“How can we?” I asked. “We don’t have proof. He may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. He hasn’t given us any absolute evidence—and he’s prefect now.”
That set Francis off some more, but I admired the scenery until it was my turn again, and didn’t mind him. “It’s just as well we couldn’t pin him down,” I pointed out, “because if they arrested Avior, they’d be missing the others. All the prefects are in on it. Not the demonology part, obviously. The others plan to kill the king the old-fashioned way. And the only time they can do that, when no one but the prefects and the king is present—”
“Is at the prefects’ conference,” Francis realized. “But—Mercedes, the conference this year is in Lindo, not Edenfield.”
“I know,” I said, “but Lindo is the most dangerous prefect. She’s out for revenge, and she’s spent the past year turning her manor into a death trap for the king. If he steps in there, he’s never stepping out.”
Francis’s comment was unprintable but beautifully elegant. It lasted only a single breath, but it did justice to both the aesthetic of the tough working man and the rules of flyting. At the end of it, he asked, “Why Edenfield?”
“Aside from the fact that it’s at the opposite end of the country from both Avior and Lindo,” I replied, “because A) it has minimal security, which means we could plant the spy equipment needed to listen in on and record what the prefects are saying—”
“Which is highly illegal.”
“—and B) because Prefect Edenfield is our most likely ally, if we need to recruit one of the prefects. Batata is well-meaning but useless; Fjordland is old and confused; Hemmel is hopelessly besotted; and Tey is young and impressionable. The others are simply nasty people.
“Edenfield, as we understand it, agreed to regicide because he thinks it’s the only way he can protect his prefecture and his nation from spies and invaders. He says Akter and Vela are getting more aggressive. I don’t know how much truth there is in that, but I believe he believes it.”
“Nothing can excuse treason—or murder.”
I paused. “By ‘murder,’” I said, “do you mean all killing? I mean, if we went to war, would you join up?”
Francis flared. “Of course I would! What do you take me for?”
“No, it’s not like that. Luc—”
“Oh,” Francis said darkly. “Luc.”
I opened my mouth automatically, to defend Luc against that tone, and then shut it again. This wasn’t the time to get distracted—and opening the floodgate guarding that topic was not something I wanted to do in front of Francis. Not until I knew where I stood.
I cleared my throat. “Anyway,” I said. “As far as we can tell, Edenfield was the last and most hesitant to agree to treason. My boss thinks that if Edenfield feels he has any other option, he’ll jump on it . . . which makes it worrying that Silvertip is suspicious of Edenfield. We can’t have any prefects backing out—because if they do, they become unpredictable, and we might not be able to stop them.”
I summarized my earlier trip to Edenfield and my encounters with Prefects Avior and Silvertip, and let Francis digest. He didn’t swear when I’d finished. He didn’t say anything. He stared out the window and went thoughtful and quiet.
I let him stew until we’d crossed the border into Edenfield and the buildings had gotten steadily poorer and sparser. Then I asked, “Are you in? Will you help us?”
He remained a studious scholar of the scenery, but he wasn’t ignoring me. After a few seconds, he said, “It’s weird how things work out.”
“It . . . is?”
Francis abandoned the scenery in favor of a sidelong glance. “Yes, Mercy, I’ll help you. That’s obvious.” He sank back to the window. “I mean this whole situation. My whole situation. Things never go like you plan, you know?”
“They sometimes do.”
He went on like he hadn’t heard me. Maybe he hadn’t. “I won’t say you were right about her. You acted way out of line. But if you hadn’t, maybe I wouldn’t have found out.”
So we were talking about Theodora. I adjusted my hands on the steering wheel and kept alert for street signs.
He took a breath. “We got into a fight. I called her after you came back, you see. I thought—but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she brought you up again. Asked me if I wanted to hear what had happened with your boss. If I wanted information on him. It was weird how she phrased it, like she wanted me to pay for the information. And I remembered what you said about making deals with her—”
Francis had listened to me? And remembered what I’d said?
“—And besides, it wasn’t right. She was acting as if friendship, as if dating, were an exchange. As if you only did something nice for someone or only told them something because you owed them or wanted them to owe you, and not because you loved them or because it was right.
“I couldn’t believe she thought in a way that wrongheaded. I didn’t understand. Not at first. But she—it was—”
He rubbed his face as if in pain.
“Like I said, we got into a fight. She couldn’t understand what my problem was. She got angry, and that made me angry, and I said things I wish I could—that I shouldn’t have said. But you would have understood, Mercedes.” He spread his hands appealingly. “You know not to take things personally. When I’m angry, I say things, but I don’t mean them.”
“I know you don’t,” I said, and did not add, Usually or But sometimes they hurt anyway.
“I would’ve apologized if she’d let me,” Francis complained. “She said plenty of things that were as bad or worse! She could call me to apologize—she should—but she hasn’t.
“We’d agreed to meet again, but she didn’t show. I waited for hours, and I called her, but nothing. I’ve called again and again, but she never answers. She’s completely blocked me out.”
I cleared my throat. “Sounds like it was for the best. If she was like that, better to find out early on.”
