She headed on down the grand stair, shoulders slumped in exhaustion. Mikael went back up. He drew Aldassa away from the sentries. “You found her?”
Aldassa didn’t ask how he knew. “Yes. Near the Iron Bridge. Body was simply abandoned on the river walk, sometime before dawn. They meant for her to be found quickly.”
“If it was there, they meant as many people as possible to see the body.” Something in his dreams made him think that the killer wanted the attention. Wanted to be seen. Where did that idea come from?
“Looks so,” Aldassa said. “Newspapers aren’t printing this, police aren’t talking about it, so they’re making sure it gets out by word of mouth. You look like shit.”
“It’s been a lousy morning,” Mikael agreed, unoffended. “Did you bring the body here?”
“Yes.” Aldassa tilted his dark head toward the courtyard. “I think the sentries knew what we were bringing in. They all wanted to touch. Come see?”
Mikael followed Aldassa back out into the cool air of the courtyard. The army’s cart was likely made for transporting supplies, but today it held a single blanket-wrapped form.
Mikael glanced up at the rooftops of the palace and saw several of the sentries there watching the scene in the courtyard below. Aldassa nodded to the two soldiers who held the horses’ reins, and they averted their faces. He gently drew back the blanket, exposing the body to midchest.
Mikael stared down at the pale face of Iselin Lucas. Whoever had laid her in the cart had carefully straightened her braids, leaving them to lie over her shoulder as if she lay sleeping, but the sheen of blood that covered her chest and abdomen and the terrible carvings in her skin were still clear to see.
“Did you know her?” Aldassa asked.
“Yes. One of the twenty-twos.” He didn’t want to explain that he’d talked to her only the night before last. “Her name is Iselin. They missed her this morning.”
Aldassa raised his eyebrows, an unspoken question.
“I was told she had a boyfriend in the city,” Mikael explained. “Evidently, she went out early yesterday evening to meet him and never returned. I sent that message to your office, but they probably missed you.” Then he realized what seemed wrong about this body. “They kept writing.”
Aldassa’s brows drew together. “Meaning?”
Mikael took a deep breath and then cringed when his aching lungs protested. “She died before they finished,” he said. “I know that from my dream. But for blood magic to work, the victim has to be alive, doesn’t she? So why finish the inscription after she died?”
Mikael’s stomach abruptly turned, but he held the nausea at bay, quickly looking away from Iselin’s face.
Aldassa covered Iselin’s body again, obscuring the marks from curious eyes, but then he lifted the side of the blanket to show Mikael the dead woman’s wrist, ringed with bruising and scrapes. “Ligature marks,” Aldassa said. “She was bound.”
“Any marks on the first two?” Mikael asked.
“No.”
Mikael felt his neck, fingering that tender spot that told him Iselin had been drugged like the others. “Why bind her and drug her?”
“More for you to answer,” Aldassa said. “Will I have access to the body? We did find her.”
Dahar hadn’t yet discussed with the colonel the issue of jurisdiction, so Mikael didn’t tell Aldassa that they wanted to use his people to continue the investigation. “I can see to it that you and Kassannan are given access, under the Daujom’s name. Cerradine, too, of course.”
The three of them had been raised in the fortress, so it was a simpler matter to get them past the sentries than it would be to allow outsiders in. Aldassa nodded, accepting those conditions. He glanced toward the palace walls, and Mikael turned back to see that a pair of sentries now stood at the door that led to the grand stair, waiting on them.
“Can they take her?” Mikael asked.
Aldassa gestured for the sentries to come over. The four of them lifted the body from the cart, still wrapped in its blue army blanket, and carried it directly to the grand stair into Below. Mikael’s aching lungs began to protest, his breath coming short again. The cold rooms were on Seven Down, a long way to go.
But halfway down the grand stair, two more sentries came away from their duty posts, not asking what the blanket held. They helped carry the body down the stairs. More joined the first two as they reached One Down, sparing Mikael the burden. He let one take his place and followed.
Some came merely to touch the blanket-wrapped burden, a silent contact, then moved away. They became a somber processional in black, slowly moving down each level into the depths of Below.
• • •
The first housemaid, ostensibly needing to build up the fire in Shironne’s bedroom, came to tell her that Verinne had left the colonel standing on the steps outside the front door.
Infuriated, Shironne dashed down to the door and opened it herself.
Verinne tottered up behind her, exuding a mixture of terror and fury. “You mustn’t let him in!”
The colonel didn’t seem daunted by the old woman’s protest. “I need to borrow Shironne for a time. Things have taken a bad turn.”
“No,” Verinne said quickly.
“Of course I’ll come,” Shironne said over her. “Verinne, this is important.”
“I can wait here on the steps, madam,” the colonel said in a placating voice. “I won’t enter the household.”
“There’s been another death,” Shironne told him. “I had terrible dreams. Or perhaps I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t sure this time.”
That sparked the colonel’s interest. “They found the body a couple of hours ago, and it’s been taken to the palace. I need to take you there, so I felt I should come myself to take you.”
