52
“What are you doing?” Salina asked as she entered the room.
“I read a book once about ways to overcome traumas of the mind,” I answered Salina, keeping my eyes focused on the table in front of me.
“By burning yourself?”
“You joke,” I said, passing my hand through the flame of the candle while tapping my thigh with my other hand in time with the metronome I’d wound earlier, “but you’re not far off. It was written by a Southeast Islander, actually, a woman named Kolka. The Mind Fears the Body. Number 391.”
“The mind fears the body?”
“Aye, she believed that most trauma we experience, we process and move on. It can be healthy, even, to know that you should avoid water where sharks swim after a near encounter, or that the dark alley up ahead may hold cutpurses lying in wait.”
Sweat ran down my cheek as I passed my hand through the candle flame again, fighting to keep my voice even and my hand-tapping on beat. “Some trauma overwhelms us. We can’t process it, and so it lives within us constantly, turning clear seas into dangerous waters and daytime streets into murder rows.”
“My dad said his father was changed after the Tidal Wars,” Salina said. I heard her shut the door behind her. “That was back when it was a requirement to serve for a time in the army or navy.”
“His bad luck he chose the biggest maritime action since the Empire’s founding,” I said.
“It was. I barely remember him. Mostly what I remember is an old man who spent much of his time sitting in a chair, yelling whenever something wasn’t done quite right. Even if that something was sitting on his lap.”
“The difference between serviceable and perfect can be a wide gulf at sea. A line tied with one knot too few can come loose.” I studied the candle’s flame. Blue around the wick turning to shades of red that softened to bright yellow. Flames liked to pretend they were friendly, harmless, sources of light and warmth, but draw too much of them and their true nature showed. “A cannon,” I continued, “with only one wheel secured can blow out of its mountings.”
“I’d never thought of it that way before,” she said.
“He likely didn’t either. He should have read Kolka.” I passed my hand through the candle a third time and bit back a curse as my tapping slipped off the beat.
I twisted in my chair and Salina arched an eyebrow before sitting on the edge of my bed beside my chair. Her dress looked nearly like divided trousers but her jacket flared wide enough to show it was all of a single piece. The latest fashion inspired by the Doga’s Masquerade outfit. A white, silk ribbon hung from her right arm, bright against the dark-turquoise dress. Crossing her legs, she leaned back.
“So, what trauma are you erasing?”
“It’s not really erasing,” I explained. “The idea is to expose yourself to a very small sample of the trauma. At the same time, you listen to something that’s rhythmic and repetitive. Something that distracts part of your mind from what you’re going through.” I nodded toward the metronome that was losing its beat as its gears wound down. “You also interact with your body to provide another distraction. Those distractions help the mind from becoming overwhelmed by the retelling or repetition of the trauma.”
“You’re afraid of candles?” Salina chuckled. “How ever do you read?”
“I’m afraid of fire,” I said, and she stopped laughing.
“This”—I waved at the table—“isn’t enough to fix me, if I can be fixed, but it’s something I can cling to when I need.” Which I need. I hadn’t fought or screamed at the maid—who wasn’t Marin—who lit my lamps the night before, but only because I’d wrapped the sheets so tightly about my fists that I’d torn holes in it. As soon as she left the room I’d blown them all out … and then nearly broken my toe trying to get back into bed without the benefit of Sin’s night vision.
“That’s a nice gesture,” I added, standing up and turning my chair around so we faced each other properly. “She wasn’t of your house.”
“No, but she was of yours,” Salina said, touching the silk ribbon on her arm. “I know you were teaching her to read. I was sorry to hear she broke her neck falling down the stairs.”
“A freak accident, really,” I said lightly. “It was the skirts that did her in.” I met Salina’s questioning gaze and looked away. “I’ve ordered the servants to hem theirs.”
“I don’t understand why that led to you and Eld falling out, or was that due to the Masquerade?”
“I think we were looking for an excuse to have it out?” I ran my hand through my braids, felt the freshly shaven skin beneath them. “Marin provided the spark and the rest went up like a matchbox.”
