The duke sat up and leaned against the headboard, which squeaked. The bed had come with the room too (one reason Rafe had agreed to pay more for this room; the other was the fact that it had a door that could be bolted), and Rafe had tried to fix the damn squeaking before, to no avail.
“It’s—it’s something I’ve never experienced before,” the duke said tentatively. He took one of Rafe’s hands, still holding a lump of cheese, and kissed it. “I only know that I want to continue to experience it—to experience you. ‘This wild boy / Whose lips sweeten my own.’”
Now the duke was quoting Audley at him! This was unheard of. Rafe disliked the strange fluttering he felt in his belly and tried to shrug it off. “I’m not from the Hill,” he said, an edge to his voice. “Is that what you like about me? Perhaps you’d like it even better if we met down by the docks.”
The duke let Rafe’s hand go and made a frustrated noise. “Stop it. You are a brilliant man, Rafe. You are a scholar. This is what I admire about you! And you don’t treat me like a noble to curry favors from, either. That is rare.”
Rafe looked at the duke, whose face was turning red with emotion. It was endearing: this man with gray at his temples, complimenting him so fiercely. Impulsively, he threw the remaining bread and cheese onto the floor and kissed the duke again, pressing his mouth roughly against Will’s, scraping the night’s growth of his beard against the duke’s cheek. Their kiss deepened, and Rafe slid his arms around the duke, beginning to press him down onto the thin mattress again, but Will said, “Wait. There’s something I must say.”
Rafe whispered, “What? What could be more important than this?” His hand slid down Will’s body.
Will groaned but said, “Wait. Stop. Rafe, I can’t stay. I’m sorry, but I’ve stayed too long already. I have an engagement this afternoon, and my wife will have my head if I miss it.”
Rafe flopped onto his back with a bitter sigh. “The duchess.”
“In a way, that’s what I wanted to discuss with you,” Will said seriously.
“The duchess?” Rafe said again, this time with surprise.
“Well . . . Tremontaine, I suppose.” The duke winced. “It pains me to say this, but I have certain responsibilities that will prevent me from visiting you as often as I’d like. And I’d like to visit you often.”
At that moment a drop of water plummeted from the ceiling directly onto the duke’s forehead, causing the duke to start in surprise.
“Damn it,” Rafe muttered. “That leak!” He glared up at the ceiling, noting that the piece of oilcloth he had tacked over the offending crack had come loose. He stood up on the bed, causing it to sway dangerously, and reached up to press the tack holding the oilcloth against the ceiling back in. He sat down again, pulling the sheets up. “You were saying?” he said, somewhat embarrassed.
The duke gave him a gentle smile. “My dear,” he said softly.
Rafe’s breath caught in his throat. My dear? Rafe tried to shake off the disturbingly warm feeling rising in his chest, but it was confoundedly difficult, especially when the duke was gazing at him with those blue eyes.
“I want to see you as much as possible,” the duke continued. “Every day. But I cannot come here as often as I’d like, and you cannot simply visit Tremontaine House without a reason.”
“I can think of a few reasons,” Rafe said suggestively.
William smiled. “An acceptable reason.”
“One that the duchess will accept?”
“That too.”
Rafe scowled up at the oilcloth. He could already see the rainwater pooling in the center of it. He would have to move his bed over so that it blocked the desk again. Otherwise he’d have to sleep with a bucket on one side of the mattress, which he had done before and concluded was worse than having to sit on the bed rather than the chair to use the desk.
“Does the duchess object to me?” Rafe asked bluntly. He was a merchant’s son, and his knowledge of nobles was largely limited to matters of business, but it was widely believed—or rumored, at least—that those who lived on the Hill viewed the bonds of matrimony a bit differently than Middle City types like Rafe’s family. Rafe had assumed that Tremontaine was free to do as he wished with whom he wished, but now he wondered if the duchess had more influence than most noble women. Come to think of it, Rafe had heard of the Duchess Tremontaine recently, but he couldn’t put his finger on where she had come up.
