by Sam Hawke
The Stone-Guilder glanced up, straightening her hair with her fingers as she tried to reassemble her dignity. She looked at me, then back at Hadrea. “If you’re convinced I’m your enemy, it doesn’t matter what I think.”
I shrugged. “And if you’re not, you’re a loyal Councilor I’ve just humiliated and accused of murder. Then you’d be reluctant to help me anyway.”
She half-smiled. Clothing back in place and posture straight, she regained some confidence. “I’ve no head for intrigue,” she said. “There are plenty of Councilors I don’t like, but I’ve never thought of any of them as killers. I suppose I would just say what I told you the other day, Jovan. You seem bent on the idea that the poisoner is working with the rebels. And maybe they are. But they’re no Darfri or rebel sympathizer, not truly. They killed your prisoner before he could tell you something that would help you understand the uprising. They murdered the only leader we had who didn’t want them destroyed. Why are you so sure they care anything for those people out there?”
“A means to an end,” Hadrea murmured. “Is that not your saying?”
My heart beat faster. The pieces that had been clattering around in my head, too jumbled to decipher, started straightening. Patterns forming. Images and memories—some my brain had been trying to draw to my attention for days, weeks even—began to make sense. Someone had incited the rebellion. If Tain and I had not returned unexpectedly early to the city, it would have been besieged while leaderless and absent its own army. Clearly the traitor wanted the city to fall. But Eliska was right: the traitor was using the rebels and the Darfri, shredding any chances for peace between the sides, murdering anyone who brought a chance of understanding between us, consigning both sides to massive losses of life. They’d tried to make us think our enemy was someone external to the Council; a rebel spy among the city Darfri, the Talafan visitors, a lone guard with a grudge.…
And my own brain had been trying to give me a clue for weeks. The petitioner who had tried to attract our attention the day we visited the hospital. His head had appeared in a sack days later; Marco told us the rebels had sent his head back with our runners’, and the intelligence master had confirmed he was a spy working the southern border. But he had been trying to talk to Tain—not the intelligence master or Marco—in the city, not in the estates, and only just before the siege. He couldn’t have been killed by the army outside.
“We never saw our own runners,” I said aloud, barely registering the confused expressions of the two women. “He said the rebels sent our runners’ heads back. But we only saw them wrapped up for burial.” A spy who might have been trying to tell Tain something important—perhaps what was about to happen? “Tain would never even try sending out more messengers, not after that. And we thought they were such savages. Merciless. Killing our runners in the worst, most dishonorable way.… It just confirmed what barbarians everyone thought they were. Who would pursue peace after they’d killed our messengers rather than taking them prisoner? And taunted us with it?”
Eliska stared at me, her black-streaked face still and shocked. “They never did it?”
I shook my head, feeling on the brink of vomiting. “Maybe they killed our messengers, maybe they didn’t. Our army never came, so I guess they didn’t get through, either way. But they never sent those heads back. Marco killed the spy, a spy who might have been trying to warn us the rebels were marching. And Marco used the spy’s head to harden us against the rebels and make sure we thought them cruel and honorless.”
We looked at each other in the flickering lamplight.
Our enemy, our traitor, was the most dangerous man in the city. And fortunes knew how many of the Order Guards were working for him and not for us. How were we supposed to deal with him?
* * *
Eliska took us out a different route through the sewers. By now, I barely noticed the smell. Though my first impulse had been to charge off to do something about what we had just learned, it hadn’t taken long to realize we had to be careful. We had to capture Marco without him realizing we knew he was the traitor, and I dared not use anyone to help except those I trusted. Which didn’t leave me with many options for overpowering him physically.
