by Wen Spencer
It was a lexicon, he realized, of someone's personal cant. Keifer's lovers must have given it to him so they could communicate with him. Under the book, little scraps of folded paper contained Keifer's secret messages.
Jerin unfolded one: a ball. Heraday, a cant name, talk. Despite the unknown symbol, the meaning was fairly clear. At the ball on Heraday, talk to cant-named person.
The second message sickened Jerin: Claireday, a clock showing midnight, a simple drawing of a bed, a key unlocking a door. Unlock the door to your bedroom Claireday at midnight.
The third message sent Jerin to the lexicon for the first symbol. Picnic. Food was the second word, though he checked the lexicon to be sure. The third symbol couldn't be found in the lexicon. Jerin's grandmothers, though, had carefully taught it to him: an X with an oval drawn over it—to stand for skull and crossbones. Poison.
The husband quarters looked like Keifer still lived there, throwing his fits, wreaking his anger on anything at hand. Ren stopped just inside the door, shocked.
Surely Jerin wasn't like Keifer! Surely Jerin didn't turn his anger on everything and anything.
The rooms were strangely quiet. No howls of anger. No screams of ugly, yet childishly simple names. Was Jerin even here?
She walked to the bedrooms, noting with some relief that nothing seemed broken. No shards of glass. No splintered, battered furniture. In fact, there seemed to be a strange order to the chaos.
Jerin wasn't in the big bedroom, with the bed stripped down to the frame, nor the dressing room, where not a stitch of clothing remained. It was the stark emptiness of the dressing room that turned her annoyance to concern. This was far too orderly and systematic to be compared to Keifer's random acts of destruction.
Jerin sat tailor-style on the floor of the little bedroom. He sat silent, statue-still, a box and a book both open on his lap, a scrap of paper dangling in his hand, nearly slipping from his fingers.
“Jerin?”
He looked up, pale, his eyes wide with shock. He gazed at her, seemingly too stunned to move or speak.
“Jerin? What's wrong?”
“I—I thought I might find out who Keifer's lovers were.” He held up the paper and book to her. “I was searching for clues.”
It was thieves' cant, written out on a piece of good stationery. Three neat symbols. There was also a lexicon for translating it, the simplified symbols expanded into pictures a child could understand.
“Keifer's stupid, Ren. He's a cow!” Trini had sneered her contempt of their husband. “I know you don't marry men for their brains, but there's a limit!”
Keifer's lover had apparently known his mental limits as well as Trini had. The book left little chance for misunderstanding. Ren looked at the quality of the stationery and the lexicon with its careful renderings of the palace, its occupants, and the daily life of gentle society and realized the truth. 'This isn't thieves' cant. This is the personalized cant of the cannon-stealing gentry that nearly killed Odelia.“
The color drained out of Jerin's face. “The ones that killed Egan Wainwright?”
Ren flinched in memory of the mutilated, raped man. Had Jerin's sisters told him about that? “Yes. Them.”
“How could they get into the gardens to get to the bolt-hole door?”
Ren knew that the gardens weren't perfectly secure despite the wall and the guards. It was unlikely, however, that such a vast number of women scaling the wall could go unnoticed. The Barneses? They had access to the gardens. No. The Barneses never left the palace in any large number—they couldn't have been the ten women escorting the cannons on the Onward. Nor had one of the Barneses vanished mysteriously when the red-hooded thief had been killed.
Only palace guests could have been in the garden unobserved.
And the only women invited to the palace, prior to the Whistlers, were from noble families. During Keifer's short time in the palace, the royal family entertained often. He liked parties where he was the focus of powerful women. Keifer flirted with everyone; those who had the decency not to return the attention were never asked back.
Ren flipped through the lexicon, hoping for a clue to the family's identity. There was the picture of the executioner's hood, and a translation for colors, but nothing as damning as a woman's face with “black hat” transcribed beside it. She cast the book angrily aside and looked into the nearly empty lockbox. All that remained was a small square of fine white paper, folded carefully into an envelope, as you might receive from an apothecary powder shifted inside the envelope, creating sand dune shadows as she held it up to the light. A circle overlaid an X to obscurely label the substance. Ren started to unfold the envelope, only to have Jerin catch hold of her hands with a yelp, squeezing until she stilled her fingers.
“It's poison!” Jerin cried. “Don't open it! It could kill you if you breathed it in or got it into your eyes.”
She froze. “Poison? How can you tell?”
“The cant. It's marked poison. Skull and crossbones.”
“What was Keifer doing with poison?”
Jerin picked up one of the abandoned slips of paper. “Ren, I think he killed your father.”
She found Kij and flung the note into her face. “Look at this!”
Kij took the note, unfolded it, gazed at it for a long time, and then asked carefully, “Am I supposed to understand this?”
“This is the note that your brother received along with a packet of arsenic to kill my father!”
Kij forced a hollow laugh. “Oh, be serious. Keifer would never do anything like that!”
“Keifer was a whoring, murdering slut!” Ren snarled. “After murdering my father, he fucked women in our wedding bed!”
