by Angela Boord
She laughs. “You’re too highborn for us, Kyris. Not everyone reads Vençalan in Liera, but some of us can puzzle out the Lieran, or at least understand it if it’s read to us. Here, I brought you some coffee and a bun. I’m on a break right now. Will you read the news to me?”
“Of course.” I shake out the paper and pick up where I left off, aloud this time, in my overdone Rojornicki accent. The first time Vadz heard it, he doubled over laughing, but only a native-born Rojornicki would be able to tell that I’m putting anyone on.
“The Prinze will increase patrols in the Night Market and in the rest of the city to prevent more Violence from these Gangs who seek to break the Peace and Wreak their Vengeance upon the Good and Innocent citizens of our City…”
I stop because I’m too angry to read anymore. I take a sip of coffee and a bite of the pastry the girl brought me instead.
I’ve fooled her completely. Just like I fooled Vadz and Aleya.
She’s leaning over the counter now, with her head propped in her hand, frowning vaguely at the paper. When she notices me watching her, she looks up and smiles—a little too hopefully. I’ve been taking advantage of her hopefulness too often, and the owner is probably going to take it out of her pay soon, if not her hide.
One more person to add to the red side of my ledger.
And damn, but that picture of Vadz lying in the fountain is beginning to haunt me. We weren’t fighting a battle, he didn’t understand that associating with me was going to get him killed, and neither did his wife. Now he’s one more soul for which I’ll owe a blood price when I cross over into the realm of the gods, to be judged and sorted at their Tribunal.
I take another drink of my coffee, set it down on the saucer, and make myself smile back at Lise, the kitchen maid.
“Are there really such gangs loose in Liera?” I say.
She shrugs. “People talk about them. Doesn’t mean it’s true, though. Here, listen to old Liardo over there. He’s been going on all morning about how the Sere are blocking the reconstruction by withholding payments from the building crews on purpose.”
“Why would they do such a thing? Don’t you all need buildings?”
“Because they want to get back at the Prinze but they don’t want to come right out and say it. They’re supposed to support them, aren’t they?”
“I thought all the big Houses were equals.”
She laughs. “That’s a cute notion, Kyris; is that how it works in Rojornick? Of course, that’s not true. Or at least not if you listen to all the talk in here. That man Rezzi—you know, the gavaro with the big mustaches?—he says the Prinze are blackmailing the other Heads of House into giving Geoffre di Prinze more and more power on the Council.” She beckons me closer and then leans down until our heads nearly touch. “They say he isn’t content to just lead the Council. They say he’s going to bring a vote to reestablish the Doge’s seat as ruler of Liera, and then…”
She looks around to make sure no one is listening before adding in a whisper, “And then they say he wants to make himself Emperor.”
“Emperor? Like—what was his name, Attrasca?”
She dips her head, and her fuzzy yellow curls scrub mine.
“Is that just a rumor or is it true?”
“Could be either.” She’s smiling a little, looking at my mouth.
This has probably gone far enough. I pull back and straighten up.
“Well,” I say, like the flustered and proper Rojornicki boyar’s son I’m pretending to be, and Lise giggles, her brown eyes twinkling at my innocence. “Well, but—isn’t there talk about Geoffre’s son? Didn’t he just lose his second wife?”
Lise leans down on the counter again. “Well,” she says in a low voice. “You didn’t hear this from me, but one morning, we had some gavaros in here early, and they were talking about how Cassis di Prinze’s wife had a lover and Geoffre found out and it was right after that she developed her illness…”
“Poison?”
“You didn’t hear this from me, you understand? But the gavaros were talking about how they had just hauled an Amoran apothecary down to the holding cells, and you know what the Amorans are known for, right?”
“Mmmm,” I say, turning around to look at the room.
It’s true; everybody knows what the Amorans are known for. If I was smart, I’d visit an Amoran apothecary myself, ride to the hunting lodge where Cassis is holed up, pose as a lost traveler asking for food from the kitchens, and poison Cassis’s meat. That’s if my goal was to get in and out and collect my fifty thousand astra.
But a Prinze ought to be killed by one of his own blood-soaked weapons.
In my opinion. Which is the only one that matters right now.
“They say,” Lise went on, “that Geoffre is looking for another wife for Cassis right now. A fertile wife.”
“Getting desperate for a line of succession, is he?”
“Well, if he keeps killing off his sons’ wives—” She put a hand quickly over her mouth and looked around with wide eyes. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she whispered.
“I don’t think anyone heard you but me, Lise. And I promise I have no interest in your Lieran Houses. When my exile ends, I’ll be going straight back home.”
Lies, lies, and more lies. But Lise loses some of her frightened look. “They say Geoffre has eyes, though. And ears.”
“Magic?” I murmur.
She nods. “Just look at all those men he keeps around him…”
The door rattles. I look up to see a tall man in a dark blue cloak sweeping out of it. People stop talking as the wind skirls, cold, inside. I catch a glimpse of dark hair against the blue of his hood, and then the door slams shut behind him.
I’m off the chair in an instant.
“Kyris? Where are you going?”
“I think…perhaps…a countryman…”
I stride around the tables, where the men have all gone back to their conversations, and throw open the door.
