Then the hood turned toward her. “Nobody.”
Did he suspect her? Of what? “The only person backing me is Tess. If she is your corruption, then I have a great many questions.”
He huffed, suspicion draining out of his shoulders and back. “Yes, I’ve spent the better part of two centuries fighting against the terror that is Ganllechyn seamstresses.”
“You haven’t seen what she’s like when sewing. The terror is more real than you think.” Her reply seemed to come out on its own, carried by the relief of that tension passing. What do I call him? “Rook” seemed too direct. It was a title, not a name. She opted for no name at all. “I can help you. With Vargo, and with—whatever it is you’re fighting.”
That was a less-than-subtle invitation for him to explain, but he didn’t take the bait. “In return for what?”
She hadn’t thought that far. Normally she would have had the whole thing planned: offers and counteroffers, points of concession and demand. This time her only thought had been to help. But how plausible would that be, coming from her?
“Revenge,” she said at last. “Vargo… he made me trust him. I thought I could read him, and he used that to make me believe he saw me as a friend. Not a tool to further his schemes. I want him to pay for that.”
“It seems Eret Vargo has many debts coming due. I’ll keep your offer in mind—and endeavor not to get on your bad side.” The Rook backed away and unbolted the rear door of the labyrinth. “If you have need of me, you can leave a message on your balcony. Sleep well, Lady Rose.”
And with a nod, he vanished.
4
The Face of Weaving
Kingfisher, Lower Bank: Colbrilun 13
Almost two weeks after the debacle in Seven Knots, the Faces finally looked kindly upon Ren.
Dalisva Korzetsu’s list didn’t just name Branek and his key supporters, the ones who had backed the amphitheatre bombing. It also named Idusza Polojny, the channel through which Mezzan Indestor had provoked that bombing in the first place, as well as the person who’d belatedly tried to stop it: Koszar Andrejek.
Ren knew the former leader of the Anduske had been badly injured in the schism. Some of the rumors said he was dead, and certainly no one had seen him since Veiled Waters. But if he’d lived, his allies might have sought treatment for him, so Ren—as Arenza—was scouring the bonesetters and herbalists of the Lower Bank.
After opening far too many mussels, she finally found a pearl. “I know not if it’s the one you seek,” an old Meszaros gammer told her, “but I saw a fellow around that time taken to Alinka. Beat up, he was, and bad. Those with him, not much better.”
“Where can I find Alinka?” Arenza asked, and received directions to a tenement in a part of Kingfisher hard by the border of Seven Knots.
It was one of the buildings that used to house a wealthy Vraszenian family in the days before the Tyrant’s conquest, two stories tall and built around a courtyard. Now it was carved up into many smaller dwellings, usually with shops or workrooms on the ground floor and sleeping rooms above. Ren had lived in a similar place as a child, and her throat tightened at the memory.
Especially since there was a child outside the door she sought, playing with dolls on the cracked flagstones of the courtyard.
Bloodthirsty play, from the speech one doll was making to the others. “—won’t let these Liganti pigs treat our city like a sty,” the girl declaimed. Her toy was a strange study in contrasts, with a beautifully carved face and wooden limbs and hair of braided burgundy silk, but wearing a stained patchwork coat of rags and tattered ribbons. “To the river we will drive them, and stand on their shoulders till they drown in their own muck! On rooftops we will dry their bloated bodies, and burn them in the fens! We will not rest until the clans hold Nadežra once more! Who stands with me?”
The girl gave a whispered roar for the crowd’s response. If the clothes and hair hadn’t given it away, the speech would have. The doll was meant to be Elsivin the Red, born a son of the Kiraly, later becoming a szorsa. Like some who chose the path of the rimaše, her interest in pattern reading was lackluster at best. But she’d been a dedicated revolutionary, determined to take back Ažerais’s holy city. Fifty years had passed since her revolt failed, but Vraszenians still paid the price in increased tariffs, while Elsivin’s name was still honored in whispers. And apparently, in children’s stoop games.
