«So quiet,» he said, breath in her ear. «You don’t need to be. Not now.»
The muscles in her back and the curve below her belly tightened, and she heard Jinadh make a small sound of surprise, felt his hand flex. She could taste blood in her mouth, and realized she had bitten the inside of her cheek—the same place she found with her teeth each time she wanted to talk back, to snap or snark or say something unwise.
«Lillian,» said Jinadh. «Please. I want to hear you scream.»
And like water pouring from a shattered dam, she did.
No sooner had she caught her breath than someone knocked on the door. Lillian froze, heart pounding. A timid footman’s voice called in from the hallway. «Coffee?»
Jinadh took one look at her face and burst into helpless laughter. At first, she was chagrined, but then she found it was infectious, and surrendered.
* * *
Cordelia could say one thing about Pulan, which was no matter what dust and thunder got kicked up around her house, she always put food on the table.
Not, necessarily, that folk showed up to meals on time.
Breakfast had been laid out on the terrace, but so far only Asiyah and Inaz had staggered out, bleary-eyed, to drain small cups of coffee and retreat to the cool interior of the house. They must have got up to more than smoking hookah last night, and she was glad she hadn’t joined them—better to have a clear head around this house.
Memmediv, understandably, had stayed in bed. Daoud was missing again. Pulan looked almost naked without him, and now each time she turned to ask him for something—write down a date, check her calendar—and found him missing, annoyance flashed in her eyes.
Ari was missing, too. But given his mood last night, Cordelia didn’t think he was up to shucking any oysters.
When Jinadh and Lillian showed up at breakfast, though, Cordelia had to shove a piece of pastry in her mouth to keep from saying something off-color. She choked on it, too, so she ended up coughing and pounding on her chest.
Lillian had a blush on her cheek, and couldn’t quite raise her eyes. Jinadh looked pleased with himself. A love bite bloomed just inside the collar of his tunic, a mottled shadow on his brown-black skin.
Pulan pursed her lips and picked up her coffee, ignoring their entrance.
She must be croup-serious about this taboo thing. And she could see the strain starting to ratchet tighter on Lillian’s face, and anger evaporating the sleepy, sated look Jinadh had been wearing so well.
So Cordelia swallowed down the dry lump of flaky dough that had choked her, and managed a hoarse “Glad to see you two ain’t been getting up to nothing.”
That broke the awkwardness that had started to pile up like a thunderhead. Lillian turned even pinker.
“Ms. DePaul,” said Pulan, without a spare glance for Jinadh or a spare second for small talk, “I understand you came to Hadhariti for an explanation.”
Lillian lowered herself into an empty chair, embarrassment fading from her cheeks. “It wouldn’t go amiss.”
“Ms. Lehane agreed to help us with your problem,” said Pulan. “Long before, I now understand, you truly agreed to help with ours.”
“I apologize,” said Lillian. “But you must see—”
“She is only trying to raise your guilt,” said Jinadh. “Do not let her.”
Lillian shot him a sharp look, all her tenderness replaced with rue. “And I was only trying to be polite.”
He shrugged and sank back into the wicker divan, giving Lillian the stage. But he didn’t stop staring at Cordelia, hunger and hope bright in his eyes.
“They tell me you can get my son,” said Lillian. Then, at the press of Jinadh’s hand over hers, she added, “Our son. What is your plan?”
“I got a lot of people still roaming around Gedda,” said Cordelia, which was sort of true. For accuracy, she should probably have dropped “a lot.”
“The Catwalk,” said Lillian. “We can be frank. It isn’t a secret any longer.”
“Right. So, I’ve got—or should have—a pair of hands in Cantrell who can set me up with something. Except communications are rough. We used to use a radio channel, but we’d change the codes and frequencies pretty often, and the broadcast time. Miss one call, you can’t pick up the next one.” It had been a good system. Nobody had ever got drug in off a tip from the wireless. Only once folk started talking in person. “There are safe houses and drop points all over the country but what good does that do me if I’m in Porachis?”
