A knock came on her bedchamber door.
“Darling?”
It was William’s voice. She sighed. Now that the arrangement with the Traders had been finalized, she had looked forward to a day or two free of care before she decided how best to deal with her husband and his toad of a lover. Rafe—she found it distasteful even to think the name—was a crawling kind of pestilence, cunning and oblivious at once, with a temper like fatwood and the political sense of a small green salad, and yet, without her understanding how, he had managed to foil her every effort to rid herself of him. She had insulted him, she had belittled him, she had transformed his work for her husband into drudgery so far beneath him it could do nothing but drive him away, but it seemed to have had the opposite effect; not only had he yet to abandon the duke, but he appeared more and more often, wandering about the house at all hours, a dreary, moping lump in his ridiculous long hair and his filthy robe and his whiny moods.
William spoke again. “Might I trouble you for a few moments of your time?”
It was far too early for civilized conversation—the clock hadn’t even struck noon—but his voice was suffused with urgency, and, given his erratic behavior of late, it would probably be unwise not to receive him. The gods only knew what he might do if left to plot his own course. “Of course,” she called to her husband. “Take as many moments as you like. They are all yours, after all.”
She sat up, snatched The Tyrant’s Dialogue from her bed stand—it was often convenient, she had found, to present the appearance of having been interrupted at something fascinating, so she kept books in various places around the house in which to seem engrossed—opened its thick pages, and looked up with a distracted smile as the oaken door, heavy with dignity, swung open.
“Diane, I’m sorry to disturb you at such an ungodly hour, but—”
“Not at all.” She gestured serenely with the book. “The choice between The Tyrant’s Dialogue and an actual dialogue with my husband is no choice whatsoever.”
“Then listen,” he said, suddenly gleeful. It was obvious he had to restrain himself from running to the bed, and she was filled with a sudden fear that he would jump onto the mattress and bounce up and down. But Rafe’s poisonous effect on him, thank the gods, had not been quite so deleterious to his dignity—not yet, at any rate. He simply sat very close to her, took the book gently from her, and folded her hands in his. “I have extraordinary news. For you, for me, for Tremontaine, for the City, for the Land!”
Diane sat up, hiding her unease behind a smile alight with excitement. “What is it?” Why, he was positively grinning. He had to be aware how silly he must look; it was appalling that he couldn’t have the decency to make at least a show of embarrassment.
She let it go. If she had been the kind of woman who allowed herself to be distracted by everything that appalled her, she would never have accomplished anything in the world.
William kissed her and sat back. She let amused forbearance play on her lips. “My noble husband, I trust that at some point you will move from telling me that you have something to tell me to actually telling me.”
He ducked his head. “All right, then. It concerns trade.” Her face showed mild interest. “And chocolate.”
As dismay filled the pit of her stomach like lead, she clapped her hands with just the right degree of girlish joy. “Do tell me, William, tell me at once!” Better to get it over with so she could consider what machinations would be necessary to countervail the damage her husband’s enthusiasm might do. After all she’d gone through to set up her arrangement with the Traders, was he going to knock it down—and Tremontaine with it—by upsetting the balance of the City’s chocolate trade?
No. He could not be permitted to destroy the house she had gone to such lengths to shore up. Her house, now, as much as his.
He took her hands again and looked into her eyes with a joy that was almost nauseating. “To begin with, this will be nothing you don’t already know and find tedious, but I suspect that in truth I am not nearly as clever as you about this sort of thing, and I must keep it straight as I go.”
She pressed his fingers gently. “You are forgiven everything.”
“You are too kind.” To her surprise, he bent his head to kiss her fingers, an old, loving gesture of the kind that used to mark their days. As if he thought nothing had changed between them. Perhaps he did. “So. Trade in the Land has for the most part consisted of importing goods from other places and either using it or selling it on.”
Oh by the Seven Hells. “Yes.”
“This opens us up to vulnerabilities of all kinds, the most recent example of which is that disastrous chocolate shortage.”
