“Nessiny! You are getting to be a man of the world, aren’t you.” Her eyes squinted cheerfully over her kerchief.
“Um, well. The Benevolents have all kinds.”
Zan shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. Round these parts, anyway. So all in all, you like this place, huh?”
“Wildern? Yeah. It’s kind of weird for me, you know, trees and hills.” He knew she’d understand the inference; she was from the southwest, not far from Ceien, where the forests weren’t unlike Wildern’s. And in his voice it was obvious that he came from the northeastern plains. “But I have a great mentor in the hospital, I’m staying with a good friend, I’m… I’m doing well.” It wasn’t a lie, not even by omission.
“Mmn.” Zan’s face was still half-hidden in her kerchief, but Keifon thought she was smiling. “I’m glad to hear it. Every so often we worry about you, you know? You could write.”
“Oh.” The warm light inside him fought with something darker, something with claws. “Kazi asked me not to. His career. And things. Is he — still around?”
Zan’s laugh cut through the rumble of shoveled rocks. “He’s in charge of two seventy-nine now. Major Kazi na Furujia. Our honored leader.”
He heard irony and affection in her voice, but he couldn’t read her expression. He couldn’t see anything.
Kazi was in charge of their unit. He was pursuing his dream, carrying out his life’s work, amassing power like a banker counting out coins. He’d always been regarded with a combination of envy, admiration and exasperation among the others. He was a radical and a striver, but he was their radical striver, and in the end, the unit backed its own.
And now they were under his command, every last one. Unit 279 was here. In Wildern. At this work site. Providing logistical support and chaperoning visitors with dinner party invitations. Which meant…
Keifon clutched the strap of his satchel and tried to get enough air through the fabric of his handkerchief. “Is he… here?”
“Somewhere, yeah. Probably in a meeting. Or being, you know, himself. What he does. With the feathers and all.”
The hand holding his makeshift filter dropped, and he accidentally took a lungful of dusty air. Zan stopped to let him cough it out. Keifon could feel eyes surrounding him, waiting for him to crack, waiting for him to give himself away. Kazi was out there. In this work site. In his city, the city he and Agna had claimed as their home. He spit a mouthful of muddy saliva onto the edge of the road and muttered an apology.
“Rookie,” Zan said cheerfully, patting his back.
He directed his feet toward the center of the road and kept walking. Zan took up her place as his chaperone, just in front of him. Keifon’s knees trembled. His home, his sanctuary, was halfway across the city. Every step took him further away from here, and that was enough for a start.
The road widened, complete and new. The rooftops of Wildern rolled out beneath them. The workers’ camp was cast into the trees’ shade as the sun began to sink behind the hills to the west. The breeze stirred the feathers by the door flap of one of the workers’ tents. Feathers.
Keifon folded his handkerchief and stuffed it in his pocket. “Feathers?”
“Huh?”
“You said ‘what he does, with the feathers and all.’”
“Oh, yeah. Well, they’re his followers.” She tugged her kerchief down and held up three fingers in a fan. “’Cause of the name, Eagle-eye. He won’t say if he started it or if people started doing it on their own. But they’re all over the Capital, you should see it.”
They were all over Wildern, too, tacked on the workers’ tents and nailed to signboards and inked onto fliers about the downfall the pass project would bring. Why would his followers oppose the project that Kazi was helping to lead? If they were, it wasn’t by accident. It was all part of Kazi’s plan. He was opposing the pass project even as he led it.
Who benefits?
Keifon swallowed. “Zan?”
“Hm?”
“If something… happens, you can come to me, all right? Anyone in two seventy-nine. I live on the corner of Sprucetree and Brookside. It used to be a dry-goods store, but now the first floor is vacant. I live upstairs. Or ask for Dr. Rushu’s apprentice at the hospital. Just — just find me. If you need to. All right?”
Zan’s smile was indulgent and impish. It was not surprised. “Well, that’s very kind of you, Kei. Glad to see we can still count on an old friend.”
