Liar's Moon

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  “We’re locked in a cell at Bryn Tsairn Prison. There’s no way out.”

  “Ha,” I said. “You’ve never been locked up with me before.” Although, strictly speaking, I’d never actually escaped from a prison cell; the two previous times I’d been arrested, my business associates had bailed me out. I grabbed the bars on the cell door’s little window and hauled myself up to peer into the hallway. One lonely torch burned out of sight, splashing ominous shadows on the walls and ceiling.

  “Hey.” Durrel’s voice came gently through the stifling darkness. I dropped back to the ground and gave the locked door one last tug. “Easy, Celyn. We’re not going anywhere, at least until morning. And you need to rest, with those injuries. Come back to the fire and sit down.”

  “The fire?” I tried to scowl, but my face hurt too much.

  “The candle, then.” He held out his hand, creased with prison dirt though it was, and I let him lead me back to the table. I sat obediently, but my mind was still turning over the problem of the lock and an escape.

  “Talk to me,” he said. “Tell me what you’ve been doing since I saw you last. I thought you were going to stay out of trouble.”

  That startled a laugh out of me. “I try, milord. Can I help it if trouble has other plans? And besides, who sent me into the nest of Sarist rebels?”

  “Ouch!” Durrel’s hand flew to his tattered shirt, as if I’d wounded him. “How was I to know my aunt was going to start a war? And from what I hear, you were not wholly blameless in that affair. I looked for you,” he added, sobering. “Meri told me you came back to the city, but I didn’t know how to find you.”

  “I —” I faltered. I never knew what to say about last winter, about the Nemair, the family who took me in and sheltered me from the Inquisition; about witnessing the start of the civil war that now spread through Llyvraneth like flames through a library; about Prince Wierolf, and Meri, and all the others. About not wanting to be found again. “I don’t know what you heard, but —”

  “You were a hero,” he said. “You saved Meri’s life. You saved the prince.” He leaned closer, and there was a strange, earnest spark in his eyes. “Is that why you’re in here? Something to do with — the rebellion?”

  Durrel mouthed those last words, and I scowled, considering. Was it possible? I’d been on the wrong side at the Siege of Bryn Shaer; perhaps the king was rounding up everyone with any tenuous Sarist connections, as he’d done before. And mine were rather more than tenuous, or at least they had been.

  “I thought so, but it doesn’t feel right,” I said. “They grabbed me off the street in the middle of the night. Traitors to the Crown are usually arrested with a little more ceremony, so everyone can quake in fear of the king’s wrath. This feels more like Greenmen — but these guys weren’t Greenmen.”

  “And even if you were arrested for your ties to the rebels, it’s highly improbable for you to end up in here with me. We’re not so overcrowded at Bryn Tsairn that we need to double up on accommodations.”

  He was right. There was something else here, something lower and stranger than royal politics. “Somebody apparently paid a fair coin for the privilege of sending you a thief,” I said. “The question is who, and why? That guard said somebody sent you a present. What did he mean?”

  “I just assumed he was playing with me; ‘Bait the Nob’ is a grand sport here at the Keep.” Durrel spoke slowly, as if turning a thought over to examine it. “You think he might have been serious; someone — sent you to me? To what end? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Oh, milord,” I said. “I’ve learned it’s easier if you stop expecting things to make sense.” I rose slowly and leaned back against the wood. “It would appear we have a common enemy. Who have you pissed off?”

  He eyed me evenly. “You mean besides Talth’s family?”

  “Well, that’s no good. I’ve had no dealings with them at all. Is that it? No dark secrets in Durrel Decath’s past or present?” My voice was as light as I could make it, and Durrel shook his head. I frowned. My own list was definitely longer — dissatisfied clients and frustrated assassins, disgruntled former rebels, jealous nobs. Inquisitors. The standard assortment. “There must be someone else. Could it have anything to do with the war?” Even now, magic-tolerant Sarists commanded by Prince Wierolf were advancing on the city, pressing with surprising success against Prince Astilan’s royal troops. “Where do the Decath stand?”

