In Dreaming Bound

by J. Kathleen Cheney

  The clearly unhappy guard went and held the carriage door open as Mikael climbed up, then shoved the door shut as soon as Mikael settled. It was a fine coach, smelling faintly of some incense he couldn’t quite place, the squabs clean and new. Better than a lot of the royal coaches.

  For his part, Gasanen appeared to have come from an event that required more festive garb than Mikael had seen on him before. His long dark-blue jacket was brightly embroidered with a floral pattern in oranges and golds about the cuffs and the front placket. His gold trousers and embroidered slippers matched. The clothing that Sera wore every day likely cost several times as much as Gasanen’s, but his had not come cheaply.

  “I assume your man figured out that I was after the horse?” Gasanen said, as if there could be no other explanation for Mikael’s presence here.

  “He did,” Mikael said. “That seemed the most logical explanation for setting the stables on fire. There are dozens of other ways to distract from someone sneaking about the police commissioner’s house.” He gestured toward Gasanen’s fine attire. “Or was it you who attended?”

  “Fire is a universal cataclysm most people will flee,” Gasanen said, not answering the latter question. “And the ruined stables will present a short-term explanation when the horse isn’t found.”

  Mikael looked at the older man. “Did you actually retrieve any evidence?”

  Gasanen laughed shortly. “Not what you’re after. I’ll be acquiring that later.”

  Mikael controlled his annoyance, then recalled Gasanen couldn’t sense it. “We helped you steal a horse.”

  Gasanen shook his head wearily, as if exhausted by explaining things to children. “You helped me steal a bargaining chip, Mr. Lee. This horse, and the deed of ownership I retrieved from Faralis’ office, are what I’m trading for that information.”

  “With whom?” He was pressing his luck with this man, but it was worth a try.

  “I’m sure whomever you have following me will inform you of that later. Is that all, Mr. Lee?”

  Mikael was sure he wouldn’t get any answer from Gasanen that the man wasn’t already prepared to give. “I’m sure we’ll talk again.”

  “That is the point of this, is it not?” Gasanen asked, dark eyes crinkling at the corners with genuine amusement. He opened the door, an unsubtle clue for Mikael to step down.

  Mikael complied. He wasn’t going to win any points with the man by antagonizing him.

  Gasanen called up for the driver to move on, then sat back as the guard shut the door. The carriage rolled on into the estate. The scowling guard closed the gate behind the carriage, giving Mikael a censorious look as he did so.

  Mikael made a careful note of the address, although he had no doubt Anna already knew exactly where this man lived.

  Chapter 30

  * * *

  MIKAEL HEADED BACK toward the Faralis estate to make certain Pamini hadn’t fallen into trouble. The plan had been for her to wait for him, so they could confer on the results. He found her waiting in the alleyway and told her of his short discussion with Gasanen.

  “I think we should talk to Cerradine,” Pamini said with a disgusted sound. She wrapped her arms about herself. It was definitely getting colder. “He’ll want to know what Gasanen is up to.”

  After considering the sky for a moment—it looked likely to snow more tonight—Mikael walked with her until they found a cab moving along one of the streets. He climbed up, Pamini behind him, and soon they were rattling toward an address in the Seychas district of town.

  He’d never seen Cerradine’s house before. The large stone house was in the Larossan style, without any superfluous arches or domes, and possessed sensibly sloped rooftops. It was set back behind a well-tended garden with some plants now wrapped for winter, others still green, although dusted with the recent snow. A path led straight through the garden to the front door, but it was around to the back of the house that Pamini led him.

  Evidently this was where Cerradine’s officers sought him out after hours. Pamini rapped on the back door with her knuckles and waited. She shrugged toward Mikael, a message in that he didn’t catch.

  After a moment, the door opened and an elderly Larossan woman peered through the slight opening at them, a thick overrobe clutched about her. “Tossa? Come on in.”

  She opened the door wide, and Mikael followed Pamini into a darkened kitchen—apparently the way he entered all Larossan houses. The servant’s entry.

