Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “How much did Connie know?” asked Willinghouse. He was watching me carefully, as if I might be making excuses for Constance because I—or Dahria—liked her.

  “Not sure,” I said. “Nothing about the refugees. She thought her father and his friends were working to save the northern tribes from the Grappoli advance, rather than just trying to thwart the Grappoli by whatever means they had, and she helped them cover their tracks. I don’t think it occurred to her that her principles were irrelevant to the War Office and that she was being used.”

  “I doubt she’ll be prosecuted,” said Andrews. “The courts will assume she was coerced by her father, and her attempt to help the refugees escape from Richter’s gunman was noted by the coast guard.”

  “What about her father and the others?”

  “Hard to say,” said Andrews, displeased. “The War Office was operating in secret and contrary to their own laws and treaties, trying to circumvent scrutiny by relying on private contractors. The prime minister is blaming the civil service—the cabinet secretary Rathbone and his cronies in the War Office. Though it’s hard to believe the higher-ups in the party didn’t know what was going on, I doubt we’ll be able to prove it. Rathbone will fall on his sword—a few years in prison and a fine—and he’ll emerge, good little soldier for the government that he is, exonerated and with a well-paying position set aside for him. He might not even serve time if he can convince the courts that he was acting in good faith—a misunderstanding, an overextension of his authority, but not actually criminal, surely…? You know how this goes. Everyone involved is already claiming that they were serving the national interest by working against the Grappoli, but there are a lot of red faces in Parliament now that the story has broken.”

  “I really wish you hadn’t told your friend at the newspaper,” Willinghouse cut in.

  “I had to,” I said. “She helped, and I promised her a story.”

  Anything rather than have her write about the Gargoyle of Bar-Selehm.

  No one knew who had killed Barrington-Smythe. I think Andrews thought it was me, but he had been careful not to ask the question. The man had been a killer, and he had put two of the coast guard’s cutter crew in the hospital. No one was looking too closely at who exactly had delivered his death blow in the chaos. I had said nothing about the Gargoyle, and absolutely nothing about my presumed-dead sister, Vestris. I intended to keep it that way until I had thought it all through.

  “Richter will make hay out of this,” said Willinghouse darkly. “He’s already crowing about the government’s lying to the people and supporting savages. We haven’t heard the end of it. While I’m normally pleased to see the Nationals suffer a setback, I fear that any ground they lose will be made up by the Heritage party.”

  I shifted in my seat.

  “What will happen to Horritch and the rest?” I asked.

  “Markeson will probably be charged with manslaughter over the death of his wife,” said Andrews, “assuming he confesses to a version of your account of the matter, but he’ll certainly face charges for smuggling and involvement in illegal immigration. Horritch will have to answer for the deaths of the illegals in his factory, and though proving the case against him will be harder, I think we’ll get him in the end. He’ll serve time for it. Montresat will be charged as an accessory, but I’m not sure what else. He’ll lose his government contracts, which will hurt him more than any criminal charges, since that effectively puts his munitions factories out of business. All three of them could face conspiracy charges, but I doubt they’ll be convicted of treason.”

  “And Richter?” I asked.

  “I don’t think we can touch him,” said Andrews. “The coast guard’s evidence will say he did not fire upon them and he told Barrington-Smythe not to. His attempt at a citizen’s arrest, however paramilitary, was quite legal. Since he did not actually steal the machine gun plans himself, I think the most we could charge him with is collusion, and that would be shaky. We are not, after all, actually at war with the Grappoli.”

  “So he’ll walk free,” I said, wondering—not for the first time—what we had achieved.

  “His sympathies have been exposed,” said Willinghouse. “He’ll be watched.”

  I snorted derisively.

  “His sympathies, as you call them, are the subject of every speech he makes,” I said. “He shouts them from the rooftops.”

  “I meant his leanings toward the Grappoli,” said Willinghouse.

  “I know what you meant,” I said, my face getting hot.

  “He won’t have made any friends among the nonwhites of the city,” said Andrews, “but I doubt he’s unduly concerned about that.”

  I gave him a hard look.

  “But he’ll gain ground with the whites?” I said.

  “Not all,” said Andrews, hurriedly.

  “Then those people, the ones who see his hatemongering for what it is, have a responsibility to stand publicly against him, don’t you think?” I said.

  “Well, it’s complicated, isn’t it?” said Andrews. “People are afraid of alienating their neighbors, their friends and family. Being considered a kind of traitor to your own as Constance Horritch is. I think she’d testify against her own father.”

  “I would hope so,” I said, my jaw clenched. “She should.”

  For a moment Andrews just looked at me, then nodded hastily.

  “Well, yes,” he said. “If you put it like that. Quite so.”

