The Liar's Knot

by M. A. Carrick

  “Thank you.” The depth of the Rook’s voice suggested the thanks wasn’t only for the kitten-wrangling.

  Trying to keep her tone light, Ren said, “I couldn’t let a mere cat succeed where I have—ouch!—failed.” The last word was delivered from an odd angle, as one well-hooked paw dragged her head down.

  Apparently, it wasn’t light enough. “Don’t feel too bad about not unmasking me. People have been trying for centuries. If I weren’t good at what I do, I wouldn’t still be here.”

  “It isn’t that.” Once the temptation of the braid was removed, the kitten’s antics became more of a reflexes game than a knife fight. Ren kept her attention on that, not only to preserve her skin, but because if she looked at the Rook, she would lose her nerve. “I… Several times now, I’ve had a suspicion about your identity. Every time, I’ve been wrong.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t.” She tucked her hand to her chest, out of harm’s way. It was pure imagination to think she still felt the warmth of Grey’s touch on her wrist. Pure folly to want more. “I—I got attached. To the idea that you might be someone I knew. The idea that… I could trust that person with my secrets. That with him, I wouldn’t have to keep up the lie.”

  “And you don’t have many people like that.” The Rook distracted the kitten with a gloved finger, nearly lifting her from Ren’s lap when she latched on. The scratch of back claws on leather was almost as soft as his words. “I’m sorry.”

  Ren managed something like a smile. “Not your fault.”

  His breath caught. Then he gently detached the kitten from his hand and engulfed her bat-eared head with his palm to settle her down. The tips of his fingers were a whisper away from brushing Ren’s thigh.

  “She’ll need a name,” he said. “I suggest something like Shadow Stalker or Night Vengeance.”

  The suggestions startled a laugh from Ren. “Who taught you the naming of cats? What about Velvet? Coal? Thorn?”

  He picked up the kitten and held her facing Ren. “Thorn? Does this look like a Thorn to you?”

  The kitten squirmed free, but not to cause more mayhem. She curled herself into an impossibly tiny circle in Ren’s lap and laid the tip of her tail over her nose. Without thinking, Ren said, “Clever Natalya.”

  The trickster heroine of Vraszenian folklore. It was foolish for Alta Renata to have a cat with a Vraszenian name, but—“Of course, a proper cat needs three names, one for each thread of the pattern deck. Her public name will be Nox. And her secret name… to herself only will that be known.”

  “Like kitten, like mistress. Here’s hoping the mistress will sleep as easily.”

  Ren didn’t watch him go. She only sat with the kitten in her lap, feeling the trace of warmth where he’d touched her cheek before leaving.

  12

  A Spiraling Fire

  The Pearls and Kingfisher: Lepilun 28

  Ren’s nap felt like it had only underscored her exhaustion. After she changed back into Renata, crept out again, and returned through the manor’s front door, she fell asleep immediately—and of course woke not much later, from another zlyzen nightmare.

  She lay, heart pounding, staring at the canopy overhead. Then an inquisitive mrrp? near her left ear nearly made her jump out of her skin. Fortunately the sound came before the whiskery sniff, or Ren might have reflexively whacked the kitten straight off the bed.

  Natalya walked over Ren’s face and neck with no concern for personal space before settling down in the gap between shoulder and cheek. Her skinny tail thwapped twice across Ren’s lips. Then the purring began.

  Ren went back out like a snuffed candle. And this time, there was nothing but peaceful sleep between that and Tess throwing the drapes open the next morning.

  The sensation of being well-rested was so novel, orienting herself took a moment. Ren blinked sleepily at the bright light, luxuriating in the softness of her bed, the loose relaxation of her limbs. Yawning, she stretched like a cat—and dislodged the actual cat, who mewed with indignation.

  Tess shrieked and sprang back. The mew turned into a hiss, and Tess bent to peer at the small intruder. “Mother bless me, I thought you’d bedded down with a rat!” She reached out a tentative hand, but the kitten shied back from her, taking refuge in the rumpled covers.