  The woman held a lamp in one hand, the glow highlighting white wisps of hair that had escaped from her braid. She turned up the gas in one of the fixtures, lighting a kitchen with a stove far more modern than the one in the Anjir kitchen or Synen’s tavern. It was a square room with a large worktable and smelled of recent baking, making Mikael wonder if he might find flatbread hidden under a towel on one of the counters. Pamini motioned for Mikael to sit down on the bench at the worktable, squelching that nascent plan.

  “Was that the cook?” he asked Pamini, who still stood.

  “No,” she said. “Mrs. Jhirvetis. She and her husband own this house. Well, Cerradine owns it, but they live in the front half and it’s mostly theirs still. But they were about to lose the home and he took over the mortgage so they could still stay here, and he just lives in a couple of rooms back here.”

  An interesting arrangement. “Why?”

  Pamini shrugged. “Their son was one of his officers when Cerradine first took over the office. Killed in the line of duty, couldn’t help support his parents any longer. Cerradine stepped in so they wouldn’t lose their home.”

  “Nice of him,” Mikael noted.

  “Works out for all of them.” Pamini peered down one of the dark hallways where a light was coming closer.

  Colonel Cerradine had been rousted from his bed, his white hair disordered. He had an overrobe on over the sort of loose black trousers one might wear for sparring—a sign that old Family habit died hard. The man had been raised among the Family after all.

  “Pamini, Mikael,” he began, surveying the pair of them as he ran fingers through his hair to straighten it. “Did everything go as planned?”

  Pamini cast a sidelong glance at Mikael before saying, “More or less, sir. The man kept one of the horses, the remainder went straight to the neighbor’s paddock as you suggested.”

  Mikael guessed she would prefer to be surer of that. He would, too. If she could have followed the horses to their end destination, she would have. But she’d stayed behind to make sure the stable was clear of horses and people before the fire was lit.

  “Gasanen told me he intends to trade the one horse for the evidence,” Mikael said after Pamini relayed most of their evening’s work.

  “To whom?” Cerradine asked, frowning.

  “He said we’d probably figure out who that was when whoever we had following him reported back.” Even if Gasanen was abiding by his word, Mikael still felt they’d been tricked somehow.

  The colonel turned back to Pamini. “If Messine starts in the morning, can you take over after lunch?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said promptly. “I’ll head home now and get some sleep.” With that, she left Mikael there alone with the colonel. That had probably been their plan all along.

  Mikael pressed his lips together. What does the colonel want to tell me? The man would have hustled him out with Pamini otherwise. “Is this why you wanted the murder case dropped sir? Because it would reveal something damning about Madam Anjir?”

  The colonel’s jaw clenched, dark eyes hardening. “There is nothing damning in this about her.”

  “That is not precisely what I meant, sir.” Mikael felt a telltale flush heat his cheeks.

  “I know.” Cerradine puffed out his cheeks. “Given your tie to Shironne, you’ll learn the truth eventually.”

  Mikael hoped it would be sooner. “True.”

  “I had Anjir investigated when Shironne first started working for me,” Cerradine admitted. “There was a strange transacti
on about ten years ago. He lost heavily in a business venture that failed, but then suddenly his debt disappeared. Messine put that together with a rumor about his wife leaving for the countryside about that time, both occurring about nine months before Melanna’s birth.”

  “She left him?” That didn’t sound like Madam Anjir at all.

  “No.” Cerradine steepled his fingers together, pausing before he said, “Are you familiar with the concept of slave-sharing?”

  Mikael searched back through his mind but couldn’t dig up that phrase. “No, sir.”

  “An old Larossan tradition, a man can lend another man a household slave in exchange for a debt.”

  “Ah.” Mikael swallowed despite a tight throat. “Or his wife, I assume.”

  “Or a daughter or son,” Cerradine said in a hard voice. “Illegal for decades, but it still happens.”

  Mikael pinched the bridge of his nose. “I almost found Gasanen likable until now.”

  Cerradine shook his head. “Gasanen wasn’t the victim in this, but he wasn’t the instigator, either. Anjir took his wife to Gasanen’s house and left her there. Not a word to her why she was there. Just . . . left her.”

