Cities and Thrones

by Carrie Patel

  Jane’s heart sank as it occurred to her that she did not have the appropriately massive key that was surely required to pass this epically proportioned portal. But she gave it a push anyway, and it swung open more easily than she would have imagined.

  The apartment on the other side was more luxurious than she would have expected for a man like the chancellor – thick-woven rugs scattered around the floor protected the feet from the pitiless depredations of travertine. A silk-upholstered sofa was fortified with tasseled cushions and throw pillows. The incandescent lights around the room were diffused to an inoffensive glow by shields of frosted glass.

  And yet, as Jane looked around, it became more obvious where Chancellor O’Brien had actually nested, fashioning a little haven of utility from the fluff of luxury – he’d thrown the drifts of blankets from the canopied bed and swept away all but one battered pillow. The nightstand had been denuded of all but a pitcher and tumbler, seemingly fugitive bric-a-brac crowded onto the mantel above the fireplace. The desk against the opposite wall was piled and stacked with papers, any frippery abandoned to other, less useful surfaces.

  Jane slid the tea tray to a spare corner of the desk and began sorting through the papers atop it. She didn’t know yet exactly what she needed – some hint or artifact of the plot the city leaders were working through – but she hoped that evidence would be obvious and copious enough to make her task quick and easy.

  Unfortunately, the intelligence at hand didn’t offer much – at least, not much that Jane could discern. She came across receipts and bills, inventories of items as mundane as rice and lumber, and notes transcribed in an infuriatingly obscure shorthand. If there was a story to be told in these tedious details, it would take more time than she had to piece it together.

  She shuffled through the desk drawers with waning hope, thanking whatever meticulous craftsman had so carefully oiled the slides and padded the panels. She found blank sheets of paper, spare ink pots, a letter-opener shaped like a dagger, and the infamous bottle of gin, but nothing useful. Even a man like the chancellor wasn’t likely to leave something truly important in the open.

  She’d need to look elsewhere for the blueprint of whatever plan he’d coauthored.

  Then, a soft pop sounded from outside the door. Or Jane thought one had. She froze, hovering near the tea tray and listening with all the still focus of a doe in the woods.

  After five long, uneventful seconds passed, she returned her attention to the room. She needed to work fast.

  The chancellor’s relentless colonization of the room made Jane’s job considerably easier, and her eyes quickly fell on a dilapidated old trunk that sat like a tumor on the pale travertine. It must have been something the chancellor had brought with him. Surfaced with mottled, rust-colored leather and reinforced with metal bands, it looked like the kind of thing the Qadi’s people would long since have discarded.

  Jane tugged at the lid, hoping for the same kind of luck she’d had with the door. It didn’t budge, didn’t even give her a stubborn click to acknowledge her efforts. It was solidly locked, and the numerous scratches and scuffs around the keyhole corroborated Jane’s suspicion that she’d need something more.

  Straightening her back, she scanned the rest of the room, her eyes passing over the crowded shelves, bare nightstand, and even the closet stuffed with robes for all seasons and occasions. The key could be in any of these locations (or none of them), but without knowing more about the chancellor’s habits, they all seemed equally improbable.

  On a hunch, she padded over to the bed and checked under the pillow. Nothing. She lifted the corner of the floor mat. Still nothing.

  She should have known, of course. The chancellor would keep something like this on his person, almost certainly.

  She was just rising to her feet when she heard a heavy plodding outside the door. Growing nearer and louder. There was no mistaking it now, and there was no time to flee.

  So, she rushed back to the desk, the luxurious carpets swallowing the sound of her footsteps. She stopped in front of the tea tray, turning her back to the door just as it sighed open.

  Jane felt a minute swoosh of incoming air and a hard stare of disapproval on the back of her neck. The pressure and the temperature in the apartment rose precipitously.

  “Just what are you doing in here?” Even without turning, she recognized the chancellor’s voice from the brief meeting an hour or so ago.

  “Tea, sayidh.” At the last moment, she kept herself from saying “sir.” She began pouring a glass. She hoped it lent credence to her story, and more than that, it allowed her to keep her back turned to him a little longer.

  He growled. “I didn’t order any tea.”

  “I can take it if you wish,” she said. It was as good an excuse as any to leave.

  “Leave it.” He gave another feral grumble, as if this pointless exchange had somehow been forced on him. “Just empty the waste bins while you’re here.”

  “Of course, sayidh.” Jane picked up a wastebasket at her feet, noticing a few crumpled balls of paper within. Something useful, perhaps? Out of the corner of her eye, the chancellor was shrugging out of his jacket and aligning himself with the coat rack by the door. Jane turned from him and into the bathroom, dumping a few cotton swabs and wadded tissues from the little trashcan there into the wastebasket from the desk.

  By the time she turned back to the main room, he was seated at his desk, his back to her.

  She forced a deep, slow breath. Almost free. All she had to do was make it to the door.

  Jane swallowed and pressed on. The walk to the door seemed to stretch out, like an ever-lengthening hall from a nightmare, but she imagined the colorful carpets underfoot as an offering of flowers at a parade. She bore the wastebasket aloft in front of her like the head of a fallen foe.

