“Do you have your costume ready?”
That took me a second. Lack of sleep was getting to me, if I thought he was asking me whether I was dressing up as a sheep. Then my brain connected cloven hooves and horns to demons to prefects, and I thought, Of course he’s asking. The prefects’ conference begins on Monday, and today’s Thursday. Wondering how I’d forgotten, and knowing the answer full well, I said, “I was thinking a white skirt suit.”
“Not something more . . . compelling?”
“It was compelling enough for Theodora, and she’s as close to a demon as I’ve ever met. But if you don’t like the idea, I could dig out my old school uniform. I hear the jailbait look is in for hellspawn this season.”
Lines of disapproval strained his jaw, but he satisfied himself with, “Use your best judgment.”
He was being kind again. I could hardly bear that. It seemed to me that everything I said or did today was somehow vastly inappropriate, that I never opened my mouth but to shove my foot in it—and I had no idea how accurate that perception was. I fought for something neutral to say or something to fix the situation, and found nothing. But I couldn’t leave it like that, and so, not knowing if I was making it better or worse, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night, and I think I overdid the caffeine this morning.”
“Then it is well we have no essential tasks for today,” he replied, being kind again. “Is there any of the chamomile-lavender tea left, or has it gone stale?”
Neither of my brothers was home when I got back that evening. Francis often works late, and I hadn’t seen Luc since a quarter past three that morning, when he’d jumped out of the truck and run up the stairs to our apartment.
I’d trudged up a considerable time after him; I was doing everything on autopilot. It was a good thing I’d worked out and drilled into my brain what to do ahead of time, since I wasn’t functioning too well by that point.
Before leaving the riverside pullout, I’d stripped off my boots and outer layers and dressed in the fresh clothes I’d brought with me. My filthy clothes and boots went into a plastic bag. They might be salvageable, but I wasn’t about to bet my life and freedom on them.
My first stop on my roundabout way home was at an impoverished apartment complex, where I found an unlocked dumpster half full of detritus. I poured a gallon of bleach in the plastic bag after dumping it in. Undiluted bleach can eat through clothing within a couple of hours, and it would erase all evidence and blood long before that. I dumped the bleach bottle, lid off, over the bag, like it had just spilled that way. I had a second gallon of bleach for my used brass, and disposed of that behind a closed greasy spoon.
My third and final stop was at an unmanned and un-security-cameraed carwash. Theodora had slammed against the truck when I’d shot her, and mud from the pullout caked the tires. Even apart from the physical evidence, Francis keeps his car sparklingly clean. I would’ve added a couple of gallons of gas if I’d thought I could find a station without cameras, but I didn’t think he tracked either gas or mileage that closely. I hoped not.
Luc didn’t comment on any of this.
Once home, I wiped the unused rounds and replaced them in their box, then cleaned the revolver. I stuck a rattail file up the gun’s barrel to change the rifling, though I didn’t know how effective that’d be, and snuck gun and ammo back into Francis’s room.
Everything took three times longer than it should have, as it does when you are extremely tired, and I kept remembering more things. After I scrubbed down my hands, arms, and face with oil, white vinegar, and rubbing alcohol to get rid of gunpowder residue, I remembered that I’d better do the same with the steering wheel. Then I realized that I’d better scrub down and return the flashlight and hunting knife, because Francis would definitely notice if they were gone. By the time I’d finished that and taken a long, thorough shower, I barely had time for ninety minutes of sleep.
I woke up with the certainty that I’d forgotten something, and I probably had. It’s never possible to account for every possible scrap of evidence.
The trick is to make sure they never come looking.
Work ended. I went home again. Luc left the living room as I entered.
Night settled its cloak comfortably over the earth, darkening as I neared my twenty-four-hour mark. Francis had returned at half-past eight and chatted with me over nothings, a surreal normality that could not have held true had I taken him with me to the river instead of Luc. One or two stars pressed their faces through the haze of light pollution, no match for the toxic glow of my alarm clock.
