A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  Ylfing shrugged. “I just wanted to learn. I didn’t like him that way.” Which, if that was true, gives poor Syrenen the dubious distinction of being the only young man in the entire world Ylfing hasn’t mooned over.

  I sighed. “Well, O young man of so many skills, how are we going to persuade the Queen of Coin?”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Flighty. Smart, though, smarter than she wants anyone to notice. Much concerned with seeming. I told her about the glass merchant’s wares; she appeared to take it to heart. She’s bored with politics, but she wants to be reelected. Pure vanity.”

  “Then just tell her she’ll be reelected!”

  “We’re not in the business of telling lies!” I snapped.

  “What are you talking about? You lie literally all the time!”

  “Little white lies to ease the way, nothing that hurts anyone,” I scoffed. “Nothing that they’ll ever find out wasn’t true.”

  “Then tell her you don’t know. Or tell her she should either do something that makes her happy or try harder to be good at politics.”

  “Brilliant idea, genius apprentice, and after telling her that, I’ll go ahead and tie my own noose, lay my own pyre. Perhaps you can invite that Ivo to watch the spectacle! I can’t speak as to how romantic it will be, but I’ll do my best to come up with some kind of tragic monologue, if they even let me have my last words. All this knowledge, gone! You might never find another Chant to teach you, and even if you did, they might not apprentice you. Then you’ll never be the best Chant.”

  Ylfing rubbed his hands over his face in a gesture I recognized that he had stolen or inherited from me. “Then tell her something so vague that she won’t be able to tell whether or not she’ll win.”

  “Do you think I haven’t already thought of all this? Do you think you’re coming up with new ideas? She’s not going to buy it if it’s vague; she’ll know we’re swindling her.”

  Ylfing ruffled his hair with his fingers in frustration, a gesture that was all his own. “What if you gave her a conditional, then? She’ll win the election if she does such and such—if she slays the dragon, goes on the quest, finds the lost relic, kisses the forest queen. Something like that.”

  “I don’t know what conditions the election would hinge on! And I can’t find out—I’m stuck in here! There’s only one guard who will speak to me, and he’s standing there at the door, and I don’t even know if I can trust him to give me good information! So I can’t find out!”

  “I’ll find out for you! Obviously!”

  “You’re the worst at being polite,” I snarled.

  “Being polite isn’t a skill,” he countered, “but if it were, it is better to be bad at something than to be good at it, because it is pleasanter to anticipate the journey than to nurse your blisters.”

  “It’s a wonder your people bother to learn anything at all, then!”

  “Learning is how you live prosperously,” he said, disgustingly earnest. “It’s a duty of honor to your family and to your village. No one ever fed themselves by looking at the water and waiting for the fish to catch themselves.”

  “Fine. Go find out, then; find out every possible thing about Nuryeven elections, and do it all before they manage to throw me to the executioners for spying.”

  “But if you haven’t done anything, surely they can’t convict you without evidence.”

  “You remember all those stories I told you about Xing Fe the Sailor?” He nodded. “He ended up here, apparently. Made some mistakes. Got convicted. I . . . may have mentioned in court that we were friends. I didn’t know they knew him. It was part of my apology—had to apologize as my sentence for brazen impertinence.”

  “Gods, that’s it? That’s all they have on you?”

  “So far—and anything else I’ve accidentally told them.”

  Ylfing nodded, somber. “You do lecture a lot. At anything that stands still long enough, I used to think. You’ve probably told them a lot of things.”

  “You’re one to talk! You’re the one who should be convicted of brazen impertinence! And I so appreciate the vote of confidence. Where would I be without that?”

  “Who is your advocate?”

  “Consanza Priyayat—I don’t know her last name, just the matronymic.” The naming system is complicated but consistent, and I’d overheard enough names by that point to have slowly gleaned the structure of ’em.

  “Oh! Oh, I didn’t realize—in the crowd, at your hearing, everyone was talking about her. She’s amazing, apparently; she’s won all these cases. I think someone said she’s never lost one? And Ivo said she’s one of the very best at arguing. How lucky you are! You got one of the very best ones!”

