The Liar's Knot

by M. A. Carrick

  The back room was Ryvček’s training space. She might be one of the top duelists in Nadežra, but only fools thought that meant she didn’t have to practice anymore. In addition to teaching her students, she spent at least two hours a day here, stretching, drilling footwork, lunging at the wall until the paneling cracked and had to be replaced again. The eyebrow she arched at him asked silently whether he was as diligent, and Grey hid a guilty wince. Most of his “practice” took the form of either Vigil or Rook business.

  He slouched against the wall, well out of reach from his former teacher’s sword. “Two weeks ago, I escorted Alta Renata on a trip to the Lower Bank. That night, the Rook ran into the Black Rose in Seven Knots. And just now, Arenza Lenskaya was having tea with Alinka. In her house.”

  Ryvček’s blade thudded into the wall a good three inches above the usual mark.

  She retreated from her lunge and stared at him. “She knows?”

  “I’m not sure.” That steady gaze made him feel like a new student who’d never touched a blade. Ryvček had worn the hood for over twenty years before she’d passed it on to him, less than two years ago; compared to her, he was as green as spring grass. “She had plausible reasons for being in all three places, and today she rushed out like she was afraid of being recognized herself. But in Seven Knots, she told the Rook she’d patterned him. And she knew things we don’t talk about.”

  The stillness of Ryvček’s body was that of a swordswoman, preparing to strike. “You wondered about her success. Think you that she knows these things because of pattern? Or because she has one of the medallions?”

  The possibility had crossed his mind before. “The Traementis started falling to ruin when Letilia left. And started improving when Renata returned. A medallion might explain the shift.”

  He didn’t want to contemplate it. Ren had been an ally to him and the Rook both; if it weren’t for her help, Veiled Waters would have ended very differently. The thought that she might hold a piece of the Tyrant’s corruption—the same corruption the Rook fought against—made Grey feel sick.

  For once, talking about pattern was preferable. “As for the reading… she is born of Ažerais. I don’t think she’s a charlatan.”

  “Unlike all the others?”

  Grey met Ryvček’s smirk with a glower. “Perhaps.” She knew a little of his life before coming to Nadežra, and why he disliked frauds. But his teacher was good at putting boundaries between the past and the present; she didn’t really understand why bygones might still scar him now.

  Ryvček resumed her lunges, the point of her sword beating a steady rhythm against her wall, undoubtedly to the annoyance of her neighbor. “Then what will you do?”

  He’d come to her because he didn’t know. But while Ryvček tolerated him asking for occasional advice, in the end, she was no longer the Rook. She’d walked away from it—something very few of their predecessors had managed.

  Grey scrubbed at his face. “She knows there’s a poison lacing through this city. She offered to help. I didn’t find a medallion when I searched her townhouse after the Night of Hells, but I could have missed it. If she does have one, it’s possible she doesn’t know what it is. Which means she might actually work with me.” Maybe that was what her reading meant: the chance to finally break through a wall that had stood for two hundred years.

  Even if it was a slim chance, it made his answer clear. “I think I need to risk getting closer. If she trusts the Rook, maybe she’ll tell him something.”

  Ryvček paused again, this time in thought. “You were concerned that she cannot defend herself—not as a noble should. I have begun training her. A chance it might offer me, to learn something useful.” Familiar amusement flared in her smile. “If nothing else, I’ll have a few afternoons of getting sweaty and close with a lovely young woman.”

  His teacher had always been good at surprising a laugh from him. “I almost wish I could watch. She might not be much with a sword, but when it comes to verbal sparring, I think you’ll find you’ve met your match.” He grinned. “Especially if she drops the Renata act and fights dirty.”

  Ryvček’s dark eyes twinkled as though she would like nothing better. Then they dimmed. “And if she starts to see through your act?”

  It wasn’t the first time someone had gotten close to discovering the Rook’s identity. Grey had centuries of ways to deal with it that he could draw upon. And he might not like szorsas, but he knew how they worked—not the ones with the true gift. The charlatans.

  He said, “Then I’ll give her a better performance to distract her.”

