by Sharon Shinn
“Maybe, but I’m far from convinced. And it still doesn’t explain—” He shook his head.
I crossed my arms and just waited. The pose of an annoyed women who was not going to ask for something again.
“There were welts and bruises on his face and back. As if he’d been in a fight,” Nico said.
I tried to give the impression of trying not to snort. “Well, if what I’ve heard is true, there were probably a lot of fathers and brothers who would have been happy to beat him up. So that doesn’t surprise me.”
“No, but it does raise questions,” Nico said. “It’s one of the pieces that doesn’t make sense.”
I sighed. “Put the pieces together for me, then.”
“Maybe he got into a fight—probably, as you say, over some girl he treated badly. Maybe this person knocked him unconscious and threw him into the lake, first stopping to strip off anything that might identify him. And piling him up with rocks for good measure.”
I stared. “You think he was murdered?”
“I think it’s a good possibility. And my uncle is almost certain of it.”
I wrapped my arms around myself as if, on this lovely summer day, I was suddenly cold. It took no effort at all to tremble with horror. “That’s dreadful. Surely it can’t be true.”
“I hope it’s not,” he said. “But we’re proceeding as if it is.”
“I find myself wondering,” I said slowly. “Are you sure the body you found is Lord Jamison’s? If you didn’t find his clothes or jewelry—and if he’d been in the water for a few days—” I shivered delicately. “Did he even look like himself?”
Nico nodded. “I asked exactly the same question when the courier arrived last night, and that’s one of the things my uncle is going to verify. But many things point to the body being his. His hair and beard are such a distinctive color, that’s one clue. Plus, the height is about right for Jamison. But I think the first reason everyone thought it was him is simply that he’s missing. If this isn’t Jamison, where is he?”
“Has the king been looking for him?”
“Yes. That’s why the news arrived so fast upon the discovery of the body. Harold already had men traveling the Charamon Road, trying to find out what happened to him. This dead body seems to answer that question. But, as you say, we cannot be sure just yet.”
I sighed. “Well, for the sake of the king and his sons, I’ll hope it isn’t Jamison. But then that means some other poor man has lost his life, and he, too, has family and friends who will mourn him! It’s very sad no matter who it turns out to be.”
“It’s more than sad,” Nico said grimly. “If it turns out that someone did murder Jamison, there will be a manhunt that will turn this kingdom upside down. Harold won’t rest until the killer is found and brought to justice.”
“Justice,” I said, my voice as steady as I could make it. “You mean shot by archers in Amanda Plaza.”
Nico nodded. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“I hope I’m gone by then,” I said. “No matter how much someone may deserve to be executed, I wouldn’t enjoy seeing it happen.”
“I’ve never enjoyed it, either,” Nico said, which surprised me a little, since he was such a passionate defender of the crown. But it was some comfort to know that he wouldn’t relish the experience if he had to stand there and watch an arrow pierce my breast.
I gathered my skirts in both hands and said, “I must get back to Marguerite. She’ll be worried sick. How much of this may I tell her?”
“All of it, if you like. The news will have spread through so many channels by now that none of it will be a secret for long.”
I turned to go, and he fell in step beside me, though neither of us moved very quickly. Even though this had been one of the most unsettling and worrisome conversations I’d ever had with the man, I was still fool enough to wish for more time with him, another ten minutes, another five. Apparently, I had neither a brain nor a sense of self-preservation.
“So will your uncle send you out to this lake so you can help look for clues?” I asked as we stepped off the bridge and headed for the side door.
“No. He wants me here, conducting investigations from this end.”
I gave him an inquiring look. “What can you learn in Camarria?”
“The state of Jamison’s finances, for one thing, in case you’re right. In case he was in difficulties one way or the other. I’ll also find out if anyone in the city had a grudge against him and had a reason to track him down. I might turn up nothing—but I might find the final piece that makes the whole picture make sense.”
That didn’t sound so bad; Marguerite and I hadn’t done anything in Camarria that would tie us to Jamison, so Nico’s investigations would do us no harm. “Well, I hope someone learns something very quickly,” I said as we slipped back inside the palace. Naturally, I hoped for no such thing.
“So do I,” he said. “But I also hope—”
I didn’t get a chance to learn how he might complete that sentence because another figure glided through the shadows of the passageway, heading in our direction. It was a man in his late thirties, thin and nondescript. If I had had to guess his occupation, inquisitor’s assistant would have been my first supposition. “Nico,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Nico nodded at me and turned away without another word. They hurried off in one direction, and I went in the other. My heart was so heavy that I wondered that I had the bodily strength to haul myself up the stairs, but my veins were laced with so much prickling unease that I felt spurred to faster motion.
We hadn’t been discovered yet. Our actions still might never come to light. But for the first time, I was truly afraid that they would.
