Rook

by Cameron, Sharon

  Bellamy sat much as he had the last time she’d come, in his chair looking out the window. Dying firelight flickered on the walls, and the room was stifling. Just how many times a night was Nancy tiptoeing in here to build up the fire? She was glad Orla was coming to help her. Bellamy’s eyes were open, hair combed, pajamas and robe clean, but he seemed to have shrunk beneath his blankets. Sophia put a tentative hand on his chair.

  “Father? It’s Sophia.”

  Bellamy blinked once, but did not change his stare.

  “I’m leaving now,” she whispered. “I’m going to get Tom. He’ll come back to you in just a few days. I promise you that.” She did not promise him that she would come back. She waited. “Do you understand, Father?”

  The boom of the ocean was an undercurrent in the thick, stagnant silence. Sophia waited for ten of Bellamy’s breaths, then laid a red-tipped feather in her father’s open hand. She left the way she’d come, the stifling dark of the room settled deep in her lungs. The feeling didn’t fully clear away until she was back at Spear’s farm, up the chimney stones, across the roof, and in through her bedroom window.

  Sophia turned the latch and threw her jacket on the bed. She was cold, but it was a clean cold, so much better than the horrible warmth of her father’s room. St. Just cracked open an eye from his basket, then went right to sleep again, as if girls crawled through his window all the time. She supposed they did.

  Sophia unbuckled the short sword she was wearing, the knife on the other side, pulled the smaller knife from her boot and the cheesewire from around her laces, making a pile of metal on the mattress. She kicked off her boots, and then paused, listening. She had heard one hard thump from outside her locked door.

  She stole softly across the room, avoiding the third and fifth floorboards, where the creaks were hiding, turned the lock, and peered into the hallway. It was empty, dimly lit by the overhead lantern. And then there was another soft bump, as if someone had stomped, just once. The noise had come from René’s room.

  Sophia ventured into the hall and put her hand on the doorknob. She thought better of that, and was going to lift it away to knock when the door suddenly shook, an impact she could feel through the metal against her palm. And she knew exactly what that had been. A body hitting oak wood. She threw open the door.

  A man in dark cloth, big, balding, and with bulging arms, had a rope around René’s neck from behind, and they were staggering backward, struggling in a macabre sort of dance. René had managed to get a hand between the rope and his neck on one side, and he was trying unsuccessfully to get a foot behind to knock the man’s feet out from under him. Sophia made a lightning scan of the room. No weapons she could see, no time to go for the pile on her bed. The two men lurched around again, and she did the only thing that occurred to her. She threw her body at the back of the stranger’s legs, aiming low and behind his knees.

  The man’s feet flew over her side, a boot heel catching her hard in the ribs, and both men went down backward, slamming the floor with René on top. Furniture rattled, the man lost his grip on the rope, and as Sophia was rolling free from the tangle of feet, René flipped around, gasping in a breath as he got a knee on the stranger’s arm. He brought up an arm to hit the man in the face, the rope now dangling from his hand, but then he hesitated, and so did Sophia, midscramble to get herself upright.

  The stranger had gone still, his eyes open and unblinking, staring at the ceiling, the bald head raised slightly from the floor. He had landed on the iron grate surrounding the fireplace, a small pool of blood forming below it on the hearthstone. René put a hand first on the open mouth to feel for breath, then on the man’s neck, searching for a pulse. He dropped the rope and climbed off the thick chest, coughing, looking around until he found Sophia. He shook his head.

  Sophia let a small shock wave pass through her. It wasn’t as if death was something unfamiliar. She wished it was. But she hadn’t expected to encounter it here, tonight, on the floor of Spear’s spare bedroom.

  Instead of standing, René stayed on his knees, coughing spasmodically, and stuck a hand in the man’s pocket. Sophia saw what he was doing and quickly did the same to the other side. Empty. She looked more closely at the clothes, the dark cloth, examined the bald head, shaved to remove any telltale sign of a hairstyle. He could have been from anywhere. He could have been from anywhere so deliberately that he must have come from somewhere significant.

