“People are concerned that you’re overly involved with that work. You’re not eating. What are you doing anyway?”
“Devising a new governmental paradigm for the empire.”
“Uhm. Why?”
Books started writing again.
“Did the emperor ask you to do that?” Maldynado asked.
“No.”
“Aren’t we helping him so we won’t have to have a new governmental paradigm?”
“We are helping him to ensure no idiotic relative of yours takes the throne. What happens after that… Let’s just say I have a hunch, and I am hoping to anticipate the youth’s needs.”
Trying not to feel completely perplexed, Maldynado walked out of the engine room. “I don’t know why I bother talking to that man.”
• • •
Amaranthe had never seen so many pickled vegetables in one place. Cucumber jars, of course, took up a number of shelves, in spicy, dill, garlic, and—she stopped to gape—chocolate varieties. Sicarius, walking behind her, followed her gaze with his eyes, and she hustled on, certain he’d disapprove of chocolate anything. Besides, though Amaranthe hadn’t had a dessert in a while, she wasn’t sure she wanted to break her sweets fast with candied pickles.
Other vegetables, from carrots to asparagus to beets were also represented in the tiny shop. Packed jars rose on floor-to-ceiling shelves lining narrow aisles that one had to turn sideways to navigate. Someone like Maldynado probably wouldn’t fit through the rows at all.
At the back of the store, Amaranthe and Sicarius found an older woman sitting in a chair, her legs propped on a large desk that was as cluttered as the rest of the store, with cages occupying most of the free space. Inside them, a mixture of long-haired and short-haired—or perhaps long-haired and shaved—rabbits munched on carrots. Amaranthe wondered if the half-chewed vegetables were pickled too.
“Help you?” the woman asked without looking up. Knitting needles dove and darted as they formed a sock.
“Are the chocolate pickles good?” Amaranthe asked. Maybe she could find the woman’s passion, the way she had with Pabov, and encourage chattiness.
“No, I keep them on my shelf because they’re disgusting.”
The woman’s delivery was so deadpan that it took Amaranthe a moment to recognize the sarcasm. Perhaps pickles were not her passion.
“Are there any you’d recommend?”
“They’re all good.”
“Do you have any samples?”
“No.” The woman still hadn’t looked up from her knitting.
I’m getting a sense of why this woman needs three jobs to make ends meet, Amaranthe signed to Sicarius.
Just get the information.
As always, business first with him.
“This seems like a nice town,” Amaranthe said. “I heard you’re the one to ask about acquiring property near the lake.”
With an exasperated sigh, the woman set her knitting down. “You have money?”
“Yes,” Amaranthe said, though she lacked a single ranmya. “Not enough for one of those islands, of course, but I can’t imagine any of them are for sale anyway.”
“No, they’re not.” The Pickle Lady dug in her desk and pulled out a thick notebook with corners and edges of pages sticking out on all sides.
Sicarius shifted, perhaps thinking of simply taking it and leaving, but Amaranthe held up a hand behind her back.
“Are they ever for sale?” Amaranthe asked. “Do you remember anyone buying one?”
“If you can’t afford them, they’re not any of your concern, are they?”
“I suppose not, but I get curious. Don’t you?”
“No.”
Amaranthe was on the verge of waving Sicarius forward to do whatever he had in mind when a bell jangled, announcing another customer’s entrance. Several thuds sounded, heavy feet jogging across the threshold. Maybe not customers after all.
Sicarius pushed Amaranthe behind him, a knife appearing in his hand.
“No killing,” she whispered.
Feet pounded down the aisle. A jar smashed to the floor, glass shattering.
The Pickle Lady jumped to her feet. “Blast your ancestors,” she hollered before anyone came into view, “what’re you doing?”
Before the woman finished yelling, Sicarius had pulled Amaranthe into the aisle adjacent the one with the charging intruders. He clenched his knife between his teeth, gripped the shelving unit with both hands, and heaved. It wobbled for a moment, hundreds of pickles quivering, before succumbing to its fate and toppling. Shelves and jars thudded into people and crashed to the floor amidst startled grunts and cries of pain.
