by Chloe Cox
Avignon frowned at the imagined rebuke. He considered light espionage to be part of good service. “Of course, my Lord.”
“The vintner,” Cesare said. “The one with grand plans to poison the Duke’s Blend at the Finale Feast and kill us all. Find out who his banker is. Now.”
Cesare had leverage with the Ramora boy. He might as well use it for the good of the city. Then he could use it for his own pursuits.
CHAPTER 3
Lucia had never been so happy to see something so terrifying as when the oscario emerged at her side in the amphitheater. The silent man, his face concealed by the mask of hollow eyes and huge, claw-like teeth that signified his office, had offered her a shawl and cleared a path in front of her. He’d stayed at her elbow like a wraith the whole way home, and as she fiddled with the locks on the front door, she’d snuck a glance over her shoulder. The oscario had stood back, watching, until she was safely indoors.
Lucia had been profoundly grateful for the protection of a man who asked nothing in return. As much as her thoughts centered around Lord Cesare—and they had, continuously, since the moment she’d seen him—the Duke’s heir was a man who demanded everything, even without asking.
Lucia prayed she never saw him again, even though the thought of it made her eyes well up with tears. Which was ridiculous. She was not normally one of those silly women who took dramatic license when she found a spot on her favorite dress. She didn’t cry over nothing.
This didn’t feel like nothing.
And Paolo! What she was going to do about Paolo, she had no idea. The farther she’d gotten from the amphitheater, the more she’d felt the weight of a growing, oppressive guilt: Paolo really did represent her one rational, reasonable solution. The only way to keep her promise to her dead grandmother. The only hope that her father might keep his business. The only hope that her father might stay out of debtor’s prison. The only hope that she might have a decent meal.
He was her best chance for all that, and she’d slapped him. It didn’t matter that he had hurt her, that he had crossed the boundaries of human decency with no signs of stopping. She was old enough to know that none of those things mattered, not in the real world. People didn’t get what they deserved, they got what they got, and they had to make do.
I’ve doomed us all, she realized, and for the first time in the seven years since her grandmother had passed away, Lucia Lyselle cried.
It was like she’d been saving it up.
Her whole body rocked as she tried to quell her sobbing. The last thing she wanted to do was wake her father. Still, tears poured down her cheeks, and she covered her mouth when she breathed to keep from crying out.
It was a miracle she heard the whistling, lilting and light. It was Remy’s distinctive tune, an impish question that threaded through the humid air, and never failed to make her smile. It lured Lucia away from her terrible visions of the future and transported her back to the present; there was someone to take care of in the here and now. That, she knew how to do. She wiped her eyes, wrapped herself in a cloak, and opened the door.
“What do you want?” she said with a playful scowl. It was their game to pretend that Remy was an unwanted pest. He was more comfortable accepting food or clothing if he felt like he’d earned it through annoyance or manipulative skill, like it was all just a game, and his ribs wouldn’t be visible if he took off his ratty shirt. Lucia would never convince him to renounce his crown as king of the street and live indoors, but she still tried.
Remy looked up, smiling broadly, until he saw her face. His scowl was real.
“Why are you crying?” he demanded.
“Mind your manners,” she said automatically, and smoothed the cowlick that always sprung up from his unruly head of hair. At least today he didn’t have any dirt on his face. “Are you hungry?”
Warily, he nodded. She could tell he was deeply unsettled. Another thing to feel guilty about.
Worse, she had only been able to scrape up some stale biscuits and a little boiled bacon. Their pantry was a sad, barren sight. She’d have to have another talk with Mastini, the grocer, and pretend that she didn’t notice where his gaze lingered, or where he tried to put his hands.
“Let’s have a late dinner,” she said, smiling as she turned around. Remy wasn’t having it. He grabbed a biscuit and gave her his best glare.
“Tell me why you were crying.”
Lucia sighed, and sat down at the rough wooden kitchen table. She obviously was not going to evade this forever.
“There is a boy,” she started, “a man, I suppose, whom I need to marry. Only tonight, I humiliated him.”
“And now you think he won’t marry you?”
“That’s right,” Lucia said, feeling the weight of her predicament bear down upon her once more. “Now I’m sure that he won’t want to marry me.”
Remy came quietly to her side, put a solemn hand on her shoulder, and pulled Lucia back from the brink of self pity for the second time that night. Remy almost never made physical contact with anyone. Lucia knew not to ask why.
“You could live with me,” he said. “It’s not very cold, except in the worst part of winter, but I know all the good spots, so it’s not that bad.”
It was a moment before Lucia could speak in a normal voice.
“But what about my father?” she said gently.
Remy made a face, and Lucia laughed. “See, I have to find a husband who will put up with him, too, Remy. Or one rich enough not to care.”
“So you have to make this man happy again?” Remy hoisted himself up on the kitchen table, and kicked his legs back and forth as they dangled over the edge. He tore a piece of bacon off with his teeth and chewed reflectively. “Easy. Give him a bottle of the Duke’s Blend.”
“Remy!”
“I know you keep it here, even though I told you not to.” He shook his little head. “I had to tell all the boys you’d smuggled it away to the Castel already. It’s really stupid, keeping it here.”