Salina rolled her eyes and her mouth quirked. “It’s a juicy enough story that half the nobles have bought it and the other half think it some fling between Lucrezia and the two of you. Since I’m not that stupid, are you going to tell me what really happened?”
“You’re not? That stupid?”
“Fuck you, Buc.” She grinned and crossed her arms. “Are you going to tell me or not?”
“It’s not a pleasant story.”
“I didn’t figure,” she said, pronouncing the g with that strange lilt half the rich had. “You look like you haven’t slept in two days, your entire house is in white mourning while you’re in black—very becoming by the way, although I fear trousers are already on their way out—and Eld isn’t speaking to anyone. Nor has he been seen since your servant died, and the Chair’s strutting around like an alley cat that’s caught a fat hen. None of that screams happiness for you.”
“Or for Marin.”
“Gods,” Salina breathed. “It wasn’t just a fight, was it?”
I shook my head. “It was an assassination attempt.”
“That failed, thankfully.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” I tilted my hand back and forth. “Sometimes a wound doesn’t kill you outright. Sometimes it festers and you’re left dying for days.”
“Surely it’s not that bad.”
“I don’t know,” I said, looking up from my shaking hand. “You tell me.”
* * *
“I always thought you were just an arsehole,” Salina said when I finished telling her about the previous day.
“Thanks?”
“About the children.” Salina leaned forward, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “All that time, whenever I would even begin to bring it up you always acted like you didn’t know what the bloody sands I was talking about.”
“I didn’t. Repressed memories are like that, according to Kolka.”
I hadn’t told her about Sin; only Eld knew about that. And Sicarii. And the Artificer. It was too many, and though I liked Salina, I didn’t trust her. I’d made Eld earn my trust and he’d still betrayed me in the end. Perhaps Sister would have as well, if she’d lived longer. The thought hurt and I began tapping my thigh to the beat of a metronome only I could hear.
“Until you confronted Eld.”
“He’d been lying to me about my informant,” I reminded her. “Which opened up the floodgates.”
“You’d been lying to him, too—”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours, of course.” Salina tapped her chin with a lacquered nail. “Are we alone?”
“As alone as we’ll ever be,” I confirmed. No Eld. No Sin.
“I mean,” she said slowly, shifting her eyes perceptibly to the fireplace, “are we alone?”
“Oh, that.” I grinned. “I left a little gift for the next would-be eavesdropper. We’d know if we weren’t alone.”
“What?” Salina’s eyebrows disappeared into her hairline. “Buc,” she hissed, “you can’t do that. You aren’t supposed to know the Doga’s listening!”
“Then she shouldn’t have sent her Secreto into my bedchamber,” I said.
“Who killed Marin? Who poisoned your informant and tried to kill Eld with him?”
“It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’
re hinting at,” I growled.
“Easy. I’m not accusing you,” she said gently.
“I saved my informant, though he’s not happy about the abrasion required to scour the poison off his skin.” I’d been puzzling over how to make sure Govanti didn’t go up in flames at his first sip of water when a messenger had come from the Artificer with instructions. Apparently Eld had gone in search of the man after I ordered him out of the palazzo. Knowing Eld, he’d done so at considerable cost to his mortality, but if he thought that would mend the rift between us, he’d been mistaken. Not that he’d tried to follow up on it. Just like the man.
“I know you wouldn’t do anything that could risk losing Eld,” Salina continued. “He’s a fool to have done the trick himself,” she added.
“I wish you’d have told him that three months ago,” I muttered. She made an expression and we both laughed. I didn’t feel much like laughing; it barely sparked anything inside me, but I couldn’t deny it felt better than not.
“Who set this all in motion?” she asked.
“That’s the ten-thousand-lire question,” I said. “Who stands to profit from Eld dying and me being alone?”
“Someone who knows you two are tied at the hip. Were tied at the hip,” Salina amended, reaching out and patting my knee. “Or someone who wanted one less seat on the Board.”