Diane disengaged her hands and settled back among her lacy pillows. “If you please, don’t remind me. The sooner that unfortunate episode can be allowed to fade into the blessed mists of time, the better.”
“But to forget it, darling, is to leave ourselves open to its repetition.” The concern in his voice made her want to strangle him. “I, for one, am of the opinion that there was no small element of extortion involved. Did you not notice that as soon as Davenant persuaded the Council to reduce the tariff, a new ship landed?”
The lead in Diane’s stomach began to warm, to spread like thick liquid through the rest of her body. Her husband might understand nothing beyond the edges of the truth, but that only made him all the more dangerous. “I did,” she said cautiously, “but I do believe it is possible to read too much into a coincidence.”
He shrugged. “Either way, wouldn’t it be better to eliminate our dependence on the Traders entirely?”
Diane’s heart stopped beating. She willed it to start again. “How on earth—” She felt faint. “How might we do that?”
“I’ll tell you, but you must promise to listen to the end.”
She raised an expressive eyebrow. “Is there something you fear I’ll find objectionable?”
“Hardly. I just— Well. I’ve spoken to you before about Rafe and his ideas about the earth orbiting the sun.”
She kept any hint of resentment out of her voice. “It all sounded most interesting, if incomprehensible. But that’s the University for you.”
“Rafe has a friend, a young genius by all accounts, who’s taken those ideas and applied them in a completely new way to the art of navigation.”
She saw at once what he intended, and the mass of lead solidified again in her stomach, cold. “You intrigue me.” Her voice was steady. “Pray, go on.”
“If the merchants of our city learned to navigate to far shores—to make their way even to the land of the Traders—then could they not harvest raw chocolate for themselves? And bring it back here to sell?”
And to ruin us, she thought. “Oh my,” she said faintly. “What a thought!”
“Just think, Diane. It could transform commerce in the City, in the Land, in a way no one ever dreamed possible! Imagine if we opened up our borders not just to goods from other nations but to knowledge, to other ways of looking at the world, to—”
Diane emitted a peal of laughter she was barely able to keep free of hysteria. “William, you’re magnificent, but”—you? We? What would make him more pliable? Admonish him or be on his side? Quick, quick, decide—“we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves!”
“You don’t think it’s exciting,” he said.
The look on his face was so crestfallen it filled her with a desire to slap him. For the Land’s sake, he was a duke. Dukes did not pout.
“It’s not that, not that at all.” She gripped his hands on the silk counterpane. “Why, exciting doesn’t even begin to describe the possibilities! But possibilities, darling, have two edges.”
He looked away from her toward the window. “Exactly the reaction Rafe thought you’d have.”
Diane turned to stone.
Finally: “Your secretary presumed to counsel Tremontaine on his relations with his wife?” She heard her voice rise on the last word. Careful, careful. She mu
st not lose control.
“He did. And he was right.”
Leave this subject at once. Tread safer ground. “My love, I cannot help thinking the way I think.” She pitched her voice to apology. “Yes, the knowledge we gained might lead to phenomenal advances of all sorts, but what if not all of these advances were conducive to the good of Tremontaine?”
He shook off her hands. “The good of Tremontaine, the good of Tremontaine—damn the good of Tremontaine; I’m sick of considering the good of Tremontaine!”
A shock of red heat dimmed her vision, filled her voice with shocked incredulity. “You’re sick of considering the good of Tremontaine?”
An awful silence.
Her vision cleared, and she saw his eyes wide, his mouth open.
At once she wiped the fury off her face, replaced it with loving concern, reached for his cheek.
He swatted her hand aside. “Fine, then,” he said, and his smile was ice. “Damn the good of Tremontaine and damn you, too, Diane. Damn your politicking and your maneuvering and your cold, cold heart. For seventeen years I’ve acted the dutiful pawn in your game of Shesh, because you play it so much better than any of us, and it’s always been to my advantage, but I swear to you, in this moment I don’t give a minnow for my advantage, because there is passion in my life again, there is fire, and you will not quench it, no matter how much frost you heap on it!”