The beginnings of a headache stabbed into Keifon’s temple. Who was “we,” the unit or the feather army, and was there even a difference anymore? Had they known he was here all along? Did Agna know they were here? She’d been at the groundbreaking. Had she known Kazi was here and not told him? Was he just being paranoid?
Was that what Kazi wanted? Was this how he finally won?
He wanted to jump onto one of the hauling wagons, ride home, and bar the doors to anyone except Nelle and Bargi. Maybe he’d just stay there till Agna got back. It felt like a perfectly reasonable impulse, under the trees.
He didn’t answer Zan. He couldn’t string any words together that would come out in anything but a growl. He followed her through the cluster of tents, watching their white feathers shining against the shadows. He wondered which one was Bargi’s. He wondered whether she’d pinned Kazi’s mark to her door.
Dear Agna, he wrote in his head, thank the gods you’re in Nessiny, because he can’t get you there. I need one thing in my life that he can’t ruin.
Zan saluted when they reached her abandoned torch cart. “You know the way from here. Good seeing you, Kei.”
“Thanks, Zan. Good to see you, too.” He could say that. It was still true.
Agna: Despanocta
The district where Letta plied her trade felt like Agna’s childhood vision of Academy life: cafes and crowded apartment buildings, squares where actors recited soliloquies for tips, artists painting on easels on street corners. Everyone they passed seemed no older than thirty, and the display of tailoring and stitchwork betrayed the chipping paint on the buildings and the trash piled in the gutters. Lina weaved through the crowd as though she’d rendered herself invisible, and Agna danced around apologizing to strangers to keep up.
Violetta’s studio was four stories up a worn stone staircase, above a greengrocer’s shop and two more artists’ studios. Lina let herself in without knocking. “Letta?”
Their cousin’s voice rang off the walls. “Hey, lady! Aren’t you working today?”
“Hi, Letta,” Agna called, casting about the cavernous space. Tall windows let in the afternoon sun, filtered by gauze curtains into an even wash of light. More curtains tacked to wood supports separated sections of the room or served as backdrops. One far corner was taken up with a rack of costumes, velvets and furs and silks crammed into a wall of textile excess. Several easels, some mounted with half-finished paintings, faced the backdrops or the windows.
Letta stood up from behind a cluster of crates and chairs. “Agna! You made it!”
“Yeah, finally.”
Letta cleared the studio floor in a few seconds, stopping short of the sisters and kissing the air in Agna’s direction. She had always been taller and more coltish than Agna and Lina, an effect played up by her close-cropped dark hair and habit of dressing in pants. Agna wondered whether Lina had picked up Letta’s taste in clothes, recent fashions aside. Now a paint-smeared smock covered Letta’s clothes, tacitly explaining her hesitation to get too close. A smudge of midnight blue streaked her cheek. “Good to have you back. How was the trip?”
“Long, but not bad.” Agna touched her cheek to mirror the paint smear, and Letta pulled a rag from a pocket of the smock to wipe it off. “I saw one of your paintings at Lina’s, it’s lovely.”
Letta grinned. “Thanks. Have you been to the agency yet?”
Agna’s eyes dropped. “Not yet. Tomorrow.”
“Well. You should see the one I finally got hung there. Took for-freaking-ever. Mama resisted putting it up fo
r the longest time, but Marco and I kept the pressure on.”
“Recognizing talent is not nepotism,” Lina said, as if repeating a line.
“Yep. Come see, this one’s coming together now.” The trio crossed the sea of drop cloths and paint-splattered wood flooring and rounded the stack of crates to the easel where Letta had been working. She seemed to be alone; apparently she wasn’t working from a live model today. An array of oil paints was laid out on a side table, and behind it a smaller easel held series of sketches and studies in pencil, some daubed with paints along the margins as Letta had worked out a color scheme. A half-finished painting sat on the easel, blocked out in swoops of color. The background suggested a deep ocean, with vague shapes of seaweed receding into the depths; the foreground held three cavorting figures draped in pale banners of some material that had been sketched out, but not yet painted.
Agna’s hands echoed the placement as she studied the composition. One of the figures was diving, her body a sleek arc against the water. “How in the world did you pose this?”
