The memory of the hooded figure watching her window from the snowy street came to the surface as she reached Voorstraat, and she broke into a trot, slipping over the icy cobbles but staying upright. That hadn’t been a dream, not a waking one nor the regular kind, and gazing back through the haze of her mind to that night, she saw the silhouetted features of Jan beneath the hood, the snowlight flashing on his handsome, upturned face. If there was a comfort to be had in knowing you were mad, Jolanda could not see it.
Taking the stoop in a bound, green velvet gown flapping like a sail in a squall, the Lady Tieselen fled inside her house and did not emerge again that day. When Lijsbet came to her bedroom after supper, Jolanda let her maid under the covers but pretended to be asleep, not trusting herself to keep it together if she started talking. Better to push it all down, let it sink under, the way she was sinking into the pallet as Lijsbet droned on and on. The maid sounded like the fisherboys shouting at Jolanda as she swam from them, voices garbled by water and waves, and then the surface closed over her, the tide spinning her ’round and ’round until she settled facing the bottom, everything dim and cool.
She found her brother Pieter down there. She had no idea how he might look now, or even what he had looked like when he’d left home so very long ago, but it was surely he. It should have been a good dream, then, for she missed him even down all these days, but it wasn’t.
He was in the dining room from her other dream, the waking one she had suffered in the flooded Oudeland manse. They had candles burning down there in the meer, the table set with putrid food, the poses of the seated corpses so identical to how real nobles sat at supper that when she’d first attended one in Wurfbain’s Leyden manor, she had nearly fainted from the shock of it, the vision from the sunken house somehow forgotten until that very moment. Count Wurfbain and Lady Zoete had turned to acknowledge her and Sander when they’d joined the table, but thankfully the drowned Tieselens had done no such thing when she swam through the kitchen door and saw them arrayed at their board. She’d already found the one corpse in the kitchen, but seeing all these dead folk sitting there as if the flood had never happened would have been bad enough even without the eels.
The drowned graaf and his family had worn them in place of clothing. It was nauseating, seeing the swarming black ribbons coiling around one another and the bones of the Tieselens to make doublets and gowns and even feathers in hats and hairpins for veils. She had known then that she was dreaming despite being awake, and so hesitated in the doorway for only a moment before swimming to the table, and the man who sat at its head.
A beard of eels curling down through his jawbone, a glint of metal on the finger of the hand that rested around the stem of a black goblet. Floating over the table, she saw the wine that filled it was a mass of tiny red eels, and she nervously expected them to explode from the glass as she wrested his skeletal hand free. Instead she knocked the goblet over and the thin coils of the elvers spread across the tabletop like liquid, running in rivulets that only broke the illusion of wine when they reached the edge of the table and ran off it in long threads rather than individual drops.
There was the ring, cold and heavy in her palm, and as soon as it was there, the shadow of the great catfish passed over the open window. Jan must have swum through that very window on his first attempt to find the ring, when it was still too muddled with silt to see his family as he passed them, blindly seeking access to the second floor and the bedroom where he believed the ring to be. So close, Jan! In this dream Jan did swim past her, then, into the kitchen, and she made for the window just as she had on that day when he had tried to murder her, when she had found what Sander was made of.
She went to pop the ring into her mouth, to better swim with open palms and keep the prize tucked beneath her tongue until the catfish would spook her into swallowing it. As she raised her hand to her lips, however, she felt not the metal band but something cold and slimy squirming in her fist. Try as she did to keep it trapped, the young eel wriggled between her fingers. She chased it, but then Pieter was there, rearing up from the murk just as the catfish had, and the elver-ring swam directly into his needle-ridged maw. She twisted away, through the water and the nightmare and the memories, but could not awake, much as she wanted to. As in life, so in dreams.
IV.
