“That’s why I’m here.”
He turned away from the painting and looked right at her. Bastan had strangely pale eyes, almost a faint purple, and a sharp chin that always made him seem angry. Black hair had begun showing hints of gray over the last few years. Sam liked to think she caused that.
“Your brother isn’t here, Sam.”
She tamped down the fluttering in her chest. She’d known it wasn’t likely that he’d come here. If anything, he would have gone to Marin, but she knew he hadn’t done that, either. That was the first place she’d checked. The stupid woman had the good fortune of not being at home. Otherwise, Sam might have hit her. Marin liked Tray so why would she risk an assignment—and a useless one at that—that would get them caught?
“I didn’t think he was.” She managed to keep her voice steady. What she asked next would be harder. “I think he got caught. I need help getting him free.”
Bastan tapped his first finger on that sharp chin of his, his brow knitting as he did. “No.”
“No? How many of these paintings have we gotten for you, Bastan?” There were other things she’d gotten for him, but the paintings were what he valued the most. “I need my brother. Without him, I—”
“Will do just fine. You’re skilled enough that you don’t need him. I half believe you’d do better without him. There are times you refuse my suggestions because you’re afraid he can’t reach the same places as you. That wastes your talent, Sam.”
“It doesn’t waste anything. My brother keeps an eye out for me. He’s the only one who looks out for me.”
“I look out for you.”
“You look out for yourself.”
Bastan shrugged. “That’s mostly true, but seeing as you manage to bring me such lovely things, looking out for you has the same effect as looking out for myself. So, you see, I do care.”
“Then you’ll help me find my brother.”
“If he was caught, then you’ll have to check the cells. You know the punishment thieves face… especially men. Highborns are stupid enough to think that kind of punishment will keep the city safe.” He shook his head and looked back toward his painting.
“Outside the city is dangerous.”
He flickered his gaze to her. “It is, but inside can be dangerous, too. Why begrudge a man the ability to protect himself, especially with people coming from all over for the protection of the city?”
She wasn’t about to argue with Bastan, and she didn’t need to remind him that her brother wasn’t a man. He was younger than she was, and she barely claimed herself a woman. That made Tray a boy in her mind. A boy who was her responsibility, regardless of how he might see his responsibility to her.
“He wasn’t thieving. Only watching.”
“Then he should not have been captured.”
Sam hadn’t considered it that way. Why had he been captured, other than because he was sitting on a rooftop. It’s not like there are many legitimate reasons he would have been there. It’s not like standing watch was anything subtle.
“Well, he was.”
Bastan tapped his chin again. “It’s possible they only want him for questioning. If that’s the case, they will release him soon enough. You have to be patient.”
“I have to keep him from getting killed.”
“You said he wasn’t thieving.”
“When have you known the highborns to care? All they care about is their sections of the city and keeping us out.”
“If they begin to act without evidence, and they fail to follow the law they established themselves, there’s a risk of a different kind of upheaval. They will follow their law, Sam.”
She wished she could be as confident as Bastan, but she’d seen too much badness happen to those she’d worked with over the years. The highborns didn’t care about those in these poor sections of the city. Places like Caster weren’t important enough to them. “If they don’t let him out, I’m getting him free. I’ll need your help.”
Bastan met her eyes. “No.”
“Stop saying that!”
“I can’t get involved if your brother is questioned. I can’t draw attention to myself and have the highborns discover me.”
“They already know about you. They just can’t pin anything on you.”
“Which is how it will stay.”
“What about these?” she said, sweeping her arm around the paneled room. “If one of the highborns finds this place, and sees all the paintings you have here, what are they going to think?”
“Why would they think anything? Why would they even be here?” He leaned forward with the questions, menace dripping from his words. “They would have no reason to even come to the Sornum, and even less to find their way back here. If they did, I would do everything in my considerable power to discover who led them to me.”
Sam threw up her hands. “Fine. I’ll get him free myself. You have to deal with Marin and her terrible intel then.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s given me bad information more than once. Tonight was the last straw. If I didn’t have to find Tray, I’d be chasing her down. Maybe I’d feed her to the eels.”
Bastan offered a hint of a smile. “The eels are nothing but a myth.”
“Yeah? What grabs people off the streets then?”
“Me.”
Sam swallowed, averting her gaze so that she didn’t have to look into his strange, pale purple eyes. He wasn’t the strangest type of person living in the outer sections of Caster, but he was one of them. “Anyway, you let her know that I’m coming after her.”
“What did she claim you’d find?”
Sam twisted her hands together. Admitting why she’d gone into the highborn house would be dangerous, especially as she’d been working on something Bastan hadn’t approved, which meant moving it with another fence, but he had to know he wasn’t the only one in the city who used her services.
“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me what it was.”
Bastan’s laughter cut her off. “You didn’t ask what she was after?”
“That’s not how it works, and you know it!”
