Liar's Moon

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  When the Keep guards finally cracked the drawbridge and it crashed onto the docks, it was almost a relief to get off that landing and inside the prison. Upstairs, I smiled sweetly at the guard on duty, my grin made brighter by the gold crown I held up to his grizzled face. “I’m going in there,” I said sunnily. “I trust you have no objections.”

  The guard took a slow moment to bite the coin, then spat dangerously near my feet. It was pointless, really. Any counterfeit coin I’d have brought would contain enough gold to pass that silly test — thieves have rules about such things, after all — but I just shrugged and let him have his moment. “Make it a good show,” he said, in a slow, Low Gerse drawl. “We don’t get much entertainment up here.”

  When I realized what he meant, I wanted to hit him, but thought better of it. If that’s what he wanted to believe of me, all the better. It gave me an excuse to keep coming, to get in and out of Durrel’s cell without attracting too much attention. I winked at him, then swished my way down the hall, hitching my skirts a little above my ankles as he followed me.

  A sour whistle pierced the cellway’s gloom, and I recognized the crude attentions of Durrel’s neighbor, watching from the tiny window in his door. “Aw, give Temus a kiss, now, sweet,” he purred, smacking his lips. “Can’t let that nob have all the fun.”

  The guard whacked Temus’s door with his baton. “Oi!” he cried. “Settle down now, or we’ll have you moved to the Rathole where you belong!” The prisoner blew his kiss to the guard instead, and hung in the window, watching us.

  “Celyn!” Durrel was waiting at the door, as if he’d known I would come.

  The guard unlocked Durrel’s cell door. “Don’t get any ideas, hen,” he said before shutting it behind me, his voice low and wet in my ear. “Any mischief, and we might decide to keep you both.” The door shut with a clang — but no click. He hadn’t locked me in here, and I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel safer or not.

  “Let me see you,” Durrel’s voice was raw, like he hadn’t spoken since I’d been here a few days ago. “Your cheek looks better.” He smudged my face gently with a finger that was cracked and cold, but clean. He wore the torn shirt he’d been arrested in, but it looked cleaner than last time, and now he had a worn but well-made leather jerkin over it. I glanced over the dim cell, and saw that the shirt I’d brought him was hung neatly from the rafters, its arms spread to dry. A rough woolen blanket I didn’t remember was folded neatly on the bed. He saw me looking and said, “From my father, who apparently had the same instincts for quality that you did. I gather there was supposed to be more,” he added. “Clearly the guards left me the choicest pickings. I hear there were fisticuffs over the horse blanket.”

  I gave a laugh that turned into a cough. Despite the comforts sent by Lord Ragn, I thought Durrel’s cell was actually getting worse. The sun had shifted so morning light flooded the room, and the stench of refuse was overpowering.

  “This I cannot endure one moment longer,” I announced, and walked straight over to the chamber pot. There was nowhere to dump it, so I marched it down the hallway and left it by the guards’ station, ignoring their protests.

  “Uh — I’m going to need that later,” Durrel said mildly when I returned, but he was smiling broadly. “I see you have your basket again. Should I expect more wonders? Soap, perhaps?”

  I snapped my fingers. “Damn. And here all I brought were shipping manifests from the Ceid warehouses.”

  His gaze turned keen. “No. Truly? You are quite the conjurer,” he said. “Let’s have a look, shall we?” He straddled the bench, and I followed him to the table.

  “It’s freezing in here,” I said; dank and chill with an annoying drip echoing through the walls. “Shouldn’t you have a fire?”

  “Well, you see,” Durrel said, looking up at the ceiling, “today the price of a fire is twenty crowns.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Twenty crowns was the cost of a horse. He didn’t answer, and I thought my first reaction was right. His father’s supplies had only punctuated the squalidness of his conditions. “Don’t get used to this,” I said. “Don’t let yourself get used to this. You’re getting out again.”