“I doubt my wife even knows about you,” William responded, looking faintly horrified at the idea.
Rafe thought it best to avoid mentioning the fact that he had insulted the duchess in her own home a few days ago. “What would be an acceptable reason for me to come to Tremontaine House?” he asked.
William leaned toward him, a boyish delight suffusing his face with an eager glow. “My current secretary, Tolliver, has been with me my whole life—he was my father’s secretary before me. He’s begun to forget things—appointments and such—and he’s simply not as sharp as he used to be. I need someone younger on my staff, and I think you would be perfect for the position. If you become my junior secretary, you can learn all the ins and outs of society, and we can be together every day. It wouldn’t even be unheard of for you to have a small apartment at Tremontaine House, eventually.”
Rafe was speechless. The idea of taking a job as a nobleman’s secretary was something he had never considered. He had come to the University for the pursuit of knowledge, with the goal of eventually opening his own school. He had come here to avoid the life of a merchant—a life of bargaining and warehouses and waiting tensely for shipments to arrive or for word that those shipments had been lost. Rafe had a sudden vision of himself sitting at a secretary’s desk in William’s library, fingers stained with ink, as he wrote endless notes to various lords and Council members accepting this or declining that invitation. The thought of it was so strange that Rafe had no idea how he should feel about it.
He remembered, then, when he had last heard of the Duchess Tremontaine: at home, his parents had been talking about her. There had been something going around the countinghouses of the Middle City about the duchess’s power to set fashions on the Hill, and what the Hill folk suddenly wanted, of course, affected the merchants. But was it that her influence was declining, or that it was on the rise? Rafe couldn’t recall exactly what it was, and for once he cursed himself for not paying closer attention to merchants’ gossip.
“What do you think?” William asked when Rafe continued to be silent.
“I—I don’t know.” If he became William’s junior secretary, their relationship would change. Would it become a society-sanctioned, look-the-other-way affair, in which the Tremontaine servants would come to know the details of their trysts while keeping mum about them in public? If they did, surely the duchess would discover them sooner or later—and Rafe was inclined to believe it would be sooner.
“It would solve everything,” the duke said. “We could be together. We could call for a proper luncheon to be made for us. In a few months you wouldn’t have to live in these leaky rooms anymore. Come join my staff. You won’t regret it.”
“You’re asking me to give up on my dreams,” Rafe said.
The duke frowned. “No! I would never ask that of you. I share your dreams, Rafe.”
“And what of your promise to convince the Board of Governors to reconsider that vote?” Rafe asked pointedly. “How is that coming along?”
The duke was taken aback. “I told you it would take some time.”
“I don’t have time!” Rafe snapped. “I’ve been working for this my whole life. I’m in the middle of something truly significant right now—it is the end of Rastin and his pigheaded regurgitators—it’s going to be groundbreaking, and now I’m going to have to wait for a year while you attempt to force those idiots on the board to admit they made a mistake? What if you can’t succeed? No one will attend a school founded by a second-rate University scholar with no connections.”
William
’s face became increasingly gloomy. Unwilling to confront the duke’s disappointment, Rafe threw off the sheet and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have time to be anyone’s secretary.”
The floor was cold and a bit scratchy beneath his bare feet. Rafe reached down for the pile of clothing he had discarded earlier that morning, when he had led William into his bedroom and shut the door between them and the rest of his roommates. He pulled on his shirt and breeches, tucked his shirt in before reaching for his scholar’s robe. Behind him, he heard the duke dressing as well.
“You have connections,” William said. “But you seem to have no faith in them.”
Rafe turned to face the duke. He was so tall he made Rafe’s room look as if it had been miniaturized. He did not fit here: He was all lean grace and aristocratic bearing. Rafe hated making this beautiful man look so glum.
“You don’t understand,” Rafe said miserably.
