by Kirby Crow
“For children,” Kon stated, as if explaining simple matters to a dullard. “Is it not plain? For some of us to have children of our own. It's not a requirement, but they're women and we are men and it happens. Women are different from us. They have a need to care for living creatures, which is a rare blessing.”
Kon's gray eyes were measuring and careful, and Marion was struck by the stark clarity of it all.
“Tris,” Marion breathed. “He really is your son.”
Kon nodded.
“Paladin save us.” Marion sank into a chair. “How? Where do they hide?”
Kon gave him a look that was almost kind. “In plain sight, my dear. Behind sacred masks and robes of office.”
Marion’s thoughts seemed to swim around like a school of fish in his brain. He needed badly to sleep. The Villa Merlo. The fat fathers. Masked to hide their features, cloaked in robes so large and heavy that no shape was possible to discern. “Who else knows these things?”
“Some chosen few. Those I've deemed trustworthy. The Cwen don't hate us,” Kon said, ice and venom warring in his tone. “They simply have a low opinion of us. To send a woman here is to bring her down to the level of a man, undeserving of rights. Beyond the Lion Sea, men must do as we're told, go where we're commanded, work at whatever position is determined for us. We can't hold any office of power over a woman, even as the overseer of a farm or mill. We're chattel to them, hampered by volumes of consecrated laws governing our behavior, our dress, even our speech. The male body is a thing of shame. We're not allowed to express desire unless we're approached first. A woman claiming a man is perfectly permissible, but a man claiming a woman is punishable by death. We can be imprisoned for nakedness, or for fighting, drinking, dueling, swearing... a thousand laws. Even fucking each other is a crime.”
The bitterness of Kon’s words was more than anger. It’s personal, Marion realized. He had known Kon for twenty years, but he had never known him at all.
“You lied,” he said in frank awe. “All these years, you lied. You didn't come here as a child, didn't grow up as a Malakhan. Where are you from?”
Kon sighed. “Not Cwen, god forbid. Some place much further away. I came to Malachite when I was fifteen; old enough to know exactly what I was running from. The rest I will keep to myself.”
He reached out to close the window, and Marion saw his hand move in an odd gesture as he grasped the latch. A signal.
Marion turned just as three of Kon’s house guards reached the doors of the library. They were carrying ornamental pikes, but there was nothing decorative about the sharp metal tips on the poles. He glared at Kon accusingly.
“Family,” he spat.
“Calm yourself.” Kon secured the window. “I had to make sure you were alone.” Kon raised an eyebrow at his guard captain, who nodded. “It appears you are. Where is Jean Rivard?”
Jean had fled the coach, then. He always did have a nose for danger. “Why?”
“I only want to know what he knows about the Archer. I believe there are things he hasn’t told you.”
“Don’t try to pin this on Jean.” Marion curled his hands into fists. He wanted to punch something badly. Dominique was lucky he hadn't returned with the guards. “I won’t let you hurt him.”
Kon waved the guards back to their posts. The door closed. “I'm not a murderer, Marion. It would take a great deal more than my personal dislike to condemn Jean of anything.”
“Dislike,” Marion said flatly. “You didn't always hate him. When you needed us, you trusted him. I remember.”
“I was fond of him in those days, but I never trusted him,” Kon mused. He paced slowly and tapped his fingers together, as if trying to make a decision. He stopped and faced Marion. “The concept you have of Jean is willful ignorance on your part. I think if you ever faced up to the truth, you'd have to admit that he lost the man he really wanted long ago.”
Kon won't harm me, Jean had said with a smile. Bright truth broke into his mind, like flinging open a dark curtain on the dawn. Kon wouldn’t harm Jean, because Kon felt he owed him.
“All those soft, smooth boys Jean glories in seducing, as if he's compensating for some lack,” Kon said. “He had a beardless boy of his own, once. Before Mika came to me, did you ever notice Jean having a particular affection for him? Did he ever treat him as anything more than a casual bedmate?”
