The beautiful, wise-eyed redhead had told Kaab it would be two weeks until the forgeries she’d ordered were finished. But after witnessing Micah’s disarming, razorlike intelligence slice open the heart of a problem that generations of Local sailors had not been able (or not bothered) to solve, Kaab knew she had to move quickly. She judged that she had a very narrow window remaining in which she’d still be able to influence Micah’s future thinking on the topic. Even if she stopped Rafe and Micah permanently (and after Citlali, she wished never to see another assassination again), what was to stop some other Local scholar from reaching the same conclusions independently? On the other hand, if she could subtly misdirect Micah’s investigation, Kaab might buy her family months—even years—to stabilize the situation at home and neuter the political and financial consequences of any potential discoveries in the Land.
Tess lived on a dead-end street just south of the old bridge. Kaab had memorized the way there as a matter of course the first time she visited. She found herself subject to a number of speculative stares now, as then, though the reason had clearly changed. In her Local dress, with her heavy skirts and the hood of a rain cloak pulled to shadow her face, they had no way of knowing her for a foreigner. But they knew her for a woman. Apparently just that was enough to make small boys stick dirty fingers in their mouths and whistle before laughing and running away. Old men smoking foul-smelling sticks in leaky porticos leaned forward in their rockers and called her things like “filly” and described how they’d like to “pierce her cheeks” as she hurried past them. The young men did not even bother with euphemism. This lack of respect infuriated Kaab, but she couldn’t very well turn on each of them with her dagger, and so she tried instead not to listen.
And if this was what they did to her, how did a buxom, vivacious woman like Tess manage to walk the streets unmolested? Ben had died nearly two weeks ago. If the term “protector” had seemed abstract before, she understood its concrete purpose a little better by the time she climbed the stairs to Tess’s apartment, obsidian blade in hand.
“Who is it?” Tess’s voice sounded strained and tired. She spoke through the closed door and made no move to open it even a crack.
“It’s Kaab,” she said. “I wish to ask about the drawings—”
Kaab heard Tess push back two bolts before she unlocked and opened the door. She was wearing a long gown of white linen trimmed in ivory ribbon that looked very comfortable—no stays at all. Her sunset hair surrounded her face like the corona of an eclipse. Kaab felt undone, looking at her. She felt out of breath and full of fire. She thought of Citlali, months dead and as like this woman as the desert is like the sea, and could have cried.
“Are you planning to stick me with that pretty piece of black glass, or did you want to talk to me?”
Kaab realized that she still held the dagger in an open stance. She wrapped it in its sheath with hands that wanted very much to tremble and replaced it in her pocket.
“My apologies,” Kaab said. “I received too much attention on the way here.”
Tess laughed shortly. “Don’t let the boys get to you,” she said. “That’s just how Riverside goes.”
“It seems like a place fit for murderers and thieves.”
Tess’s cheeks quivered, as if she wanted to smile but couldn’t. “It is,” she said, and gestured for Kaab to enter. “So how is your inquiry going? Did you find out anything new about Ben?”
Kaab followed her inside, careful to keep her distance. She had hired Tess for a job, not for seduction. But she was starting to forget the difference.
“I’m sorry,” Kaab said. “It’s hard . . . it seems that no one will talk to a foreign girl about their murdered lover. He was a prostitute, your Ben?”
Tess sighed and walked over to her desk, where a fat tallow candle threw the brightest light in the small and curiously neat room. Tess’s white dress billowed behind her knees.
“Prostitute, rent boy, paid companion, whatever you want to call him. Someone probably killed him over a stupid, reckless mistake he made. I don’t know why I asked you. I don’t know why I expected anything different.”
Her reaction shocked Kaab. “But I told you, he was murdered from behind. It was no duel, no bar fight. He was your friend and protector. Don’t you want to know what happened?”
Tess shook her head. “What happened is that we live in Riverside. How do you think men die around here? In feather beds, surrounded by weeping grandchildren?”