  If it were possible for my opinion of Shironne’s father to slip any lower, it would.

  “Understand,” Cerradine went on, “Savelle defended Gasanen to me when she told me of the affair. Said he was kind to her, didn’t demand anything from her, and that she initiated the sexual relationship, mostly to punish her husband. Gasanen even offered to hide her from Anjir, move her and her daughters to another city, but she was afraid of a scandal.”

  Mikael didn’t understand the woman’s terror of scandal, but everyone had their own fears. Savelle Anjir’s mother had brought down scandal on her that plagued her childhood, and she dreaded doing the same to her own daughters. Instead she’d remained in a violent marriage and kept up the façade of the serene politician’s wife. “And after the affair?”

  “At the end of two weeks, Gasanen returned her to her household and never asked anything from her again. She says he’s never made any sort of threat against her or threatened to take Melanna away. He did contact her after Melanna was born, renewing his offer of protection, but no more.”

  Offer of protection, Mikael knew, meant an offer to make her his mistress. He doubted Savelle Anjir would ever have accepted that. “Wouldn’t the affair have given Gasanen grounds to blackmail Anjir?”

  Cerradine shook his head. “No way he could expose Anjir without embarrassing Savelle.”

  “Ah.” That Gasanen had refrained from doing so indicated he had some fondness for Madam Anjir.

  “All in all,” Cerradine said, “he’s better than a lot of men. Less dangerous. And . . . I believe he has the Anjir family’s best interests in mind.”

  And thus they were letting the police handle the murder of Jusid, and they would never trace it back to Gasanen. “I need to find out who is trying to buy Shironne, sir. Otherwise she’ll never be safe outside the walls of the Fortress.”

  “I’m pursuing that Mikael,” Cerradine said. “But we may not be looking at an easy answer. Coalitions between the houses, old alliances, seem to be shifting. Rumblings of war between the Pedraisi and the Cince.”

  The Cince? That had never crossed his mind.

  The Cince Empire, sometimes referred to as the Ancient Enemy among the Families, lay on the far side of the vast pentarchy of Pedrossa. As such, they were often ignored in politics. Mikael had no idea how that could relate to Shironne, save that the Pedraisi might want to use her skills against the Cince. That just added a new layer of worry to the situation. “Why would they go to war?”

  “Usually we’re told the Cince want a passage to the West, to the Western Kingdoms, which the Pedraisi refuse to give them.”

  Nothing new about that. A land passage to the western side of the continent would save them having to sail around the bottom of the world to get there. But their limited trade with the Western Kingdoms wasn’t much of a reason to start a war, so it had never happened. “And that affects Shironne? The Families? How?”

  “I don’t know, Mikael.” Cerradine moistened his lower lip with his tongue, the closest Mikael had ever seen to a nervous gesture from the man. “Something is happening in the Lucas Family,” Cerradine said. “The other Families as well. There are whispers of . . . change.”

  The Families? Change was not a trait one associated with the Six Families. “Such as?”

  Cerradine steepled his fingers. “Not entirely sure. Deb wouldn’t tell me.”

  Mikael had no idea what the man was after. It was something Deborah wouldn’t tell him. That hinted that Deborah knew, had likely known all along.

  Of course the Lucas elders would know about any change that was coming to the Families. He’d noted that, for the past few months, Deborah had spent more time in elders’ meetings than she did in the infirmary. What was happening that required so much deliberation? And what did that have to do with the Cince? The colonel wouldn’t have mentioned that far-away country if he didn’t think there was some connection.

  Mikael licked his lips. “And you think I know?”

  The colonel’s head tilted, hawk-dark eyes regarding Mikael steadily. “What do you know?”

  He’d been paying attention to the king’s actions, and not even worrying about the Families, but Cerradine definitely thought the slow-to-move Families were the agents of change here.

  Something to do with Shironne, surely, and that had to be that she was a touch-sensitive. When the Pedraisi priest, Ramanet, grabbed Shironne and realized what she was, had he told anyone of the existence of a girl with such great talents? They had no way to be sure. But if he had, then anyone could know about her talents.

