I examine the shelves. Many bottles of single ingredients remain, but if Tillis says I’m too late, I’m guessing Sneryis has already had his fill of florals and balsams and turned some would-be clientele away. The only chance I’ll not meet the same fate is to identify a surprising note. One that doesn’t tip the entire scent symphony over into raucous clanging.
Everything in the concoction so far is somewhat warm. I could risk muddying it with another layer, or disrupt it entirely with something unexpected.
My fingers dance down the shelves of bottles
Lavender? No, too astringent.
Camphor? By the Primordial, no. I turn back to Tillis, gesturing to the jar. “Does anyone in their right mind ever try this?”
“You’d be surprised,” she drawls.
Ah. Here we go.
Mint.
I take the bottle back to the counter.
Her expression reflects her scathing opinion of my choice. “You know the risk here, yes?”
I stare flatly at her.
“I have to ask. Ry gets haughty if I don’t. Rules are rules and all that. How many?”
She means drops. “Three,” I tell her. Let’s walk on the wild side.
In they go. Almost clear. Innocuous. But with cool, crisp bite. A tinkle of icicles. She swirls the vial then disappears through the door I hope to pass through.
It’s a tedious wait. I lean against the wall, ankles crossed, and pop a clove pastille into my mouth.
When it’s melted away, I start on another.
And a third.
One would think Tillis is stretching this out as a small revenge. Before now, I’d have ventured she was above such pettiness.
Finally, she reappears and gestures to the door with a scowl of petulant defeat. “Ry has such a soft spot for you.”
I give her my most beatific smile. “He’s not alone.”
Stepping into the inner sanctum, I blink slowly, letting my eyes get used to the darkness. One can never really know what to expect – Sneryis keeps the colour scheme a surprise, a non-linear rotation through the rainbow. It’s not cheap to achieve, either. Glorified powder rats he keeps on retainer have to constantly feed the braziers various powders to change the tint of their flames. Tonight, the shadows of some of the sharpest, deftest operators in the Empire are cast against a glow of imperial purple.
Is Senryis feeling patriotic? And if so, to which of the Kaidon brothers?
Or is it more of a turned-up nose to the political upheaval of late – imperial heirs can go missing, the Founding Accord can be broken, and yet still Sneryis has an establishment full of select clientele. Just the way he likes it.
I scan the bar. The wall behind is lined with clay jugs and glazed bottles in various hues. Silver cups for those with a predilection for the drinking game of Aphorai – Death in Paradise – and carved crystal domes with handles for those who seek the smoke-scented white spirit of Hagmir.
I take my seat at the polished black stone bench. “River Gold, if you please.”
The barkeep is discreet enough to not voice the question in her eyes.
“It has pleasing floral notes. And I find hops refreshing.”
“No judgment. Just don’t get many orders for beer.”
My drink arrives in a bronze tankard beaded with condensation. Sneryis ships ice down from the Alet Range and the beverage is delectably cold. I take a swallow, closing my eyes to fully savour the sensation of cool, bitter liquid trailing down my throat.
A tall figure takes the seat beside me. He stares straight ahead, rubbing the carefully curated lines of stubble along his jaw, so perfect they could have been painted on his skin. “Thought you’d never make it.”
“I’ll admit Doubt had her naughty way with me for a moment, too.”
He tilts his head, aquiline nose angled to the ceiling, eyes closed, impossibly long lashes curled against his cheek. Almost imperceptibly, his nostrils flare. “What did you manage to add to that concoction?”
“Mint.”
“Ha! Let nobody call you anything if not audacious.”
I give him a slow wink. “So, why did you go quiet on me?”
“Have you had your head up a select orifice since you arrived?”
“Fair.” I’ve always liked Darzul. He’s one of the good ones. He’ll be keeping himself as far removed from the current ruling regime as possible without walking away from the capital.
“First thing’s first. Whatever you want this time, it will cost you.”
