“The Hermlin Black,” Kai’s voice floated from across the room, sounding self-satisfied now.
“I’ll see what I can arrange,” Dahar said.
Shironne opened her mouth to protest—Verinne would never allow that—but the colonel spoke first. “If you can get word to me in time, I might be able to bring Miss Anjir there.”
Mind reeling, Shironne felt for the chair she’d sat in before. There was no point in joining the argument since the two older men were already arranging everything between them.
About a foot to the left.
She moved over in that direction and her fingers collided with the arm of the leather chair. Bare fingered still, she sensed that Mikael often sat in this chair. The leather bore the feel of his hands, oils from his skin—recognizable to her now since she’d touched him. She sank into the chair and drew her gloves back on, leaving only her face exposed. This sense of his skin lingered on her hands. Not unpleasant, but not yet familiar.
Mikael had settled back in the other chair, seeming amused and resigned at the same time. Between them, they think they run the world, he thought at her. Well, them and Deborah.
“Deborah needs to be involved with this,” the colonel said then.
Shironne clapped a hand over her mouth to hold in the laughter, but it leaked out as a strangled cough.
“Are you all right?” the colonel asked, worried. He came nearer and said, “You look flushed.”
“I’m fine,” she gasped. “I just need to sit here and rest.”
Mikael projected innocence, as if he thought he could affect the colonel. Perhaps he can. He was that loud. Kassannan had been correct about that.
Dahar’s irritation flared again, but he said, “If she’s willing, we can set it up. But she’s supposed to be getting some sleep now, so don’t go down and wake her.”
“You’re assuming there’s going to be another dream,” Mikael said, all amusement fading from his thoughts.
“I have no doubt there will be,” the colonel said. “I hope the two of you can tell us why this is happening then.”
Shironne bit her lip. She wasn’t sure she could, even if she walked into Mikael’s dreams. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to do that. If she met the killers in the colonel’s office, she could touch them and know what they thought. She doubted she could do so in a dream.
“. . . I thought they could take her down with them while I’m gone. She’s very good in that sort of situation.”
What? Shironne wished she’d been listening. “Where are you going, sir?”
“The city council is meeting this afternoon. It’s best I go,” the colonel said. “Will you be all right if I leave you in your uncle’s hands? His aides can take you to view the body, and I should be back by the time you return.”
The colonel was leaving her here alone, Shironne realized. He’d left her with Aldassa before, but never with strangers. Then again, she really couldn’t consider Mikael a stranger anymore, could she? “I’ll be fine, sir.”
• • •
“I need to make some arrangements first,” Kai pronounced. “We can meet in the cold rooms on the hour.”
Mikael had almost forgotten about Kai and Elisabet over near the door. Kai simply walked out of the office without waiting for any answer, leaving Dahar looking vexed again.
Mikael was annoyed for Miss Anjir’s sake. Why couldn’t Kai make an effort to be friendly?
The girl sat with her gloved hands meekly folded, a posture that Mikael suspected now was not a true representation of her demeanor. If he understood the expectations of Larossan society, she’d violated about half their rules already today. Sitting on the lap of a man to whom she wasn’t married was more something a barmaid would do. But for her powers to be useful, she had to touch people. That must have taken some determination on her part.
Her head turned his way and she shrugged with one shoulder.
Dahar walked to the chair where Miss Anjir sat, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Miss Anjir, I hope your mother won’t be upset when she finds out Cerradine left you in our charge.”
Miss Anjir shook her head. “I don’t often work with the colonel anyway, sir. I usually work with Captain Kassannan or Lieutenant Aldassa.”
Dahar cast a helpless glance at Mikael, as if to beg for his assistance. He was clearly in a foul mood, and Mikael suspected he’d prefer not to deal with a child while he was in a temper.
Mikael’s stomach reminded him then that he’d never had lunch. “Have you eaten, Miss Anjir?” he asked.
“Ever? Or in the last hour?”
Dahar rolled his eyes.
“You knew what I meant,” Mikael said, amused.
Taking advantage of his interference, Dahar drifted away from the chairs to pace the entry floorcloth.
The girl’s head followed Dahar’s motion almost as if she could see him, but then she turned back to Mikael. “You meant that you’re hungry and want to eat something before we go downstairs, having successfully kept down your breakfast this long. Do you really do that?”
“Do what?” Mikael knew but wanted to hear Miss Anjir say it.
She looked uncomfortable, amazingly easy to read with her expressive face. It seemed almost as if he could sense her emotions as he had when he’d been a normal sensitive.
“Vomit,” she said, and flushed. “You were like me once?”
“Yes, I do. All sensitives start out the same, but for some reason a few of us change. Yes, I’m hungry.” Mikael decided he’d answered all her questions. “If you’ll give me your arm, I’ll walk you down to the kitchens and I, at least, can get something to eat.”
The girl hesitated.
“If you want, I’ll let you hold the end of my sash.”
“Like a dog?” Her expression was dubious.
“I’ve never had a dog. It might be an interesting experience,” he joked.
