The fishwife executed a graceful bow, fins fluttering. “Welcome, Your Grace.” She turned and motioned to the guards at the end of the foyer. They opened a set of doors behind them. “Please, follow me.”
We followed. My grip on Meire’s hand became tighter. “Did you tell her who I was?”
“Naturally,” Meire said. “I cannot simply swim to the royal treasury and demand access.”
“So you can speak to other citizens Below telepathically?” This would be a fascinating tidbit to present to Farhod.
“No.” But Meire sounded unsure. “It is more that… we can speak to each other without your being able to hear.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Your Grace, we will have the book of receipts brought up immediately,” the fishwife said.
As she disappeared, I turned to Meire. “Is it possible that someone could sneak Below?”
“I do not know, Your Grace,” Meire said. She kept her eyes on the room around us; clerks floated at stations set out on the walls. Iron spikes had been fastened into the walls to keep their waterproof documents from floating all over the room. Between the spikes, tapestries hung, depicting the wealth of Below—softly glowing magic, ingots of iron and electrum, scenes of trade and prosperity between citizens. “I have never known it to happen in my life. We do not want visitors. Present company excepted,” she said, flashing her teeth at me.
“What about the moat?” I pressed. “Someone could get Below from there.”
Meire’s eyes widened, her mouth turning into a small O of confusion. “Swim from the moat to the city Below? That would be impossible. And the moat is patrolled. You would be…” She shook her head. “You would accuse our guard of conspiracy and treason.”
My stomach jolted unpleasantly. If I wasn’t careful, I’d endear myself to Below as poorly as I’d endeared myself to my ministers Above. But I had to find the answers. “What about the messenger bowls? Could someone else have used them? The way we did?”
“They are personally monitored by His Grace’s staff,” Meire said. “Only your family is allowed correspondence.”
As far as she knew.
The treasury records came as a slim book made from pressed algae paper. Meire held the lamp above my head as I flipped through it. Harvested seaweed, fishing permits, coral, and pearls. And then came the magic.
The jars were measured by weight and stored so the pearls at the top didn’t crush the ones at the bottom. I read through the ledger with growing frustration. “It’s all accounted for.”
“Is that not good?” Meire said. “It means that the error must come from your treasury.”
“Every scrap of magic in my treasury has been accounted for, too. Any extra magic that was obtained had to come from here.” I sighed as her scales rose defensively. “I’m not claiming anything. I just have to find out what happened before—” Before I lost the coronation trials. Before I had to choose between marrying Sigis and death. Before the person who created the curse turned it on me.
I ran my fingers down the ledger column, pausing when I hit a fuzzy patch. I frowned and traced over it again. “Feel this.”
Meire caressed the page with her long, four-jointed finger. “I do not understand.”
“Hold up the lantern.” I angled the book so that the page in question was isolated in the light. The fibers were scraped and cut in a crosshatch pattern. The ink feathered lightly around them. For a moment, I was distracted by the ink. What did they use? How did they keep it from dissolving? “It’s been scraped,” I said. Like vellum when Farhod needed to amend a report. “Look at this.” I flipped to an earlier page. “The addition was off in this column, so the accountant corrected it by scratching out the number and writing the correction in a free space.”
“And added a signature.” Meire indicated a squiggle of ink.
My stomach lurched. “To verify that the change was valid. In case anyone had a question later. Meire, this means that whoever changed this number, here where it’s scraped, didn’t have permission. They covered it up by changing the ledger. Whoever it was could be our illegal seller.”
“His Grace will be displeased,” Meire murmured.
But I wasn’t. I finally had solid evidence there was a buyer from Above.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Meire took me back to the surface and released my hand to bow. “Thank you for your help,” I said. “And thank His Grace for allowing it.”
“I am honored to assist you,” Meire said. “You are welcome Below any time you might wish. Merely send word.”
“Could you send news?” I said. “If you find out who altered the ledger?”
“I will do everything within my power.” Her crest flattened slightly, and her feet swished from side to side. Finally, she added, “And if you address a note to me, only I will see it.”