At least he was one of the good ones. “You jest.”
“It’s not for me. It’s to help people get out of here before it’s too late. Ekasya isn’t going to get any more liveable if the regent keeps walking this road. Whether it’s lack of money, food shortages, or getting on the wrong side of the heavies holding the city at their mercy … lives are going to be lost. These are people who’ve helped me for turns. They’ve helped you for turns. I’m not going to roll over without doing the same.”
“Exactly how much is this going to cost me?”
“How much have you got? Bribing the guards isn’t going to get any cheaper the longer this plays out.”
I sigh. “Fine. What’s mine is yours. Everything but what I’ll require to get out of the city again. Agreed?”
He gives me a solemn nod.
“Now, I need your assistance locating someone.”
CHAPTER 9
ASH
Ami and I emerge into the Ekasyan sun, pain shooting through eyes that haven’t seen more than torchlight in what feels like half a lifetime. Above us, the imperial complex looms, emanating a foreboding that makes me feel like I’ve reverted to childhood. My home is once again alien to me.
I look back, but the only thing following us is my guilt at not leading Zostar’s younger captives to safety. I send a prayer for mother Esiku to watch over them until the day I can return. May that day come soon.
Below, the city itself looks different. Perhaps the change is in my imagination, perhaps it’s me who’s changed. It takes until we thread our way through the first of the laneways to realize what it is that’s gnawing at me – it’s quiet. As if people are staying off the streets, keeping indoors.
It’s unnerving. Not least of all because it’s the first time I’ve faced the city, or even simply anywhere outdoors, without Linod’s Elixir coursing through my veins to calm me. Even so, my hands are steady. I feel stronger than I ever have, which doesn’t make sense given the gruel and inactivity of the dungeons.
There’s no time to contemplate, though. We pass by a plaza, and Ami angles towards the first gathered group of people we’ve come across. I’d prevent her from doing so, but don’t want to create a scene. Thankfully, she hovers at the fringes as the small crowd listens to the herald give the day’s announcements.
There’s an assurance more grain will be coming to the city before the next moon.
A reminder there’s a curfew in place – the first I’ve ever heard of one in the capital.
And a notice of a reward.
“The Hidden Prince becomes Missing Prince! The Regent will pay dearly for any information leading to the return of his most beloved brother.”
Nisai. If Iddo doesn’t know where he is, then there’s hope.
As the gathering dissipates, Ami plucks at her stained smock, nose wrinkled. Out here in the light, I finally see how much we’ve been marked by the grime of our incarceration. The lines of my hands have dirt embedded in them. It’s caked under my nails. And now that we’re in the open, away from the overwhelming humid dankness under the mountain, I can tell I don’t exactly give off the perfume of roses.
“We have to get cleaned up,” I tell Ami. “We might be able to pass for beggars, but if a patrol finds us, they’re likely to throw us straight back into the dungeons even if they don’t identify us.”
“I know a place,” she says, and starts walking.
“Wait,” I hiss. “Where? Tell me. We’re in this together.�
��
“Esarik’s.”
Something nudges at the corner of my memory. Something terrible. Esarik was there. The day in the throne room, when we failed to cure Nisai and I …
Ami shakes her head, her eyes stern. “You don’t get to look at me like that. Even by aristocratic standards it wasn’t improper. I married him.”
“It’s not that. It’s about Esarik. I…” I choke on the words.
“I know he’s gone,” she says curtly. “They used that knowledge to torture me. They wondered why I stayed loyal to a Prince who couldn’t keep even his friends safe.”
I bow my head.
Because I have the creeping suspicion that it wasn’t Nisai to blame.
Before I was a fugitive, I would never have imagined it could take the best part of a day to traverse the capital. Ami and I slink along back lanes, only edging out to the spokes of Ekasya’s main thoroughfares when unavoidable. At those points, we keep our heads down and walk deliberately, but not so quickly to suggest we’re fleeing.