“You don’t understand, Mercedes.”
I didn’t want to understand. I didn’t want to hear this. But like a good little sister, I said, “Then explain it to me.”
He scrubbed his hands through his hair, trying to find the words. “She’s not meant to be like that,” he attempted. “She’s clever and funny, and she knows so much. More than anyone else I’ve ever met. She can talk about practically anything and make it interesting. And she’s fun. It’s like she glows, and I want to bask in that glow forever. I want to be a part of it. She’s far too good for me, too smart for me in so many ways. I could hardly believe it when she agreed to go out with me. You don’t know what it’s like, Mercedes, being with someone like that.”
He didn’t mean that comment in a nasty way, I assumed; it was the classic condition of believing your own pain the center of the universe. But it sure didn’t make me feel more sympathetic.
“I could’ve happily spent the rest of my life with her,” Francis went on. “Admiring her.” He shook his head and thumped his wrist against his thigh. “She shouldn’t be that wrongheaded. She should know better, but something broke somewhere. Maybe it was the way she was brought up. Maybe it was some other bad influence. Maybe she never had anyone to teach her Christian values. I know that if someone explained them to her properly, she’d see in an instant what’s wrong with her thinking, and she’d fix it. She’s like that. But I didn’t have the words.”
He fell silent again, and I thought he was done. I could see his reflection in the window. I searched for another topic, any other topic.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that I would’ve married her, if I could’ve.”
This was too much, even for Francis. “You barely knew her a week!”
“Three days. I knew her for three glorious days before our argument. And I will treasure every moment of them until the day I die.”
He made no effort to wipe away the fat, rolling tears. He leaned his forehead against the window and sobbed as if the
re were nothing else in the world.
Chapter 20:
Battery
We arrived in Gjerde around ten in the morning. Under the chipper sun, I could see what had not been apparent at night: that every one of the houses was a different shade of orange, yellow, or red. Gjerde may have been poor, but it had civic pride: the houses were old, but the paint was fresh and crisp.
My boss’s plan had been that I stay in a bed-and-breakfast in town and not let Prefect Edenfield know I was there. A spy is much more effective if the other side doesn’t know she exists. But thanks to Silvertip, that was no longer an option.
I called my boss again, and again got voicemail. That was disturbing, but I could come up with reasons for it. I left him a cheerful nonsense message and asked him to call me.
What was going on? Had something gone wrong on my boss’s end? Had he succeeded in moving the conference, or should I be collecting the spy equipment and rushing down to Lindo Prefecture?
Somehow, I didn’t think I’d get it through their security nearly as easily—unless I attached myself to Edenfield’s retinue, which would mean getting him on my side . . .
Which went with what my boss had wanted anyway, so there couldn’t be any harm in that.
Mind made up, I directed Francis, who was back at the wheel, to drive through the brief town and up the single lane to the manor.
By daylight, when one could dismiss the hill behind it, Edenfield Manor was nowhere near the same scale of impressiveness as Silvertip Manor. The roof was simple and brown, the windows narrow upright triangles, and the wooden walls white-and-chocolate zigzags and reverse zigzags.
“Mock Tudor,” Francis commented. “A fancy one. Those’ve been less popular in the last fifty years.”
I hummed. “Look at how the pure white reflects sunlight; it’s clearly meant to blind enemies—and then drive them mad.”
“The style was originally medieval, so you could be right.”
“Could be?”
“My dear sister,” Francis said, in true flyting cadence, “your head is already as swollen as a week-old cow carcass. I don’t want it to explode. Then again,” he mused as we approached the front door, “maybe I’m wrong. Maybe instead of exploding, it would inflate like a balloon, and you could float instead of walking.”
“On the superheated hydrogen of my own ego.”
“Not so different from what you do anyway, then.” He knocked on the manor door, and we waited. After a minute, he tried the knob. Locked. He banged harder. “Doesn’t anyone answer doors around here?”
“The servant couple is pretty old, judging by their snores,” I said. Francis gave me an odd look, so I clarified: “I mean they might not have great hearing.”
Francis grunted and hunted around for a doorbell. I thought again of Silvertip Manor, and the idea that Edenfield might have already left for Lindo, and shifted from foot to foot. I needed information. If I couldn’t get it from Edenfield, I could get it from his office—which would also allow me to recollect the spy equipment.
“No one’s coming,” I said. “Let’s do this the hard way. Over here.”
“There’s a back door?”
“There’s a window that’s easy to jimmy.”
“Mercedes!” Francis cried, more with affectionate exasperation than actual rebuke. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who remembered our childhood hijinks.
I crooked a finger at him, and he followed me around to the east side of the manor. I was halfway through the children’s window when a voice behind me commanded, “Stop right there!”
I stopped right there, knee over the sill, and laid my eyes on my first Edenfield knight.
He was barely more than a boy: thin haired and knobbly cheekboned, but with excellent posture and one hand on his sidearm. Edenfield knights wear midnight-purple uniforms with ice-blue trim. Although he was young, this knight’s uniform had clearly been well worn. It looked warm, sensible, and intimidating.