The rest of the day, and the entire one that followed, were as somber and tense as any I had passed in my life. Cormac’s guests gathered for meals and organized outings to some of the local attractions, but neither Cormac nor Jordan joined any of the activities and no one had much heart to enjoy them. It seemed unfeeling to laugh and flirt when a man you knew had recently been murdered, but it was intolerable to do absolutely nothing. So the nobles played cards and strolled through the gardens and visited Amanda Plaza, where everyone took turns tossing a few coins through the grate behind the statues of the triple goddess. I thought it would be fascinating to find out what particular grace everybody prayed for, whether it was mercy or justice or joy. I didn’t even have to ask what Marguerite was hoping for when she dribbled her coins through the narrow openings.
Though if there was a goddess who would promise to keep secrets, that was the one I would have prayed to for the rest of my life.
“This is so utterly wretched,” Leonora groaned that afternoon as Marguerite and Darrily took tea with the sisters in their expansive suite. “I feel so very much in the way! Surely the king is wishing every one of us gone.”
“Should we leave then?” Marguerite inquired. “Just go back home?”
“I asked Jordan that very question when I came across him in the hallway this morning,” Letitia said. “He looked very serious and pale, but he was willing to stop and talk to me for a few moments.”
Letitia glanced around the room with her eyes at their widest. “He said that his father had made it clear that none of us would be allowed to leave until the mystery of Jamison’s death has been cleared up.”
Darrily’s dark brows pulled down in a frown. “Why? I agree with your sister, we must all be a great nuisance at this time.”
Now Letitia leaned forward, dropping her voice to a whisper. “The inquisitor wants us to stay.”
Darrily started backward as if she had been stung. “‘The inquisitor’! But— Does he think any of us could have been involved in Jamison’s death?”
Letitia spread her hands. “I don’t know! But I was under the impression that anyone who tried to leave would appear suspicious.”
Lavinia’s eyes took on a mischievous sparkle. “Oh, it’s enough to make me wa
nt to pack up and head out of town, just to see what would happen.”
“You can’t do that!” Marguerite exclaimed. “If you catch the attention of the king’s inquisitor—”
“Gorsey, what could the bad man do to me?” Lavinia drawled.
“Arrest you, for one thing,” Darrily said drily.
“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Leonora exclaimed. “None of us hunted Jamison down and knocked him senseless and threw him in a lake! The king—or his sinister inquisitor—is being melodramatic. There is no reason we shouldn’t be allowed to leave this dreary palace where we can only be an annoyance to our hosts.”
Darrily’s expression was sardonic. “I agree,” she said. “I, too, would be happy to leave. But I do not want to be the one who catches the inquisitor’s eye because I am impatient to be gone.”
“Nor I,” Marguerite said in a soft voice. “But it certainly would be good to go back home.”
Oh, it certainly would.
For me, the brightest moments of both those days—and simultaneously the most terrifying ones—were the chances I had to snatch quick conversations with Nico. This situation had rattled him; he seemed eager to talk to someone as a way to make sense of the unfolding events. More than once it occurred to me that he was just pretending to be disturbed by the discovery of the body and the possibility that he might be hunting a murderer. More than once I thought perhaps he was trying to trick me into an unwary admission—that he and his uncle had already figured out who the killer was and they were hoping I would unwittingly supply them with more evidence.
But I didn’t think so. He might be an inquisitor’s apprentice, but he was also a young man, not a hardened investigator. Not so many years ago, he had been an impoverished low noble living off charity with his widowed mother. There was something boyish in his reaction to Jamison’s death, I thought. Maybe it was just that he had never before known someone who met his end through violence.
Or maybe he realized that I was rattled by the situation and that I wanted constant updates and reassurance, and he was seizing every opportunity to be with me when I was at my most vulnerable so he could provide a little comfort.
At any rate, we both wanted to talk to each other every day, and we quickly formed the habit of meeting on the white bridge that overlooked the small side garden. He had no fresh news for me that first night after the ball, but the second night he did.
“We’ve found Jamison’s clothes,” he said almost without preamble.
I felt a jolt of terror that I tried my best to hide. “You did? Were they buried somewhere near the body?”
He shook his head. “Not even close. They were here in the city.”
“I don’t understand. Here where?”
He gestured vaguely toward the south. “Someone dropped them off at a pauper’s box run by one of the temples. Except the clothes were so fine that the priestesses set them aside, thinking they had been donated in error and the owner would come looking for them. Instead, I found them.”
“How clever of you!” I said admiringly.
“I kept thinking. If his things weren’t at the lake, where would they be? If someone really did kill Jamison, he could hardly risk keeping the clothes with his own possessions.”
“He could have burned them along the side of the road,” I suggested. “That’s what I would have done.”
Nico nodded. “Me, too. But maybe he was traveling in a public conveyance, or in company with someone who would have found such behavior suspicious.”
“Couldn’t he have burned them in the fireplace of an inn where he stopped for the night?”
“In the middle of summer? A fire would be suspicious.”
“Oh! You’re right.”
“Much as I hate to think it, I believe the discovery of the clothes is even stronger evidence that his death was murder.”
“I’m not sure why.”
“It’s like you said. A rural freeholder who found fine velvet and satin lying on the ground—and a leather belt with a silver buckle, set with garnets, no less—well, that person would have kept the items to sell or use. Only someone with a crime to cover up would have tried to hide them.”