  Isla Traementis, the Pearls: Colbrilun 14

  Too many nights awake and days sleeping had thrown off Donaia’s old habits. Exhaustion dragged her eyelids down as she sat with Tanaquis and Renata in the salon, abetted by the afternoon sunlight dancing on dust motes and Meatball draped heavy in her lap. And the gentle burr of Tanaquis’s voice as she went over the astrological charts of the petitioners for adoption…

  Donaia jerked her head up from its dip, dragging herself back to Tanaquis’s words. “I can’t recommend her. Bad fortune from now until Ninat claims her. Nencoral Fintenus, on the other hand…” Tanaquis shuffled one chart off onto an empty chair co-opted for that purpose and presented the next one. “Very promising. Prime in Quarat True with an Alter in Tricat, and both Paumillis and Corillis full at her birth. I wouldn’t be surprised if House Fintenus counteroffered in a bid to keep her.”

  “I’ve no interest in getting mired in a bidding war,” Donaia said, pinching her brow in an attempt to ward off sleep. “House Traementis is established enough that people should fight to join us.”

  She felt guilty for asking Renata to sit in on this meeting. The girl was run ragged these days, handling their Charterhouse business; Donaia ought to hire another advocate to take some of the burden off her. Another advocate wouldn’t have Renata’s style, though, her gift for reading people’s moods, her ability to lure people into believing her foreign origins made her an easy mark.

  But when it came to evaluating candidates for adoption, Donaia knew the waters best. She couldn’t hand this task off to Renata. At the same time, she was strongly considering taking Scaperto up on his offer of time away, in his bay villa—which would mean leaving Renata in charge of the house. The girl would need to know who she was dealing with. Her and Giuna both; after all, whomever they adopted would be their new cousins.

  “It needn’t be a bidding war,” Renata mused. “I’ve met Nencoral a few times. I suspect we could offer her some… nonmonetary benefits. After all, she wouldn’t have applied if she were happy in House Fintenus.”

  That was the other reason to have Renata here. She looked at these people and saw potential. All Donaia could see were flaws.

  She didn’t want new family. She wanted the family she’d had. The family she’d lost.

  Donaia pressed one hand against her belly. Last night she’d dreamed she was bearing, and in the way of dreams, it had been both her pregnancy with Leato, and a new child coming. Only when she went into labor, she gave birth to one of those hideous monsters that had killed him. A zlyzen.

  Renata and Tanaquis kept talking, moving from chart to chart. Donaia was so glad to see a friendship growing between those two. Renata had plenty of friends in Nadežra, but sometimes she wondered if the girl felt at all close to any of them. Superficial entertainments were no substitute for a true bond. She’d learned that all too sharply when House Traementis’s false friends had fallen away.

  “Would you consider it?” she asked.

  The question popped out without her thinking, and cut through the conversation like an imbued knife. Tanaquis blinked. “Consider what? Adopting Algetto myself? I don’t think he’d accept demotion to gentry status. And House Fienola, all one of me, has even less to offer him than House Traementis used to.”

  Renata shifted in her chair, and Tanaquis blinked again. “I suppose that sounded bad. Don’t worry. I don’t mind being th
e last; everything dies eventually.”

  “No, I meant—” Donaia struggled for a more polite phrasing, recalled that it was Tanaquis she was speaking to, and cast delicacy aside. “If we offered to adopt you. Would you join House Traementis?”

  Renata’s lips parted on a soft “ah,” her hazel eyes darkening as she ran social calculations at the speed Tanaquis could run astrological ones. But it wasn’t Renata’s approval Donaia wanted. If she was going to open her house and her register, let at least one of the new entrants be an old friend.

  “Hmm. Ninat does lead to Illi. The death of the old makes way for the birth of the new,” Tanaquis mused, oblivious to Donaia’s shiver at the mention of death and birth together. “My chart should be acceptable. And you’re no longer cursed. You have more than enough room at Traementis Manor for more people… but my observatory is set up just how I like it.”

  Tucking a stray wisp behind her ear, Tanaquis gave Donaia the same look Meatball had when he didn’t understand a command. “I see no significant flaws—but also no profit to you.”

