And it is the Assembly that pays them, so it would be an even worse idea to drop by with a personal note from the King. Which left me two options; either I shoot the guards—problematic in the extreme—or Camden experiences a religious conversion and calls for a Confessor.
Bless me, Saint Lalage patron of ward bosses, for I have fucked up awfully.
I’d got a friend—well, more like an acquaintance, but I needed her help and that made her a friend—who spent two or three years in a seminary before they caught her selling cherry flowers, as they say in Acacey. She got thrown out, but they let her keep the robe and hat and collar, and she let me borrow those no problem. I mean, she was curious as hell, but I couldn’t help that.
So there I was, sweating the starch out of the collar and hoping my hair didn’t flop out of the hat, because Confessors are supposed to cut back on worldly indulgences and apparently hair counts double, and here was this guard who was just about the biggest prick since the secretary in Hôtel Camus, and I was quite certain nothing worse could happen without getting a cannon involved somehow, when in popped Speaker Jaque.
“Shit,” I said, real prayerfully.
“I have been ordered to prepare a report on the prisoner,” he said. I noticed he was careful not to say who’d ordered him, which I guess was smart, because the guard was definitely in the Assembly’s bag but Confessors used to hang on to the kings, and for all Jaque knew they’d taken up the old habit. And I guess the pricky guard felt like his game was up, because he said real grudgingly how the Confessor might as well accompany the Speaker to deal with the Boss—you could tell it rankled, having all those people in one sentence be a lot more powerful than him.
So Jaque and I went down the prison corridor, and I kept my head down and didn’t say much more than a word, and it looked like everything was going to be just peachy wonderful when Jaque blurted out, “Are ear injuries like that common among Confessors, Boss Livy?”
I said something very un-Confessor-like and punched him in the nose.
My hits aren’t as strong as Gaude’s, but it was more than enough to take down ugly little Jaque. He crumpled like a handkerchief and I bailed for Camden’s cell, which I at least had a key to now. Behind me Jaque was cursing like a sailor’s granny and howling for the guard, but quiet enough that I didn’t think anyone heard.
The lock was rusty, which would’ve made it great to pick but really was shit for the poor key, and by the time I got the door open Camden looked about ready to rush me. His clothes were torn and a little bloody, and I didn’t like to think what it’d taken to make his arm hang like that, but his face said he was more than ready to kill somebody if that’s what it took to get out of there.
“Shit, Camden, it’s me,” I said. He didn’t really relax, but at least he looked less ready to kill somebody. “I’m going to bust you out, but I had a bit of a run-in with Speaker Jaque and—”
And I never got to finish that sentence because all of a sudden I had a pistol between my shoulder blades. The pricky guard seemed to have dug up about fifty pricky friends and they were all aiming at me. Like I said, I’m not a gambler, but those aren’t exactly what you’d call close odds.
“Congratulations, Boss,” somebody said. It might’ve been the first prick, but once you get into it they all really sound the same. “Looks like you’ve got yourself a cellmate.”
Bless me, Saint Lalage patron of ward bosses, for I have fucked up awfully.
* * *
“Next time I want a king dead,” Camden said, “I’m going to hire a plebe lynch mob and leave you down in Olimpia where you belong.”
Nice going, Camden. Pretend like there’ll be a next time. Everything’s easier if you don’t admit you know the truth.
“The sheer brilliance of it all,” he continued, “is that they don’t even need to hold a trial. The King can just snap his fingers and have us dead.”
“He won’t,” I said, just for the sake of arguing. “He knows me.”
“Not as Boss Livy, I’ll bet. And besides, do you really think they’re going to give him a choice?”
“But it’s murder.” I slammed my fists into the wall of the cell. It hurt, but not as bad as I wanted it to. “The Assembly’s going to kill us, and then they’re going to kill the King. And they’ll hand-pick another scapegoat and the whole damn cycle will keep repeating—”
“Shut up, Livy. They’re not going to kill the King because you’re going to do that.”
