“You’re just doing this because you want to see the Prophecy finally disproved,” I said a little too bitterly. “You just want to finally be vindicated.”
“A little,” she admitted. “Part of me would have no greater pleasure than to see Shaula utterly gobsmacked for the first time in her life. But that’s not the whole reason. Alcoro’s in trouble. You’re in trouble. And this is the one thing I have to offer that might potentially help you. I love you. You’re still my bug.”
The childhood name hit like a shock, and dammit, the tears practically leaped from my eyes. Why did this always have to be my body’s first reaction? I wiped at them with both palms. I kept wiping even after I’d rubbed them away, grinding the heels of my hands into my eyes until my vision went red. I held them there and let out a deep, thick breath that was half-groan.
“There’s no possible way,” I finally said. I lowered my hands slowly to the wood, resting them palm-down in a mirror of hers. She watched me with a slightly sad look, one edged with barely concealed disappointment.
I blew out the last of my breath. “Except maybe one.”
The corner of her lips twitched in a smile.
Chapter 3
I lay on my stomach, peering into the dark overhang and clutching a stitch in my side. The climb up to the crawl space under the laundry had been steep and perilous. The snowstorm two nights ago had buried the upper canyon in deep snow, and the trail, already poorly defined as it was, was completely invisible. I’d made the best guesses I could, but it had still taken me twice as long as it would normally have to climb to this little-known place. I glanced skyward, where the golden-white walls of Stairs-to-the-Stars soared into the late afternoon sky. This task still seemed no less impossible than it had yesterday morning in my mother’s little kitchen, but our plans had been laid, and the only options were to go forward or waste the opportunity. I drew in a sharp breath of winter air and ducked to look back under the overhang.
One side effect of being an entomologist is that you quickly get used to crawling around places any sane person would avoid. When I first arrived at Stairs-to-the-Stars as a wayward child, my aunt wasn’t sure what to do with me. It was Ancha, the palace exterminator, who remembered working with my mother and offered to continue my basic science lessons in exchange for an extra pair of hands in her work. For years I picked through trash middens to gather cockroaches for pesticide tests and slithered along storm drains to break up mosquito pools. Even when I moved from pest control into my advanced studies, frequenting undesirable places was still a necessity. I remembered sweating in the sun until my long sleeves and high collars were soaked while I prized cicada exoskeletons from their summer perches. I recalled moving hurriedly through mountain lion country at night in search of stag beetles, banging a stick against my canteen to keep the cats away. I never minded the work—I could often tune out the most unpleasant surroundings, and even found some exhilarating, like the lion country. Admittedly, that was after I returned home in one piece.
This time, though, rather than me hunting the specimens, the specimens were finding me, no matter how hard I tried to avoid them.
Here’s the thing about tarantulas. They’re docile. They don’t like to bite humans, and even if they do, nobody’s ever died because of it. I’ve encountered tarantulas as much as the next Alcoran who spends any time at all moving among the crevasses of the canyon. It’s not uncommon for each house in the hobs to have a resident tarantula or two. Nobody thinks to get rid of them—they keep down pests.
However, here in the space beneath the laundry, there were hundreds of them.
They scuttled away from me, surrounding me with a constant clicking and tippling of little claws on the grit. I eased forward on my stomach, crawling arm over arm through the narrow space. The laundry was situated above a natural crevice under the foundation, which had presented a problem for generations of pest controllers. Because it was over a crevice, it wasn’t shaped out of straw and adobe like the rest of the palace. The floor and pillars were all wood.
And where there’s wood, there are termites.
I paused, brushing silk webbing from my lips. One panicked tarantula the size of my palm was scuttling backward, lifting its forelegs in a defensive display.
“Calm down,” I muttered, spitting webbing off my tongue. “I said calm down. I’ll be out of here as soon as I can find the grate. Hush—don’t you stridulate at me.” The hissing spider twitched backwards, waving its claws menacingly.