No, he hadn’t. And Jean had always been so resentful of Kon's attention, Kon's gold in Marion's purse, Kon's voice in the Consolari recommending Marion for advancement, guiding his career, one promotion after the other, until finally he was highwarden, only a few steps down the ladder from magestros.
All these years, Marion had believed the malice between Kon and Jean had started with Mika.
His smile was so brittle it felt like it was slicing his face. “Did you fuck Jean before seducing Mika, or after?”
“Does that really matter?”
“Damn right it does,” he growled. “Tell me the truth. Right now.”
Kon nodded. “Before,” he answered. “Jean claimed to love me, but I could not return his affection and I wouldn’t lie to him about it. If it's any comfort, it was a very short affair, and I've always felt very badly about Jean. He did not take the rejection well.” The sharp lines of Kon's face relaxed. “I’m sorry. If you want to hit me, I will not call for the guards.”
Marion shook his head, thinking of the hundred times he had found Jean in bed with a man, or several men. None of those times had ever felt like a betrayal. Not like this. “You had an affair with Jean, and then you rejected him and stole his new lover, too. Jesu’s blood, that’s cold. Even for you.”
“I stole nothing. Jean was a grown man. So was Mika. The only thing I regret is hiding the truth from you.”
You have lies of your own, Marion thought. You never told Jean about Aureo. You never will.
He shoved his hurt aside. “It doesn’t matter,” he said grimly. “We're not boys to fight over who gets the man and who fucked who. It’s done. Forget it.”
Kon paused for a moment, then nodded curtly. “Very well. We will not speak of it again.”
“All I care about now is getting my exiles back.”
“Rescuing those children will cost lives, perhaps even your own.”
“I don’t care.” In that moment, he didn’t.
“Tris does. That matters to me. Leave the boys to their fate,” Kon urged. His voice turned formal. “An outright assault is the only guarantee of success. If the highwarden will step aside and relinquish his authority in this matter, then the office of magestros will be free to cleanse the Zanzare, once and for all.”
Civil war, Kon meant. Wanted or not, planned or not, this was an opportunity to purge the Island of Thieves. Blood would turn the canals red, half the island would burn, and the endless struggle between the Citta Alta and the men who refused to live under its rule would be over. All he had to do was let it happen.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“You’ve sacrificed innocents to save yourself before. Why not now?”
Marion thought of the Reed Gate, and a part of him screamed in agony as the stench of smoke grew heavy in the room. He bit the inside of his mouth to break the spell. Ghosts, he thought. Ashes.
“Tris,” he said simply.
Kon smiled faintly, but he had his answer. “Ah yes. How could you ever face Tris again, knowing that this time you had a chance to save the innocents, and did not? Perhaps you really are in love with my son, Marion. I hope so.” The cold mask of the magestros slid back into place. “I’ll send for a meal. In the meantime, I suggest that you wash and sleep. Have your wardens ready at dawn. Dominique will go with you and lend his soldati to the search.”
“Not the guardiers?”
“The carcelero has other duties,” Kon said shortly.
Marion huffed a short laugh. Typical of Paris to want to keep his hands clean of this, as well as his pretty clothes. “Dominique wants to stick a sword
in my back.”
“Mika will do what's required of him. I trust him.”
At least someone does. Marion wanted to argue more, but he could see that Kon was immovable.
He worried that he’d chosen the wrong path. Kon was correct: getting the exiles back would not be bloodless. It might mean his death. I’ve never even told Tris I love him, he thought. He realized that he desperately did not want to lose Tris. They complemented each other, each providing what the other keenly lacked, but it was more than that. Maybe Kon felt the same way when he was with Dominique, though Marion would have felt more simpatico with a shark.
And yet, he was more worried about the exiles than the danger. He thought also of the girl's doll hands, the fear in her eyes. His first instinct had been to protect her, which confused him terribly. He had been taught that women were more powerful than men. They were foreign, unknowable creatures who ruled the world. Men ruled in Malachite only by sufferance, and because it benefited the Cwen. The Cwen exile he had seen was small, weak, frightened.
