My laughter had left me a light-year ago, and my voice rasped when I forced out words. “On what evidence?”
“On my testimony,” Torben replied, “and my witness.”
I twitched my lips up, closing my eyes and leaning my head back against the desk. “Testimony that directly contradicts mine. One voice against another. Prefect against head knight.”
“You’re forgetting Lord Holst.”
I shook my head, rocked the back of it side to side against the solid desk. “You’re right. I should have said prefects against head knight. Chivalry isn’t dead.”
“Once Lord Holst has the situation explained to him—”
I opened my eyes and looked up at him. He was standing again, rising above me. Not so sure of himself as he’d like. “Once Bo has the situation explained,” I said, “he’ll say three things. First, that his head knight manipulated and threatened him into abandoning his post. Second, that his head knight did this in order to get the prefectship for himself, and that only my presence prevented this catastrophe. Third, that I never attempted to make him leave—that I encouraged him to stay; you were the one telling him to leave—and that I never asked to be made prefect or in any way acted against either Edenfield or him.”
Torben scoffed, but I’d seen him rear back from these accusations. “I notice you don’t deny lying about being a king’s agent,” he said.
I raised my handcuffed wrists and dropped them again. “What’s to lie about? You saw what happened. I showed him my identification and told him what it meant. You verified my words. You can check my ID again if you like, but you’ll find that it’s real. I have plenty of colleagues who’ll vouch for me.”
“Then why are you here?” Torben snarled. “Why would a cryptanalyst’s personal assistant appear out of nowhere, assault one of my knights, and break into the manor? Why would you force the prefect to change the conference location?”
I’d gotten him pacing. Not much—a couple of steps as he spoke.
“Would you believe I’m just a concerned citizen?” I asked.
“I would not.”
“I am, though—both concerned and a citizen. You can hardly deny there is a lot going on here to be concerned about. But”—he’d opened his mouth to interrupt—“you’re right: I was sent. My then-boss, Sr. Jon Nordfeld, was invited by Prefect Avior to be his guest at the conference, and Sr. Nordfeld is a very particular man. He likes things just so, and I was to ensure a smooth stay.” I blinked broadly up at him. “You saw yourself how surprised I was that Sr. Nordfeld didn’t arrive with Prefects Avior and Lindo.”
“I have seen you pretend a great many things,” Torben said, “surprise being the least of these.”
I shrugged, letting this roll off one shoulder.
Torben tried again. “Nordfeld. Another concerned citizen, I suppose?”
“Cryptanalysts are a strange lot,” I said, with feeling, thinking of Sr. Basile. “Who knows what he wants and why he wants it? If he were here, you could ask him.”
“But as he’s in a Lindo prison, he’s none of my concern,” Torben said, “and he wasn’t the one who changed the conference location.”
“No,” I agreed; “that was Bo. After having met Prefect Lindo, can you dispute his decision?”
“I can dispute your motivation.”
“Ah, but let’s review the actual situation,” I said. “You threatened Prefect Edenfield until he fled, and you tried to do the same to his replacement. It’s pretty clear what’s going on, isn’t it? This is a power grab. You want Edenfield . . . and perhaps not only Edenfield. How powerful would you be if you could discredit the prefects in front of the king—or in front of Prince Emok, should the king prove unavailable? Any astute king would have grown wise to the con man’s pretty face, but who better to take into a royal confidence than Torben Nass, ugly but honest, so loyal that he stuck by the crown even though it meant betraying his prefect. So—”
I gasped and cringed away. I couldn’t help it; he was fast. I thought he was going to strike me, but no. He stopped short, out of reach, tamped down by staggering self-control. I curled into the desk, words lost.
It felt like we stayed that way for ages, me frozen with my back to the desk and knees hiding my face, not breathing; him on the knife-edge of temptation.
When he spoke again, it was as if from a great distance. “Silvertip is no friend to you.”
My face must have indicated the obviousness of this statement, because he added, “Nor Avior.”