“Aha.” Letta pointed past the canvas, and Agna leaned around it. The pile of stuff in the middle of the room that she’d taken to be clutter formed the negative space to the models’ free-floating dance; she could almost imagine how Letta had placed them, balanced on corners and edges. Letta sat at the canvas and picked up her brush. “And the model is an acrobat, anyway. Same one, posing three times. Cheating, I know.”
“Ha. No, that’s smart.”
“Do you need any mixing, Let?” Lina called from another corner of the space.
“Uh, yeah, I could do with more of this.” Letta dabbed her fingers in a delicate eggshell white and held her hand up. “Scales are next.”
“Got it.” Lina busied herself at a counter at the edge of the room, picking jars from a tiered rack that seemed like the most organized spot in the studio.
Letta wiped her hands and applied a deft stroke of blue to the shadows. “Pull up a chair if you want. I’ve got to stay on schedule with this thing.”
Agna found a folding stool and settled in to watch. As Letta added dimension to the water, they talked about the gallery plans and the backers. Agna kept her new concept of exhibiting the herbal illustrations to herself, but filled Letta in on the latest developments in securing funding. Letta had never been much for writing letters, but she’d kept up through Lina and Marco, and had endless questions about the market in Kavera and the artistic styles Agna had found among her contacts.
When Agna’s back cramped from sitting on the stool, Letta waved her off to a side table to look through some sketches of upcoming paintings. Letta’s technique had always been to sketch fragments and piece them together after the fact, so the wide table was scattered with torn scraps no bigger than Agna’s palm, pinned to the surface of the table. Lina ground up pigments in a mortar and pestle at the mixing table, swaying side to side, content in her own world.
The stack of canvases leaning next to the table called Agna to investigate, and she spoke over her shoulder as she sidled toward them. “Would you consider selling to one of my clients? I think Keth Vogal would love your style. She’s an enormous theater patron, so anything from a play would be right in her zone.” She could see one of Letta’s paintings in the lobby of Keth’s theater, something sumptuous and dramatic.
“Hmm, do they do Nessinian plays in Kavera, or should I look up what they’re playing out there?”
Agna carefully flipped through the canvases. “Some foreign, some domestic. She loves Achusan stuff, though, knights and courts and dragons and all of that.”
“Ughhh, dragons. Scales will be the death of me. What is it with scales these days?”
Agna turned, taking in the underwater painting from a distance. It occurred to her that the as-yet-unpainted sections would become fish scales. “Is this one a commission?”
“Yep. It’s from The Water Maidens, that book from a thousand years ago.”
“Tch, two hundred at most.” It wasn’t the best-known book out there, but it had its followers. Agna had read it when she was sixteen or seventeen.
“Whatever. Scales.” Letta added a tendril of hair floating in the water. “It’s a challenge, anyway.”
“Hm.” Agna turned to the canvas stack. Some of them were blank, and some were finished paintings — posed portraits of people in opulent, modern clothing, a study of a street seen from high above that Agna suspected had been drawn from this neighborhood, and a few more fantastical pieces in Letta’s usual style. She paused at a painting of Lundra blessing a wedding, surrounded by celebrants carrying flowers. “Someday I’ll have to commission a Fourian painting from you.”
“I don’t know how it got to be such a fad. Most of these people aren’t even Church of the Four. They just like the iconography. Would that be for your Yanweian friend?”
“Yeah.”
“Now that you’re here in person, you gonna tell us what’s going on with that?”
Lina giggled quietly, and Agna whipped around to shoot her a look, but her back was turned. It was fortunate that Letta wasn’t paying attention, either, because it was suddenly very warm in the studio. Agna tipped another canvas forward in the stack, and reached the last, blank canvas. Having nothing else with which to fidget, she leaned the canvases in their original position. “There’s nothing going on. Never was. And his ex is in town anyway, so if something were going on, there wouldn’t be anymore.”
“Oh, please. Does every Academy kid graduate with the romantic logic of a ten-year-old?”
“What?” Agna turned in time to see Lina deliver a small dish of paint to Letta’s station. Her lips compressed when Letta looked up at her, but she did not protest, handing over the paint and returning to the mixing station to clean up her supplies.
