CHAPTER 19
I climbed the stairs to my rooms. I needed to write down everything I could remember about the Butcher. Any detail could make a difference.
Why had Reynald taken Kaiden with him? I’d have to ask him when he got back.
Twenty minutes later I stared at six sheets of paper. I had reproduced the Eliarde torture scene exactly. Word for word. Every gruesome detail.
How? I didn’t have a photographic memory. If I had, my college days would’ve been much easier.
What about something else from the books? Something random.
“I trusted you. I’ve known you since you were twelve years old.
You’ve stayed at our house.” Solentine’s voice rose, raw with anguish.
“You’ve eaten our food. My father taught you how to handle a dagger.
You stood right here, in this hall, and swore to aid my family in every battle!
” Solentine swept the bottle off his desk and hurled it against the wall.
It bounced and rolled across the floor, coming to rest at Everard’s feet.
“You were the closest thing I had to a brother.”
Word for word.
This was not normal. Why was this happening?
A faint slapping sound pulsed through the room.
This had to have some sort of significance. In most portal fantasies, heroines who popped into books wrote down everything they remembered in some secret diary so they wouldn’t forget it. Apparently, that was not going to be an issue for me.
Slap.
Maybe I just thought this was perfect recall. I didn’t have the book in front of me, so I couldn’t compare. But it seemed right, it felt right . . .
Slap-slap.
What the hell was that noise?
I stood up, leaning over the desk.
An eighteen-inch fish lay on the floor between the open door and my desk. It was white striped with orange and speckled with red and turquoise, and it resembled a bug-eyed red snapper with long fins.
Was I seeing things?
I held still and listened. The study was empty.
I looked over my shoulder. I could see my bedroom through the doorway, and it was empty, too.
I looked back. The fish was still there.
No strange sounds. No intruders lurking in the corners.
The fish flopped, slapping its tail against the floor.
I jerked back.
Slap. Slap-slap.
The sound of someone’s steps as they ran up the stairs came from the hall, and Will appeared in the doorway. He saw the fish and halted.
“Fish,” I told him.
“I see it.”
Oh good. I wasn’t imagining it.
“Where did it come from?” Will asked.
“I have no idea. It wasn’t there when I came in.”
“How did it get here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it magic?”
“I don’t know.”
The two of us stared at the fish.
Slap.
“Is this some sort of Kair Toren custom I don’t know about?”
Will shook his head. “Nothing I ever heard of.”
“Could you please put it out of its misery?”
Will walked over, pulled out his knife, and sliced through the back of the fish’s head. The fish went limp. I handed Will a rag and he wiped his knife on it.
“This is the second fish that’s showed up in my rooms. The first time I thought it was Kaiden, but he’s out with Reynald now.”
“Why would Kaiden leave fish in your rooms?” Will asked.
“Why does a twelve-year-old boy do anything?”
“Good point.”
We looked at the fish some more.
“Did you want something?” I asked.
Will pulled a small, sealed envelope from his tunic and passed it to me. “Someone rang the bell and left this by the door.”
While we were waiting on the salt ship to come in, Gort had rigged a rope and a bell to our front door. Unlike Derog, we didn’t have the manpower to have somebody sit by it. If one of us went out, we’d pull the rope when we came back, which rang the literal bell in our courtyard.
“I might have seen a priest walking away,” Will said. “It was hard to tell with the cloak, but I think they had a blade staff.”
Blade staffs were polearms, like spears and halberds, but while spears thrust and halberds chopped, the long, sharp blades at the end of the blade staffs were used to slice.
Rellas was a martial kingdom, and a lot of priests practiced martial arts.
The blade staffs served as preferred weapons for a number of denominations, so much so that when people saw one, they usually assumed a priest wielded it.
I tore the envelope open and pulled out the paper inside.
Drugh knows. He’s coming.
Shit.
Drugh was Filderon’s sort of son-in-law. He was trained as a knight, although never knighted, and he ran his own mercenary company, acting as both a commander and a broker. He was also bad news.
I showed the note to Will.
“Hireling damn it. I swear, we weren’t seen.”