“Nor Lindo, nor Tey, nor Fjordland,” I said. “Nor you, nor any of the others. I didn’t come here to make friends.”
It took Torben a long time to answer. I’m used to seeing people shut off, from working with Sr. Nordfeld, but never like this—never from one extreme to the other, from vast emotion to cool distance. It’s something I’d like to be able to do myself, but I never think of it in the moment. If I plan ahead of time, I can separate myself and prevent strong emotion, but once I’m angry, it’s hard for me to remember to stop. To want to remember. It takes a real shock to interrupt me.
I’d had a real shock. I couldn’t seem to find any words. I was glad when Torben spoke again, tonelessly, having reanalyzed the situation and come to a decision.
“You may wish you’d let yourself be frightened off,” he said. He stepped back and moved to leave. His hand was on the doorknob when he stayed himself, half-turned, and tossed something small and glittering onto the carpet by my feet.
The handcuff key.
Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. That was how long our meeting had lasted. That was also how long it took me, after Torben had left, to pull myself together enough to crawl over, grab the handcuff key, and stand up. When I peeked into the hallway, nothing had changed and no one was visible. As far as anyone else was concerned, the encounter might never have happened.
It took me twice fifteen minutes to get cleaned up and calmed down, and that long again before I’d prepped and primped and perfumed myself to my satisfaction. I wanted to look perfect, too perfect for anyone to imagine me looking otherwise.
Bo’s antibiotic ointment was expired, but I used it anyway. He had plenty of aspirin, and I cupped my hands under the tap for water to get it down.
When I emerged from the bathroom, I found Francis lying on my carpet, staring blankly at the ceiling. I lay on the floor next to him to try out the view, but it was only a ceiling, and I was wrinkling my outfit, so I got back up again.
“I keep calling and texting her,” he said, “but she won’t answer. I know I should give up, let her go, but I keep hoping. Is a ‘goodbye’ too much to ask?”
No prizes for guessing whom he was talking about. Something clenched in my throat, and I swallowed it back down. I wasn’t sorry for killing Theodora; I did my best to be proud of myself. She’d needed to be stopped, and it had been my duty to stop her in the only way I could. If I’d walked away, part of me would have been responsible for all the future deals she made, all the people she mutilated and hacked body parts off and murdered.
But that didn’t make it easy to think about, or pleasant, and I could not afford to let the roiling ball of rawness in my stomach catch up with me, not now. I had to concentrate on what was important in the moment, or more people would suffer.
I asked, “Have you slept?”
Francis didn’t seem to have heard me. He said, “I can take a hint. I can. I only wanted to hear her say it in her own voice, to give me that closure. Even if she doesn’t apologize. I could understand that.”
“Francis,” I said, “I know this is hard, but you’ve gone through this before. You’ll be fine in a week or two, and there’ll be another woman.”
“Not like this one.” Francis rotated his body my way. He hadn’t slept a wink. I idly wondered if, as Prefect Edenfield, I could order him to visit a sleep doctor in such a way that he’d have to obey. Maybe if he resided in this prefecture. Or maybe I could ask the king to order him, as part of my reward. That and ni
ne years’ hard labor for Torben sounded about right. Or the cat-o’-nine-tails. Whichever.
“You just don’t understand, Mercedes,” Francis moaned. “I’m going to be alone forever.”
He was looking full at me, but he couldn’t see anything wrong. I’d done a good job with my makeup, then, because Francis would notice if anyone would—even through his melodramatics. But the funny thing was that as soon as I assured myself of this, I found that I desperately wanted him to notice. I wanted to tell someone what had happened. I wanted someone to take my side.
But pride won—or shame, I guess. “I’m going to head to breakfast,” I told him. “I know you’re feeling low, but you need to pull yourself together. We’re beginning at nine this morning; that gives you nearly an hour to pour some coffee down your throat and get your brain straightened out. Maybe take a shower.”
“It won’t matter,” Francis said. “They’re not going to say anything interesting. Besides, we’re recording everything. You can just tell me if anything happens.”