  He gave a shrug. “It starts to hurt less if you forget you were once a human being.” He sounded so lost and hopeless I couldn’t bear it. “The prisoner in the cell next to me is apparently a spy from Talanca. He spends all night swearing at the guards in Talancan, and all day crying and begging for mercy. He hasn’t had any visitors.” Durrel shifted one knee to his chest, and still didn’t look at me. “He could get out of here, but his government won’t pay his ransom. I heard the guards say that his execution has been scheduled for next week.”

  “Durrel —”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s all right.”

  “What about your father? Was there any message?”

  “If there was, it went the way of the wine and the gold.” He gave a determined smile, his fingers on the edge of his leather jerkin. “The blanket and the jerkin are both his, from Favom. That’s message enough.”

  “What about our friend Temus?” I said, trying to change to lighter subjects. “Next you’ll be telling me he’s the ambassador to Brionry.”

  “Our resident entertainer? I’m not sure how he ended up here. They brought him in a few days after me, but even the guards can’t agree on what he did — and Temus’s story changes hourly. I think he’s mad.”

  I thought of that brown, beady eye tracking me down the hallway, and shivered.

  “Hey,” Durrel said, turning my face from the cell door. “Don’t look like that. It’s not so bad. I have clean clothes and company. That’s all I need. Show me what you brought.”

  I pulled the documents I’d nicked from the dockhand from my basket. They hadn’t told me much, but I thought they might spark Durrel’s memory. “I found Geirt,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “She still insists that it was you she saw.”

  Durrel drew a circle on the table with his finger. “Do you believe her?” he asked quietly.

  “Well, she’s hiding something,” I said. “She got very defiant when I questioned her closely, and Barris didn’t want me speaking to her at all. I can have another go.” I leaned forward and spoke low. “There’s something weird going on at that warehouse. Everyone seemed — I don’t know, skittish.”

  “I think that was just Talth,” Durrel said. “Her servants were like that too, always hiding their faces, averting their eyes, as if they were afraid to look at us. Nobody lasted long in her employ either. In the first three months we were married, I lost track of how many different housemaids we had.” He looked rueful. “I made the mistake of trying to be friendly with one of the kitchen maids once. Talth sacked her the next day. I still don’t know what happened to her.”

  “Sounds like a lovely woman,” I said. No wonder somebody finally put poison in her drink. “I think Geirt liked you, though. I think she’d help if she weren’t so scared.”

  His eyes flicked to mine. “I believe I’ve had enough of Geirt’s help,” he said. “What else did she tell you? Did she say Talth and I quarreled?”

  I nodded. “But she couldn’t say over what.” I took a stab. “Was it Koya?”

  “Gods, no. Why would you —” He rose and moved away from me, then sank down on the bed, hand against his neck. “That didn’t have anything to do with Talth’s death. I swear.”

  “Then what was the argument about?” I pressed.

  After a long moment, Durrel looked up at me, his face tilted in the slanted light. “Money. Money I had lost.”

  “All right,” I said. “How, and how much?”

  “Five hundred crowns.”

  Marau’s balls. Hardly a princely sum, for the Decath and the Ceid, but more than enough to quarrel over. “Didn’t you have your own money?” He was Decath, after all; they owned half the countryside.

  “Technically, yes,” Durrel said. “I had my allowance and the money from the marriage
settlement, but Talth insisted on managing it. She considered me an irresponsible child. At the time, it just seemed easier than having another argument.”

  I was liking Durrel’s dead wife less and less. “All right, so what happened to the five hundred crowns?”

  “I was an idiot.” We’d established that, but I held my tongue. “I — I met this girl. She said she was a Sarist.”

  I couldn’t help a darted glance toward the cell door and the guards outside. “Where was this?” I whispered.

  “Some bar on Temple Street. One of Raff’s haunts. They don’t bother Guards there.”

  I nodded. I knew the place, or its type. They bothered — or didn’t bother — everyone with equality there.