The man with the blue cloak is nowhere to be seen.
Instead, I’m looking at the Watch walking down Artisans’ Row to the café.
Six men. Four of them Prinze, one Forza, one Garonze.
I open the door behind me and slink inside again, closing the door as gently as I can. I walk back over to the counter, where Lise is waiting on me, still wearing her surprised, confused expression.
“Did you know him?” she asked.
“I didn’t get a good look,” I hedge.
I smooth out the newspaper page with the picture of Vadz in the fountain and skim the article until I find a description of myself.
The Murderer wrapped himself in a Black Cloak and stood over the Dead Man like a Raven preparing to dine on his Flesh…
Dammit, my cloak. And if they knew Vadz was a smuggler, that means they probably know he was Rojornicki, too, and they might put black cloak and Rojornick together…
And end up at the right answer after all.
“Lise,” I say, sliding out of my cloak just as the door opens again. “I’ve told you about my exile, yes?”
“Because of the enemies of your family.”
“They’d like to hunt me down. I fear…that they may have followed me here.”
“Oh, Kyris!”
“No, shh. Can I come around the counter with you? Out the back door?”
She looks back over her shoulder nervously. “I don’t know…” she says. “Ser Carvoli…”
I’m already moving. The Watch is standing just inside the room, pushing down their hoods, surveying the tables. I’m carrying my cloak in a bundle pressed against my body by my right arm.
I can almost hear Arsenault’s voice in my ear: We’re going to look natural. No one will notice.
I meet Lise at the end of the counter and smile at her. “I think that man might have told your Watch some lies about me. They don’t know he’s not telling the truth. We’re all crazy barbarians, yes?”
“Crazy barbarians,” Lis
e says, laughing softly as I come up beside her and put my left arm around her shoulders. I’m not much taller than she is.
I steer her back into the kitchen before I let her go. “Thank you, Lise.”
I press a quick kiss to her cheek, and then I’m walking fast, in between the pastry chefs and the other kitchen girls, who start to call out at me, What are you doing in here, where are you going, you’re not allowed —
But I’m out the back door now and walking as fast as I can around the building. Toward the open-air stalls of Artisans’ Row and the Textile Section, where I lose myself in the crowd and do a quick trade of my black-and-silver Rojornicki tunic for a plain brown cloak.
“I want to check an account,” I tell the Sere clerk, who keeps writing at his desk without looking up at me. His floppy indigo beret looks like a dinner plate about to slide off his head. “I’ll need to write down the numbers for you.”
The counting house is dim, lush with velvet rugs and draperies. Knots of householder men sit in upholstered gilt chairs surrounded by their servants. Big slate boards line the walls, and more clerks wearing those floppy indigo berets climb ladders to write on them with styluses—ship dockings and departures, the prices of cinnamon and pepper, gold and silk.
I need to get my money taken care of quickly. I lost the Watch in the Market, but that doesn’t mean I won’t run into them again. It doesn’t mean that they won’t ask the right questions of the right people. It doesn’t mean that the assassin in the wolf mask isn’t tracking me down right now, while I stand here.
“Did you hear me?” I say. “I need to check an account.”
The clerk finally looks up at me. “A numbered account?” He sounds skeptical, probably because of this brown cloak I’m wearing now, and my white shirt with no tunic. My green armband is hidden.
“That’s right. Money should have come into it early this morning. I want to know the total amount, and then I want to deduct fifteen thousand astra and move the rest to a different account.”
“Fifteen thousand? There’s more than fifteen thousand in that account? For you?”
I glance over my shoulder and then lean in like I’m telling him a secret. “I’m taking a payment for my master. He doesn’t want it traced. Do you understand?”
The clerk cocks his head, then nods slowly. Transactions like this happen in Liera every day. “What is the new account?”
“It’s a number too. I’ll write it down for you if you have a piece of paper. But this is secret, si? It falls under the keep-mum laws.”
I reach in under my cloak to hook the green armband on my right bicep. No one else can see but the clerk.
The clerk’s eyes widen, but then he schools his face the way he’s probably been trained. The keep-mum laws come into play when the Houses trade for power. As my father’s only child and the daughter of a silk-growing House, I received the education meant for his heir. I learned accounting and banking laws, and I know how to manipulate the price on a bolt of silk, probably better than the Forza do if that slate is any indication. Invoking the keep-mum laws means that if this clerk divulges any of the information traded in this deal, he’ll have his mouth branded.
“That will require a seal,” the clerk says shakily.
“I have it.”
I dig in one of the inside pockets of my cloak and come out with the seal Tonia gave me. It’s a Caprine seal, carved with the image of a bull and a sheaf of wheat. Hopefully, this will gloss the fact that the account I want to move the money to is an old Aliente account, long out of use, passed down only in the Householder’s own family as a source of emergency funds. My father kept the seal in a secret alcove in the wall of his study. For all I know, it’s still there, but I remember it well enough to recreate it.
The clerk picks up the seal and rises from his seat to walk through a narrow door into the back. I rest my hip against the desk and scan the countinghouse. I don’t think anyone followed me from the alley. All seems normal. The householders, smoking and jaded; the clerks, industrious; a few gavaros hanging around the door—bodyguards trading notes.