“If you accepted the job, you should know all the terms. Haven’t I taught you anything, Sam?”
She glared at him, but Bastan seemed nonplussed. She hated that about him.
“Going in without knowing the objective is a mistake. With a mistake like that, maybe you deserved to get caught.”
“I almost did,” she said. “I had to jump in the canal to get away.”
Bastan’s smile made the memory of what she’d gone through all that much worse. “See? No eels.”
“There was something in the water.”
Bastan shrugged. “We both know there are fish in the canals. Kyza knows I serve them in the Sornum. If you found anything, that was likely what it was.”
She wrinkled her nose. The fish in the canals were disgusting. How could Bastan serve them? She thought he served fish caught out in Ralan Bay. Besides, whatever had brushed up against her leg hadn’t been a fish.
“What did you find?”
Sam pulled the pages from her pocket. She’d worried about how they’d dry, and whether the swim through the canal would leave them useless, but when she’d laid them flat, they had dried nicely, looking no different from when she’d first grabbed them.
“I found these. There were more, but this was all I grabbed.”
“You lost Tray for paper?”
Sam wanted to throw him in the canal and see how he liked the sense of eels swimming alongside him. “They aren’t anything of value, so I don’t know what Marin was after. The paper is weird, though. I tried writing on it, but the ink didn’t stick.”
Bastan laughed. “Why would you try writing on it if you were going to steal it?”
She gave a sly smile and admitted, “I was going to leave Marin a little treat.”
Bastan shook his head. “You should be careful about the kind of enemies you’
re willing to make, Sam. Some are more powerful than you realize.”
“Marin?”
He cocked a brow and paused. “Even I have to admit there’s something intriguing about that woman. Best not poke her too much, or she might be like one of those eels you’re so afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid of them. I went in the water, didn’t I?”
“It sounded like you didn’t have much choice in the matter. But yes, you went in the water.”
He reached for the pages and Sam pulled them back.
“What are they worth to you?”
“It’s paper, Sam. It’s worth nothing until ink is placed upon it. Then it can still be worth nothing, or it could become incredibly valuable.”
She clutched the pages tightly. “Give me a price.”
Bastan laughed softly. “Let me have a look and I’ll decide. Maybe I’ll at least give you something to make your trouble worthwhile.”
She doubted there was anything that would make what she’d gone through just to get those pages worthwhile, especially with her brother missing, but maybe she could get something out of it.
Bastan took the pages and set them on the table in front of him. He ran his hands across the edge, and she noted how the corners of his eyes softened slightly. She recognized the surprise there. She’d seen it from him before. Maybe he’d find the useless pages worthwhile, and maybe he’d even pay her enough that she could bribe her way into the cells to get information about her brother.
Bastan dipped a pen in a jar of black ink and wrote in a neat hand along the bottom corner of one of the pages. At first, his writing looked like it would remain, that the tight way he wrote his name would remain, but then the ink faded much like it had when she’d tried implicating Marin, fading into nothing.
“Interesting,” he said.
He ran his hand along the page again, this time using only the tips of his fingers, as if to feel for some imperfections in the page. When he was satisfied, he dipped the pen into the ink bottle again, and started writing, this time with more force than before, and pressing along the bottom edge of the page. As before, the ink took hold for a moment, long enough for her to note that he wrote in a language she didn’t recognize, and then the ink faded again. This time, more slowly before disappearing.
Bastan reached beneath his table and pulled out a tray of ink. A dozen bottles were on the tray, each with different colors. Some appeared like they were only slightly different shades of the same color. He took a maroon ink and tapped his quill into it, letting it sit.
“Where did you say you came across these pages?” he asked without looking up.
“The highborn house where Marin sent me. There was supposed to be something valuable on the top floor, but there was this huge study, a library of sorts, full of books and a stack of these pages on the table. I grabbed these before the men came up the stairs.”
“Hmm.” He scrawled with the maroon ink, writing again in a different language, and this time, the ink stayed. It remained visible for longer than the black ink, but then it disappeared, as well, leaving the page looking as if he’d never done anything to it. “Fascinating. Do you think it would do the same with paint?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t exactly experiment on it. I grabbed it when I couldn’t find anything else. I didn’t think there was anything special about it.”
That wasn’t completely true. She knew that the ink hadn’t stuck to it, but thought that might only have been because of the ink the highborns had in their house. Some ink had to work. Otherwise, what was the point of having paper like this?
Bastan stood and went to a cabinet in the corner of the room. Inside, he grabbed a different tray and brought it over to his table, setting it down. On the tray was a brush, and Sam realized that he had a variety of paints on the tray.
“Let’s try blue first,” he said, though it was mostly to himself.
Bastan dipped the brush into the paint and scrawled a few words across the page. The thick paint clung to the paper, and his words seemed to practically protrude from the page. Sam shook her head, chuckling softly.
