A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  “If she’s so obnoxious, is she really worth all this trouble? With the headway I’ve made with Vihra Kylliat . . .”

  “I don’t like gambling,” Consanza snapped. “Take every advantage you can. And don’t underestimate Tarmos. She’s not incompetent, she’s just selfish and irritating. She wraps herself up in silly ribbons and jewels and scandalous gowns, but she’s just as calculating as the rest of them.”

  I say a lot of things about Consanza, it is true, but whatever she said to the Queen of Coin was effective: Taishineya Tarmos, quaintly, sent along a calling card the day before she stopped by. By the time it got to my cell, it had been handled by fifteen or twenty different wardens, and it had a sad thumbprint of grime on one corner of the beautiful, thick, wood-pulp paper (very expensive in these parts, even without the narrow line of gold leaf running about the edges).

  Her footmen arrived before she did, laying out a small knee-high table, a rug, a cushioned stool, and for some reason a silver dish full of water. They heaped more fuel onto my brazier, set a kettle on the fire, and laid out a modest tea service alongside a porcelain dish of honeyed apricots stuffed with spiced chopped nuts.

  It was a simple picnic for a Queen, but to my eyes it looked like the grandest feast I had seen in years. My mouth watered to look at those glistening, honeyed apricots.

  The footmen, in frustration and disgust, also swept the room and sprayed thick perfume up and down the hall in an attempt to dampen the unpleasant smells of the ward. By the time Taishineya Tarmos came and settled herself on her stool, with some kind of tiny fluffy animal lapping out of the water dish by her feet, I couldn’t smell anything at all, let alone differentiate between the perfume she was wearing and the one that had been so liberally splashed around. I will probably never escape that smell. It will haunt me to the end of my days.

  “Good afternoon, Master Chant,” she said. She plucked a juicy piece of candied apricot off the plate and ate it in one bite. “Your advocate sent me a letter, all about you and your tragic situation. I really had no idea. She’s rather clever for what she is, isn’t she?”

  “You mean for an advocate?”

  Taishineya giggled. “Oh, you. You remind me of my own grandfather.”

  “I apologize, madam, I truly didn’t understand what you meant.”

  “Oh—for a foreigner, of course!” She giggled again.

  “My impression is that her father and mother were born and raised here, as was she.”

  The Queen ducked her head and smiled. “Well, of course, you’re a foreigner too. I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to understand what I mean.” She ate another apricot. Didn’t offer me any. I decided then that I didn’t like her.

  The fluffy animal at her feet was staring hard at me. I ignored it.

  “Anyway,” Taishineya Tarmos said, “goodness me, I’ve heard so much about you. I seem to hear new things every day! Your advocate told me quite a lot. It seems I’ve been rather left out of the loop!”

  “The loop?”

  “Well, when your advocate wrote to me, I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired to vote one way or another—espionage charges are exciting to hear about, but the trials are so boring to listen to. Most of politics is boring,” she added in a confidential whisper.

  “Is it? Then certainly you would have had matters more interesting to attend to besides running for office.”

  “No, indeed! Because now everyone carries a little handful of my portraits in their pockets! Such a thrill.” She fished out a heavily embroidered and beaded velvet purse from a pocket in her skirt and tipped out a few gold and silver coins. She held one up close enough for me to see. “It’s a rather good likeness, wouldn’t you say?” Her lacquered fingernails shone like jewels.

  “Yes, it seems to be.”

  “But you must look at it properly. Let me turn in profile for you so you can see what a really good likeness it is.” And she did just that, glancing at me expectantly out of the corner of her eye.

  “Being imprinted in gold could not possibly increase your beauty,” I said obligingly. She had a rather weak chin, I thought, and if she kept eating candied apricots at that rate, she might have a second one before too long.

  But she was clearly delighted with the compliment, and she poured her riches back into her purse and vanished it amongst her skirts again—all shades of lavender, with an oddly styled vest or doublet in rich royal purple, as heavily beaded as her coin purse had been. “So . . . I’m not the only one who has been sneaking in to see you, am I?” she said, scrunching up her nose in a way that I expect she thought was endearing. I didn’t like it. And I didn’t trust her. There was something about this giggling doll that didn’t ring quite true.

  “I’ve only spoken to my advocate. . . . I don’t think anyone’s snuck in to see me. I don’t get visitors.”

  She laughed. It was clearly practiced and perhaps intended to sound like tinkling bells. It sounded like a five-year-old. “No, the other Primes. Apparently I’m late to the party.” And, mercurial, the tinkling laughter shifted into a little moue. “Unfashionably late.”

  Her expression set me on edge. If she was revealing that tiny amount of displeasure, it meant there was a hundred times more of it lurking beneath the surface. “I wouldn’t say that, madam. Casimir Vanyos hasn’t been to see me yet.”

  “Oh, old Casimir.” She waved that off with an airy gesture. “He just sits in the House of Law with his books and his little clerks. He’s an old grump, takes no notice of society.”

  “And the other Queens do?”

  “They should.” She smoothed her skirts over her knees and folded her hands primly. “It’s important to know what the people want.”

  “Do you spend much time socializing with the people?”