  “Ivo can shove it up his ass. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. She’s awful. She doesn’t care about this case. It was just assigned to her as a requirement to keep her license. Well, okay, she does care about it a little bit now that the Primes are involved, because she wants to, as she put it, kiss ass like she’s never kissed ass before. She wants to have a cushy desk job waiting for her in ten years when she’s ready to retire from idiotic courtroom theatrics. Lazy twit. We don’t get on.”

  “I bet I’ll like her,” Ylfing said, all sunshine. “You just don’t like people with strong personalities. I bet you’re just clashing horns with her. I’ll go see her and introduce myself. I bet if we put our heads together, we can come up with a way to get you out of this.”

  “Optimism is the surest sign of a fool.”

  The very next morning I was rudely awakened at a truly obscene hour. “Chant!” someone hissed. “Chant, wake up!”

  “Fuck off,” I muttered, pulling the blanket up to my chin.

  “I have food. Fried dough with sugar on it, they were selling it outside the courthouse! They’re called monk’s-puffs! I bought a lot—Ivo lent me some money, I saw him again last night, so there, now don’t make a fuss about it—and when I came here, I gave half of them to the guards and they let me bring in the rest to you! And look, open your eyes, Consanza is here too!”

  “What time is it?” I cracked one eye open. “It’s still dark.”

  “Don’t know, but it’s getting towards winter now so . . . It’s just like home! So dark and cold! And I saw the northern lights last night, just a whisper.” He sighed with great nostalgia, only half joyful. “Look, the monk’s puffs are still warm, wake up and eat. Consanza said they only feed you slop, and you looked so thin when I was here yesterday. Get up! Get up or I shall throw them at you, and they’ll get all over the floor, and I know how much you dislike eating off the floor.”

  I pushed myself upright. The blankets didn’t help much with the discomfort of sleeping on a bench, and it was so narrow that it wasn’t easy for me to turn over or change positions in the night, so I always woke up cramped and stiff and achy. Consanza, already smoking, was poking a crumpled-up piece of paper into the brazier, which had burned low overnight. When it caught a little lick of flame, she piled small logs of twisted straw on top of it.

  “They keep it too cold in here,” Ylfing said to her. “He could get sick, he could die—that wouldn’t be fair, would it? Him dying before they’ve even convicted him of anything. It’s negligent.”

  She shrugged. “Take it up with Vihra Kylliat.”

  “Maybe I shall,” Ylfing said with all the loftiness of youth.

  “I don’t recommend it.”

  “But you just told me to.”

  It was bitterly cold, and it would be until the fire was going again. I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and shuffled up to the bars. Ylfing handed me a piece of those sweets he’d brought—it was as soft and warm as he’d promised, even in the bitter cold. He must have kept it well wrapped.

  “Isn’t it good? Consanza said the guards love little treats.”

  “Your accent is atrocious,” I said, sitting back down on my bench and nibbling the thing slowly. “What are these called again?”

&nb
sp; “Monk’s-puffs, generally,” Consanza replied. “Some people call them other things.”

  “How did you get him in here? I had to go to the other room last time.”

  My advocate shrugged. “Told them he was my apprentice.”

  “Chant, Chant, Chant, listen,” Ylfing said, breathless. “I started talking to people about the Queen of Coin, and Ivo helped me, he told me all about how elections work—”

  “You saw him again?”

  “I already told you I saw him again.”

  I eyed my apprentice. He had a very convenient scarf wrapped around his neck, but so did Consanza, and Ylfing was still wearing mittens, even. “Where’d you get the new clothes?”

  “Borrowed them from Ivo. I already told you about that, listen—”

  “Consanza, do you know this Ivo fellow?”

  “Can’t say I’ve met him,” she said, scratching her chin and adding another few straw logs to the brazier. “There’s dozens of court scribes, and advocates don’t usually have any reason to interact with them. But,” she said, sucking pensively on that damn pipe, “from what I’ve heard from Ylfing since he came to my offices yesterday, I feel like I already know him.”

