Soulstar

by C. L. Polk

  “Is this sufficient?” I asked.

  “Perfectly,” Tristan said. “I think you have a spy.”

  “Because of a mailbox?”

  “Yes,” Tristan said. “I’ve lived here for a year now. I have some experience in finding information someone might not want divulged. I’ve recruited informants. And someone operating in Kingston has a fondness for leaving drop signals on mailboxes.”

  “The ribbon,” Miles said.

  “More the clockface marked in chalk,” Tristan said. “The informant tied the ribbon. The handler marked the clockface. That’s a meeting, scheduled.”

  “Where?”

  Tristan shrugged. “No idea. But it’s at five o’clock.”

  “What information could anyone possibly have because they went to a funeral?” I asked.

  “All kinds of things. People gathered here. They talked. They gossiped.”

  They called secret meetings and chose a new leader for the movement. What if it was someone in the committee? “What do I do?”

  “You keep an eye out,” Tristan said. “And you assume that whoever it is spying, they’re accessing the most important information in the room.”

  I pressed my lips together. “You mean to say that someone’s spying on us,” I said. “On the Solidarity Collective.”

  “Exactly,” Tristan said. “Assume it’s one of your people.”

  “How do I catch them?” I asked.

  “Be sharp. See if you can find the result of leaked information. Follow it to the person who benefits the most. Solidarity has plenty of opponents, so it might be hard to narrow down.”

  A thought made me go cold. “What if Jacob’s death is a result?”

  “What do you mean?” Miles asked.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “No one save the committee knew that Jacob was going to announce the shadow election in his speech. It was a secret. But then Jacob was shot.”

  “And you took over his speech,” Tristan said. “That implies two things. One, that whomever is organizing intelligence gathering does not like the idea of the shadow election—”

  “And two,” Miles said. “They’re going to be watching you now, to see if you’re a new threat to their goals.”

  Blast. Blast it to pieces! Was I a new threat? Oh, to be certain. I had stepped in it up to my neck.

  “Can you lie low for a while?” Tristan said. “While we Amaranthines have a slightly different view of death, I’d rather you were corporeal.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have a responsibility.”

  “She’s going to be working for Grace,” Miles said. “Policy advisor to the Chancellor.”

  I wasn’t. I would have to tell Grace, and as soon as possible. “Actually, the plans have changed.”

  Miles tipped his head back. “They made you leader of Solidarity.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Then you need security training,” Tristan said. “And you need to find out who’s leaking your secrets to an interested party, because once they find out what you’re up to, you’re next.”

  * * *

  My stomach gave a terrified little thrill when I approached the funeral home’s front door. There was a spy in Solidarity. It wasn’t too hard to imagine that the person responsible for planting that spy and the person responsible for assassinating Jacob were the same person. Or a group. And Jacob had enemies. Plenty of people didn’t want him stirring up their workers, instigating their tenants, fighting against the laws and traditions of Aeland.

  But who had it all? Plenty of people disliked Jacob. Who hated him? Who—

  I pushed open the door and stopped, my heart sinking.

  Zelind stood on the sidewalk, bundled against the river breeze, gloved hands in the pockets of a knee-length cloak. Khe stood with kher back to the street, watching me finally emerge from the funeral home.

  Beside kher stood Jarom, who gave me an irritated glance before turning his attention back to Zelind. “What I’m saying is that your arrest shouldn’t have happened. Birdie was funding the Riverside Division’s mounted unit. She was paying for the whole thing.”

  Zelind said nothing.

  I remembered the mounted police. I remembered how they used horses to corner and intimidate people on foot. “Riverside Division doesn’t really have much of a mounted unit anymore.”

  “Birdie wouldn’t give them another cent after they snatched Zelind. They had to dissolve. She didn’t have you arrested. She would never. Zelind. Please see reason.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” Zelind said to me. Jarom sighed in frustration, and Zelind ignored him like he was wind. “You never met me in the sanctuary.”