More imperial guards patrol than I remember, while fewer ordinary citizens crowd the streets with their gossip or wares. It could be a foreign city – one in the military states over the ocean we’ve only ever heard traveller tales from at the imperial court, too distant for regular trade or diplomatic relations.
Eventually, we reach one of the few half-respectable neighbourhoods outside the walls; the houses and shops are the last to be made of stone, many of them built up against the wall itself as if clinging to a notion they are part of Ekasya proper by proximity.
At the gate of a complex of half a dozen dwellings, Ami bends to feel under the lip of a waist-high urn containing a lilac shrub. It’s almost finished flowering, so that the last few sprays of blossom are browning and ready to drop. I remember how she used to bring the first blooms of the season into the Early Imperial section of the palace library. Was this the very plant they were from?
Something scrapes and a spider drops out on to Ami’s wrist. She clamps her other hand over her mouth, stifling a shriek as she shakes the hairy creature off. She bends to look under the rim before continuing her search. Then she gives a little hmph of satisfaction. In her hand is a key.
We enter a courtyard bathed in the golden light of early evening. It’s quiet, the noise of the city seeming more distant than it actually is, the only sound from inside the complex a singing Trelian lark perched on one of the clay-tiled roofs. More potted lilacs dot the paving stones.
The scent seems from another life.
A life that’s gone to the sky.
“I don’t know if they know about this place,” she murmurs. “We should be careful.”
I follow Ami up a narrow flight of stairs to an intricately engraved door. The key she retrieved from the planter turns smoothly in the lock.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.
It looks like a single-room garret, a fireplace on one wall and an alcove with a tap and copper trough for ablutions on the other. Perhaps the modest dwelling was well furnished, but now it’s in shambles. The bed has been wrenched away from the corner and left at an angle. Drawers from a cherrywood sideboard have been emptied and upended. Books bound in expensive aurochs leather sprawl every which way, broken at the spine or fallen from toppled stacks. Scrolls are half unrolled, some torn or crumpled, an undeniable boot print emblazoned across one.
“Seems they got here first.” Ami looks at the wreckage with sad eyes, then steps forward to right the nearest chair. It wobbles on three legs as she rubs her hand over the back. “Esarik would be devastated.”
“I thought he lived near…”
“His father bought him a manse on the main imperial boulevard further up the Mountain, but this is where he comes when he wants – wanted – to think. Be himself. I’d thought nobody knew about it but me. When Zostar’s men first took me, I used to imagine escaping and coming here to wait for him.”
I don’t reply. Instead, I ease one of the drawers back into its frame, feeling the urge to put the room to rights, as if such a pathetically small gesture could help assuage my guilt at my friend’s downfall. How am I going to broach it with Ami? And if what I suspect is true, what does Nisai think of it? He’s never truly admitted to himself what my curse is. He’s always seen it as more protective than destructive. Would this make him finally understand?
“Here, let me find you something to wear.” Ami picks through a pile of scattered fabric and holds out an outfit that looks distinctively Esarik – dark trousers and a simple but elegant long-line tunic in fine charcoal-coloured weave. At least the colour is appropriate.
“Are you sure? I don’t want to…” It seems I’m no longer capable of finishing a sentence. But what can I say?
She hands me the clothes. “He’d want his things put to good use.”
I accept them with stiff formality, and nod towards the taps in the alcove. “I’ll give you a few moments to yourself. But make them swift. Whoever turned this place over may return.”
I draw the door shut behind me and lean against the wall, forcing myself to breathe deep and even as I survey the lilac-studded courtyard. Further down the slope, a woman hums as she pegs out laundered bedsheets on a terrace between terracotta-tiled roofs. Other than the relative quiet we witnessed in the city’s main thoroughfares, everything seems as it should be.
Ami sticks her head out the door. “Your turn.”
She’s run fresh water into the tub and left a bar of soap beside it. More lilacs. I smile sadly. No wonder Esarik adored them. The thought only makes me think of his end. Of Ami’s loss.