Another failure to add to my list: I had likely witnessed Marco poisoning Caslav and not even noticed. I had seen Marco in his role as a bumbling, naive temporary Councilor take the first bowl in front of Credo Bradomir, the most tradition-driven of all the Council, knowing he would be corrected for his error. A bit of sleight of hand, and a clear poison could easily have coated the inside of that bowl. But there was no point lamenting my stupidity now. We needed to tell Tain, and devise a plan to handle it.…
“Oh! Tain.” I said aloud. Eliska and Hadrea stopped, water sloshing about us, and stared at me. “Eliska, you don’t know. Tain’s not dead.”
The Stone-Guilder said nothing for a moment. Then, “Is this some kind of trick? I thought you believed me.”
“I do.” I ran a hand through my hair with a sigh. “It’s because of that that you should know. He was poisoned. But we suspected either you or Marco, so we let you think the attempt had been successful.”
She swore. Then, after a moment, she laughed. “Well, you know what, Jovan? That’s the first good news I’ve heard in a while.”
And I found myself laughing as well. It was a strange moment, standing in the half dark in a sewer, stinking of shit and slime and who knew what else, the three of us laughing like nothing had ever been so funny.
Eventually it dried up, and the gravity of the situation fell again on my shoulders. Eliska led us to the exit. Through the grate we could see nothing but darkness. “It comes out here near the north side of the lake,” she said. “You can’t get in from the outside, so Dara and I used it to leave.”
“Yes,” Hadrea said, calm. “I followed you out here last night as well.”
Eliska ducked her head. “I thought I was being so careful. I never saw you.”
I grinned. “No one ever does.”
I followed the women through the grate. “We shouldn’t go together to the Manor,” I said, as Eliska closed it behind us. Aside from flickering lights on the far side of the lake, the night was quiet and still. “We can’t know whether the Order Guards are loyal to the city or to Marco. He could have any number of them watching us.”
“I’ll go home,” Eliska said. “I could use some time to digest this.”
“If you come to the Manor tomorrow, on normal business, Argo will let you in. You can see Tain. And hopefully we’ll have an idea what to do by then.”
We parted ways there, Hadrea and I heading south, toward the bridge, and Eliska north toward the gate. The sense of companionship that had renewed itself between us spiraled away in the cool predawn air. Several times I tried to think of a way to start a conversation, but the longer I hesitated, the stonier her profile became. Inside the Manor, she stopped short of Tain’s rooms and instead bade me a stiff goodnight before choosing the corridor that led to the rooms she shared with Davior and Salvea. She was gone before I could think of anything to say.
Dropping onto my pallet beside Tain’s bed, I felt completely alone. He slept, mouth open, color good, looking relaxed. One good thing, at least, and the rest could wait until morning. While Marco thought Tain dead, he had no reason to be lurking about the Manor, waiting to strike again, and Tain needed rest more than he needed news of betrayal.
* * *
I woke to the sound of my friend snorting and grunting, then he sat up and peered down at me. “Jov?”
“I’m here.” Blinking the sleep from my own eyes, I stretched and took a seat on the stool.
“You should replace that with something comfortable,” Tain said.
“The discomfort keeps me awake. Well, that and your snoring.”
He laughed, and the simple sound filled me with sudden emotion. It felt wrong to ruin the moment of levity, but I did it anyway. “Tain, Marco’s the traitor.”
“What?”
>
I told him everything. How Marco had managed the poisoning at the lunch. The spy who had tried to come to us. The rebel prisoner and the brutal execution of the jail guard.
Tain listened, stunned. Even more than me he had trusted Marco; he had a bond with the man from his tutoring even before he had become our invaluable adviser in the siege. “I can’t believe it,” he kept saying. “But he loves this country. You can’t tell me he’s still an agent of Perest-Avana after all this time?”
I didn’t have an answer. “I can’t tell you much of anything. But he’s not working with the rebels to help them, and he’s certainly not working for us.”
Tain shook his head. “I’m still not sure I understand. Did our runners survive, then? And if that wasn’t them we buried, who was it? They were real heads. I sang them the burial song.”
I would never wipe that image from my mind. They had been real heads, I was certain; I’d smelled it even through the masking paste. But if they’d really been our messengers he’d have showed us one we knew; no need to hide the spy’s head in plain sight.