The clerk returns carrying a book of slips.
“It is as you said,” he says in a low voice as he sits down. “I can write you a letter for fifteen thousand astra if you tell me who to make it out to. Ten thousand astra were transferred into the numbered account you provided.”
I tilt my head. “Make a letter out to Jon Barra for five thousand,” I say, “And send a letter for ten thousand by guarded courier to the Qalfan hospital for a healer named Aleya. The letter needs to be disguised and delivered only into Aleya’s hands. Take the fee for that from my master’s account. And—I’m sorry, sir, I’ve just remembered—a hundred astra in coin, five broken into catos—will that be too much trouble?”
“No,” the clerk says, blinking as if he’s stunned. He reaches for his quill. “No, ser, no trouble at all.”
From the countinghouse, I pay a boatman to pole me down the Mera to the quay, by far the quickest way to get there, and from there to a smaller canal leading to the Dalza, the area where the ship captains and merchants live. I hop out of the wicker boat onto the dockside and head for the streets fanning up the hummock from the green lagoon.
All the houses look the same—narrow, white stone, red tile roofs. The Dalza escaped destruction in the wars by reason of heavy bribes, and also because most of the fighting was focused on the wharves where the Houses keep their warehouses and the ships come in. Some of these houses still sport gilt lintels over their gates and doorways, and some have elaborate fountains in the front courtyard—nymphs and goddesses mostly, spilling water from their hands. But some of the houses are shabbier, with roof tiles missing and overgrown ivy storming their walls. The house I’m looking for is one of these, all the way at the end of the street. The waves of the lagoon slap against the red brick wall of the back garden, which is wild with bougainvillea and roses not yet in bloom.
I grip the giant iron knocker on the front gate and give it a few loud raps. In a moment, the wooden doors creak open and a tall man scowls at me from the security of his red-and-gold livery. Jon only employs fellow Dakkarans. He earns his livelihood as a trader of rare woods, but he might as well have a Dakkaran legation here on the sly…which seems likely, knowing Jon. His guard has the dark brown skin and the black-dotted cheekbones of a Dakkaran warrior, and I hold my hands away from my weapons.
“I’m here to see Jon,” I say.
“Lots of people come to see Jon,” the guard says. “Who are you?”
“My name is Kyris.”
“Why would he want to see you, Kyris? You don’t look that important to me.”
“He’ll know who I am. Just give him that name.”
“You have a purpose in mind?”
“If you tell him my name, that will be enough.”
The guard looks skeptical. “Skinny whiteskin boy like you calling on Jon?” he says. “We’ll see.”
He straightens up and shoves the gates closed. His bootheels thump on the flagstones as he walks away. I lean against the front garden wall and check my surroundings. It’s a better neighborhood than the one Jon used to frequent, but the memory of last night keeps me jumpy.
Then bootheels click closer, and the gates creak open again, wider this time.
“Jon says he’ll see you,” the guard says. “Follow me. Close.” If he was surprised by Jon’s answer—and I can’t see how he wasn’t—he’s already hidden it. He steps back so I can walk inside the courtyard. Then he closes and locks the gate and leads me up a flagstone pathway to the front door of the house.
From the outside, Jon’s house is unremarkable. It doesn’t stand out from any other house on the street.
Inside is a different story.
The floor plan of the house is designed for an unobstructed view of the lagoon from front to back. The foyer—tiled in quartz-veined marble—leads straight to a big, open room with a wall of windows.
So much glass. So much s
ilk in the patterned velvet-and-brocade curtains. How much coin did he spend on that wall alone?
The furnishings are similarly expensive, in the careless, simple way of those who have money and nothing to prove. The patterns on the silk upholstery are woven by the most prestigious velvet makers in Liera. Mixed in among the threads I see some burgundy, too—Aliente silk from another time.
Jon himself stands in a corner of the room, looking out at the lagoon. A woman and a man—both of them tall and Dakkaran, their long locks gathered together at the nape of their neck with matching red silk cords—sit in chairs on either side of Jon. They wear traditional Dakkaran robes woven of red Lieran silk, long to the knee and slit at the hips, belted with a gold wrap with big, curved daggers thrust through it. Polished ebony hilts peek up over the cuffs of their boots.
“Kyris, my lord,” the door guard says.
Jon doesn’t turn around, but he shifts his head to the side. Unlike his guards, he wears Lieran clothes—not red like those of his servants, just a simple spun brown with black trousers—and his locks are twisted into a shorter queue at the back in a Dakkaran version of the Lieran style. If you met him on the street and didn’t know him, you would think that the only Dakkaran tradition he maintains is the gold that lines the curve of his right ear in rings.
But it’s a front, a disguise, like the tumbledown facade of the house.
“Kyris,” Jon says, in his deep, booming voice with the lilting accent. It echoes off the high ceiling.
I straighten up. “Jon.”
“You’ve been scarce.”
“Working for the Caprine.”
“I still don’t have any information for you.”
“I’m not here about that.”
“No?” Now he does turn around. He looks me up and down. “Have you accepted the truth, then?”