A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked. I wasn’t sure anymore. I’d figured out on the way that the Weavers were working for someone, and by their rough treatment of me I’d guessed it was someone who didn’t particularly care if I arrived in one piece. Perhaps I had miscalculated once again. “It’s just that I’d like to write a letter to Ylfing first, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “What? No, of course not. Kill you?” There was that godforsaken tinkling laugh again. I’d forgotten she did that. I glanced around the room, careful not to look at her lest I actually vomit on the floor, but I didn’t see that fluffy little animal she’d been carrying around everywhere. “No, you’re going to work for me.”

  Well, that was a better option than death in a back alley and being dumped in the harbor, at least. At that point, I still didn’t have any hopes of walking out of Nuryevet alive, and I was still waiting to hear of any signal from you. “Work for you,” I said. “How so?” In my letter, I’d only given her the idea to come back and take what was rightfully hers, to use Coin as a weapon. I had implied that the will of the people was behind her. I’d told her this was the moment of her destiny. And I’d said that if she could rescue me from prison, I’d give her the keys to the country.

  She sat on a chair facing the couch and folded her hands on her knees. “You’ve given me such excellent advice all this time. And you can see the future! You were right about what I needed to do, both in the prophecy and when you told me to come back. So I’d like you to do further work for me.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I’d pictured—I’d had an idea that I’d feed her some bullshit and then she’d let me go free, and Ylfing and I would run off west to meet you, and I’d tell you how to sweep all the game pieces off the board, and then we’d be done and I’d be left to my own devices.

  And instead she wanted to keep me. Annoying, not part of the plan, but that was when I knew I had her. Do you remember what I told her when I read her fortune?

  When we’d sent the message to her in exile, we told the stonecutter who had carried it to take his chisel with him, and to “accidentally” drop it at Taishineya’s feet when he handed her the letter from me. Pick up the chisel, you see. That’s what I’d said—originally, it had been just a whimsy, meant only as a suggestion that she should pay more attention to the working class instead of wasting all her time on silly parties, but as it turned out, it gave me a tidy little back door into her brain. Success at last. At last.

  “And,” she continued, “because I remembered what you said about most people being fools, and about how politics is really just telling the right story. And you seem to be a man who knows what the right story is, and how to tell it. So you’re going to do that, and I’m going to finish crushing Vihra Kylliat. And then I’ll be the only Queen.”

  “There’s still the others,” I said. My mouth was dry, but this was a woman who wanted something. Something that I could sell to her! Something that would keep me alive until you arrived in a terrifying horde from over the mountains. “Zorya Miroslavat—”

  “Oh, she won’t be a problem after tonight,” Taishineya said airily. “They’re off killing her as we speak, I expect. I have such excellent helpers now. Powerful ones.”

  I thought of that blackwitch, the signs of them—that rusted lock. The creeping feeling of unease. The way one of the Weavers had vanished into the darkness. I suppressed a whimper. “And—and you’ve heard they disbanded Pattern? And elected a new Queen of Coin?”

  “That’s nothing. She’ll be dead soon too. No one will even remember her name by Midsummer. You’ll ensure that—you’ll come up with the stories we’ll tell them.”

  “This isn’t my country. I’ve given you what advice I have, and I was thinking I might just . . . go. It’s not my revolution. It’s not my problem.”

  “It’s your problem now,” she said. “Because I say so. Because your Queen says so.” She wasn’t my Queen. I hadn’t voted for her. “You can come up with stories that will make me popular and powerful, or you can come up with a new way to breathe water. Either way, I’ll make sure you get to see your inventions tested—maybe that apprentice of yours will help with the water-breathing project?”

  “Oh, come on! Don’t go dragging him into this!”

  “I certainly will drag him into this if you don’t cooperate. You needn’t whine about it so. It’s not like you won’t be compensated for your work, anyway. I’m not an unfair employer—you’ll get your own room, and a desk, and things to write with, and three hot meals a day.”

