It was unlikely he could do what he said he could. Retrieve Stephen from Gedda? What would she do then? She would have to leave Porachis, and her position in the embassy, under a cloud of chaos and shame. She would need to run, and tear her eight-year-old son away from everything familiar.
Familiarity didn’t necessarily connote worth or safety. But she had seen the Ospies in action, and knew they could deliver on a threat. If Memmediv tried but couldn’t execute his promise, the careful détente Lillian had built with the current regime would be destroyed, and the consequences unbearable.
Meeting Flagg’s demands meant she would at least see her son.
And then, she would have to figure out her own bargain with his father. His father, who had asked her to do all the things she hardly dared consider now, when doing them would have been safe, but scared her.
One step at a time. First his father had to help her catch a fugitive.
* * *
Jinadh looked tired when they met the next day, on a park bench along the river. He sat slumped low, one ankle over one knee, rather slovenly for a Porachin gentleman in public. But this close to midday the park was nearly empty, so there was no one to see.
«Palace living took its toll on you, I see.» She sat beside him and snuck a look at his face from behind the dark, round lenses of her sunglasses. He wore a pair as well, though they didn’t do much to hide the pouches beneath his eyes.
«Don’t tell,» he said. «I would lose my playboy reputation. But keeping up with Lady Suhaila and her set is a marathon. I’m thirty-seven, not seventeen.»
«I’m sure you were just as bad as her, when you were that young. She should hope to age half as well.»
He cupped his chin and rubbed at his beard, considering the compliment. In Geddan, no doubt to foil potential eavesdroppers, he asked, “Are you flirting with me?”
“No.” She turned away, stared at the river and the egrets on its bank. One of them dipped to stab at a fish. “Yes. I’m sorry. You make it easy.”
That made him laugh, with a note of bitterness. «The hill up from habits is slippery.»
«A pretty boy is the fruit peel beneath a woman’s shoe,» she said, pleased to hold her own in the volley of Porachin aphorisms.
“What do you need?” he said, dropping out. He looked, perhaps, a trifle stung. She regretted her display of wit.
“How soon can you go back to your cousin’s house?” She was cagey about naming names, though the path was empty in either direction and the sun beat down on the pavement like a foundry hammer.
“A week, perhaps? It would help to have an excuse. She cannot exactly throw me out, but I am not her favorite relative.”
“Could you go sooner?”
“Why?” He straightened slightly, finally turned to face her fully. “Did he find something in the pictures?”
“We need more information about that choreographer. Flagg thinks she might be … important.”
“You can tell me,” he said. “It might help to know. And to whom would I reveal the truth? Telling anyone how I found out would require a complicated explanation.”
She cast her eyes from side to side, hidden behind their lenses. Still alone. Nevertheless she spoke softly, and he had to lean closer to hear. She could smell the musk of his sweat, faintly, beneath limewater and hair tonic.
“He thinks it’s Cordelia Lehane. The founder of the Catwalk.”
His eyebrows puckered above his sunglasses. “What is she doing in Porachis?”
“Well, she’s at your cousin’s house. What do you think?”
He shook his head and said, “Pulan,” with such resignation Lillian felt as if the bench sagged beneath them. “Is that what she and Memmediv talked about at the premiere, with the Lisoans?”
Lillian pushed her sunglasses back up her nose; they had begun to slip as she perspired. “I don’t think so. That’s something else entirely, and he’s quite nervous.”
“Oh?” A line of mirth cut a curve around the corner of his mouth. “He told you that?”
“Yes.” She must have said it too curtly, because he turned more fully to face her.
“He did.” Jinadh cocked one elbow onto the back of the bench. “When?”
“Flagg has me … watching his slate carefully, as it were. Keeping an eye on him,” she amended, when Jinadh’s brow furrowed at the idiom.
But the wrinkle remained, even following her clarification. “Beyond asking for my help?”
“Yes.”
“How far beyond?”