  “Not everything is about profit,” Renata said.

  Donaia’s emphatic gesture at her niece took the place of the words welling up in her throat, crowding too close to get out. As Tanaquis’s brow furrowed, her grey eyes shifting back and forth between the two of them, the knot untied itself enough for Donaia to say, “You’re a friend. And you’ll stay a friend regardless of whether you accept the offer—but I want the chance to choose one person for something other than mercenary reasons.”

  “Oh. I hadn’t considered that aspect.” After a moment’s more hesitation, Tanaquis reached over and awkwardly covered Donaia’s hand where it rested on Meatball’s ruff. “It’s a kind offer. I should consider what the consequences for us both might be, and I’ll need to cast more charts… but I will think about it.”

  Splinter Alley, the Shambles: Colbrilun 17

  Vargo didn’t know the Shambles as well as some of Nadežra’s other slums. It was a rabbit’s warren of stalls and squats and seedy shops servicing the merchants and mercenaries who traveled the Dawn and Dusk Roads, everyone squeezed between the Cinquerat’s taxes and the local fire crews. The only organized activity that made any profit in the Shambles was the off-book brothels fronted by papaver dens, and that was one business that Vargo did his best to stay out of.

  The brothels, and the children caught in them.

  Vargo might not know the Shambles well, but he knew not to walk its streets in his usual finery. He’d forced himself into the unwashed coat and shirt of one of Nikory’s crew—his skin itching at the inevitability of lice—and he’d donned a cheap mask despite the urge to take his disease-preventing one instead. The Shambles was no place for Eret Vargo.

  Even with those precautions, he drew the notice of the beggars and pickpockets working the spaces between stalls. The knot of artfully hollow-eyed waifs that flocked around him looked hungry, but not for food. Pity-rustling must be more lucrative than he remembered, if they depended on makeup and dirt smudges to ply their trade.

  “How long has she been in operation?” Vargo asked Nikory, who flanked him opposite a frowning Varuni. Since the events at the amphitheatre, he hadn’t been allowed to take a shit without her standing sentry. He might have been touched, if he didn’t know she was just protecting her family’s investment. They relied on him to get their goods past the tariffs.

  “Started hearing her name about two years back,” Nikory murmured, his split tongue flickering out to wet his lips as he eyed the children. They’d swelled in numbers, which might have been more threatening if any of them came higher than Vargo’s elbow. Even so, Varuni’s chain whip clinked as she studied the gathering crowd.

  Vargo side-eyed Nikory. “And you didn’t tell me about her because…?”

  “She was an eleven-year-old brat!” Nikory’s voice went high with incredulity. “We was supposed to take that seriously?”

  I was eleven.

  ::And definitely a brat.:: Vargo hadn’t expected the reply, and he flinched. He hadn’t meant to think that loud enough for Alsius to hear.

  He flicked his collar, where the spider had hidden himself away. Takes one to know one, old man.

  Smiling at the mental sputters that followed, Vargo stopped before a run-down building not much different than all the others lining the narrow, winding alleyway. A plank hanging from one corner was carved with a crude, four-petaled flower, smoke curling lazily up from its center. The vermilion paint had long worn away, remnants of it clinging only in the deepest grain of the wood, like veins of heart’s blood. Tarry soot blackened the window on the inside, but Vargo spied the twitch of a curtain parting and then falling back into place.

  At his nod, Nikory rapped on the door.

  The speed and efficiency with which they were let in, searched, and divested of the few weapons they’d brought was impressive. Varuni was allowed to keep her chain, but only after her look promised pain for the large boy who’d tried to take it from her.

  Vargo wasn’t worried. Over two years, Arkady Bones had risen to become the biggest—and youngest—knot leader in the Shambles. Hurting Derossi Vargo, leader of half the knots on the Lower Bank, would be stupid; this girl had proven she was anything but.

  Once the door crew was satisfied that Vargo and his people posed no danger to their boss, a guide led them through a main room packed with nests of blankets. Some of those were occupied by multiple children snuggled together for comfort. From beyond a curtain-veiled doorway came the meaty aroma of steamed dumplings.