“You are going back to Gedda?” Lillian’s flush evaporated. “I can’t say I like your odds.”
“I’m clever and keen,” she said, defensive. Memmediv had said the same thing, and other people’s doubt always made her cocky. “And I can keep my head down. But I do have a problem.”
“Which is?”
“Once I get there, I don’t know what things are supposed to look like. Figured you could help with that. What’s the steps to this dance? Who picks your kid up at the end of term? What kind of car do they drive? What kind of papers they carry?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never gone along. My guess is a black car, government plates. Maybe flags on the bonnet. That’s how the diplomats’ children went when I was young, but that was years ago. Someone at the school could tell you, probably.”
Greasepaint might know somebody, if he was still in place. Mother’s tits, too many ifs.
“They’d carry credentials, too,” said Lillian. “And there’s always a letter, saying who’s to take him, and where. Flagg usually writes the letters,” she added. “I only sign them.”
That cruelty had an outsize sting. It was funny, how the small insults really made her gorge rise, when the Ospies stood for much larger things, and worse.
“This time,” said Cordelia, “you’re gonna write it. We can get a car easy enough, and the flags. Plates’ll be tough but we might be able to fake that with some spit and polish.” She was lying, a little, maybe. But even if her folk were all drug in to the last pair of boots, surely she could scrounge a car. For Queen’s sake.
“You’ll have to get there before the people they actually send,” she cautioned. “Otherwise I’m fairly certain they’ll be able to tell the difference.”
“Have you signed Flagg’s letter yet?” asked Cordelia.
Lillian nodded. “Last week. What about the government credentials?”
Yeah, she was stuck on that one, too.
“I have some.”
They all looked up at the new voice. Memmediv leaned heavily on one of the pillars, wearing dark glasses and holding a cup of steaming coffee.
“Mr. Memmediv,” said Pulan, a little too brightly. “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Unwell,” he said, and staggered toward an empty chair. By the time he sat down there was a fine white line around his lips.
“Perhaps,” Jinadh suggested frostily, “you should have stayed in bed.”
“And miss the explanation that I promised to Ms. DePaul? Especially when it seems I might be useful. Permit me one suggestion?”
Cordelia looked to Lillian. Her jaw was stiff and where Jinadh’s hand was on her knee she covered it with her own. She didn’t clench her fist, but the pads of her fingers were pale from the pressure. Still, she gave a single, curt nod.
“Let me get the boy.”
For a tense moment, Lillian said nothing and Jinadh watched her. Cordelia prayed this living DePaul could step over the dead (or resurrected) one. She needed Memmediv to stay on her good side.
“What are you thinking?” Lillian asked, after a pause that taught Cordelia the scripture by heart.
“I need a way out of Porachis that will take me close to the border, and my people, once the guns come through. Flagg is already suspicious, and Lillian can only put him off for so long. When things crumble, which they will, I want to be safely out from under his boot. I can bring the boy across the border to Asiyah, on the film set. He can fly Stephen wherever you need him to be. Whic
h, I think, should be outside of Porachis.”
“You’re too high profile,” said Lillian.
“No,” he said. “I’m just high enough. Nobody at Cantrell will question me, not with my credentials. Not the way I will wield them.”
“And Flagg?” She was bearing down on him now, like a sleek hound over a rat or a weasel. “How am I supposed to distract him from your absence? What am I supposed to say?”
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “As long as we have a good diversion. Ideally, one that puts the spotlight where Flagg doesn’t want it, and keeps the press attaché far too busy for intrigue.”
The coin hit the pavement half a second later for Cordelia than it did for Lillian, who was already saying, “You’re talking about Sofie Keeler, aren’t you? Breaking the story about her wife in jail?”
Memmediv touched the frames of his sunglasses, moving them a fussy fraction of an inch up his nose. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t have to: His smile crept across his face at quarter-speed.
“It … isn’t a bad plan.”