A thrill of exhilaration spun through Shironne. He meant to take her to the palace. “I’ll go get my coat.”
“No, you’ll stay here,” Verinne insisted, her agitation spreading. “This household is in mourning. Your mother wouldn’t want . . .”
Shironne wanted to yell at the old woman but shook her head to get that idea out of it. She was reflecting Verinne’s frustration. She drew a deep breath and interrupted the woman’s nascent tirade. “My mother would want me to help. I have her permission to work with the colonel. I’m going, and I won’t change my mind.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead she made her way back up to her room, located her coat, and returned to the front door, where the colonel was still trying to smooth Verinne’s ruffled feathers. Shironne didn’t give the governess a chance to protest again. She walked out the door and held out one hand for the colonel to take.
Fortunately, her bravado wasn’t in vain, because the colonel set her hand on his arm and led her down the steps and to the waiting carriage. Once he’d gotten her settled and stepped up himself, she grabbed the hand strap and held on. The carriage immediately began to roll away.
“Did you notice anything unusual about the dream?” he asked.
Shironne shifted against the seat as the coach took a turn. “It was odd, in many ways. It was clearer, to begin with.”
“Anything else?”
She tilted her head. “Before the dream, sir. It seemed almost like the Angel of Death was . . . I don’t know, calling me. Like he was afraid I might not hear. I don’t know how to explain that.”
He found that interesting but didn’t respond.
“And . . .” She hesitated. “I felt like there was someone else there, watching everything. Someone evil. I know that sounds melodramatic, sir. I’ve sensed that before, but not as clearly.”
“The young woman who died was a Lucas, Shironne,” he informed her.
“They killed someone from the Family? That’s legally . . . um, bad, isn’t it?”
“Yes, legally bad,” the col
onel said, letting her feel his amusement over her flawed terminology. “Among other things, it changes who’s in control of investigating the deaths. Now the Daujom’s in charge.”
“What does that mean for us?”
“It means the prince would be within his rights to demand that I turn over everything concerning the investigation, including you.”
“What?”
“As a witness,” the colonel clarified. “You viewed the first body, and since he doesn’t have that body to look at, you and Kassannan could be required to supply that information.”
Judging by his tone and her sense of him, Shironne didn’t think that would happen. But it was interesting how much this third death changed his sense of urgency about the whole thing. “I’m willing to do whatever is needed.”
“I’m hoping Dahar—the prince—will leave the case in my hands, or at least offer to coordinate with our investigation. I don’t know how he’ll react to involving you. You are his niece, after all.”
Shironne had known that the palace’s investigators, the Daujom, were overseen by the king’s brother. For some reason, she hadn’t ever thought of him as her uncle. It was a strange thought. “Does he know I work for you?”
“Whenever I’ve mentioned you,” Cerradine said, “I haven’t used your name. But he has numerous investigators who work for his office, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows your identity. On the other hand, we’ve worked hard to keep your actual duties secret, so I don’t think he knows that you’re anything other than a regular sensitive like your mother.”
“Will that make a difference?”
“Yes,” Cerradine said. “You see, it means that I’ve been keeping a secret from him. That I’m acquainted with your family and he’s not. Dahar hates being left out, whether or not there’s a good reason. I always felt that if your mother wasn’t ready to meet him, then she shouldn’t.”
“It’s not that she didn’t want to meet him,” Shironne corrected. “Mama’s actually curious about her half brothers. She’s seen the king on a number of occasions, but not his brother, so she took us to a melee when we were children in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. She’d heard he was a judge there, or something like that.”
That set off the wheels of thought in the colonel’s mind. He didn’t speak for a moment, so Shironne turned her attention to the sounds outside the carriage. Traffic seemed quieter than usual, as if people were in mourning. No, they were frightened, she decided, the worry almost a taste in the air.
“When was this?” Cerradine asked.
Called back to attention, Shironne smiled ruefully. It wasn’t as if she could forget that fair. She’d made an idiot out of herself. “I was eleven,” she said. “The summer fair.”
The fair took up a great deal of the king’s public park, an area that had once been on the outskirts of Noikinos but had since been subsumed by the city.
“Interesting. Did she see Dahar?”
“I . . . um, fell and we had to go home,” Shironne admitted, rubbing the scar that crossed her palm. Fell was the kindest way she could put what had happened. She’d actually tumbled over the rail into the arena itself, forcing the martial competition to come to a halt. Her mother had been mortified and whisked her away before anyone recognized them. “Mama didn’t have the chance.”
“Too bad. Dahar would have noticed the resemblance immediately. He sees himself in a mirror often enough.”
Shironne grinned. The comment was tinged with affection, though. “You like him, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. Sometimes he irritates me. I’m certain I annoy him. But we’ve been good friends for many, many years.”
