“Sit down,” Radd said. “Listen to me very carefully. I lived here when the last Tazekh war started and Piyr died. It feels much the same now. Things are about to break. Don’t ask questions, of me or of anyone else. Don’t go looking for old friends or start spending nights out. Go from here to home to here, and nowhere else except the places you absolutely need to. Don’t talk politics with anyone. Or history, or Citadel gossip.”
She nodded. It was good advice, and in other circumstances she would have taken it.
“They might come after me,” he said. “I was arrested in the last war. My wife was half-Tazekh. If you come and I’m not here, get the hell out. Go as far south as you can.”
“What if it wasn’t the Tazekhs? What if it was the resistance?”
His sigh was as expressive as an oration. He said, “Karolje’s going to tear this city apart looking for those arsonists. It doesn’t matter who set the fire, he needs someone to target and he’ll take anyone who crosses his path. It’s far better for you to err on the side of caution. Do you want to find out what other things king’s men are capable of besides that bruise on your face? Someday they are going to search you, and whatever you are carrying, even if it’s nothing, will be enough to put you to the question.”
She wished she could confide in him. “I’ll be careful,” she said.
Then she went into her windowless side room, lit the lamp, and started on routine tasks. There were letters to write, accounts to manage, papers to sort and file. The language of contract and bequest, dispute and appeal, demand and rejection, flowed from her pen with a comforting familiarity. The smell of fresh ink was stronger than the acrid scent of smoke.
As she dripped wax on the flap of an envelope, she remembered Sparrow flipping the coin. Every loss had to be borne by someone. If Karolje wasn’t crushed, the people of Karegg would be.
* * *
It was twilight by the time Anza and Sparrow arrived at a large mansion on the eastern edge of Citadel Island. The mansion was surrounded by a wall at least eight feet high with an ostentatious gate, which was flanked by a pair of tall, narrow boxwoods. A uniformed servant opened the gate for them. The house was pale stone, features indistinct in the dusk. Sculpted bushes loomed around it. Lights were on in all visible windows. Sparrow used the heavy knocker on the door, and they were promptly admitted by another uniformed servant. Standing in the large foyer, Anza heard voices upstairs.
“This way,” said Sparrow, leading her out of the foyer and into a wood-paneled drawing room where sat three men and two women. Anza froze in the doorframe. One woman was Irini, her chestnut hair gleaming.
They looked at each other in consternation. There was no animosity between them, but Anza didn’t like the thought of someone who knew that much about her being in the resistance. Irini probably felt the same way.
Sparrow said, “We have a new member. Harpy, come forward.”
Anza did, trying hard not to bite her lip. She felt about three inches tall. The last time she had been this nervous had been when she first walked onto the College grounds.
Sparrow introduced the others. Irini was called Moth. The men were Jasper, River, and Miloscz, the second woman Apple. Then she said to Anza, “Tell them what you’ve done.”
“I—” She cleared her throat and started over. “I killed three soldiers during a raid. I got away.”
Miloscz said, “Prove it.” He was dressed expensively, hair pulled back in a rich man’s tail. His manner said that he was used to power. She wondered why he used a real name.
“I can’t,” she said, her nervousness dropping away as she engaged. “But I will swear by anything you like.”
“Cocky, aren’t you.”
Sparrow said, “Are you challenging my decision, Miloscz?”
The silence lasted long enough to be uncomfortable. Then the man said, “No.”
“Good.” She looked at River. “She’s your student. Leave your bag here, Harpy. Go with him.”
River stood. He was in his middle thirties, tall and lean with reddish-brown hair tied back with a blue cord. A scatter of freckles across his nose and cheeks gave his face a mischievous charm. He shook her hand.
They left the room and descended a narrow staircase to a wine cellar. The air was cool. River reached up and moved his hand at the top of one of the racks. The rack swung open, revealing a closet bristling with weaponry. Swords, bows, a few pikes. Anza drew in breath. He took a quiver and bow from the closet and handed Anza the bow. It fit her well and was much lighter than the bow her father had given her. The wood was well carved and beautifully polished.