  Renata soothed Clever Natalya while Suilis came in with a pitcher of water and filled the washbasin. “I found her in the tree when I was on my balcony last night. Poor thing seemed to be stuck.” She caught Tess’s gaze on the word “balcony,” and got a slight widening of eyes in return. Too many of their conversations were reduced to this now, hinting at things because someone else was in earshot. She mourned the loss of the time when she could have simply said The Rook gave me a kitten and watched Tess melt.

  It was that as much as the coalescing of the half-formed notion in her mind that made her say, “Suilis, could you fetch a saucer of milk?” Her own breakfast already waited on the table in her sitting room, but Ren had no idea if the kitten could eat it. Her experience of pets ended at the rats the Fingers had sometimes trapped to fight each other.

  “Begging your pardon, alta, but I don’t think Tess will thank me if she has to clean up kitten runs later. I’ll bring up some trout instead.” Suilis bobbed a curtsy and stepped out.

  In her absence, Ren asked softly, “Can you arrange for me to be undisturbed? I need to lay a pattern.”

  Tess checked the hallway before returning to whisper, “Not here. Yesterday I caught Suilis snooping in your room.” Her lips pressed into a flat line. “She’s tried hard to be friendly with me, but I’m wise to her now.”

  The news jolted Ren. If I didn’t have Tess watching my back… “Should I have her sacked?”

  After a moment’s thought, Tess shook her head. “I don’t know that she means any harm. And even if she does, isn’t it better that she’s here to keep an eye on? No, I’ve a notion of how to deal with it. Don’t you worry.”

  Before Ren could ask what that notion was, a creak from the hallway signaled the end of their privacy. Tess straightened up. “What do you say to the jonquil surcoat with smocked bandeau, alta? I’m certain some people would find that quite fetching.”

  Ren tried to go along with the hint about her mystery suitor, but her heart wasn’t in it. Watching Tess bustle about, playing alta’s maid with Suilis, she thought, It hardly counts as playing anymore. Not when there was never any time off the stage. She’d never meant to trap Tess into a servant’s life, curtsying to and fetching for her own sister… but whether she meant to or not, that was exactly what she’d done.

  The weight of that reflection pursued her out the door of the manor. And although Ren had a basket of tricks good for shedding any tail, no trick could help her escape her own guilt.

  But the scene in Kingfisher drove it from her thoughts. Yesterday there had been Vigil patrols sweeping the area, looking for the escaped Anduske; today it was the Ordo Apis, and they were doing more than just sweeping. The courtyard of Alinka’s tenement was full of stunned people and broken belongings. Arenza barely dodged a travel chest tossed from a second-floor window. It broke on impact, scattering wedding linens, a kureč banner of the Anoškin, a bundle of embroidered black that had to be someone’s koszenie, the record of their lineage.

  Alinka caught her arm and pulled her away. “Say nothing,” the other woman warned in Vraszenian, dragging her inside. “They know this is Grey’s house and will bother us not, but I’ve no wish to test their patience.” A last glimpse showed the family rushing to take stock of their broken belongings, before Alinka firmly shut the door.

  “What are they doing?” Arenza asked, her blood cold. “Why come here?”

  “They search all the districts, one by one. Seeking the Stadnem Anduske… and any who might have sheltered them.”

  Like Alinka. Arenza watched the woman gather up her huddled children, pressing kisses into their hair. “You did so well, alča. You and Jagyi, quiet like bunnies.”
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  I brought this on them. Not the connection to the Anduske—Grey himself had done that, and Alinka, insisting Koszar stay until he recovered—but the sudden crackdown. And yet, how could Ren have left Idusza and the others to die?

  She wanted to apologize, but couldn’t. Arenza had nothing to do with the escape.

  At least she could draw comfort from the plan she’d put into motion. The meeting at Traementis Manor had gone well, and Donaia was sleeping better thanks to a calming tea Alinka had blended for her. There would be a message on its way later today, inviting her and the children to come with Donaia to Quientis’s bay villa once the adoptions were complete, a little over two weeks hence. That would get them all out of harm’s way, until the search for the Anduske died down.

  “You came not for this,” Alinka said, with the determined air of someone trying to pretend to normalcy. Her grin slid toward cheeky. “But if it’s Grey you came to see, he’s not here.”

  It startled an embarrassed laugh from Arenza. “I seek him not. Only a quiet place to lay some cards—though it seems quiet is not to be found.”