But Tain answered his own question. “The missing street people,” he said suddenly. “There’s a streetwoman who’s been trying to see me for weeks, claiming that Order Guards or dark spirits have stolen her child away. I’ve been getting letters. She said five men disappeared off the street in the night.” I remembered, too; my sister had been accosted by the old woman on the same day as the secret burial. I had assumed the men she spoke of were just assigned duties on the walls, being relatively healthy and young. “Do you think he did … did that to them, just to fool us?”
“Who’d miss someone off the streets, especially now?” I muttered, extra guilt sinking in. “He probably figured we’d ignore it as unimportant, and he was right.”
Honor-down, we had thought an impassioned army murdering messengers in such a horrific way was barbarous. How much worse that Marco could have done such a thing to five innocent strangers just to use their heads as convenient props in his gruesome play.
“How are we going to stop him?”
“I can’t risk confiding in any Order Guards. They could all be working with him, for all we know. What if his allies volunteered to be the ones who stayed behind?”
Tain paused so long I thought for a moment he’d fallen asleep again. But eventually he said, “What about one of your concoctions? Could you knock him out?”
I nodded, thoughtful. “I don’t want to risk any kind of altercation with him, but if I could dose his food or tea we could drag him to jail and we wouldn’t need an Order Guard to watch him. Being a poisoner himself he’s probably pretty careful, but if I choose something I’m immune to I can eat from it, too.”
“Do it,” Tain said. “I’m no use to you, weak like this. And Marco’s a dangerous man. We need every advantage we can take.”
I agreed, though fear chilled my veins. As Hadrea had been so quick to point out, I was no soldier. I wouldn’t pit myself against her, a farmer, and Marco was a lifelong professional. What if I couldn’t fool Marco? Would my fear and judgment show? I’d spent my lifetime hiding my role as a proofer. We would all just have to hope I could hide myself as a poisoner just as effectively.
* * *
The remainder of the day was spent in an endless game of dodging Councilors and searching for an opportunity to get Marco alone. I felt like a Muse piece, considering my every move to best avoid the most dangerous other pieces. I barely missed Bradomir, who was storming through the Manor gardens, prepping his excellent baritone for some shouting at Argo, and avoided too both Budua and Marjeta since I wished neither to reveal to nor conceal from them the truth about Marco. But as if he were playing the same game, Marco gave me no chance to talk to him in private, either. One minor crisis or another always interrupted us whenever I thought there was a chance. At least he was given no opportunity to cause mischief that I could see, since he was in full preparation mode for the inevitable attack on the bridge, managing the trenches and defense plans and conducting our last training of the people who would soon be our front lines. Eliska warned us grimly to get some sleep, because the rebels would not need much longer to prepare to take the bridge. It could be any time now.
I was meeting with the guards at the Finger, almost unrecognizable now with its additional fortifications, and the scouts on the southern wall when Nara and Lazar cornered me, both smelling suspiciously like kori. I told them Tain wanted a full Council meeting first thing in the morning. This time, I wasn’t even lying.
“I was beginning to think he’d decided he didn’t need a Council anymore,” Nara told me, her peevish face even more pinched than usual. “Or he’d found a secret way out of the city and just left us here to burn.”
Honor-down, sometimes I fantasized about slapping that expression off her face. “The Chancellor’s working hard, Credola. He’s done his best to keep the city running and he needs all of you to be pulling your weight, as well. What he doesn’t need is his own Council spreading rumors like that to damage the morale of our people.”
Lazar looked away, and the embarrassment on his face suggested he hadn’t been keeping that particular suspicion to himself. I gritted my teeth. Nara lifted her chin a little more, looking me in the eye. “People are getting close to starving, Credo Jovan,” she said. “Their Chancellor’s lack of caring is the least of their worries.”