The carriage came to a stop then, and the door opened from without. They were at the palace, Shironne realized. Whoever stood at the door managed to combine curiosity with control, a reaction that fit what she knew about the Lucas Family. This had to be the sentry line at the fence. She’d seen it when she was a child, of course, the wrought-iron fence defended by a line of stern Family all in black, pale hair in sleek braids, all alike. They had seemed mystical, but she’d been young and had used only her eyes. The minds around her now seemed little different from those of the colonel’s people, only more uniformly controlled.
The person standing at the carriage door stepped up onto the frame, causing the carriage to sway a bit. “Colonel Cerradine, who is your companion?”
Ah . . . the sentry’s a woman. Shironne smiled at her.
“Miss Anjir,” the colonel said coolly.
A hint of curiosity snaked out around the person in the carriage’s doorway, with a touch of disdain. Shironne swallowed. In the dim light in the carriage, she must look rumpled and ill dressed. She’d braided her hair hurriedly that morning. If she’d known she would be making her first visit to the palace, she would have checked to be sure her garments matched. She surreptitiously fingered the hem of her long tunic. Even with her gloves on, she recognized the embroidery and beading. This was her bright pink tunic, one that seemed to go with most of her petticoats. At least her mother had always told her so. She let out a relieved breath.
The sentry still considered her. “Are you willing to vouch for her intentions, sir?”
“I will vouch for her intentions and her actions,” the colonel answered.
The sentry’s mind stilled as she weighed the emotions behind his words. “Very well. They’re expecting you, sir.”
She stepped down from the carriage and shut the door. The carriage rolled slowly forward.
“They don’t always do that,” the colonel explained, “but they’re upset.”
They came to a halt. Cerradine opened the door, stepped down, and then helped Shironne to the ground. The carriage clattered away across flagstones, Cerradine’s driver likely heading to the companionship of the stables and a quick game of tiles.
The colonel led Shironne up a flight of stairs. “We’re in the courtyard behind the palace,” he explained, knowing she liked to have some idea of where she was. “There’s a double stair leading up to the back entry of the first floor of the palace. When we go in the doors, we’ll turn to the left and walk down the hall to Dahar’s office. The sentries know me, so we’ll not be stopped.”
She followed him along the hallways, not as far as she’d expected. She could feel people watching her, curious about her presence but not overly so. That had to be the sentries. They were supposedly posted everywhere in the palace.
The colonel drew her to a stop and rapped on a door. “Are you ready?”
Shironne shrugged. “I suppose it’s too late if I’m not.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When they entered the quiet room, Shironne felt someone’s sharp mind focus on her immediately.
“What is this, Jon?” a man asked. That had to be her uncle Dahar. She couldn’t imagine anyone else having the nerve to address the colonel so informally. She’d certainly never heard anyone do so before.
Shironne could sense his anger, curiosity, and frustration, all in rapid succession. Then the emotion was locked away, held at bay for a moment, only to burst forth in seething curiosity again. The prince was, she decided, one of those people who took things apart to see how they worked and then neglected to put them back together, endlessly curious but always moving on to something else.
A second person stood not far away, mind tinged with curiosity but rigidly controlled. Another sentry? Shironne suspected this one was a woman, although she wasn’t certain why. She turned her face in that direction. The woman’s response turned to caution then, almost as if she feared Shironne might attack her.
A third person waited in the room, a sullen mind, carefully not thinking in her direction. He resented her—not personally, of course, just a mild resentment like that reserved for a class of people.
She hesitated in the doorway, one hand clenched on the colonel’s sl
eeve, not knowing what to do with herself. She didn’t know where anything in this room was. How big was it? Were there steps? Where were all the things she would trip over? The prince’s agitation and the unknown man’s resentment tore at her nerves, making her more anxious than she would normally have been in the colonel’s presence.
She reached into her pocket and wrapped a gloved hand around her focus, throwing herself into contemplation of its smooth lines to drive out the foreign emotions.
“Kai, would you give us a few minutes in private?” the colonel asked.
The resentful man left the room, the woman fading away with him as if she had no identity other than his.
“I’m not leaving,” Shironne whispered to the colonel before he could ask the same thing of her. She had little desire to sit in the hallway of an unknown building surrounded by unknown people.
“Of course not,” the colonel told her. “Come with me.” He walked with her across the room, warned her of a step up, and then placed her hand on the arm of an upholstered chair. “Why don’t you sit down?”
She stroked the unfamiliar chair before sitting. It proved to be overstuffed and smelled of leather. She sank into it more deeply than she’d expected, feeling hopelessly small.
“I don’t think you’ve met Miss Anjir,” the colonel began.
“You shouldn’t have brought her here,” the prince said quickly. “She’s a child.”
“I’m not a child,” she insisted. “I’m seventeen years old.”
Surprise ran through him. Shironne wasn’t sure whether her age provoked that reaction, or the fact that she’d spoken. “You are still a child, Miss Anjir,” the prince told her firmly. “Why did you bring her here, Jon?”
“I want to stay in control of this investigation,” the colonel continued. “I have more people to put on this than you. You can pull in all of your planted servants and shopkeepers and I’ll still have more.”
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