The duke took the few steps toward him and for a moment Rafe thought he was going to kiss him, but he only reached for the handle of the door. “I’ll see myself out,” the duke said. “I hope you’ll reconsider.”
Sheaves Lane was even narrower than most of the Riverside streets Kaab had walked through on her way to the Three Dogs, and the overhanging buildings in combination with the drizzle made her feel as if she had stepped into twilight. There were only a few buildings on the crooked little lane, which dead-ended in a three-story house with a placard in the front bow window that advertised a price so low for one night’s stay that Kaab was sure it was a front for some kind of vice.
Next to the house was the sign of the Three Dogs, which depicted, logically enough, three dogs cavorting around a pint of ale. One of the dogs was black, the second brown, and the third a color that might have once been red but had long since faded to rust. On the other side of the Three Dogs, separated by an alley, was a sagging, half-timbered building with shuttered windows. The Three Dogs itself had only one small window next to its front door, which was closed, and little could be seen through the dirty glass. It did not look like a place suitable for Tess; it looked like a den for thieves and criminals. Indeed, this entire street could have been plucked from any number of legends of Riverside that had fascinated Kaab on the long voyage across the sea. She itched to go inside, but she knew it would be smarter if she exercised the skills she had learned in the service to get a better lay of the land first. She well remembered her uncle Ahkitan’s advice to avoid putting oneself in an unfamiliar and potentially dangerous place without first noting the locations of at least two exits. It was unlikely that the Three Dogs had only one entrance, and the alley looked promising. Without hesitating—because hesitation drew more suspicion than confidence—Kaab continued down Sheaves Lane and turned into the alley.
Though the street had been paved, the alley had not, and she skirted a couple of dank puddles that smelled as if someone had emptied their chamber pots into them. Wondering yet again why the people of this city allowed their streets to become so fouled, she was grateful for the thick soles of her new boots. She looked up and saw a couple of windows in the walls above, both dark, before the alley opened into an empty, muddy yard. It was hemmed in on two sides by the walls of neighboring buildings, but the rear of the yard overlooked the river itself. A broken iron railing leaned precariously over the edge, and steps descended from one corner.
Kaab approached the steps and peered over, seeing a steep, uneven flight of stone stairs. At the bottom a narrow wooden dock extended into the river, where a couple of small boats were moored. Across the steely expanse of the water the City rose into the misty midday. The dark stone towers and ancient, grand halls of the University were washed by the rain into shades of cloud and dusk and shining slate, while the river continued north in a wide, lazy curve.
Kaab turned back to the Three Dogs, where a lean-to at the rear of the tavern sheltered several canvas-covered cords of wood and the tavern’s back door—her sought-after second exit—and a slightly less grimy window. She headed closer to see if she could get a look inside, and as she approached the lean-to, she noticed that one of the woodpiles didn’t look quite right. In fact, it didn’t look like a pile of wood at all. Kaab’s pulse quickened as she knelt down inside the lean-to beside the suspicious-looking shape and reached out to pull back the canvas.
She was right: It was not a pile of wood. It was a body.
She uncovered the hand first—a man’s hand—and then gently peeled the canvas back to reveal a torso dressed in a wet but otherwise unremarkable tunic, a sturdy neck, and a face that she recognized. It was Ben.
Kaab remembered him instantly. She recalled the gleam in his eyes and the grin on his lips as he fought her. Those lips were colorless slashes on a pale face now, his eyes half slit to reveal only the whites. Damp strands of hair clinging to his ghastly cheeks as well as his wet clothing suggested that his was the body that had been recovered from the river. This was the reason that Tess had come to this grim corner of Riverside. She had come for Ben.