“Guess you’re painting something new,” she said to him.
The paint started to congeal and thicken. Bastan tapped his chin with the end of the brush and then pulled out a piece of paper from a drawer in the table and touched the brush to it. The paint spread across the page, performing differently than it had on the paper she’d stolen.
Bastan focused on the stolen paper with the thick lettering. The paint seemed to avoid sticking to the paper, almost as if it could be shaken off. He dipped his finger into the paint, and with a quick flick of his wrist, Bastan wiped his hand across the page.
“What are you doing—”
The paint failed to stick to the paper, instead smearing onto his hand.
Bastan brought his hand to his face and stared at it. “I wondered if the paint had gotten too thick, but that’s not the case now.” He continued staring at his hand, eyeing the paint that now stained it, as if it would change. Sam wasn’t entirely certain how to interpret the look on his face. Finally, he tore his eyes away from his hand and gazed at her. “You’ve done well, Sam. This paper is quite unique.”
Sam started laughing. Leave it to Bastan to find something as stupid as this paper valuable. “I think you mean useless.”
He frowned. “Perhaps it will eventually prove to be, but I can think of some uses for paper like this.”
“If ink doesn’t stick to it—”
“Then we cannot be caught sending messages. When I discover the secret to this paper, then we have a safe way to send word to others we work with.”
“What makes you think there’s some trick to it?”
He pressed his hands on the table and fixed her with a wilting glare. Sam ignored it. She’d seen Bastan try to intimidate her often enough that she knew better than to pay it much attention. Maybe it had worked on her once… Fine, it had worked on her once upon a time, but now, she knew to ignore him.
“The highborns had this for a reason, Sam. Don’t you think they have worked out how to use it?”
Sam grudgingly agreed that made a certain sort of sense. Not that she’d ever tell him that. “Good luck figuring that out, Bastan.”
He leaned forward, and this time, she actually took a step back. “You’re going to help me with this, Sam. I need you to go back to the highborn house and… Why are you laughing?”
Sam was shaking her head. “You won’t help me with Tray, yet you want me to help you?”
“You haven’t heard what I am willing to pay.”
“I don’t think the pay matters. I’m not going after anything for you until I get Tray out of the cells.”
Bastan sat down in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He studied her, a bemused expression on his face. “That’s your price?”
She had started to turn, ready to leave, when she paused and turned back to him. “What?”
“The price. I want to know the secret the highborns have that lets them use this paper. I could send someone else, but I suspect you won’t tell me which house you found this in, and even if you did, you probably wouldn’t share with me where in the house you discovered it. So, I think you have to be the one to do this. Tell me, Sam, is that your price?”
“I thought you said you don’t want to get involved when it comes to the highborns. Isn’t that what you said? That you don’t want them to know about you, so you won’t help?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “That is what I said.”
“Then why are you willing to get involved now?”
“I told you the reason.”
“No. You told me what you want me to believe is the reason, but you could just as soon ask Marin which house it was. You don’t need me to discover that. What you’re after is something else. And if you’re not going to tell me, then I’ll just go after Tray myself. It might be better if it was me, anyway. I wouldn’t want you to risk any highborns learni
ng about you. Besides, you said they were likely only taking him in for questioning.”
“That is what I said. But it’s possible they have other reasons, especially if there’s something more about this paper than either of us realizes.”
There was that conversation that she’d overheard, but she didn’t know anything about what it meant. The only thing she knew was that she had broken into a highborn house and come out with paper, losing Tray in the process. She had to get to him, somehow, and the only person who might be able to get her access was Bastan.
“Fine. Tell me what you intend to do, and I’ll decide if it’s a worthwhile price.”
Bastan laughed softly. “You’re a challenging woman, Sam. Has anyone ever told you that?”
She shrugged. “I might have heard something similar from others. Seeing as how we both want something here, I need to make certain it’s the right price for me.”
Bastan looked as if he didn’t want to answer, but then he leaned his elbows on his table, fixing her with that pale-eyed stare that he had. “I have an asset in the prison.”
“An asset? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what I said. I have an asset. I will find out what the highborns intend with your brother, and then we can make a decision.”
“You should do that, regardless! Why wouldn’t you use this asset even if I didn’t risk myself going back into this highborn house? After everything we’ve done to help you over the years—”
“You.”
“What?”
“You have helped, Sam, not your brother. I have no special place in my heart for him, so it matters little to me whether the highborns decide to punish him.”
“You say punish as if it doesn’t mean execute.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “I doubt it means execute. As I’ve said, they will follow their laws—”
“Why won’t you help him?”
“Using my asset is risky, not only for me. I do this, and I use up my favor with him.”
Sam tapped her toe. “That’s not good enough. I don’t only want to know what they intend with him. I want to make certain that he’ll be safe.”
“That… will be difficult.”
The Book of Maladies Boxset Page 4