She rose and regally held out her hand. “Are you always so annoying?”
“I’m afraid so.” Mikael placed her hand on his arm. “You seem to bring out the sharp side of my tongue. Although it’s nice to talk to someone who doesn’t seem to mind my joking. The Lucases are very serious.”
Dahar stepped out of their way as Mikael led Miss Anjir to the office door. Mikael nodded to him as he passed, and then led the girl down the hall to the back of the palace, where the kitchens occupied the ground level.
What did the sentries think of him walking the halls with an unfamiliar Larossan girl on his arm? Word of this would be all over Above and Below within an hour, especially since he was going to take her down into the fortress. He’d opened himself up to all manner of gossip.
“They seem too serious to gossip,” the girl said in a pensive tone. “Does the woman ever talk?”
The woman? “Oh, Elisabet. Not much. She’s a guard. Her job is to watch, not converse.”
“I’ll bet she’s good at it. The former, not the latter. She seems very . . . um, controlled.”
“She is.” Controlled was an excellent word to describe Elisabet, Mikael reflected. “Stair. She’s been contracted to Kai as his guard for three years now, so she’s had time to perfect her silence.”
The girl walked down the steps with him, slowing when he did.
“Do you count?” he asked. “I had a friend who used a cane on the stairs because he said he never knew how many there were.” He started to take a step forward, but the girl had stopped on the landing, a perplexed expression on her face. “Miss Anjir?”
“I think I’m still trying to look at them,” she replied after a moment. “It’s like my mind still thinks I should see things but nothing’s there. Does that make sense?”
“Yes. I’m never going to get any food at this rate. Second stair.” The girl slid out a foot and found the steps. Mikael started down. “One of my friend
s was blinded when we were twelves. It took him a while to stop looking for things.”
Her head tilted. “What happened to him?”
“He’s a quartermaster now. In the Lee Family, of course, not the Lucas.”
“Oh.” Judging by her expression, she found that intriguing. “How was he blinded?”
“He hit his head against the floor during training.”
“And he couldn’t see ever again?”
“No.” He caught sight of her furrowed brow and wondered if she might see again someday. Deborah should be able to tell. Did she want that?
They stepped out into the main kitchen, a perpetual flurry of motion. Voices sounded from all over the cavernous space as the cooks began early preparations for dinner. The girl’s hand tightened on his arm, confirming the anxiety he sensed from her. Mikael gave her a brief description of the kitchen so she could orient herself, recalling that large spaces confused people without sight.
The cloths on the reserved tables were red, and pennants hung in bunches over the ovens and around the walls, making it look like a Larossan place. Most of the palace’s servants were Larossan. Even so, the smell of the spices was wrong, a traditional Anvarrid meal in preparation for the evening in the king’s household, no doubt.
One of the cooks directed them to the cold repast area, where bread and meat remained from the servants’ lunch. The servants of the fortress had a long history of interaction with the Lucas Family and accepted them as fellow servants, a misconception the Family permitted. The Family provided their service as a part of their treaty with the Anvarrid government and not solely for pay. As long as both groups fulfilled their duties, they got along reasonably well.
Mikael led the girl to the broad wooden counter and placed her gloved hand on it while he took a piece of bread and stuffed some meat inside. “Do you want anything?” he asked. “This is the time if you do.”
“What is there?”
She sniffed, but the smell of baking flatbread overlaid everything else, so he doubted she could tell. He perused the selection for her. “Meat: lamb, and I believe this is chicken. Some more bread, no cheese, a few apples.”
“Apples, this time of year? Could I have one . . . and perhaps a piece of bread?”
“Hothouse fruit.” He looked through the apples, picked the best of the remaining ones, and pocketed a second for himself. He turned her gloved hand over and placed the first apple in it. “I have a piece of bread for you as well.”
“Is there somewhere to sit?”
“In the kitchens? No, not for us.” He tried to think of an appropriate spot to sit and eat, but not one where they would be directly under the eyes of the sentries. “We can sit on the steps outside for a few minutes.”
She placed the apple in her tunic pocket and took the flatbread he handed to her. He led her back up the stairs, out the main hallway, and onto the steps leading down into the back courtyard of the palace, describing it as they walked.
“We’re standing on the first-floor landing behind the palace,” he said, and went on to tell her about the granite stairs and railings, the flagstone courtyard, and the neat and symmetrical gardens beyond that. He led the girl to the half landing, staying to one side so they could eat out of the way of any traffic. He sat next to her on the steps. Here the Rifles on duty on the rooftops could still see, but not overhear, them.
It was sunny now, the flagstones dry, with the wind blowing the scent of the stables in the other direction for a change. A marvelous day, Mikael reflected, save that one of their own had died in the early hours of it. It was strange that he’d had to remind himself of that.
“It is much nicer than this morning,” the girl said, holding the piece of bread in her gloved hand. She lifted it and brushed it against her cheek. Then she tore off a small piece and touched it with the tip of her tongue.
Mikael watched the process curiously, thinking it perhaps a bizarre new ritual popular in Larossan society.