If I think of anything else, like, I’ll look you up,” said Sander as the sheriff in charge of the city militia offered him a bow on the stoop. The sheriff was just how Sander always pictured sheriffs when he heard the word—big, cow-faced plaguebitch with a mustache like a woolly caterpillar and a squint you couldn’t slide a sheaf of vellum through. Lansloet stood at the ready to close the door, as though this were some welcome guest being shown out and not a rat-eyed chiseler working an angle.
The sheriff said something about that being very good and all as he left. As soon as Lansloet had the door closed, Sander let out a bottled breath in the servant’s face, the vintage of which must have been impressive indeed, for the normally unflappable Lansloet coughed into his spindly fist. It was the second morning after Sander had slain Braem—the day after the dirty deed, Graaf Tieselen had not left his manse, but now Sander was itching to be away from the oppressively cramped quarters.
“Who saw Simon with the kids?” Jo met him in the hallway, but Sander pushed past her.
“Shouldn’t eavesdrop,” he muttered. “Some sheephead fishermen, nobody we know.”
“Wurfbain’s friends, I don’t doubt, and how does that prove anything?” Jo said, following him. “So what if some fishers saw him with ’em while they were alive? Simon’s a creeper, no question, but he’s no killer!”
“No,” said Sander. “He’s not.”
Sander hadn’t tried to hide Braem’s body or anything, yet the sheriff had only brought news of Simon’s impending execution, with no mention of the condemned man’s brother having been found murdered in the street. Why not? No man could walk off a stomped stump, no way, no how, and the odds of nobody noticing a dead man in the mouth of an alley after two nights and a full day between them seemed pushing reason harder than a man had to push to pass piss through a morning cockstand. No, the militia must have found the dead Braem and suspected Sander, but not having enough to go on, were trying to trick him into letting something slip to the sheriff.
“Let’s go and see him,” said Jo. “They’ll let you into his cell, they have to!”
“Nay, going to see Primm,” said Sander, the commission he’d ordered from the fat man suddenly seeming like a vital addition to the household instead of a fun toy he could pick up any old time. He tried very hard to avoid thinking of how Simon had helped him pick out the wood for that particular arbalest. Much as he wanted to visit the incarcerated Gruyere, how would it look for him to associate with a reviled, doomed child-killer, especially with Hobbe like as not looking for a means of discrediting the Tieselens? According to the sheriff, there was no question as to Simon’s guilt—a boatload of fishermen had detoured by the Tieselen warehouse to see about buying a cask, only to discover Simon up to his knees in the mudflat, a headless boy half-buried before him.
Poor cunt was doubtless trying to retrieve the body to turn it over to the militia, but luck of the luckless, got rumbled midway through—where had Braem been during all that? Sander had told Simon before the brothers had dropped everyone off at the Rotterdam harbor to pretend to find the body only when Braem was with him, so he’d have someone to back him up if the militia tried to pin the crime on him… little late to ask Braem now, Sander thought ruefully, and what could he himself do for Simon?
Bust him out, a part of Sander suggested, spring the fool… but Sander throttled the thought. Simon had brought this on himself by being an impatient fusspot, and so he’d have to stew in his cell until Sander thought of a way of freeing the idiot that didn’t involve jeopardizing both himself and Jo. They were far too vulnerable to try anything rash to save Simon before Sander could figure out what exactly Hobbe was plotting.
Then there was the question of what exactly Simon had told the militia since his arrest, what he might say if prompted…
“You going to let me tag along, or am I confined to the house again?”
“Nobody confined you,” said Sander, having wandered back through the kitchen to the dining room, where his interrupted breakfast awaited.
“I did as you told and stayed inside yesterday,” said the girl, looking a touch more sheepish than usual for some stupid reason. She’d been acting strange ever since they got back to Dordt, and hadn’t said a word at supper the night before. Odd, but now she seemed back to her annoying old ways, or close enough. “What’s going on? You think I’m too thick to see how queer things are?”