In a fiat, emotionless voice, Kij asked, “Are you sure?”
“Yes! The evidence is everywhere, once you start looking!”
Kij sat still, controlled. “What do you want me to say, Ren? 'I'm sorry' does not seem to be large enough for this.”
“You can tell me who!” Ren shouted. “Who killed my father? Who laid waste to the Wainwrights, nearly murdered Odelia, and butchered forty of my troops with grapeshot? Who was fucking your brother?”
“I don't know!” Kij cried, spreading her hands. “He flirted with everyone. I don't know who could have seduced him to that level. Even if Eldest knew that he was being unfaithful, which I'm sure she didn't, who could have guessed that anyone was using him for treason? Keifer? He wasn't intelligent, Ren!”
Intelligent, no, but cunning, yes. He should have been on that stage that night. What a performance he wove for such a young man. During the courtship, he pretended to be blindly in love with Eldest. He fooled the Queens into thinking he would make their daughters a fine husband. His fits of anger were just illusions to cover his infidelity.
“I need to know who was using him, Kij. He might be dead, but they're continuing their treason.”
“I don't know. It was six years ago, Ren, and I wasn't Eldest at the time. I tended family business. I was always either on the Destiny or at Avonar. Eldest stayed here in Mayfair, but she couldn't have known. Do you think she would let him chance destroying our connection with the crown? We gained so much influence when we became your sisters-in-law; we'd have lost it all if you returned him to us.”
Ren sighed. If Keifer had kept his secrets from her own sisters, right under their noses, she supposed that his sisters could have been just as fooled. They would have seen him only at social functions and occasional joint family dinners. “Raven will be by to interview your staff and sisters. I'm sorry, but we'll have to make this public in hopes of information surfacing. We need to track down my father's killers.”
Kij frowned. “Is that truly wise? There will be rumors that Keifer picked up something and spread it to you. I know what that's like, Ren. People don't want you sitting on their chairs, afraid they'll catch something.”
“If rumors are all I have to deal with, Kij, I'll be happy. It has yet to be seen if Keifer has left death behind
him. But I will find these women, and then, heads will roll.”
The thunderstorm started with the longest thunder Jerin had ever heard, as the cloud boiled off the plateau and struck the river valley. It went on and on, and finally died. He went to the window and watched as the thunderclouds claimed the sky until only the farthest horizon remained clear, a slice of gold in a sky of rolling gray. Raindrops began to fall on the gray flagstone of the balcony, a splattering of dark spots. And then the rain started in earnest, in driving sheets.
I was so happy. Jerin opened the door and walked out into the pounding rain. It was too good to be true. Keifer was probably diseased. Ren and Odelia and Trini are going to die.
If they did, he couldn't bear going on too. It would be more than just the grief of losing them. No one would think him clean, not even his own family, who knew of his indiscretions with Ren. Everything balanced on an edge of cascading disaster. If Ren was infected, the Queens couldn't allow him to marry Lylia and the younger princesses. If his family had to give back the four thousand, they would lose the mercantile, and would have to pay the penalty.
His sisters had planned to stop in Annaboro for a few days before going on to Heron Landing. With a quick boat, the Moorlands could fetch back Cullen with his reputation fairly intact. With four brothers, why would his sisters need to visit a crib? The public opinion would be that, unlike Ren, his sisters were clean and thus Cullen was safe, regardless of any dalliance.
But Jerin's brother's price would be worthless forever. The betrothal notice had gone to the newspaper before his sisters left. His return to his sisters—and the reason why—would be equally public. Returning the four thousand crowns would be a crippling blow to his family. Much as his sisters loved him, they would have no choice but to set him up in a crib, servicing strangers for ten crowns a night.
He stared down at the bleak drop below the balcony, a storm of dark emotions raging through him. My life has been ruined by a man already dead.
“Jerin!” Ren dashed out into the cold pounding rain and caught his arm. “What are you doing out here?”
“If he was alive, I would hunt him down and cut out his heart!” Jerin trembled with the desire to do violence. Never before had he wanted to hold on to someone—preferably by the throat—and squeeze the very life out of him. Nothing would be slow and painful enough to ease the pain inside himself. “Why did he do this? He had everything!”
“Jerin, we're clean!” Ren shouted over the roll of thunder. “If Keifer had anything, he didn't pass it to me or the others!”
He blinked the cold rain and the hot tears out his eyes. “Clean?”
Ren smiled at him, oblivious to the rain. “There's not a single trace of anything! Keifer's noble lovers must have been clean. Nobles don't visit cribs!”
It sounded so sane and reasonable. Of course, nobles were never pushed to desperation—they had money to buy the pretty son of a poor farmer if they had to bend that low. Surely if the women slept with Keifer, it was part and parcel of using him to commit treason. Had sex and the lure of doing something forbidden been simply an easy leash to control Keifer with?
The darkest and bleakest of Jerin's emotions drained away, leaving him feeling bruised.
“Come on.” Ren tugged him back toward the suite. “Come out of the rain, and take off those wet things before you catch a cold.”