Well, he couldn’t tell me to shut up and then pull out the carpet like that. “Shit, Camden, how?”
His face told me I was a shithead to have to ask, but we were both crammed in that hot little cell and bleeding nastily and, well, once you get into it like that it takes more than an ugly face to hurt your feelings. Camden tossed his hair like a barmaid and leaned back against the wall. “You’ll demand to see the King. Say the guards are forcing themselves on you or something and you need to get out.”
I raised my eyebrows. I mean, I’m no expert on how guards think, but if I was going to force myself on one of us, Camden was real easy the prettier one. “Alright, supposing that ridiculous plan works, do you really think the Assembly’s going to say shucky darn, looks like the King’s dead and now we can’t kill the bosses? They aren’t that stupid.”
“No, they’re that smart. Do you know how good a pardon looks to the plebes?”
He probably wanted to say more, but he made a too vigorous gesture and had to swallow this creepy little scream as it opened one of the gashes on his shoulders. I stopped being mad at him long enough to clean up the blood, and then long enough to think about what he’d said.
And in the end, when one of the pricks opened the door to see what all the fuss was about, I said I wanted to see the King.
* * *
Turns out Camden was smarter than I gave him credit for. There’s this law on the books that basically everybody’d forgotten about, and it says that any condemned prisoner “of adequate rank” can get an audience with the King if they holler for it. So I hollered good and hard, and everybody got to concluding that a ward boss counted towards adequate rank, and they whisked me on up to the Assembly rooms so fast I didn’t have a chance to kiss Camden goodbye. Not that I would’ve, but if things got knotty enough I’d probably never see him again, and it would’ve been nice to at least work in a handshake.
The Assembly rooms were flashy, but it was still the opening blow of Thermidor and they weren’t any cooler than the prison. The walls were sage green, pretty but kind of stuffy, and the pictures were all these real dark portraits of fat men and women in heavy dark clothes. And I got to memorize just about every inch of them; just because the Assembly’s going to follow some dusty old book law doesn’t mean they’re going to be fast about it.
I was sitting in an undersized armchair—leather, too, which does some pretty twisted stuff in Thermidor—when the King finally showed up, and I nearly flew into his arms before I remembered that he didn’t know Boss Livy and it would be a bad time to let on to who I was. And no, I don’t know why I thought that, why I thought it mattered what the King thought of Livia. I’m just a shithead, I guess.
Sylvain stared at me for a good few seconds before getting out of the doorway so a small tribe of Assemblymen could come in. You could tell what they were thinking, and it was somewhere along the line of oh shit, please don’t let him know and like this bitch because a royal pardon’s going to throw one nasty wrench into the machine.
It was funny in its own way, how everthing’d be fine if only Sylvain stopped making the people happy. But that was like hoping we’d all wake up one day and find the sky a pretty shade of green. Sylvain was the kind of king everybody wanted back when they’d hung Bastian; now we had Sylvain, and I’d’ve given anything to be dealing with Parsifal the Flesh-Eater.
Sylvain turned to the Assemblymen and said, his voice like hot coals, “Why has this woman been arrested?”
“Impersonating a Confessor,�
� I offered, just to see what the Speakers would do. Jaque wasn’t among them, and that suited me just fine.
One of them—I think she was Gaude’s age, but the wig made it hard to tell—spat on the rug at my feet. “Damn Confessors,” she said—a real Assembly-like statement. “She’s a ward boss, Livy of Olimpia.”
Sylvain didn’t look at me, just tilted his head like what the Speaker’d said was in the right language but didn’t make any sense. Ma’am Varlow made that motion a lot. “I wasn’t aware that either was a capital crime.”
“Ward bosses exploit the people for money and political power,” someone else said. “They hold every official and unofficial position in the city.”
“We don’t have the Assembly yet,” I said, because we didn’t. They all twitched a little.