One man had reached the end of the aisle before the unit collapsed, a fellow in a gray uniform and carrying a short sword. It wasn’t the same uniform as Amaranthe had once worn, but she knew an enforcer when she saw one. Sicarius did too. He pounced on the man like that alligator in the swamp. The enforcer hit the desk, and rabbit cages toppled. The Pickle Lady skittered backward. Amaranthe, hoping the woman wouldn’t notice in the chaos, grabbed the notebook.
Sicarius slammed the enforcer’s head into the desk. The man’s eyes crossed, and he slumped to the floor. The Pickle Lady screamed for the enforcers.
In the collapsed aisle, broken glass and shelves shifted as men tried to climb free.
“Leaving would be good.” Amaranthe headed for the door.
Sicarius slipped past her before she could lead the way outside, but she supposed she couldn’t fault him for being protective when she was armed only with a notebook. Thanks to the imperial day of mourning, there weren’t many passersby on the cobblestone street outside, so she and Sicarius slipped into an alley and out onto the next block without anyone noticing. He lifted a hand to stop her, then climbed a drainpipe to the roof of a two-story warehouse next to the public docks. Scouting the neighborhood and seeing if any other enforcers were about, Amaranthe guessed. She eyed a sternwheeler ferry docked at the last pier, wondering if the Forge people might have passed through the area on the way out to their island. More likely, they had arranged private transportation from a private dock.
“Your new friend is loose,” Sicarius said from behind her shoulder.
Amaranthe almost dropped the notebook. “That was fast. I thought you had better tying skills than that.”
Sicarius leveled a cool stare at her. Just when she’d thought they were to the point in their relationship where he’d stop doing that.
“Never mind.” She patted him on the arm. “He was an engineer. They’re crafty.” She waved to the rooftop. “No more enforcers coming?”
“That may be the town’s entire complement. They’re regrouping outside the pickle store.”
“Perhaps we should take to the woods.” Amaranthe lifted the notebook. “And hope the answers we seek are in here.”
“Agreed.”
• • •
Amaranthe yawned and squinted at the real-estate notebook, trying to read by the predawn light. She sat on a boulder perched on the water’s edge with gentle waves lapping at the base. From the surrounding trees, birds chirped a variety of songs. The spot would have been peaceful if she weren’t straining her eyes, anxious for the sun to come up so she could read what the pages held.
The day before, Sicarius had insisted on putting a few miles between them and Markworth’s enforcers, and twilight had fallen over the lake before they reached a suitable—to his vigilant eyes—campsite. They’d have to be doubly careful now that the law knew he was around. Perhaps Amaranthe shouldn’t have let her curiosity draw her to that research station. She hoped nobody in the Forge group was paying attention to the goings on in Markworth or keeping tabs on enforcer reports.
Amaranthe held the book up, angling the pages toward the brightest section of the sky.
“Millcrest,” she murmured, starting to be able to pick out words and names. Unfortunately, the unorganized notebook contained far more than recent real estate transactions. Renta
ls, within-family transfers, and boundary adjustments were all recorded, and not simply for the islands but for the numerous properties in Markworth and all around the lake as well. “This’ll take forever.”
She needn’t read every page, she reminded herself. She could simply skim through and look for names she recognized. Thanks to Books’s research and rooting around in Retta’s head, she knew quite a few Forge members. She could also look for properties purchased in the names of businesses as a way to hide personal ownership. Larocka Myll had done that back in the capital.
Bertvikar. Amaranthe pointed to the name. That was familiar, one of the founders.
“You found something,” Sicarius said from behind her.
Startled by his arrival, Amaranthe almost fell off the boulder. Even after she recovered her balance, her heart pounded in her chest. She gripped the cool stone beneath her and silently cursed her body’s overactive reflexes. She’d known he was about. Was she going to flinch at everything now?
Sicarius did not comment, though he must have noted her response.
