Liar's Moon

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  “What kind of something? Gone wrong how?”

  “I don’t know. He’s — nervous, like I’ve never seen him. Secretive. I want to say it’s because he’s worried for Durrel, but that’s not it.”

  “What do you think happened? What changed?”

  “A month or so ago Ragn had dinner with someone from the Celystra — he has to do that, to maintain appearances — and something spooked him. Since then he’s been increasingly evasive. When I ask questions, he won’t answer me. He makes arrangements without telling me, and changes details at the last minute. I’m worried for him. I’m afraid it might have to do with — everything else.”

  From the way she said that, I understood well enough what “everything else” meant. “I know you know more than you’re saying about your mother’s death.”

  Koya shook her head. “Only that it wasn’t Durrel or me who killed her. Beyond that — nothing, I’m afraid. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Then at least help me find something that implicates Karst. Records, letters — you could get access to your mother’s business papers.”

  “It’s not that easy,” she said. “Barris does all of that now, and it would look awfully suspicious for frivolous, ridiculous Koya to suddenly start snooping around in Mother’s affairs.” She took a breath. “But I’ll try.”

  I looked at her, all gown and shoes and careless, reckless beauty. “Why do you do — all of this?” I waved a vague hand at her dress and hair.

  She gave a weary sigh. “It’s impossible to keep a secret in Gerse society,” she said. “Gossip is the currency that keeps this town running, after all. And silly, drunken, dissolute Koya who’s in love with her stepfather? Better they think that than learn the truth.”

  “That she’s smuggling Sarist refugees to safety at great risk to herself?”

  “Why, that’s just incredible!” she cried in a gay voice, loud enough to be overheard. “What a delicious imagination you have, Celyn! What other scandalous adventures have I been up to?”

  “I think Tiboran must have laughed at your birth,” I said.

  Her smile dipped a bit. “Well, I do seem to have a natural capacity for playing the brainless coquette,” she said.

  “Not brainless,” I said. “Never brainless. Lonely, maybe. But you’re plainly no fool.”

  She regarded me through shadowed eyes, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “Thank you,” she finally said, and for the first time that night I thought I saw a crack in her mask. “I will see what I can turn up, if you promise to be careful. I must go now, but will you tell Durrel I’m sorry?”

  “For what?”

  “He knows.”

  That night it was too hot and muggy to sleep. People all over Gerse were dragging pallets onto rooftops, balconies, and airy sleeping galleries. Rat was at Hobin’s, where there was actually a chance to catch some breeze from the river. I lay awake beneath the open window, thinking about Koya’s revelation. It was incredible to me that someone like her — who had every advantage possible in our fair city — would even bother to help a few poor Sarists to safety. People like you, she’d said. What would I do with a rescue like that, swept out of Llyvraneth, somewhere Werne couldn’t track me down? Somewhere his grasping, magic-hunting fingers couldn’t reach? But I’d tried that before, running away with the Nemair, and I’d just ended up right back in Gerse, wasting my days while Koya risked everything to save people like me.

  The tiny vial of Tincture of the Moon still sat on my windowsill, drinking in moonslight and spilling it back like an amber prism. I studied the little bottle. There was scarcely a drop left swirling inside the dark glass. It had a milky, metallic gloss to it, like quicksilver. I remembered the ingredients from the herbal in the apothecary’s shop — the pearl, the wine, the tsairn, or silver. The silver. From my apprenticeship with Lady Nemair, I had a passing knowledge of some medicine, and the healing (or otherwise) properties of various preparations and their ingredients.

  But clearly I was an idiot, because here it was staring me in the face.

  The silver.

  I sat up and grabbed the vial. I knew what Koya had wanted this tincture for. And it wasn’t poison. Not exactly.

  Feeling hot and cold all over, I held the little bottle up to the light. Silver dampened magic, which was why Lord Ragn’s refugee had worn heaps of it — heavy chains and belts and bracelets wound about her limbs. And why the Bal Marse dungeon and Inquisitors’ torture chambers all over town had been outfitted with silver shackles. But it only worked so long as you had the silver in contact with your skin. Take off the necklace, the rings, and you’d light up like a candle flame, for anyone with the power — or the tools — to see.