1:49, it said. 1:50.
I rolled away from it and shut my eyes. I must have slept, because when I looked again, the clock read 3:16. Three-quarters of an hour past the 24-hour deadline, and I supposed I should feel relieved about that. Instead, I shoved a tissue box in front of the clock and got back to sleeping.
No one knew what I had done. No one came to arrest me.
Not until the next evening, anyway.
That afternoon, my boss was ready to leave work before the clock had even struck five, which said more to me about his nerves than he’d ever express aloud. He hadn’t said a word about the prefects’ conference all day, but it colored his every gesture, his every request for coffee.
I wasn’t quite so circumspect. When I dropped him off at home, I said, “Your plan is good. It will work.”
“Thank you, Mercedes,” he replied, and closed the car door between us.
It was a good plan. It was a simple plan, which helped. Tomorrow morning, we’d separate: he’d go to Avior, and I’d go to Edenfield, to scout things out and wait for him. He, impersonating an arrogant, mysterious demonologist, would convince Avior that the only way to make the ritual work was to move the conference to Edenfield. When they came up, I’d join them as my boss’s browbeaten personal assistant. The more slavishly meek I appeared, the more dramatic my eventual demonic reveal.
And yes, I was massively looking forward to that.
We were a good team, my boss and I. Once the conference was moved to Edenfield, the rest would take care of itself: the spying devices would record evidence of infamy, and we’d warn the king in plenty of time. A little prodding might be necessary, true, but spreading dissension and raising doubts are well within my capacities. And if Avior demanded a demon summoning by way of yours truly executing a one-eighty personality shift, so be it. Avior would believe it, the rest of the prefects would continue to consider him a complete lunatic, and voilà.
It would work. Chess might not be my preferred form of strategizing, but I trusted my boss. And then we would be heroes.
My mind was resting so fixedly on Edenfield that when I got home, I didn’t immediately process the significance of the strangers filling the sofa; or why they stood when I entered; or why Luc’s face hung bloodless and strained.
“Oh,” I said wittily. “Hi.”
These were not local reeves; they were knights. Silvertip knights, by their green-and-silver uniforms. I couldn’t imagine what they were doing in my living room.
“Mercedes Cartier?” asked the knight on the left, his pointed chin set in professional blandness.
I returned the greeting with a side helping of mild curiosity. “Yes. What’s going on?” My response came out admirably innocent and bewildered, and only afterward did the obvious answer slam into my brain.
I wasn’t just being stupid. Silvertip knights are concerned with matters of prefecture-wide security, not ordinary law enforcement. There was zero reason they would be investigating Theodora’s disappearance . . . unless she had made a deal with someone very high up the food chain.
Luc looked like he wanted to throw up. I let myself stare at him, horror creeping into my eyes, mouth dropping. “Where’s Francis?” I whispered, and jerked into frantic action, looking around wildly, the picture of an anxious sibling. “Where’s Francis? Has something happened to him? Luc—”
“Miss Cartier,” the knight said, “you are under arrest
.”
The breath slammed out of me, and I had to fight to make it look like shock rather than fear. The room spun. “Arrest?” I said stupidly. “What do you—what for?”
“I suspect,” said the knight, “that you already know the answer to that.”
Interlude
Lord Chancellor Rodrigue Thomas was not aware of His Majesty’s aversion to gray tweed, but at this point very little from that quarter could have shocked him. If he had known, he would have abandoned his tweed, though reluctantly. It was one of the few materials that could effectively cut the chill of the palace, and he found velvet tasteless. But tasteless or not, he knew his duty, and he would have worn velvet if it meant the king listened to him. He would have dressed as a clown or a ghost or gone stark naked, if it meant the king listened to him.