“This isn’t a hunting bow,” she said.
“It’s the same as is used to train the lords’ sons for war when they’re boys. The range is longer and the arrow faster. Get comfortable with it here before we go outside.”
“Shooting in the dark?”
“That’s when you’re most likely to be working,” he said.
The reality of what she was undertaking bore down on her. She spent ten or so minutes holding the bow at various angles from various positions, checking the tension of the string, nocking the blunt-head arrows. She practiced tossing it from hand to hand, slinging it over her back and shoulder, stringing and unstringing it.
“You know what you’re doing, I’ll grant you that,” said River after a while. “Come along.” They went back up and along a corridor. He removed the heavy bar from a door at the end and swung it open inward. Rivets on metal bands caught the light. It had gone full dark. The air drifting in was sweet with night blossoms and grass.
At the back of the house, a long lawn sloped gently downward. Garden beds and hedges were dark features to either side. A stone path split the lawn lengthwise, ending in a small round pavilion with a stand of trees behind it. The lake lay beyond, a sheet of black. Frogs croaked near the water. The only light came from the stars.
“There’s a statue in the center of the pavilion,” River said. “Can you make it out?”
“Yes,” Anza said. It was too dark and distant for her to tell whom it was a statue of, but the stone was light-colored, and she saw the head, the bent arm, the angle of the hips.
River handed her the quiver. She adjusted the strap and checked her reach. She had no hope of hitting the statue. River had to know that. It was not her ability to hit the statue that was being tested.
“There are ten arrows,” he said. “Shoot them as fast as you can without stopping between them. On my mark. Go.”
Her first two shots were clumsy, her third smoother. With the fourth she found her rhythm, and the last six arrows left the bow cleanly and forcefully.
“How are we going to find them?” she asked. River hadn’t brought a light.
“Not so fast. Your speed was good, but you drifted. Your shoulder turned in and your elbow out on those last two.” He put one hand on her shoulder and the other around her forearm. She tensed at the first touch, but relaxed herself as he adjusted her positioning. “Feel that?”
“Yes.” She did, an uncomfortable tension as her muscles aligned unfamiliarly. She remembered her father saying, Bring your shoulder back.
“Draw and release ten more times. Keep the elbow where it belongs.”
She obeyed. Twice her elbow moved outward and she corrected it.
“Now,” he said, “put the bow down, then take your stance and hold it while I get the arrows.”
It was easy at first. She watched him moving smoothly through the grass, bending now and then. He had three arrows in his hand when the strain started in her extended left arm. Then her right shoulder. She evened her breath. In, out. In, out. Her bent elbow was shaking. She tightened her leg muscles. Breathe. She imagined the air spreading beyond her lungs to the rest of her body, strengthening the tendons in her wrist, buoying up her arm.
An itch developed below her shoulder blades. This should not be so hard, damn it. All she was doing was standing still. Breathe. Her right shoulder twitched. Her jaw tightened with resolve, and
she forced herself to relax it.
Grass beneath her, and dirt, and below that rock. Rock would hold her up. The earth pulled relentlessly at her. Lifting a foot was like separating iron from magnet. When she fired an arrow, the same forces pulled at it. There was no escape, not even through speed. The arrow would strike anything in its way, but it could not win the war with earth.
She wanted to shake her head to clear her thoughts. Doggedly, she kept to her position and started counting with her breath, letting the numbers become meaningless words.
“Good,” said River from her left, and she started. Her arms trembled and fell. He continued, “You didn’t hold that as long as you think you did, though. You have to get stronger. I have the arrows. Your aim was decent, but your range needs work. Let’s try again.”