  But their guide led them past that, up a curving flight of stairs to the balcony that ringed the main floor. There sat Arkady Bones, in a recessed alcove that gave her a view of most of the room. Her high-backed chair was too big for her spindle-thin frame: a tyrant in miniature, surveying her domain.

  Her knife-cut hair stuck out in jagged points from under a bright red cap. A patched coat hung over the back of her chair; both of her bare arms were bound from wrist to elbow with thin, braided cords. The same cords worn on the wrist of every child he’d seen since entering the Shambles, in an array of colors as diverse and clashing as Master Peabody’s abdomen.

  Had she sworn individual knot bonds with every child in her crew? Vargo marveled at the madness.

  “Eret Vargo,” she said, as overly solemn as an actress cast in a role too large for her skill.

  Keeping his smirk at bay, Vargo bowed with a hand over his heart, equally solemn. “Mistress Bones.”

  A tense moment passed. Then the girl grinned, sharp as a dagger, and twisted on her throne. She kicked her legs over one arm and leaned back against the other. “You en’t looking half bad for a cuff whose back was shredded worse’n a night-piece’s skirts. I figured you for Ninat’s pyre after Veiled Waters. Glad to see you’re upright enough for fucking.”

  “… Thank you,” Vargo said, nonplussed. In the back of his mind, he heard laughter. Alsius?

  ::Don’t mind me, my boy. Just feeling nostalgic.::

  Fuck you.

  “How’d you do it?” Boots thunking to the floor, Arkady leaned forward, sharp gaze searching Vargo like she could see under his borrowed coat. “They say you’re some chalk-eating inscriptor. You use a numinat to save your ass? You got scars? Can I see ’em?”

  This time, the snicker was out loud, and it came from Varuni. Arkady had managed to crack that impenetrable facade? She was dangerous.

  “Yes, I am. No, I didn’t. Yes, I do. No, you may not,” Vargo said sternly—only realizing after the words were out that he was acting as Alsius had in their early days. Which was probably a mistake.

  Definitely a mistake. “Guess we know where you stick your chalk when you en’t using it,” Arkady muttered.

  Vargo snorted and matched her insolent expression. “My edge and my compass fit up there, too.”

  Grin returning, Arkady asked, “And your self?”

  “A man can but try.”

  Arkady cackled. “Butt try!�
�� Her laughter launched a wave of giggles from the children ringing the balcony. Vargo could almost feel Varuni rolling her eyes, and he knew Alsius was doing the same—all eight of them.

  The tension broke with the laughter. Arkady grabbed a round pear from a bowl at her elbow, then tossed one to Vargo as well. “Guess we should stop shitting about and talk business. I en’t stupid. You want to take my crew, and nothing I can do to keep it from happening. But you try doing it by force—” She held up both arms, voice descending into a hiss. “And I will ‘but try’ to fuck you with your own cock for every one of these you make bleed.”

  Before Vargo could find words, Arkady smiled again. He was beginning to realize that all her smiles were knives. “Or we can do this peaceful-like. You leave my people alone, and maybe we can work something out. I don’t come cheap, but I’m worth more to you here in the Shambles than floating belly down in the West Channel.”

  Covering his surprise with one hand, Vargo tapped his lip and pretended to consider. “I believe you might be.”

  ::Vargo, we didn’t come for this.::

  No reason we can’t use it. He had no interest in taking over Arkady’s tangle of knots—but she didn’t know that.

  “We can work out the details later,” Vargo said, glance traveling over their audience. Stick-thin legs dangled from every space along the balcony ring, wide-eyed faces pressed into every gap between the rails. He suspected Arkady would make him pay well for her cooperation, but that was always more profitable in the long run than bleeding a new knot dry. “In private. But as a gesture of goodwill, I have a question and a favor to ask.”

  Arkady crossed her arms, chin lifting as though she feared what he wanted but wasn’t going to let it cow her. “Sure. En’t this an old papaver den? First toke comes free.”

  She needn’t have worried. Vargo’s request was as soothing and easy as poppy smoke. “I understand you’re friendly with the Black Rose. I want to know what you know about her. And I want you to pass on a message.”