I shook my head. “That relies on a secondary factor. What if you notice something I don’t? Or what if something stops me from getting back to you? Or what if the delay makes an essential difference? No, Francis: you said you’d help, so now you need to help. Besides, I’ve been working on them.”
He groaned.
“On which note,” I added, “watch out for Torben.”
Francis raised his head. “The head knight? Is he still around?”
I nodded. I hadn’t meant to bring up Torben; it’d just slipped out, and now it required explanation. “He’s the one who made the voodoo doll for Bo.”
Francis perked up. I’d told him about the doll yesterday when I’d showed him the ring, but there hadn’t been time for details.
The topic was safe enough, so I curled up on a chair and went over the incident again, including Torben’s folktale threat, and that led naturally to the cottontail in my bed this morning—
“That’s where the blood came from?” Francis exclaimed.
I frowned at him. “What did you think it was? No, never mind. I can guess.”
In my flurry of activity, I had never dealt with my bedding. There simply hadn’t been an opportunity, though each time I’d passed my bed, I’d seen the mess of blood-encrusted sheets and made a mental note to hand them to Gina. Then again, I didn’t want to freak her out. Maybe, I thought as I unwound myself from the chair and set about stripping the bed, I could get Francis to deal with it. Or do it myself, in my copious free time.
“Francis,” I said, “most of this blood is at chest level or above. Do we need to have a chat about basic anatomy?”
“I didn’t look closely. I was respecting your privacy.”
The sheets were resisting my efforts to peel them off. I tugged at them, increasingly exasperated. Why wasn’t this working? Tears of helpless frustration beaded in my eyes, but the joke was on them: I was wearing waterproof mascara.
I tugged harder, helpless against the fitted sheet. What was I doing wrong? Why wouldn’t it come off? Why was this so difficult? Why—
“Mercedes, sit down,” Francis ordered me, alarmed. “I’ll do it.”
“I can strip my own bed!”
“Sit down.” He pushed me toward a chair, and I slapped him. He stepped away but didn’t back down. “Fine. Sit down on your own. But stop screaming at the sheets.”
I hadn’t been screaming. Had I?
I sat down and watched Francis, in two easy movements, strip off the dirty sheets and the mattress cover beneath. The mattress itself had survived its second ordeal in a row.
I didn’t move when Francis left or when he returned with fresh sheets and blankets—blue ones, to match the furnishings upstairs, and blessedly clean. He remade the bed while I watched, and I found myself talking again, to fill the silence.
Once I had started, I couldn’t stop. I disgorged my morning from beginning to end, leaning rigidly over folded legs, gripping the chair. At some point, I found I’d begun striding, gesticulating. Story time had long ended in favor of theorizing, threatening, ranting, working myself up even as Lindo had.
I clamped my mouth shut. The comparison was too appalling.
“I’m going to beat him to a pulp,” Francis announced, flexing his hands. He was flushed dark and breathing hard. I must have been working him up at the same time as myself, without realizing it. Well, why shouldn’t he be worked up? He was my brother. “You can stay here,” he told me, “or you can come watch. But he’s going to wish he was never born.”
About time someone stood up for me, I thought. Then my better sense surged back, bringing with it the red dye of alarm. “Francis, you can’t. He’s a head knight.”
Francis’s growl was eloquent.
“Francis,” I said. “Francis!”
Francis was not listening to me. He was lunging away, out of the bedroom, down the wood-paneled hall.
“Francis, calm down!” I ordered, jogging after him. “Francis, he’s Edenfield’s head knight. My head knight. You can’t—”
Francis stopped at the front door and swung on me. “Shut up, Mercedes.”
I stepped back and folded my arms. “Don’t I have a say in this?”
“No.”
“Excuse me?” I demanded, but Francis was already throwing open the front door and thundering outside. I ran after him, yelling at him to stop, and that he was going to get in trouble and that it wasn’t worth it, and that as prefect I ordered him—
I caught up and grabbed him, and he brushed me off like a fly, not looking back when I hit the ground, not even when I yelped in pain.