“You know, I don’t stare at people when they eat,” she said in a waspish tone.
“I’m sure you would if you could. What are you doing?”
She flushed, putting both her hands in her lap. “I’m not hungry.”
“I’m only curious, Miss Anjir. I didn’t mean to offend.”
She shifted the bread between her gloved hands, dropping the spare bit on the ground. “Cook has to be careful with my food. She knows what I can tolerate. On the other hand, I can always tell her if food has begun to go bad.”
He gazed at her lowered face. “Is your mouth sensitive?”
“My skin is sensitive,” she whispered.
“What, all of it?” Had he ever heard that about touch-sensitives?
“My fingers the most, but my feet too. My lips and my tongue—I think my tongue is the worst—but all of it.”
“Your face?”
She nodded. “People always want to make me look at them, so they try to lift my chin, because I’m short, you know. I think Dahar meant to. Isn’t there something I could call him that would sound proper?”
“You’re accustomed to Larossan names. Dahar only has the one name. He hates being called by his title name, so you’ll have to call him Dahar.”
She tore off a little piece of the bread, hesitantly put it in her mouth, and then swallowed.
“Kai,” he continued around a bite of his sandwich, “you can call Mr. Lucas or Master Kai, if you wish. He’s the king’s heir, if you haven’t figured that out yet, but the Senate won’t confirm him until next year, once he’s a twenty-five. Don’t bother to address Elisabet at all. She’ll ignore you. It’s Master Elisabet if you do, since she’s a First.”
“First?”
“Head of a yeargroup—all the children born in the same year. Elisabet headed her yeargroup. Kai headed his. It’s an honor, but also a great deal of work.” He ran through a primer of how to address different people in the Lucas Family, and Anvarrid, and then people like himself who had two names, one Family name and one Anvarrid name—an impressively complex set of rules. During his recitation, she choked down half her bread.
He glanced at it, wondering if she intended to finish it or feed it to the pigeons. She simply handed it to him instead. She fished the apple out of her pocket then, and held it in her gloved hand. “It’s coated with paraffin.”
“You can feel that through your gloves?”
She shrugged. “They . . . um, mask the impressions I get. I have to concentrate to read through them, but I can.”
“Mine was bitter,” he said in consolation. He ate the remainder of her bread as he gave that last revelation some thought.
“I like bitter apples.” She sighed and took a careful bite. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
Mikael took his knife from its sheath and plucked the apple out of her hand. He cut a sliver and sliced off the peel. “Take your glove off.”
Considering how loudly he apparently thought, he wasn’t sure the glove would block his thoughts from her anyway.
She yanked at the fingers of her right glove and dropped it in her lap. She took the sliver of apple from him and quickly placed it in her mouth. “This is why I don’t go out anymore,” she said after she swallowed it. “In society, I mean. It’s not just that I’m blind.”
He could understand. At this rate, she’d never make it through the first course at a formal dinner. She could still carry on a conversation, sing or dance even, but she couldn’t eat in public. He’d seen enough of Anvarrid social circles to know how cruel people could be. The Larossans, for all that they had different rules, wouldn’t be any kinder to someone who was unusual.
“The colonel told me it’s supposed to get easier as I age,” she offered. “I’ll become . . . um, habituated to things. I don’t sing that well anyway.”
Mikael wondered where he could dig up more information on to
uch-sensitives. Deborah would know. He continued handing her thin slices of the apple, and she dutifully ate them. When she’d finished the last piece, she tugged a small cloth from a coat pocket and began scrubbing at her fingers with it.
“I don’t know if I want to see again,” she said.
He hadn’t asked her that, not aloud, but he’d wondered . . . back in the stairwell, before they’d entered the kitchens. “What, you’re just answering that now?”
“I needed to think about it. It makes some things easier not to see.”
Not to see? “Such as?”
“Well, I touch a lot of things, but I don’t have to see them. Like the man the police pulled out of the river. To me his body was a thing, not a person. He was a collection of facts, and his memories were like . . . a bunch of old letters I’d found abandoned in a desk. I think if I saw him, I would think of him as alive, like you do.”
He hadn’t given it much thought, but perhaps that was why he reacted to the bodies the way he did. Because he thought of them as alive, and seeing them dead was a horrible shock.
“You need to learn to let go,” she added. “You hang on to them too tightly. You think of them as you.”
She’d said that back in the office. He needed to give that some serious consideration, but later. “Well, are you ready to look at a body now?”
She tucked the cloth into her tunic pocket. “I suppose so. Does the palace have its own morgue?”
“No,” Mikael said, “but the fortress does.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The fortress. For a moment, Shironne forgot to breathe.
She wasn’t just getting to visit the palace. Mikael intended to take her down where most Larossans never would go, into the heart of the Lucas Family’s sovereign territory. Melanna will be so jealous.
He rose and helped her up. “We’ll go down to the courtyard,” he explained, “and around to the side entrance. Saves going up the steps and back down again.”
The fortress was supposed to be deep underground, so she supposed it would be a long way. He was worried about stairs.
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