  “Visitors?”

  “What do you need visitors for?”

  “Because I’m human! I need to talk to other people!”

  She waved one hand dismissively. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Will I be allowed to go outside? Will I be allowed to speak to anyone?”

  “Outside!” she cried. “On the street? Heavens, no.”

  “In the courtyard, then! A morning constitutional around the fountain.”

  “Under supervision, or alone?”

  “With my visitors.”

  “They wouldn’t count as supervision. You’ll have someone to guard you at all times, but you may go anywhere in the bank that you please. But remember—I have Weavers working for me now. If you try to escape, they will be able to track you. I don’t know if I’d order them to bring you back alive or not. I suppose it depends on how I’m feeling that day.”

  Having my run of the bank building seemed like riches in comparison to the tiny cells I’d been confined to since late fall. A man could rest a little here. It wasn’t what I’d planned, and I didn’t hold out too much hope for what three meals a day meant. I thought it was safe to assume I’d be given the same variety of plain slop that I was fed in Grey Ward. But it was a step away from the gallows, and so I took it.

  “All right,” I said, “fine. I’ll work for you, for now. Do I get to leave at the end of it? After you’re the Queen of all Nuryevet?”

  “That remains to be seen. I suppose it depends on how well you do.” She paused and turned one of the glittering diamond bracelets around her wrist. “I might be more convinced to set you free one day if . . .” She wanted me to say if what, but I didn’t feel like giving her the satisfaction. We sat in silence (stony on my part, expectant and then frustrated on hers) until she said, “If you tell me another prophecy as good as the one you gave me before. It seems to have been quite accurate. Or you could tell me several. The more I know of my future and how to guide it, the more likely I am to not need your guidance around to help me. You can be sure that I will repay my gratitude with a substantial reward.”

  I muttered something about how the ways of the gods were as unclear to me as thick fog, how I could not always just call for a prophecy on command, as if I were ordering wine at a brothel. But in this muttering was also the implication that one might come to me at any moment, and that that event was not entirely out of the realm of possibility. I saw my fate well enough, and I still had a few weeks before I had any hope of hearing from you. A few weeks at the minimum.

  Taishineya seemed satisfied and she left soon after, having brushed off another request for a message to be sent to Ylfing. I was thereafter introduced to my guard for that night. I can’t remember his name, just that he had a jaw like a cliff face and a nose that had been broken so many times it was almost squashed flat. We’ll call him Flat-Nose.

  The room that Flat-Nose took me up to had been an office, once. There were four desks of sleek wood with a satin-soft polish, chairs, what seemed like a thousand filing cabinets. . . . But it was not an unlovely room, certainly not in comparison to a prison cell. The desks and chairs had been moved against one wall, and there was a long couch against the other wall, near the windows, with some plain blankets laid over it. A tiny iron stove, its pipe running up and out through the wall, provided just enough heat to blunt the sharp corners off the wintry chill and no more. Flat-Nose poked into all the corners and places where someone might hide, and
peered out each of the windows in turn, looking both up and down.

  He dragged one of the chairs in front of the door, and I saw there was a chain on its seat. He hadn’t spoken a word to me this entire time, but he locked the chain around the door handle and looped it through the arm of the chair. He sat down in it, crossed his arms, tucked his chin into his chest, and promptly went to sleep.

  I looked at the desks and thought about rummaging through them to find what treasures they held for me, but . . . there would be time for that in the morning, and better light for it too, so I took off my cloak and my snow-sodden trousers, hung them on a chair in front of the stove to dry, and nestled into that couch. It seemed the softest thing that I had ever slept in—that anyone had ever slept in. A feather mattress could not have been more blissful at that moment. The blankets smelled musty, and the couch was old enough that it had developed a dip running down the middle of the cushions, but I sank into them and was asleep the moment I got the blankets tucked up to my chin.