  The door, and the sanctuary beyond, was only three paces away when the chancellor coughed and sputtered behind her.

  “What exactly is the meaning of this?”

  Jane turned slowly, holding the wastebasket between them as if it might ward off his attention. But he wasn’t even looking at her – he was glaring at a half-empty tea glass between a curled thumb and forefinger. And he seemed to address it when he spoke:

  “How many times have I told you people to serve mine black? This is like drinking honey straight.” Another noise of animal disgust issued from his throat. “Hand-holding and coddling. It’s as if you people think no one can be bothered to lift a spoon on their own.”

  “I’ll... take it away, sayidh,” she said.

  His gaze snapped to her. “And bring me more. Prepared properly,” said the man who, moments ago, had not even wanted tea.

  “Of course.” She edged toward him. He was still staring, more or less, at her, but he seemed to see nothing through his veil of rage. She took the tray as carefully as she’d take a food dish from a rabid dog. Balancing it in one hand and the wastebasket in the other, she slipped out the door while the chancellor directed his burning attention to the matters on his desk.

  The wadded papers rattled around in the bottom of the basket as she padded down the steps. Her fear of the chancellor above – or another prowling attendant below – was just barely greater than her anticipation. The other attendant was still polishing the floor when she finally made her way back to the courtyard. Jane kept her head down as she retreated to the safety of the service corridor.

  However, the corridor scarcely felt safer than the main hall. Attendants bustled to and fro – just as one person cleared the short branch where Jane waited, a new set of footsteps would approach from the other end. And even though the gazes of the passing men and women tended to remain politely pointed at nothing, Jane knew better than to take that for a lack of attention.

  The bigger question, she realized as she continued back to the kitchen, was whether she should even risk going back to the chancellor’s office. If he recognized her, it was all over.

  Then again, if she didn’t p
lacate Lady Lachesse, she might not be any better off. Maybe the old woman was full of bluff and bluster. But Fredrick didn’t seem to think so, and Jane would rather endure another finite ordeal than the worry of wondering how and whether Lady Lachesse was going to bring the hammer down on her.

  Besides, there was still Roman to think about. Roman and the rest of Recoletta.

  She picked up her pace. She’d already made her decision. Now, she was just going through the motions of explaining why to herself.

  And as for the risks, well. She’d likely overestimated the man. In the few minutes they’d shared the room, he’d only looked at her once, and even then, it had been with the unseeing stare of a man who’d turned his focus inward.

  She almost laughed. There was such power in anonymity, in subtlety, and men like Chancellor O’Brien had no idea.

  Besides, sudden flight bore its own risks, too. Suppose the chancellor, spurred to a fit of petty malice (which Jane wouldn’t put past him), decided to punish this serving girl who’d abandoned both his tea and his wastebasket. If the right questions were posed to the right people and word got around that Amina had given directions to his office to a nonexistent Recolettan woman named “Lucy” who’d been fumbling around the laundry room, it would be a question of when, not if, suspicion fell on her. There weren’t many (perhaps any) other Recolettans working at the Majlis.

  A rush of aromatic steam heralded the entrance to the kitchens, prying her pores open one by one. Cooks and attendants rushed about, shouting orders and questions over the clanging of pans and the shouts of other orders and questions. Jane found a capable-looking woman wielding a ladle and a calm sense of authority.

  “I need a pot of tea, no sugar,” Jane said. “For the chancellor.”

  The woman’s eyes widened in solemn understanding. She pointed to a bare section of countertop. “Leave the tray there. You’ll have another ready in three minutes.” She glanced at the wastebasket in Jane’s other hand. “Trash is around the corner.”

  Jane shouted her thanks, but the cook had already turned her focus back to the kitchen. Jane headed back to the hall to find the garbage room the other woman had mentioned.

  It was a quiet little nook of a room sectioned off by a thin curtain. A long, dark chute led off to some unknown depth. For now, the room was empty enough for Jane to risk pulling the crumpled papers out of the basket.

  The first was a short list of numbers, squiggling currency symbols, and a few mundane items: pomade, bath powder, and, of course, gin.

  Jane dropped the receipt back into the basket.

  The other page was harder to decipher.

  The numbers were arranged in neatly delineated columns. She kept trying to make sense of the senselessly abbreviated headings when finally her eyes fell on the note scribbled below the figures:

  Total forces mustered. Can move with three days’ notice.

  – Sergeant Mussola

  Time slowed to a halt as she read and reread the page, searching for another interpretation. Troops in Recoletta. War in the streets again. Something ached in her, as dull and distant as a phantom limb.

  Quick, shuffling feet on the other side of the curtain reminded her of where she was and what she still had to do. She shoved the balled-up paper into one of the robe’s voluminous pockets and dumped everything else into the chute.

  The tea tray was waiting as promised, a little trickle of steam rising from the pot, when Jane returned to the kitchen. The matriarch with the ladle gave her a quick nod, and Jane took the tray, retracing the path back to the chancellor’s apartment.

  When she nudged the thick door open, the chancellor was still at his desk, scribbling away, his lips pressed tightly together.

  Across the room, the battered old trunk, the same one she’d tried to open not ten minutes ago, lay open.