“I’ve narrowed it down to four or five,” I said.
“This Sicarii person?”
I nodded. “She or her cronies definitely did the legwork here. The question is, did she know what she was doing or was she taking orders?”
“From the Chair?” Salina asked.
“Potentially.”
“Who else? N-not, not the Empress?” she choked.
I snorted. “If the Empress wanted me dead I think I’d be dead already. She’d have her Imperial Guard surround the palazzo and destroy it with cannon fire. Gods, she could probably bombard me from her fortress with mortars right now and not a damned soul would do anything about it.”
“That’s true.”
“If it’s not Sicarii or the Chair, then it’s likely the Doga or the Gods. The Doga doesn’t make a lot of sense, but she knows enough to make the list,” I added.
“The Gods?” Salina hissed.
“I don’t think it’s the Gods … in some ways it’d be easier if it were.” I pulled a kan cigarillo from a drawer in the table.
“Since when did you take up smoking again?”
“Next you’ll lecture me on drinking and keeping the company of strange men, ’Lina,” I said with a laugh. I left unsaid that without Sin, kan was the only thing keeping my thoughts from driving me mad. “Gods or no, I’ll find out in the end.”
“You sound like the Buc who walked into the library last summer,” Salina said with a smile.
“Good.”
“You know,” Salina said, tilting her head as if studying me. “Maybe you never really were the arrogant, unfeeling arsehole I thought you were back then, or after the fire killed all those children.”
“Oh?” I put the cigarillo between my lips and bent over the candle, forcing my hand to keep an even beat against my thigh despite the terror clutching my chest. The cigarillo lit. Drawing deeply, I held the smoke in my lungs, let the kan seep into me, then exhaled in a billowing cloud. “Do tell.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “You grew up on the streets, lived cheek by jowl with harshness and violence. That kind of living doesn’t leave you with much freedom, least of all the freedom to catch your breath, think past the next day, and see potential alternatives.”
“Eld was my alternative,” I whispered.
“Exactly. He gave you that opportunity to catch your breath, to read, to find wisdom”—her lips quirked—“or knowledge, at least.”
I cursed and she laughed.
“What I’m trying to say,” she continued, “is that you have options to consider now. Maybe since circumstances have changed, perhaps you have changed, too?”
“Gods,” I said, taking another drag on the cigarillo. “I hope you’re wrong.”
“You do?” Salina frowned. “Why?”
“I’m not wearing mourning white,” I said, my thoughts distilling as the kan slowed them down, “because white shows bloodstains.” I ground out the rest of the cigarillo on the tabletop, scoring the fire-maple surface. “Black doesn’t. Black hides all manner of things.”
“What are you going to do?”
“The old Buc would have found a stiletto and a throat and she wouldn’t have stopped cutting until answers or blood spilled out.” I stood up and stretched, feeling the blades pressing against my sides, the small of my back, and my wrists. I couldn’t keep the smile from my mouth. “At the moment? Either would please me, but the Cordoban Confederacy have a saying they use when trading that I really like.…
“Why not both?”
53
“You shot me!” Rafiro gasped, writhing on the alley’s broken cobblestones. His bicorne lay beside him, his dark hair a disheveled mess that matched his bloodshot eyes. He glared up at me, holding his knee. “You stupid bitch, I ought to—”
Damn. I clicked my tongue and reached for another lead ball. The constable, the blue who had first given us Sicarii’s name, hadn’t been walking steady when I found him and followed him into the alley, where he searched out a dark place to take a piss. Now that I’d put a round into his knee, he’d be even worse. With Sin’s strength, the steel bands bracing the slingshot’s frame were an enhancement. Without him, I could barely pull the thing back far enough to do much of anything. It’d been enough to knock Rafiro on his arse, but the booze—I could smell it on his breath from here—had helped. It hadn’t been enough to break his leg properly, which was what I’d intended. His hands moved. I pulled back as hard as I could, not reaching quite half draw—and shot him in the other leg.