But Lucia was lost in thought. How bad would it be? One bottle?
“Paolo did ask about the Duke’s Blend…” she murmured to herself. It was an interesting thought, rife with possibilities—and risk. Which is why it took Lucia so long to notice that her little friend had stopped chewing.
“What?” she asked.
“I know someone named Paolo,” Remy said.
The idea of Remy, king of the street boys, and Paolo Ramora, banking heir, running in the same social circles made her smile. She never would have known Paolo herself if it weren’t for her father’s debt and the Ramoras’ enthusiasm for Lyselle amberwine.
“There are many Paolos in J’Amel, Remy,” Lucia teased.
“This Paolo has a dog,” Remy said casually, watching her face. “He calls it his Hellhound.”
Lucia kept her voice level. “That’s an interesting name.”
“It’s a hunting dog, but it doesn’t have anything to hunt, because Paolo keeps it here in the city.”
“I’m sure he lets it run around sometimes.”
Remy’s deliberate calm was having the opposite effect on Lucia. She felt the way one does before a big storm, when the clouds just hover over the horizon, promising eventual destruction.
Slowly, Remy nodded. “He does. There’s a game he likes to play with the Hound and some of the street boys. He says it’s fair sport, but I don’t think that’s why he does it.”
Lucia had gone quiet. Of all the things she could think of to say, none of them seemed adequate. It seemed best just to let the truth roll over her and see if she could bear it.
“I think he does it because he likes it, even when the boy wins. The boy almost never wins, though. Stubbs won once, but he said he only got one piccioli for it, and his arm hasn’t been the same since.”
Remy hopped off the table and brushed biscuit crumbs from his faded shirt, not out of some sense of fastidiousness, Lucia knew, but because he didn’t want the other boys to start hounding her fo
r food.
“Paolo thinks it’s funny. Stubbs says it was better when he’d just chase us off. He said having a man laugh at you while you fight a dog for a meat bone was worse. That’s why I stick to stealing.”
“You shouldn’t steal,” Lucia said absently.
Remy made a face.
“You shouldn’t marry men named Paolo,” he said, and let his smile break through before scampering off toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“Everyone’s drunk! I have pockets to pick!” He grinned, and then he was gone, silently slipping through the kitchen door and leaving Lucia alone with her own thoughts.
The bright light that was Remy quickly faded from her mind, replaced by the terrible things that she had learned. So Paolo was as bad as she had feared. Maybe slightly worse, maybe slightly better, but still a man who could derive joy from the pain of others.
Who am I to point fingers? Lucia wondered. Me and my Severille obsession.
But she knew that was different, somehow. It wasn’t real pain. It was a kind of game, where everyone agreed. Not at all like someone with so much power and money using it to torture small, poor boys.
Lucia’s chest began to tighten, constricting around her lungs, choking her. It was too horrible to think about. And yet this was the man she had to marry? This was the man she had to hope would marry her?
There are few things worse than having only terrible choices. Lucia felt having no choice at all was one of them.
She cinched her cloak about her and rose to clean with her usual quiet efficiency. There wasn’t much to clean when there wasn’t much food to make a mess, but she cleaned anyway. Her mind needed something for her body to do while it mulled things over. She had only one thing to offer Paolo, besides herself, and that was an ultimate trump card that she was certain, now, that she’d need to hold on to until the last possible moment.
All she had was the Duke’s Blend.
Such a risk! Everything she and her father had worked for. All of those late nights, testing blend after blend, additive after additive, heating them all precisely in those little glass beakers, carefully filtering out the precipitates. Her father had a rule about writing things down: don’t. He even wrote complicated cyphers that said nothing at all, in case someone should come looking for his notebook. Lucia used to think he was a little bit paranoid, until she started to notice how the other vintners always seemed to turn conversation around to their very secret distillation processes. It had meant many long hours by his side, memorizing everything there was to know about making the best amberwine in the world.
And they might lose it all if she were caught with a bottle of the Duke’s Blend before the Finale Feast.
Lucia crept softly to the door of her father’s still, sure it would be slightly ajar, as it usually was. The latch had broken years ago, but since her father never wrote anything down and all the crucial ingredients were hidden away in the secret storeroom, he hadn’t seen any point in repairing it. It was almost a point of pride. It was also the thing that let Lucia check in on her exhausted, awkward, loving father whenever he fell asleep at his workbench.
He was asleep now, his grey hair tousled and his head resting on his calloused hands, his gentle snore filling the small room. She wouldn’t wake him. Likely he’d been working on some tricky problem, and when he woke up with a start in the middle of the night, he’d have the solution.
Lucia wished she had the same skill. She would have to find some way to fix this. Paolo’s father could call in the debt at any time; they were already behind in payments, counting on the bounty from this year’s vintage to carry the balance. The idea of her father without his business, without his still—or worse, in debtor’s prison—was unbearable. And what would become of her didn’t bear thinking about.
She resolved not to cry as she climbed into bed. She knew the sound would travel through the flue and would wake her father below. He could sleep through most things, but not the sound of his daughter crying.