  * * *

  THE REFUGEES WHO ESCAPED from the train car were mostly rounded up and relocated to the Blackstairs camp pending repatriation, but local assimilated Mahweni community leaders had launched an amnesty campaign on their behalf, which the Brevard party had taken up, arguing that they should be permitted to stay and join the local workforce. Richter spoke against the idea, of course, but the National party members who would usually block such measures had been humbled by the War Office’s underhand dealings, and they did not feel, according to Willinghouse, that they could mount a suitable opposition without seeming to be hypocrites. I was visiting Rahvey’s family, sitting by the river in a patch of grass that smelled of wild onions and garlic, close to, but not technically in, the Drowning when Tanish brought the news.

  “Passed,” he said, unable to keep the grin of his face. “Narrowly, but it passed. They get to stay.”

  Aab signed to the Quundu, and there was an explosion of delight and relief that began as shouts and laughter, then became dancing, and ended in silent thoughtfulness with not a few tears. I watched Rahvey bustling around with pots of goat cheese flavored with cardamom and hot peppers, listened to her cheerfully complaining about how many people there were and how the Lani could not possibly afford to keep feeding them. They were the things she always said, and they were true, but she smiled as she watched them eat.

  Championed by the Brevard party, the newly approved measure—which carefully emphasized the fact that offering amnesty to those already here in no way opened the country to others who may come in the future—granted a stay of deportation and potential citizenship to upward of a hundred souls, mostly women and children. It offered no provision of housing or employment, so there were still hard times ahead, but they would be hard times here or close by, not in slavery, not clinging to sinking rafts, and not in their war-torn homeland. It affected only a few, and it was but a partial solution, but it was as close to success as I could see for the moment, and I celebrated with them.

  I also successfully petitioned Willinghouse for a small increase in my stipend, so that I could pay Bertha more. Her class size had almost doubled, and she was considering reducing her shift load in the factory to spend more time teaching. They had no schoolroom per se, and continued to meet on the riverbank with a few ragged books between them and a half dozen pencils, carefully passed out and collected at the end of each class, but it was another partial victory.

  There would be no total victories, not for people like them or, for that matter, people lik
e me. Not for some time yet. But maybe one day, when the partial victories were pooled, we would find that we had done enough to make something more complete at least possible.

  Was it worth the loss of Namud? I could not say, but I thought he would approve.

  Mnenga took several of the children under his wing and offered to show them his village. Some—in spite of the horrors they had endured—had already fallen in love with the city and wanted to be like Bertha, reading and wearing northern clothes, and buying food from shops with money earned in the factories. Others saw in Mnenga a version of the past they had left and wanted to return to the bush, to herding and hunting and planting.

  “We will see,” he said. “My village has lost many young people to the city, so we have room. If we will be happy and they will be happy…” He shrugged and smiled. “We will see.”

  “I will come and visit them,” I said.

  “And me,” he replied.

  “And you.”

  He reached into the pouch he wore at his waist, plucked out a hide bag with a drawstring, and gave it to me. I opened it, and sorrel nuts spilled into my hands. I grinned at him.

  “This is a magic bag,” he said.

  I gave him a quizzical look, and he smiled mischievously.

  “If you keep filling it up,” he said, “it will never be empty.”

  I nodded solemnly, then studied his face.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”

  He made a shrug and a head shake that said there was nothing to thank him for, and then we caught the strains of children singing, a high, lilting lament, sad and beautiful and strangely knowing.

  We turned to follow the sound.

  By the river, the pyre with its heap of flower-strewn sandals blazed. The children stood stalwart, singing good-bye, and we sat in silence watching the water flow down to the sea.

  * * *

  SUREYNA WAS FEELING PLEASED with herself.

  “Junior reporter assigned to follow up parliamentary deliberations on the refugee crisis,” she said, brandishing a note from her editor. “I’m not the lead lioness by any means, and I’ll probably only get to write up the bits no one else cares about but—”

  “It’s a step up from cucumbers,” I said.

  “That it is,” she said. “I had another idea too.”

  She fished inside her desk and pulled out a sheet of paper featuring a box of close type. It read Lady Ki Misrai wishes to extend her thanks for the hospitality shown to her by the people of Bar-Selehm and hopes to return very soon.

  “Why?” I asked, lowering my voice. “She’s done. I can’t play her again.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Sureyna. “The Istilian embassy concedes that there are lots of aristocracy in the Lani homeland, including some who style themselves princesses, who are unknown to them. They aren’t about to expose Lady Misrai as a fraud, particularly if people continue to say nice things about her. She was, I think you’ll find, quite the hit in polite society, and lots of people have already claimed to have been with her at events all over the city.”

  “They can’t have been,” I said. “I didn’t go anywhere as her except Elitus and Violet Farthingale’s apartment.”

  “Exactly,” said Sureyna. “But people want to be in her orbit, as it were, so when one person lies about seeing her somewhere, all her friends agree and become a kind of royalty by extension. I’m thinking that if I occasionally imply that someone claimed to have seen her at some fashionable gala or other, that will keep her in mind for when you want to reuse the disguise. Ethically it’s borderline, but it might be useful.”

  “Sounds risky,” I said.

  “Not compared to climbing out of windows and running along roofs,” she said.