“I believe you. We don’t know what happened. Maybe he told Drugh he would be meeting you.”
I had a little bit of ammunition against Drugh but nothing that would knock him off-balance if he was truly determined to avenge Filderon. The relationship between the two men was strained, and they barely talked, but according to the note, Drugh had decided to do something about it.
Who had left the note? Who would know that the Magnars had done away with Filderon, that Drugh was looking for them, and that they were here, in this house? I spun the roster of characters in my head. Maybe, possibly, the Shears, but delivering an anonymous note wasn’t Solentine’s style.
“What do you want to do?” Will asked.
“We sit tight until Reynald and your father come home. If Drugh shows up, don’t open the door.”
He nodded and turned to walk away.
“Will?”
“Yes?”
“Please take the fish with you.”
Reynald studied the note.
They’d been gone for two hours; so long that I was beginning to worry Drugh had jumped them somewhere.
When they’d finally returned, we had gathered in the kitchen.
Gort was sketching something on a large piece of paper spread on the kitchen table, while Kaiden tinkered with some small object in the corner, perched on a chair cross-legged.
“Are we paid up with Taryz?” Reynald asked.
“Yes.”
A few days ago I went up to Taryz Teahouse, passed a noma to the proprietor, and told her I wanted the “favorite customer” service.
If anyone left a note for us, they would pass it to us, and if we wanted a private room, we could have one at a moment’s notice.
Should something unpleasant happen in that room, Taryz wouldn’t ask questions and might even get rid of the evidence if the tip was large enough.
“Gort, you and the family need to go to Taryz tonight and drink some tea,” Reynald said. “Be seen. Let the waiters know that if someone were to come asking, you drink tea there just about every evening at seven bells.”
Gort nodded.
“Do you have anything on Drugh?” Reynald asked me.
“Yes, but he’s stubborn and it might not be enough.”
“No matter,” he said. “I’ll make sure it will suffice.”
“If you say so.” He had promised me he would handle the complications. Drugh and his two hundred mercenaries were definitely a complication.
“This concerns me more.” Reynald frowned at the note.
Same. “Could be someone among the Shears.”
It sounded thin even as I said it.
“Whoever wrote this knows too much about us,” Reynald said.
We needed to solve this mystery. And I had no clue how to go about it.
“Done.” Gort straightened.
I went to look. He’d drawn a map of the Knight Vanquisher Plaza in black ink.
The plaza was roughly egg-shaped and depicted from above, with two streets that ran north stretching from its wider end, and a single street at its narrow end going south.
In the center the statue of the Knight Vanquisher reared.
It wasn’t just a drawing, it was a piece of art, beautifully inked in delicate detail, down to traces of the cobblestones on the street.
I’d had no idea a brush that tiny could even fit into Gort’s steel pincer fingers.
“The lay of the land,” Gort said.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“You should’ve been an artist.”
“To make a living, I’d have to do portraits, and I can’t paint people to save my life. When it comes to living creatures, I paint what I feel, not what I see. Maps are easier. Straightforward.”
“Do you see the problem?” Reynald asked.
I studied the map. “No.”
“Look at the buildings.” Reynald traced the border of the plaza with his fingers, sliding them over the roofs.
The buildings were close together. They formed two continuous walls that bordered the edges of the plaza without any gaps. What was it he wanted me to see . . .
“No places to hide?”
Reynald nodded.
“Let’s say I’m the killer,” Gort said. “I like to plan. I select the places for my corpses carefully. Before I ever bring a body here, I’m going to walk through this plaza on different days and at different times.
I’ll memorize the entrances and exits. I will take note of the people and their patterns.
When do people come in, when do they leave, who locks the doors at night.
I might memorize the faces of the regulars, those who visit every day. ”
“Makes sense.”
Gort tapped the buildings one by one. “Pan oil merchant, a harness maker, a shoemaker, and two accounting houses. This is a trade plaza. It’s deserted at night. The two accounting houses have guards they lock inside, and they don’t come out until morning.”
“If a killer shows up with a body and sees people loitering about in the plaza after dark, he’ll run,” Reynald said.