  Flat-Nose and I ate breakfast together in silence the next morning—eggs boiled in their shells, with a piece of toast and one thin piece of some kind of salty meat. I devoured all of it in moments, and eyed Flat-Nose’s, too, but he didn’t look like a man I dared to beg food from. I spent a little time going through the desks, as I had thought to do the night before. Plenty of blank paper, twenty or thirty different blank forms, ink and pens in great quantity and variety . . . A few personal effects of the desks’ owners, here and there. A pair of green-and-white knit mittens with a lacy stitch around the cuffs, a calendar with a lot of dates and memos written into it, a pocket-size notebook containing what seemed to be a list of ideas for stage plays or operas . . .

  Flat-Nose abandoned me after breakfast. He left the door open.

  The next twenty minutes were very strange—I fixated on that open door. I wanted to run straight through it, but somehow I couldn’t.

  I paced around the room.

  I looked at the door from the corner of my eye.

  I pretended not to notice it.

  I pretended to walk past it as if crossing to the other side of the room, and then suddenly changed my mind and veered towards it, but every time I got to the threshold, I froze, my heart pounding and my mouth dry.

  No, I see what you’re thinking, and it wasn’t wizardry. I had simply forgotten how to exit a room without being bodily dragged from it. Being imprisoned does odd things to your mind.

  At last, by sheer force of will, I flattened my back against the wall, squeezed my eyes shut, and sidled out step by step, squeezing against the jamb. Once I got into the hallway, I had to lean on my knees and catch my breath, but that was the worst of it. I looked down the long, long length of the corridor and my head spun at the sheer space.

  The hall was floored with marble tile and thick red-patterned rugs; the walls were paneled wood, painted with fantastic murals of forest scenes—creatures gamboling amongst a profusion of flowers, amorous mythical creatures pursuing attractive young men and women, that kind of thing.

  I know, I know, it is sort of odd, and I hadn’t thought it would at all be in the Nuryeven style. But a bank is a bank, I guess, and pointless luxury always seems to grow out of the walls like mold. The wall sconces were all decorated with tasteful accents of gold leaf, the staircases were wider than usual, the ceilings were vaulted. There weren’t any lamps lit; all the light came from the wide windows at either end of the corridor, and through the open doors into the various rooms and offices along either side, but it was more than there had been last night, and more than enough light to work by. The office I’d been stuck in was more drab and bleak than the hallway—I deduced that it must have been remodeled more recently, while the hallway had been preserved in its original function as a passageway of the palace.

  How lovely it was to stretch my legs! I spent all the morning exploring the bank, running up to the top floor and poking my nose in corners and cabinets and under tables, fiddling with things that invited fiddling, peeking out of windows and around corners and behind paintings. I found stern-looking men and women in some of the rooms—Taishineya’s Fifty Thieves, though they didn’t call themselves that, of course. Most of them didn’t speak to me; a few of them ran me off like a feral cat. I heard some of them complaining about cabin fever, and I laughed! How I laughed! Those young bucks didn’t know shit about cabin fever. I had five floors to wander through completely at liberty. It was only when I tried to go outside that I was stopped and turned back. Had to have my keeper with me, they says. Queen’s orders.

  I asked where she was, and they directed me to what must have been the master suite of the building when it was still a residential palace. When it was a bank, it was the chairperson’s office; now it functioned as Taishineya Tarmos’s receiving room and seat of power. I knocked on the doors—vast oaken things, with polished fittings and fixtures of hammered brass. They were certainly imported from the south—I hadn’t seen trees big enough to make doors like that the entire time we’d been in this godforsaken country.

  Someone opened one of the doors for me, and I poked my head in. Taishineya lounged on a couch, a book hanging from her hand. “Oh, Chant,” she said, in a tone of exquisite boredom. “What do you want?”

  “Can we get letters out of here? I mean, clearly you can, with your Weavers. I suppose you’ll be moving against Vihra Kylliat next.”

