by Sarah Ahiers
I needed his help. Why was it so hard to appeal to his sense of justice? “Help me, please. They were your family, even if you were no longer Family,” I said. “They were your blood.”
“Pah.” He shook his head.
I leaned back. “Maybe you are too much of a Da Via to help me.”
He slammed his fist of the arm of his chair. “Don’t you dare call me a Da Via!”
“You were married to Estella Da Via. I know that much. And there you sit, choosing them over us.”
“I’m not choosing anyone. There’s no point to your little plan of vengeance. It doesn’t matter.”
“They were my Family!” My voice cracked shamefully, and I flushed.
Marcello eyed me. “And you were lucky to have them when you did. Not everyone in this world is so blessed. You should count yourself further blessed that you survived while they didn’t. Forget about them. They will surely be reborn—if they haven’t been already—and won’t have a single memory of you. Flee from here, from Lovero. Find some man to straddle and make yourself a new family. It’s the only way you’ll achieve any peace in this life.”
I glared at him. “I don’t need peace in this life. I need vengeance.”
He got to his feet. “Well, you won’t find any help here. I need you to leave now. And you’re not welcome back, niece.”
I stood. More than anything I wanted to hurt him, to claw his eyes, bury my stiletto in his unfeeling heart. But I had promised Les I would behave, and he was my only hope now of getting the information I needed from Marcello.
“My father would be ashamed of you,” I said.
Marcello smirked. “He already was. Now leave.”
He turned his back on me and headed to the kitchen.
I waited for my anger to abate so I wouldn’t lose my temper again before I strode from the fire. On a small table sat a dish filled with coins, the coins Les had been stealing from his marks. Marcello and Les weren’t even using them.
I needed clothing. And food. And money to claim any further letters Faraday might send me. I couldn’t just sit around, begging for Marcello’s help, waiting for the Da Vias to find and end me. I had to do something.
I scooped coins into my hand and shoved them into my purse. I didn’t take them all, but enough to get by. One way or another, Marcello was going to help me.
In the tunnel room I jerked the grate up. Suddenly Les’s hand was on mine, closing over it and the grate. His palms and fingers were warm, and calloused, but his grip was gentle. I glared at him, the coins heavy in my purse.
He gave me a sympathetic smile and mouthed a silent apology for how Marcello had treated me.
I wanted to be angry at Les, too, but he seemed sincere in his apology, just like he seemed sincere in everything he did. My rage began to fade, and I nodded. It wasn’t his fault, anyway. He had warned me.
“Later tonight?” he whispered.
For a moment I wanted to tell him no. I wanted to walk into the middle of the street and wait there until the Da Vias found me and sent me to meet Safraella like the rest of my Family. It would be so much easier.
But my Family would be ashamed of me, and regardless of how Marcello felt, I knew if I added more shame on top of my guilt, I wouldn’t meet Safraella when my life ended. My heart would be so full of despair that I would wander the dead plains as a ghost in my own personal hell.
“Only if we work on the firebomb,” I said.
Les tightened his jaw but then finally nodded. He closed the grate quietly behind me.
My sour mood—tinged with the despair I was trying not to acknowledge—followed me out of the tunnel. It was late afternoon, but the Yvanese continued with their shopping at the markets, using every moment of daylight available to them. I slid into the crowd, heading back to my safe house, lost in my thoughts. People packed the market. More than once I had to bite back a vicious barb, or an equally vicious elbow aimed at a person who’d gotten too close. People spoke quickly, conversation limited by daylight. Cart vendors called out their wares, telling people if they couldn’t pay now, they could pay later with interest. Debts were accepted everywhere.
I’d failed with Marcello. Again. And I knew I wasn’t going to get a third try. All I had now was Les. He would have to get the information from Marcello, which meant I had to keep training him, keep in his good graces, remind him that Marcello was holding him back and it was in his best interests to help me.
Even if it wasn’t. Even if helping me could get him killed.
My stomach rumbled, the tea I’d drunk with Marcello doing nothing to ease my hunger pains. Before me stood a vendor with more of those meat pies Les had introduced me to. I had money now. But I couldn’t just spend it on anything. If I used a small bit to buy one pie, I could eat half now, and half later.
The stall owner held up his fingers for a price, and I reached for my coin pouch.
It was gone.
I felt around my belt, but it was nowhere to be found. I twisted to search the crowd behind me.
To my left, someone whistled a familiar tune. I turned. Captain Lefevre. He smiled when I made eye contact.
“Ah, Miss Lea. Have you lost something?”
I swallowed. He could have been following me the whole time. But I hadn’t done anything to give myself away. Unless he’d seen me crawl out of Marcello and Les’s tunnel. But I would have noticed that. . . .
“I seem to have lost my money pouch.” I patted my hip. “You don’t think it was stolen, do you?” He had to realize I was faking my naïveté, but if other people in the crowd were listening or watching, I wanted to be clear on how I presented myself in case he publicly accused me of anything.
“Perhaps this is it?” From his fingers swung my money pouch.
“Yes!” I smiled sweetly and reached for it, but he turned to face the stall owner.
