Liar's Moon

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  “Didn’t you check on him? Go to him, see how the marriage was working out?”

  “I thought to leave him alone, to adjust to married life on his own, that it would be better for him to be independent. I thought the problems they were having were normal for noble marriages. No one of Durrel’s rank marries purely for love, and seldom do we have much say in who our partner is. What happened to him is no different than what countless other young noblemen, and women, have gone through.”

  “Except he was your son.”

  “He was my son,” Ragn agreed, and we both heard what neither said. I should have done more. I should have protected him better.

  “When did you realize what Talth was up to?”

  “It was slow,” he said. “After we confided in her, Talth insisted we use her ships, her warehouses for the shipments. Initially it seemed a blessing from the gods. Resources we’d had to scramble for before, now at our least bidding. But then I heard — from dockmasters or border guards we were on good terms with — that she was starting to change the terms of deals, withholding bribe money, charging the passengers. . . . I tried to break off my dealings with her, and that was when she threatened to expose us. She had me trapped. She had Durrel trapped.” He examined the rim of his tankard carefully, before looking skyward once more. “And then we learned that Talth had been taking on passengers of her own, making them work as slaves in her house and businesses.”

  “And that she was turning over those who could not pay to the Inquisition.”

  He nodded grimly. “I went to Bal Marse to reason with her.” He paused to take a breath, but I was breathless, motionless. “It was late, and none of the servants was about; I remember thinking she must have sold them off already, and I was blind with rage by the time I found her. When I confronted her about the Inquisition, she laughed. I offered to buy her out of her share of the operation, but she told me she’d found more lucrative partners.” Lord Ragn’s mouth was set, his face hard. “She’d gotten all she ever wanted from me, after all. She had my son.” He gripped the edge of the table tightly. “And then she looked at me and said she hoped the son would turn out as profitable as his father.

  “I — I’m not sure what happened next. She turned away from me, and her glass was sitting right there, and I had the Tincture of the Moon — Koya had insisted I carry some, earlier in the week, for the passengers we had coming in. I had never removed it from my purse, and it seemed so simple suddenly, so obvious what I had to do.” His face twisted painfully, but he went on. “I stayed long enough to watch her drink it, then I left. I must have thrown the bottle in the river. I didn’t have it with me when I got back to Charicaux.”

  “You dropped it in her room,” I said. Where it rolled into the watch-hole. “It was almost empty.” Just a single drop left.

  “But why did Durrel have any?” he asked. “I still don’t understand that.”

  “He bought some tincture for Koya,” I explained. “When you resisted the idea of using it, she approached Durrel. She knew he’d do anything for her.”

  “I didn’t realize,” Lord Ragn said. “And of course when they found the bottle in his rooms, and with the rumors that their marriage was troubled —”

  “And Geirt seeing you leave Talth’s chamber and mistaking you for Durrel —”

  Lord Ragn pressed his eyes closed briefly. “It was all a terrible mess, and I just needed time to fix everything.”

  There’s never time to fix everything, I thought, but held my tongue. Lord Ragn was silent too, for a long moment. Behind me, I sensed one of Koya’s hounds snuffling at the terrace doors, pressing its nose to the glass and wondering why its visitors had secluded themselves outside.

  “How does Karst fit in?” I asked.

  “He was one of Talth’s enforcers. She’d send him to make sure her clients paid up when promised. We’ve been trying to negotiate with the Ceid, get Barris to let us take the shipment off their hands, but Karst has been suspicious. He’s been sniffing around lately, threatening us.”

  I pulled back against the low stone wall and looked up into the sky. Pinkish clouds swallowed the moons, leaving us in shadow.

  “What will you do?” Lord Ragn asked.

  “Do? What do you mean?”

  “Will you tell my son?”

  “I have to,” I said. “I don’t want to turn you in, but Durrel’s life is at stake. I can’t let him die for a murder that he didn’t commit. And neither can you.” A cold, dark thought stopped me. “Koya doesn’t know.”

  “She knows,” he said sadly. “She just won’t admit it to herself.”