  “I’m sorry. I got caught up in a discussion.” I looked at Jarom. “Could you excuse us?”

  “You can’t just dismiss me.”

  “Go,” Zelind said. “Leave me alone. I don’t want you here.”

  Jarom’s expression crumpled into shocked hurt.

  “But I told you what you wanted.”

  “Go away, Jarom,” Zelind said. “I’m about to have a fight with my wife. Go buy something expensive. Just go.”

  Jarom glanced at me, sneered, and looked at Zelind.

  “You can’t make me give up,” he said. “We need you. You can have anything you want. Just come home to us.”

  Zelind turned kher back and walked away, leaving me to hurry after kher. “I’m sorry I didn’t go to the sanctuary to get you. Everything just kind of happened, and I never realized—”

  Zelind focused kher unsmiling gaze on me. “You didn’t sit with me during the service.”

  “I had to talk to Winnie.” And I had to break her heart again when I told her Jacob wasn’t chattering away in my head. But that didn’t stop her from dragging me to sit with her and Duke in the front row, where she went through four handkerchiefs and I feared that maybe she couldn’t stop, now that the sedative had let go of her emotions.

  “Then you ignored me after the service to talk to your Amaranthine friend,” Zelind said.

  “Tristan needed to tell me something important.”

  “What was so important, then?”

  I sucked in a breath. “I can’t talk about it here on the street.”

  “You forgot I was even here. Because of all your secrets.”

  I had. But it wasn’t on purpose.

  “That isn’t fair,” I said. “Winnie needed me. Tristan had something important to tell me, and I have obligations to the movement. My work wasn’t done after getting you all free. There’s more to be done, and—”

  “It’s more important than me.”

  “No,” I said. “I was just where everyone who needed to talk to me was all in the same place, and it went too far. Please, can we talk at home?”

  “I had a surprise for you,” Zelind said. “I’ve been waiting to tell you for hours, but you forgot me.”

  “I was just busy,” I said. “But now we can go home, and then you can tell me. Please.”

  “You don’t even know what it is,” Zelind kept kher gaze straight ahead.

  “You said it was a surprise.”

  “That isn’t the point. You didn’t notice me sneaking off. You didn’t notice that I wasn’t in our room or in the parlor or on kitchen crew or even whether I was in the clan house or not. You had no idea I was up to something.”

  “My friend died,” I said. “He was shot. By an assassin. And then the police wanted to pin it on me. And then the funeral, and the meeting, and then Tristan—I have been busy. I have a busy life. Dozens of people depend on me.”

  Zelind hunched kher shoulders and watched kher feet. “All I wanted was for you to notice I was gone.”

  We stepped into an intersection, and the wind shoved our shoulders. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t home enough to realize that you were making something. That’s it, isn’t it? You made me something, and you wanted to give it to me, and you worried I’d catch y
ou sneaking around. And then I didn’t. And it made you feel like I don’t care about you. But you never once wondered about how I feel.”

  “You’re too busy to feel things,” Zelind snapped.

  I flinched. “You won’t touch me!”

  Curtains twitched open. Bernard Blackstone opened the front door of the Clan of Full Sails and called across the street. “All right there, Auntie?”

  “We’re fine! We’re almost home,” I called.

  “Just so,” Bernard said. “Have a peaceful journey.”

  Stop screaming at each other in the street, he meant. But I wasn’t done, so I lowered my voice to a growl. “I know you’ve been through something terrible, something I can’t even imagine, but you won’t talk about it. You act like nothing’s wrong, but it’s all wrong, Zelind. You won’t touch me, and I’m not even supposed to be sad. Or angry. Or hurt.”

  “But you have to deal with it,” Zelind muttered. “Your damaged, traumatized spouse, the witch made out of glass, and if you touch kher, khe’ll shatter to pieces.”

  “You’re not ready for—”

  “No,” Zelind said. “We are not making this about my failings. I have tried to share happiness with you. I wanted to share it with you today. But you’re different too.”