“How much does she owe you?” he asked. The stall keeper held up one finger.
“That’s quite all right, Captain Lefevre,” I said. “I can pay the fine gentleman.”
Lefevre smiled at me again, his sickly sweet grin. He dumped my coins into the palm of his hand. He poked through them, examining each one closely, before he finally removed a coin and handed it to the stall keeper, who pocketed the money and passed me the meat pie.
Lefevre dumped the money into my pouch and cinched it. He held it out to me. I reached for it, but he clasped my hand with his own.
“You must be more careful with your coins, Miss Lea. You never know when they’ll draw someone’s attention. Someone who’s looking for you, maybe.”
He stroked my palm with his thumb, tracing the healing burn. I jerked my hand away, yanking the pouch with me. Lefevre smiled even more brightly.
“I’ll try to keep that in mind, Captain Lefevre.”
I slipped away from him, determined that he wouldn’t catch me unaware again.
Les’s hands shook as he tried to pour a concoction from a bottle into a vial. The harder he tried to still his fingers, the more they shook.
The moon shone down on us as it made its way toward the horizon. The canal waters sparkled with its light, creating starbursts in the streets. Something I’d never see in Ravenna.
Finally I grabbed his hands and took the bottle away from him.
“If you’re not careful, you’ll spill it,” I snapped. “Some poisons only require skin contact, and if you spill those, you’ll be dead.”
Les sighed and jerked his hair tie off before running his hands through his hair. “I’m no good at this. I don’t have the patience for mixing poisons.”
I poured the poison carefully into the vial, then stoppered it with a cork. I passed it to Les. “Mark the top with a symbol. It should be unique to you, so no one else can use it.”
He pocketed the vial before tying his hair back once more. “How do you have so many recipes and antidotes memorized?”
“Because I’ve been doing this for over ten years. But you don’t need to be a master pois
oner to use poisons. These ones are easy to craft and simple to use. You could coat your cutter with one, and a shallow cut would become a mortal wound. Poisons are versatile and have more uses than just dosing someone’s food for a quiet kill.”
Les shook his head slowly. “I’ll never be the kind of clipper you are.”
I didn’t like the turn of this conversation. If he thought he wasn’t getting a good value, he might decide not to help me. Yes, he’d originally offered to help me for no other reason than just to help, but I still didn’t trust that intent.
Then again, I knew how Les felt. Rafeo had been an amazing clipper. Everything came easily to him. Matteo and I struggled to even come close to his skills. Matteo especially took Rafeo’s skill as a personal insult, as if Mother and Father had somehow contrived to make him look bad. But not even Matteo could stay angry at Rafeo for long.
“Let’s work on the firebomb,” I said. “That’s more important than poisons.”
Les grabbed a satchel he’d brought with him and set it between us. I sat down across from him. He laid out a blanket and set down different spheres, some ceramic, others metal. Beside the spheres he placed small jars filled with different-colored powders, and a few more with liquids.
The materials looked similar to the ones used to make smoke bombs, but when I picked up one of the ceramic spheres, it wasn’t divided in the middle.
Les pointed at my chest. I looked down and found my key loose from my leathers. I tucked it back in.
“What is it for, anyway?” he asked.
“My house.”
“I thought your house burned down.”
I nodded. “It did. I just . . . couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. It’s all I have left.”
And it served as a reminder, so I’d never forget that my secret had destroyed everything. I glanced at Les. He was so eager to assist me, a stranger he barely knew. A girl who had invaded his home and stolen from him, and yet here he was, back to helping me again.
Would he be so eager if he knew the truth about me? That the murder of my Family was on my hands?
Les smoothed the blanket. “Okay. Well, timed smoke bombs are similar to the throwing kind. The ceramic shatters and the chemicals combine and smoke appears.”
His flashed his hands before me, mimicking an explosion. “For the timed ones, though, we have to use some different chemicals and different layers.”
He picked up a jar with a clear liquid and placed it in front of me. “This will eat through metal. Not immediately—and how fast depends on the type of metal, the amount of solvent, and so on. It takes a lot of trial and error, and even then sometimes it doesn’t turn out right.”
He glanced up at me, and I nodded to show I was following.
“Besides metal, it will also eat through flesh and fibers. Wood. Fabric. But it can’t go through glass.” He flicked the jar with his finger, and it pinged quietly.
Ate through flesh. I immediately thought of different ways to use it. Perhaps a thrown vial at an enemy as a deterrent. “Where did you get this?”
“It’s a traveler recipe. It’s something we’ve—they’ve—kept secret for hundreds of years.” He pushed the jar aside. “So, how the timed smoke bomb works is, I fill one of these small metal spheres with the powdered smoke agents. Then I place it inside one of the ceramic spheres.”
He showed me how the ceramic sphere was actually two pieces, tightly fitted together like a puzzle. The metal sphere fit inside the ceramic halves, and he closed it up. “I fill the ceramic with the liquid smoke agent and the acid. They don’t like each other, so they stay unmixed, and the acid picks and pocks at the metal until it’s breached. The acid and the powder also don’t like each other. That’s where the flash comes from. When they mix, the acid is burned up, exploding the ceramic casing, and then the remaining powder and liquid combine to make the smoke.”
