Oh gods, she thought, her momentary relief crashing down around her. She had done nothing to rate being taken before either of Karolje’s sons. They would not bother with anyone as lowly as her. Not even if they had traced her to the raid last night.
Unless they had found out who her father was.
ESVAR WAS NOT given to pacing. That was his brother’s habit. To fidget he used his hands, rubbing a coin between his fingers or toying with a stick of sealing wax. Most wealthy men wore their hair shoulder length, tied back with a cord, but he kept his short, in part so he would not be tempted to touch it.
He had a chessboard on his desk, and while he waited for Marek to return with the prisoner, he played with a pawn. The pieces were metal, shiny new steel for one side and dull black iron for the other. He preferred having the first move, strategizing instead of reacting, so he often played black to make it harder for himself. To learn caution. To watch.
The door opened, admitting Marek. As soon as Esvar heard that someone not of Nikovili’s household had been arrested, he sent Marek running to grab her away from the examiners. Ordinarily he would not concern himself with so routine a matter as the arrest of a merchant, but some of Nikovili’s associates were powerful, a few having been guests of the chancellor at Citadel occasions.
He put the pawn back in place before looking at the prisoner. She was close to his own age, dark haired, dark eyed. Her skin was olive, marred by a huge swollen and purple bruise on one cheek. Without the bruise, without the filth of captivity, she might have been pretty. A dirty bandage over the palm of one hand looked new, though it had been soiled by the cell. She was short and slender, but he saw the muscles on her bare arms and knew she was strong and probably fast. She lowered her head as soon as they made eye contact, but not soon enough for him to fail to observe the utter blankness on her face.
He knew what she saw: a tyrant’s son, a murderer, a man whose wealth and power could swallow her whole. She would consider herself lucky if she was only beaten. If he wanted her, he could have her with impunity.
He remained in his chair. This wouldn’t take long. He said to Marek, who was standing against the door with his arms folded, “Did she have belongings?”
“I ordered them brought to you, sir.”
“Make sure it happens. And have the examiner sent up too while you’re at it. Who was it, by the way?”
“Mityos Lukovian, sir.”
Damn and double damn. The man was one of the cruelest. It was unsurprising that he had claimed the Nikovili questioning; smuggling was a crime of property, not sedition, and technically within the chancellor’s jurisdiction. Despite being under the command of Doru, Lukovian was loyal to Goran, and if Nikovili said anything that implicated the chancellor, the examiner would cover it up. He had probably already sent a report of Esvar’s interference to Goran.
He waited until Marek had left to ask the woman, “Why were you at Nikovili’s house?”
She coughed, touching her throat. He saw ligature marks. Her voice was hoarse and emotionless, her words slightly accented of mid-country. “I had brought him a contract to sign, my lord.”
“Did he know you were coming?”
“He was told to expect someone to come with the papers, my lord. I don’t know if he knew when.” Careful, not about to assert anything that might be false. She had been trained to protect herself from power.
“Did you know him well?”
“My lord, I never met him before today.”
“Did you draw up the contract?”
That triggered a slight reaction, a jerk of the shoulders. Surprise or fear, he could not tell. She coughed again and said, “I was the courier, my lord.”
A disavowal of responsibility. Her clothing and accent suggested she was the child of a tradesman or crafter who had had money enough to keep a small home but not for leisure or books or travel.
“Do you know what he is accused of?”
She shook her head. Nikovili, like many other rich merchants, had tired of Karolje’s excessive taxes and turned to smuggling. The evidence was genuine, and enough to hang him. The Crown was jealous of its revenue. But even a smuggler had to conduct his business with old customers and partners, had to have honest income to maintain appearances. There was nothing unusual at all in Nikovili continuing to sign contracts.
“Smuggling,” Esvar said.
She looked up, face pale. The suddenness of the movement sent her into a fit of coughing. When she recovered, she said, “It was an ordinary contract, my lord. For Milayan glassware.” Her eyes were watering from the coughs.
Karolje’s tyranny had made fear a completely useless way to measure guilt. He thought she was exactly what she seemed to be, a person who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and was caught up in the arrest. An innocent.
He needed her. Needed her to go back into the city and recount an act of justice, needed her to say that Karolje’s son had been fair. One of the few sharp memories he had of his mother was her telling him that justice was a lever; a small amount could move something very large if the force was applied properly. If enough levers were in place when Karolje died, he and Tevin could get the city to move in the direction they wanted.
He resumed questioning. “Did he ask you to carry any messages to anyone? Take any papers for him?”
“No, my lord.” Another cough.
“Who did draw up the contract?”
She hesitated. “Radd Orescu, my lord. A lawyer.”
He had heard of Orescu, whose clients included a few minor nobles. The man was said to be completely honest.
He took a gamble. “Were you taught at the College?”
“Yes,” she said, barely audible. Why was that so frightening to admit?
Because with that and Radd’s name, it would not be hard to find out most of her secrets. She had some. Everyone did.
“What did the examiner do to you?” he asked.
It was the wrong question. She shrank away.
“I’m setting you free,” he said. “If I ask the examiner, he’ll lie. What did he use?”