  “Of course! All the time!”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, parties. I get invited to all of them now I’m Queen. It keeps me quite busy!” She bestowed another glimmering smile on me. “I canceled a lunch date to come see you, you know.”

  “I’m flattered,” I muttered.

  “Oh, shy man!” She popped another apricot into her mouth, and then picked up a second and offered it to the little fluffy thing. The fluffy thing scarfed it down. I clenched my jaw.

  “Just parties, then?”

  “Oh, no, of course not. Also lunches, suppers, picnics, hunts, carriage rides, holidays in the country . . .”

  “What about everyone else? The people who aren’t invited?”

  “The poor, you mean?” Another tinkling laugh. “I don’t think they have enough time to care about politics. I understand that—I barely have enough time for it myself! But never mind all this. There’s something that I have been dying to ask you.”

  “Oh?”

  She scooted her stool closer and leaned forward, her face a little more serious. “Am I going to win the election next year?”

  “What election?”

  “The Commerce election!”

  “How should I know?”

  “Because you’re a fortune-teller or a prophet of some kind! Aren’t you? Weren’t you up for witchcraft charges before they went after you for treason?”

  I was completely speechless.

  “Here, do you need to read my palm?” She drew back her cuff and began extending her hand, but paused and glanced at my own hands, which were filthy and calloused, the nails chewed short. “Or something else to scry with, maybe?”

  “I don’t read the future.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Because I’m not a blackwitch.” That wasn’t the only reason—as I said before, I don’t have a lick of magic in me.

  She furrowed her brows at me. “What does that have to do with anything? They’ve been saying you know things, and what I want to know is whether I’m going to win.” She put her hands back in her lap, clenched into fists.

  “Who’s been saying that? What do they think I know?”

  “Oh, everyone. It’s practically common
knowledge at this point. You know how news spreads. Someone talks about the blackwitch on trial; someone argues that you’re not a blackwitch; someone else points out that blackwitch or no, you seem to know a lot of things, so you certainly must be a spy. Someone else gets huffy that there’s no crime in knowing things. Then it turns into a jolly argument about whether you’re a spy or an oracle, and I’ve decided to come find out for myself.” She twinkled at me. “So. Which is it?”

  “But I don’t have the gift for it,” I blurted before I could think better of it. Then I heard what I said. I had no doubt that someone would take that as me confessing to espionage—do you see? Offered the choice between being a spy or an oracle, I deny the latter, so therefore . . .

  Iron swans, whispered a desperate voice in my head. Taishineya’s expression had turned frosty.

  I scrambled to regain my footing. “I mean—not for just foreseeing the future willy-nilly whenever I choose to. It’s more difficult than that. It requires . . . persuading the spirits to help me.” Her expression eased slightly, and I seized upon an opportunity. “And it requires assistance.”

  “What kind of assistance?” she asked, suspicious.

  “Well, my apprentice knows what to do. . . . If he were here, if we had the materials, I could certainly try to peer through the veil. I’m certain I could foresee what you need to do to win.”

  “Then let’s summon him here now!”

  “Well, that’s the problem. I don’t know where he is. When I was arrested for that silly witchcraft charge, I was dragged off before I could speak to him or communicate where we should meet. I may have lost him forever. . . .”

  “Couldn’t you have asked Anfisa Zofiyat to look for him?”

  I gave her a wry look. “I did, madam. I wrote letters, but she kept them for herself. She thought they had a code in them. She’s one of the people who has decided I’m a spy, not an oracle.”

  “Hmph. She’s crazy,” Taishineya Tarmos said sharply. There was a hint of an edge behind the giggling doll after all. “Someone’s going to kill her one of these days—she’s the worst of them. She thinks she knows things about—about people. Everyone.” She was nervous—more nervous than Vihra, and less well-equipped to handle it.

  “She certainly seems like she’s been swept away by paranoia.”

  “Swept away . . . What a delightful way to put it.” She picked up the fluffy animal—was it a dog? It looked more like a round puff of golden cotton than a dog. She set it on her lap and stroked it. Fed it an apricot, put another in her own mouth. “She’s not the only one who has people.”

  “People like the Weavers, you mean?”

  “The Weavers ought to be shut down, the whole institution. And they should all be called home and executed. They’re interfering little pests,” she hissed. “They stick their noses in where they’re not wanted, at home and abroad, and they . . . make things difficult for me.”

  “Difficulties that must be unwelcome, if you’re looking to get reelected next year.”

  “To say the least.” She smiled again, but it was strained. “But I have men and women who are used to travel—give me a message and write down the last place you saw your apprentice, and what he looks like, and the most likely places he would have gone, and his name, and I’ll have my scribes copy it out. I’ll send five people looking for him. And when he comes, you’ll tell me how to—” She jolted to a stop. There was a vicious light in her eyes, and I was sure that if she’d continued, she would have said something like you’ll tell me how to destroy the others.

  “I’ll tell you the path to take towards victory, I promise,” I said, trying to sound soothing. I pulled out a folded, unsealed piece of parchment from under my blankets. “As for the letter, I’ve already written one, if you wouldn’t mind taking it today.”

  “Oh! How cunning of you. And the directions?”