I withdrew my leg and wrestled down the instinctive This isn’t what it looks like! in favor of a smooth, confident, “Oh, good! Finally, someone who can let us in. Why isn’t anyone answering the door?”
The knight wasn’t impressed. “I’m going to need you to step inside the knighthouse,” he said.
I tossed my head airily, already moving his way, mildly surprised but utterly unbothered. “It’s no secret why we’re here,” I said. “We’ve come on urgent prefect business. You must’ve noticed the Silvertip van. We need to see Prefect Edenfield immediately. Ah—he hasn’t left for Lindo, has he? That would be a mistake.”
The knight treated me to a slow, steady, law-enforcement-approved expression that gave away nothing. “Come into the knighthouse,” he drawled, “and we’ll discuss the situation.”
“We’d be happy to,” Francis said.
I frowned. “We really don’t have time for this.”
“We don’t have time to get arrested over a misunderstanding,” Francis countered. “Or shot.”
I sniffed, which didn’t stop him from rubbing it in.
“I should’ve known better than to go along with one of your harebrained schemes. Through the window! If you weren’t so good at pretending to know what you’re doing—”
“I did know what I was doing!”
“You’ve broken into places before?” the knight asked.
I threw up my hands. “No one was answering the door! We needed to get in. What were we supposed to do?”
The knight didn’t bat a lash. “I’d gladly believe you,” he said. “But under the circumstances, I’ll need to check out your story before allowing you near the prefect.”
“So he hasn’t left—good. We’re in time. Don’t let him leave before I’ve a chance to talk to him.”
“If you are who you say you are,” the knight told me, “you’ll have my apologies and my assistance. But you understand that we can’t let people run around breaking into the manor.”
“Of course,” I said. “Lead on, Sir Knight.”
The knight led on, around the corner of the knighthouse. I saw the moment he spotted the Silvertip van, and the impression it made on him. For an instant, I thought he’d change his mind there and then, but he checked himself and led us inside the knighthouse instead.
The bulk of the interior was taken up by the main room we stepped into, but there were two doors beyond—at a guess, one led to a bathroom and the other to a storage area/holding tank. It was clean and well cared for, but age had degraded it to shabbiness. To be fair to it, I thought it honest shabbiness, not the pointed sham inside the holding area of the Silvertip knighthouse. It reminded me of Batata of all places: poor but honest.
The knight—whose name, according to the picture award on the wall, was Olaf Olafsson—took our driving licenses and tapped away at his computer. Francis definitely had his share of driving violations, but I doubted that anything else would show up. As for me, no ordinary knight would know what “CSS” really stood for—only head knights and prefects had access to that sort of information—if it was listed at all.
Whatever Olaf found, it didn’t raise his eyebrows, but it did raise a landline to his ear. He didn’t bother to lower his voice or go into another room or make us go into another room as he talked; but then, he wasn’t saying anything secret. He told his head knight what was going on, along with reasonably flattering descriptions of us, and asked for instructions.
I waited, listening to his tone, and thought he wouldn’t need much of a push to give me what I wanted.
“It occurs to me,” I said ruefully, shamefacedly, when Olaf hung up, “what us trying to break in must have looked like. You’ve already seen proof of legitimacy, but I still owe you an apology. You have to act superior and snooty in Silvertip or no one will give you the time of day, but here . . . I recognize that Edenfield knights have to be suspicious of strangers, official van or no. Please forgive me.”
“I forgive you,” Olaf said mildly, shuffling the papers on his des
k. “And I believe you. I know city folks don’t act like us out here.”
“That’s the worst of it,” I said. “I wasn’t city folk until I moved to Silvertip three years ago; I grew up in Batata.” I offered him my hand and smiled shyly and sweetly. “Shall we start over? My name is Mercedes.”
“Not this,” Francis muttered, but he had the decency to mutter it low enough that Olaf didn’t hear.
I kept smiling.
Olaf’s ears went red, and he shook his head. “Sure,” he said. “Only, I mean . . .” The red spread from his ears down his jawline and across his cheeks. He cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, it seems the prefect is in lockdown until the conference ends and isn’t accepting visitors.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “But surely that doesn’t apply to official messengers. Perhaps if you called Prefect Silvertip—”
He ducked his chin apologetically. “Prefect Silvertip isn’t in charge of this prefecture; Lord Holst and Torben Nass are—and Captain Nass requests that you remain here with me until the prefect departs. In the meantime, I hope I can count on your honor that you will respect this and not attempt to leave prematurely. Edenfield wishes to maintain a good relationship with Silvertip.”
Those were surely the head knight’s phrases, not his. I groaned and rubbed my eyes, then stopped before I scraped off my makeup. It’d taken me the last hour of the drive to hide the effects of the past few days, but no amount of makeup or hair styling stopped me from hurting. I must’ve been tired still, because I wanted to cry. Again. I’d been doing more crying in the past couple of weeks than in the previous year.
“I am sorry,” Olaf said. “I know this must be frustrating. How about something to eat? You must have been driving for hours.”
“Your head knight made his decision without all the information,” Francis said. “This is a matter of life and death.”
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