She did not like the angle he seemed to be taking; if he tacked any closer he might start to suspect her original intent. “He offered me a deal to double-agent for him. To pass false information to Flagg.”
“What can he offer you that could possibly…?”
She watched realization kindle in his eyes, watched it spread across his expression like flames catching in a dry wood gone too long without a burn. Or, not a wood: a grassland. His face was wide and open for miles, unshadowed by guile or suspicion. He had always had such a beautiful smile. “And you said yes.”
“Of course I said yes.”
He put a hand to her upper arm, his grip thoughtlessly tight with elation. It was not just the strength of his hold that made him difficult to shake off; a host of inconvenient emotions made her reluctant to move.
But she did, in the end, pushing him away so his palm slipped against her skin, moving to her elbow before falling away. “It was the only way to get close to him, to find out what he was really doing with Satri.”
“What.” It wasn’t truly a request for clarification: Devoid of all inflection, it was more like a blink, a breath, than it was a word.
“He can’t do it, Jinadh. They’re onto him; they’re about to fold his operation up.”
“What was his plan?” Jinadh’s hand had tightened on the bench, and the one she had pushed from her arm was fisted now, suspended several inches above his thigh. Not quite as if he meant to throw a punch, but more as if he didn’t know what to do with his limbs. Or perhaps more that he had forgotten he had them.
“I didn’t ask,” she snapped. “Because I knew it would be implausible. And that asking might smack of canniness. I am supposed to be desperate for his help, not shrewd.”
“I do not believe you.”
She sighed. “Yes, you do.”
“Well, I do not want to!” He stood from the bench, shoulders hunched, and spoke to the river. To her horror, she caught the echo of his words bouncing from the water.
“Calm down.” She stood, too, and went to him. “We’re very close to scratching this whole scheme, and as soon as we do, when the Solstice holidays begin—”
Arm raised, he whirled around and she startled, though he did not touch her.
“If he can do what he promised you, he is offering us something we gave up years ago. No, I apologize. Something you gave up. And now, you are giving it up again. What for, this time? What reason can you possibly have to stay?”
“It isn’t worth the risk,” she insisted, and this time she was the one to put a hand on him, to hold him tightly with their faces close so he might listen to at least half the words she said, she hoped. “If he fails, I…”
“You’ll never see Stephen again?” he asked, and if he had not been raised according to Porachin standards of masculinity, she believed he would have shoved her away. Instead he took a step back, yanking himself out of her grasp. “So what do I have to lose?”
She had not expected him to react this way, and now she was furious with herself for failing to predict it. What did he have to lose? He had already offered to leave everything for her, once: his home, his title, his family, his work. What would keep him from seeking out Memmediv and his conspirators and spilling all these secrets in a bid to see the son who had been kept from him?
“Me,” she said, only now fully grasping the truth of it.
Because she had never truly considered Memmediv’s offer, the inherent dangers
had never seemed relevant. Now that Jinadh demanded an explanation, she found one she hoped might convince him. “If he fails, neither of us sees Stephen, and I go to prison. Maybe—probably—to the scaffold. Or wherever Cyril went.”
She rarely spoke of her brother, and hoped his name would lend weight to her fear, her threat. She hated herself for using him as a tool, but imagined he would have done much the same.
Proud chin raised and nostrils flared, Jinadh stared at her for a long moment. The silence between them broke with the splash of a stabbing egret and the creak of its wings as it rose from the bank. Jinadh, likewise, turned and flew.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
“This oughta be turned back into pulp,” said Cordelia, slapping the Geddan translation of Song of the Sky onto the table in front of Pulan. “I can’t feature shooting any kind of picture in the middle of such a rumpus, but this? It’s so sappy it’s an insult.”
“It is entertainment,” said Pulan, and shrugged. “Is there not a phrase for this in Geddan, that stage people use?” She tapped her lip with a varnished fingertip, all campy confusion. “Oh yes. ‘The show must go on.’”
“You’re crazy as a busted tile,” said Cordelia.