Numbly he followed. She pulled his nightshirt up over his head. She was soaked to the skin and shivering herself.
“You need to get dry too.” He reached for the buttons of her shirt.
Ren toweled his hair as he undid her clothes, dropping them into damp piles at their feet. All at once, it seemed, they were naked, pressed close together, kissing. All the fear and anger and hurt twisted into a desperate, consuming need to be together.
Two steps, and they were on the bed. Ren reached between them, took hold of him, and guided him into her. One smooth warm stroke, and they were joined as one.
“We shouldn't have done that,” Jerin murmured much later. “Not yet.”
“We're wife and husband minus a large circus act called a royal wedding. It's only a show for the common folk. The betrothal contracts are the true binding word, and those are all signed and legal.”
“We're married,” he whispered, barely believing it. A few weeks ago he was a simple landed gentry's son, without a title, in an obscure part of the realm. “I'm Prince Consort.”
“Yes, my love, you are.”
“You love me?”
“With all my heart.”
“I wanted to tell you, before you left the Whistler home, that I loved you, but there didn't seem to be a way. I never dreamed you would want me for a husband.”
“A hundred years ago, and I would have carried you off that first night, Odelia and your sisters be damned.”
She brought a basin and a towel to the nightstand. Dampening the towel, she washed him clean, the warm nubby fabric rubbing gently against him.
“That's nice,” he said sleepily.
“Go to sleep,” she murmured, drying him. “You'll need the rest.”
He fell sound asleep, wondering what she meant by her remark, and woke to find Odelia joining him in the bed. Under the loose wrap, Odelia wore nothing. She was fuller in the chest than Ren, broader of hip, and wanted to try positions she had read about. Like Ren, she washed him before tucking him in.
“I wore you out,” she laughed as he yawned.
“I didn't get much sleep last night.”
“They should make it a tradition. No one ever waits for the wedding night.”
“Someone must.”
Trini woke him with a tray of food and a session that was mostly eating, talking, and tentative cuddling. He thought that they wouldn't consummate their marriage until later, but then Trini, in sudden silent resolve, held him down and mounted him from the top. Afterward, she lay on top of him, listening to his heartbeat until they both fell asleep.
Lylia woke them, impatiently scooted her older sister out, and allowed him to clean himself for her. She was nervous, awkward, curious, and eager. He felt like a mountain range, being explored, climbed, and conquered. Yet when she fell asleep tangled in his arms and sheets, he watched her breath, her so-kissable lips parted slightly, and felt deep, moving love for her. He loved them all. Ren's strength. Odelia's whimsy. Trini's passion despite her shyness. Lylia's determined struggle for justice.
He kissed Lylia's lips, and cuddled her close, and fell asleep happy.
Chapter 13
Jerin's father liked to say, “Over. Done. Gone.” It settled many fights between his siblings, with no lasting hard feelings. They all struggled to meet their father's high expectations. With maturity Jerin realized that you needed that release from anger, to put it behind you, in order to work ahead. As children, his parents forced them to put the hurt aside. As an adult, he had to find the power to decide he had raged long enough, that his anger had served its purpose, and move on.
The news that Keifer's infidelity had left no lasting harm helped. And the serial prenuptial sex worked wonders. So the next morning, at a cheerful breakfast with his wives on the balcony, he decided it was time.
The novelty of the husband quarters was wearing off, and he noticed now how shabby they were. The carpets were threadbare. The divans were battered from the princesses' roughhousing on them. Sun rot and moths tattered the drapes. The ceiling needed paint where damage from roof leaks had been repaired. Some of the ivory had been picked off the keys on the grand piano. Even the wallpaper was worse for wear, grubby from tiny hands as high as a child might reach, and peeling at the very top at every point the water damage had reached. What surprised him most was that Keifer hadn't made any changes.
Odelia shrugged it aside when he mentioned it. “He was lazy.”
“He liked to make himself pretty,” Trini said. “He didn't care about how the room looked.”
Lylia pointed out, “Father didn't want the fuss of redecorating, and Keifer
died only a few months after Father.”
“Keifer came up with some plans before he died,” Ren said. “It would have bankrupted the country. He wanted to gold leaf the ceiling.” She took a bite from her toast, thinking for a moment before continuing. “And to tear out the floor and put new marble in—and mirrors over the beds. He and Eldest would have screaming fights over it, and he'd lock her out of the quarters.”
“So he could be with his lovers,” echoed between them without being said.
“If you make a list of what needs to be done,” Ren said, “and give it to Barnes, she'll line up the workers.”
“It would be expensive,” Jerin said.
“Don't plan on gilding the ceiling, leave the floors be, and I'm sure it will be a reasonable amount. It needs to be done, love.”
Jerin gazed through the windows to the massive set of rooms. “Are we going to do all the work ourselves?”
“Good gods, no!” Ren laughed. “The workers will be closely supervised, though, and you'll have to stay someplace else. It would take forever if we tried to do it on top of our other work.”
“I can paint—” he started to offer, but Ren put fingers over his lips.