* * *
He let her quit when she could no longer close her fingers around the bow. Inside the house, bow and arrows put away, she saw that her fingertips were chafed and swollen. It was going to be miserable to use a pen tomorrow. Her arms seemed to weigh as much as she did.
A single lamp lit the unoccupied drawing room. Anza slumped into a chair. After a few breaths she leaned forward to unfasten her sandals. River opened a drawer beneath the window seat and tossed a blanket at her. “I suggest you lie on the floor,” he said. “If you fall asleep in that chair, you’re going to be stiff as hell come tomorrow, even if you are only about twenty.”
“I suppose you get a bed,” she said, trying to gather the fortitude to move out of the chair.
He grinned. “If you were a real soldier on campaign, you’d be on the bare ground with hard lumps under you every way you lay.”
She was abruptly quite awake. “What the hell do you mean, ‘real soldier’?”
His voice went icy. “What do you think I mean? Conscripted, worked to the bone, having watched your comrades get injured, even killed in training, your own body scarred, your superiors insulting you with every breath… You’re soft, girl, you always will be. Doesn’t matter how well you shoot, you’re never going to be able to endure a tenth of what a king’s man does.”
“I know it’s not a game!” Anza said. He ignored her and left the room.
She made an obscene gesture at him under the blanket and rearranged herself in the chair. She glowered at the lamp.
“He’s right,” said Sparrow from the doorway. “And quite wrong, too. There’s more to soldiering than brute force, which River knows perfectly well or I wouldn’t have him with me. We’re not going to get anywhere by hurling ourselves at the Citadel gates. That doesn’t mean you don’t need a great deal more training.”
Anza flushed. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Sparrow left the doorway and seated herself in a chair opposite Anza. She leaned forward, elbows on thighs, hands clasped together between her knees. She said, “My father fought in the Tazekh war. He died as the result of an utterly dishonorable decision Karolje made. Many other men died with him. I’m not going to risk everything I’ve worked for since by trusting any of it to a hotheaded girl who lacks discipline. Moth told me you were once her lover. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“She also said the two of you split because you wouldn’t settle into it. You thought she was boring.”
“That’s not—” She stopped. Her rapidly growing shame said that Sparrow was right. She and Irini had stopped being lovers after only three months because of dissatisfaction Anza was unable to articulate at the time. All she had said was that she didn’t think they were giving each other the happiness lovers deserved. She saw now, painfully, that as much as happiness she had wanted novelty.
“I suppose that’s true,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“Do you understand that there is nothing about what we are doing here that is exciting? We spend twenty hours planning something that takes five minutes but has to be done perfectly. With discipline, without spontaneity. There’s only room for improvisation if things go wrong. Pray that you never have to improvise. That’s what it means to be a real soldier, and it has nothing to do with how many people you’ve killed or what you want for yourself.”
“I see.”
“If you have any fantasies that I am going to slip you into the Citadel to put an arrow through the king’s heart, get rid of them now. That’s not how this is going to work. Clear?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Sparrow relaxed. “Now, River said you have a good eye. I can’t have you come here every day to practice, so on the days you don’t I want you to practice your stance. Make yourself stronger, quicker. You might have to get yourself over a wall or into a coal bin to escape.”
“Who are going to be my targets?”
“Karolje’s soldiers, for the most part. Occasionally we may need you to do something else in the way of causing a distraction. It won’t be for a while yet. We have to be sure you’re ready. Come back here the third evening from now. We’ll try to get you here every two or three days. Don’t come unless you’ve received a message confirming when to meet. If Miloscz—he owns the place—gets found out, we will have to scatter fast.”
“Why do we use his name, then?”
“No one in the resistance works with him except those of us here now. And it’s convenient to have one person who can present their real face to the world for tasks involving money. He’s too well known in the city to get away with a false identity. Ivanje was the same when he led us.”
The lamps, the furnishings, the carpet all spoke of old wealth. On a side table a porcelain vase held an arrangement of red and yellow hothouse tulips. The room the prince had talked to her in had been sparer than this.