Kaab looked away—and saw what she should have seen the moment she walked in, had she not been so distracted by the beautiful Tess.
The room was too neat, the desk clear of all but a few sketches. Last time, it had been a comfortable warren of papers, wax seals, and colored inks. Kaab thought Tess’s loose dress might be what she wore for sleeping. Yet she clearly hadn’t slept for quite some time.
“Maize flower,” Kaab said softly, in Kindaan. She continued in the Local tongue, “What has happened to you?”
Tess held herself very still for a moment. Then she lowered herself into the chair, dropped her head into her arms, and started to sob. Kaab rushed over and knelt.
“Someone ransacked the place,” Tess said. “They came and went through every damn thing. Smashed half of my drawers for the hell of it. Pulled up floorboards, and I hope the mice ate them for their trouble. Went through all my work. My seals, my Nobles’ Almanack—the latest edition! They destroyed most of my sketches. Tore them to shreds and left them around like snowflakes. All the ones I did for you are gone, Kaab. Destroyed.”
Only Tess’s continued sobs kept Kaab from rushing straight to the desk. She put her arm around the woman’s shoulders and held her close.
“And the originals?” she said, trying to keep the panic from her tone. “The charts of my people I gave you to copy—to alter?”
“I had those with me. I’d gone out that day to Tilney Market, to a good colorist’s shop I know, to match one of the blues that I couldn’t find down here. And I’m glad I did, because I hate to think what those dogs would have done to them.”
Kaab released her breath in a careful exhale. “You have them safe?” Tess nodded, pointing to a portfolio on the desk. “But they destroyed your work?”
“I’ll have to start again. I’m sorry, I know you wanted the forgery quick, but it will take at least another week, maybe longer.”
“Don’t beg pardon. I’m glad you’re safe, Tess.”
She would find a way to delay Micah and Rafe. Kaab shuddered to think what Uncle Chuleb and Aunt Saabim would have said if they knew. At least the originals hadn’t been caught in the destruction.
“But who was this?” Kaab said. “Did they take anything else?”
Tess shook her head. “They pawed through my dirty clothes, but they didn’t take a button. Not that I have much of value, but if a thief bothers to break in, you expect him to snatch a few things just for the trouble, you know? I worried that it might have something to do with you, Kaab. You were so secretive about this job.”
Kaab considered and rejected the idea. “I don’t believe so. My commission is . . . unusual. And secret, yes, but there are only a very few people who would understand what the numbers mean. What about Ben’s things?”
Tess jumped to her feet and walked to the shuttered window. She looked as though she wanted to hit something but was sure the blow would hurt her more than whatever she struck.
“Went through them, too,” she said finally. “Just like they went through my things. There wasn’t much. This isn’t—this shouldn’t be about him.”
“Why not?”
“Because if it’s his murderer, he already got Ben! And if it’s someone from Riverside, I’m still in my fortnight of mourning. They wouldn’t touch me. They should have respect for the dead.”
Kaab could now see how grief and lack of sleep had agitated Tess. But she couldn’t understand how someone would let such base emotions cloud their reason in a dangerous situation. She
rolled her eyes. “Perhaps they should, but not everyone honors the gods who gave us life. You need a protector now. Or these people might come back and do worse.”
Like steal my family’s charts, she thought, but had the good sense not to say.
But this only made Tess angrier. “Didn’t you hear? I’m in mourning! I won’t dishonor Ben like that ”
“Would you rather die? Or lose your home?”
Tess smacked the shutter behind her, which rattled ominously on rusted hinges. “Ben was my protector and I loved him, but he was no saint. I know he was up to something when he died. Maybe that’s what whoever it was who came thought too. But if that’s so, then they came up dry. And that’s probably the end of it.”
“It might not be,” Kaab said. “You’re connected to him. What if they come back?”
“Then I’ll get my own pretty dagger and tell those bastards to leave me alone.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“You know all about how I live in Riverside? A rich foreign Trader girl like you?”
