed in my ears long after it soared overhead.

  It truly looked weightless, an unnatural, overstuffed, wingless bird, and as it disappeared into the next swath of laden clouds in the distance, I marveled at the sort of mind it would take to bring such a peculiar beast into existence.

  I didn't have the chance to wonder for long. I noticed that watchful, lecherous eyes were upon me and I knew that I should hurry — or at least move along as fast as my weak and weary legs could carry me.

  It had only been hours since the train had taken me away from the station nearest the only home I'd ever known, a place where I was no longer needed or wanted; still, I longed to return to it.

  My mind played again and again over what the Argents had said to me, as they stood at my bedside and looked down upon me, with not only their eyes but their souls as well.

  We allowed you to stay this long out of regard for the many years of loyal service rendered to this household by your father.

  However it has become apparent that you are neither willing nor able to carry on in a similar tradition and standard of care in your duties.

  Out of consideration for the past and concern for your future, we will provide you with two weeks' severance and a train ticket to the city, where you will hopefully be able to find another place of employment.

  Place of employment.

  The words stung with the shock of an insect unseen, outraged when disturbed from its comfortable position nestled among the whorls of a flower. I had considered their household, their family, to be something so much closer to a real home, even if I knew deep in my heart that I never truly belonged there.

  I wanted so much to belong there, to belong anywhere. Still, when you are the servant's child, no matter how much anyone tries to pretend, there is no way that you can ever be accepted by those who pay your salary.

  I finally rounded a corner and escaped those leering eyes. I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, winded now though I had not run.

  I leaned my back up against the first streetlamp I found. I was bathed in flickering gold light that offered little comfort and made me long for the heat of the Sun. I closed my eyes and tilted my face up toward the now inescapable, soaking rain.

  As it drenched the skin beneath my clothing, I realized there had never really been anywhere in the whole of the world during the nearly eighteen years of my existence that ever felt like a home. The truth was I had always lived one step away from destitution, dependent upon the mercy and benevolence of others; I had just been too certain in my innocence to believe it. I had trusted in error that the tenuous and transient were solid and eternal; that places, and people, could always be counted upon to remain as they were. How wrong I'd been, and how devastated I felt now at the realization that the foundation of my life had cracked and crumbled to dust beneath the weight of my wounded soul.

  This new and unwelcome understanding of my place, or rather lack thereof, made my throat ache. I felt the unwelcome but entirely familiar sensation of impending unconsciousness sweeping in, threatening to carry me into darkness I was powerless to escape.

  Before I could fade into the black, someone gra
sped me by the shoulders, and the shock jolted my heart back into temporary submission. It was an officer of the local constabulary, and he made sure that I did not keep my place under that light post for long.

  “Young ladies are not to wander the city streets alone,” he said, “least of all at night and in the rain. Go home.”

  I nodded and moved away as quickly as I could, terrified to confess that I had no home to return to.

  I walked farther than I believed I was capable. I didn't know where I was going, but understood it was imperative that I keep moving. My faulty, faltering heart warned me with every beat, every step, and every forced inhalation that it was ready to desert its post and leave me utterly abandoned. I wondered that it hadn't done so yet, and doubted, just for a second, that the physician had been correct. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with me after all.

  That wishful hope was soon extinguished, as the searing pain returned to the place where it had taken up residence behind my aching ribs.

  CHAPTER 3

  I DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHEN I actually lost consciousness. I only recall that I awoke to a dizzying, indescribable odor that burned my nose and lungs.

  When my vision returned to something resembling focus, I saw a small bottle held near my face and realized someone had revived me on purpose. I came to the startling discovery that I was no longer in the rain, nor did I feel cold. I was, most assuredly, indoors.

  In fact I was propped up on an elegant divan, situated beneath several blankets and in front of a vibrant fire. A fine, full tea service sat on the table before me, though I knew that I lacked the strength to reach out to pick up the cup, even if I had been welcome to.

  I didn't know if I was welcome. I didn't know where I was, at all.

  My eyes settled upon a man with bright blond hair and large, angular eyes the color of pitch. He was extravagantly dressed — costumed, really — in a red, crushed velvet coat. It was worn over a blouson shirt of whitest linen that boasted cascades of intricate lace trim on cuffs and ruffled collar. His trousers were made of leather and his boots were calf-high, with many large, square buckles that glimmered as he crossed one leg over the other.