  “You’ve told her?”

  “No, but she knew I was there to see her mother, and she’d given me the poison.”

  He was right; Koya had to know, had to have known all along, and she’d hidden the truth from all of us, all this time. Maybe even from herself. But what about Durrel? How would he take the news that his father was a murderer?

  “Grant me one favor, Celyn.”

  I wasn’t in any position to be generous, but I heard him out.

  “Give me time to find Talth’s last passengers. We may still be able to rescue them. But if I’m arrested . . .” He turned his anguished eyes to me. They were all Lord Ragn’s responsibility, all children he’d delivered into the clutches of a monster, and he had to save them.

  “All right,” I said. “But only if you agree to something in return.” When he nodded, I said, “You tell Durrel the truth. He deserves that much.”

  There was a long silence, a thick haze hanging over the river, and bullfrogs singing their low, brooding song to the moons. Lord Ragn traced an endless circle with one finger on the papers before him. “Durrel is my only child, you know. After he was born, his mother was very weak, and we knew there would be no more. When he was just a boy — eight years, maybe nine — he fell ill while I was away on business for the Crown. He and his mother were at Favom Court, and he’d broken into the stables early one morning and taken one of the horses to ride. But he fell, trying to jump the paddock wall, and he injured his chest. A fever set in, and for a week, they tell me, our physicians thought we’d lose him. I had forbidden him to ride that horse; it was the last thing I’d said before leaving for the city. He wasn’t defiant, but there was something — somehow I knew, the way he’d been eyeing it the past weeks, like he was ready for a challenge. But I was sure I knew better, and it never occurred to me that he would disobey me.”

  Of course it hadn’t. I’m not allowed to have thoughts of my own. Lord Ragn shook his head, remembering. “I was tied up at court and couldn’t return, though my wife told me he called for me endlessly, in the delirium of fever. When I was finally dismissed, the spectre of Marau had departed, and he was well on the mend, with nothing but a broken collarbone to show how near to death he’d come. I sold that horse when I got back, and I promised myself I would never put my son in harm’s way again. And until Talth Ceid, I kept my word.”

  I waited, watching Ragn stare blankly at his maps.

  “It is harder than you can imagine to do good in this world,” he said, so quietly I wasn’t sure he was speaking to me. “To know what the right thing is, all the time. To choose the better of two bad paths, always wondering if you have chosen wrong.” He sighed and met my eyes. “Do not judge too harshly actions taken out of love.”

  I didn’t understand, and there wasn’t a chance for him to explain, for at that moment Koya’s dogs pushed through the terrace doors, followed by Koya herself. “I’m sorry to disturb you both,” she said, and there was a chord of tension in her voice that suggested she knew or had guessed the content of our conversation. “But there’s been a messenger, and he’s brought a note.”

  “No bother,” Lord Ragn said, reaching for the paper she carried.

  Koya shook her head. “It’s for Celyn.”

  “For me?” I took it, unfolded it in the moonslight and read it swiftly. “I have to go,” I said. “It’s from Cwalo.”
/>   “Cwalo — who?” Lord Ragn asked, but I was banging up the steps. “Where are you going?”

  Reluctantly I turned back. “He says Durrel knows where the refugees are.”

  “But that’s wonderful,” Ragn said, rising, but I forestalled him.

  “And he’s disappeared.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “What? Where would he have gone?” Lord Ragn’s voice was harsh. “You must have some idea.”

  “No, I —” I faltered, uncertain. “I’m not sure. What did he say to you at Stantin’s? I know he was curious about Talth’s properties in Markettown —”

  “Damn.” Lord Ragn was pacing now. “I told him it was madness to go down there.”

  “It’s possible he went somewhere else,” I said. “Master Cwalo might know more.”

  He nodded, his face drawn. “Good. You go there, and I’ll check Markettown. It’ll take all night, the way traffic is. If I don’t find anything, I’ll meet you back at —?”

