(The Happenstance cards for Poacher include Bailiffs, Laird Dogs, and Banditos—any of which might conceivably enter into the Green Dragon—though probably not War Parties or Fire Dragons, which are also to be found in the card game but not, fortunately, very often in Ragnor Bella.)
I took a sip of the new persiflage, nearly gagging at yet more alcohol. This was well past my limit. My father would be distressed. Mr. Dart as well, very like.
Then again, my father would be distressed that I was betting by the cards, and not the man. I felt sloshy and slow, and not at all up to dealing with a Tarvenmoor duellist at the Green Dragon for almost-certainly-nefarious purposes probably involving brigandage.
I blinked up to see the stranger gazing steadily at me. He was smiling, and not looking at his cards, and I thought, with cold abruptness: this is not about the game.
By the Emperor, I thought a moment later, when he laid a ring down on the table, and said: “Challengers first. I bet this golden ring.”
By the Emperor, this is another secret society, and I’ve somehow given the passcode. Bloody hell.
“Uh … the Summer Queen,” I said, putting a wheatear and a bee down where the coins glinted gold and silver next to the ring.
He’d set the ring with its signet facing me. It bore the same five-petalled flower picked out in tiny garnets as the ring the Honourable Rag had worn, and which the pie had contained, and which meant … what?
He nodded acceptance of my ante, and drew a Happenstance and two Fish, laying down one of his first draws of the latter.
I realized that the Honourable Rag could easily have lost the ring again in a game of chance earlier that day, or indeed the evening before—Mr. Dart said he seemed to have become a most hardened gambler in his time at Tara, which everyone was turning a blind eye towards because, well, the Ragnor holdings were vast and the Honourable Rag well able to take care of himself in a fight with the kinds of thugs one was likely to get in Ragnor Bella.
My Tarvenmoor gentleman was a cut far above the usual sort, however, and I wouldn’t have liked to see even Violet sparring seriously with him. Though admittedly Violet sometimes had much the same cool appraising look in her eyes as the duellist did looking at me. Which was disconcerting in quite another way.
I played a few hands with my Happenstance cards alone, shuffling out Dog for first A Fish Eagle, which was no good, except it was a Red Card and therefore required me to pick up two Happenstances to replace it, and which led me to A Boat and A Second Friend with Urgent Needs, and just as I was debating how best to go about the necessary transmigration of cards—for one was only to draw from the same pile two hands in a row—there was a sudden sharp tinkle of a small silver bell hung over the bar.
I sneezed immediately and strongly, and dropped my cards so I could cover my face rather than spray across the table at Red Bess and the duellist.
When I recovered myself (and pulled out my third handkerchief, which was a bit stuck), I saw that all signs of illegal activity had disappeared, including the cards, the persiflage, and the
stranger.
The ring still sat next to my two coins. I eyed it warily, weighing whether it was due to some sense of honour—he had undoubtedly seen my perfect Net and the plausible Tall Tale encapsulated in Boat, Book, Friend with Lunch, and Second Friend with Urgent Needs, which readily beat most hands unless he had the Wise Salmon, Holy Quest, and Grail cards—or some deeper, more sinister, reasoning.
I was still weighing my odds in this rather less straightforward gamble when the front door burst open and the Ragnor Constabulary burst in, truncheons waving and whistles shrilling, and looking for blood.
Some other long-ago lesson made me grab book, ring, and coins, drop to the floor, and while the Constabulary were busy with the bartender and five ruffians who hadn’t been quick enough to get all the accoutrements of Hixhen off the table before them, crawled behind the tables and through the back door.
I stood up in the deserted kitchen to brush myself off. The floor of the Green Dragon was not the most salubrious of surfaces; the second Mrs. Buchance wouldn’t have tolerated it in her disused outdoor privy, let alone inside an eating establishment. Not that people usually came to the Green Dragon for its quality of food.
