Margaret sighed. “Why couldn’t you have just eaten some bread and cheese?”

  “When I’m gone,” said Alvin, “you always govern the city wisely. Nobody challenges you because you always choose rightly and most often kindly as well. So kindly that they aren’t even aware that they’re being governed.”

  “Thanks for noticing,” said Margaret.

  “Neither of us was meant to govern a city,” said Alvin. “We can only do our best.”

  “You were born to do it,” said Margaret.

  “I was born to build the city. With my blood and the water of the Mizzippy. But governing it? I don’t have the desire.”

  “But who else? Who else do the people come here to meet, to be led by, to be protected by?”

  “Protected from what?”

  “From bad, selfish government,” said Margaret. “From people who care only for gold, for the wealth they can take from those who earned it, for the control they can exercise over the weak.”

  “I think it’s a shame,” said Alvin, “that the only way to ensure government that is, in our opinion, good and just, is for you and me to do the governing.”

  “So you’re aiming to retire?” asked Margaret.

  “The only job I really like is bringing knacky people to the city.”

  “Too bad it’s not the only job that must be done, which only you can do.”

  “What about the woman I just brought here?” asked Alvin. “You didn’t say a word about her. Is she a murderous scoundrel, too?”

  “No,” said Margaret immediately. “Of course I looked into her first, to make sure she wasn’t one of the women who thought you needed a better wife than me.”

  “I don’t think there’s any such women, but go ahead. What about Eliza Nutbutter?”

  “She’s not falling in love with you, though she admires you greatly,” said Margaret. “Her knack is mysterious to me. Usually a person’s knack floats in the midst of their heartfire, plain for me to see, but she has considerable power and doesn’t really understand what it is or how to use it.”

  “I imagine that means you’re going to make friends with her,” said Alvin.

  “If she’s willing,” said Margaret.

  “She is,” said Alvin.

  “You discussed it with her?”

  “Of course not. I just know that she’s very interested in how the Crystal City works, not as an architectural marvel—which I happen to think it is, what with being made out of water with a speck of blood—her interest is in how the people work together. That’s all she asked about, when we talked at all. How do people with all these powers get along? Do they agree not to use their knacks on each other without permission? And while she was asking I thought, How do they all get along?”

  “They’re just normal people. The normal envyings, resentments, longings, hurt feelings.”

  “Yet nobody’s putting curses on people.”

  “Alvin, a few people have tried to put a hex on somebody, but I always detect it.”

  “And what, you go beg them to take it off?”

  “Your very talented brother Measure removes any hex that I don’t approve of. So if somebody is cursed with, say, irresistible flatulence—”

  “Arthur swears he didn’t know that’s what would happen.”

  “But he swears so hard that I know he was pleased with it, or at least I’m pretty sure,” said Margaret.

  “Arthur is pleased with himself almost all the time,” said Alvin, “and he’s usually right to be. I let him do almost all the talking when we met Robin Sower and his pretend wife and their shady friends.”

  “So Eliza Nutterbutt is interested in how our community manages to get along with so much power floating around.”

  “Nutbutter,” said Alvin.

  “What difference does it make if I mix up her name?”

  “To her, the difference between being your friend and being a target of investigation,” said Alvin.

  “Everybody gets investigated whether I want to or not. It’s not something I can forgo with no sheriff and no jail.”

  “And do you think that’s close enough to the truth that it doesn’t count as a lie?”

  “I must look into everybody’s heartfire,” said Margaret. “If I don’t do it, who will? Even though it’s as unpleasant as coughing your guts out when you get a bit of liquid in your lungs.”

  “You said ‘guts,’” said Alvin.

  “It’s a perfectly acceptable word,” said Margaret.

  “The Bible says ‘bowels.’ I prefer guts to that,” said Alvin.

  “As do I, which is why I used it.”

  “If I had taken that bath you offered,” said Alvin, “I’d be out of the bath and toweling off by now.”

  “But if you had accepted my food, you’d still be eating.”

  “I’m a slow eater,” said Alvin.

  “And a fast bather,” said Margaret.

  “I only bathe when I’m too lazy to chip all the dirt off my body myself.”

  “Alvin, tomorrow, when you go out to find some boys in the street who want to pull sticks with you, would you be so kind as to find Eliza Nutbutter and invite her to luncheon at our house?”

  “It would be rude not to invite Robin Sower along with her—I daresay he’s just as hungry.”

  “But not those two thieves,” said Margaret.

  “They were all thieves, carrying their contraband through the woods on a stolen wagon pulled by a couple of stolen mules.”

  “I’m a thief at heart, too, Alvin,” said Margaret. “I believe that in your place I might have admitted that gold gratefully into the city, because we’re so short on specie.”

  “I’m thinking we should start a bank, so we could print our own paper,” said Alvin.

  “You have to have the gold to back up your paper.”

  “I heard to the contrary. I heard that as long as your assets are held in mortgages on the houses in the community, a bank can get by with much less gold.”

  Margaret shrugged. She didn’t want to argue finances with Alvin. He just didn’t have that much regard for gold, considering that he knew how to make it from iron or granite or limestone.