I slid forward some more, navigating through the space by the faint light filtering through the crevice opening behind me. I’d already passed three termite traps laid at the base of the wooden pillars that held up the floor above. These baits had always needed routine checking, and Ancha had often sent me crawling in rather than trying to squeeze in herself. It was hardly my favorite task—she knew I despised small spaces and never made me go farther than the fourth pillar. But because of my numerous trips to this place, I knew something that I’d never have thought would serve a useful purpose.
“There must be a way in,” my mother had said the day before, trimming a quill, clearly preparing to begin a long and winding list of all the ways one might sneak into the palace. “Something nobody’s thought about . . . we’re always told all the sewers have grates, but if one of them were loose . . .”
“There’s the grate in the crawl space under the laundry,” I said.
She’d looked up at me, her quill poised above her page.
I’d fidgeted. “So they can replace the termite baits.”
She’d stared a moment longer, smiled, and lowered her nib to her page. “All right. Step two.”
But it wasn’t quite that simple. The grate existed because nobody was expected to do what I was going to try to do—crawl to the farthest pillar. The dirt beneath me sloped up to meet the floor above, and by the time it reached the final pillar, there was less than a foot of headspace. Ancha had sawn the hole in the floor to allow a person to reach down and replace the baits from above, so I wasn’t even sure how I was going to bend my body to fit through the opening—it was barely shoulder-width, and there’d be no room to sit up until I could wiggle the grate free.
And that wasn’t even contemplating what came next. I couldn’t help but feel that the plan my mother and I had thrown together was a patchwork quilt with too many loose threads. What if I’d misjudged the timing of the laundry schedules? What if someone recognized me? What if I couldn’t get into our rooms before Celeno’s physician gave him his evening dose?
What if I couldn’t get him out?
I dragged myself forward again and promptly cracked my forehead on a joist. I paused, rubbing the spot. Two coin-sized tarantulas skittered away. Mother had had me describe the space as well as I could remember, making a sketch from my memories.
“There’s headspace for maybe fifteen feet,” I’d said over the scratching of her charcoal. “Then it narrows past the fourth pillar. Between it and the fifth, the space drops to maybe eleven, twelve inches.”
She’d nodded. “Rattlesnakes?”
“I’ve never seen them inside. But there are tarantulas.”
“Oh good. You’ll feel right at home.”
I did not feel right at home, but it wasn’t the spiders’ fault. It was because now the space barely cleared the top of my head, even before I reached the fourth pillar. I shivered. I hadn’t factored in how much I had grown since making this crawl as a skinny, knobbly girl. I could handle the shoulder-height crawl to the first few termite baits well enough, where there was still daylight and moving air, but being pressed in on all sides, squeezed by the darkness . . . I fought down a wave of dread and lowered my chin so it almost scraped the ground. I pulled forward again. Another tarantula hissed at me.
“I’ll cut you open,” I threatened in its direction. “I’ve picked apart invertebrates tougher than you.”
I reached the fourth pillar and the bait trap laid at its base. This was the point where
everyone else would turn around, weaving up and then back down through the palace to access the final one. Before I lost all wiggle room, I took a breath and turned over onto my back. Wood dust and grit rained down on my face, and I squeezed my eyes shut. Now came the real test. If the space got too narrow, I’d have to slither all the way back out and come up with a way to make contact with my mother, who was probably lurking near the public livery, waiting to acquire mules and meet me at the Stone Tree, the ancient petrified trunk on the outskirts of Callais. Of course, the longer we waited, the more likely it would be that the royal guards would pick up my trail—not out to the coast like we’d hoped they’d believe, but right here under their noses.
I felt little claws in my braid and made a hasty swipe—a tarantula tangled up in my hair was where I drew the line. That was a surefire way to get a bite to the face or worse, their little barbed hairs stuck somewhere vulnerable, like my eyes or lips. Hurriedly I pulled myself forward again, using the joists above me for leverage.