  “The worst has passed. I will take the children upstairs.” Jagyi fussed when Alinka withdrew an arm to gesture for Arenza to use the table. She wrapped him up again quickly, but the tension had broken, and a full tantrum loomed behind it.

  “I can make my own tea,” Arenza said, reading the hesitation in Alinka’s expression as she glanced at the water warming on the hearth, the brick of tea waiting next to it. Alinka gave her a grateful smile and nudged a curious Yvie upstairs, Jagyi’s wail drifting in their wake.

  Brick tea wasn’t nearly as good as what she drank at Traementis Manor, but the preparation was soothingly familiar: toasting a small chunk, then grinding it and whisking the powder in. That done, Ren arranged herself at the table and took out her cards.

  She should have done this ages ago. But after nearly turning her brain to sausage patterning the Rook, she’d been half afraid of what would happen if she tried to pattern Vargo—because at the time, she thought he might be the Rook. And then, once they’d fallen out…

  Admit it. You were even more afraid then. Vargo, with his spider spirit and his unnaturally fast healing, his knowledge of numinatria. What defenses might he have around him?

  There was only one way to find out.

  She took three deep breaths, then recited the prayers as she shuffled, cut, and dealt.

  The good of his past puzzled her. The Mask of Bones, revealed; in most cases she would interpret that as some metaphorical ending. Here, it felt like a literal death. Yet the sense she got from that grinning skull wasn’t a dark one—or not only dark. This wasn’t Vargo profiting from murder… not exactly. Whoever had died, they’d made Vargo the man he was today—and that was better than what he would otherwise have been.

  At the other end of the row, The Mask of Nothing formed a chilling counterpoint. It was the card of madness, in all its forms, from rash action to literal insanity, and it had appeared in Koszar’s pattern as well. They didn’t mean the same thing, though—at least, she thought they didn’t. Vargo had brushed up against something that lay outside the bounds of rationality. The eyeless mask on the card resembled the one Renata had worn to the first Praeteri initiation, and her pulse leapt as she remembered the rage that overtook her in the temple. Was that why Vargo was so interested in the Praeteri—because of their eisar numinatria?

  That left the middle. One Poppy Weeps represented pain and suffering, of which there was certainly plenty in Vargo’s past. For himself as well as for others; hadn’t she sensed that when they danced on the Night of Bells? He spared no one in pursuit of his goals, not even Derossi Vargo.

  Ren turned over the next row. Her fingers trembled at Drowning Breath, the ill of his present. It had appeared in the pattern her mother, Ivrina, laid in the nightmare, as Ren’s own ill future: the confrontation with Ondrakja and the zlyzen. The one that had killed Leato.

  Ondrakja was gone. But whatever Vargo was doing, it was equally terrifying… and only partially balanced by Labyrinth’s Heart in the position of good. When Ren looked at the labyrinth painted on the card, she didn’t see the serenity of walking its curving path; she saw a spider’s web, with Vargo at the center. He was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to move.

  Unfortunately, the central card baffled her almost as much as the present row of Grey’s had, laid on this same table. In that position, The Face of Song could be read as either revealed or veiled, or a mix of both—but neither made sense. On the one hand it signified love, peace, reconciliation; on the other, an insistence on painting over conflict and pretending it wasn’t there. Prior to that confrontation in the temple, Ren would have thought it pointed to her own false warmth with Vargo. That was long gone, though, their conflict bared to the world.

  So you’re not all-seeing, she thought wryly. At least this time the central card didn’t try to scramble your brains like an egg. The Rook was still one up on Vargo.

  With the Rook at the forefront of her thoughts, she immediately felt the connection when the top row disclosed The Ember Adamant. That had been the Rook’s good future, a chance for him to fulfill his mandate against the nobility once and for all. For Vargo it was ill, and a fate Ren recognized all too well. He owed a lot of debts—not of money, but other kinds—and had made a lot of promises he might not be able to keep. Ren had teetered on the brink of a fall like that as she worked her way into House Traementis. Vargo failing now would be like Ren failing Tess.