I hadn’t been to the stores in two days. I’d also barely eaten anything aside from portions of Tain’s food. A sick knot twisted in my stomach. “What level are our supplies at?”
“We’re out of oats and beans,” Nara said, smug. The slapping itch in my hand returned. “There’s enough rice for one serving a day at the ration stations, for perhaps another few days. Even with the nets out every day, there can’t be enough fish for all of us. Fighting’s breaking out. Are you blind, boy?”
I scanned the faces of the men and women loitering around the square. Listless, despondent. Thin. We had already cannibalized anything we could use for food; all the edible plants had long been stripped out of the gardens and used as extra fiber in the rations, and we’d eaten some dubious animals over the past few weeks, leaving only the ones that could supply milk. The rebels didn’t even need to take the rest of the city by force. We’d all starve to death just as easily.
“They’ll be eating each other soon enough,” Nara said, voice dripping with scorn. “Little better than animals.”
I did a much worse job of containing my anger this time; Lazar stepped back a little as my head snapped around. “You know, I’ve had about—”
But Nara had never been easily intimidated. She stepped up close enough to smell her sour breath. “About enough of these animals? Me, too. Perhaps you’d like to tell us what you know about my great-nephew? You know, I’m only an old woman, but I hear rumors, too.”
Blood rushed to my face and I looked away from her accusatory eyes. Did she know what had happened to Edric, or merely suspect? “Tomorrow, at dawn, in the Council room,” I muttered, and didn’t bother with a farewell.
Since it was becoming increasingly clear I would not be able to separate Marco from his possible co-conspirators among the Guards tonight, the Council meeting it would have to be. The other Councilors might not believe that the Warrior-Guilder had merely fainted, but if all went according to plan, we would have the traitor incapacitated and we would no longer need to worry about their loose tongues. I returned to the Manor to prepare the teacups, nerves building. Would he suspect me? I tried to shut down the part of my brain that pictured all the ways it could play out if he did, because none of those outcomes looked positive for me. I just had to stay calm.
Fortunately, my exhaustion was greater than my anxiety this time, and it seemed like I had barely settled into my pallet in Tain’s room when I was jolting awake again.
And then the city’s alarm bells rang.
Darpar
DESCRIPTION: Dark brown crystal, hard but brittle, often found in conjunct
ion with opal.
SYMPTOMS: Short-term, sudden increase in energy and strength, bad breath, developing into muscle tremors; longer-term weakness, memory loss, mental deterioration.
PROOFING CUES: Sweet, metallic taste and sickly smell on breath.
26
Kalina
A queasy belly woke me; I sat upright, retching, and cracked my head on a beam. Groaning, I swung my legs from the cramped bunk, clutching my head with one hand and my stomach with the other. A vaguely familiar tune ran through my head, a fragment of my dream. It took several breaths to remember where I was.
Outside, someone stopped whistling, and I realized the tune hadn’t been in my head after all.
“Garan?” I called, trying the door.
He opened it, peering in with a furrowed brow. “Are you all right?”
“Sick,” I managed, trying to step out. “Can I come on deck?”
He bit his lip. “I don’t think … The Warrior-Guilder wanted you to stay belowdecks.”
“You can see I’m sick,” I wheedled. “Garan, don’t make me throw up down here. It’d stink for you, too.”
He looked back and forth down the corridor, wringing his hands. “I’m not sure…”
“We don’t have to talk, and I’ll keep a scarf up so no one notices me. Please?”
A moment’s hesitation, then he relented. “Come on, then. But scarf up.”
I unwrapped the sticky scarf from around my neck and threw it over my head like a hood, then followed Garan abovedecks. Late afternoon sun and lush green banks greeted me, and the freshness of the air filled my lungs sweetly. I sucked in several deep breaths, wondering how I had slept so long. Garan ushered me to the quietest part of the deck, looking nervous. “I’m not the traitor, remember?” I said, and he smiled in response, but his eyes still darted about as if expecting Aven to pounce on his disobedience at any instant.