Ren’s confidence in her lead solidified. The child had learned to play at sedition from someone; this might well be a Stadnem Anduske safe house.
The girl looked up as Arenza approached. Her sun-streaked hair was coming out of its two braids, and her clothes were patched and dusty. “Are you looking for my mama?” she asked, squinting into the sun.
“If your mama is Alinka, yes.”
“MAMA!”
Arenza wouldn’t have been surprised to see that bellow blow the front door off its hinges. Instead, after the pigeons squawked and settled, the door opened to reveal a careworn young woman. Her hair was kept out of her face by a practical crown braid, and both strands of the marriage token braided into it were the grey of the Kiraly raccoon. When she saw Arenza, she hurriedly wiped her hands clean on the frayed panel sash that decorated her skirt. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Arenza Lenskaya Tsverin,” Ren said in Vraszenian. “I seek some friends of mine, and I heard that to you they might have come for healing.”
The curiosity in the woman’s expression closed into guarded caution. She glanced past Arenza, searching the courtyard—not busy, but by no means empty. Untying a cord from her sash, she tugged a toddler out from his hiding place in her skirts. “Yvieny, keep watch over your brother,” she instructed, tying the cord around the girl’s wrist. “And wander not from the stoop. It’ll be supper soon.”
Ignoring the girl’s grumbles, Alinka gestured Arenza into the workshop and closed the door. The lamplit interior seemed doubly dim after the brightness outside. Ren smelled the herbs before her eyes adjusted to see them, a mix of floral and medicinal, fresh and pungent, one step off from the incense and resin that had scented her childhood home.
The counter running along the back of the room had been transformed into an herbalist’s workbench, but hanging alongside the curtain that veiled the stairs going up to the sleeping rooms were coils of cording in every color of the dreamweaver. Finished knots dangled from a beam: the tight budded rose of Ažerais for good luck, the seven-lobed wagon knot for longevity, the simpler triple cloverleaf for family. The table dominating the center was long instead of round, better to lay sick clients on than patterns, but the pot kept warm by the hearth steamed with the starchy scent of cooked rice, and the chairs around it were padded with thickly embroidered pillows.
It felt like home. Simultaneously a soft embrace, and a knife of grief between the ribs.
Alinka didn’t move farther into the room. Likely she’d only let Arenza in to keep their conversation secret from her children and anyone who might be loitering in the courtyard. “A healer should not speak of her patients to strangers,” she said. “Who are your friends?”
If this were a Stadnem Anduske safe house, Arenza would have been asked for a password. “Idusza Nadjulskaya Polojny is my friend, but Koszar Yureski Andrejek is the one who needed help. I have for them a warning.” She straightened her shawl, drawing Alinka’s attention. It was the fine shawl the Rook had given her, and while the hidden knives were no use here, the embroidery was.
Alinka’s eyes widened when she recognized it as a patterner’s shawl. Immediately she stepped back, hand to heart as though Arenza were an honored guest. “You are Idusza’s szorsa friend! Apologies for my rudeness. It is only… not all who ask after friends are truly friends. Will you take some tea?”
“Thank you, yes.” There were shoes by the door, and Alinka was wearing slippers; that and her liquid accent marked her as not from Nadežra. A southerner, with the customs and speech patterns of a true Vraszenian, born and raised away from Ligan
ti influence. It made Ren feel out of place as she surreptitiously wiped her boot soles and stepped across to the table. “I understand your caution. I’ve searched since the terrible business during Veiled Waters, but they have hidden themselves well.”
“Yet pattern brought you here. You are as gifted as Idusza claimed.”
Play my skill up, or down? “Pattern, and a good deal of searching,” Arenza said with a laugh. “I hope you can shorten my quest.”
Alinka had busied herself with brewing the tea. It wasn’t just hospitality; she was hiding trembling hands. “Koszar was badly injured, and then infection set in. Several days he lay here, before they could move him. I know not where they took him after that.”