  “Do you know him?” Sophia whispered. St. Just was barking full force, clawing from the inside of Sophia’s room, and footsteps were coming up the stairs.

  “No,” said René, voice gruff. “He was in the room, waiting …”

  Then Benoit was through the doorway, candle in hand. He looked at the dead man’s eyes, then spotted the reddening mark on René’s neck. He turned to Sophia. “Êtes-vous bien?”

  “I’m fine,” she replied as Spear came at a run to the door. He stopped, Orla moving around him and into the room from behind. Sophia saw Spear’s eyes widen at the sight of the dead man, his hand grab the doorjamb, and for a moment she couldn’t decide why he looked so odd. Then she realized it was because his hair was mussed. Orla pulled her to her feet, lifting and pinching her arms, checking for injuries without comment.

  “What happened?” Spear asked. He sounded dazed.

  “A man has attacked me.” René stood up. He was a little breathless, voice full of sand, but very calm, so much so that Sophia was not fooled. “We fell …” His gaze darted once toward Sophia. “… as you can see.”

  Spear did not miss where René’s look had gone, and then he took in Orla, brushing off Sophia’s clothes and checking her limbs. “Sophie?” he said. Now he had both hands on the door frame, as if he might push the opening apart. “Were you in here?”

  She narrowed her eyes at Spear’s tone. “I heard a noise and came to see what was wrong.” She glared back, defying him to ask her more. When he didn’t, she turned to René. “Is he Parisian?”

  But before he could answer, Orla said, “No.” She stood looking over Sophia’s shoulder. “He’s shaved off his beard and what little hair he had, but that’s the hotelier of the Holiday.”

  Benoit asked René for a translation, then knelt down, studied the man again, and nodded his agreement. Sophia turned to Spear. “Are they right?”

  “Yes,” he said, ducking beneath the door. “He looks so … I didn’t recognize him. But …” Spear looked around at them all. “Why would he try to kill Hasard?”

  Sophia stared down at the hotelier. She didn’t even know his name. It was just coming home to her that if she hadn’t stepped into the hall, it would have been René, not this man, lying dead on the floor planks. She looked to René, hands on knees, still catching his breath, and felt the pull she’d been resisting since that night in her bedroom become a tug, an ache so hard it made her put out a hand for the bedpost. What would have happened if she hadn’t thrown open that door? She turned to Benoit, and found that he’d been watching her.

  “Is this the man you saw in the woods?” she asked him in Parisian. Benoit scratched through his wispy hair, once more assessing the hotelier’s dead body.

  “It could be so,” he replied. “The shape is not unlike. I would say, yes, it is so.”

  “This man needs to get off Spear’s land as soon as may be, while it’s still dark,” Orla said, her Commonwealth cutting harsh through the Parisian. “Unless somebody thinks we ought to bring out the militia?”

  If they brought out the militia, they would never be boarding a ferry to the Sunken City at dawn.

  “Does he have a wife?” Sophia asked. “Children?”

  Spear shook his head. Orla crossed her arms, expression severe.

  “Spear and Benoit, go make certain we don’t have any other uninvited guests in the house, and then Spear, go get a shovel. Two or three, if you have them. The other side of Graysin and over by the cliffs will do, I think. I’ll change clothes …” Sophia realized with a start that Orla was
in her nightgown. “… and bring something to wrap his head in, so he won’t make a mess on the stairs. Sophie, take care of Monsieur’s neck. Monsieur can take first watch while the rest of us are gone, and I’ll get you a bucket and brush to be cleaning that hearth.”

  Orla discovered that everyone was staring at her, making the lines of her face deepen.

  “You thought we were going to lock the doors and have a long moon’s sleep?” she said. “Go!”

  Spear and Benoit scurried, though Sophia wasn’t sure Benoit knew what he was supposed to do, Orla marching out right after them. René watched Orla leave, then met Sophia’s gaze.