Amaranthe cleared her throat and lifted the book, holding the pages close to her face. “Maybe. I recognize this name, but it doesn’t seem to be for a plot of land. It’s a… ” She flicked an annoyed glance to the east, wondering why the sun was taking so long to peek over the distant mountains.
“Should I have searched for spectacles to accompany your costume?” Sicarius asked mildly.
“Absolutely. If I were clearly near-sighted, people might assume I’d picked out that hat on accident. I… ” Amaranthe lifted her head as something dawned on her. “Did you just tease me?”
“Yes.” Sicarius stood beside her boulder, his hands hooked behind his back. “Are you offended?”
“No, no, I approve. I’ve been teasing you for months.”
“I’ve noticed,” he said dryly.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what might elicit a smile from you.”
“Knowing Sespian is safe.”
It would be tough to make that happen; as long as he was the emperor, there’d always be people plotting against him. Though she couldn’t imagine Sespian continuing to accept his position once he learned the truth about his parentage. Maybe Sicarius would be happy, or at least willing to smile, if he and Sespian could walk off somewhere and spend time together, not as emperor and imperial assassin, but as father and son.
“We better work on making that happen then.” Amaranthe handed him the open notebook. “Can you, with your superhuman anatomy, read this page?”
Sicarius accepted the book. “The Bertvikar entry?”
“Yes.”
“Bertvikar acquired the mineral rights in a… freehold estate.” He lifted his eyes.
“Ownership in perpetuity rather than for a fixed time period,” Amaranthe explained while she drummed her fingers on her thigh. Mineral rights? She wasn’t sure whether to find that interesting or dismiss it as a dead-end. Buying mineral rights might be what had brought the lake to a Forge person’s attention in the first place, but she couldn’t imagine all these wealthy people holding their meeting in some dingy mine shaft. “Which island is it, do you know? Those are map coordinates listed in the entry rather than the metes and bounds way of defining things that most of the parcels down here use.”
Sicarius gazed out upon the lake, running calculations in his head perhaps, as he considered the mouth of a river and a few dark islands silhouetted against the predawn sky. He flipped to a map at the beginning of the notebook. “It’s a trapezoid between Forestcrest, Arrowcrest, Marblecrest, and Duncrest Islands.”
“Between? As in the land under the lake?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve heard of mining dry lake beds, but how would they pull minerals out from under all that water?” Amaranthe scratched her head. “It must have to do with the hot springs. The same power the military academy is researching could push minerals to the surface.”
Sicarius handed her the notebook. “It is unlikely this has anything to do with the meeting.”
“I know. I’ll keep looking. I—did you say Marblecrest Island?”
“Yes.”
Amaranthe switched from drumming her fingers on her thigh to drumming them on the open pages of the book. “Pabov said there was a Marblecrest Island, but I’d dismissed it as being too blatant a choice for a secret meeting, given that they’re Ravido’s allies. Of course, it’s not widely known that Forge has a link to the Marblecrests.” It wasn’t even widely known that Forge existed, Amaranthe reminded herself. “We didn’t know anything about it until a couple of weeks ago. Maybe it’s not such a stretch.”
Sicarius grunted noncommittally.
“You don’t think it’ll be that obvious?”
“No.”
“We might as well check,” Amaranthe said. “How do you feel about taking a morning row out to Marblecrest Island?”
The second grunt was even less enthused than the first.
Chapter 18
Dawn wasn’t a good time to knock on someone’s door, especially not when that someone was the Turgonian emperor and not overly fond of the person doing the knocking. Yet Maldynado stood outside the captain’s cabin, with his fist raised. The steamboat had turned off the Goldar River earlier that night and would reach Lake Seventy-three before long. This might be Maldynado’s last chance to leave the emperor with a good, or at least amenable, impression of him. He’d also, after doing some mental wrestling with himself, had decided that Sespian would be better for Amaranthe than Sicarius.
Maldynado knocked.
Not many seconds passed before the door opened. Darkness bathed the interior, and Maldynado, standing next to a lantern on the exterior of the cabin, didn’t see anyone at first. After a moment, his eyes adjusted and he picked out a dim shape.