  She must have stopped, because the chancellor looked up at her. “You may leave it on the desk,” he said, his tone almost conciliatory, as if he’d decided that his myriad frustrations might not actually be her fault. She circled around to his side of the desk, keeping her eyes on the page before him and her pace just slow enough that he’d mistake her deliberation for respect.

  She set the tray on a corner that had been left bare for her purposes.

  But when she saw what he was writing, she brought her hand down on the corner of the tray, upending the pot all over the chancellor and his desk.

  Even then, as a wave of dark liquid crested over white pages, as the chancellor’s head turned to face hers, the movement as slow and unnatural as an owl’s, she wasn’t sure if it was something she’d done on purpose or if her hands had spasmed in fear or out of some manic sense of fatalism. But by the time Chancellor O’Brien turned his burning gaze on her, the reasons no longer mattered.

  She remembered her bare face and couldn’t believe now that she’d taken so much risk just to possibly peek at a few notes. She turned her face down but felt the heat of his stare on her forehead like the noonday sun.

  The first bead of sweat slid down her temple.

  “Make yourself useful, girl,” he said.

  It seemed to take forever for his words to congeal into practical meaning in her ears. When they did, she bobbed her head once and turned toward the bathroom for a towel.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  She froze, turned back, and looked at the mess. Her eyes darted from side to side, but of course there was nothing. That was the point. Not daring to lift her head, she knelt and sopped up the spilled tea with the front of her robe. She felt the chancellor’s gaze on her the whole time.

  And yet, stronger than the fear watering her blood was her anger at this humiliation. She would make this count.

  So when she’d dabbed the last of the mess from the travertine, she rose, careful to tuck her head behind her shoulder in a gesture that the chancellor would surely mistake for shame.

  Let him.

  While he reveled in her cowed posture – back hunched, shoulders drawn together, hands slowly mopping at the pool of tea – she scanned his desk and found exactly what she was looking for.

  The ink was already blurring and bleeding, but the chancellor’s response to Sergeant Mussola was still clear enough:

  Ready transport in eight days. Madina will send one of its own trains for your purposes.

  She was dimly aware of her hand, clutching a wad of her black robe, repeatedly buffing the same spot as she read, reread, and memorized the line.

  The chancellor’s snort reminded Jane that she wasn’t alone.

  “I’ve always wondered what you people wear under those robes,” he said. “Figures.”

  She looked down at herself to see the green of her regular robes showing beneath her knees. She dropped the wad of soiled robe, and the heavy fabric fell like a stage curtain. But the chancellor laughed in a way that told her he’d clearly mistaken the reason for her discomfort.

  But only because he didn’t recognize her face. She needed to get out before he did.

  “Hurry up,” he growled.

  Her toe bumped against the tea tray, and on a sudden impulse, she lifted it and swept the stained and sodden papers into it. Let the chancellor tell her otherwise.

  A noise of protest rattled and died in his throat.

  She grabbed the corner of her black robe and gave the surface of the desk a final sweep. “A thousand pardons, sayidh,” she said, thickening her consonants after the local fashion.

  “I don’t care how many, just get out of here.”

  She bobbed her head and hurried out, the tray rattling with the faint shaking of her hand.

  The passage down the stairs, the radiant rotunda with its assiduous attendant, the dim passage back to the kitchen – everything passed in a blur, her ears ringing. She set the tray on a bare patch of counter, taking the dripping papers before anyone could say a word.

  She ducked back into the alcove with the garbage chute where her breathing, loud and ragged, echoed in the tin
y space. She fought for control, squeezing her eyes shut and counting each rapid lungful.

  Finally, she opened her eyes again and peeled the soiled pages from one another. Receipts, news reports, and hopelessly obscure communiqués. The only page that meant anything was the one she’d already seen, the response to Mussola. She salvaged the wadded troop numbers from her pocket, tore off the black robe, balled the other soggy pages into it, and dumped the whole mess down the chute.

  Thus unburdened, she at last brought her breathing under control.

  Chapter Nine

  The Upper Hand

  Jane sat on the pilfered messages a full three days before meeting with Lady Lachesse again. It felt good in a way she hadn’t expected. Like polishing a wealthier woman’s pearls and pretending, just for a while, that they’re yours.

  Nevertheless, another surprise had been waiting for her when she returned home from her extraordinary day.

  Fredrick had retreated into one of the low, pillow-crowded seats, which was usual, and he held a glass of wine, which was not.

  Rather, it had not been since their escape from Recoletta – that was one change for the better for him since settling in Madina.

  When Jane walked in the door, he waved at her as if they were on opposite sides of a street. Her heart crumbled in her chest. Barely an inch sloshed around as he beckoned her. Knowing Freddie, that only meant he’d filled his glass to the brim and drunk the rest already.

  “Come,” he said, slapping the pillow next to him. “Sit, sit.” That’s when she saw the other glass, resting on the floor near her seat. By some miracle, he hadn’t knocked it over yet – it was as full as his must have been minutes ago.

  She sat next to him, slow and steady, lest a sudden error on her part send him, her, the wine, and his thankfully high spirits careening in some unknown direction.