  “I will go and invite Mr. Sower and not-so-goodwife Eliza Nutbutter. Should I tell them what we’re eating?”

  “It depends on what the catch is tomorrow from the river.”

  “Really? Can’t we afford beef?”

  “It’s still spring, and nobody’s been butchering, except for a few geese, and goose is hardly the nicest meat we can serve.”

  “Duck?”

  “Sparrow? Crow?” Margaret grinned. “Fish cooks the quickest, so if we have more guests than we planned, I can dress and cook another round of fish in ten minutes, if I keep the fire hot.”

  “Just remember,” said Alvin, “mustard doesn’t belong on fish.”

  “Anything belongs on catfish.”

  “You’re not serving that bottom-feeding water-scab, are you?”

  “Not everyone shares your distaste for it.”

  “Margaret, please don’t embarrass me with catfish tomorrow. Because I won’t stay to eat, if it’s catfish.”

  “I was just teasing, as you well know. Try not to invite every boy who challenges you to a stick-pull.”

  “The only person who still owes me a wrestle right now is Eliza Nutbutter.”

  Margaret looked at him through squinting eyes. “Threw you, did she?”

  “I let her,” said Alvin.

  “Meaning you didn’t break the leg she tripped you over,” said Margaret.

  “You know I don’t fight like a riverman.”

  “You learned fighting from Mike Fink, my love. There’s not a way to cheat that you don’t know.”

  “And I choose to fight fair whenever there’s absolutely nothing at stake.”

  “But with the Buttnutter woman,” said Margaret, “your honor is at stake.”

  “She threw me,” said Alvin. “In front of witnesses.”

  “You don’t care about the witnesses or the rumors about it in the town, how a woman threw you.”

  “I have my honor to uphold.”

  “So something is at stake,” said Margaret.

  “I can’t very well take her on in the street—she’s not much of a lady, but she deserves better than to take part in a wrestle, which would make her socially unacceptable to a good number of folks.”

  “You like her,” said Margaret. “You feel protective.”

  “Are you suspicious?” asked Alvin. “I feel protective about everybody.”

  “And I feel suspicious about any woman you feel obliged to grapple with.”

  Alvin rolled his eyes and headed for the door. “Taking a walk before it’s full dark,” he said

  “Try to be home before breakfast,” Margaret called after him.

  The door closed behind him. He wasn’t really angry, she knew, but he did hate it when she kept him from being careless about engaging the affections of women. He did not understand how he was admired in the Crystal City, and, by many, worshiped.

  She went into the kitchen and then into the pantry, where she opened the icebox and took out a couple of fine fat catfish, which she believed God had created just to frighten small children. She had served catfish at table more than once when Alvin was home, and he never realized that’s what it was, because she had learned some pretty good tricks from Mistress Modesty, about how to cook any fish without confessing its ancestry or natural domicile. Not many knew how to do it, and other people had served him catfish and he detested it; how could he recognize her catfish, seeing how it was delicious?

  Am I a disobedient wife? Margaret wondered. Deceiving my husband?

  Yes, she told herself. I obey him whenever it matters, but I choose to be the judge of when it matters. It’s part of my responsibility as magistrate in this semi-organized community to keep Alvin Maker happy and keep everyone else happy with him.

  And sometimes that required her to reinterpret his instructions so that she could follow them without alienating too many people in the town.

  3

  ELIZA NUTBUTTER WASN’T sure what to make of this Crystal City. She had seen the big cities of the East, but she was sure none of them was in the same league as the European cities that she had always intended to see before she died. She had tried more than once to save enough money to cross the Atlantic, but something had always blocked her.

  Getting robbed and left penniless.

  Having her ticket of passage on a trans-Atlantic ship stolen and the captain refused to recognize her even though he had personally given her the ticket.

  Being accused of witchcraft, which really infuriated her because those fools didn’t understand that knacks didn’t come from the Devil—if there even was a devil, he didn’t have anywhere near the powers of some of the knacks she had seen. As her own knack, for that matter. She was able to escape—of course, because that was what she did—but she had to leave things behind. Money she had earned legitimately, not stolen. The daguerreotype of her mother. She was sure that the landlady of her tiny attic apartment would keep the money. But would she keep the picture? Why would she?

  No matter. She ran into Sower then, and figured that her share of the gold would easily buy her, not only passage to Liverpool or Nantes, but also the trappings of wealth, including hired bodyguards.

  And if these sneakthieves she was with were caught, one thing Eliza was sure of: She could get away.

  But she hadn’t gotten away. She was going along with their plan of hiding out in that haven of knackery, the Crystal City, but only until the gold was divided up, and then she’d have been out of there.

  Instead, they had their wagon taken out from under them by Alvin Maker himself. Without the gold, she had no more reason to head for Crystal City. But Alvin Maker intrigued her. So quiet, able to be silent while his partner did all the talking—a lippy, obnoxious, absolutely delightful Black man—and yet the Maker was able, from a distance, to change their gold into tin. Or so he claimed.

