Liar's Moon

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  “Hist!” He waved me frantically to silence, even though we were the only ones in the shop. “I told you, even the name of that stuff is outlawed!”

  “Then who’s been breaking the laws lately, Grillig?”

  He scowled, but bent closer to me. “Apothecary up in the Temple District. I hear he’s the man to see if you have a rat problem.”

  “That’s it? Where did you hear this?”

  “Like I’d tell you that. Nobody’d ever talk to me again.”

  “You would love that,” I said. Grillig shrugged, but I couldn’t get him to tell me any more. Fair enough; how many potioners’ shops could there be in the Temple District?

  The day had turned rainy, puddles collecting in the damp streets and making the city seem cooler and gloomy. The Temple District sat in the Second Circle at the heart of the city, where there used to be six churches ringing a round courtyard. Now the ancient chapel to Mend-kaal had become a storehouse for municipal records, and the temple of Sar had been razed entirely. The only ones still standing were the Celyst building, its congregation more thriving than ever, and the temple to Zet, its gilded façade still maintained by generous contributions from the city’s noble population. Planted between those two, as grand as its neighbors in its own inebriated way, was Tiboran’s house of worship, a massive tavern, theater, and inn known simply as the Temple. I hadn’t been down here in months, not since a glance around the area told me nothing had changed here except me.

  Since Grillig hadn’t given me more specific directions, I spent a fruitless hour poking around the back streets of the district, looking through apothecary shops and accumulating stains on my shoes I didn’t want to contemplate. Finally I rounded a corner where Temple Street collided with a nest of tangled alleyways, and saw what I’d been seeking, a shadowed storefront with a begrimed sign hanging outside, showing a mortar and pestle. The red snake twining around the base of the mortar told passersby something important about this potioner’s shop: They were authorized to carry poisons.

  A bell went off as I opened the door, and the sunlight disappeared behind me when it swung shut. It was dark inside, cramped and tiny — a big man could stand in the aisle and nearly touch each opposite wall, if he didn’t crack his head on the low ceiling first. In the dim light, I made out neat rows of shelves holding bottles and boxes and pottery jars, all with dusty, illegible labels. At the sound of the bell, a bespectacled man with a balding head shuffled down the shelves behind the counter and peered at me. His sharp, pinched face and wide, unblinking eyes gave him the look of a mouse. I stepped up to the counter and dipped a hasty sort of half curtsy.

  “Yes?” the potioner inquired, staring me up and down. “I’ve not seen you before.”

  “No, I, uh — I work at one of the big houses on Castle Street.” I pitched my voice shy and low, shook up my syllables to the unrefined accent of a serving girl. “My mistress sent me here for something to kill the rats.” I waited — Castle Street was a long way from here; how suspicious would he be?

  “You look like a strong girl,” the shopman said finally. “I’m sure you have no trouble dealing with rats.”

  I didn’t let him see the sigh, but dug in my dress for one of Lord Ragn’s gold coins — how much money would a fine lady give her servant to bribe a shopkeeper? “My mistress says she wants it done clean.”

  The man regarded the coin for a moment, not touching it. Finally he said in a low voice, “How big a rat are we talking about?”

  And here I thought I was going to have to give him a little push. Instead, I looked around furtively, as if anxious, and swallowed.

  The potioner regarded me a moment, and then palmed the coin and began rustling under the counter. He brought out a ragged, clothbound book and cleared a space for it. “There are a dozen things that will effectively deal with a rat problem,” he said conversationally, heaving open the book. It looked like an herbal, handwritten notes beside drawings of plants and addenda scrawled in the margins. “The question is, how long do you want it to take, and whether you want it, you know, to look natural after. Take monkshood, for instance. Very fast acting, but violent. Distasteful.” He gave a little shudder and flipped through the pages. “Or nightshade. A tidier death, but trickier — it’s hard to get the dosage just right.”

  I stared at him. What if I had just come in after rat poison? What would he sell me then? I watched the pages turn, but as he pulled his finger down the menu of toxins, the bell on the door rang, and somebody shoved it open.