The space narrowed further. It squeezed. When I slid under the next joist, a button on my coveralls popped free, and I consciously tried to will away my flaring panic. I breathed shallowly, both to keep my chest from expanding too much, and to avoid sucking in a stream of dirt filtering through the cracks above. Another pull, and then one more. Blindly I reached behind my head for the next grip, and then I felt it—my fingertips poked through the metal grate.
Oh, it was going to be tight. The round lip of the sunken termite bait underneath me ground into my back as I forced my body under the grate. My cheek squished against the lattice, and hurriedly I put my palms against the metal and heaved. The grate only rattled—it was heavier than I remembered. Biting back my dread, I wiggled for a better position, my elbows braced against the ground, and pushed again. With a stubborn groan, it slid an inch or so, one corner shifting up to rest on the wooden floor. I spit hair and dirt from my lips and pushed again, feeling the satisfactory slide as the grate lifted free and slid across the floor.
A tarantula hissed again close by, but I couldn’t tell where it was. Regardless, I had no space to fend it off now. I wiggled until I could lift my head and shoulders through the narrow opening, and then thrust my arms one at a time until they were splayed out on the laundry floor. Like a butterfly splitting a chrysalis—only a lot dirtier and less graceful—I heaved myself through the hole, first my torso, then my waist, and finally my legs.
I crawled onto the floor, sweaty and panting. I shook my head to release the cloud of dust in my hair, and down thumped a renegade tarantula. It backed up and waggled its claws, clearly furious that I’d snagged it in my braid. I ignored it, straightening and peering across the gloomy laundry room. It was warm and steamy, sharing the space with the furnace to give ready access to hot water. Wide tubs sat in a line, and drying lines ran from one end of the room to the other. Hurriedly I stripped off the grimy coveralls I was wearing, revealing the nearest approximation to a palace laundress’ attire as I could remember.
My skin prickled despite the heat, thanks to the unfamiliar feeling of air against my bare forearms and neck. The laundresses who worked in these sweltering rooms spent their days stirring vats of simmering water and lye. Their uniform was the only one I could think of that would have short sleeves in the winter months. And it was the lack of sleeves or a high collar that would be my best disguise. Nobody in the palace knew about my wine stain. Nobody except Celeno, and Shaula, and my physician. I turned my arms, setting the inky purple skin against my sandy brown, and my stomach twisted. Folk were going to stare. But I hoped they’d stare at my mark, not my face.
I wiped at my hair again, nudging my mother’s simple star band as I did so. It was the only real option—I certainly couldn’t wear my golden band with the three faceted diamonds, and wearing nothing on my head would stand out more than my wine stain. I nudged it one last time, drawing some fortitude from having it on my head, and then bundled up the coveralls.
The hitchhiking tarantula was still sizing me up, its forelegs in the air. On an impulse, I dropped the coveralls over her and scooped her up. She let out a muffled hiss.
“You come along with me—I might need you.” Carefully I replaced the grate and tried to brush away the tracks of dirt I’d left. Hopefully the palace termite baits would be on nobody’s mind.
I sought out a laundry tub of rinse water that didn’t have lye in it and cleaned the grime from my face and neck. I threaded out my braid and shook as much of the dust from my hair as I could before tying it back again, remembering to pull out a few wisps in imitation of spending long hours in the steam. A spotty pane of glass hung on the wall near the staircase, and I peered hard at my reflection. Pulling out my mother’s field illustration kit, I used some of the ink to redden my cheeks and spot them with dark freckles. I was reminded a bit of Queen Mona, though she managed to wear hers with elegance and artistry, while mine looked more like a speckled grouse’s egg. Still, they added to my disguise, along with the work-worn cheeks. At this point, there was nothing I could do but hope it would suffice.
I packed away the kit and piled my coveralls into an empty basket, trying not to squash the tarantula. I arranged a clean bundle of cloth over it all, hoisted it onto my hip, and wound through the tubs to the laundry door, pausing to listen up the stairwell. No sign or sound of anyone, which was fortunate for me—other palace attendants might pass off an unfamiliar face, but the laundresses themselves would know I wasn’t one of them. My heart in my throat, I slipped through and padded up the stairs.