“I don’t care if they’re making a bid for the crown,” Sylvain said. He looked at me over his shoulder, just for a second, and turned back to the speakers. “I told you at my coronation that I refused to order executions.”
Well, there was an unexpected twist. I breathed a little easier for all of a second before the woman who’d spat at me dropped out the trapdoor.
“Yes, well, the people don’t know that, do they?”
“You can hang her,” Sylvain said, his voice a little quieter than before. “Just don’t put my name on it.”
“Yes, you cowards, let’s see you kill me on your own.” I sat back in my armchair, smooth as a queen. “Let’s see how the plebes like it when you hang the only people who care about them. Think they’ll feel bad when they find out your little toy king didn’t wind up to your orders?”
“Oh,” somebody said. You could tell it was involuntary, like they hadn’t thought I could put all those pieces together for myself.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” a man by the window said. He reminded me of Camden but red where Camden was gold. Little wisps of red hair stuck out from under his wig, and his cuffs were trimmed with red lace, like he’d slit his wrists and was slowly bleeding to death. “His Majesty is perfectly capable of following orders.”
I jumped up and took a step forward. Sylvain took a step back, and we were right on a level, and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye and froze. My heart just sank. There was a paper knife on the desk behind me, and I knew I could reach it in time, wondered if the Assembly would let me go if I just threatened to kill their scapegoat—
“I’m not afraid of you,” Sylvain said, and his voice stopped my thinking like a brick wall, it was that hard. “You can lock me away in that dungeon for as long as you like, I’m not going to sign a death warrant.”
“Yes, but no one’s going to look twice at the warrant for a ward boss. They’ll never know whose signature it really is.”
They had us trapped. I did the only thing I could.
I pointed out the window behind them and screamed bloody-murder.
Damn cheap trick, but it works surprisingly good. They were all distracted for about three seconds, just long enough for me to grab the knife from the table and shove it down my bodice.
“Sylvain,” I hissed. “Take me to your rooms.”
He looked from the window to me, and smiled in a sort of vague congratulations. Nice job, Livy, you tricked the shitheads. Now came the hard part.
A bead of sweat dripped down my neck, followed the blade of the knife in my bodice all the way down to my stomach. And sat there, blue-cold in the heat.
* * *
The Assemblymen were pissed. Pissed that they’d fallen for my stupid trick, and pissed that Sylvain was acting like a king when they’d just told him not to. But they’d made the rules, and the rules said that if the King wanted to have a girl in his rooms alone it was his prerogative to do so. They’d probably hoped that particular rule would set him hell-bent on rape and wickedness but, well, you take what you can get. And right now the best they could hope for was that we’d smother each other with the pillows.
So they escorted us up to his bedchamber in the Hôtel Camus and stationed a fucking pack of guards at the door, and Sylvain and I stood on the other side and tried to act like it wasn’t the most fucking awkward thing in the world. I mean, they didn’t actually think the King had just been overcome with lust for a woman several years his senior, but they didn’t know why he’d brought me here and that made them the kind of uncomfortable that just seems to seep into everything around it.
So there we were, standing in the doorway of his gorgeous bedroom with its purple wallpaper and eggshell-blue couches and deep cobalt curtains, and there was the paper knife against my skin like a slab of ice, and I think I’d finally reached the point where I knew Camden was right. I was going to hang, along with Camden and half the ward bosses in the city, unless Sylvain wasn’t there for the Assembly to pin its death warrants to. Of course, they might also arrest me for killing the King, but at least then I could claim revolutionary fervor or something in my defense.
Oh, yes, there were a lot of reasons to kill a King.
“Livia…”
I put a finger across his lips. “Sylvain, we don’t have much time. I just want to ask you one thing.”
“Anything. Livia, Livy, I’m so sorry—”
“Why did you invite me to visit you?”