  Was it possible? Could this work? If so, Koya was half brilliant, and I needed to know. There was one way to test it. Ignoring the fact that the only person I knew of to actually ingest any Tincture of the Moon was now dead from it (but she’d had most of a whole vial, I told myself), I swiftly upended the bottle, letting the single silvery drop swirl down to the lip of the glass, and into my mouth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  As soon as I did it, I knew it was a mistake. Only a drop of the stuff, barely enough to survive on my tongue, but the burn from the silver knocked me to my hands and knees, gasping from the searing pain that shrieked through my throat and mouth. Water. Suddenly, desperately, thirsty, I tried to crawl toward the kitchen, but my legs wouldn’t hold me, and I spilled to the floor, unable to move. Hours of silent agony — why did that sound familiar? A cramp seized my limbs, and I tried to cry out, but couldn’t open my mouth to scream.

  I lay there, immobile but writhing inside, the floor shifting in weird, smoky patterns under my cheek. As the cold took my feet and hands, my shins and wrists and forearms, the room seemed to change size around me, and I reached out for the water pitcher — now close at hand, now half a league away. My fingers curled and uncurled uncontrollably against the wooden floor, trying to grasp the handle. Somewhere, one of the moons, maybe, a god banged on the earth, making the whole building shake.

  So this was what it felt like to die. I was just getting used to the idea, my lungs boiling in my icy chest, when thunder split the sky, and horses crashed into me — and then somebody was peeling away all my skin. And I’m sure I screamed.

  Everything hurt. And then nothing hurt, but everything was too loud. And then I was horribly, horribly sick, and someone was holding a damp cloth to my face, and someone else was yelling.

  “Are you out of your mind? What in hells were you thinking, Celyn?” That voice, unmistakably, was Durrel. I tried to move, to look around, but strong arms held me down. I blinked, almost the only thing I had strength for, and through the haze of my vision, I thought I recognized . . . golden hair, blue sleeves. Koya? I struggled to sit up, but Koya was surprisingly strong, and she held me down with considerable force.

  “You won’t be able to move much for a few hours,” she said softly, and her voice next to my ear was like being sanded to death by wool wadding. “It’s always like that after. But yes, what were you thinking?”

  I stared at her, at the red face of Durrel swimming in and out of my vision, and I couldn’t remember. “I —” My voice was a choke, a rattle, no sound at all.

  “You could have killed yourself!”

  “Enough. Stop. She needs to rest.” Koya rose from the edge of the bed and I watched a blur of blue put something that might have been an arm around something that might have been a person, and move out of my field of vision.

  I couldn’t sleep after that, just lay in a fog of alternating clarity and confusion, feeling cold through to my very bones, and trying not to panic. I clearly remembered what I’d done — I’d swallowed the last of the Tincture of the Moon from the bottle we’d found behind Talth’s fireplace — but what escaped me now was why. Something important, something to do with Koya . . . but that didn’t seem right. And now I’d almost killed myself and couldn’t even remember the reaso
n. I stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling, which advanced and receded as I watched it, wondering where I was. Koya’s house, perhaps.

  Finally, when I imagined feeling returning to my hands and feet, Durrel came back. Alone this time. And quieter. He knelt beside the bed, and his face was lined with concern. With effort, I fixed him clearly in my gaze, and he gave what was obviously trying to be a smile, and failing miserably.

  “I’m sorry.” I don’t know which one of us said it, but his fingers came up to brush a damp strand of hair from my forehead, and it was everything I could do not to shriek from the pain of his touch on my skin.

  “How —” How did you find me? I wanted to say, but lacked the energy. He understood anyway.

  “I had to see you. I — after you left the Temple, I was angry and so sick of being cooped up in there, so I went for a walk. And somehow I found myself down in Seventh, outside your building. I know, I shouldn’t have gone out — but damn the gods, I’m glad I did!” He took a moment, let the fury subside. He tried a smile instead. “I realize you were upset, but suicide? Over me? Celyn, I’m touched.”

  I coughed out a painful laugh, and Durrel sobered again.

  “Koya says you’ll be fine. Eventually. I don’t understand. What were you doing?”

  I tried to shake my head. “I — I can’t remember,” I said, and my voice sounded strained and whiny. “Why —?” It was too much effort to put into words. Why would Koya be so knowledgeable about the effects of the poison? The answer was somewhere; I’d had it a moment ago, before I’d gone and nearly killed myself trying to prove . . . what?