Her hand went to her throat. A smear of ink darkened the back of one of her fingers. She wore no rings, and her nails were short and blunt. A practical woman. She said nothing. Her guard was still up.
He had no reason to get her to lower it. He pointed at a chair. “Sit down and wait until the captain returns with your things.” To one side of the desk was the report he had been reading when he was told of the arrest, and he slid it back in front of him. He had learned young how to focus on one thing to the exclusion of anything else, and he was accustomed to the presence of waiting men while he read or thought.
The two men captured last night had talked, but essentially said nothing. They had followed orders and described only a vague plan for some sort of an attack at the docks. All they could say about the archer was that she was a young woman called Finch. The description of her could have matched three out of every ten women in the city. The woman captured with them had died before she said anything. Esvar hoped she had died quickly. Nothing in the report explained how the archer had acquired arrows of the sort used by soldiers, not by hunters.
He folded the report in thirds and put it in a drawer. The woman across from him had her hands clasped on her lap and her head bent. She might have been praying. He doubted she was. Her stillness had a patient strength to it that was not supplication. She wasn’t expecting anyone to help her, not even the gods. He envied the calm.
Finally the door opened and Marek came back in. “Lukovian’s waiting outside, sir,” the captain said as he put a plain leather bag on Esvar’s desk.
Esvar acknowledged the words with a brief nod and opened the bag. A few coins, a paring knife, an empty water flask. Papers. He took them out. Identical copies of a contract, signed by Nikovili. None of the provisions were unusual. The woman had not lied.
He refastened the bag and held it out to Marek. “Release her,” he said. “There’s nothin
g here.”
“It’s after dark,” Marek said.
The Old City would be safe, but in the rest of Karegg she would be prey for criminals or the watch. A note from him would not save her from either.
“Have someone trustworthy take her home,” he said. “Or to a shrine if she doesn’t want to tell you where she lives. Send Lukovian in when you go out. I won’t need you anymore tonight.”
The woman took the bag from the captain and followed him out without a glance at Esvar. Esvar felt a twinge of emotion he was surprised to recognize as disappointment.
He had no time to think about it before Lukovian entered with as much defiance in his step as he probably thought he could get away with. On another night Esvar might have let it pass. Not tonight.
He stood and leaned forward, hands splayed hard on the desk. He needed Lukovian to feel the sting of the reprimand. “What the hell were you doing?”
“My orders were to question everyone, sir.”
“Everyone in the household. It was pure chance that she was there. Did anyone else in the house know her name?”
“Sir, she had been hiding from us somewhere in the house. Innocent people don’t hide.”
“We both know that’s not true. What do you mean, ‘had been hiding’? They caught her later?”
“I don’t know the details, sir,” Lukovian said stiffly.
“It’s your business to know the details before you start interrogating someone. If you don’t know who they are and what they were doing, you don’t know the right questions to ask. If you’re more interested in killing people than doing your job, I can send you off to join the border guard.”
Lukovian’s color rose. It could have been either anger or shame. “I wasn’t going to kill her, sir.”
“Don’t lie. I saw the marks on her neck. I heard her voice.” It was tempting to goad the man, to abuse him. That was the language Lukovian understood. “Sit down.”
“Sir?”
“In that chair. Now. Do you play chess?”
Lukovian sat as though he expected the chair to be pulled away beneath him. “No, sir,” he said. He was wondering what the trick was. Good.
Esvar slid the board closer to the examiner. “A pawn,” he said, demonstrating, “can move forward. Not backward, not sideways. One square at a time. It captures on the diagonal, like so. It’s not powerless, but it’s limited. The other pieces have more freedom. That makes them more dangerous.” He positioned a black pawn to capture another pawn and a black knight able to check the white king on one move.
“I can take this pawn easily,” he said. “Or I can let it go and threaten the king here. Which serves me better?”
“Threatening the king,” said Lukovian. He was still suspicious.
“Yes. Threatening the king.” He rearranged the pieces to a defensive posture. “And if I’m holding off an attack, I don’t care about the pawns when I need to defend against the more powerful pieces. I certainly don’t care about pieces that aren’t on the board. If that woman was in the game at all, it was as a pawn. You aren’t supposed to be putting all your time into the damn pawns, Lukovian. Let them go.”
“It didn’t hurt to question her. Sir.”
“Do you think Nikovili is the only rich man who has broken the law? What do you think happens if word gets around that visiting a man for ordinary business can get you killed? What happens if the next time it’s someone delivering a crate of wine? That’s how things start unraveling.”
“It wasn’t me who arrested her.”
The insolence tipped Esvar into sudden, violent fury. He had to pause to collect himself before he said, “That’s irrelevant. You’re experienced enough to know when there’s no information to get from a prisoner. You don’t get to kill them for your own fun.” The words were thin and sharp as a knife.
Lukovian said, “Yes, sir,” much more subdued. The message had hit home.
“Get out.”
The examiner almost knocked the chair over as he rose. He left hastily. It was the guard outside who shut the door.