He looked at me blankly, took my hand away from his lips and stared at it as if the answer was hidden there, like the palm readers in Acacey used to say. I moved my other hand to the opening at my collar, so my fingers were just inches from the knife.
“At the horse festival on 1 Messidor,” I said. “I asked you your name and you wouldn’t tell me, just invited me to visit you. It must have been the first time you saw me, so why—”
“It wasn’t the first time I saw you,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows like Camden. “It wasn’t?”
“No. I saw you from this window, standing beneath the lamppost. A lot of people came those first few days, but you—you were always there. You acted so strangely when you knew I was watching, but when you didn’t…” He shrugged. “I followed you to Olimpia one time. It was late and everyone else had already gone. You stopped at an apothecary on the way home and bought a package of licorice, then brought it to one of the tenements and told the landlord to give it to all the children. Then you were gone, and I asked the landlord what your name was. He said Boss Livy.”
“Shit,” I said. He’d known who I was all along.
“I was surprised that you kept up the act,” he said. “Swooning whenever I looked at you and all that. But then, when I found you at the Rivermill, you were acting like yourself. And I admired you, really admired you, for the way you bought food for the children and checked in on your warders’ employers and all those other things. I knew you were a ward boss. But you were acting the way I imagined a king should act.”
“Sylvain,” I whispered. There were fucking tears in my eyes but he was still holding my hand, and I didn’t want to break that grip to wipe them away.
“I’m sorry, Livy,” he said. “I didn’t want to embarrass you. I just wanted you to know—”
But I couldn’t take anymore. I pulled my hand away and kissed him, not a lover’s kiss but a hard, cruel, angry kiss that drew blood. I hated so much. I hated Camden for what he’d asked me to do, and I hated the Assembly for making it necessary, and I hated Sylvain for not deserving it. I hated myself, too, more than the rest of them combined.
But I took the knife out of my bodice, and I drove it up into his chest.
He made a little noise against my lips and shoved me away, so hard that I struck my head on the wall and fell crumpled up on the floor. Blood dripped down his pure white shirt, and there was so much of it, so much that I couldn’t see the blue room anymore, just all that red blood.
Sylvain pulled the knife out of him—so much blood, but it hadn’t really gone that deep, just the tip was dripping and dark—and he threw it at the floor in front of me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and it actually got out, even t
hough my throat felt like it was choking full of blood. “I’m so fucking sorry, but it was the only way. They’re going to make you kill us so that the people hate you, and that’s stupid and fucked up because the people know how good you are, they know how much you care for them, and I’m just so fucking sorry I could choke.”
He said nothing, just went over to the windows and ripped off a strip of curtain. He pressed it over the wound and stood there, looking out onto the street, while the blood soaked into the fabric. But it was dark blue fabric, and the blood hardly showed against it.
“Those people need us,” I said. “If it was just me I would’ve knotted the noose myself, honest, but half my warders are immigrants and all of them are poor, and they do what they can but the Assembly won’t listen to them unless they have the ward bosses to back them. And I know that doesn’t change anything and I’m still a fucking monster—”
“No,” he said. His voice was strong, not even burbling, and when he lifted the curtain from his chest I saw that the blood was drying and brown, and the wound on his chest had already started to clot. “You missed, Livy.”
He came across the room and knelt in front of me and ran his fingers through my hair, brushing the ear that Jaque’s kid had nicked those years ago. “You’ve never killed a man with a knife, have you? It’s not like pulling a trigger. That’s something you learn when your ward boss is weak and you don’t have any skills. They teach you to kill people.” He kicked the knife away from us, and it was like the motion just ripped a sob from his chest. “And if you’re good enough at that, the Assembly figures you might be enough of a monster to be king.”
I held him and let him sob into my shoulder. Now that the curtain was torn, a cool breeze wafted in through the window—the window that was also a door. And there I was holding him, holding him like he was the only precious thing in the world, and he was clinging to me like the orphan he was, and both of us knew all too well how soon we had to let go.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #59 Page 3