Without thinking, I held up my hand. Meire’s pressed against it. Her longer fingers and wide palm dwarfed my own, and for a moment, I wondered if magic properly applied could bridge that gap, give me fins for toes and webbed fingers, a new life Below. “Thank you.”
Her hand separated from mine, pressed against my nose and mouth. A prickle started in my lungs. She flipped and swam down, down into the dark.
I kicked upward toward the hole in the ice that was the entrance to my duchy and surfaced with a gasp. Aino and Viljo hastened to pull me out of the water, and Aino hurried me behind a screen to change before my shirt could freeze to my body.
“Please tell me you found something useful,” she said.
“I did.” I took a deep breath, willing the mantle of my father to fall over me. Grand dukes had grand rages. Anything less was a childish tantrum. “Minister Olloi, tell me about the break-in.”
“I—excuse me, Your Grace?”
Why was he gaping like that? “The break-in,” I repeated, trying to push my forceful tone around my urge to chatter. Grand dukes didn’t like to repeat themselves. “The one that occurred before my family fell ill. The one you reported to the guard.”
Olloi blinked. “I don’t understand what that has to do with—”
“I didn’t ask you to understand.”
Olloi’s mouth worked like a fish’s. “It—must have occurred some time in the night. I check the gate to Below every morning and evening, and one morning I came down and the locks were broken.”
I looked at Viljo. He shook his head once. “And then you had them replaced with the rusty locks you just opened for me?”
His face turned red. Guilty. I turned from him and went to the door. The padlock still hung from it, and I bent to examine the iron and the wood around it. “How were the locks broken?”
“Ah.” Olloi sounded closer and closer to tears. “An ax? A knife?”
I looked back at him. “Why are you asking me?”
“I don’t know what it was; I can only guess!”
“Ekata,” whispered Aino. Behind her, Viljo frowned.
I watched Olloi carefully. “There’s no trauma to the door.” No mark, no chip in the wood.
Olloi began to tremble. “I don’t understand,” he said.
I pushed down my pity and folded my arms. “You lied, didn’t you? This door wasn’t forced. There are no broken locks. That’s because someone unlocked this door with a key. That someone is you. Viljo, arrest the minister of Below, if you please.”
Viljo coughed. “I, ah—was ordered by Prime Minister Eirhan not to arrest anyone on Her Grace’s behalf.”
That little traitor.
A fist closed around my heart. Grand dukes commanded obedience. “Now, Viljo.”
“Wait,” Olloi said, and panic ran deep in his voice. “It was Annika. They forced me to open the gates and lie.”
Viljo hesitated, and I did, too. Encouraged, Olloi began to babble. “I thought that if I reported it as a break-in, someone would investigate and find out. But no one ever questioned me.”
He could be telling the truth. If Olloi had told the captain,
and the captain told Eirhan, and Eirhan told him to forget it… I nodded to Viljo, who stood down, then went to the bench and sat, reminding myself that grand dukes were regal even when they had soaking-wet hair.
“I’m loyal to your father.” Olloi knelt and bowed his head.
I snorted. “I can’t say I believe that, considering.”
He flinched. “I am, but my wife—Annika threatened to hurt my wife if I didn’t leave the door unlocked and let them go Below.”
“So your wife’s life is more important than the grand duke’s?” I said. That was an unfair question; I would probably have preserved Olloi’s wife before my own father.
“I didn’t know what Annika would do,” he said, and the remorse in his voice was not entirely motivated by fear. “I thought they wanted to sell magic for a personal profit. I thought they wouldn’t get far without the help of someone from Below.”
His shoulders shook with fear, and I knew it was a selfish fear, entirely centered on preserving his own life and that of his family. But unlike my other ministers, Olloi feared me. I held the power of life and death over him. And that was a power that could be shaped, used, wielded. Warmth filled me.