Disaster. She breathed faster so her cheeks would redden. One hand strayed to her bosom; the other grasped his shoulder. “Husband, you are not the only one in whom passion stirs at this moment.” She thickened her tones. “Seeing you in such a state rouses in me—”
“Oh, yes, Diane, yes, yes, how perfect!” The bitterness in his laugh! “Cold reason cannot bend me to your will, so you feign hot fervor instead, while inside ticks the same grinding metal clockwork, lubricated with acid, that has served you for a heart since the day you were born!”
She reached a beseeching hand up to him, only to see him raise his own hand to her, poised to strike; stare at her with horror, his sides heaving; and fling himself from the bed to lope, cursing, from the room.
A great cry began deep within Diane, and all her strength was not enough to contain it. For seventeen years, she had not wept a single tear that had not been in pursuit of her goal—not since a certain dreadful day—because if she had learned one thing very, very early in her life, it was that tears availed nothing, nothing at all, and every moment spent releasing them was a moment spent running toward destruction, and that was not her path, it was not, it was not, and she bit into her lower lip so hard it grew paler than her cheeks, and then she bit harder and shut her eyes tight and made her hands into fists and dug her nails into her palms and drew blood and bore down with everything she had and everything she was and pressed, and pressed, and pressed. Finally, the almost unbearable tension surrendered just enough for her to know she had conquered once more the forces that sought to draw her down into the deep, and they were not invincible, she had triumphed, and she released her fingernails from her palms and her teeth from her lip and felt the blood rushing back where it belonged, under her control, and she opened her eyes and began to breathe again.
She sat quite still until for five minutes together she had been utterly, utterly calm. Then she rose, wiped the blood from her palms with a handkerchief, and rinsed them in the basin until the water ran clear.
What a fool she had been, to think safety so cheaply bought.
A hired sword of Tremontaine knew where he belonged.
Leave it to Samuel, the first swordsman, to fight the showy exhibition bouts and lead the men to swoon and the women to call for their smelling salts; he found fame and adulation gratifying. As far as Reynald was concerned, the more attention you called to yourself, the more your freedom was restricted. Unobserved, as the second swordsman, he could accomplish all sorts of things Samuel would turn up his nose at—no, scratch that—all sorts of things Samuel had probably never heard of.
Let the first swordsman strut about like a popinjay. Reynald preferred the shadows.
So it was to the shadows that he kept as he made his way across the old bridge under a quilt of clouds spreading slowly and silently over the scatter of stars in the twilit sky, to the place where shadows cloaked all those who sought their protection:
Riverside.
She must not discover the identity of Ben’s killer, the Duchess had said of the Balam Trader girl. Her insinuation that he achieve this by means other than the sword, he could safely ignore. Political maneuvering was for the Hill. Reynald did not have the patience for it.
He kept his eyes open—his hand resting lightly on the hilt of the sword hanging from his left hip—for the dark woman dressed as a boy and carrying a sword. Ridiculous.
He strode past mewling lovers, past sauntering pickpockets, past whores fanning themselves while they flirted with the linkboys, to the house of the redheaded wench where Ixkaab Balam seemed to be found most frequently these days. But he could see from the dark, unshuttered windows that no one was there. Nor was she at the Maiden’s Fancy. Nor at the Three Dogs.
Bah. The evening was lengthening. Perhaps she was in the Balam compound, where he could not go. He would return tomorrow. Reynald hastened to the establishment where his other errand took him. It was too dark by now to see the sign over the door, but the figures painted on it, he knew, had long faded past the point of recognition anyway.
The proprietor, a jolly, middle-aged man with one leg that stopped at the knee, supporting himself on a crutch, looked up to attend to the new arrival. “Greetings! And how are you this fine evening?”