“Mr. Cartier,” Torben said when Francis flung open the knighthouse door and pounded in. I knew it was Torben speaking: no one else has a voice like wind rustling through dry grass. I verified that a second later, when I flung myself in after Francis and saw him. He stood behind his desk, reed thin, four inches taller than my brother but a hundred pounds of muscle lighter. “I can see that you’re upset.”
Francis’s response was more battle cry than coherence, and he charged.
My brother was fast, but Torben was faster. He waited until the last moment and then slid to the side. Francis’s right hook went wide, and I thought the left would too, but the desk hampered Torben, and the follow-up clipped his chin.
Torben backed around the desk, wary, graceful and light to Francis’s sheer power. Shiro went wild, barking and barking, lunging at Francis’s ankles. Francis kicked at the dog, and Shiro squealed and scurried away.
“Grab him,” Torben told me, eyes barely brushing mine.
I grabbed the thrashing dog, who rewarded me by barking madly in my ear and then licking it apologetically. The back door opened and Olaf appeared, baffled and alarmed. Torben cut a silent hand at him, and Olaf stayed put.
“Stop it,” I said, and didn’t know if I was talking to Francis or Torben or the dog. “Stop it!”
Francis moved in, tight and low, first jabbing and then wind-milling into a baffling whirl of motion: punching, kicking, kneeing, snapping his teeth. Most men would’ve gone down under that, but Torben stood his ground, utterly focused. It felt like he was hardly moving, fast though he was, the eye of the whirlwind: ducking, blocking, avoiding hits, but not attacking. It was utterly breathtaking, watching these two—until I realized that Torben wasn’t fighting my brother; he was playing with him.
Any inclination I might’ve had for fairness vanished. I put the struggling Shiro on the floor and let him go. The little dog immediately ran for its master, interrupting the careful footwork, the ease of the game, and Torben had to stumble aside or step on his pet.
Francis pressed his advantage, landing a sledgehammer punch on Torben’s stomach and, when Torben doubled over, smashing a second one against his cheekbone.
Torben lurched back with the blow, and Francis grabbed his shirt to punch him again.
That was what Torben had been waiting for. He put a hand over Francis’s, fingers
wrapping around the base of the thumb, thumb pressed between the middle and ring knuckles. Then he dropped his weight and leaned in.
Francis blenched and crumpled instantly. All the rage in the world couldn’t keep him upright, and muscles don’t do you any good when they’re working against you.
I’d seen the move before, in my self-defense classes, though I couldn’t have replicated it. Using techniques in an actual fight is a lot different than in practice, and I’d used the only aikido move I knew well on the creature in the auction house. Like that one, this move, done properly, stopped your opponent instantaneously without doing any permanent damage. Aikido is a purely defensive martial art.
Of course, part of the reason aikido’s purely defensive is that when done aggressively, you don’t just disable your opponent so you can escape—you break their bones, dislocate their joints, and even kill them. Such as, to take a random example, when your opponent shoves a broiled rabbit at you and then attacks you with a knife and you maneuver that knife around so that they’re shoving it at their own eye. Lean your weight in and, with barely any effort, you’ve made them stab themselves through the brain—and who could blame you for defending yourself?
Francis gasped in agony, unable to wriggle away without shattering his wrist. Torben reached back with his free hand, unhooked a fresh pair of handcuffs from his belt, and casually shook them out. He snapped one bracelet around Francis’s torqued wrist, then switched hands so he could bring up the other wrist. Only once Francis was secured did Torben relax the wrist lock at all, and then it was only to twist it another way so that, with an agonized yelp, Francis was forced to his feet.
Olaf, eyes shining, held the door open as Torben guided my brother forward with one hand on the back of his neck. Then Olaf followed Torben in, to attach the cuffs to a ring on the wall above a bench, presumably installed for exactly that purpose.
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