“Okay.” I nodded. I’d made smoke bombs before, and with all my poison and antidote experience I understood how chemicals mixed in different ways reacted to different things. “What’s all this for, then?” I pointed at the remaining powders and liquids he’d placed on the blanket.
“These are the combinations we’re going to try, to see which ones will make the biggest fire that will burn the longest.”
Les grinned and I did too, though my grin came from picturing the Da Vias, trapped behind the flames of their burning home.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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twenty-two
WE SPENT HOURS TRYING DIFFERENT COMBINATIONS, our hopes high. But after a few hours of frustration and frayed tempers, we decided to try again later and went home for some much-needed sleep.
In the morning I headed to a different market to look for clothes. The old one had good prices, but I didn’t want to face the women of Acacius again.
It didn’t take me long to find a shop. I bought two dresses and changed immediately. I was almost tempted to throw out the stained one, but even if I didn’t wash it or ever wear it again, I could use it as a blanket or a pillow on my saddle-blanket bed. There was no point in being wasteful.
I used some of my coins to buy a filling lunch, one that would hopefully last me the rest of the day. Then I headed to the mail office. Faraday had said he was going to send me another letter, so I wanted to keep checking.
It was the same postman as before, and he bobbed his head as I entered. “Oleander, right?”
I nodded and he flipped through the envelopes in the bin. He pulled one out, then glanced at me over his shoulder before returning to the letter.
“Is it for me?” I asked.
He faced me, letter held at his thigh. “Do you go by any other names?”
Another name. Of course I did, but why would Faraday use it when he’d used Oleander before? “Lea,” I said. I would’ve forsaken the letter before I risked giving him my last name, too.
The postman set the letter on the counter. He pulled out his ledger and made a mark on a line. “Two gold again.”
I passed him the coins and he slid the letter over to me.
“Thank you.” I walked out of the shop into the bright afternoon sun.
The letter was addressed to me, but I understood why he’d hesitated before handing it over. It had my name, Oleander, written on the front, but someone had crossed that out, a single black line through the letters, and replaced it with Lea.
I sat on a bench outside and cracked the seal of the letter, the pages unfolding in the gentle breeze.
A pressed white poppy fell into my lap.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel my heart beating, couldn’t do anything but pinch the poppy between my two fingers.
I opened the letter and read.
Maybe this will find you. If you’re even in Yvain. If you’re even still alive. I don’t know. I must be an idiot to think this letter will go anywhere. But I found this flower in a saddlebag kept at a monastery, and I couldn’t believe it was simply a coincidence.
Maybe it is, though. Maybe I’m just crazy.
But if you are alive and do get this letter, I want to say . . . I want to say a lot of things, actually. And I wish I could say them to you, but I guess if this is the only chance I have, then I’d better take it.
I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t mean anything, and maybe it doesn’t even matter because you’re dead anyway and this letter will go nowhere.
But if you do get this letter, and you are alive, please be careful. I’ve spoken to the Addamos, and they’ve scoured the dead plains. Yvain is the only place they haven’t searched yet. It won’t be long before the rest of my Family catches on. We’re close. We won’t give up. Better for you to disappear, to vanish and never come back.
That was it. No signature. Nothing to tell who had written it, but I knew the letter came from Val. If he’d found the flower in Butters’s saddlebag, it meant the Da Vias
were closer than I’d thought. If the Addamos had steered Val to Yvain, enough to send a blind letter anyway, then the others would be close behind.
Dumb. I was so, so dumb. I should’ve destroyed the poppy when I’d found it after the fire, should have crushed it. But I’d kept it, put it aside somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore, so I wouldn’t have to feel the things it brought to the surface. And now here it rested in my fingers, a reminder of all the mistakes I’d made, that I continued to make, and the consequences that seemed to never end.
A shadow fell over the letter. I looked up. Les stood before me, blocking out the sun.
I squinted. “What are you doing here?”
He glared at me until I shifted. “You stole from us.”
I narrowed my eyes. So that was the way this conversation was headed. I took a breath. “I needed the money. It was just sitting there. You weren’t using it.”
“Oh, of course,” he scoffed. “You needed it, so you just took it because we weren’t using it. It all makes sense. I thought you were a thief, but now that you’ve explained it, I see I was mistaken.”
“That’s not—”
“I don’t even know what’s worse,” he interrupted, arm cutting through my words. “The fact that you’re still going to want me and my master to trust you, to help you, after all this, or that you didn’t trust me enough to just ask for the money in the first place.”
I blinked. If I had asked him for it, I would have been beholden to him. I couldn’t let him hold that over my head. We had agreed to an even exchange.
“My master will never help you now.” He paused and rubbed the back of his neck. “I would’ve given it to you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have even asked why you needed it.”
“Clothing,” I said. “And food.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
Of course it mattered. It wasn’t as though I’d stolen the money to spend on frivolous things like necklaces or lace. I had spent it on things I truly needed.
“I trusted you.”
My body froze at his words. He had trusted me. What had I done to engender such blind faith?