“So, what’s the plan?”
“The plaza has no places to hide, but the side streets do,” Reynald told me.
“We’ll put Will here and Lute here.” Gort touched the two streets leading north.
“I will take this street here.” He tapped the third street, which led south. “But there’s a lot of distance between those streets and the center of the plaza. We don’t know which direction he’ll be coming from, and if he’s as good as we think, none of us should take him on alone.”
I stared at the plaza.
“It would be good if we could hide in one of those buildings.”
Reynald smiled at me and touched the roof to the west of the statue. “I’ll take the oil merchant.”
“How? Did you bribe them?”
He shook his head. “No. Didn’t bother asking. They would never let me into their warehouse overnight.”
“Then how are you going to get into the building?”
Something heavy landed on the table in the middle of the map. A thick padlock with its arm out.
“Done!” Kaiden said.
“How?”
He grinned at me. “My dad was a lockmaker.” The smile faltered, then slid off his face. “I’m good with locks.”
I’d had no idea. It struck me—I knew almost nothing about Kaiden. According to Lasa’s notes, his parents had died, and he must’ve been apprenticed to someone, because the entry mentioned his “trainer” had sold him.
“The lock on the oil merchant’s door is the weakest,” Gort said. “And there is no guard inside.”
It made sense. Pan oil wasn’t dirt cheap, but you would have to steal barrels of it to make it worth the risk, and then you would have to sell it somewhere. There were better thieving targets in that plaza. The oil merchant didn’t bother with a guard.
“It’s not a bad lock,” Kaiden said. “It’s not a good lock either. Thirty breaths. Maybe fifty.”
“Once the killer shows up, I will engage him,” Reynald said. “If he tries to retreat, one of the others will block his exit long enough for me to press the advantage.”
Anxiety squirmed through me. I didn’t like this plan.
“In addition, we’ll put Shana on this roof here.” Gort tapped one of the western roofs. “If things get out of hand, she’ll shoot him.”
“Where am I going to hide?”
“At home,” Reynald said. “You’ll stay here and wait for us to come back.”
No, I didn’t like this plan. Not one little bit.
Reynald nodded to Kaiden. He swiped the lock off the table and scurried out of the room.
“What do you know about your friend from the Garden?” Reynald asked.
“He is not my friend, and next to nothing.”
“Do you have any guesses as to who he might be?”
“No. You’re obsessing about him.”
“I know him from somewhere,” Reynald said. “I can’t place it, but my memory tells me to be wary. Why was he at the market, where the body was displayed, with his face covered?”
“You also had your face covered.”
“I was escorting you, and I didn’t want to attract attention. Your clothes and hair don’t communicate the right level of wealth. You can’t afford me, Maggie, and that discrepancy would draw the eye. People would come to the wrong conclusions.”
By Rellas’s standards, my usual dress put me somewhere in the lower nobility.
Reynald didn’t read as a lower-nobility bodyguard.
Gort fit the bill—an aging mercenary who had decided to take a cushier job.
Will and Lute would pass as well, skilled and dangerous, but too young to have developed a reputation.
But Reynald was well known. If people saw one of the top swordsmen in the kingdom guarding a woman who clearly couldn’t afford to hire him, they would conclude that I was paying him in other ways.
“Thank you for protecting my honor.” And I’d just said that with a straight face.
“Don’t mention it. The man from the Garden. Tell me about him.”
I recounted the meeting in the Garden.
“A lord,” Gort said when I finished.
Reynald nodded, his face grim. “What does he look like without the coif?”
“Very handsome,” I said.
Gort and Reynald shared a look.
“What kind of handsome?” Gort asked.
“Beautiful. Like the kind of face that makes you stop and stare. He has these captivating eyes, light hazel, like golden amber. They almost glow. Long eyelashes, too.”
Reynald rubbed his face.
“I’m not helping, am I?”
“No.”
“Sorry.”
“No matter,” he said. “He will appear again and when he does, he will tell me everything I want to know.”
“He didn’t seem scared of you,” I reminded him.
The demon from the basement gave me a narrow smile. There was no humor in it. “And that will be his undoing.”