“Oww!” he howled, falling onto his back. “Ye kneecapped me. Crippled Rafiro!”
“You shouldn’t have reached for that pistole in your boot then,” I told him, my voice loud in the space between his cries. “There’s no one around to hear you screaming and even if there were, they wouldn’t care. Still”—I sighed, slipping another round into the pouch of my slingshot—“it’s growing tiresome.”
“D-don’t. Don’t,” he pleaded. “What do you want? I’ve a little set by from bribes. It’s yours,” he gasped, grinding his crooked kan-whitened teeth together. “Want me to arrest someone? Name them and I’ll do it.” He sat up, breathing hard, tears bright in his dark eyes. “I’ll arrest the Doga herself if you stop fucking shooting me.”
“Hmm, that could be interesting.”
“Th-the Doga?” He winced. “I was jesting, sign—”
“—ora,” I finished for him. I had a streetlamp at my back and from his vantage on the ground, all he’d be able to see was my outline. He didn’t need to know my age. I’d prefer it if he didn’t know my sex, but there was nothing to be done there unless I wanted to pretend to be a lad whose balls hadn’t dropped yet.
“Signora, what do you want?”
“Information is what I came for, but you’ve just given me an idea,” I told him. “I’ve someone I want you to arrest.”
“Gods,” he whimpered, probing his knee with two fingers. “Who, signora? I’ll have them picked up before dawn.”
“Sicarii.”
Rafiro’s crying cut off like he’d had his throat slit. He looked up at me through his greasy locks, salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin turning him into an old man. He drew in a ragged breath and shook his head. “Where’d you learn that name, signora?”
“A blue told me.”
“One of us?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care if you believe me or not.” I tried not to laugh and had to fight with my tongue not to tell him he’d been the blue with the loose lips. He’d sent the prostitute after Eld and me with the information that led us to the Mosquit
oes’ maestro. We could have easily been immolated along with the beggar king—it’d clearly been a setup. The question was, who had done the setting? I had a suspicion. Now let’s hear you confirm it. “You made me an offer and I’m taking you up on that.”
“Now you’re jesting,” he said, a wheezing laugh shaking his shoulders. “You’d do as well to cut my throat here and now as ask for that.”
“I’m thinking on it,” I admitted. Between the drink and both badly bruised knees, I figured he wasn’t going to be pulling off any fancy calisthenics and attacking me or trying to run away, so I slipped my slingshot back into my jacket and drew the stiletto I always left unblackened. Twisting it through my fingers so it caught the light, I took a step forward and he tried to slide away.
“S-signora, no!”
“You say you want to live, but you won’t give me what I want.”
“I can’t! I’d die trying,” he said, spittle flecking his lips. “They’d kill me before I got within a dozen paces of them.”
“Who would?”
“Sicarii. Her gangs. What’s it matter?”
“All right, all right,” I said, catching the hilt in my hand and pointing the blade at him. “You can’t arrest Sicarii, but you can tell me who you work for.”
“Servenza,” Rafiro growled, reaching for his knees again. “I’m a constable, you bloody fool.”
“No shit,” I said. “You’re the fool. I just kneecapped you. Alone in this alley. You see anyone else?” I turned a slow circle, arms outstretched. “What’s to stop me from ending your miserable life here and now?”
“Nothing,” he whispered.
“Nothing,” I agreed. “Save what you tell me. So—”
“I’m just a constable, I swear.” He screamed and grasped his cheek with both hands, then made a noise in his throat when they came away bloody.
“Lie to me again and the next blade will be through your throat.” I’d tossed the blade I had tied to my left wrist while he’d been focused on the stiletto in my right. I’d grown too used to Sin’s preternatural accuracy; instead of pinning his collar to the street, I’d sliced his cheek open. It could have just as easily been his throat and that would have taken any answers he had along with this life. “You won’t see that one coming either,” I added.
The Justice in Revenge Page 37