She took a sip from her glass and sighed. “The rest of it is, you’ve made me begin to reconsider, Buc. Or you had started to. Now, I can’t tell if you ever really cared or if that was just another card you played when you needed to.”
“Oh?” I whispered. Her words made my ears buzz, and I could hear my breathing, swift and shallow, over the ringing as something red and hot filled my head. “When did you ever call the streets your home?” My tongue lashed out like a whip. “The gutter your bathing tub, the trash heap your bed?”
“Never, and that’s why I’ve been so slow to come around to even noticing, much less caring, about the children of the streets,” Salina said. She leaned forward, her brown eyes boring into mine. “But you used to care, you gave alms to them every day, not just at Festivals, you added them to the Company’s payroll at first, at least until—”
“Until I realized it was too little, too late,” I snapped, cutting her off.
“Too late? What about the children dying out there now?” She waved a hand in the general direction of the street. “What about the ones who were desperate enough to attack you a few days ago? They don’t have time, Buc.”
“You sound like Eld,” I growled.
“Does that mean you’ll keep giving me the rough side of your tongue while actually listening to me?”
“Salina.” I snorted and crossed my arms. “You don’t get it. Neither of you do. I’m aiming for the stars.” I shook out the long, loose braid I’d hastily pulled together after waking up and let my hair settle against my shoulder.
“Cleaning up the gutters won’t change where that light from the stars falls today. It’ll still land on the Empress and the Doga and the Company and all of this,” I said, gesturing around. “But if I control those stars, I control their light and where the light falls.” I took a deep breath, tasting bile in the back of my throat. “Forever.”
I swallowed the bile and the tiny voice that whispered that Salina was right. Maybe she’s right, but I’m right, too! That didn’t mean I didn’t care. I remembered Quenta’s glazed eyes, the bloody ruin I’d made of her. Someone, likely Sicarii, had been responsible for her blood even if my hands dealt the blows. I’d see them paid back a thousandfold, but Sicarii was just a symptom of the disease. I couldn’t keep cutting out bits of cancer while the rest of the body rotted away. I needed to cure it all. Which required a seat at the table. I had to play their game—the Doga’s and the Chair’s—to win.
Damn Eld and Salina and that tiny voice for making me feel guilty about doing it. No one thanks the physiker for the scalpel.
I said as much and Salina rolled her eyes.
“Why are you here again?” I asked, not entirely politely.
“To make you squirm hard enough to puke all of last night’s delectables, clearly,” she said with a sigh, settling back into her chair. “To talk about the Masquerade and what masks and outfits we’re going to wear.”
“Aye, I’ve heard that’s coming up soon now,” I said dryly.
“The Doga’s Palacio is already being strung with decorations and firecrackers, or so I’m told,” Salina said. “Last year she hired some outfit from Southeast Island, who made a dragon appear from smoke. It chased one of the jesters half around the ballroom. This year, the Chair’s hinted she hired some entertainment of her own to get one over on the Doga in front of her guests.”
“It’s all a performance, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” she said with a sniff. “That’s the point. How else to show power without resorting to violence? Make no mistake, everything about the Masquerade is a proxy for war. The displays are a show of arms, the outfits suits of armor, and the masks shields. The dances are little more than duels, and the polite conversations, diplomatic discussions all aimed at tipping the balances here, shifting them there. Buc—haven’t you been paying attention at all?” She shook her hair. “Look beneath the surface, what do you think this is all about?”
I nodded slowly, my mind connecting the dots between some of the natterings of that dancing maestro to bits and pieces I’d heard from some of the Board about previous Festivals. Crowding out those thoughts were my memories of last night: the bar Joffers had taken us to, where a woman with a harp and another with drums had set the place to roaring out drunken sea shanties. We’d laughed and tossed back drinks and even sung along, usually butchering the tunes completely. In the moment, it’d felt like more than just friendship, but looking back on it now, it felt like something old friends would do. Is that all we are? Was it really any different than when we’d just been friends? I needed to change the sums, refigure the calculus.
“What do you wear to make a man forget himself, lose his wits, and fall madly in love with you?” I asked, before realizing I was speaking aloud.
“By. The. Gods.” Salina took a gulp of wine and set the glass down so hard some liquid splashed over the rim and stained her sleeve; she took no notice. “You really are in love with Eld, aren’t you?”
“It could be another,” I said, but it didn’t sound convincing even to my ears. “There are plenty of eligible men in Servenza.”
“Aye, but you don’t hang around other men.” Salina sighed. “Buc, if you love him, why don’t you tell him?”
“I—I didn’t know it was love,” I lied. Because of Sin. I pressed my palms against my eyes, hard, then harder, until bright white spots danced in the darkness. Because I was scared. I took a breath and lowered my hands, blinking back the darker spots that now sprang before my eyes. The pressure had been a relief from the wrenching tightness in my chest, even if just for a moment. “I don’t know anything about this,” I added, the admission burning my mouth.
“About love?”