My chest tightens as fragments of memory flash through my mind. The throne room. The shadows moving. Blood. Everywhere, blood.
My friend’s among it all.
The lilacs suddenly smell sickly. Laced with guilt. My jaw clamps tight against a dry retch.
I wash as quickly as I can, douse myself with a bucket over my head, then towel off with the white linen Ami left hanging over a hook. The freshness should be an incredible luxury after feeling like I’ve been marinating in my own filth for moons. It probably would be, if I didn’t have to face the clothes. Esarik was almost as tall as me, but the Trelian was slim. I tentatively pull the tunic over my torso, not wanting to split a finely stitched seam as it strains across my shoulders.
Then I let the bathwater out, pausing to watch the residue of the dungeons drain from the basin. If only I could wash away the whole experience just as easily.
The sound of knocking brings me back to myself. Ami must have taken my silence as a sign I had finished up, though she still opens the door gingerly.
I avoid her gaze, instead bending to pick up a tripod that was toppled beneath a window, where a star-glass had apparently been set up. Better to focus on the problem before us. “Do you have a plan from here? Your family?”
Ami didn’t talk much of her family, but I remember she was one of three, her father a modest carpenter, her mother a much-in-demand seamstress. The latter’s designs popular enough among the merchant class and minor aristocracy to have paid for Ami’s apprenticeship to the Head Curator at the palace library.
She shakes her head. “I don’t come from the sort of family who would appreciate me bringing this kind of trouble to their door. And even if I did, I don’t see how they could possibly help. I have to move on to another library. If I’d done so sooner, Es … he could have come with me. Got away from his father. And the Guild of Physicians. I didn’t know who was worse back then, Zostar or Lord Mur.”
I scowl. “I’d say it’s become very clear. Now, though, we should try to make contact with the Council of Five.”
“Did you not see, in the arena?” She runs her fingertips down the wooden frame of the alcove, where a door may have once been. “They were courtiers. How do we even know there weren’t Council members among them?”
My mind conjures an image of Nisai’s mother, Shari. The woman who allowed me to enter the palace as a bo
y, and to sponsor the training that would lead to me becoming her son’s Shield. “They would never be involved with something as heinous.”
Her hand keeps moving down the doorframe, then pauses. “You can’t be certain how deep this goes. I would never have suspected the Head Curator, either. But then he began frequenting certain pre-Imperial collections, locking himself away with clay tablet fragments from the Shadow Wars and esoteric scrolls that so-called alchemists produced in the century following. Visits from Zostar and his colleagues became regular, and they became more and more impatient with each appearance.”
There’s a click as a section of the doorframe slots inwards then protrudes just far enough to grasp. Ami gives a little sniff of satisfaction and slides it out like a vertical drawer. It contains a number of compartments, some with tightly wound scrolls, others with coin purses.
Other than Ami, only Kaismap must have known Esarik had such foresight.
Or was it paranoia?
No. He would have told me if he was in some kind of trouble. Or at least told Nisai. Wouldn’t he?
I shake my head. “If I could get to Councillor Shari, she’d help us. I know she would.”
Ami tosses me one of the coin purses. “Even if you’re correct, how do you propose to get past everyone else to find her?”
She stuffs the other purses and scrolls into a satchel that reminds me of Rakel’s. Eagerness and frustration war with each other at the thought – for all I know, Rakel could be in the next courtyard, or at the other end of the Empire.
As for Ami’s question, I don’t have an answer. There is no way back into the imperial complex. Daring the trek up Ekasya Mountain to the wealthier sectors of the city would be an incredible risk. I still don’t know how closely Iddo’s entwined with all of this, but I don’t for a heartbeat think he would welcome me with open arms.
Ami crosses the room and begins to rummage in the contents of a cupboard, now piled on the floor. “We’ll think better if we eat.”
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