So I’d made it past step one of our plan. I was inside the palace. And now that I was, the next step loomed before, a terrifying obstacle. Our plan hinged dramatically on one factor—I needed to be sure Celeno’s physician and attendants assumed he had taken his usual evening tincture of poppy and herbs . . . without him actually taking it. The only time he was left in relative peace was when he had slipped into his listless, drugged sleep—otherwise he was under almost constant watch. If I tried to spirit him away before he took it, someone would find out within minutes. If I couldn’t get to him in time, I’d never be able to wake him up. But there was a problem.
Several problems, actually, each of them vying for the spotlight as the worst, most terrifying problem of all.
Celeno’s poppy tincture was locked in his physician’s case, each dose set into labeled vials. The case, in turn, was locked in the physician’s office. The office I thought I could get into, if I could convince a palace guard I was bringing clean bandages, but the bag . . . there were two keys to open the case. One was on a chain around the physician’s neck.
The other was in Shaula’s apartment.
I’d never had the courage to make an argument over why Shaula had the only spare key to the drugs constantly administered in Celeno’s daily regimen. Others passed it off as being the ultimate safeguard—there certainly couldn’t be a spare key in our royal apartments, no matter how well hidden, lest Celeno uncover it and have access to the case. And for some reason it was deemed inappropriate for a councilor to keep it. And clearly I couldn’t have one—at least, it was clear to everyone else. So it resided with the Prelate.
I stood in the hallway, gnawing my lip. I’d already dismissed the idea of retrieving the key from around the physician’s neck. Rastaban knew me intimately—very intimately, as he also served as my physician, though I required less attention than Celeno. But he’d treated me for illnesses before and examined me to determine my reproductive health. He knew my face, and my wine stain, and the rest of my body as well. There was no way I could even get close to him, let alone remove and then replace a chain from his neck without him noticing.
That left Shaula’s apartment. The thought made my blood freeze, and I tightened my grip on the basket. Getting into her rooms would be much trickier, and much more dangerous. I hadn’t yet concocted a good reason for me to be there if I was found by a passerby, and if I was found by Shaula . . . my stomach clenched.
Now, I reminded myself. That’s why you have to go now. It was dinnertime. The Prelate would accompany Celeno to dinner, then guide his evening Devotion, then see to the administration of his poppy tincture, and only then retire to her rooms. It was now, or never.
I had only taken two steps down the hall when someone turned the corner up ahead of me—another servant, dressed in groundskeeping attire and heading in my direction.
I suddenly flushed with uncertainty. How did servants interact with each other? Did they nod? Smile? Ignore each other? Was there animosity between different vocations? I warred with my distant memories, trying to determine how I should react, forcing myself to keep moving forward. He got closer—I could make out the emblem on his jacket. In another heartbeat, he’d entered that awkward sphere that demanded interaction. Before I could make up my mind, he offered a short, perfunctory nod. With a mixture between a gasp and a gulp, I nodded back.
And then we’d passed each other. I exhaled.
Relax, I chastised myself. Acting like a frightened pika will only make you stand out more.
I tried to behave more nonchalantly with the next few people, and when I relaxed enough to summon the right kind of distant pleasantness, I finally noticed the furtive stares. Gazes slid from my face to my bare arm clutching the laundry basket. Some lingered; some flicked quickly away. This flustered my newfound courage, and at the next few encounters I hurried past with my head down.
I knew the steps to Shaula’s apartment well—they were off the Prism’s star courtyard, where Celeno and I used to do Devotion once a week. But I’d never actually been inside the apartment. I hadn’t seen her personal rooms since she was an acolyte, where she occupied one of the stark little cells on the adjoining hall with barely enough space for a cot and desk. There had been no space for me to share such a place, of course, so once I came into her care, I lived in another acolyte cell at the far end of the hall. The dramatic jump from that tiny space to the royal apartments had unnerved me for months after I’d married Celeno—I spent much of the time edging through our private halls, trying to take up as little space as possible.
Creatures of Light, Book 3 Page 5