  “Where they’ve always stood, off to the side where they can’t get into trouble. Waiting for the pieces to fall so they can still be everyone’s friends when it’s over.” I thought I heard an edge of bitterness in his voice. “But what about you? I seem to recall there was rather more about you than you originally let on.”

  That was no surprise; my relation to the High Inquisitor had become a more or less public secret in the last few months. “But no one knows I’m back in the city,” I said — which wasn’t strictly true — “and even if they did, they’d be looking for a waiting gentlewoman, not —”

  “A ragtag, street-brawling urchin?”

  I had to grin. “Something like that.”

  Durrel gave my stained and rumpled men’s clothes a critical eye. “I think I preferred your last disguise.”

  “Runaway nun?”

  “More romantic, definitely.”

  “Well, that’s what I was going for.” This conversation was ridiculous, but I couldn’t help it. Lord Durrel was too easy to talk to.

  “This is probably not the time to mention that you should maybe have stayed out of the city,” he said, a quirk to his lip.

  I shook my head. “I had to come back. I had friends here, and —”

  “No, I get it,” he said. “It’s home.”

  Home. I wasn’t even sure what that meant anymore. I leaned my head against the curving stone wall of the cell. It was late and surreal, and the bumps on my head were taking their toll.

  After a silent moment, Durrel straddled the bench and poured out another cup of the stale water. “Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way,” he said. “Maybe we’re not looking for a mutual enemy, but a friend.”

  I choked on my water. “I thought I’d gotten past the sorts of friends who have you arrested.”

  Though we ran through our tiny circle of shared acquaintances once more — many of them his cousin’s family, who’d taken me in for the winter, and all their friends and allies — we had no better luck. I couldn’t fathom any of the Nemair or their fellow Sarists having me arrested.

  “We’re left with a puzzle,” Durrel said, and there was a lively spark to his voice that seemed all out of place.

  “Pox,” I said. “I hate puzzles.”

  “Surely we’ll know more come morning,” he said. “Our — friend — must have some plan.”

  “I hate waiting too,” I said, and personally didn’t care to stick around to learn the plans of people who randomly had their acquaintances arrested. But it seemed I didn’t have a choice about that, so I plied the rest of Durrel’s story from him.

  It seemed their marriage, however promising on paper, was troubled from the beginning. Talth, generally accounted a respectable widow, turned out to be cold and controlling, unaffectionate but to her four children, and kept Durrel on a tight leash, like a prize dog she’d bought to show off to her rich friends. By the time his tale wound round to the night of the murder, a dark picture had emerged. An overheard quarrel, a witness who saw Durrel leaving his wife’s bedchamber, the empty poison bottle in his rooms.

  “But I didn’t do it,” he insisted. “Her maid is lying. I left Talth’s rooms at midnight; she can’t have seen me there two hours later.”

  “And no one can confirm your story? That you were alone in your own quarters all night?”

  “I can barely confirm my story,” he said. “I don’t remember much about that night. I — I was angry, and there was . . . rather a lot of wine involved.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “One thing she wasn’t stingy
with was her wine cellar.”

  “What was the fight about?”

  He shrugged. “Money, Koya, who knows. Nothing, anything. I barely knew the woman, Celyn, but apparently she’d decided to hate me almost as soon as we were married.”

  “So in a drunken rage, angry over money, you broke into her rooms in the middle of the night and poisoned her.”

  “I know it looks bad. Her family is convinced I’m guilty, and —” He faltered and stared up at the ceiling. “And so’s mine.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said. I had met his parents, Lord Ragn Decath, his genial, good-natured father, and a sweet, soft-spoken stepmother, Amalle. They’d been kind to me, when their son thought I was an errant Aspirant on the run from convent school. I had liked them.

  But I’d touched a nerve. Durrel’s expression grew closed. He shook his head. “Amalle has left the city, and my father won’t see me. He hasn’t come or even sent word since I was arrested.” He rose and crossed the cell, looked out the high, barred window at the fading sky. “We’ve talked the moons down. The guards will be back on duty soon.”