  I jumped a little — fair enough, I was supposed to be a nervous serving girl plotting a murder with her mistress — but the shopkeeper barely looked up. He pushed the herbal my way and turned to deal with the other customers, a pair of older townswomen who regaled him with detailed complaints of their rheumatism and flux. I only half listened, browsing through the book and its pictures of herbs, powders, anatomical diagrams, celestial symbols. . . . I had a passing familiarity with such a volume, having assisted Lady Nemair in her stillroom during my tenure at Bryn Shaer.

  Even so, I nearly flipped right past it, a color drawing of the shadowy gray full moon of Marau, ringed by a pearly halo. The artist had left out the bright dot of the Nameless One, the tiny moon that follows close behind her father, god of the dead. But that hardly mattered, because he had included a title, in bold stroking letters. Tincture of the Moon of Marau.

  And a recipe: By the full light of Marau, dissolve in three parts strong red wine, one white pearl and one black. Distill until Marau has turned to new, and strain. Add to this solution three grains of blue monkshood, a drop of quicksilver, and a full measure of ground silver. When Marau is full again, heat over low flame until the liquid glows with moonslight. This decoction may be mixed with any liquid and will retain Marau’s power, but it will be especially potent when returned to the liquid of its birth, red wine.

  I read that paragraph over and over, feeling a frown start to form. Silver, pearls, and red wine — stupid and expensive, but not really harmful. Quicksilver and monkshood, though, were deadly. This was a nob’s poison. I could only imagine what such a dose would cost. Did this guy have any? Did I want to know the answer to that?

  I didn’t have a chance to decide; the other customers left and the shopkeeper scurried right back to me. I had flipped back a few pages, my thoughts clamped down hard.

  “Well?” the shopkeeper inquired. “Have we decided? Maybe a nice preparation of alum?”

  I looked around the room and took a deep breath, my finger still lodged in the herbal. “I think my mistress was looking for something a little more exclusive. Exotic. Expensive.” With the slightest emphasis on that last word, I turned the book to the page with the recipe that had killed Durrel’s wife.

  The shopkeeper paused for a moment. “That will take some time to prepare,” he said finally. “A month, at least. Can your mistress wait that long?”

  A month. Did Durrel have that long? What if the Ceid started pressing for a decision from the king? What if they got tired of waiting? I just bit my lip and nodded. And then I remembered that I didn’t actually want any of the stuff myself; I was trying to learn who else might have bought some. How was I going to get this guy to tell me that?

  “Of course,” the potioner continued thoughtfully, “I may have some left from the last batch.”

  “The what?” I said sharply, forgetting to be the timid servant.

  “The last batch.” The apothecary turned back to the shelves behind him and wheeled a ladder into place in front of one glassed-in case. Climbing up, he teetered at the top as he fumbled for a ring of keys at his belt. “It’s surprising you’d come in and ask for this, you know. It’s very uncommon; I don’t think I’ve made up more than one or two batches since I was an apprentice. And I’ve kept shop here for near thirty years.” He reached inside the case and drew out a dark bottle, held it up to the light, shook it a bit. “And then, I get two orders in one summer. Extraordinary.”

  That was one wo
rd for it. I could think of another. “Really?” I said, trying to sound merely conversational. “Who bought the other?”

  The potioner seemed to dislike what he saw in the jar, and climbed back down to the counter, shaking his head. “Oh, some fellow. I hadn’t seen him around here before. I’m sorry, I’ll have to make new.” Consulting the herbal, he quoted me a price, asking if my mistress would pay. If the poison wasn’t potent enough, the price was.

  “How much will that buy?”

  The shopkeeper showed me the bottle, a brown vial about the size of my hand.

  “And how many, erm, rats will that dispatch?”

  “This should fix you up nicely,” he said. “It only takes a little” — he held up a smaller vial, no bigger than my thumb — “for your average-sized vermin. It won’t work fast, mind you, but it gets the job done.”

  I could feel myself getting breathless even now, and I wasn’t really going to buy anything. I’d had it right from the beginning — a nob’s poison. Who had spent so much to ensure Talth Ceid such a pricey and rarified death?

  “That price is fine,” I said faintly. “This other customer, who was he?”