  Durrel took my hand and held it to his face. His breath was hot and gentle on my cold fingers, and I closed my eyes with a sigh. “I’m sorry. It was stupid.”

  “Don’t do anything like that again,” he said. “I couldn’t stand it, when I found you, lying there on the floor, the vial still in your hand. . . .” His voice shook, and I opened my eyes, to see him staring at me, an odd brightness in his charcoal-colored eyes.

  “It wasn’t a fatal dose,” I said.

  “You didn’t know that.”

  I shook my head. “No, I —” But it was gone again. “I know what it was for. I mean, I knew what it was for. Why she wanted it —”

  “Hist. It doesn’t matter.”

  Of course it mattered! The only reason for my colossal idiocy, and now I’d lost it. Helplessly, furiously, I felt hot tears spring up and blot my cheeks. I turned away from Durrel.

  At that moment, Koya returned, carrying a basin of water, with a length of linen draped over one arm. “Lord Durrel,” she said rather formally, “if you’ll excuse us, I have a patient to tend, and feminine modesty to defend. Out.”

  Obviously reluctant, Durrel rose from my side and edged toward the door, staring back at us, at me, until finally the door whispered shut behind him.

  “Do you have to do that?” I asked, nodding toward the basin.

  “No,” she said. “I just wanted him out so we could talk.” She settled beside me. “Normally we give it with a preparation of poppy, to ease the effects of the poison. It is still a poison,” she said. “And you’re luckier than you know.”

  “What is it for?” I asked. I had known, earlier.

  Koya gave me a sad smile. “You’ll figure it out.”

  They made me stay at Koya’s for two more days, during which the numbing effects of the tincture held me fast to the bed. Durrel hovered nearby, alternately attentive and restless, until his own edginess nearly drove me crazy. Koya and I finally made him promise to return to the Temple and keep out of sight and off the street.

  “She can’t hide you here,” I insisted. “What if Barris shows up?”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s just — I don’t know what to do with myself, all day, with you —” He stopped that sentence still unfinished, but I knew what he wanted to say. We’d been on the verge of proving Karst’s guilt and Talth’s connection to the Ferrymen, and I’d gone and blown everything by my own stupidity, and until I was well enough — or at least remembered what the hells I’d been trying to prove — our investigation was at a standstill. “I need my protector,” he said softly.

  From across the room, Koya made a face, but eventually he gave in, with Koya promising that her own boat would deliver Durrel safely back to the inn, where Eske would no doubt keep an eye on him. “You two are worse than the guards at the Keep,” he said, and Koya and I exchanged looks of satisfaction.

  Sometime on the third day, I woke to find myself blessedly alone, at last. I was hot and weary and starving, but mostly I felt restless, tired of being tied down to a sickbed and anxious to get back and figure out whatever it was I’d been trying to do. Gingerly I peeled myself off the mattress and, bracing myself for the vertigo, carefully stood.

  I was naked. Of course I was. I turned my head slowly, looking over the room for my clothes. It had been night when I’d drunk the poison; I’d had on just my smock, which was probably ruined. Well, Koya appreciated outrageous behavior. I tugged the damp sheet from the mattress and wrapped it around myself, then shuffled out into the corridor. Amateurs. They hadn’t even bothered to try locking the door. Although I did have to step carefully over one of the huge, shaggy sighthounds, which had stretched itself across the threshold and refused to budge when I opened the door.

  The maid, Vrena, was just outside. Perfect. I couldn’t remember why I’d tried to kill myself, but the name of Koya’s servant was right there. She let out a little screech when she saw me, and tried to usher me back inside my room. I was small and sick, but I resisted. “Fetch Mistress Koya,” I suggested.

  “She’s not home,” Vrena said. “Oh, lady, she’ll kill me if she finds you gone” — this, as I tried to push past her into the corridor.

  She wouldn’t if she found Vrena knocked unconscious and tied to one of the atrium pillars, but I didn’t have the energy to suggest it. “Just . . . get me some clothes?”