Reynald held out a piece of foolscap on which was scratched a single word. The shopkeeper, after understanding that his visitor did not intend to do him the courtesy of stepping any closer, clumped merrily over to him—a customer was a customer, after all, rude or otherwise—his free hand outstretched for the paper. When he read it, however, his brow wrinkled in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
At last Reynald smiled. “I think you do.”
“Sir,” said the proprietor, his eyes wide, “I assure you, I don’t. I don’t know what this means. Perhaps you misunderstand the nature of my shop.” A big smile. “But you have a pleasant evening, all the same.”
He turned to swing back to his counter, but before he reached his destination, the point of Reynald’s blade pressed into his back, a tiny spot of blood blooming around it.
“Why don’t you try that again?” The proprietor shuddered, but those who knew the second swordsman of Tremontaine well would have called his tone affable.
A long silence. Then, unwillingly, the man spat, not looking around, “Fine. But I don’t want to see you in here ever again.”
“What you want,” said Reynald, “is none of my concern.”
A little while later, he left the shop whistling, his eyes light and his step jaunty. Drawing blood always put him in a better mood.
Rafe was being driven mad by his own hair.
He kept binding it up so it would stay out of his face as he worked, the flame of the single candle on his desk dancing dim light onto the foolscap. But before you could say “sword,” the ribbon would be in his left hand again, his thumb and fingers working it feverishly as his goal drew nearer and nearer, and the light on the paper, foiled by the fall of dark hair, would grow even dimmer. “Yes,” he muttered to himself as the sound of his pen scratching did what little it could to fill the silence of the room, “yes, take the inverse of the opposite angle as the . . . and then multiply it by the result from the previous . . .”
For he had taken measurements of the heavenly bodies again, and he could taste success like the finest chocolate on his tongue. “No, no, not that one.” He laid the ribbon down, shuffled through the pile of paper in front of him, scanning each page quickly, until he found the number he had been searching for. “And then fill in this equation with . . . yes . . . yes . . .”
His eyes grew wide as t
he pen scratched faster and faster, and he stopped breathing for a moment, and at last his hand was still.
“Yes!”
He had done it.
On the ink-smeared pages before him lay proof that Rastin was wrong, that de Bertel was wrong, that the basis for all astronomy for the last two hundred years was wrong.
The earth orbited the sun.
The sun, not this planet he and his friends trod, was the center of the world.
He leaped up, knocking his chair over. “Praise be to the gods and the demons and the Horned King!” He raised his arms high above his head, grinning, his hands fists, and danced around the room like a boy of ten who’d just won a kickball tournament. “Take that, Rastin!” He drew an invisible sword and, leaping forward, stabbed the air in front of him. “Take that, de Bertel!” The air suffered another wound. “Take that, Chauncey! Martin! Featherstone!” His laughter in the empty room was full and rich.
And now to tell Will. Will, who would be just as deliciously thrilled as he was, would vibrate just as much with joy, would—
An insistent knocking at the door. Rafe gave the air the coup de grâce owed a worthy opponent and tripped, bubbling, to the door.
Where Will stood in the doorway.
Without even giving Rafe time to greet him, he strode into the room, swallowed Rafe in his embrace, and kissed him, hot, fierce, as if his lips would devour the younger man’s. He put his hand behind Rafe’s head, his fingers clutching the scholar’s hair in a fist, and held it immobile.
Finally he broke the embrace.
“I feel,” said Rafe breathlessly, “that I ought to make a wry comment.” Instead he returned Tremontaine’s kiss, his own lips just as hungry, and walked him toward the bed, tripping against the heavy frame and falling onto the mattress, his lover heavy on top of him. Will reared, his hands on Rafe’s shoulders; Rafe tried weakly to pull himself up, but neither the duke’s need nor his own would permit it. A voracious coupling, this, teeth and fingernails and lips and tongues and hair and bodies yielding to each other as they moved, the guttering candle finally dying and leaving them to surrender to the dark and to each other. Eventually, after a cry from one and a cry from the other, all was quiet and all was still.
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