“Sire?” Maldynado said. “I came to see if… uhm, Yara said I should talk to you.” Not exactly, but that might get him an invitation in.
“I see,” Sespian said.
That didn’t sound inviting. Maldynado was trying to think of something else to say when a match flared to life inside.
Sespian set a dagger down on a table and lit a lamp. It wasn’t Sicarius’s black dagger, but a more mundane blade.
“Sit,” Sespian offered and took a seat of his own, one where he could reach the weapon.
Maldynado sat on the opposite side of the table, leaning against the far armrest, so Sespian wouldn’t think he wanted anything to do with the dagger. So few people had ever thought of him as dangerous that it seemed odd that Sespian considered him a threat. Though maybe he’d simply answered the door holding a dagger to be on the safe side. For all they knew, stowaways remained on board.
“What is it?” Sespian wasn’t yawning or rubbing his eyes like a man who’d been sleeping. More likely, he’d been lying awake worrying.
“I heard… Ah, Yara mentioned… Sire, if you’d like any advice on pursuing ladies, and getting them to pursue you back, I’m an expert on—” Maldynado stopped. Sespian wouldn’t be impressed by bragging. This might be a time for modesty. “I’ve won the hearts of a few ladies over the years and could answer questions on the opposite sex if there’s anything you want to know. Not that you need advice. I mean, I really don’t know how much, er, experience you have.” Maldynado decided he better stop talking. A red hue colored Sespian’s cheeks, but he had no idea if anger or embarrassment caused it. “I thought I’d see if you had any questions. That’s all.”
“Are you… suggesting I seduce Brynia for information on the meeting?”
“What? No. Yara said you liked the boss.”
Sespian stared.
“Amaranthe,” Maldynado clarified.
The clarification didn’t cause Sespian’s gaze to blossom with enlightenment. Yara, he recalled, had been guessing that Sespian had an interest in Amaranthe. Some feminine hunch. Perhaps such a hunch shouldn’t have driven Maldynado to knock on the emperor’s door at dawn.
“I see I’m
mistaken.” Maldynado stood. Bad idea. This had been a bad idea. “I’ll just leave you alone.”
He crossed the cabin, and his hand was on the doorknob, when Sespian said, “Wait.”
“Sire?”
“Perhaps… ” Sespian’s hard gaze had faded, replaced with a hint of youthful uncertainty. “Sergeant Yara loathed you a week ago. Now she watches as you leave a room.”
“She does? Er, of course she does.” Curiosity intruded upon Maldynado’s ability to leave the last sentence alone. “In what way does she watch? Like she’s regretting my absence, or… ?”
“Like she’s trying to figure you out.”
“Oh.” Maldynado didn’t know how much of a victory that was. He often watched Sicarius the same way. Some people were just cursed strange.
“Like she wants to figure you out,” Sespian said, “because she might find something there worth discovering. She doesn’t strike me as a woman to care overmuch about a pretty face. That you’re swaying her opinion of you leads me to believe you might truly have some expertise with women. That is something that eludes me.”
“Having a pretty face always helps,” Maldynado said, heading for the chair again, “but if you’re an idiot who says all the wrong things, it won’t save you.”
Sespian winced.
“Not that you’re an id—that thing, Sire. I mean, I haven’t heard you speak to the boss much.” Now Maldynado winced. Speaking of saying the wrong things… . He leaned back and took a deep breath. “That’s not important. Let’s establish a starting point. Has she suggested she might be interested in you?” It was, after all, entirely possible that Books was wrong about Amaranthe and Sicarius sharing some sort of attachment. Books certainly didn’t have a noteworthy personal record when it came to romance. And if Amaranthe had shown interest in Sespian, Maldynado could understand the kid mooning over her. Blood-spattered military fatigues or not, Amaranthe did, when she wanted to, have a way of gazing into one’s soul, seemingly without artifice or evasion, and convincing a man that her interests were his interests as well.
Sespian slumped against the backrest of his chair. “No. She said I was too young.”
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