  “An excellent woman,” he said. Then he coughed.

  Sophia walked quickly around the dead man to René’s washstand, poured water from the ewer into the bowl, and wet a cloth. She wrung it out and went back to René, who was now sitting on the edge of the bed. She knelt down. “Show me your neck.”

  “There is no …”

  “Just show me your neck.”

  He raised his chin. There was a red mark circling his skin, a burn almost, tiny pinpricks of blood where the rope had pulled hardest, already purpling along the edges. She sponged at it carefully, the little pulse at the base of his throat beating strong. She imagined what his throat would look like without that pulse, and struggled with a hot burst of fury. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  “Are you shaking?”

  She paused, holding the wet cloth against the mark. “I’m angry. That’s all.”

  “At who?”

  She stared at him, incredulous. “At LeBlanc, of course!” René leapt up from the bed and began to pace.

  “I do not think he was trying to kill me.”

  “But you’re standing between him and a fortune!”

  “No, no! I mean him.” He coughed again, waving a hand at the dead man on the floor. “He was not even trying! He is here, waiting, as soon as I climb through the window, he has me unawares, he knows not to get his feet knocked out from under him …”

  “He did get his feet knocked out from under him!”

  René turned, his smile wry. “You are the variable in every equation, Mademoiselle. But I am saying he knew how to keep his feet back so that I could not knock them out, and that he had the advantage of weight. And yet this man cannot throttle me properly? He lets us thrash about the room with my hand beneath the rope? No, no, no.”

  He went to the pitcher and poured himself a glass of water, drinking slowly and apparently painfully. Sophia sat on her heels, cloth still in hand. “What do you mean you were climbing through the window?”

  He set down the glass. “I mean that I have been on the roof, watching Sophia Bellamy come sneaking back into this house.”

  She opened her mouth once, then closed it.

  “You have spent much time on the roof these past days. Do you think no one notices when you are gone?”

  “I went to see my …”

  René threw up a hand, the perfect impression of a red rope across his palm. “I know where you went!” Now she saw where all that restless energy was coming from. She was not the only one angry. He was furious. With her. “You know there is someone …” His eyes darted to the body on the floor. “… you agree there will be no more climbing out of windows, and yet you go anyway, alone, without saying … That is madness. Reckless!”

  Sophia bit her lip, still kneeling on the floor, breathing hard against her own temper. Then before she could react, René came across the room, sat again on the edge of the bed, and caught her head in his hands.

  “Look at me. Do you trust me?”

  She looked at him. He was angry and wild-headed and unshaven and beautiful. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was the hint of an irate smile around his mouth. “Then prove it. Prove that you trust me and tell me your plans.”

  “You know all our plans.”

  “Stop lying to me! Do you think I do not see all the things you choose not to tell us, how you have placed the others and how you have so exactly placed yourself? Do you really think I am what I pretend to be?”

  The room had gone still. And just as suddenly as he had in Spear’s kitchen, René dropped his hands. “I am sorry,” he said, and got up to go stand in front of the window, arms behind his head. She could see him struggling for control, deep breaths that were straining the linen of his shirt. She missed the warmth of his palms.

  “Tell me your plans, Mademoiselle,” he said, in the calm voice that was not, though this time the sound was full of gravel. “Tell me what the firelighter is for.”

  “To blow up the Tombs,” she said. Just like that. How odd to hear those words coming from her mouth; it made her heart slam repeatedly in her chest. “I’m going to empty the prison holes, blow them up, and take down LeBlanc. If I can.”

  René had gone absolutely still in front of the window. She counted several more breaths before he said, “This is why you wanted both the ships. Not as a decoy. You are going to fill them with prisoners.”

  She didn’t need to answer.

  “And, like tonight, you go on your own, you say nothing …”

  “I … didn’t want to worry them,” she whispered.

  “What you did not want, Mademoiselle, was to be prevented. Tell me I am wrong.”