  “The docks.” I gave him Cwalo’s address, and he nodded, looking distracted. I felt like I should say more, but I didn’t know what, not after everything he’d told me tonight. Instead I just turned away and darted back up the stairs.

  “Celyn —”

  I didn’t look back.

  I took the quickest route I knew across the city, with the rivers jammed and the streets clogged with angry soldiers: over the roofs. Full dark had fallen, the sky awash with moonslight and tinged with the scent of gunpowder. It gave me a chill and hastened my climb across the slates and tiles and occasional thatch of the city’s rooftops. I was out of practice and badly dressed for such a mission, but at least the weather was dry and the roofs weren’t slippery.

  Terribly.

  I picked myself up from the dusty cobbles, my hands scraped painfully, and shook the limp out, racing the last of the way to Cwalo’s property.

  All sorts of dire scenarios proposed themselves, but they all distilled to one simple explanation. Durrel, tired of waiting and chafing at being confined yet again, had broken free and gone looking for the missing Sarists. Alone. With the Watch after him, and Karst still out there.

  I was breathless and sweating, my palms stinging with blood, by the time I skirted the last corner and barreled out onto the Big Silver boardwalks. I felt a little dizzy, probably from not eating for two days, and bent against a flamboy to catch my breath, rubbing my chest to ease my heartbeat. But the sensation didn’t subside, and I only felt more anxious as I hastened along the docks to Cwalo’s. I couldn’t shake off the sense I was heading in the wrong direction.

  The warehouse was in chaos. Green soldiers swarmed the dockyard, toting guns — theirs or Cwalo’s, it was hard to tell — and casks of beer. Crates had been torn open, their contents scattered on the boardwalk, tossed aside into the water. I reeled back. What had happened here? Where was Cwalo? Where was Durrel?

  I made my way inside the warehouse, and found Cwalo in his office. “We planted the seeds, my girl,” he said, glaring at the soldiers even now sacking the storeroom. “We must bear up through the harvest. But that’s not why you’ve come.” He gestured me closer, and I shut the door behind me. “I’m afraid our boy slipped away when the soldiers arrived. We’d been going over some records when we were distracted by the marching outside. I gave him a pistol, for his own protection, but he disappeared the minute my back was turned.”

  “You’ve armed him? I have to find him.”

  “Not out there, lass! Half the Green Army’s coming down on this town. They are mad with drink and armed to the teeth, and they are not under anybody’s control.”

  “Durrel is out there.” My voice was calm, but inside I was pleading with him to understand.

  And he was Cwalo. Of course he understood. Wordlessly he took a case from his desk drawer, flipped open the lid, and began assembling an inlaid pistol, gathering shot and powder. “I presume you still remember how to use this,” he said. I nodded, but I was looking at the books splayed open on his desk.

  “Are these the records you were going over?” I asked.

  “Aye,” he said, peering sternly at the pistol’s working parts. “Troop musters from Hobin, in and out of the city.”

  I shifted papers aside. “That may have been what you were reading,” I said. “But Durrel was looking at these.” Tucked inside a stack of royal army recruitment rolls, corners bent to hide its different size, was another document, now a little rumpled and edge-worn from being dragged to and fro across the city, stuffed in sleeves and doublets. I turned the Ceid harbor shipping manifests around, looking them over for . . . what? Whatever Durrel had seen, whatever had sent him out into the night with a gun.

  “Lass, what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly, drawing my finger down the rolls. What — there. Familiar names, scrawled in the margins: Belprisa, Ponvi, Light of Yraine. I pushed a hand against the neckline of my bodice, wishing that my pulse would settle. Was this what Durrel thought he’d figured out? The Ceid shipyards, where tall ships were trapped at harbor because the city was sealed off from invasion. How many vessels were docked there tonight? Did he think he was going to search them all himself?

  “They’re on a ship,” I said with urgent certainty. “I have to go.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Cwalo said gravely, handing me the pistol. I didn’t bother reminding him how very seldom that was the case. I just strapped the pistol snugly to the sheath on my leg and dropped my skirts over it. Cwalo would have been welcome company tonight, but I could hardly ask him to leave his warehouse while it was being looted by the king’s army. I gave him a quick, firm hug and took off into the night.