  “And then what?” I said. Bludgeon the one who brought breakfast and steal his keys? Not a terrible plan, the more I thought about it.

  He sat beside me. “It seems the gods keep throwing us in each other’s paths, Celyn Contrare,” he said. “I say we see what they have in store.”

  He sounded so patently silly that I had to laugh. This entire situation was completely cracked, but it was almost worth it, to see Lord Durrel again. “That sounds like one of your friend Raffin’s lines,” I said. Raffin Taradyce had been the engineer of Durrel’s escape (and mine) from Gerse last year.

  He did grin then, but sobered quickly. “Speaking of, I have news you won’t like. Raffin’s joined the Guard.”

  I felt my eyes narrow. “City or royal?”

  “Ah, no . . .” Durrel was shaking his head, almost wincing. “Acolyte.”

  I shouldn’t have gone cold all over, but I couldn’t help it. Durrel Decath’s best friend was now a Greenman, one of the brutal henchmen of the Inquisition who tore children from their beds and tortured their victims in secret dungeons all over the city in their ruthless quest for magic users and heretics. All in the name of Celys, our great Mother Goddess. I clutched at my bare wrist, where I’d once worn a silver bracelet given to me by Meri Nemair. It was too dangerous to wear silver in the city now; the slightest glint of the metal would condemn you as a magic user. “His father’s idea?”

  “Who else?”

  I sighed. “Remind me to tell you how I met Lord Taradyce sometime.”

  “Hist,” Durrel said. Outside in the hall, we heard footsteps, then a loud bang on the door, and a guard threw it open with a godless crash.

  “You there, girl,” he said. “You’ve made bail. You’re out of here.”

  I scrambled to my feet, Durrel behind me. “Who?” I demanded. “How?”

  The guard shrugged. “You want out of here or not?”

  I turned back to Durrel, feeling suddenly helpless.

  “Go,” he urged.

  “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “It’s not so bad,” he said. “The most surprising people pop in to see me.”

  The guard was glaring at me in brutish impatience, and as he edged me toward the door, Durrel called my name. I hung back. “Can you get a message to my father?”

  “I’ll try. What do you want me to say?” The guard had hold of me now and was pulling me into the hallway. Durrel looked flustered, perplexed. “Think on it,” I said. “And tell me next time.”

  “You can’t come back here! It’s too dangerous.”

  “There are visiting days every week,” I said. “I’ll come then.”

  The guard slammed the door hard between us, but I watched over my shoulder as pale fingers curled through the bars in the tiny window.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Outside the gates, across the drawbridge, a lanky young man in a ridiculous powder blue satin suit leaned casually against a rain barrel.

  “Rat?” I raised my arm against the piercing sunlight. “What are you doing here?”

  “I believe that’s my line. Gods!” Rat jumped as I lowered my arm from my face. “Marau’s balls, Digger. I hope somebody’s bleeding in the street somewhere thanks to you.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Were you expecting someone else? It hurts just to look at you.” Rat winced, leaning in to inspect my bruised eye and gashed cheek. “I have a boat, thank the gods. If they’ll even let you on. You smell like —”

  “I know what I smell like.” A hired river launch bobbed nearby, and I hobbled toward it. “How did you know where I was?” I repeated, lowering myself into the boat — without any help from Rat, I’ll note. He hopped down after me and told the boatman where to take us.

  Rat, properly Halcot Granthin, my roommate, produced a slip of paper from his doublet. “They sent a note.” I unfolded the page, a crisp sheet of stationery so white it was almost too bright to look at directly. Your lodger has been arrested. Fifty marks bond to release her from the Keep. “Aunt Grea found it under the bakery door this morning. By all the hells, what were you doing?”

  “Working. Red guards pinched me in Markettown.”

  “Entertaining,” he said, obviously waiting for more.

  “You do it next time.” There was nothing on the paper to give up its origins.

  “Recognize the handwriting?”