The tea she brewed was soothing, fragrant with chamomile and mint, as though Alinka could tell Ren had been living the lives of three people with the hours of only one. But the steaming cup thunked a little too hard onto the table. You know exactly where he is, Arenza thought, blowing across the surface of the tea. Alinka was right to be cautious, though. Any woman with the right kind of shawl could claim to be Idusza’s szorsa friend. “Have you some way to send them a message?”
Alinka brightened. “Certainly!”
“I would be grateful.” The mug had a small crack on the far rim. The room was cozy and clean as such places went, but Alinka’s clothing was patched like her daughter’s, and there wasn’t a lot of food on the shelves. Once upon a time it would have looked ordinary to Ren… before her adoption into House Traementis.
The same impulse that made her offer to aid the Rook drove the words out of her without thinking: “I can pay for your help.”
“What? No, no.” Alinka waved her hands in front of her. “To reunite friends, I’ll take no money—and doubly not when helping a szorsa. This city has not changed me so much that I forget to honor those blessed by Ažerais.”
It had been a clumsy offer, more Liganti than Vraszenian. With outsiders they haggled, but among themselves, debts took a different form. Arenza said, “Then let me thank you with a pattern.”
Delight bloomed in Alinka’s expression. But as Arenza reached for her deck, Yvieny’s voice pierced the walls again—this time in a shriek of delight—and a moment later, the door opened.
To reveal Captain Grey Serrado.
In rumpled clothes that were neither his dress vigils nor his patrol slops. He had the toddler balanced on one hip, a basket overflowing with greens on the other, and a shrieking Yvieny riding his leg as he dragged them all through the doorway.
“Mama! Mama! I got honey stones, see?” Yvieny released her grip to hold up a cone of hard, sticky candy.
Serrado set down the basket, freeing a hand to tousle the little girl’s hair into even wilder tangles. In Vraszenian he said, “Scold me not, Alinka. I know you wish her to…”
His words faded as he caught sight of Arenza sitting at the table. Ren hoped desperately that her face wasn’t showing what she felt: the free-fall horror of realizing exactly what she’d stumbled into.
Grey Serrado had worked with Idusza to stop the bombing. Of course he’d helped the wounded Koszar afterward.
I’m sitting in his house. And Alinka is his wife.
Kingfisher, Lower Bank: Colbrilun 13
“You… have a client.” Grey’s words thudded like cobbles, inelegant and stupid. Yvieny had warned him that someone was with Alinka; he’d been braced for anybody other than the woman in front of him. She found me. She found us. How the hell did she figure out the Rook’s secret?
He diverted his attention to Jagyi, who had seized his ear and was tugging like it would detach if pulled hard enough. Hopefully, that would cover for his flinch on seeing Ren—Arenza—sitting blithely at Alinka’s table. He had to get her out of here before she said anything she shouldn’t… but first, he had to act like everything was normal, so Alinka’s suspicions wouldn’t be aroused.
What was normal in this situation? “I meant not to interrupt—”
“You interrupt nothing.” Alinka sorted through the basket he’d brought. “And a dinner of rice alone would be bland. Watercress. Taro. No lotus root?”
“There was none to be had.” He shifted to keep Arenza in his peripheral vision while pretending to listen to Alinka’s scolding. Her gaze was on her tea, chin tucked low to hide her face. As though she was afraid he’d recognize her.
Relief and doubt warred within him. If she was hiding, she didn’t realize he knew she was Ren, and Renata. Which meant she had not, in fact, unmasked him as the Rook.
Except Grey had seen firsthand how good of a liar she was.
He was chasing his own tail, the usual mental divisions that kept his life separate from the Rook’s falling apart like cheap paper in rain. He hadn’t yet figured out what to do when Alinka took Jagyi from him, saying, “Let go of your uncle’s ear, bibi,” and Arenza’s gaze came up in startlement. It flicked briefly to Alinka’s marriage knot, then to Grey’s hair, too short to hold a braid, before skittering away. He nearly laughed. She thought Alinka was my wife.
Then a shadow passed across her expression as she tied the threads together. Grey was a northerner, Alinka southern, so they couldn’t be born to the same family. That meant Alinka must be Kolya’s widow.