Cordelia wondered what it cost Lillian to say that. Her face gave nothing away.
“It is an excellent plan,” said Pulan, “and puts Vasily where I would prefer him, without bringing my name into the … oh, fiasco? Yes. Does it suit you, Ms. Lehane? You could travel together. It would give you good cover, moving with an Ospie diplomat.”
She liked it. She hated that she liked it, but Pulan was right. She could pose as Memmediv’s secretary, maybe. Wear a skirt suit and gloves with the fingers stuffed and not say much at all. Just nod and smile and get him sandwiches, like Daoud did for Pulan. And how many times had she forgotten Daoud was even in the room? She would be invisible.
Lillian looked like she was working up to say something, but before she could get it out, the ring of leather on marble echoed from inside the house, and Daoud came skidding onto the terrace, out of breath.
He gasped something in Porashtu, which got him a swear out of Pulan, and a name.
“Aristide,” she said, with the same kind of long-suffering venom Cordelia had heard out of people married to drunks who just wouldn’t die.
“Please excuse me.” Pulan rose from her chair and set her coffee by. “A small problem has arisen.”
And while Lillian and Jinadh seemed content to let her handle it, and Memmediv had turned even paler than before, Cordelia got up to follow.
* * *
He was actually in the rotten car before Pulan came after him. But she caught him cursing at a flooded engine, trapped in the turnaround.
He’d meant to get an earlier start, but slept through sunrise and woken with a pounding head that wouldn’t permit any sudden movements. He hadn’t managed to pack the night before, and while he didn’t need many things, he did need some. He was so ill-prepared he felt trapped in a parody of his flight from Amberlough. Even the outcomes were reversed.
Stones, he hoped the outcomes would be reversed.
“Aristide,” said Pulan, “where are you rushing to, so soon after your return?”
Cordelia trailed after her, narrow-eyed and silent. He resented her for looking so much better than she had when he scooped her from the gutter last week, and for slotting so easily into Pulan’s subterfuge. The shadows under her eyes had faded, and she walked a little straighter—less like she expected a sniper’s shot or a bomb blast. He suspected the latter had less to do with food and sleep and more to do with successful business dealings. She took to Pulan’s lifestyle very well, with excellent effect, while all it had done for him was break his teeth, give him an ulcer, and turn him into an alcoholic.
Well. Perhaps the lifestyle wasn’t entirely to blame.
“You were supposed to find my resignation letter after I’d gone,” he said. “It’s stuck to my desk. With a knife, and all my love.”
“Well, I did not find it,” she said. “I found you first. Which means I can tell you in person, I do not accept it.”
“I don’t care if you do or don’t.” He tried the ignition again, to no avail. Queen’s cunt, if he had to walk to Anadh, he would. “I’m leaving.”
“If this is about Mr. Memmediv—”
“It doesn’t matter what it’s about,” he said. “Nothing you can say will keep me in this house a moment longer.”
“If you go,” said Pulan, “you put many of us in danger. Including—perhaps especially—Ms. Lehane.”
He hoped he didn’t look as startled as Cordelia did. He certainly felt it. “Explain that one to me.”
She crossed the gravel of the drive and folded her arms on the side of his car, tucking her chin over her crossed wrists. Kitten-like, she smiled.
“Do you think it prudent,” she said, “to stir up a storm of gossip in the glossies at this moment? Do you think it would be good, to have so many curious eyes watching the studio, as we begin to shoot in Tzieta?”
She had leaned into the last sentence a little too hard. “You don’t want me tearing the lid off your little business deal.”
“Nobody does,” she said. “Am I right, Ms. Lehane?”
A flush turned her sunburned face blotchy under its freckles. “Pulan, I don’t—”
“What did you do?” he asked, because this had become absurd: all of the elisions and evasions and the questions neither asked nor answered. The assumption that ignorance meant safety for both of them. “Who did you become, while my back was turned? Sofie Cattayim said you’re some kind of terrorist.”