“That makes sense,” I admitted. I knew that all too well. As casually as I could, I asked, “Do the priestesses have any idea who left the clothes behind?”
“No. The collection box is unattended, and they only check it every few days. So not only do we not know who dropped them off, we don’t know when.”
“Have you found out any more about Jamison’s finances? Any reason someone might have wanted to kill him?”
“Nothing suspicious yet, but I imagine every tailor and cobbler in the city would have liked to see him dead,” Nico said with a hint of humor. “He ordered only the best, but he frequently forgot to pay his bills. The city tradesmen only did business with him because of his connection to the crown.”
“It would be kind of the king to settle some of those debts,” I said.
Now Nico’s expression was cynical. “Expedient, more like. I am going from shop to shop, offering to pay whatever Jamison owed—and encouraging all the tradesmen to confide in me about anything they know.”
“I hope you discover something useful.” Though I knew he wouldn’t. “But it seems like all of this could take a very long time.”
“It certainly could.”
“Have you considered that you might never discover who killed him—if he was actually murdered?”
Nico was silent a moment, and then he shook his head very slowly. “Oh, we’ll find out,” he said in a low voice. “Malachi—my uncle—will never stop looking.”
I swallowed around the sudden tightness in my throat. “Why? Was he that fond of Jamison?”
He glanced at me with narrowed eyes. “Not fond of Jamison. Fond of the queen,” he said.
I was sure my face reflected my bewilderment. “What? How is she involved in this? And why would that matter to your uncle?”
He stared at the water again as he answered. “You know Tabitha is Harold’s second wife. Perhaps you don’t know that they are completely at odds—they hate each other as much as any two people can. She has no fondness for Cormac or Jordan, either, and she absolutely despised Jamison. When Malachi first broached the notion that someone had murdered Jamison, the very first thing Harold said was, ‘Did she kill my son? If so, you won’t have to execute her in Amanda Plaza because I will strangle her with my bare hands.’”
This was a complication that hadn’t even occurred to me might arise. “Oh dear,” I said faintly. “How awful. For everyone.”
Nico nodded. “Indeed. Fortunately, I can’t see any reason she would have tracked him down on the Charamon Road to do away with him, so I don’t think she’s a serious candidate for murder. But if there’s the merest hint that the queen might be suspected of the deed, Malachi will search every corner of the kingdom to bring the true criminal to justice.”
“Why?” I said again.
“He’s an Empara man—like me, like the queen herself. It was one of the conditions her family imposed before they agreed to the marriage. The king had to agree to hire Malachi as one of the inquisitors for the crown. That was more than twenty years ago. Since then, he’s slowly worked his way up to the top of the ranks. There are many who suspect his loyalty is more to Tabitha than to Harold, though he’s been so vigorous in carrying out his duties that it hasn’t really mattered.” Nico blew out his breath. “Till now.”
“If the queen is guilty—though I could hardly believe such a thing!—will your uncle be willing to show the evidence against her?”
“A question Harold is already asking,” Nico replied. “You see why Malachi will not rest until this crime is solved.”
“Yes,” I said, wishing very much that Malachi did not have such a powerful incentive. “I can only hope he starts finding answers very soon.”
“I think we all hope that.”
“Marguerite said something this afternoon. Lady Let
itia of Banchura told her that none of Cormac’s guests will be allowed to return home until you’ve learned what’s happened. Is that true?”
Nico nodded. “Although it seems just as unlikely that any of them could be guilty of murder, my uncle wants to make sure of it before they are scattered to the corners of the kingdom. But naturally, nearly two dozen high nobles cannot be held prisoner in Camarria for weeks and weeks. Although—”
I waited a moment before prompting, “‘Although’ what?”
He glanced down at me, his expression softening from the grim lines it had held from the moment we met on the bridge. “Although I would not be unhappy if there were some reason you could not go home by month’s end,” he said softly. “I certainly wouldn’t have arranged for a murder as the circumstance that kept you here—but if that is one of the consequences, I cannot be entirely sorry.”
I tried to suppress a smile as I gave him a quick sideways glance. “I hardly think this is the time for dalliance,” I said primly.
Before I knew what he was planning, he swung me around so that my back was pinned against the bridge and his hands were gripping the rail on either side of my body. He crowded closer, pressing against me, dropping his head so his mouth was only inches from mine.
“Maybe it’s exactly the right time,” he murmured. “When better to remember what it feels like to be alive than when you’re faced with the stark reality of death?”
I tried really hard not to wish he would kiss me. “I thought we were starting over,” I said breathlessly. “Getting to know each other again. Getting to trust each other again.”
“By my count, we’ve already known each other just about as many days as we did in Oberton.”
“But they’ve been such hectic days.”
“My days are always hectic,” he said, leaning even closer, but still not quite touching my mouth with his. I could tell he was giving me time to offer a strong counterargument or to struggle in his hold; I could tell he was making sure I was willing. Goddess save me, I wanted to protest—but not as much as I wanted him to kiss me.