  She nodded her agreement and hurried off down the hallway. I went the other direction, seized by an idea. I was half mad (and more than half naked), but this was the best opportunity I was likely to have to search Koya’s house. Maybe she hadn’t killed her mother — but she knew more than she’d admitted about Talth’s death, she was neck-deep in her own involvement with smuggling Sarist refugees, and she was definitely withholding key information about the Tincture of the Moon. If she wouldn’t tell me, then I’d have to figure it out myself.

  I found her bedroom easily, the most ridiculously opulent suite in the house, every inch of it gilded or colored in blue silk. She had left that door unlocked as well. I went in, my sheet trailing behind me like a train. Koya appeared to share her mother’s penchant for darkness; the room’s large windows were hung with heavy drapes, and I realized that these were the rooms of someone who often worked nights and needed to sleep during the day. I shoved one set aside, bathing the chambers with hot afternoon sun and stirring up a cloud of spicy-scented dust. Though there were three vast silken pillows on the floor, the damask counterpane on Koya’s bed was covered with gray hairs from the dogs. Near the window was a spindly desk with outsized carvings dripping gilt, and I had only to turn halfway to reach the matching dressing table with its bounty of conveniently placed hairpins. My hands only shook a little as I popped the fragile gilded lock. I steadied myself against the edge of the desk, breathing hard.

  The desk was mostly empty, but I pushed aside the quills and various invitations to society events to locate the spring that released the hidden panel inside the drawer, where the real secrets lay. It would have been nice to discover a memorandum detailing the uses of Tincture of the Moon, but I was none so lucky. Only a letter or two from contacts in Brionry or Wolt, offering positions as clerks or nursemaids for reliable workers. Under the letters was a ledger book, with monetary notations — some of them astronomical — carefully detailed, but without a single identifying word. Certainly nothing that said, “Cost of forged Brion passport, twenty cr
owns.” I rubbed at my chest, where my heart still banged unevenly, relieved at least that Lord Ragn and Koya’s plans for their smuggled Sarists didn’t stop at the Gerse dockyards.

  Tucked inside the ledger, its crease weak from wear, was a letter to Koya from her mother, a spewing, vitriolic rant accusing Koya of every conceivable offense, from ingratitude over her marriage to Stantin Koyuz, to trying to bilk Talth of her fortune, to “base designs” with Durrel. I tossed it back inside the hollow of the desk like it had burned me. Why would anybody keep such a nasty thing?

  There was nothing in the room, however, that explained my stunt with the poison. I leaned heavily against the bedpost, feeling a little dizzy. What now?

  There was something else missing, as well, I realized, staring hard at the blue and gold furnishings. In all this vast room, with Koya’s bed and Koya’s clothes and Koya’s books, there was no trace of magic — nothing at all from the Sarists she must have had contact with. I turned about the room, frowning. I should find at least a faint spark here and there. Footprints. Fingerprints. Something.

  I wanted a closer look, but at that point Vrena reappeared. With a firm shake of her head, she pointed me out of Koya’s chambers, closing the door with a sharp click behind me. The clothes she brought me appeared to be her own castoffs, a threadbare smock about my size, and a plain brown kirtle with a stained skirt. I decided not to push my favor with Tiboran (or Vrena) and didn’t ask for shoes.

  The maid followed me anxiously to the riverside doors. “Tell your mistress I had business to attend to,” I said. The urge to get out of Koya’s house was overwhelming, like insects crawling along my insides. I just hadn’t decided where I wanted to be instead.

  “She won’t like that at all.”

  At that moment I wasn’t sure I cared what Mistress Koya liked or not.

  I’d told Koya’s boatman to take me back to the bakery, but as we skirted through the murky water toward the center of town, the feeling of dread and panic I’d felt since taking the poison only intensified. I couldn’t help tallying up the crises in my mind as we traveled. How to prove that Karst killed Talth? What had Koya meant when she said something had spooked Lord Ragn? Would Berdal make it safely through to the front with his secret maps of Gerse? Would Durrel stay put at the Temple until we figured out our next move? And what had become of Raffin? Troubles twisted in on one another until I felt seasick from them. I looked up into the sky, where the green dome of the Celystra loomed over the city. Koya had said Ragn’s puzzling behavior had started after he’d dined with somebody from the Celystra. And back when this had all started, Raffin had made that curious remark about not asking questions of other Greenmen.