  Who did he care about that much? His spirit, Alsius? There was an odd warmth between the two at times. The connection between them whispered to her from the middle card, The Face of Roses. Vargo did recover swiftly from injuries; she suspected Alsius was the reason. But in the ambivalent position, that healing came with a cost.

  And the counterpart to The Face of Roses was The Mask of Worms. That card had occupied the central position in the Rook’s future, representing the unknown poison corrupting Nadežra—a poison the Rook clearly suspected Vargo of profiting from. Was he right? She couldn’t tell. Everything felt tangled up together, the threads too snarled to tease apart.

  Whether he was right or not, Ren couldn’t ignore the final card. The Mask of Night was Ir Nedje, the deity of bad luck—but it lay revealed. Something in Vargo’s future held the possibility of averting disaster.

  Disaster like The Mask of Worms. Like what the Rook fought against.

  She stared at the cards, trying to feel the threads of not only Vargo’s pattern, but the Rook’s. She was sure they influenced each other somehow, but—

  “Alinka!”

  The door banged open, revealing Grey in his patrol uniform. It was almost the mirror of Ren’s old nightmares, but this time her heart lifted instead of seizing with fear. And when his gaze fell on her, she saw a similar warmth, paired with relief. She wouldn’t be sitting quietly at his kitchen table with a cup of forgotten tea if something had happened to his family.

  “They’re upstairs,” she said, sweeping her cards into a pile before Grey could study them. “All is well.” Here, at least.

  He shut the door behind him and sagged against it. “Thank you.” Then, as she murmured a prayer of gratitude and tucked the cards away: “Who was that for?”

  Ren’s answer came softly, almost drowned by the sudden noise from Yvieny upstairs as she heard her uncle. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

  Kingfisher, Lower Bank: Lepilun 28

  Grey didn’t have to try nearly as hard as he expected to talk Arenza into staying after she finished her pattern. He could practically see her weighing her schedule and obligations, but her body showed no inclination to move. When he offered to fetch crab claws and garlic fried daybread from a stall on the Tmarin Canal, it was too much for even her self-control to resist.

  Yvie pounded the claws until the table was sprayed with butter, the morning’s fright forgotten. Arenza couldn’t fill the gap Kolya had left at the table, but she
made it a little less empty, a little easier to deal with a garrulous Yvie while Alinka tended to Jagyi. Grey’s amused glance caught Arenza’s several times over a gruesome detail in the long-winded tale of the terrible Claw-Cracker, denizen of the Dežera. When their fingers brushed mopping up the buttery remains of Claw-Cracker’s last stand, he let her be the one to pull her hand away.

  After the bucket was depleted and Alinka had taken Jagyi upstairs for a nap, Grey scrabbled for a reason to keep Arenza there awhile longer. The quiet ache in her voice last night haunted him, the wish that he were the Rook. He knew she enjoyed spending time with his family, being Vraszenian for once instead of Alta Renata… but he hadn’t thought of his own role in these occasions. The possibility that it was his own company, not just Alinka’s, that she craved.

  Yvie solved the puzzle for him. When he finished washing her hands clean of butter, garlic, and bits of crab shell, she turned to Arenza. “Last time you were here, you said you would draw a card for me, and then you didn’t!” She flopped across the table, a picture of woe, and twisted so she was looking at Arenza upside down. “You have to keep your promises. That’s a rule.”

  Had Ren’s manners always been so tidy, or had she picked that up from being Renata? Her hands were remarkably clean. But she still wiped them off before bringing out her cards and shuffling. “Hare and Hound,” she said, flicking the card up between two fingers. “Know you the sto—”

  “Clever Natalya!” Yvie said, bouncing upright. “When the evil sorcerer was chasing her, so she had to turn into a hare and so he turned into a hound and so she turned into—”

  Grinning, Grey let his niece relate a mostly coherent version of the tale to Arenza while he cleared off the table. By the time Clever Natalya had tricked the sorcerer into turning into a dream, then defeated him by waking herself up, he wasn’t quite done, so Arenza moved on to card tricks. Yvie didn’t have the patience for the more drawn-out kinds of street magic, designed to make the audience think their chosen card was thoroughly lost in the depths of the deck, but she was entranced by stunts like single-handed shuffling or one card seemingly leaping from the pack of its own accord.