  “I am not.”

  “You are. You just don’t see it. You don’t see how little you need people, while they need you for everything. You work and work and work and you don’t resent it for a minute. It’s your life, and I don’t seem to have anywhere in it that fits.”

  “You fit.”

  “Do me the courtesy of being honest with me. The government lied and told you I was dead. You grieved. You mourned. And then you built a life that only has room for you in it.”

  Had I? My blood rushed, cold and anxious.

  “Then let’s rebuild it,” I said. “Look. I know I have a lot of secrets where the movement is concerned. I don’t tell you things. But I have to tell you. You need to know, and I should have told you sooner. And if we worked together, then maybe we’d have a life for us.”

  “No. Tell me your secrets. But I don’t just want to be your tagalong. I have something important too. I have something to work on too. That’s what I wanted to show you.”

  “Then please show me,” I said. “I really do want to know.”

  “All right.”

  “And I’m sorry I made you feel excluded. And I had something to tell you. I should tell you it all.”

  “All right. But me first. Straight to the attic.”

  We didn’t make it three steps inside on slippered feet.

  “What took you so long?” Eldest said. “Even I made it home before you did.”

  “I had a few things I needed to take care of,” I said. “And Zelind wants to show me something—”

  “That contraption khe’s making in the attic?”

  I had missed it. Zelind had hinted at what khe planned, and I missed it. I should have noticed. I should have asked. I nodded, not trusting my voice.

  “Bring it down, Zelind,” Eldest said. “Show everyone what you made.”

  “It’s just a prototype,” Zelind said. “It’s crude.”

  “Go fetch it,” Eldest said.

  Zelind knew better than to wrangle with Eldest. Khe jogged up the stairs to obey.

  Aunt Glory looked up from her heirloom lace knitting. “And then Robin can tell us what was so important the committee hauled her off for a meeting in the middle of their leader’s funeral.”

  Aunt Bernice clucked her tongue. “I’ll bet you a button I already know.”

  The elders didn’t miss a thing. “That should wait until we have made a formal announcement.”

  “Ha! Just as I thought,” Aunt Bernice crowed. “They chose you to lead Solidarity. Didn’t they?”

  Footsteps faltered on the stairs behind me. The skin just between my shoulder blades crawled with aversion. “You can’t tell anyone. We’re doing a press conference after I talk to the Chancellor, and then—”

  “And then you’ll be busier than ever,” Zelind said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But there’s more, and I wanted to talk to you about why I wanted you to get involved, and—”

  I pointed at the wooden plinth in Zelind’s hands, shuddering. Copper wire wound from a child’s windflower to a cylinder coated in the stuff to an old, chipped mounting base for a lightbulb. “What is that?”

  “It’s aether,” Zelind said.

  Khe concentrated, and the windflower spun, slowly at first, and then fast enough that the bright paper was a blur as it whirled.

  After a few heartbeats, the lightbulb glowed.

  “The wind blows; the fan turns the rotor; energy builds in the coil; the light turns on.” Khe smiled. “I just earned the clan a quarter of a million marks.”

  ELEVEN

  Clan Cage

  Zelind and I went to bed in the sulky silence of an unfinished argument. I tried to leave kher asleep, but Zelind’s eyes popped open the moment I stood in the narrow channel between my bed and kher cot.

  “Just me,” I said. “I’m on breakfast.”

  Zelind eyed the outfit I had laid out the night before. “And then you’re leaving again.”

  “I am. I won’t be gone all day. Can we talk when I get back?”

  Zelind rubbed kher hand over the springy, dense coils of kher hair, then pressed kher hands over kher eyes. “Sure. We’ll discuss it.”

  I fled the flat animosity in kher voice to cook a hundred pieces of goose sausage, flinching every time a tiny bubble of grease pricked my hand. I concentrated on my task, ignoring the talk, which was nothing but Zelind’s invention.

  “Why doesn’t it sting, though?” Halima asked. “It used to hurt my ears.”