A tray of stuffed rolls that had not been on the bill of fare lay cooling on the side, and I hesitated approximately five seconds before laying some coppers next to the tray and taking three. It was hard to juggle the ring and the hot pastries at the same time, so I slipped the ring on, my earlier concerns forgotten. It was a bit loose but didn’t seem entirely likely to fall off. I didn’t sneeze when I waved it experimentally in my face, so whatever it signified, it presumably wasn’t a deleterious enchantment.
Yes, I know.
***
I went outside to find that everyone appeared to have slunk off into the barn—or at least that’s where I could hear low voices—but I thought that surely the Constabulary would think to look there—they were stupid, but surely not that stupid—so I turned up my collar and turned my steps to the road home. Rather to my surprise, it was getting dark. Well, hours pass quickly when drinking and reading, even without friends to chat with. I wondered what had happened to Violet—and what everyone else was up to.
On their way to dinner at the Talgarths’, I recalled triumphantly, though only briefly because despite the pastries I was still drunk enough to feel maudlin and sad at the thought that all my friends would be enjoying a Fifth Imperial Decadent style dinner party—possibly complete with flute-girls and acrobats—while I was walking down the road in the dark, and the rain, alone, towards a crossroads no doubt under the power of the Dark Kings and the cultists.
I know.
When I got to the crossroads, I spent a few moment regarding the the waystone. After a few minutes I realized I was leaning up against the stone, no doubt doing something awful to Dominus Gleason’s careful spells, not to mention the discourtesy to the dead laid there.
I wouldn’t like someone leaning up against the waystone under which my father was buried.
I was drunk, I realized. I did not want the unquiet dead rising. But I still stood there, looking at the cords binding the broken stone and shivering. Then I heard hooves and the creak of wheels.
I lowered my head as the vehicles approached, and devoutly hoped no one recognized me.
Two carriages went past without slowing except to make the turn: the Woodhills’ and one I didn’t recognize. The third, solidly black except for a stylized white moon painted on the coat of arms, pulled to a creaking halt. Naturally, if against my better judgment, I looked up.
Someone inside leaned out and looked at me. I regarded him thoughtfully. It wasn’t quite dark, and we were out of the woods; dull shadowless light illuminated everything. We could see each other fairly well. Or I could see that he was a plump man wearing black robes and a black hood and a well-polished black mask.
He spoke in a low and hoarse voice. “A young man waiting at a crossroads at sunset on the third evening of the Moon’s transit through the House of the Dragon. Dear me. I hadn’t thought they taught anything worth learning in Ragnor Bella.”
“I’ve been away,” I replied, as suavely as I could.
There was a kind of smile in the voice. “Well indeed. The pay’s the standard: your heart’s desire.”
I paused a few heartbeats, but he seemed entirely serious; well, he would. “And the work?”
His turn to pause, and then he chuckled low and sinister. “Easy as serving a pie.”
And that was how I ended up at the Talgarths’ that evening.
Chapter Twenty-Five
To my surprise, the Black Priest’s nefarious plan quite simply did consist of having me serve pie to the diners. Or rather, doctoring dessert with a special liquid, which he gave to me in a phial, and serving it to the diners.
He stared at me intensely the whole while he was explaining his plan, which took the entirety of the twenty-minute carriage r
ide from the crossroads to the Talgarths’. I stared back in a half-pretended semi-stupor, wondering why exactly he was rambling so very much in his explanations.
Nevertheless, I nodded at what seemed appropriate times, and wondered just how likely it would have been for someone else to have been there, ready and willing to do something obviously both illegal and dangerous for such a vaguely-worded and dreamy future reward.
(Stargazing was the word that came to mind, in the Encylopedicon’s terminology.)
The Black Priest didn’t seem to suspect anything, which worried me. It also worried me how I was to avoid being recognized once inside the Talgarths’.
We pulled off the main highway onto the equally smooth
carriageway leading to the Talgarths’ house. The Black Priest continued to stare at me, and I continued to pretend I was more drunk than I was. The golden ring felt cool and heavy on my finger. The phial was transparent black glass, heavy for its size, with some sort of iridescent liquid sloshing heavily around inside it.