  “Within these walls,” she yawned, “I prefer her and the other one to be referred to only as ‘the Pretenders.’ ” It did not escape my attention that the other one was now a singular, not a plural. Ice trickled through my stomach, and I decided not to ask how things with Zorya Miroslavat and Taishineya’s other Weavers had gone the night before.

  The Pretenders, though. Vain bitch, but when you’re standing in someone’s palace surrounded by fifty-odd people who are apparently willing to kill for her, you say yes, ma’am.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “You mentioned who you wanted to write to last night,” she drawled. She seemed absent, like she was thinking of something else. Or maybe nothing at all. “Who was it? Your servant, was he?”

  “My apprentice,” I said. “The one you met.”

  “Of course. Apprentice. What was his name?”

  “Ylfing.”

  “Ill-thing, yes. Foreign boy, wasn’t he?”

  “As foreign as I am. If I write a letter to him—I’d like to bring him here, you see. To help with my work for you. Teaching him as I’m telling your stories—it’d be a valuable addition to his education.”

  “I’m not here to provide ‘valuable additions’ to the education of strange foreign children. I don’t see how making up nice things to say about me needs an assistant or apprentice or valet, whatever he is.”

  I cleared my throat. “And then there’s the prophecies, madam, as I’m sure you recall. Unless you’d like me to spend four or five years training one of your other staff to Ylfing’s level?”

  “He didn’t do much last time. Surely it can’t be that complicated.”

  “He is trained in perfect memorization—if I were to have a fit, he would be able to remember every word and twitch I made, whether they were nonsensical or not.”

  “Ugh. Fine, I don’t care. Write whatever you like, take it down to the kitchen, and ask for someone to deal with it. I have such a headache from all this.”

  I went back up to my room—I was going to be so sick of all those stairs by the end of it, let me tell you, but at the time I was thrilled with the novelty of having to walk a distance. I had some trouble going back through the door into my room, particularly standing outside and looking in, seeing how bare and unlovely it was compared to the rest of the building. I didn’t quite have to squeeze myself through against the wall the way I had before, but it was a close thing, and once I was inside I found that I couldn’t close the door without my heart seizing up.

  Once the note was written, I forced myself back out of the door. Every time I pa
ssed through, it got little easier, and I hadn’t had such trouble with the doorways that weren’t mine. It was just when I was going into or out of the space that was intended to keep me in one place, you see.

  Took the letter down to the kitchen, and then there was a bit of confusion about where it was supposed to be taken—I didn’t know Ivo’s address, or Consanza’s. There was an almighty row between me and two of the Thieves, but I bullied them and browbeat them into finding out where Consanza lived and taking it to her, and I gave them all the information I had ever gleaned about her—that she lived in a more well-to-do area of the city, that there had been houses burning a few streets away from her, that she was a famous advocate and surely anyone would know where she lived if only they asked around a little bit.

  I was rather at loose ends for the rest of the day, and I thought about coming up with some propaganda for Taishineya Tarmos, but it was necessary to consult with Ylfing and find out some news about the outside world before I started that. No one in here seemed to be in any particular hurry.

  That’s the thing about a siege—they’re very expensive for the people outside. As long as no one tries to dig under the walls, or climb over them, then the people inside just have to sit and wait. That is, they wait either for the siege to pack up and leave or for the food and water to run out, whichever comes first. Taishineya Tarmos seemed to have a solid supply of food and water, and she held the majority of the currency in the city via the bank and the mint that it housed, so it was only a matter of time before first wages and then patriotism ran out permanently.

  It was apparently easy enough to get a letter out and delivered, and to get a teenage boy back inside, because Ylfing was there at breakfast four or five days later.

  This time I really did hobble across the room and catch that fool boy up in my arms, since there was no one stopping me from doing otherwise. He was freezing cold and a little damp all over—he’d clearly just come in from outside, and it was snowing then. He seemed taller, too, and he was strong enough to hug me hard enough to hurt my bones a little.