  “I don’t know, treasure,” Halima’s father, Boyd, said. “Robin! Did Zelind tell you why it doesn’t sting?”

  “I don’t know.” But I had a guess. The invention used wind, not souls. What we used to hear was their pain.

  “What’s with you?” Jedrus asked, spreading butter across fresh toast. “Did you stay up all night?”

  “No.”

  Jedrus picked up another piece of bread from the toasting grill. “Is everything all right?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Mm-hmm. You had a fight.”

  “Jedrus, not now.”

  “It’s all right. Fighting with a spouse is a knock upside the head. So long as you don’t try to win, it’ll turn out just fine.”

  I didn’t need advice. We were going to talk later. For now, I made a plate in the kitchen and ate at the counter. I snuck to the front, found an old coat with a beaver fur collar, and pedaled up to Mountrose Palace.

  I knew my way through Government House, and the golden oak door to the Chancellor’s office swung open at my touch. A strange man perched on the edge of the office secretary’s seat, facing a desk that was far more cluttered than I was used to seeing it.

  “What happened to Janet?”

  “Early retirement,” the new secretary said, and pushed his glasses up his nose. He stared at Joy, then turned an uncertain look on me. “I don’t—” He pawed through papers, searching for an engagement calendar. “Do you have an appointment?”

  I could say yes. How would he know if he forgot to write it down? “I’m Robin Thorpe,” I said. “Joy is my companion. The Chancellor would like to see me, I think.”

  “You’re Robin Thorpe,” the secretary repeated. “I’m James. James Hammett. Is this your first day? I thought that was tomorrow—”

  Oh, James. It wasn’t comfortable, watching someone new on the job drowning in all the tasks their predecessor handled flawlessly. I desperately wanted to stack up every piece of paper on that desk and show him how to three-box his work. Did he even have a process notebook? I needed to stop. I wasn’t here to rescue secretaries today.

  “It was,” I said. “But I’m here today. Could you find out if she has a minute for me?”

  What
if she didn’t? I could manage tomorrow if I had to. The press conference wasn’t until noon. If I hurried, I could handle all of it.

  James piled up all the paper he’d had balanced on his lap in the mound with all the rest, and I craned my neck to see his face all the way up there. He was easily as tall as Grace, but lanky as a lamppost.

  “I’ll just—please have a seat, I’ll—”

  Poor James. He knocked on Grace’s door, went in, and said, “Your consultant’s here today. Robin Thorpe? I know she was supposed to be here tomorrow, but—”

  “Send her in,” Grace said. “And then play something suitable for morning.”

  “You can go right in,” James said, and I stepped inside Grace’s fortress of books. All the bird feeders mounted directly on the windows had been removed. Her second room had a parlor’s worth of furniture, balanced on a soft silk rug.

  Grace slipped the papers she was working on in the center basket of three and capped her pen, though she twirled it around in her fingers. “You’re here a day early.”

  “I am,” I said, and then stopped as music, sparkling and gentle, played to mask our conversation. “Oh. He’s very good.”

  Joy swayed and let one hand glide through the air, describing the tempo and melody. “He’s marvelous.”

  “Joy likes his music very much,” I reported.

  “James Hammett studied music with Joanna Wensleydale. He’s excellent,” Grace said. “But he’s so nervous when he has to take the main desk in the morning.”

  “He’s not your new secretary?”

  Grace smiled and gripped the pen as if she were writing. “Oh, no. He’s an under-typist. But my new secretary’s children aren’t in school until nine, and so I need someone warming the seat until she comes.”

  “Well, I’m relieved,” I said. “He’s quite overrun at your main desk.”

  “You didn’t come here to chat about my staff,” Grace said. “You’re here a day early. Why?”

  Best to just get it all out immediately. “I can’t work for you,” I said. “I’m the new leader of Solidarity.”

  “You’re concerned about conflicting interests?” Grace asked. “I think you can do both, but we can consult someone—”