“You’re not safe! Tess—it is very dangerous here.”
Tess’s eyes were twin volcanoes, spitting smoke. “I won’t have some wide-eyed foreigner coming in here with a borrowed sword and pretending she knows Riversiders better than I do. You learn to survive, or you die. I survive. I don’t need your help.”
“My help? I would help you if I could. Of course! But as you say, I’m no Local. My family has influence, but not in the way that you need. Ben is gone. Open your eyes, Tess! You need a new protector. Or are you too proud of your murderous Riverside to see the truth about it?”
Kaab knew that she shouldn’t have said it. But it was said, and it was true, and pride—her own vice—kept her from apologizing. It came as no surprise when Tess pointed to the door. No surprise, but for how much it hurt her.
“Get the hell out of here before I change my mind about your precious forgeries. Don’t come back until I send for you.”
“Tess—”
Tess turned her back. “Go.”
In the increasingly drunken, festival atmosphere of the Old Market after the foreigner’s latest, breathtaking fight, no one was inclined to take overmuch offense at a jarred elbow or a carelessly trod-upon foot. This was to the benefit of the man moving like driftwood through the crowd, bobbing in its eddies and lazy currents. He munched on a meat pie and apologized to everyone who he bumped with his conspicuously oversize, badly weighted sword. And somehow every bump, every heartfelt apology with an accent at once identifiably from the country and impossible to place more precisely, pushed him closer to the crowd that surrounded his redheaded quarry. She was the forger they called Tess the Hand, until recently under the protection of a rent boy named Ben. A young fellow who had made himself dangerous to the woman that this man served.
The bumbling man with the awkward blade had not seemed so foolish when he stepped neatly behind Ben in the open streets of the Hill and plunged his dagger between Ben’s ribs. Nor when he had searched his person, removed his jacket, and dumped the body into the river.
Tess the Hand was alive. But only because the man wanted to make sure of what she did and didn’t know. His employer would demand that. He didn’t think Tess knew where Ben had gone the night the young man had made the fatal mistake of underestimating his employer. To gain entry to a certain well-guarded house, Ben had carried a picture that he sent up to the swordsman’s employer. It had to have been drawn by Tess. The swordsman had been ordered to make sure that no copies of it existed, and that any who knew what they looked like be silenced quickly and efficiently.
Silence, in this case, might have meant death. But in all his years of service, Ben was the first man his mistress had ever ordered her swordsman to kill. He would certainly kill, if necessary, even a woman. But killing was merely the most certain method of silencing someone, not always the most efficient.
“What’s missing, Tess?”
“Maybe you dropped them.”
“Who’d steal some stupid piece of paper?”
“Is it a big job, Tess? Something from the Hill?”
“Ah, come on, give us a hint at least!”
“I can’t say a word,” said Tess quite loudly. “Except that it’s my head if I don’t find those sketches!”
The swordsman bumped heavily into a plump man staring despondently at the foam dregs clinging to the bottom of his tankard of beer. His apologies carried him within a few feet of Tess. He peered at her with as much curiosity as the rest of the crowd, but when he saw the bag she had left open beside her, he forgot himself for a moment and stilled. That bag had not been in her rooms five days ago. Which meant that it quite possibly could have contained the sketches that his mistress had sworn him to find and destroy.
It also meant that someone else in this crowd could have taken them before he had his chance.
Automatically, he adjusted the weight of his sword. He looked around, scanning the crowd more deliberately for signs of any pickpockets or clandestine swordsmen like himself. He found at least eight of the former. One of the latter he knew by reputation, and he would have had opportunity to talk to them. But did Applethorpe work for anyone who might take an interest in his employer’s affairs?
The swordsman re-collected himself and slouched again into the boorish country bravo. He hung back in the crowd. He waited for an opportunity to reveal itself while he contemplated how to present this latest development to his mistress. She would not be pleased.
He did not concern himself with his momentary lapse in demeanor. It did not occur to him that someone else might have noticed.