“About what to say, how to say it, how to behave,” I growled. “None of it. I haven’t read the right books.” That wasn’t quite true. I had read the one on how to train dogs and another, Silk and Sheets, that had more to do with what a woman could do to make a man lose his mind between the sheets than how to get said man on said sheets in the first place. I felt my body warm at the memory and looked at the floor to distract myself. “Haven’t had a desire to until now,” I continued huskily, “and it’s twisting me in knots and distracting me from what matters.”
“What matters, Buc?”
“Him, damn it, haven’t you been listening?”
Salina leaned forward. “Aye, but you just said he’s distracting you from what matters. Or your feelings for him are.”
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I had said it, I remembered saying it, but it didn’t feel right. “Sin?”
“Your subconscious,” he suggested. “Telling you this is just an infatuation that will fade with a little time and space?”
“My subconscious, or you?”
“You haven’t accepted Possession,” he reminded me, “so—”
“So you can’t have done,” I whispered mentally.
“I’m just confused,” I told Salina out loud.
“Of course. Love is a confusing emotion,” she said after a moment, staring past me. “Especially when you start off as friends, and you two have been thick as thieves for years now.”
“You’ve been in love?”
“Twice,” she said, her mouth forming a smile that didn’t match her eyes. She glanced at me and shrugged. “The first time I told her I loved her too fast and she laughed at me.”
“Arsehole.”
“No, she was right. I was young. She was barely a year older, but it seemed to matter so much, that year between us.” She chuckled. “I was infatuated and in love with the idea of being in love—which comes from reading those kinds of books when you’re too young to know fantasy from reality.”
“And the second time?”
“The second time was her friend, a quiet lad whom I didn’t notice at first. By the time I did, he’d decided to be brave and foolish and join the navy.” She picked up her wineglass but just held it, not drinking. “I didn’t tell him I love
d him. I’d learned, you see.”
“Learned what?” I asked.
“That there’s great power in telling someone you love them,” Salina said softly. “You’re baring a part of yourself, opening a hole in your armor for the other to do with as they will. So I made him say it first. I promised myself I’d say it back when his frigate returned from escorting a troop ship. It would be Midwinter. I’d be resplendent in my Masquerade gown and he in his uniform, and his parents would approve.”
“Sounds like you had it all planned out,” I said.
“I did,” she agreed. “All of it. Save for the part where winter storm winds drove them aground off the Southern Horn of Frilituo and they sank in sight of shore. The waters were too rough for any boats to reach them.”
“Oh, damn.”
“They said bodies washed ashore for a fortnight after, but all that ever came back from Ferdin was an empty uniform.”
There was a saying in Servenzan that the sea claimed her own and as the island came from the sea, we were all hers in the end. Salina had lost her father and her love to the sea, but she was far from alone there. I lost Sister, but not to the sea … and never had anyone else to lose. “Salina, I’m sorry,” I said finally.
She waved me off with one hand and took a long swallow of wine. “It happened. Telling him wouldn’t have stopped his ship sinking.”
“But you wish you had told him?”
“Every day,” she said, smiling through her tears.
“So you think I should tell Eld? Today?”
“Is he getting on a frigate bound for Frilituo?” I laughed despite myself and Salina surprised me by chuckling, too. “It’s been enough years that I can laugh at my foolishness.”
Tears gone, she looked at me steadily. “Would you rush into battle knowing your enemy but not the land?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why rush into telling Eld how you feel?” Salina said gently. She handed me her glass. “Here. Drink.”
“Oof.” I sniffed the spices and between last night’s drinking and remembering that strange spiced smell the maestro had to him, I nearly vomited. “I’ll pass.”
“No. You drink a toast before going to war,” Salina said. “That’s your toast.”
“We’re going to war?”
“You are, at any rate,” Salina said, grinning. “You know Eld, but you don’t know his heart nor his thoughts where it concerns you. We need to change that.”
“His heart?”
“Sure, if we have to, but first we need to reconnoiter the lay of the land, understand what you’ll be up against.”
“Then I tell him how I feel?” The thought made me nauseous and excited, the rawness of the emotions not unlike being aboard a Cannon Ship at sea.
“Then you tell him how you feel. You’re always telling me the first rule of war is to know your enemy and the second to know the terrain. Once you have those … we attack.”
“I like the sound of that,” I admitted.
“Now, I know you love those new jackets and trousers, and I do, too,” she said, touching the hem of her jacket and frowning at the wine stain amongst the silken flowers embroidered onto the cuff. “But in war you need an element of surprise, eh?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” I agreed. “What are you thinking?”
“You’ll be amongst royalty, so you might as well look like a queen,” Salina said. Thinking of the Doga’s command, I nodded. “And if men have a failing, and they have many, it’s a desire for that which they cannot have.
“I’m thinking white and gilt and perhaps a splash of color along the hem—” She began to talk faster, warming to her topic, laying out her idea so clearly I could see it in my mind.
“But first,” she said when she came to the end, drawing in a deep breath. “Drink.”
“To war,” I said, holding it up.
“To victory,” Salina said.
Victory. I liked the sound of that.
I threw back the glass and discovered I liked the taste of the wine far less. I dashed across the room with Salina’s laughter loud in my ears and reached the chamber pot in the corner just in time.
The wine didn’t taste much like victory coming back up.
29
“Whisper,” Eld hissed, rubbing his temple with his left hand.