Esvar wanted to pick his own chair up and hurl it at the window. Anger was his demon, always. He did what he had taught himself to do: grip the edge of the desk and stare at his hands. He imagined the blood moving through each capillary, returning to his heart like waves to the shore. The force of his hold made his wrists ache.
Slowly, slowly, his fury eased. He released his hands and shook them, loosened his shoulders. He knew that if he thought back on what had happened, he would surge into violence again. Best to go outside, where he could be alone to rage at the stars if that was what he needed. He didn’t want to hurt someone who didn’t deserve it.
* * *
The moon, a few days past the full, was bright. When he passed a lamp, his shadows fell at angles to each other. At the deserted exercise ground he paused. It was tempting to find a staff or a blunted sword and work out his anger. Without a sparring partner, it would be only fighting the air.
He avoided the barracks and took the path that led down the hill to the northern shore. The moon shone on the smooth grey stone, and he had no difficulty. He passed a guard post halfway down and noticed the familiar movement of a soldier moving forward to challenge and retreating as he recognized his lord. Someday, if Karolje ordered it, that recognition might mean Esvar’s death.
A mosquito whined at his ear. He slapped at it and quickened his pace. Honey locust trees sweetened the air. To his left was the wall surrounding the Citadel gardens; to his right, moonlit grass, kept short and free of scrub. If an enemy took the docks, it would not advance unseen. Nor was there cover for escape.
Closer to the water, the hill got steeper, and the path became a series of stairs separated by ten or fifteen yards of leveled ground. The lightless towers of the Citadel protruded above the slope of the hill and the trees. The building was nine hundred years old and from here seemed to have grown out of the rock. It was immense, terraced and graded and trussed, rooms opening onto a courtyard on one side and looking over a steep slope on the other. In the oldest portions of the building, where walls were stone, the windows would be open, letting out light and sound. In the steel and glass sections, the walls acted as mirrors. One could not tell who might be watching.
He stopped walking at the top of the last flight of steps. Moonlight lay feathered on the calm, dark water. No boats were docked. The guardhouse by the dock was square and boxy, the flag on top limp against the pole. Light shone out of the open doorway. He heard laughter.
Four guards were on duty. It was a prize posting, saved as a reward. If you were on guard at the dock, you didn’t have superior officers breathing on you, and the only work required was to check the cargo of the scheduled arrivals. There were men watching with spyglasses from Citadel towers who would be able to raise an alarm long before a suspect boat ever came close. The guards could sit around a table and gamble with dice or cards and not be caught in dereliction of duty.
They would be resentful if Esvar showed himself, authority intruding on their allotted freedom. He sat on the steps and tried to steady his breathing. He was much more agitated than he wanted to be. He should not have spoken to Lukovian. If things were going to unravel, let them.
A nighthawk swooped overhead. He flexed his hands. Westward, above the hills, a star brightened and went out. A meteor. There would be more over the next few nights; falling stars happened every year at this time. He wished he could be among the superstitious who thought the meteor shower presaged some great event. No gods had their hands in this world.
The water drew him. He forced himself to his feet and descended the steps, listening to the sound of his boots on the stone. A soldier came out of the guardhouse. Recognized, saluted, stepped back. Esvar acknowledged it and continued walking. This would get back to Karolje, the prince wandering alone when he should be doing his duty. Indulging in vices was understandable; seeking solitude was not.
He went past the dock to the narrow strip of
stony beach, where he stood and looked at the water. When he was younger he had swum in the lake, diving off the dock, not for pleasure but for training. In summer there was the flash of warmth breaking through the sunlit surface and then, quickly, the chill of the water. Close to shore, the water was murky with tiny particles of silt and algae. Standing chest deep, he couldn’t see his feet. Farther out was clearer and colder. Occasionally he would swim through a warm area where hot water from the underground springs rose upward.
He had almost died once in the winter, when ice fringed the shore and the chill water numbed his flesh at once. The dive was from a boat, not from the dock, or he would have hit the surface too hard to recover at all. He flailed his way back to shallow water, but when he tried to stand, his legs gave out and he fell forward. A soldier hauled him out, hacking and shivering, and wrapped him in a blanket and put him in front of the guardhouse fire. He was eleven.
The training had done what it was supposed to, toughening his body and inuring him to physical danger. And it left him feeling brittle, a blade of metal folded too often and too quickly cooled, sharp but breakable. Karolje had seen Tevin eluding his grasp by then, and he had tried to make a successor out of his younger son. If he had started two or three years earlier, he might have succeeded; but the king had been away too much in the south, fighting the Tazekhs, and some of the soldiers who remained in Karegg had treated Esvar with the sort of rough affection they might give to a stray dog. Women of the court took pity on him, the motherless boy. By the time the war was over, he had too many attachments to be twisted out of all compassion.
He bent down and felt among the stones for a flat one, which he skipped out onto the water. Seven bounces before it sank. His mother’s body was on the lake bed, he was sure of it. The soldiers had likely killed her at the dock, then weighted the body and dropped it over the side of a boat a mile at least from shore. That was what would happen to him or Tevin if they resisted the king past his limits. They would die alone, and their bodies would be swallowed by the lake waters, and fish would swim among their bones while some other man was king.
The Vanished Queen Page 6