65 hours earlier
Diane, Duchess Tremontaine, returned late from a small ladies’ supper hosted by Sarah, Lady Perry, who had spent most of it being insufferable about her daughter’s recent betrothal. Josephine Perry was small and dark and had no conversation to speak of, but she was, nevertheless, to marry Rupert Vernay, Lord Filisand’s horse-mad heir—the very one Diane had hoped her own daughter, Honora, would catch if she were clever. Honora was a lost cause, run away with a minor nobleman named Campion and breeding little heirs in the country somewhere, and everyone knew it.
If that were not enough, there were the saffron hares. Lady Perry had had the effrontery to serve Diane’s own signature dish—though the desired sunset-gold color had shaded distinctly to orange due to the injudicious use of turmeric.
Every eye at the table had watched Diane as she took a delicate bite.
The duchess had smiled with a cruel sincerity. “Delicious! It is so lovely to see hares coming back into fashion at everyone’s tables. And adding the spices of far-off Uru does turn them a most delightful shade! A unique recipe, Sarah; you must get your cook to send it to me.”
That had been the only triumph of the night. Her dress had been, of necessity, made over from one she had worn to last year’s MidWinter balls. Trust flighty Aurelia Halliday to mention how much she had enjoyed seeing Diane dance at them and then look boldly and obviously around the table to see if anyone else had noticed the dig.
Even the Duke Tremontaine had not been spared.
Eager to repay Diane’s comment about the hares, Lady Perry had said, “Diane, I pray you will not think me indiscreet, but I feel we are such friends that I cannot fail to voice my concern. Is the duke quite well? I only ask because Lord Filisand mentioned, during one of our little family gatherings here—Josephine and young Rupert are so enamored that they can’t bear to spend more than a few days apart, and who are we to deny our children the happiness of young love, I’m sure you of all parents understand my sentiments—well, dearest Filisand said that your husband has been looking quite peaked at Council meetings lately. He even slept through a vote, and only woke to the applause when it passed!”
The ladies tittered. The duchess smiled graciously.
“Of course, we all understand that sleep may elude us from time to time for one reason or another”—Lady Aurelia snorted and tried to tur
n it into a sneeze—“but to hear that the dear duke has been looking off-color, and has even come late to several meetings, appearing flushed and breathless, well, that is quite another matter, and I wanted to set dear Filisand’s mind at ease by being able to report to him that Duke William is quite well, I hope?”
Diane prided herself on her control and poise and grace. But Lady Perry at full gloat would have tried Humility herself. Still, Diane had maintained a chilly, polite concern.
“How very kind of Lord Filisand,” Diane had merely replied. “You may certainly tell him that the duke is in excellent health, and hopes that young Rupert’s streak of gambling on losing horses will soon come to an end. One so hates to think of Lord Filisand having a moment’s anxiety on any subject, dear man.”
A little broad, perhaps, but effective. Lady Perry had not ventured anything more for the rest of the night.
But while the dinner had ended in stalemate instead of the threatened rout, Diane could not rest. When Tilson opened the door of Tremontaine House for her, she glanced at the clock. Nearly midnight. She could wait until morning, but her agitation was such that she felt it best to find her husband immediately. She had known that he had arrived late to two recent sessions of Council. She had not mentioned it to him because she had deemed the infractions minor. She had doubted that it would give rise to comment. But she had not counted on Lady Perry’s uncanny nose for trouble.
“Has my lord retired for the night?” she asked her maid.
Lucinda curtsied, her head bowed. “Yes, madam.”
Perhaps, had Lady Perry not spent an entire evening politely poking Diane’s tenderest spots with blunted knives, Diane would have noticed Lucinda’s brief hesitation before answering such a simple question. But her preoccupation with her husband was such that Diane determined to rouse him and impress upon him once again the importance of this tax meeting tomorrow, and of his standing on the Council. And when she felt sure that he was hers again, she would make love to him.
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