He was a warden. Protecting the weak was what a warden did.
Kon watched his struggle with a sad look. “Acceptance is a hard lesson. The world is what it is, highwarden. Neither you nor I made it, but we must survive in it.” He put his hands on Marion’s shoulder. “When I was a young warden, I defied the old magestros and sent a woman back to Cwen. She was older than your donna, with brown hair that fell to the small of her back. She begged me every day to let her be with her children. Eventually, I granted her wish and put her on a trade barge bound for the northernmost ports of Cwen. The trade ships stopped for ten months after that, and when Aequora came, the first boat was empty. They did send a box, though.” Kon’s eyes were black stone, his upper lip curling with wrath. “It containied the head of a woman with long brown hair. There were no trade ships for two years. That's how the Cwen send a warning.”
Kon patted Marion’s cheek like a beloved son. “We are islands in the sea, a hundred miles from any shore. Without Cwen ships, we starve. We depend on their trade for everything, even citizens. I can never jeopardize that again for the sake of one innocent, or even a thousand.”
“You won’t have to. I'll get her back,” Marion swore. Ashes and ghosts. “I’ll get them all back.”
***
The Arsenale swarmed with wardens and armed men wearing the red armbands of the soldati. The iron gates of the harbor—never opened unless a ship was beyond, waiting to dock, or inside and waiting to depart—were parted to the sea.
Marion had slept fitfully and woke before dawn. He’d traveled in the dark with Dominique to the Arsenale, only to discover the harbor emptied of ships and a single vessel anchored.
“That’s not a Malakhan ship,” Marion said.
Dominique clucked his tongue. He had outfitted himself in fighting gear: leather armor over his shirt and a pair of wickedly curved knives at his waist. “Very observant. Kiss for luck?”
Marion made a rude gesture and watched Dominique strut up the ship’s gangway like he owned the sea. Dominique's sense of humor was bizarre at best. Marion was beginning to wonder if Kon kept the man around because his presence confused his enemies. Surely not. Kon's motives were never that simple.
There were thirty cannon on the port side alone. Marion stood at the bottom of the gangway and stared up at the lines of the ship, scanning the gun deck, the foremast and mainmast. White sails blotted out the stars. He was no mariner, but it seemed to him that the tall vessel did not have the bulk to be a cargo ship, nor the deep hull for the open sea. It was all gun, sail, and menace. He followed Dominique onto the deck.
Dominique saw his face and nodded. “Yes, she’ll wallow like a sow in a high wave, but she wasn’t built for the sea. She could, if it came to that, but this lady will stay close to shore. This is the Drake, the first of our purchases to arrive from the Solari shipyards.”
From Solari, not Cwen. Cwen would never sell cannons so well-made to Malakhans, nor a fighting ship capable of navigating the shallow lagoons of Malachite with speed. With enough power and shot, the Drake could repel an armored Cwen galleon at distance. And Dominique had made it sound like more ships were coming.
“She’s a warship,” Marion said. “Just who are you going to make war upon?”
“Who do you think?”
Marion did not recognize the stocky, bearded mariner at the wheel. Dominique introduced him as Eliot.
“Captain of the Drake,” Dominique added.
Marion greeted Eliot politely, then took Dominique’s arm and steered him to the gunwale, out of the captain’s hearing. “What’s happening?”
Dominique’s face was grim. “Kon gave the order to attack the Fortezza.”
“Cazzo,” Marion swore. “He said I would make that decision.”
“He just wanted to keep you in the castello long enough for the Drake to be readied.”
That smoke-eyed son of a whore. “And you knew all the time, didn’t you? You bastard. Those are men on that island, not animals. You can’t attack them without warning, without giving them a chance to choose.”
“They’ve had plenty of chances, and they keep choosing the wrong damned side. They’re helping the graycloaks now. They don’t want order or better food or clean streets, they just want the Teschio back. They’re never going to be good citizens, Marion. They’re never going to be anything more than a cancer on the city, and it’s long past time we cut them out.”