Thomas brooded over Prefect Lindo’s visit. He was not as well pleased with her visit or subsequent renewal of vows as King Emil clearly expected him to be; nor did he rejoice over the king’s retelling of the conversation in the rose garden. Nor did he have any intention of allowing the matter to rest, as the king had so pointedly indicated he ought. If he had his own way—if he were king—Thomas would simply arrest and try all the prefects and have done with it. He understood why this was diplomatically dangerous, but as sick and disgusted as he was by the reports of the prefects’ behavior, and as inclined as he was to think treacherous prefects worse than replaced prefects, he was willing to take the risk.
He played with this fantasy briefly and then released it. Unless the arrests were performed in perfect unison and complete secrecy, the prefects could retreat behind their hordes of knights—or worse, team together against the capital. What would come next? Civil war?
Only if any prefects remained to support the king. Otherwise, it’d be a plain old deposing.
How had things come to this?
This question frustrated Thomas in more ways than one, because although in name and rank King Emil ruled the country, in practice that onus had increasingly fallen to the chancellor—and since the chancellor’s official power was limited, Thomas found his hands tied. Sometimes, he resorted to more creative measures, uncomfortable though they made him, but there were things simply beyond his power.
He could not act against the prefects. He could not ignore or disobey the king’s orders. He could not make more than paltry diplomatic motions toward Vela and Akter. He certainly could not declare war, if it came to that—as it surely must, if a stronger hand did not take the wheel. If only he could gain the king’s approval and carte blanche! Yet he felt utterly helpless to gain that approval or even to understand what might be necessary to gain it.
Frustrated and desperate, he expressed these sentiments to the chaplain, his long-time friend and confidant and (since cancer had eaten Thomas’s wife to a husk before finally and mercifully releasing her into death) the only person in the world whom he absolutely trusted.
“I have spoken to the king as well,” the chaplain admitted. His name was Abraham Beck, and though time and age—he had half again Thomas’s years—had bent his spine and stiffened his fingers, passionate energy brightened his eyes and brought a smile to his withered lips with gentle frequency. There was no smile there now, however; only a pained hope. “It did not go well. I fear Emil has abandoned his faith for good—although, God willing, the Holy Spirit will drag him back kicking and screaming, and our faltering nation with him.”
Thomas sighed, not rejecting his friend’s hope but weary for its fruition. “He trusts no one but that woman and her magic. Whenever I think we’ve finally convinced him, that he might be willing to listen to reason, he falls back to saying no, no, we can’t do anything until the seidkonur reads the birds, or whatever it is she does. If only—” He paused uncomfortably. “I don’t suppose—is there any way—”
Abraham turned such bristling eyebrows on him that Thomas let the rest of the thought fall silent. “Do you know,” the chaplain asked frostily, “why all forms of divination—including seidr—are banned in the Bible? Why only true prophets can tell the future? Why telling the future accurately is considered absolute evidence of a true prophet?”
Thomas nodded slightly, but Abraham’s eyes burned. The curve in his spine seemed to unwind when he got like this, and he seemed to grow taller, larger, and brighter. “The clue is in the name,” he said: “divination. The power of the Divine. For Ebba Lundquist to claim she or her tree or her birds can tell the future is for her to claim that they have the power of God. And that is vile blasphemy. It is also,” he added, in case Thomas got any ideas, “ineffective blasphemy. She cannot and does not have any real power.”
“I never thought her anything but a charlatan,” Thomas assured him. “I only thought, perhaps, that evil might be turned to good.”
Abraham passed a hand over his brow and apologized for his heated tone. The chancellor wasn’t the only one worn out by King Emil’s stubborn peculiarities—or the only one considering extreme responses. “You may be right that the only way to motivate the king to action may be to create a false response to that woman’s seidr,” Abraham admitted, “but I don’t know if I can be a party to that. Is giving credence to divination sinful? I think it must be—unless it is the Lord Himself turning it to His advantage. And yet so too is it sinful to stand uselessly by as a man runs toward his death and the ruination of his country.”