Letta sighed. “Esirel is a lovely person, and I know you and she are friends, but I am not particularly on the Esirel-and-Lina team these days.”
“What team? There is no team. They’re…” Inevitable. Obvious. Esirel and Lina had been childhood sweethearts, for goodness’ sake, and they’d been together ever since. The last step of getting literally married was more or less a formality, and the thought of either of them dating someone else was unnerving. It would be like her parents dating other people. “Anyway, what does that have to do with anything?”
Letta’s brush looped through the air. “Did I just hear you say that if you were with this Yanweian guy, he would ditch you as soon as his ex came to town? Why in the world would you go out with such an ass in the first place?”
Agna stopped short of answering and folded her arms. She remembered the empty front room, sweltering even in the evening, and Keifon telling her stories about his old unit mates and about Kazi. He hadn’t said he loved Kazi more than he’d loved anyone else other than his daughter. He hadn’t needed to. She remembered the shattered, angry person she’d met in Vertal a few years ago. She remembered what losing Kazi had done to him. He’d rebuilt since then, become a new person, ready to live a new life. But he still missed his old life. She could hear it every time he talked about it.
“I’m not going out with him,” she said at last, hating the wobble in her voice. “So it doesn’t matter.”
Letta picked up a wider brush and swirled it in the paint that Lina had mixed. “Your attitude matters. That’s my point. I am sick of my friends doing stupid shit, all right? I’m getting too old for this.”
The irony drew a bitter chuckle from Agna. Letta was the youngest of the three, a year behind Lina; she was no older than Agna had been when she graduated from the Academy. And yet Agna’s cousin had surpassed her — her career was more established than Agna’s, and she had a stable relationship with a smart, ambitious peer.
Agna wandered further from the easel, toward a rack of props and costume pieces. She hadn’t come home to compare herself to her family, and it wasn’t their fault if she was floundering. It was frustrating and embarrassing, but she had to keep from taking it out on them. Sh
e ran her hand down a hat’s fluffy plume, letting the tickling sensation distract her. This wasn’t why she’d come here, either. Even if the arguments with her father dragged out for days, she would only have a few opportunities to see her sister and cousin. She couldn’t spend them sulking over her lack of accomplishments in life.
“So, long-term,” Letta said, raising her voice across the expanse of floor. “Stay or go?”
Agna turned away from the costumes. “Stay there. I’ll have to figure out a plan to get my father off my case. And take care of the agency; I don’t mean to duck my responsibility. Compromise. That’s all.”
“Huh. I mean, it’s too bad for us to lose you from Murio, but I want to see this gallery of yours someday. And it’s better to break new ground than to just follow along in the same rut. The agency didn’t survive for two hundred years by never taking risks.”
Agna clenched her fists. “Thank you! Just be my spokesperson, Letta. That’ll convince my father.”
“Oh, no, I’m a Nocta artist from birth. We’re the enemy.” Letta turned to grin in Agna’s direction. “Or so we like to pretend.”
The door creaked open, and Agna turned.
“Let?”
“Hey, sweetie. Got some visitors.”
As the new arrival closed the door and crossed the room, there was plenty of time for Agna’s stomach to sink through the floor, rebound, and tie into knots. His clothes struck her first; she was out of date on what was current in Murio, but she could spot money and quality in any style. His violet waistcoat, which Agna had taken for black at first, contrasted with his pale linen shirt and the matching silk scarf tucked in at his throat. His face was more like what she’d half-pictured, with the strong jawline of the Pirci nobility and dark eyebrows that gave him a look of distant impatience. He wore glasses, which she hadn’t expected; they crystallized the sense of aristocratic finery.
He craned his neck to follow Letta’s voice. The bored expression on his face melted into a bright smile as Letta stood up from her easel and stripped off her paint-spattered smock. She dodged the staging crates to meet him in the middle of the floor. Agna’s gaze flicked away from the lovers’ embrace. Lina, her task as mixer discharged, had taken a seat on a battered trunk.
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