I counted out careful seconds. “I don’t think you’re lying,” I said at last. Olloi’s head whipped up. “If I’m wrong, your death will be public and brutal. If you try to run, it will be the same. Don’t leave your rooms.” I stood. “And don’t tell anyone we had this conversation.”
Olloi sagged so heavily I thought he’d fall backward. “Thank you, Your Grace. Thank you.”
It felt stranger to be on the receiving end of gratitude than of fear. “Don’t grovel. Tell me the truth. And tell me if anyone threatens you again.”
“What reason would Annika have to betray us?” Aino asked in an undertone as we left the entrance to Below.
“I guess we’ll find out. Get me Annika’s schedule, won’t you? Discreetly,” I added. We couldn’t have a repeat of the treasury disaster.
Aino nodded. A strange, proud look came over her face. “You were impressive,” she said.
“I was like my father, you mean.” And it was what I wanted—it was what I needed—but it didn’t make me happy.
I itched to write to Meire and update her on my new findings. Instead, I went back to my rooms and dried myself by the fire, waiting for Aino. “Annika has a meeting with Eirhan and Yannush at three,” she reported when she came back.
That wasn’t for another hour. “A nap?” Aino suggested.
“Farhod.” I was long overdue for a visit to my family.
Aino rubbed at her brow and smoothed her frizzy auburn hair. “You should leave him to his work, Ekata.”
“It’s my work, too,” I said. It should be my work. It was what I was good at.
My father’s rooms were thirty steps down the hall from mine and guarded not by two guards but four, who bowed to me as I passed through. I stopped at the entrance to his antechamber. The stink of his rooms—sour sweat and soiled bedclothes and bitter medicinal remedies all mixed together—nearly sent me back out again. And the heat—it was a wonder the floor hadn’t collapsed on the rooms beneath. A cold drop of water from the melting lintel hit the back of my ear and slid under my dress.
Six of my siblings lay in the antechamber on mattresses. The rich furniture—brocade chairs and velvet couches in vibrant purple and gold—had been shoved up against the carved ice walls, wrinkling tapestries of previous grand dukes. The antechamber was as large as my entire suite, and had two fireplaces, both roaring. Two doctors knelt; one checked Nari’s pulse while the other slid a long, woven straw up Fenedyo’s nose. As I watched, the doctor sucked on the straw, then spat a long line of clear fluid into a bedpan next to him.
Don’t be sick. It’s what doctors do. It was what I might end up doing someday. The doctor who monitored Nari looked up at me. His frown became recognition, and he bowed his head. “Your Grace. Do you need something?”
Nari had once impaled Velosha with an iron nail, aiming for the stomach but missing any vital organs. Fenedyo made me think of bitter winds, of searing panic. When he’d locked me out of the palace, I’d known exactly what hypothermia would do to me, and it had taken me longer than I wanted to admit to remember the kennels had warmth and safety. I looked upon my siblings with no love. Why was I trying to save them?
I headed to where the smell was worse, sweeter and bitterer and sicker. The rest of my family lay in the bedchamber—Father and Mother on the enormous oak-and-brocade bed, the rest of my siblings on more mattresses and cots. Father’s cherrywood desk had been filled with most of Farhod’s medicine cabinet. Farhod sat in my father’s chair, peering at a solution in a glass dish. Munna tended Kavrosh.
“Any progress?”
Farhod stretched his shoulders. “There’s been no change. They’re halfway drowned and they can’t wake up. Their breathing is labored, and there’s a bubbling in their lungs. We drain them sometimes, but it doesn’t really do anything.”
I touched Father’s wrist. It was clammy, and his pulse threaded. My father looked smaller, suddenly, thinner and frailer and paler.
The doctors moved quietly around me, pretending I wasn’t there. I went to examine the ingredients strewn across the desk. “What have you tried?”
“I prescribed bloodleaf and sapphire kelp. No improvement.”
I ran through my list of breathing agents. “Mint and ulna?”
“Done that.”
“Wormwood?”
“Some debate on the efficacy,” Farhod said.