Kaab wondered how he had died. Had he been killed in a fight? He was Tess’s protector, after all, so that would make sense, but there were no signs of violence on his body. Had he taken an accidental tumble into the river and drowned? Kaab didn’t know him well, but he had been light on his feet when they fought, and he was a healthy man who lived on an island in the middle of a river. She studied his body more closely. The shirt he wore was made of fine linen, the plentiful fabric bunched up in numerous folds and stained by the river water . . . which made it easy to overlook the small dark spot on his chest. She looked around, making sure the yard was still deserted, and then reached out and pushed up the shirt. The pale flesh of his chest was punctured by a small wound, as if someone had thrust a knife in through his back. Kaab’s heartbeat quickened. She put her hands beneath Ben’s body and heaved the stiff corpse on its side and then over to its stomach.
She peeled up the shirt to reveal a bigger wound: It was a thin, deep cut, clearly made by a dagger, judging by its shape. And it had been made with precision, angled in a way that would drive the blade up beneath Ben’s ribs and straight into his heart.
At the end of last summer, Kaab had made a decision that put her in a lakeside Tullan courtyard under the light of a full moon. She could smell the cool, slightly damp scent of the night air in her nostrils even now, mixed with the jacaranda perfume that the women of that house wore. Instead of Ben’s corpse on the ground before her, she saw the curved form of a woman crumpled on her belly. She felt the hard flat tiles beneath her knees as she knelt beside the body. The bright light of the moon silvered the wound on the woman’s back, the exact shape of the obsidian daggers that Kaab and every person in the service carried with them. That had been an execution, and so was this.
How awful, and yet how horribly fitting: people killed in the same way here.
Kaab’s stomach heaved as if she were aboard a ship on the open ocean during a storm. She swallowed thickly, and Ben’s face swam into focus again. “May Ixchel guide you to the land of the dead,” she whispered in Kindaan, and then adjusted Ben’s shirt back into place before turning the corpse onto its back and re-covering it with the canvas.
The City was on the most distant edge of the Balams’ trading empire; it was supposed to be a quiet little nothing of a place where she could be out of the way until the consequences of her ill-advised Tullan adventure faded into distant memory. Listen to your aunt and uncle when you get there, her father had said with a pained expression before she was hustled aboard the ship that would cross the great sea. Follow the plan for once and don’t get into trouble if you want to keep your place in the service. Her aunt and uncle would not approve of what she was about to do, but Ixkaab Balam, first daughter of a first daughter of the greatest Trading family of the Kinwiinik, was not known for her prudence. She was known for her courage—or at least, her daring. She had learned from what had happened last autumn; she was wiser now,
but she was still herself.
Kaab left the lean-to with its canvas-covered corpse behind and headed back out the alley toward the front door of the Three Dogs.
The problem with the figures Rafe had given her, Micah realized, was that the artificial number of unity was incorrect. It should be zero, not this unnecessarily huge and complicated number listed in the appendix. That number created an inordinate amount of complications, forcing all sorts of calculations that in turn caused a ridiculous percentage of error. Micah wondered why the mathematicians who had been so excited about this table hadn’t been able to see this problem as clearly as she could. It reminded her of what had happened the other day at the lecture, when she had corrected the magister about the angles. In her mind, she could visualize the angles very clearly, like a curved slice out of the surface of a ball. It was beautiful, really, the way the angles would increase, like the crack in a doorway broadening bit by bit to let in more sunlight. And yet it seemed that the students in that class couldn’t see it the way she could.
Micah was startled out of her mathematical reverie when the door to their rooms opened, smacking into the corner of the wooden table where she was working. The pen she had been holding scratched against the paper, accidentally turning a number seven into a two. Rafe came inside holding a meat pie wrapped in a bit of greasy, brown paper. “Hungry, son?” he asked, holding it out to her.
“Oh yes!” she cried, reaching for the pie with an ink-stained hand. She had been working on her calculations all morning and had been so absorbed in them she hadn’t thought to eat, but as soon as she smelled the rich scent of lamb and gravy, her stomach growled. Before she took her first bite, though, she made sure to cross out the incorrect number two to prevent herself from making an error in the future.
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