“Mrs. Figgery is expecting you,” he said, finishing up the fifth iteration of his instructions as we clunked over the drawbridge, turned onto gravel and crunched to a halt. “Go to the back door and tell her your name is Potts, and she’ll set you right.”
I nodded and set the phial into my pocket, and got out of the carriage. His stare felt tangible on the back of my neck. I first straightened, then slouched, thinking that I was supposed to be some middle-class layabout, and that it would be better not to carry myself and speak like a young man of consequence—which was what I was trained to be, if not in practice. My hair felt straggly and coming out of its queue; I’d lost my hat at the Green Dragon. Well, I probably had a slightly better chance of recovering it tomorrow from the tavern than I would from the Talgarths’.
It was sifting rain. I had perhaps a hundred yards to walk between where the carriage had stopped, in the shadows of a group of pines, and the house. The Talgarths had spared no expense—even the back was brightly illuminated with mage lights set in coloured glass, showing off the fanciful turrets and domes of the pile.
The Grange had been built by Justice Talgarth’s father in the heyday of Emperor Eritanyr’s reign, which was called in architectural history the Fifth Imperial Decadent Period. Northwestern Oriolese interpretations of this style were called Bastard Decadent, a fact which had always amused me tremendously.
White-washed brick (the usual building material in south Fiellan), copper tiles like a snakeskin roof, round windows and moon doors of all sizes and inconvenient locations, and the multi-coloured werelights showing off the carved plaster ornaments. And that was just the outside.
It was perhaps the rain, and that the wind was at my back, but I got to the door without having to sneeze more than once. I took a deep breath of the cool night air before knocking, and resolved that whatever else I did that night, not doctoring the desert was something I could count on.
Not sneezing was a fainter hope, but I gripped my third handkerchief tightly and resolved to do my level best.
Not being in the same room with people I knew—that was probably the best plan, too.
Otherwise, I was going to wing it—and hope that Mr. Dart was in fact there and I could speak to him out of notice of anyone else.
I nodded to myself, That seemed a reasonable plan: don’t sneeze, don’t draw attention, don’t try to mingle, don’t poison or enchant or drug anyone, and try to talk to Mr. Dart alone and unnoticed.
I knocked on the door, and while I waited—why is it that one rarely stares at the door? It seems rude, somehow; I always end up looking around aimlessly—I noticed the carriage disappearing not back down the drive, but around the corner of the house to the front where the guests would be entering.
Hell, I thought, and the door opened.
***
Before letting me in, Mrs. Figgery the housekeeper called Mr. Benson the majordomo, a tall fat man who rubbed his fingers with glee when he saw me—and the ring I wasn’t quite able to keep hidden by my handkerchief. I was not sneezing near as much as I expected, but could feel the ticklish need to do so bubbling in the back of my nose.
“We’ve lost half a dozen footmen to that cursed woman’s experiments,” he said to the housekeeper.
“He’ll look right enough,” she said coolly; “at least she’s replacing them.”
“True,” he said, then barked at me: “Name?”
I jumped, nearly said my own, managed to squeak out, “Mr. Potts.”
He rolled his eyes. “Aping your betters, are you? Of course it is. Name, boy.”
I tried not to show an obvious hesitation, though my mind was whirling. I hoped it was confusion but feared I wasn’t yet sober. Jemis was too uncommon, the only other person I’d ever met who was called it was Mr. Ned the fisherman. My father had found it funny—my father—“Jakory.”
“Jack it is,” Mr. Benson said, and Mrs. Figgery said, “The dressing bell has gone, Mr. Benson.”
“Damn!” he said, and grabbed my arm.
I had to scurry to keep up, as he led me down a series of back corridors to a hidden staircase, then hastily up five flights without a pause. I was breathing hard by the time we got to the top; despite his bulk, Mr. Benson appeared unmoved.
“In here,” he said, thrusting me into a room full of steam and coppers and laughing men in various states of undress. “This is Jack,” he boomed into the noise. “Get him ready, he’s taking Hink’s place.”