“Am I?” Pulan shuffled through a stack of invoices and correspondence at her elbow, some of them on Hadhariti’s peacock letterhead. “This,” she said, picking a shipping manifest from the bunch, “says that a cargo ship will carry my lights and cameras and properties to Tzieta. And this”—another bit of paper, with an official seal at the head—“says that I may bring them into the country freely. And this”—yet another manifest—“is the train on which I will take them north and east, into the steppe, very close to the Geddan border.”
It clicked for her then. “You’re moving the guns with the picture. So we’ve got to make the picture to move the guns.”
That got her a smile like a twist of sugar candy. “Very good.”
“I don’t see why I gotta read the script, if I’m gonna be off kidnapping.”
“Because Chitra is preoccupied with the big numbers, so Inaz needs choreography and coaching. If Aristide brought you on to dance, why not use you?”
Cordelia sighed in resignation and hauled a magazine into her lap from the stack beside the breakfast tray. It was all in Porashtu, but there were heaps of pictures—stars and producers and royalty, laughing and gleaming in the bright light of the camera flash. Flipping through, she landed on a spread from last week’s premiere: Aristide, and Pulan, and a blond woman with pale eyes who couldn’t have been anyone other than Cyril DePaul’s sister. Cordelia didn’t need a caption to tell her that.
She spent a long time staring at that picture, at the bright crescent of Lillian’s smile and the angle of her jaw, and wondering. Was she anything like him? Would she make the same mistakes, trample on the same principles? The Ospies had a hold on her and they were using it, and how was that any different than what had happened to Cyril?
Did Lillian know about that? Did Aristide know what had happened to him? Did anyone?
She almost wished Ari were here, so she could grill him. Feeling like she had an upper hand, she might press him harder this time. But he’d run out on them pretty suddenly, no explanation. Just left a note with Djihar that said he’d gone back up to Anadh, and that he’d be back in a day or two.
Pulan didn’t seem worried. “He will return when he is done sulking and can behave like an adult again. Men,” she added, and gave a roll of her eyes that said more than any insult would have.
As if Cordelia’s thoughts had conjured it, a car roared up the drive outside. Pulan looked up from the schedule she had laid out on the veranda table, weighted down with dishes of pistachios and green almonds still in their shells.
“Ari?” asked Cordelia.
“Perhaps,” said Pulan, freeing her bare feet from the voluminous folds of her kaftan and stepping down from the chaise.
Before she had quite straightened, before Cordelia had quite risen to follow her, a bang echoed through the hall and out onto the terrace. Cordelia could make out the scurry of footsteps—Djihar’s slippers slapping on the tile, the sharper ring of running leather soles—then Daoud’s high, clear voice, though she didn’t understand the Porashtu words.
A wrinkle appeared between Pulan’s dramatic eyebrows, in the small triangle where they almost met above her nose.
Cordelia didn’t like that wrinkle. That wrinkle meant Pulan didn’t know who was charging through her own house, trailing staff after them like tumbling trash in a strong storm wind.
She sat lower in her chair, put her hands between her knees where they were hidden but easy to raise if she had to … what, throw a punch? She wasn’t armed. She thought Pulan might be—that kaftan could hide a multitude of nasty pieces. There was a team of bruisers, too, but too far off right now to do much good if it came to something ugly on the terrace.
Unless there were keen snipers, stationed up above. She wouldn’t put that past Pulan. Best thing was to keep low, try to stay out of the way. Her heart slammed against her ribs. She got ready for a freight train, or a battalion, or whatever came through that door, open from the terrace onto the entrance hall.
But it wasn’t a train that nearly ran them down, bursting from the house into the open air.
“Jinadh,” said Pulan, and the wrinkle finally went, replaced by an eye roll. “What are you doing back so soon?”
But Pulan’s cousin had lost all that oily swell veneer that had coated him so thick last time he’d been at Hadhariti. He looked wild, almost. He looked the way Cordelia’s heart felt: frantic, ready to beat against whatever bars held him back.