“Are you ill, sirrah? Eld?” Govanti frowned. “You don’t look well.”
“You try drinking from night through the morning with an old sailor and a mag—former street rat,” Eld muttered. He blinked in the shade of the too-bright alley and tried not to swallow too hard. A certain delicacy was called for in his present condition. Joffers was fine, steering me here. And Buc went out dress shopping with Salina. Damn the pair of them. He tasted something foul in the back of his throat and swallowed again.
“The physikers sell an ointment paste rubbed on a fresh oyster, still wriggling from the sea, that they swear will cure any hangover,” the lad offered, shifting so that he leaned against the building opposite Eld.
Eld covered his mouth and lifted a hand to stop Govanti saying any more. The notion of swallowing an oyster right now was bad enough—the idea of one that wriggled … He could taste it in the back of his mouth and for a moment, thought he was going to vomit but forced it back through sheer will. I’ll die on that hill, stomach, so leave over. I’ll—
* * *
“You dropped your handkerchief.”
Eld refused to follow Govanti’s gesture, back farther in the alley where he’d lost everything he’d ever eaten. Perversely, he felt better now. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he asked, “You want to fish it out?”
Govanti turned green beneath his fine crimson jacket—a hand-me-down from Eld himself—and Eld nodded. “Thought not.”
Leaning against the wall and glad for it to take his weight, he pointed toward the palazzo opposite them. “That’s the house the Parliamentarian went to after she left me the other day?”
“Aye, she stayed there for a long while, too,” Govanti said. He shifted his tricorne, running his fingers through his hair. “I can’t say how long because the blues came around and I was drawing looks from my clothes.”
“You did fine,” Eld assured him. With all the unrest in the lower Quartos, the Constabulary seemed bent on keeping peace in the finer ones, and here, where Eld looked just moderately well-dressed, Govanti would have stood out like a week-old fish. As it was, they were keeping to the alley—no sense letting the old woman know he was following her.
“What are we looking for?” Govanti asked.
“Not sure,” he admitted. “We’ll know it when we see it.”
Govanti finally stopped asking questions and Eld closed his eyes for a moment—a bad move, because then he felt himself spinning, his head a throbbing drumbeat by an energetic fool. I don’t know how she did it, drinking me under the table. I should probably blame Joffers. The old man had seen right off they weren’t okay and he’d been the one to lead them to the backcanal tavern. He didn’t shove drinks down our throats, though. It had been a riotous good time from what he could remember.
With half his blood rum, Eld had been able to stop worrying about what his presence was or wasn’t doing to Buc or what the magic in her was doing to the pair of them. He’d completely forgotten about the Mosquitoes’ gruesomely dead maestro and the Doga’s task and the fact that Buc still hadn’t told him the Chair was going to exile her any day now. None of it had mattered.
“Eld? You ever feel like someone was trying to kill you?” Govanti whispered.
Waking up had been the worst, followed closely by the realization that Buc was waiting for him outside his door, fully recovered and ready to go. Not with you, though. Out with Salina … the two of them had concocted some scheme between them. Buc hadn’t given anything away but Salina had a terrible poker face and she certainly found something amusing. He burped and the fumes burned his eyes. Gods, maybe she was just laughing at my shambolic condition.
“All the time,” he told Govanti.
He hadn’t been in any fit state to argue with her, which meant now he, too, was going to the Masquerade. He’d been to several as a child on the mainland and in the Foreign Quarto and once even been invited to the Doga’s Palacio, to the side door, when he was in uniform—but he’d had little stomach for frivolity then. Even less now. He rubbed his temple again, trying to massage the tightness out of his skull, though he had to admit the hangover was worth the good time they’d had. Maybe this will be more of the same? Only, he wasn’t in uniform now, which meant he had to find a proper suit to wear. No, not suit, costume. Gods, I hate disguises. Between that and his poor head, it was enough to make a man cry.
“Wait! Who’s that?”
“Shh,” Eld muttered, but he followed Govanti’s finger nonetheless.
A man as dark-skinned as Buc was climbing out of a carriage, a pale woman following—both dressed in fine silks, her jacket and trousers cut so closely to her that if she were wearing white instead of burgundy Eld was certain she would have seemed naked. The man, grey bushy eyebrows climbing up his bald scalp as he argued with her, was oblivious to their path, nearly walking into one of the supporting pillars of the arched entrance to the palazzo. Sidestepping it at the last minute, he spun around so quickly that Eld half expected to hear his kneecap dislocate from here. Instead, he completed the turn as if he’d meant to do it all along and caught the woman by the shoulder. She spun back toward him, something hanging around her neck swinging back and forth, gold shimmering in the sunlight.
Mage’s medallion. Eld bit back a curse. Buc had been right: the Doga was going to need watching over with so many potential enemies gathered in one place. The Parliamentarian is working with the Sin Eaters. It could have been Company business, but he’d never known the Company to go to the Sin Eaters; it’d always been the other way around. It was more than that this time. I know it.
“You did good, Govanti,” Eld told him, clapping him on the shoulder. “Now we know who she went to tell about our conversation.”
The Justice in Revenge Page 22