“What, another one?” someone said out of the steam. I waved my hand in front of my face. The air was heavy with some type of perfume that appeared a mixture of lilac and lavender. I sneezed a couple of times, but lightly, and relaxed at the thought that we’d been wrong about the magic used indoors. It seemed the Talgarths kept all the display for the public areas.
“Aye,” Mr. Benson said, and pushed me forward until I stumbled against a scalding-hot copper. I tripped over myself trying to back away, and landed with a thump on the floor.
Someone laughed and two others grabbed hold of my boots and pulled, and before I knew it I was as naked as the others and being thoroughly bathed in as fine a bath chamber as any I’d ever seen. It matched even the one at Morrowlea reserved for high-ranking guests, which I’d drawn on cleaning detail one winter’s day, and gotten into trouble for using first. Another one of Lark’s bright ideas that had landed me in the soup.
I couldn’t see any of the other servants very clearly through the steam. My remaining inebriation didn’t seem to be a huge problem, or indeed an isolated incident—there were flasks of something cool being passed around, though I did retain enough of a head to feign taking my turn instead of actually drinking. My clothes had disappeared, which didn’t bother me until someone said, “Oho, Jack’s brought his own drink!”
I pulled myself out of the bath, accepted a towel someone thrust at me, and said in the general direction of the voice, “It’s uh, not for drinking.”
“What’s the good of it, then? Fancy bottle.”
“Uh, it’s a …” I paused, then something I’d read once floated to mind, and I added: “It helps your innards go, if you must know.”
The room roared with laughter, and I heard a clink as if a stopper was being replaced, and breathed a sigh of relief. Someone—the speaker or another, I had no idea—emerged out of the steam, wrapped in a towel, and passed me the phial with a suggestive leer.
The glass clinked against my ring (which I’d managed not to lose, though the soapy bath had nearly removed it half a dozen times) and he dropped his gaze down and then up, and then he grinned, draped his arm over my shoulders, and led me out of the bathroom and into a dressing room that felt like an icebox in comparison.
The room was nearly empty, but clothes were laid out on various stands, with accessories in shallow baskets lined up along a table, shoes below and ribbons above.
I looked at my companion. He had jet-black hair, bright blue eyes, and pale freckled skin, like a Kilromby i
slander. He was thinner and less muscular than I, but had the reach on me, and besides, I had no idea where in the house I was, what exactly I was meant to be doing, how serious any of this was, or what.
“Is there a Miss Carlin here?” I asked at random, and he tipped back his head and laughed. “Good one, man, good one! Miss Carlin. Hoo boy.” He reached out to a smaller table next to a rack of pink satin I hoped we were not putting on, and drank a good long slug of a silver flask before passing it to me with a wink.
“Just to loosen up any nerves before the night’s work.”
“Is it hard work?” I temporized, accepting the flask but not
lifting it to my mouth.
He grinned again. He was definitely foxed or worse, his pupils dilated wide. “Jack, my lad, they’re old-fashioned and we’re the servants. Hard work.” He wiped his mouth and winked. “Hard, but hardly work—especially not once they get to dessert.”
***
During the empire, only the very wealthiest and most important had actual human servants; everyone else made do with magic. (The poorest, of course, who couldn’t afford even magic, had therefore to make do with their own labour and tedium.)
I remembered, as a boy, how my father’s house had all the little luxuries everyone took for granted: the hot and cold running water, the privies, the lights, the cold boxes (that did not need ice to stay cold), the way that dust and grime simply wafted away in the light breeze that was really, well, whatever it was that the Imperial wizards bound to be the cleaners.
But a dinner party, where one was trying to impress one’s guests? Oh, that’s when the money was spent. Servants, as many as possible—as well-trained as possible, too, of course, but the exceptionally well-trained were very expensive and in very great demand indeed, so people made do with as many as well-dressed as possible. Like the resplendent furniture and dishes, the servants were to be seen and admired—though also like the furniture and cutlery, not to be considered as anything other than useful objects in the house. Individuality was not encouraged.
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