  Was that the question Gasanen thought he would ask? If the Pedraisi knew about Shironne’s talents and wanted to collect her? Or whether the Cince might? He licked his dry lips again, frustrated by chasing answers that were simply not inside his head.

  Even the questions weren’t there . . . and everyone apparently thought they should be.

  “I can’t help you, sir,” he finally said.

  Cerradine rose, a signal that their interview was over. “One favor, Mikael. Remember that you are as gifted as Shironne. In a different way, yes, but you might be just as valuable. And vulnerable.”

  Mikael’s eyes lifted to meet the colonel’s. “You heard about this afternoon.”

  Cerradine laughed softly. “News travels like flies. Be safe.”

  Mikael left Cerradine without any further answers or questions given, and an hour later lay in his own bed, his mind still chasing Cerradine’s and Gasanen’s words around fruitlessly in his mind.

  Chapter 31

  * * *

  “COME ON,” TABITA whispered, shaking Shironne’s shoulder.

  Shironne grabbed her jacket and boots from the shelf. She hadn’t changed out of her uniform before lying down that evening, so she sat on the edge of her bunk, slipped on her boots, and laced them. Upstairs, Mikael had fallen asleep with many worries still hanging over his mind, too many unanswered questions. Unable to help him, she hurried and gave in to Tabita’s tugging on her arm.

  “I don’t know how . . .” Tabita’s voice trailed off and she tugged Shironne out to the hallway.

  “What?” Shironne asked.

  “I was going to say I don’t know how you lace your boots in the dark.” Tabita radiated embarrassment. “I forget sometimes.”

  Shironne heard the other girl settle on the floor—likely to put on her own boots. Shironne drew her jacket on while she waited. The movement of other feet sounded in the silent hallway; Eli and Gabriel, she decided.

  “Keep quiet,” Eli instructed unnecessarily.

  Shironne didn’t have any intention of talking, so she waited while Tabita finished. Tabita’s hand settled on her arm then and drew her along the hallway away from the main hall. After a moment, a door opened, and Tabita pulled her into a smaller room—the showe
rs. The smell was distinctive.

  “She hasn’t come back, has she?” Eli asked as soon as Gabriel closed the door behind him.

  “No.” Tabita let Shironne’s arm loose. “Do you have any idea where she went?”

  Tabita clearly expected her to answer that. Shironne picked through the jumble of thoughts she’d drawn through her brief contact with Maria. “I . . . um, she was going to go to a garden.”

  “The royal gardens?” Eli asked.

  Shironne shook her head. “No, in the city. I don’t know the name.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I could walk there, but I couldn’t tell you the name of the street. She doesn’t think of it that way. She uses . . . buildings and things to find her way, not a map.”

  “We can’t take you with us,” Eli said quickly.

  “With you?” Tabita hissed in protest. “You can’t mean to go after her.”

  “I do,” Eli said. “She’s my responsibility. She’s my sister.”

  “What did your father say?” Tabita asked.

  “He didn’t tell him,” Gabriel replied, disapproval in his tone.

  Shironne felt Tabita’s flare of disbelief; clearly, she and Eli had argued about this again. Shironne didn’t want to wait all night while they wrangled over it once more. “Don’t waste time fighting,” she said. “Do you actually know a way out of the Fortress?”

  “I do,” Eli said coolly, “but you’re not going.”

  Shironne wrapped her arms about herself. “How do you intend to find the garden, then?”

  In the end, all four of them went, despite each other’s protests.

  There were any number of ways to get out of the Fortress, Shironne knew that, but generally one was never taught more than three. Mikael knew of a handful, she realized suddenly, a virtue of his position in the Daujom, and his familiarity with the other Fortresses. But he was a black. No one would try to stop him.

  They chose the simplest route, getting past the sentries on Two Down by looking very official. Being the First of the yeargroup lent Eli a modicum of authority. The fact that he had his two Seconds with him made their manufactured errand seem even more important. Having a member of the Royal House along didn’t hurt, either. They took the stairwell down to Three Down and then used their specious story about taking Shironne out to the gardens to meet her sister on the sentry guarding the refuge escape wells.