  He went on, still rubbing the back of his neck. “I was there with Raffin. He was off duty, and we’d both had . . . rough days, so we had a little more to drink than usual.” He winced a little. “We saw this girl in the back, being hassled by a couple of muscles. I was tired, and I just wanted to go home — but Raff was edgy, itching for a fight.” I must have made a sound, because Durrel said, “Don’t look so surprised. He’s stronger than he looks, and he’s had Guard training.”

  “Go on.”

  “So while Raffin took on the two heavies, I got the girl away from them. She told me they were Ferrymen, and they’d promised to get her and her father to safety, out of the city, out of Llyvraneth, but they’d upped the price and now she couldn’t pay.”

  “And you offered to help.” Oh, I could see it all so clearly. Durrel and Raffin, boys still, so eager to rescue the girl in distress. I’d witnessed them play out that very scene myself once. With the king’s latest crackdown on dissidents, these “Ferrymen” had crawled up from the muck of Gerse’s underbelly — ruthless boatmen or other porters willing to smuggle Sarists out of the city or out of Llyvraneth entirely, for a price, usually an exorbitant one. But it was a desperate gamble for the passengers. Anyone trusting his life to Ferrymen was more likely to end up beaten and robbed — or handed straight over to Greenmen — than across the strait in Corlesanne.

  “I had to. You would have too, if you’d seen her.” Durrel’s voice was urgent, insistent. “She was all bruised, and she had a star tattoo inside her wrist. She was trying to hide it with her sleeves, but —” He trailed off. He obviously knew what it all sounded like, but even now he couldn’t help himself. “I tried to get the money from Talth, but she wouldn’t pay.”

  “No soft spot for Sarist refugee girls? Was that the argument?”

  “No, the argument came a few days later, when she found out I’d taken the money anyway.”

  I nodded. “And how did you find out you’d been swindled?”

  He looked surprised. “How did you —? Right. Raffin saw the girl two days later, in the same bar — no bruises, no tattoo, drinking and laughing with the same guys who’d been roughing her up. He took her in, but apparently pretending to be a Sarist isn’t an offense the Inquisition is interested in, and the money had disappeared by then.” He looked sick with the memory.

  I sighed. “You’re like a little girl who finds lost kittens in the street,” I said. “Sooner or later one of them is going to bite you.”

  He lifted a hand up toward the window. “I have a few scarred fingers,” he said. He met my eyes and gave me a grin. “But once in a while it works out all right.”

  I shook my head. “You know I was using you too.”

  “Then I guess there’s no hope for me after all.” But the grin lingered, infectiously, and a moment later, I had it too. Still shaking my head, I doled out the remaining contents of my basket, pies, beer, charred ledger page. Durrel stared at the bounty like a starving man confronted by a feast so large he can’t fathom where to start eating. He rose from the cot and came back to the table.

  “Food first,” I said firmly, passing him a pie. “Aunt Grea made these for you particularly, she expects a full report on my return, and trust me, Aunt Grea is not someone you disappoint. So eat up.”

  “Aye, mistress,” Durrel said. He broke into a pie willingly enough, but his fingers and eyes kept straying toward the manifests, until I shoved everything else aside and spread them across the table.

  “Does any of this mean anything to you?” I asked.

  He gave a mumbled affirmative, leaning over the papers and dropping crumbs everywhere. I showed him the charred scrap from the empty warehouse office.

  “Well, this is Talth’s handwriting,” Durrel said, brushing the burnt paper smooth. “And these look like dates. The other numbers might be, I don’t know, ships’ registries? Look, here’s a repeat. And another.” He turned the paper to me, and I saw what he saw, the same number matched up with several different dates.

  “See if it’s in the manifests,” I said, and Durrel laid the papers carefully in order, combing through them swiftly with his broad fingers.

  “What else did you see at the docks?” he asked. “Ships, people, cargo, what?”