  “If you give me a moment . . .”

  She nodded, waved airily. Her invisible mask was back in place, her persona as firmly affixed as Nerissineya’s birthmark. She turned to devote her full attention to the candied apricots, and I pulled back the blankets and found another scrap of parchment, the ink, and the pen, and I lowered myself slowly and creakingly to the floor—there was no desk, so it was the only thing to write on. Seeing this, Taishineya dropped the folded parchment I had handed her and wiped her hand hurriedly on her skirts.

  I narrated aloud as I wrote the directions, though I imagined that she probably wouldn’t remember or care. “His name is Ylfing. He’s a youth, in his seventeenth or eighteenth year, as near as I can guess. He’s of the Hrefni people, who live far to the west off the coast of Genzhu’s north flank, past four mountain ranges and the Amariyani Sea. He’s tall and strong—I make him carry all our things. Middly brown hair, like dead grass. Very pale skin, the Hrefni have, much paler than I am, but not so pale as—well, have you ever seen a Norlander or a Vint? Most of them have skin the color of white shelf mushrooms, the ones that grow on trees in the summer. The Hrefni are a little browner, but not much—like very milky tea. And he has blue eyes, the color of shadowed snow. He’s going to stand out in a crowd, is the point I’m trying to make here.” I wrote all this down as I said it. “I last saw him outside the house of a man who had given us lodging for the last few days—I don’t remember his name, but this was near . . . Uzlovaya, I think, was the name of the big town. The village was Cayie. I was down the road from the man’s house when I was arrested—I was only telling stories to some people in exchange for bread. We were going to move along in the next day or two, because Ylfing had been paying for our lodging with chores, but the man was running out of things he needed done and wanted money instead. We hardly ever use money. I guess he would have had to leave, unless the man has let him stay on.” I folded up the description and directions and held it out to her. She looked at it with open distaste and took it from me by pinching one corner between two fingernails. One of the footmen whisked it away instantly.

  “And in return, you promise you’ll scry?”

  “I can promise to try,” I said, and that was true. I knew a score of different techniques for telling the future. Some of them even worked—sort of, and for other people. Kaskinen doesn’t have that magic. I didn’t know if Ylfing had it either, but I didn’t think so—if he were any good at that, he would have told me. It’s the Hrefni way.

  “I don’t know that I should do you a service in exchange for the possibility of payment. Perhaps that works wherever you’re from, but it’s not how things are done here.”

  I rubbed my hands over my face and combed out my beard with my fingers. “Then I can give you advice now, as a down payment, and scry later.”

  “I’ve had advice from dozens of people. I hired people to give me advice.” There was that petulant little moue again, but I saw another glimpse of that edge of steel behind it.

  “I will wager you haven’t had this advice before.”

  Another airy wave. “All right, go on.”

  “What story are you telling?”

  She tilted her head. “What?”

  I repeated myself.

  “I’m not telling any story.” It was fascinating, what she was like when she forgot to perform her little act. Her voice dropped to a more natural register; her posture shifted so, so slightly, transforming her from a lovely, delicate flower to a person with strength in her spine and a beating heart.

  “Of course you are. You’re in the public eye—your actions tell a story about you. They tell a story about a woman who is concerned with appearances. With seeming, I think, rather than being.”

  “There’s no difference.” She laughed, the false tinkling laugh from before. “This is rather funny advice so far.”

  “A very long time ago, and half the world away . . .”

  THE SEVENTH TALE:

  The Glass-Merchant’s Wares

  . . . there was a woman who owned a little shop where she sold glassware. Beautiful, fine work by the best artisans in
all the city, little fantasies of crystal. She also had some poorer work, which she kept for people who weren’t quite high enough in society to be able to afford the very best, but who were clawing their way up as fiercely as they could, who wanted to seem like they were doing a better job than they were. It was a rather boring trade for the woman—she had inherited the business from her father, and she had not much use for or interest in glass, except for the money that it brought in and the reputation it granted her, but the shop was known throughout the city for its exquisite wares.

  One day a lord of the city came in. He needed to buy an entire new suite of wineglasses, for a clumsy servant, dusting the shelf, had knocked it loose and the whole glittering collection had fallen and shattered into the smallest fragments.

  (I paused for the faintest moment here to see if Taishineya would have a reaction—a bark of laughter, perhaps, or the declaration that she hoped the lord had dismissed the servant immediately, but she just sat there and looked . . . innocently blank. At the time, I thought she looked like she was obviously feigning inquisitiveness, but in hindsight she might have been feigning the feigning of inquisitiveness.)

  The lord was hosting a great banquet that very night to celebrate the engagement of his eldest son to a young woman of much renown—he needed to go home with the glasses that very afternoon.

  The glass merchant nodded calmly, but her heart had gone still in her chest. She simply did not have that many wineglasses in stock, certainly not of the quality that this lord was looking for. But she had a clever idea, and she had a lot of poorly made wineglasses, enough to supply the lord twice over.

  “Well, my lord . . . Usually I wouldn’t suggest something like this, but since your whole collection has been destroyed . . . It just seems like true serendipity that this would happen to you, today of all days,” she said.