  It didn’t take me long to reach the Ceid dockyards, even dodging soldiers making disturbingly merry with the contents of the river’s warehouses. Soon I was back at the familiar port, gazing up at the tangle of vessels packed together at the harbor. They seemed curiously unguarded; the warehouse itself was standing open to the night and the elements, and it looked like someone had been interrupted in the process of unloading cargo. But where was everyone?

  Where was Durrel?

  I recognized the Belprisa, still anchored beside a low-slung caravel with no flags, and a big, new merchant galleon, which was liable to get stuck in the summer muds if it had to linger in the Big Silver much longer. The Ponvi. Was the Light of Yraine among that crowd of vessels, and how was I ever going to figure out which ship Durrel had identified?

  I paced the abandoned dock, distracted by the annoying quiver in my pulse, thinking hard. What had he seen? I tried to picture him here, finding the right ship — but another thought came to mind instead, from that night we’d watched Lord Ragn receive his refugees. Durrel saying to me, You knew which boat they were on before I could even see it; asking how I’d tracked the magic from Bal Marse to the warehouse. . . . I turned slowly, looking over the ships, blocking out the buzz of mob traffic in the distance and the urgency of my throbbing pulse. Straining through the darkness for some sign, some faint shimmer on a curving hull or furled sail, I settled my attention at last on one small brown craft, swirling Talancan script spelling out a name on the prow. All the wild turmoil inside me settled abruptly, like iron filings snapped to a magnet, orienting in the same singular direction — my strange magical compass calibrating itself.

  Belprisa.

  There was no logic to it, but I knew. However Durrel had discovered this, he had done it without the benefit of magical aid, but I no longer had any doubt, not with the arrow in my blood pointing unequivocally at the ship. Lord Ragn’s missing Sarists must be aboard the Belprisa. How long had they been there? I thought back over the last fortnight or so, all the times I’d stood right here. When had I seen the Belprisa before? Had I felt anything odd? Had I missed them, trapped so close, and merely walked right by?

  Not this time. I crept toward the water, behind crates stacked up on the shore, ready for someone to come and carry them off. A movement on boar
d the Belprisa caught my eye and I glanced upward. A lantern swung from the mast, and the sails were pulled high and tight. Through the still night, over the lapping water and the murmur of sleepy gulls, I thought I heard voices, floating down through the darkness.

  I hesitated, but the snatch of sound was gone as quickly as it had come. I edged closer. The gangway was still in place, and in the wide-open silence, I simply walked on board.

  Crouching low, I moved as fast as I could along the deck rail, trying to follow the murmur in my chest, but it was now curiously silent. Either it was satisfied that I knew where I was going, or it was overwhelmed by the proximity of magic, or —

  Or the prisoners were gone. And their magic with them, hauled away to the Celystra to be enslaved.

  I swallowed that thought, refusing to believe it. And what, by all the gods and hells, had become of Durrel? I reached a hand toward my leg, only slightly reassured by the heavy presence of Cwalo’s pistol. Low voices carried on a sudden breeze, and this time I finally saw somebody: a lone sailor on the upper deck, the skipper by his dress, engaged in conversation with someone I couldn’t make out. The skipper was a big man with a brace of pistols and a short sword at his belt, and I had the firm conviction I should steer well clear of him.

  Cautiously I ducked down behind a row of barrels lashed together and found a stair leading down into the cargo hold — and here, at last, proof that the niggle in my blood was more than imagination. There was enough magic strewn around — handprints on the railing, long streaks like somebody’s skirt brushing against a wall — that it was bright enough to navigate the depths of the vessel. I felt all that power rushing back to me, stronger than anything I’d experienced since I had taken the Tincture of the Moon — or before. I had only to brush my fingertips against the smooth, wooden planking of the ship’s hull, or catch hold of a rope handrail, and a glittering path woke up before me, lighting the way for me alone.