  The potioner looked nearsightedly into the distance, frowning. “Nobody I knew. Definitely not one of my regulars. Young fellow, I think. Had a girl with him, tall, pretty. Not like you.”

  I stared hard at him for a long moment, feeling suddenly cold. “Describe them.”

  “Well, he was just your average rich lad, noble, at a guess. Quiet. Wore a sword and a big ring, a bowing dog, if I remember aright. She was the looker. Put me in mind of Zet, she did, with all that golden hair and height on her.”

  “And they bought this poison together.” It was hard to get the words out.

  “Well, they ordered it together, but if you ask me, it was the lady what wanted it. But when it came time to pick it up, he came back alone.”

  I turned without thanking him, something fluttering loose in my chest, and wandered out onto Temple Street, nearly into the path of an oncoming oxcart. They’d ordered it together — the young nob with the bowing dog on his ring, and the tall blonde who looked like Zet. I felt sick. I knew that bowing dog all too well. It was the seal of the House of Decath.

  I was such a fool! The arguments, the evidence, the witness . . . it had all been there, if I’d only looked at it.

  Koya and Durrel had bought the poison to kill Koya’s mother, and then Durrel had gone and fetched it home again.

  My friend Durrel Decath was almost as good a liar as I was.

  PART II

  KEEP YOUR

  EYES OPEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After that, I resigned my commission as Lord Durrel’s champion — just turned my back on the Keep and kept on walking. It wasn’t as if there was so little to occupy my days, after all, that I had to spend them sneaking around warehouses and digging up sordid secrets. There was a war on, and lots of places I could put my talents to better use.

  I turned my attentions instead to helping around the bakery. I was objectively one of the worst cooks in Llyvraneth, but I could sift and stir if the need arose, and Aunt Grea didn’t protest too strenuously the day I came downstairs, donned an apron, and fell into kneading beside her. Business was thin at the bakery these days, though she didn’t like to speak of it; the grain shortages had pushed up the price of bread so high that many Seventh Circle folk couldn’t afford it anymore. Grea cut her costly wheat with cheaper grains where she could, but it was hard to ignore the grumbles in the street and the dark looks from her customers.

  “It isn’t my fault,” she’d tell them. “Talk to Bardolph.” But bakers were an easier target for ordinary folks’ wrath; little did they care that Grea struggled too.

  “You don’t need to do this, you know,” she said to me one hot afternoon in the shadow of the blasting ovens. I was up to my elbows in flour that was mostly rye and punching down a ring of dough with enough force to leave dents in the table. “I’m sure you’d rather be doing anything else.”

  I just shrugged and flung the dough down onto the bread board with a bang that sent flour and cats and bakers flying. The truth was, I was mad as hells with myself, and I couldn’t even explain why. It wasn’t just that Durrel had lied to me; it was that I had believed him. I’d wanted to believe him. I’d looked into his eyes and thought, He is not a murderer. He can’t be.

  What an idiot I was. Didn’t I know better than anybody how thin that line was, how easy it was to cross? It would have been the work of a moment for Koya to lure Durrel into helping her; look how easily he’d thrown away five hundred marks on that fake Sarist girl.

  Look how easily I’d been lured in.

  And so I punched and rolled and dragged bags of grain around, hoping the hot, heavy work would sweat all thoughts of Durrel Decath right out of me, until even Aunt Grea finally grew a little alarmed one afternoon and sent me back upstairs “to cool off,” she said with a fierce glare that did not brook defiance.

  Upstairs, Rat bent over our makeshift table, regarding two bottles of wine with intensity, one blond eyebrow cocked in focus. “Here,” he said, handing me a glass. “Taste this.”

  I wasn’t in any kind of mood to refuse a drink, so I downed the shot he gave me. “Tastes like Grisel,” I said, recognizing the fine, fizzy Corles wine.

  “Ah.” Rat lifted a finger, then handed me another, this one in a clay cup.

  “Tastes like Grisel,” I repeated

  Rat gave me a look of disdain. “Heretic.” With a flourish he lifted one of the bottles to the light. “This is sparkling Grisel, a thirty-four-year-old bottle, in fact, which was entrusted to me by his lordship. And this” — he handed me the other bottle, which looked nearly identical — “is not.”