And it only took Pulan a second longer to clock the difference, because the frown lines came back and she said something in Porashtu that sounded serious, concerned. The way you’d talk to a pregnant lady clutching her belly, an old man in a faint. Jinadh snapped something at her, then shook his head and said, more softly, «I’m sorry,» which Cordelia could pick out.
Maybe she perked up at that, or made some movement that caught his attention, because suddenly those wide, hungry eyes were on her. He reminded her a little of a half-feral street dog: the type that remembered humans could be kind, but was ready to bite at any fast movement, any slight, or for no reason at all.
“How’s it turning?” she asked, voice low and steady. Like the way you talked to that kind of dog, to get it to come close enough to eat a scrap.
“You,” he said, “are in terrible danger. And it is all my fault.”
* * *
“Do you care to explain?” Pulan settled back into the chair she’d so recently left. “Did you publish something unwise, and bring a horde of admirers down on us?”
“Ms. Hanes,” he said, his voice rising like a question on the name, “would not tell me anything to print. In the end, it likely gained her time.”
Queen’s cunt. He knew.
Her heart had not slowed down. The ramekins and coffee cups on the table pulsed in time with its beat, or rather: her whole body pulsed, even her eyes, and so nothing around her would stay still. To steady herself, she clutched the arm of her chair with her right hand, because there was no point hiding it now. “Who did you tell?”
“I did not tell anyone,” he said. “They already suspected. But I did give them some photographs.”
“That rotten camera,” she said. “I knew it.”
Pulan’s feet had not left the tile, and now they flexed, as though she might stand again. She asked him something in Porashtu, grave as an undertaker.
Jinadh’s eyes flickered to Cordelia and he said, “To the Geddans.”
Pulan’s eyes followed the same track his had, and then went narrow. “Why?”
“Because…” He dropped his gaze to the tile. Cordelia, who had only ever seen him glittering and proud and grinning too hard, thought solemnity looked better on him. Made him less ridiculous. He took a breath, shoulders rising, and then went on. “They have my
son.”
There was a tight, brief silence Cordelia couldn’t parse—surprise, maybe, but with an edge of sulfur, a sear to it.
“Your son,” Pulan repeated. And then something more, in Porashtu again. As if Jinadh’s words had shocked her Geddan vocabulary straight out of her head.
“We both know she never bore a child. Do not make this more difficult than it needs to be,” said Jinadh. Then, “This story concerns Nellie. She should understand it.”
Pulan’s eyes went narrow and shiny with malice, and this time she didn’t look at Cordelia after Jinadh did. She did switch to Geddan though, her voice pulled tight over a searing bed of angry coals, curling crisp at the edges. “Who was it? Who did you … who is the mother?”
“A Geddan diplomat,” he said.
“What?” This time she did stand, and it brought her very close to him. He was not much taller, and she thrust her face into his. Cordelia shrank more deeply into her chair, but Jinadh didn’t flinch. “Who?”
“Lillian DePaul,” he said, and Pulan burst into the kind of laughter Cordelia had spilled so many times, the last few years. The kind you let loose when it was that or scream.
“I loved her,” said Jinadh. “I know it was foolish. But I did, and both of us always wanted children, so when she … What other chance would I have, in this country?”
“Sorry,” said Cordelia, scrambling to keep up. “I still don’t—you were knocking Cyril’s sister?”
“Yes,” he said.
“How old’s the kid?”
“Eight,” said Jinadh, and she saw his smile start, then die.
“Eight?” Pulan’s voice climbed through an octave, incredulous. She put a hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes. Something that sounded suspiciously like a curse leaked out between her fingers.
“You been carrying on this whole time?” asked Cordelia. “And nobody knew?”
He shook his head. “It was always too … not dangerous, but … it was never a good idea. When she had the baby, she needed a story people would believe. If anyone entertained suspicions about us, it would be a strain upon her fiction.”
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