“And what do you know of Sofie Cattayim?” Pulan’s voice was sharp with curiosity, and maybe fear.
“I know our friend here got her into an awful bind,” said Aristide, “and she wanted me to get her out.”
“You gave her Memmediv’s name,” said Cordelia. “Tits, Ari. Like trouble wasn’t tailing us close enough already.”
“Us,” he hissed, and shook his head. “She was right, then. What is it you’re up to now? Planning some kind of fireworks display?”
“If I tell you,” she said, “you promise you won’t go haring off to Liso?”
His dignity bowed heavily under that assumption, but he shored it up and raised his chin. “You don’t know where I’m going.”
Her eye roll bore down heavily on his creaking sense of self-assurance. “Well, if all you’re going to do is mock me,” he said, and made as if to turn the useless key.
“Ari, wait.” Cordelia took a step forward, dropping her attitude in favor of earnest insistence. “Stay. Just for a little while—a week or so. It wouldn’t be great if you went right now and folk start looking our way. Especially not with Lillian—”
“Oh, are you going to twist that knife as well?” He wrenched the keys so hard they tore the skin in the crease of his knuckle. Hissing, he pulled back his hand. There was nothing for the engine but to let it drain. “You might as well fillet me.”
“I ain’t twisting,” she said. “I ain’t in that line. Never have been. Why do you always think other folk’ll do what you would? We ain’t all got your gears and springs behind our eyes.”
“Perhaps,” said Pulan, “we could discuss this indoors? The heat is coming up.”
“I’m scared,” said Cordelia, and he admired how she ran over Pulan in favor of him. Not many people would dare. “Not just for me. I’m scared for Lillian and her kid and that dope who’d lie down in front of a—”
“Kid?” he said, because he’d stopped listening after she said that. The other words had flowed over him while that one burrowed in and stuck, parasitic, leaching warmth from his limbs.
“Yeah,” said Cordelia. “Mother’s tits, I can’t keep track of who knows what anymore. Her kid. Stephen. With Jinadh.”
He blinked at his own hands on the useless steering wheel, wondering when his grip had grown so tight. “A son?”
“Aristide, please get out of the car.”
Distantly, he could tell Pulan’s voice had taken on an edge. She was still trying to be pleasant, but she was a ha
irsbreadth from calling for Pramit or one of the bigger footmen to manhandle him out of the driver’s seat, if necessary.
Maybe they would have to. He wasn’t sure his own limbs would obey him. He couldn’t remember exactly how it felt to move under his own power.
Cyril would have been—or was?—an uncle. Why did that strike him as little else had? It did not hurt worse than Cyril’s death, or his sudden resurrection so swiftly followed by news of his disappearance. It didn’t have the same heft as any of those things. But like a sliver of glass, featherweight and nearly invisible, it slipped into him with agonizing precision and promised pain with every step, every brush of fabric on his skin.
“How old is he?” His own voice, wet and hoarse and caught deep in his chest, alarmed him. He did not sound like himself.
“I don’t see—” Pulan started, but Cordelia cut her off.
“He’s eight,” she said. “Old enough to be away at school.”
Another thing he had never known. Had never thought to ask. Not, he suspected, that Cyril would have told the whole truth. But he might have guessed something from the other man’s evasions, if he’d bothered to elicit them in the first place.
How careful they had been with each other, despite the bruises, scratches, bite marks, blows.
He felt a sense of inevitability drawing close around him. There might have been resentment, too, but it was muffled, far away. All he felt now was the riptide of Cordelia’s confession drawing him along: I’m scared for Lillian and her kid.
He could leave now and run headlong into the Lisoan jungle, but if he found Cyril, did he want to haul him out of the jungle to see Lillian’s face on the front page of the paper, Cordelia in prison or worse, and all of it his fault for being in too much of a hurry?
He yanked the keys from the ignition so suddenly he caught Cordelia flinching from the corner of his eye. “All right,” he said, “but from here on out, you tell me everything.”
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