Normally Grey was able to juggle these kinds of situations like a master street performer. But it was too much, with too little warning: the collision of what he knew, what Ren knew, their assorted identities and secrets. He needed space to think it all through, without her watching; he couldn’t trust his own mask right now.
Since he couldn’t throw Arenza out, Grey took the vegetables from Alinka instead. “I’ll deal with this. You should see to your client.”
“Actually, I am her client,” Alinka said. “She offered to pattern me—”
The chair scraped across the floor as Arenza stood up. “My apologies; I just remembered I have not the time today. And you are busy besides. But I will come back, if I may. And you will pass the message to Idusza…?”
She was looking for Idusza? True, they’d met during the riots—but no, that had been Renata, not Arenza. Did she know Koszar was upstairs, still bedridden from his wounds? What in eleven hells was going on?
That chin tucked down, hiding her face. He’d seen that posture before… in the pretty young patterner he ran off a street corner months ago. And Idusza had sought Grey out because an unnamed szorsa told her to.
He’d assumed he’d discovered all of Ren’s games. More fool me.
Ordinarily Alinka would have pressed a guest to stay for dinner, but with the dangerous secret just above their heads, she offered only assurances and farewells as Arenza departed. Once the intruder was gone, she pulled on gloves to clean the taro root and said, “I know you distrust szorsas, but that one has Ažerais’s gift. How else to explain how she found us?”
Grey feared the explanation had nothing to do with Ažerais. Ren was resourceful, and no matter how careful he’d been, someone could have noticed Andrejek’s midnight arrival. “We cannot keep him here,” he said, gaze straying to the stairway.
“Ask me not to move a man so injured. When his eyes focus and his speech stops slurring, then I’ll consider it.” Kneeling, she gathered Yvieny into a hug and kissed her daughter’s thistle-wild hair. “You did so well, alča. Keeping watch and keeping secret. Can you continue doing that for Mama?”
More interested now in her honey stones than in the stranger upstairs that mostly slept, Yvieny mumbled agreement around sticky fingers. Alinka met Grey’s eyes. “And can you take a message to my patient’s friends? Perhaps a szorsa can help them where we cannot.”
“I will,” Grey said, giving Alinka a kiss on the brow and calling out a farewell to Yvie and Jagyi.
He was halfway out the door before Alinka realized he was leaving. “I meant not for you to go now—”
“Best not to wait, and I still have a pile of Vigil paperwork to get through. Wait not for me. Likely I will sleep in my office again.”
; Grey closed the door on her objections, worn thin after over a year of living on top of each other. After his brother’s death, Alinka had needed support, and Grey couldn’t afford to pay for both his rented room and this place. But neither could he risk her or the children catching him sneaking out at night. Dodging his fellow hawks was easier.
It wasn’t the Aerie he headed to, though, nor Idusza. After the Black Rose’s warning in Seven Knots, and knowing Indestor had chosen Ren for his ritual because she’d been conceived during the Great Dream, Grey was inclined to agree that she had uncanny insight and luck. Was this the first time a szorsa—a true one, blessed with the gift—had ever patterned the Rook? Had the hood really been enough to hide him from the eyes of a goddess? What if Ren took it into her head to pattern Grey?
He cut through Kingfisher with rapid strides, toward the townhouse of the person who knew the Rook the best… because she used to be him.
Kingfisher, Lower Bank: Colbrilun 13
Ryvček’s silver-shot hair was damp with sweat, and she hadn’t bothered putting down her practice sword before opening her door. “Szerado. You look like a zlyzen is on your heels.”
“Don’t joke about that,” he muttered, sliding past her into the entryway.
“Would you like to come in? No, worry not; I was sitting idle when you arrived.” She shut the door behind him and headed for the back of the narrow townhouse. “Whatever it is, you can talk while I practice. Though why I bother when every two days some idiot hires me, the Masks alone can say. Has everyone forgotten how to settle grievances without steel?”
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