“But Jean’s down there!”
Dominique frowned. “How do you know?”
“Because Jean knows Kon.” Marion saw that Dominique did not like to be reminded of that. “Jean would want to warn them of what’s coming, to give them a choice to return our people and avoid blood.”
“That’s treason.”
“It’s loyalty,” Marion growled. He grabbed the collar of Dominique’s shirt. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? Jean took you in right off the fucking boat, gave you a home, protected you. And you threw him away for Kon.”
Dominique smiled. “Jean didn’t own me, Marion. He used me as much as I used him. I figure we were square, at the end.” He glanced down at Marion’s hand on him. “You, however... the only reason you’re not mending nets in some Solari shithole is because I told Kon you were in love with Tris. I lied, Marion. Again.”
Marion snorted. “You’re still lying.”
“Kon thought you’d betrayed him, had your aim set on becoming magestros by fucking your way up the ladder. It’s what a crossbones would do, right? I promised him he was mistaken. I pleaded. I cried.” Dominique’s smile turned cold. “I played Kon better than you ever played Tris. You would have been impressed.”
Marion shoved him away, suddenly ashamed. “I never deceived Tris. I never lied to him. And I didn’t ask for your damned help!”
Dominique relaxed, and Marion caught the glint of metal near his wrist. Of course Dominique would have a blade ready. He probably slept with the damn things.
“I didn’t do it for you,” Dominique said.
Marion sneered. “You’re just a murderer with a soft spot, then? How sweet.”
Dominique gave him a boyish smile that made him look ten years younger. “I kill when I have to. I don’t cry into my beer about it, true, but I don’t enjoy it. I just do what needs to be done.”
“Killer-boy,” Marion replied waspishly.
“If you say so.” Dominique shrugged, unaffected, and Marion realized he was not going to reach him with insults.
Marion turned to look at the fifty wardens gathered at the bottom of the gangway, awaiting their orders. There were thrice as many soldati behind them, armed with glittering pikes and falchions.
“I remember your first night in the Zanzare,” Marion said. “You hadn’t eaten in days. Jean brought you to the tavern for a meal, and he broke a man’s jaw for grabbing your ass. Our world was so new to you. You were scared.” He put his hand on Dominique’s shoulder and looked at him steadi
ly. “I don’t know what caused you to be this hard, but it didn’t happen to you here. All that was before you became a Malakhan. And now I can’t believe that even you would long for the kind of blood and pain that will come of this. If the exiles can be found before you reach the Fortezza, will you call off your attack?”
Dominique seemed to struggle with the proposal, and Marion seized the opportunity.
“We weren’t all bad, even the crossbones,” he said quietly. “Remember how young you were when you came to us? Did we let any harm come to you, from anyone? Even if it was only for a little while, you were one of us.”
Dominique sighed heavily. “If our people are returned, I’d consider that an act of good faith. If they do that, I won’t fire on the island. But I still have orders to take the fort, and I can’t promise they’ll let me have it without a fight.”
If Marion was lucky and swift, he could end this without a shot fired. “Are you going to stop me?”
“I should. Tris would want me to.”
“He won’t blame you if I die.”
“No.” Dominique’s blue eyes were hard. “But he’ll be hurt all the same. Are you really willing to risk so much for Jean?”
“He’d do it for me.”
“Is it always going to be this way?” Dominique demanded. “Tris comes last with you, after Jean and your badge and the city and everything else. He deserves more than that. He deserves a man who can appreciate him.”
“I appreciate him. I feel—”
“Your feelings are useless if you keep them to yourself.” Dominique shook his head. “For years, I’ve watched my son twist himself into knots trying to make Kon proud of him. I’m not going to watch him do it with you. He loves you so damned much, but if you don’t love him back by now, you never will. Maybe it would be better for all of us if you did get yourself killed.”
Holding Marion’s gaze, Dominique deliberately turned his back. “You took your men and slipped away when I wasn’t looking. If you manage to live, that’s the story you’ll tell. Pray I never hear anything different.”
TRIS