Could she do it? Could she bear to be with Paolo? It seemed impossible. Aside from concerns about Paolo’s character and cruelty, that look from Lord Cesare had polluted her, and, for lack of a better term, had poisoned her against all other men. Perhaps it was only in close comparison to someone like Lord Cesare that Paolo seemed so wrong. She very much wanted to believe that; even now, her mind shied away from what Paolo had almost done. Besides, Lord Cesare was the heir to the Duke’s seat, and so far outside the realm of possibility for her that it was laughable. Of course, she wasn’t laughing.
“I will not cry,” she whispered.
She had to find a way to make it up to Paolo, and if she couldn’t bring herself to sleep with him—yet, she thought grimly—there was only one option remaining.
Silently she slipped out of bed and snuck back down to the amberwine still. She tried not to look at her sleeping, snoring father, hopefully dreaming good dreams, and made her way to the supply cabinet. The key that triggered the sliding panel in the pantry floor that led down to the secret storeroom was not a physical thing, but a precise alchemical mixture that only two people in the world knew how to make. When poured into an innocent-looking channel along the edge of the pantry’s north wall, it flowed down into another chamber, kept flush with substrate, and catalyzed a complicated hydraulic system that moved the panel and revealed the dark stairs down to the storeroom. Just another of her father’s brilliant inventions that no one would ever know about. It would take her at least a quarter of an hour to make a small batch of the key. She would only take one bottle of the Duke’s Blend, she told herself. Just one. A peace offering for Paolo.
It was still a capital crime.
~ ~ ~
The front door shattered on the third blow.
The booming blows came in such quick succession that Lucia thought she was still dreaming. She had groaned into her blankets, wishing she could sleep not only through the morning, but well into the evening, too. It had been an intense night, after all, and it likely wouldn’t be a morning that she’d be eager to face. And it was the first true day of Bacchanal; no one in the entire city had any business so urgent that it justified whatever was happening to their front door.
And then there was the awful, splintering crash of the front door falling to an expertly wielded battering ram.
A harsh voice echoed up the stairs. “By order of the Duke, you are under arrest!”
Lucia bolted upright, eyes wide. How could they know? She hadn’t even left the house with the Duke’s Blend! Slowly, reason returned: of course they didn’t know. This was something else.
That thought, however, was not comforting. Lucia stumbled out of bed and knelt beside the flue, listening for whatever stray words happened to float up, but it was difficult to hear anything above the sounds of crashing equipment and breaking bottles. It began to dawn on her: this was real.
They were ruining her father’s still.
She threw on a dress and opened her door, but the sudden silence, after all that chaos, gave her pause.
“Of course there’s no one else here!” her father suddenly shouted, his voice breaking. Even to Lucia it sounded like a lie. “My wife is dead, my daughter is away. You can’t just barge in here like this, I have the Duke’s contract!”
Lucia’s head was foggy from the previous night. She was still puzzling over her father’s obvious lie when she heard a strange step on the stairs.
“I told you: no one else is here!” her father screamed. “Get out of my house!”
With slow horror, Lucia realized that her father wasn’t trying to deceive these soldiers. He was trying to warn his daughter.
Fear seeped into Lucia’s mind and sobered it right up. She grabbed what little money she could and a small purse and, at the last moment, the bottle of the forbidden Duke’s Blend, for no other reason than it was the most precious thing in her possession.
The last words she heard as she hauled herself out of the
window and down to the ancient trellis below were, “Vintner Lyselle, by the authority of Duke Lupin, Ruler of J’Amel, I place you under arrest.”
~ ~ ~
Lucia ran all the way to David’s house, keeping to back streets and little-known alleyways, possessed by a primal sort of fear. She forced herself to slow down as she approached the large, corner house where David lived with his parents and six sisters. She was still wary. She would have to think things through.
Sitting on a back stoop, just out of sight of the main road, Lucia wondered why she’d never felt wary around David’s family before. His father, Vintner Clavel, was technically their competition. But somehow it had never mattered that Clavel had maneuvered into positions of power within the Vintner’s Guild; he’d always been a friend to the Lyselles. It helped that Clavel catered to the common taste, with inferior but inexpensive amberwine, and left the more delicate, high-end palates to the Lyselles. What Clavel lacked in her own father’s genius for alchemy, he made up for in business acumen. The two vintners were opposite images of each other in temperament, as well, and always had been; where Lucia’s father was awkward and shy, David’s was gregarious and charismatic, the sort of man who knew how to make anyone feel at ease.
Except, of course, for his son. There was a reason they spent most of their time at Lucia’s house.
Lucia had thought she was running to David’s house as a place of safety. But that wasn’t quite right; it was David who was safe. If the Duke’s soldiers were arresting vintners from some insane reason, there was no telling when they might come for Vintner Clavel.
Lucia stiffened with fear. They might even already be there.
Grow a backbone, she admonished herself. You have no choice.
She gathered a few dirty bits of gravel and some small, brown things that she very much hoped were gravel, and sneaked up to David’s house. His window was high, and the angle was steep. She got lucky with her aim and hit his window on the first try.