  “But people will know it’s not real,” I replied. “If you post something about her attending an opera when no one there saw her—”

  “They’ll say they did, and that makes it true,” she said with a sly grin. “After all, it was in the paper.”

  * * *

  MADAME NAHREEM GAVE ME a long look. In response to her inquiries I had recounted everything that had happened on the docks, talking her through it all as it happened and in detail. Almost everything, anyway. There were things I was not ready to discuss, questions I was not ready to ask. I had not mentioned Vestris.

  “This Barrington-Smythe frightened you,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “He was a killer.”

  “But it was more than that, was it not?”

  I paused to wonder.

  We had just finished Namud’s cremation, a private affair on a hilltop in sight of the estate, and were sitting in the drawing room, a sunny, spacious chamber made formal by the straight-backed chairs. Somewhere outside they were grilling meat over a fire lit with a brand from the funeral pyre in the Lani way. I could smell the smoke, sweet and fragrant on the air, and distantly I heard the clatter of pans in the kitchen. Madame Nahreem seemed to hear it too, and for the slenderest of moments, I caught in her face something wistfully sad, and knew she was thinking about Namud. I had seen so little tenderness in her that I was startled by the fact of her grief, even more so when I saw her eyes bright with unshed tears.

  Don’t be too hard on her.…

  One of the pet hyenas slumbered at her feet, its black muzzle inches from my leg. It grunted, shifting, and her attention came back to the room and to me. It was as if she had thrown a veil over the person I had briefly glimpsed in her face, and she looked upon me as her old self, stern and a little irritated, awaiting my response to her question about Barrington-Smythe. I scowled at the Lani rug on her polished wooden floors and tried to find the words.

  “It’s like he was sick,” I said. “In his head. He didn’t do what he did because he was paid to or even because he hated people like … like us.” She squinted slightly as if about to qualify that last remark, but said nothing. “The intrigue, the military posturing, even the racism, all of that was just an excuse, a way of justifying hurting people, breaking them apart. It’s what he enjoyed.”

  “That scared you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Because you can’t reason with such people. You can only beat them, and I did not have the strength or the skill to do so.”

  She nodded again, but there was something thoughtful in her face, and I realized I had revealed more than I meant to.

  “So who did?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You did not have the skill to overpower him, but someone did,” she said, watching me, hawkish and unmoving. “Someone cut his throat. I checked the autopsy reports through Inspector Andrews. He did not die in the melee, hit by a stray bullet. He was killed by someone standing behind him. Would you like to tell me who that person was?”

  I just looked at her.

  “One of the children,” she said, “reported seeing someone clinging to the struts of a water tower in sight of the docks. Something, I should say, since the child did not think it was a person. The police dismissed the observation as hysteria, but there have been other such sightings in the city, have there not?”

  “I think I’ve heard something about it,” I said, trying—and failing—to sound casual. She may as well have been wearing the neutral mask, while I felt my confused anxiety was painted all over my face. “I thought it was just a folktale. A scary story.”

  “Told particularly,” she said, “by steeplejacks.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Interesting, isn’t it, the way people invent monsters to scare themselves? As if the real world isn’t terrifying enough.”

  She smiled faintly and left it at that, but I knew that the tales of the Gargoyle had given her something to think about, something that made her distant and reflective again, as if she was remembering something from long ago. Whatever it was, it involved my sister. I was sure of that. My beautiful older sister who had once—for all I knew—trained at this very house. Had Willinghouse known? Had he hired her as he had hired me? Whose c
hoice had that been: his or his grandmother’s? Why this strange, obsessive interest in my family when the training I was now undergoing had failed so spectacularly with my sister?

  “Namud liked you,” she said suddenly. “So do my grandchildren. I do not always see eye to eye with them, but I think their estimation of your character broadly sound.”

  It was as indirect and understated a compliment as I had ever received, but it cost her something to say it, and I lowered my head, giving in to my old diffidence.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I endeavor to give satisfaction.”

  “You’re not a servant,” she quipped, something of her more usual sharpness returning. “Don’t talk like one. And never think like one.”

  Another critique that sounded like she was coaching me to play Lady Misrai, though I think her advice was supposed to be more than that. I wondered if she had ever said something similar to Vestris before she had become … whatever she was now.

  You could ask her. You could demand why she sought to replace Vestris with you, if that’s what happened, and what she is trying to atone for.

  Not yet. I didn’t want to just ask. I focused on the neutral mask and, when I felt ready, looked up, met Madame Nahreem’s keen gaze, and nodded once.

  * * *

  DAHRIA MET ME IN the garden.

  “I thought you hated it out here,” I said, admiring the treelined walkway where the rollers gathered and the fire-eyed grackles squabbled.

  “It’s not so bad at the moment,” she said, giving me a sidelong look.

  “Perhaps it’s the company.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You’re a bad influence,” I said.

  “Me!” she exclaimed. “What about you? You’ll have me eating with my hands out of a trough and going to my bedroom via the outside drainpipe. If my friends in the city could see how I live out here—”