“Let’s say we can justify it,” Thomas said. “How would we go about it? I don’t know what the king and the seidkonur expect will result from her magic or how they’d interpret such a result—but whatever it is, it must be something so unusual that it has not occurred in these many months of her attempts.” He threaded both hands through his hair and then regarded them unhappily. “I cannot pull a coin from my great nephew’s ear without him catching me out.”
Abraham ran his tongue along his back teeth. He had an idea, but not one Thomas was likely to jump on. As he was considering how to phrase it, Thomas’s attention fixed on him, and he knew he had to try. “This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this,” he hazarded, “but the problem remains that neither of us has the abilities necessary to act. We need help.”
“Someone we can trust with our suspicions, with a plan this—precarious?” Thomas said doubtfully. “Is there such a person?”
“I believe so. As I said, I’ve thought about this before—long and hard. I believe we should confide in Keir Skuli.”
“The skald!” Thomas exclaimed in horror. “Why not confide in the seidkonur herself and be done with it?”
Abraham smiled grimly. Once, he would have reacted much the same way. On the surface of it, the skald—the court bard—was not an individual to inspire awe. Young and gangly, he was friendly with everyone, liked by nearly everyone, confided in by many, and respected by few. The joke around the palace was that Keir was better suited to the role of court jester than bard.
To his credit, Keir seemed to be in on the joke. On one occasion, Abraham had seen him dressed in the colorful diamonds and innumerable bells of a jester—which he must surely have dug out of some dusty attic, for Carina had kept no jester for two hundred years. Keir had run about the palace, apparently immune to embarrassment, turning cartwheels to make people laugh and putting on a truly spectacular juggling show in plain view of everyone. There had been no apparent reason for this abrupt show, except that a little girl with a broken leg had been depressed because she had been unable to play outside with her friends, and had needed cheering.
He was like that: ridiculous and generous and shameless, and most people who knew him left it at that. But then, most people weren’t in a chaplain’s privileged position. They hadn’t been summoned to deathbeds only to, invariably, find the skald there before them, soothing the patient until the chaplain’s arrival if the chaplain arrived in time . . . or waiting solemnly, unwilling to abandon the corpse, if the chaplain arrived too late.
No one but Abraham had ever seen him like that, with the glisten of tear
s upon his cheeks, with his face the proper age in absence of the perpetual smile. But Abraham had seen, and that seeing had led him to see other things.
He saw that people who confided in the skald found things inexplicably going better for them.
He saw how seeming coincidences regularly made the servants’ lives easier.
He saw how arguments sparked in Keir’s presence sizzled out in a few carefully placed words.
“I do not understand it,” he told Thomas, “but Keir gets things done—and he does them for good.”
“And it doesn’t hurt,” said Thomas, “that he attends chapel on Sunday and Wednesday.”
“No, it doesn’t hurt.”
“Even though he spends twice as much time with the seidkonur as in chapel? Or do you suppose he’s trying to convert her?”
Abraham spread his hands. “You now know as much about him as I do. What do you say? Shall we consult him?”
“I trust your discernment,” said Thomas. “If you trust him, then so shall I.”
Chapter 14:
Perjury
I’d been waiting for ages. I couldn’t tell how many ages, because the only clock in view had said 6:31 when I’d come in and had continued to say 6:31 ever since. I could’ve dealt with that, if it had meant a completely dead battery, but oh no. The battery had just enough juice left to keep the clock ticking, the hands shuddering but lacking the strength to win the battle against gravity.
None of the knights or lower prefectsmen acted bothered by the clock. Maybe they kept it that way on purpose to torment prisoners. It sure added to the décor of the place, heightened the atmosphere. They were big on atmosphere, in here: ugly lighting, bars covered in layers and layers of flaking diseased-frog-green paint, a metal slab for a bed, and the overwhelming stench of chemical cleansers. Admirable, the way they’d managed to attack all five senses. Masterful work with dinner, honestly. And the toilet arrangement—genius.
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