Mechanica Read Online Free

are wrong about at least one thing,” Mother told me over tea the next day. She’d come up from the workshop for a little air, she said, and a little respite. I knew that respite for her meant a lesson for me, but I didn’t mind. I always wished Mother would spend more time teaching me, not less.
    Mr. Candery had told me to meet her in the library, and there he brought us a pot of clary-bush tea and thin sandwiches layered with radish and white goat’s butter. I crunched happily through the sandwiches and drank the strong, colorless tea, relishing the warmth and energy it gave me. These days, Father was always complaining about the expensive Fey imports Mother insisted on keeping stocked in our kitchens. After their last argument about it, she’d stopped ordering Fey wines or dried fruits, but I was grateful that we still had the clary-bush. It was always my favorite tea: floral and sharp, at once a courtier’s handkerchief and a knight’s armor.
    “What are the books wrong about?” I asked, tucking into another sandwich. Thin radish, sweet butter, speckles of salt. An unladylike swig of clear tea.
    Mother usually paused to think before answering any of my questions, but this time her response was immediate. “Esting’s dominion over Faerie is
not
peaceful.” She spoke even more forcefully than usual. “There are rumors of—look at me, Nicolette, when I’m talking to you.”
    I glanced up guiltily. “I’m sorry, Mother.” I’d been watching the painted fish on the inside of my teacup as they flitted through their china world, making tiny ripples and bubbles in the tea. Another Fey treasure, this tea set, one that Father had paid dearly for when he and Mother were still courting. He never liked to see that tea set himself anymore, but it was special to us, to Mother and me.
    To prove I’d been listening, I added, “There’s talk of something, you said?” I had not yet begun to fathom that when Mother and Father disagreed about something, it meant that at least one of them had to be wrong; it had only recently occurred to me that they fought more often than they did anything else.
    Mother’s lips pursed. “The Fey have grown selfish with their magic, they say,” she said. “They’re not nearly so willing to give it to us as they used to be. I imagine they’ve begun to realize how valuable it is here, much as people like your father have tried to hide that fact from them. They’re not
animal
s
,
for the Lord’s sake. They can think. And if they keep thinking, it won’t shock me or anyone else with a brain if they decide to rebel.”
    People like your father
. . . She’d always called him William before, even to me. To hear her say “your father” seemed distancing in a way that frightened me, in a way that I didn’t like to think about.
    “But can you still use magic, Mother? Can you still make the buzzers?”
    It was the name I’d used as a toddler for Mother’s mechanical insects, the ones that Father sold all up and down the continent, and that for years had been the height of style in the Estinger court. My methods for fixing them had improved rapidly in the last months, and I was longing for the day when Mother would decide I was ready to start building my own. I was convinced that day couldn’t be too far off. But if she stopped making them entirely . . .
    I’d always loved magic. It was just another tool, really, like coal power; it simply wasn’t fully understood here. But I couldn’t believe that it was as bad as Father’s books seemed to suggest, and as some Estingers seemed to think it was.
    I looked at Mother pleadingly.
    “Oh, don’t worry, darling,” she said. “It would take much more than high prices to stop me.”
    She gestured casually toward Mr. Candery, who was conducting a pair of wheeled feather dusters around the bookshelves and mantel with small flicks of his elegant fingers. She’d been making more and more helpmeets for him lately, things that made his