  “I haven’t talked about him that much,” Ylfing muttered into his monk’s-puff.

  “I think I could recognize Ivo simply by looking at his handwriting,” Consanza added to me. “It is, or so I hear, beautiful.”

  “Ivo says,” Ylfing began loudly, his cheeks all pink like a maiden’s, “that Taishineya Tarmos only won Commerce by three percent. Ivo also says that Commerce is elected every five years, making it the shortest term of all the Primes. Ivo also says that most people don’t think she’s doing a very good job. He doesn’t think she’s embezzling from the treasury, but she did throw a silly party with Commerce funds, under the guise of wining and dining some merchant speculators from Cormerra. And he doesn’t like her, nobody likes her. He says she’s raised taxes a lot in the last four years. A lot.” Consanza nodded grimly at this in the background. Ylfing continued, lofty, “Ivo also says that my handwriting is getting much better.”

  Consanza snorted and blew smoke. “Ylfing, you’d better tell Chant about that dear thing Ivo said to you this morning. What was it? Something about—”

  “My hair, he said he liked my hair. Except he didn’t just say it as, ‘I like your hair, Ylfing,’ he said it like . . .” My twit of an apprentice dropped his voice lower and hooded his eyes and, I think, attempted to purr: “I like your hair, Ylfing. Do you hear the difference? I like your hair, Ylfing. It just sounded so full of meaning. And he kept curling a little piece of it around his finger when he was telling me things about the election, and it was really distracting, but so sweet, right? It made my heart all fluttery. Don’t you think he sounds nice?”

  “Ivo should take up poetry,” said Consanza. She winked at me, and I felt more camaraderie with her in that moment than I ever had before. It took all I had not to laugh.

  “Oh, oh, I agree!” And then Ylfing wittered on for several minutes about various other allegedly adorable things that Ivo had done; Ivo this and Ivo that, which I will not inflict upon you—it was all how much he knew about everything, and how much he cared about things, and how he sent money home to his family in the country, and so on. Meanwhile, I finished off the rest of the monk’s-puffs and Consanza and I just looked at each other in silence (she, at least, seemed incredibly amused) while Ylfing talked himself out. It’s a good skill for a Chant to have, the ability to talk at great and elaborate length, but Ylfing has yet to learn how to sift out the most interesting parts of a story and discard the dull ones. For example, he waxed poetic for almost a full minute about how handsome Ivo’s hands were, and how attractive to see his fingertips stained with ink, and isn’t it beautiful to see someone’s craft upon their skin—and if you think that a minute isn’t a long time to talk about hands, then I recommend you try it for yourself. I couldn’t very well tell Ylfing to stop chattering, for every few sentences he’d remember some other useful piece of information that Ivo had provided him and then off he’d go on another wild tangent, and Consanza stood over the brazier the whole time, just smirking with an odd kind of fondness at Ylfing and occasionally dropping a comment—which only encouraged the boy, and I tried to signal to her that she should stop.

  At long last, when Ylfing paused to gasp for breath, Consanza slipped in, “They’ve scheduled another hearing for you.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Wonderful.”

  “Wonderful is what you might think, yes. You’ll need to finish up securing Taishineya Tarmos’s support before that. What else have you to bribe her with?”

  “Not much money,” Ylfing said, dejected. “I don’t think she’d want our pennies anyway.”

  “Secrets,” I said. “That’s all I have. Secrets and stories.”

  Consanza nodded. “Sure. What secrets you got?”

  “Not many of those either.” I scowled. “I’m not a spy, you know. My knowledge is a cross section of things most people know. What have you been doing, anyway? Haven’t you been working on any kind of defense for me in case this grand plan doesn’t work?”

  “There’s a lot of paperwork to do,” she said absently. “I think Anfisa Zofiyat might try to file for having you serve another stint in the Tower.”

  “Better there than here,” I grumbled.

  “Seriously? Seriously? After telling everyone who would listen that she has a blackwitch in the Tower? Say good-bye to your head if she gets custody of you again!”

  Ylfing looked at me with huge eyes. “Chant! That’s not a little white lie! That’s something someone could check!”