Sander had hoped she was that thick, but that was the problem with the little bitch, too clever where it inconvenienced him and too dull when he needed her sharp. If she’d been smarter, she would have cottoned on to Sander faster, forced him to talk sooner. Now that she had called him out, how much to tell her? Not about Braem, definitely not that, but maybe something…
“Get your shit on,” he said, looking down at the hard bread and harder cheese on his plate. Everything might be totally fucked, they might have to be out of the city by nightfall. The uncertain situation with Hobbe was one thing, but now that Simon was nabbed and might well finger Sander as an accomplice if a certain count leaned on him heavy enough… Then there was Sander’s actually having murdered someone in the city, and the militia staying mum on it… You didn’t need to be as quick on your toes as Sander was to see it might be time to cut their losses. “Wear your armor. Big cloak, something with a deep hood.”
“We’re going to see Simon before coming back here,” said Jo as she turned to leave. “You don’t have a choice on that.”
“We’ll talk about it when we’re out,” was the biggest bone he was willing to throw her, but it was enough to get her moving.
Sander sat back down at the table, dunked the bread into his wine, and sucked on the ruddy rye. If they were to just make a break for it, this very day, how much could they pack up without being obvious? He’d stop by Laurent’s office, see if that scoundrel would still work for him, even after Sander’s severing ties with Hobbe. If anyone knew a good way of transforming weighty metal wealth into the sort of words on vellum that Sander could trade for coin somewhere else, it was Laurent. Of course Hobbe wouldn’t stand for Sander’s maintaining the part of noble after their falling out, of course Sander had put himself in a precarious position by bumping Braem, but there might still be time, there might…
But what if the situation with Braem was different than how Sander had initially seen it? Braem had said spies were everywhere, that Sander shouldn’t be seen with him, and even to the end Braem had been a Cod loyalist, whereas Hobbe was as Hook as they came… What if the spies Braem had feared were Hobbe’s? If the count caught wind of Braem’s murder, would it restore his faith that Sander was a better Hook than a Cod, that he might still be useful? Or at least convince him that Sander could now be blackmailed if necessary? Not like Hobbe had a lot of better options, one of the two legitimate heirs to the Tieselen wine importation business being dead and the other condemned to the same, and so if he got rid of Sander now, he was as good as out of Dordt politics… might be worth trying to patch things up with Hobbe, rather than just abandoning a king’s ransom on account of the Old Sander rising to the surface, making Graaf Tieselen nervous…
And what about Hertog Von Wasser? He was a powerful man if ever there was one—should Sander risk turning to him for help with clearing Simon’s name and combating Hobbe’s schemes? Or would that be even worse, exposing his weaknesses to a man who had, up until a fortnight ago, wished nothing but the very worst for the Tieselen family?
Then there remained the question of who was watching Sander from the Grote Markt the night of Braem’s murder. Gilles had done a similar impression of being hanged when they’d first met at the White Horse, and so he came to mind first. Even if the Frenchman hadn’t pissed off back to grapetown like he’d claimed, though, he was a sight stockier than this cunt had been. A wee bastard could bulk himself up with extra clothes and all, sure, but Sander had never heard of a trick that let a big man look markedly smaller.
What about Hobbe, then? One of his men? It hadn’t been Simon, that much was sure—Braem had been honest about his brother being locked up… What else might the deceased Gruyere have been telling the truth about?
Being so confused made Sander want to puke. He closed his eyes, trying to find a loose end amongst the knotted possibilities in order to start unraveling the scheme, to find out if he was part of the hunting party this time or if he was the quarry—at present he was doing a merry jig on the safe side of the gibbet, but it was his fault Simon would be fitted for a hemp necklace before very long, and who knew, he might soon be joining the Gruyere in doing a different sort of gallows dance. Again his thoughts turned to somehow busting Simon out…
“Are you neuking kidding me?” said Jo, and blinking at her, he saw she was ready to go, her conspicuous brigandine attire smothered under a hooded canvas cloak—one of his old jobs, if he wasn’t mistaken.