“It was fruitless,” said Munna. Their gray-brown hair was greasy, and some unnamed fluid stained their coat. “Your Grace, this is hardly the place for you.”
“It’s not contagious, is it?” I challenged them.
“It would seem not.” Munna looked as though they wanted to say something more, but I set my jaw.
“Farhod, magic made the curse.” I tried to keep my voice low. I still didn’t trust that Munna and the other doctors weren’t in Eirhan’s pocket. Eirhan might know more than he claimed. “Maybe magic can unmake it.”
“Magic doesn’t do whatever we want, Ekata,” Farhod said. “It only obeys your father, and he wouldn’t have done this to himself.”
Unless someone else had bought the secret from Below. Or discovered the secret on their own.
Winter roses bloomed around the bedposts, dipping toward Father’s head. “Farhod, they use magic Below all the time. They have the secret of it.”
“The creatures Below might be people, but they’re not human,” Farhod warned me. He rubbed his temple, and I spotted a swipe of gray I hadn’t noticed before. “Don’t assume that magic will work for us the same way it does for them.”
“What if we can tap into it but don’t know how?” I said.
“Ekata, your forefathers have had three hundred years to experiment. Magic is volatile. You’re not going to change that, and certainly not in two days.”
“Father must have used something to refine it,” I said. Desperation ran like fire through my veins. If refinement were something like alchemy… something I was good at…
Munna pushed a stray hair out of their face. “He almost certainly did. But whatever it was, we don’t know.”
Then Farhod said, “You might as well show her,” and they beckoned me to Father’s desk. The water in the messenger bowl there rippled, but when I bent over it, I saw nothing.
Munna pulled open a drawer full of neatly labeled jars and wooden boxes. Father’s own little medicine cabinet. I spotted charcoal, mustard seed, nux vomica, juniper, and slippery elm. He was ready to combat an arsenal of poisons. “He wouldn’t keep his greatest secret in a drawer anyone could open.”
Munna reached down and popped the bottom of the drawer up. Of course Father would have a secret compartment. I wondered how Munna knew of it. But when they lifted the false bottom out, I saw only evidence that something had been there. Brown circular stains dotted the drawer, ingrained in
the wood. “You think whatever was in this drawer was part of the process?”
“I cannot say, Your Grace,” Munna replied, and went to check on my father.
Dead ends. Dead ends and nothing to study. I glared at the antidotes and emetics. It’s a puzzle. But I was missing a crucial piece.
Farhod touched my arm gently, and there was more concern than irritation in his gaze. “Ekata, we’ve tried every remedy we can think of. We’ve seen no change. So far the illness hasn’t gotten worse, but… if it does, I don’t know if we can stop it.”
My duke voice came back. “You can’t say that.” The whole duchy was a mess, and it was unfair that my father had abandoned me to deal with it. Unfair that all I’d worked for, all I’d studied, was, suddenly, nothing more than a hobby, and one that I had to set aside for some greater good I wasn’t sure I believed in. “We have to have something. I must have progress for the council. By tonight.”
“Or what?” Frustration bled through in Farhod’s voice. “You can’t force this. We’ll help them when we help them—and maybe we won’t be able to help them at all.”
“No,” I said, pulling Father’s demeanor around me like a cloak. The word came out strong, cold, authoritative. Everything he was. Masking my panic and turning it into my strength. “I’m not going to die on that throne. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not in fifty years. You’re going to find me a way out of it.”
Farhod took a deep breath. “Ekata,” he said gently. “Sometimes things don’t happen the way we want—”
“Don’t patronize me,” I snarled. Farhod recoiled. Rage boiled in me, and I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. “I’m not stupid. I’m not a child. Don’t you want to save them?”
“You know I do.” Farhod’s even tone was strained.
“Then do something!” I shouted. My voice cracked.
“I can’t!” Farhod shouted back. “This isn’t a test, and it isn’t a lesson, and we’re not in my laboratory. These aren’t even your father’s rooms anymore! This is a hospital, and I can’t put my work on hold to coddle you when you’re supposed to be running the country.”
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