  “No.” It was neat and featureless schoolroom calligraphy, carefully anonymous. And unsigned, of course. “Thank you,” I added belatedly. “I owe you fifty marks.” Not that I had any idea where it was going to come from.

  “Lucky again. They sent the money too. But you do owe me new trunk hose. You’ve ruined my favorite pair.” He leaned in distastefully and plucked at the stained fabric near my knee.

  “Oh, they weren’t either. I pulled these out of the fireplace.”

  “Evidently.”

  The pier where we were moored was crowded, mostly with Watch craft unloading prisoners. I seemed to be the only one getting out of the Keep this morning. In among the city boats were two long, gilded vessels packed with soldiers in green livery — more of the king’s army being shipped into the city to remind us all to stay in line. Above the horizon of buildings on the opposite shore, a sliver of green glass dome colored the sky: the Celystra, visible from nearly every point in the city.

  Tensions in Gerse had always been high, but now that we were finally, openly, at civil war, it was even worse. Soldiers patrolled the streets and waterways, and the city had closed down most of the markets, lest we citizens gather and start a riot. There was hardly anything to buy now, anyway, with the troops outside Gerse diverting most of the food and goods from the farms of Gelnir for their own use. Neighbors kept their doors and windows closed fast, and nobody met each other’s eyes. Everyone was afraid of glancing up and recognizing enemy sympathies in people they’d lived and worked beside all their lives. As the summer days grew hot and long, the king’s grip on the city grew so tight we could barely breathe.

  The boat slipped into the current, and I settled back into the cramped seat, reaching to pull my cap over my eyes. My fingers closed on air; I must have forgotten it in Durrel’s cell. I couldn’t shake that final image of him watching me, one hand reaching out as I walked away. What had happened to him? It was hard to reconcile the hopeless young man I’d just left with the gallant, good-humored nob who’d plucked me from the riverbank and swept me to safety last fall.

  Rat was watching me. “What?” I said crossly.

  “Just making sure you weren’t going to careen out of the boat,” he said. “You’re about to tip over, you know.”

  I hunched lower. “Have you heard anything about the murder of a nobleman’s wife recently — a Talth Ceid?”

  The expression on Rat’s face was immeasurable, and even the boatman turned to stare at me. “Where have you been, then?
” the sailor asked, then reddened under his sun-weathered skin, the shadow of the Keep still darkening the water before us. “Oh.”

  Rat wasn’t so polite. “Honestly, don’t you pay attention to anything? Lord Durrel killing Talth Ceid is the only thing anyone’s talked about for the last two weeks!”

  “Just fill me in,” I said. “My head hurts.”

  “I should think so,” he said. “Well, it’s brewing into quite the scandal. It seems that things behind closed doors at the Ceid household were not so dignified after all.”

  “What kind of scandal?”

  “Talth’s daughter, to start,” Rat said in a low voice. “They’re saying there might have been more than paternal affection between Talth’s oldest and her stepfather.”

  “What?” It took a moment for my sluggish brain to work through that. “You mean, Durrel and —?”

  “Koya,” Rat supplied. “And it’s not quite as seedy as it sounds. She must be well into her third age by now, and Lord Durrel’s only just a man. Or so I’ve heard.”

  “And that’s why he supposedly killed her? For this Koya?”

  “Or for the money. You can pick your motive — no, really, odds makers on Bonelicker Way are taking wagers for it — but apparently the Decath got the marriage settlement back and the house on Garrison Street when his lordship’s wife was so conveniently dispatched. Not that any of them will do him much good where he’s at now. The Ceid are screaming for Lord Durrel’s blood, and the way things look, I think they’ll get it.” Rat’s gaze had gone narrow. “Why all these questions?”

  I scratched at the back of my head, gingerly probing one of the bruises. “Apparently I’ve just spent the night in a cell with the city’s most celebrated murder suspect.”

  Rat’s expression was carefully neutral. “That’s what this is about? How do these things happen to you?”

  “I know him,” I said. “Oh, don’t give me that look. You’ve heard that story a dozen times.”

  “I didn’t realize he was that Durrel Decath.”