“You said one of our weapons was money,” Anza said. “What is gained by destroying warehouses? Who gets hurt?”
“Men who are going to want money from the Crown as soon as their insurers deny the claims. Karolje won’t want to pay it. That will set off a round of squabbling. And in the meantime we look stronger.” Sparrow looked at the doorway and stood. “Come in, Moth. Teach her as many of the codes as she can remember, and the names.”
When she was gone, Irini plopped down cross-legged on the floor. She was thinner than Anza remembered her, her jawline pointed. Her eyes were still the blue-grey that Anza had fallen into years ago. She rested her shapely hands in her lap and said, “Well, here we are. Is it true Rumil threw you out?”
“I’m surprised anyone is gossiping about me. Or is it about Rumil?”
“I still know people from the College who wonder about you. It is mostly about Rumil, though. You could hardly expect people to be quiet given what’s happening to his father.”
“I suppose not,” Anza said. She did not want to admit Rumil had not confided in her. “Anyway, it’s true we aren’t living together. I didn’t want to stay on the conditions he offered. He thought my absences were because I was having an affair. With you, as it happens.”
“I trust you set him right?”
“I tried. He wasn’t paying attention. If you see him, you have my permission to slander me if he makes things difficult.”
“He would think I was angry because you had left me again,” said Irini.
Anza said, “He lacks imagination. Not in bed, in life. I stayed about six months too long. I’m ready to swear off all lovers for a while. I hope you aren’t having troubles.”
“Didn’t you know? Soldiers took Velyana. She’s Disappeared.” A hardness to her voice that was the covering for pain.
“What?” Anza said. “When did this happen?”
“Eight months ago. I came home one day and she was gone. The neighbors said she had been taken as a traitor. There was blood on the floor. That’s why I joined the resistance. The house of Kazdjan is an evil thing that ruins everything it touches, and we have been living under them for far too long.”
“Oh gods, Irini, I’m sorry.” Velyana was either dead or locked away in the king’s prison in the mountains, suffering. “Do you need he
lp with the business? Radd is very good at contracts.”
“It’s not the contracts, it’s the bribes. I have to pay the watch, and the docking fee collectors, and the wagon drivers. There’s a new tax on some of the things I use for the scented candles, and I pay twice, once in taxes to the Crown when I buy and once in bribes to the merchant I buy from to keep the ingredients in supply for me. That goes to the Crown too, I suppose. The sellers don’t seem to be as wealthy as they should be if they’re charging everyone this much. They have to find ways to make money too.”
That explained Nikovili’s smuggling. Anza wondered what Karolje did with the money. It was not being put toward the upkeep of the city, that was evident. Did the king use all his taxes for his army? Did he hide the money away like a miser so that he could dribble out royal largesse when he needed to? Or was it spent on pleasure, golden plates and the best musicians and bottles and bottles of Tashikian wine?
“At least I’m not Tazekh,” Irini added. “They have to pay a tax just for living in the city. It’s getting harder for any of them to have a business at all.”
“You would think they’d want to be part of the resistance,” Anza said.
“It’s much too dangerous. They wouldn’t trust us, and we wouldn’t trust them. Our fight isn’t theirs.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re his people. They’re outsiders. When we knock Karolje from the throne, they still will be.” Irini shifted her position. “I used to think I could never kill anyone. But if you gave me a knife and a chance at the king, I’d do it. Not just for Velyana’s sake. He’s rotted the entire country. Before I started at the College, my grandfather told me how they used to come into Karegg for a few days, him and my grandmother, and they would shop and go to the theater and pay for a pleasure ride on the lake, and that was how things were. They trusted the soldiers they saw. I can imagine it, the actors and the boat and the ridiculous hats my grandmother liked to wear, and I feel like that’s a dream we’ll never get back. So I would kill him for that too.”
The Vanished Queen Page 12