  “She can’t know I was the one who said it,” I scoffed. “Surely it’s not that wild of a theory. All this spookish stuff about Weavers!”

  “Who else could it be?” Consanza said. “No one else has come out of the Tower recently, and Vihra Kylliat is threatening to file an appeal to the other Primes to possibly enter the Tower with patrolmen and search it top to bottom.”

  I fidgeted. “Well, yes, I expected she might do that. All she needed was an excuse—but she won’t find any blackwitches, so it’s not a problem! If she finds something else, something illegal, well.” I folded my hands. “I certainly didn’t put it there, so I can hardly be blamed. And if Anfisa has nothing to hide, then she won’t be more than a little irritated at the inconvenience. If she’s upset when I go back to Pattern, I’ll just talk her out of it.” I don’t know why I thought that I could do that—I was feeling quite sure of myself, probably overconfident from how deftly I fancied that I’d handled Taishineya. “I know what I’m doing. It’s not like Vihra Kylliat is expecting to find an actual blackwitch.” I hadn’t thought Vihra Kylliat to be the type to swallow a story whole. I’d just meant to shake her up a bit, fan the banked embers of her superstition and paranoia.

  “You think Anfisa Zofiyat will be a little irritated when Order seizes anything that looks like it might be valuable to them, under the auspices of investigating?” Consanza demanded. “Justice will, of course, back up Vihra Kylliat’s petition if she chooses to submit it. Anfisa Zofiyat is fighting tooth and nail, and I’m sure she’s started playing some of her dearer cards—even the famously upstanding Vihra Kylliat has some stains on her petticoats. And you! You’re just digging your grave deeper every time you open your mouth.”

  “They’ll keep me alive as long as I have information. That was the point you were making with Vanya’s swans, wasn’t it?”

  “They’ll keep you alive as long as you’re still a useful pawn,” Consanza snapped. “So we can kiss Pattern’s support good-bye, unless she plans to have you released so she can kidnap and torture you at leisure.” She tapped the mouthpiece of her pipe against her chin, looking speculative. “I suppose that would be fine. It wouldn’t be my problem then.” I squawked in protest, but she continued heedlessly. “I wonder if we should have been courting Law instead of Coin. But Casimir Vanyos is so reticent,
so neutral, and he wouldn’t want to get in between Pattern and Order and Justice except in an official capacity. It’s a difficult situation. But let’s discuss your defense. They’re going to keep asking you about your relationship to Xing Fe Hua—”

  “What did he do, exactly?” Ylfing asked.

  “Tried to blow up the House of Law while the Primes were in session together—with the Seconds in attendance. The Dukes and Duchesses, that is.”

  “Is that what he actually tried to do, or is that what they convicted him of?” I asked.

  “Hard to say. I’m trying to get the records unsealed.” She sighed. “These things take time.”

  “How do you get them unsealed?” Ylfing asked.

  “You fill out a lot of forms. Then you fill out some different forms. Then you hire a new assistant for this case only, because the forms have to be filled out in quintuplicate and filed with the office of each Prime, separately, and one simply does not have enough hours in the day. Then you go home very tired to your family, having eaten dinner at your desk again, and you fall straight into bed without enough energy to do more than kiss the children and your spouses good night. And the next morning you get up and you fill out more forms, and you visit the clerks to see if anyone has read your requests, and they say no. And you do this once a day for a week or so, and if you’ve filled out all the paperwork perfectly, then you flip a coin to determine whether or not they unseal the records for you.”

  “Gosh,” Ylfing said, eyes wide. “That sounds like a lot of work. Why’d you decide to become an advocate?”

  “The glamor and the personal glory, of course,” Consanza said. “I thought that was self-evident.”

  Consanza’s mention of kidnapping and torture had overcome me with a sudden black feeling. The lingering sweetness of the monk’s-puffs turned bitter in my mouth. “Ylfing, I need you to stay here for the rest of the day.”

  “Eh? Of course I will. But what for? I was going to go out and learn more. Ivo’s invited me to meet some of his friends.”