  Europe would still be there next year, she decided, right then while Arthur and Alvin were questioning them. She could go to Europe any time, but the Crystal City might be the most exotic place she could go.

  How could people inhabit one city whose citizens all had one inhuman power or another? Some were trivial, some were valuable, but some were irresistible, like Alvin Maker’s gifts. Some of the stories about him were nonsense—that he could fly, that he carried slave children from Southern plantations to free soil in the North, or to Canada, places where no man was a slave, no matter who thought they owned him. A worthy, noble undertaking, Eliza was sure. But no human being could fly. How did stories like that arise?

  Still, he was a man of confidence and strength, the kind who did not need to boast or present himself as more than he was. A man who was so powerful he did not feel any need to show off his power or assert his abilities. Eliza was drawn to such men, the handful of times she had met one.

  A politician who pulled a lot of government strings. But the government itself wasn’t all that powerful, so he was a disappointment in the end.

  A very, very rich man, so rich that he could dress in common farm clothes and still be served in the finest gentlemen’s clubs. She liked him, but he was a Puritan, and she realized that if he really understood who and what she was, he would certainly denounce her as a witch. Better not to involve herself with true believers in the Puritan brand of Christianity.

  Nobody else came close to being what she was looking for, till Alvin Maker.

  But on the long trek from the borders of Irrakwa country to Crystal City, Eliza had learned that Alvin was not susceptible to her charms. Leaving her blouse open a couple of buttons did nothing—she looked down and found that instead of being buttoned, the neckline of her blouse had been sealed together as if both sides had been woven that way. The power of making women more modest than they wanted to be—a mighty yet delicate power indeed, but in her experience, a knack that no red-blooded man would even aspire to.

  Why was Alvin immune to her charms? Uninterested in her conversation, her wit, her sharp tongue, Alvin would not even banter with her. Was he not clever enough to know sarcasm and irony when he heard them? No, it wasn’t that he didn’t understand her wit, or that he was offended by it. He just didn’t care how she talked or what she said or how she dressed or undressed.

  It was Arthur Stuart who enlightened her, though he didn’t know it. He was talking to Sower, explaining why a young man like him hadn’t yet found a feminine companion for his life. “Many men don’t marry until their late thirties or into their forties,” Arthur said.

  “True, but they’re fools,” said Sower. “The joy of marriage comes from children—from making them, and then from having them. But if you don’t have babies until you’re forty-five, then you’re too old and feeble to play with them. Romp with them. Children are more frisky than randy squirrels, boy. You need to have them when you’re still young, in your early twenties, as I perceive you to be.”

  “Being married is no guarantee that you’ll have children,” said Arthur. “Alvin and Miss Margaret lost their first little one, then had a fine boy named Vigor. But no baby for the longest time.”

  So, thought Eliza, Alvin is a married man who, unlike many such, took his vows so seriously that he did not respond to temptation at all, except to set it aside. A very, very married man. Which was honorable and Eliza respected him for it. After all, if he could seal up the neckline of a woman’s blouse, he could unbutton it, too, at his leisure, irresistibly. He would have to pick his time—nothing good would come from undressing a woman when other men were present—but Alvin could have his pick of women, Eliza was sure. But he was true to the one he had already picked.

  On the journey to Crystal City, they had stopped only once a day, for dinner, so there wasn’t all that much time for talk and no time at all for flirting. Not that Eliza would be above winning the heart of Arthur Stuart, but she suspected that Alvin’s protectiveness would keep her from taking that flirtation very far at all. She would find it very uncomfortable if Alvin stymied her by making sure all her clothes were sealed together.

  Still, she gravitated toward Arthur Stuart because she already knew the men she had traveled with, and had nothing to gain from them. But Arthur knew Alvin. It would be good to have him as a friend. And he appreciated her cleverness and gave better than he got.

  On their last meal stop, somewhere in Noisy River or maybe the western edge of Wobbish, she and Arthur were chatting about, of course, marriage. “Sower told you to marry young,” said Eliza, “and that can be good advice, if you’re able to support a wife. You’re a charming lad, Arthur Stuart, and a good-looking fellow, but I wonder at the trouble you’ll have finding a wife. Your unique heritage will make you a social dilemma for any woman, no matter her color.”

  Arthur shrugged, then gave her a little half-smile. “And yet you flirted with me, Goody Sower.” He called her that even though he well knew that she and Sower had no connection, that they had only pretended to be married to make the group look more respectable. A woman traveling alone with five men, or even three, could not have any surviving reputation. Goody Sower. Goodwife Sower.

  “I did,” said Eliza. “But you know it would have led nowhere.”

  “I think you were just afraid of what Alvin would do if you really made a try for me,” said Arthur. He glanced over toward Alvin, who was demonstrating a wrestling hold with one of the other men.

  Eliza smiled. “What would he do?”

  “Take away your ability to do anything at all with me,” said Arthur. “Because he thinks I’m still naive and need to be taken care of.”

  “And if Alvin hadn’t been with us, and I made you the same offers, would you have taken them then?”

  Arthur suddenly looked uncomfortable. “I think this salt pork isn’t sitting well with me,” he said.