“Nay, I was just… won’t be a tic,” and Sander was out of his chair and up the stairs, telling himself nothing was fucked, everything was good, he had friends now, Von Wasser and the other Cods he’d met at Brouwershaven, and the old broad Jo had dined with…
Or if not friends, people who found him and Jo useful.
Or who might find them useful…
The cold truth was that Sander was out of his depth and needed help, and between his choice of Hobbe or a Cod, he’d take the Cod. His odds weren’t much better with Von Wasser, maybe, but at least this way he’d have a decent shot at fucking Hobbe over even if he doomed himself in the process.
Pick up the commission from Primm, then head straight to Willem’s manor, which was somewhere along the harbor. So yeah, go to Von Wasser, offer Willem the exquisite new crossbow as a sort of princely friend-making gift—much as it would pain Sander to give the weapon away without having used it—and then tell the hertog how Count Hobbe Wurfbain was out to get him, that the dirty, lying Hook would do anything to get at the Tieselens… Now, that was a plan!
The streets were shallow canals from the snowmelt, and the sun had brought out crowds of women and children tired of being cooped up by a winter that couldn’t make up its mind whether it wished to be brutal or mild. As a result, Sander had to abandon any hope of staying on the edges of the roads where he might keep his boots dry and instead plowed through the wet, dragging Jo along after him. She was nattering about the importance of visiting Simon immediately, but he was too busy keeping an eye on the faces drifting past them, all of which looked vaguely familiar. That one there was definitely a graafling made destitute from the flood, just as the Gruyeres had been, and had he been eyeing Sander a little too long? Was he the one from the square? Had his family been Hook or Cod before the flood?
And why were there so many more cats out than usual? A clowder of the mangy strays crept along curbs and atop walls behind them… Sander must be losing his shit, because if put on the spot by a bishop, he’d admit to suspecting that they were watching him as well. That was just crazy… wasn’t it?
“Sander,” Jo hissed. “We’re here.”
“Huh?” Looking up, Sander saw they’d almost passed Poorter’s door. Glad to be out of the watery streets with all their potential assassins and spies, strange human and stranger feline, Sander hot-footed it up the stairs and banged on the door. Silence. Sander knocked again, and finally came the sound of bolts being slid back.
“What?” The door had opened barely a crack, Poorter clearly aiming to keep them out. Fuck that.
“Here to get that piece you’re making me,” said Sander, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. “Thought we might have a blather while we’re here.”
“I’m sorry, Graaf Tieselen,” said Poorter. “The commission isn’t ready,
and at present I find myself—”
“Come on, cunt,” said Sander, his smile positively stinging now from the effort as he put his hand on the side of the door. “I’m not going to—”
“Later,” Poorter whined. “Please, I… I’ve got a woman here and—”
“Ah, I getcha,” said Sander, pretending to be put at ease by this and taking his hand off the door. A cloud had passed over the sun, and he was able to make out Poorter a bit better through the gap between wall and door. Unless he was mistaken… “Got something on your nose, old boy.”
Yes. Instead of lifting his right hand, which was definitely bandaged, Poorter took his left off the inside of the door to gingerly touch his face. As soon as he did, Sander threw himself into the door, not giving a pike’s tooth if anyone in the street saw him forcing his way inside. Poorter was neatly knocked back and then Jo was right there, closing the door after them as they slid inside fast as good luck slipping through your fingers.
Poorter lay on his back, bleating like a birthing sheep, and between his bruised, swollen face and cloth-wrapped hand Sander supposed he wasn’t putting on a show for once. Jo locked the door behind them as Sander bounded over the prone artisan and ran to the kitchen. He hadn’t forgotten his sword this time, and not that piece of shit he’d taken off Braem—that one had gone straight out his bedroom window and into the canal—but his real girl, Glory’s End herself, honed and hard for him. How she’d gotten from the Oudeland bog to his bedside scabbard warranted no scrutiny—she always found her way to him when he needed her.
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