  She couldn’t. And then he spun around.

  “You do not expect to come out. That is why you do not say.”

  “I don’t know what will happen.” She jumped as he kicked a stray buckled shoe, making it bounce against the far wall, near the dead man.

  “And Hammond does not know this, of course.”

  “No.” Sophia got up, her temper back in control. “But this is not what we should be discussing.” She ignored the way René threw up his hands, as well as the word he’d said softly in Parisian. “We need to know who our enemies are, or we might not get to the Sunken City to do anything at all. Was the hotelier LeBlanc’s man?”

  “I think he would have been anyone’s man who paid him.” René was pacing. “But you should consider that someone on this coast has been talking to LeBlanc. And for quite some time.”

  “Do you think it was him?”

  The hands went up to his head again. “I do not know.”

  “And you think he wasn’t trying to kill you, but … what? Incapacitate you? Dissuade you from traveling to the city tomorrow? Who doesn’t want you in the city, and how did they find out where you are?”

  He looked up. “It makes no sense. But I will say this to you, Mademoiselle. If this is LeBlanc’s doing, if I am the only thing standing between him and the Hasard fortune, then the person I should be worrying for most is Maman.”

  LeBlanc twisted the signet ring with the seal of the Sunken City around and around his finger, light that was just past highmoon slanting in through the stone window. “I have finished waiting, Madame. Do we have an understanding?”

  The woman nodded, flaming red hair still vivid beneath the prison dirt.

  “One should never deny Fate, Madame.” LeBlanc’s smile came slow as he slid the pen and ink pot across his desk.

  Sophia pushed out her breath, trying to endure Orla’s tightening of her clothing. Only Orla could arrange one’s traveling costume and bury a body in the same night, and with equal efficiency. It was still practically nethermoon. But they would need to leave soon to make the dawn ferry.

  “You will … you’ll take care of Father for me?” Sophia said. She knew Orla would, she just wanted to hear her say it.

  “I’ll be looking after Mr. Bellamy.”

  “And St. Just?”

  “As if I wouldn’t.”

  “And yourself?”

  “Well, really!” said Orla. “You’d think you weren’t coming back in just a day or three.”

  Sophia grimaced as the last string of her corset was pulled, but she also smiled. She wasn’t positive she was coming back, of course. She never had been
. She never was. But it seemed much more certain now, ever since René Hasard had pulled her out her bedroom window.

  The others had been off dealing with the hotelier when the knock came on the glass; she’d nearly jumped from her skin. But when she threw open the window, René had merely stuck out a hand, offering to help her up onto the roof.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered, once she’d gotten onto the thatch.

  “I am on watch, remember?” he said quietly, his voice rough. “And I am guessing that you do not mind having a conversation on a roof, Mademoiselle.” She’d pulled up her knees, hugging them from both cold and nervousness while he settled himself, careful not to be too close. He had a mug of hot tea, though how he’d managed to climb a roof with it she wasn’t sure. He offered her a sip. Willow bark. For pain. Probably for his throat. Then he’d said, “I want you to tell me how you are going to blow up the Tombs.”

  “Is this where you try to prevent me?”

  But he’d only shaken his head. “Tell me your plans, Mademoiselle.”

  And so she’d told him, about the Bellamy fire that should already be inside a cell, and the free landovers Allemande was providing for La Toussaint, taking the people of the Lower City to the Upper, and out the gates to the cemeteries. And René had listened, first with elbows on knees, and when his tea was gone, on his back beneath the stars, flipping his weighted coin while the highmoon made the lane a luminescent ribbon, twisting through the trees along the sea cliff. There was a darker circle on the skin around his neck.

  And when she was done he took her plan and expanded it, adding detail, changing the timeline. They’d argued over it, and it had taken him some time to convince her. But in the end, René was to go back and set the firelighter when the prison yard was clear, after she’d gotten everyone away, including herself, eliminating her need to stay and play cat and mouse with LeBlanc.