  “I don’t know. Barris was there — thrilled to see me, by the way — and they were loading royal cargo onto a ship. Food and weapons and cloth for the army.” I couldn’t quite keep the disgust out of my voice, and Durrel looked up at me, eyes serious.

  “Go on,” he said. He’d marked one notation on the manifests with the edge of the beer bottle’s curved bottom, another with a crumb of piecrust.

  “Well, I got into a fight with a dockhand over oranges, and he told me they were waiting for some ship called the . . .” Pox, what was it? “Belprisa. Some Talancan vessel.”

  “Talancan? Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “Why?”

  Durrel sat back. “We have a commercial treaty with Talanca,” he said slowly. “They trade freely with Llyvraneth, even during the war; their ships go through the embargoes, and —”

  “And they’re not searched,” I finished. Durrel was nodding. I felt a little thrill of heat. “It’s easy enough to disguise a ship’s origin,” I said. “False flags, a forged registry . . .”

  “How easy?” he asked.

  “I could do it.”

  An altogether strange expression passed over Durrel’s face. He laid down the manifests and just looked at me, his face a mixture of surprise and — delight?

  I fidgeted in my seat. “You do understand I’m not really a jeweler’s daughter, right?”

  He laughed suddenly, quick and surprised. “Since I met you,” he said. But he was grinning. “Forging ships? That’s . . . well, I’ll just bet you have some stories to tell.”

  “Milord, you have no idea.” And we sat there, watching each other across the dingy, cluttered table, in the sputtering, tallowy candlelight. It softened the too-thin contours of Durrel’s face, and made his charcoal-colored eyes look very bright. I grew uncomfortable with the intensity in his gaze and looked away, back to the documents. I heard Durrel sigh once and shift through the papers. After a moment, he gave a low whistle.

  “Celyn, look,” he said, turning the singed ledger page toward me. “This here, where it’s burned away? This could say Light of Yraine, which is listed on the manifests. If I’m reading this right, it looks like they were carrying cargo worth nearly forty thousand crowns.”

  “That’s not what they reported to the harbormaster.” I showed him the manifests, where the Light of Yraine, seagoing carrack, was registered as leaving Gerse on that date with a cargo valued at only ten thousand crowns. We stared at the records together, then flipped through them hastily, searching for other ships’ names in the manifests that might match the ledger page. We came across three more — the Calthor, the Ponvi, and the aforementioned Belprisa — all carrying cargo vastly more valuable than what the manifests showed.

  “Forged ships’ registries? Unreported income? Burned records? What’s this all mean?” he said.

  I looked up from the records. “There’s something on those ships they don’t want anybody to know about.”

  “But what?” Durrel said. “There’s no way to tell from
these documents, except that the values don’t add up.”

  “Cwalo thought it might be smuggled magical artifacts for the black market,” I said. “But these sums we’re talking about are much too large.”

  Durrel’s voice was low and grim. “Well, whatever it was, it got Talth killed.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I lingered in Durrel’s cell a while longer, until the pies and the beer were long gone. We swapped wild stories, laughing over his nobbish adventures with Raffin, my near misses on the job in Gerse, as well as a few sweet shared memories of his cousin Meri, managing to keep the conversation well clear of Talth or war or murder. I felt curiously light and silly leaving the Keep, and I could not chase away the image of those deep-set gray eyes or that contagious grin.

  We had made good progress with the stolen records. We now knew for certain something suspicious was going on with Talth’s business, and I was trying to decide what my next step should be, along the path leading to the real murderer. On my way home, I stopped back at Grillig’s junk shop, wondering how much I’d have to spend this time for information. If he even had any.

  “Glad you made it back here,” he said by way of greeting. “Getting worried you weren’t going to show again.”

  I leaned on the counter. “Do you have anything for me?”

  “Maybe,” Grillig said. “I asked a few quiet questions, and I might have heard about that . . . merchandise you were interested in.”

  “The Tincture of the Moon?”