  “You’re counterfeiting wine? How?” Curious now, I slid into place behind the table.

  “Would I ask you how you picked a pocket or got into a nob’s bedroom to steal a diamond? I think not. But since you’ve asked nicely, yes, I am attempting to fill a hole in the lives of our esteemed friends. Thanks to the embargoes against Corlesanne, they are suffering without some of the finer things in life.”

  I lifted the real bottle from the table and eyed the label. “Interesting.” But my voice sounded bored, even to me.

  “And you call yourself one of Tiboran’s. Can you do the labels?”

  I set the bottle down with a clink. “I told Grea I wouldn’t bring my work to her house, and I meant it. Besides, I’m helping in the bakery.”

  Rat leaned against the dry sink, arms crossed over his chest. “This is serious,” he said. “I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “Like what?” I snapped, glaring at the wine labels instead of him.

  “Right,” he said, and took a seat beside me at the table. “Look, if you want to help Aunt, then do what you’re good at. We don’t need a second baker when there’s barely flour enough for one. If these grain prices keep going up, she’s going to need alternate sources of income.” He nudged the Grisel bottle closer to me. “Come on,” he said. “You know you want to.”

  I looked at him. “She could get in a lot of trouble for this,” I said, although in truth the risk was minimal. Nobody was going to come hunting a Seventh Circle bakery for smuggled wine, and forged wine? Well, the very idea of it would be so amusing to Tiboran, god of wine and forgers, that anyone in the liquor trade who might reasonably complain would no doubt look the other way. Besides, Rat had a point about those Grisel labels — the script had the trickiest little twist to some of the numerals, and it might be interesting to try replicating the blue tinge to the edges of the paper, said to be caused by a fungus in Count Grisel’s cellars. . . .

  I spent a little time on Rat’s project over the next few days, selecting inks and paper at a Spiral stationer’s, tracking down a glassblower willing to dodge the excise taxes on locally made wine. At night I stayed out past curfew, haunting the shadows near a bar down Bonelicker Way where the pickings were never wort
h the effort, and did a little halfhearted forgery after getting back home in the mornings. And thus another handful of hot, listless days passed, during which I was pretty damn successful forgetting all about Durrel Decath.

  Late in the week, I ran an errand for Rat that took me right past Nob Circle, to a cheesemonger’s he liked that just happened to be across the street from Charicaux. I halted on the corner, watching the weird guards patrolling the Decath grounds like horseflies. Not my concern; I did not care a whit what those nobs were up to. But before I moved on, the broad arched gateway swung wide, and a handful of riders clattered up the street and into Charicaux. One was Lord Ragn, and the others —

  Marau’s balls. Lord Ragn’s companions were a tapestry of Gerse elite, nobs or gentry all, from the looks of them. I spotted at least one jeweled chain of office around one velvet collar — a member of the Ruling Council. But the one who stole my breath away was tall, rigid-backed, dressed all in green. I didn’t recognize anything but her robes. The woman was a Confessor, one of the Inquisition’s master torturers.

  What was Lord Ragn doing with company like that?

  I wasn’t stupid enough to hang around trying to find out.

  On my way back to Bargewater, I was so preoccupied that I didn’t notice the Greenmen trailing alongside me until it was too late to move out of their way. I turned a corner, a nightstick blocked my path, and a slow, entitled voice drawled out, “Papers?”

  Pox. My gut curled up inside me. I looked up to see Raffin Taradyce and a thickset partner looming over me. There was no friendly recognition in Raffin’s face this time.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said, nicking a little strength from the irritation that had fueled my walk here.

  “Is that how you speak to the Goddess’s servants?”

  I bit back a tart reply; the other guy had a mean look in his eye, like he arrested people just for the fun of it. Still staring at Raffin, trying to figure this out, I dipped my hand into my bodice and withdrew a packet of folded-up papers, which I held past him, toward his partner’s waiting hand. Apparently my brother’s hands-off order had expired. I tried not to show fear or impatience as Raffin and the nasty-looking thug in green pawed their way through my single most valuable possession. The rattle of market traffic filled the languid air behind us, and the street smelled of horse dung, stale beer, and old cabbage in the low afternoon light.