CHAPTER 32 #2
We approached the doors. The two guards at the entrance of the Garden eyed us.
It was too early in the morning for the Garden kind of shenanigans, and the plaza was deserted.
Galiene and Hade would be taking their morning tea right about now.
And here I was, some random woman accompanied by two armed men with their faces covered.
“Tell Galiene of Sosna that a woman without shoes is here,” I said.
The left guard went inside.
Moments ticked by.
Two men walked out of the Garden. One was the guard who’d gone to deliver my message, and the other was tall and muscular, with russet skin and short curly hair.
A neatly trimmed beard hugged his jaw. He seemed to be somewhere on the crossroads of late twenties and early thirties. The mage from my first night.
The mage studied me for a moment. “She will see you. Just you.”
“No,” Everard said.
I faced the mage. “I didn’t come here for my own sake. Your mistress invited me. If she no longer needs my help, I will simply go home.”
The mage studied me.
There was exactly one sentence in the entire series devoted to this man.
At some point, Hade got desperate and hired some people to break Galiene and her daughter out of Hreban’s mansion.
The book said, Hade’s mercenaries failed, and the Garden’s only mage met his end with them. No name, no description, nothing.
Powerful mages were rare. The best analogy in our world would be doctors with an unusual medical specialty, like neurosurgeons.
There was something like one neurosurgeon per ninety thousand people in the US.
Mages weren’t quite that endangered, but the fact that the Garden even had one was odd.
For some reason, Damaes chose to tolerate his presence and autonomy. He was literally irreplaceable.
“May I see what’s in your basket?”
Everard held the basket out to him. The mage moved the piece of cloth covering the contents aside, looked at them for a long moment, and put the cloth back.
“Follow me.”
Galiene’s office lay all the way up on the fourth floor in an airy, light tower with tall pale walls and massive arched windows.
The window on the left offered a stunning view of the city, the one on the right showed a hillside cushioned in greenery.
Beautiful flowers bloomed in ornate pots, artfully grouped on the floor by the windows, their white and vivid red blossoms almost glowing in the morning light.
The wall between the windows was filled with shelves supporting books and treasures: boxes carved from stone and wood, glass vases, and small statues.
A large wooden desk stood in front of the shelves.
Galiene sat behind the desk looking exactly as I remembered, regal and cold, with her dark blond hair curved at the nape of her neck into a spiral. Today her gown was pewter gray.
On the left, Hade waited in a padded chair, her eyes sharp.
The mage took up a position by the door, just behind us.
I took my hood down.
“You found shoes,” Galiene said.
“Among other things. What can I do for the Garden?”
Galiene’s face was impassive. Whatever it was had to be bad.
“We are being harassed,” she said.
“In what way?”
“Our shipments are going missing, our people are being accosted, and our patrons are being robbed.”
It sounded like Ulmar Hreban’s petty brand of revenge. He couldn’t touch Galiene directly, so he was using his money and hired muscle to complicate her life.
“We’ve hired additional guards to take care of the last two,” Galiene said. “But we can do nothing about the shipments.”
“What sort of goods are not coming in?”
“The special sort.”
He was going after their aphrodisiacs and drugs. One of the Garden’s lures was providing a touch of the rare and forbidden. They stayed away from harder drugs, but they did dabble in lighter stuff that Rellas restricted or heavily taxed. Their shipments were smuggled in.
“I assume that you’ve tried changing the schedules and routes, and it made no difference?”
Galiene nodded. “It seems Elaut wasn’t our only traitor.”
“Someone is talking to Hreban, and you want to know who.”
“Yes,” Galiene said.
“Have you narrowed it down?” I asked.
“Wesla, Orrem, and Arale,” Galiene said. “They are the only three who knew of the new shipping changes. We’ve questioned all of them and all of them deny it. We cannot detain all three of them indefinitely. The Garden would grind to a halt.”
“Nor can we afford to lose the next shipment,” Hade said.
Wesla was their bookkeeper, Orrem was the head of security, and Arale was the one who took over the Garden after Hreban took Galiene. Right.
“Before we go any further, let’s talk compensation,” I said. “I need to borrow your mage. I have a magical item, and I need to know what it does.”
Galiene glanced at the mage. He nodded.
“Done,” she said. “What else?”
I took the basket from Everard and set it on her desk.
Galiene lifted the cloth and stared at the twenty bars in four different colors all stamped with a small shell design. Gort had carved the stamp for us.
“What am I looking at?”
“Soap samples. I’d like you to use them in the Garden to see how they perform and how your clients like them.”
“Very well,” Galiene said.
“It’s Arale.”
Galiene and Hade shared a look.
“How do you know?” Galiene asked.
“Orrem was born to a horrible father, who took his frustrations out on Orrem’s mother, his sisters, and him until Orrem grew large enough to put a stop to it.
He abhors violence against women and sees himself as a protector.
He would never ally himself with someone who sought to kidnap a child from her mother. ”
He also led the raid on Hreban’s compound and was blinded in one eye. There were a couple of scenes from his point of view, and I had gotten a good glimpse inside his head. His thought process toward Ulmar was very straightforward: hate and then more hate.
“That leaves us with Wesla and Arale. Wesla is devoted to both of you, but in particular to Galiene. She likely spent the last few days looking ashamed, and that’s because she did do something, but it wasn’t connected to Hreban.”
“What do you mean?” Galiene asked.
“Bring her here, and I will show you.”
The mage departed and returned a couple of minutes later with a blond woman. She was slender, around twenty years old, and the guilt on her face was so obvious, it wasn’t even funny.
“Wesla!” I loaded steel into my voice, doing my best impersonation of Shana. “Do you know who I am?”
She shook her head.
“I’m the woman with no shoes who saved Galiene’s daughter.”
Wesla drew a sharp breath.
Just as I thought. By now the rumors about the shoeless beggar woman who had mysteriously warned Galiene had spread through the Garden. I was probably credited with all sorts of mysterious powers.
“I see all,” I declared. “I know all. Did you think your theft would go unnoticed?”
She jerked as if struck.
“How dare you take advantage of your lady? She feeds you, she takes care of you, and how do you repay her? Admit your guilt.”
Wesla opened her mouth, struggling to say something.
“Speak!” Hade snapped.
“I stole the Queen’s Delight,” Wesla announced, her voice high-pitched. “I was the one who did it. I meant to only take one, but it was delicious, and I couldn’t help myself.” She dropped to her knees. “I accept my punishment. Please, don’t throw me out.”
I turned to Galiene and spread my arms.
“. . . I will do anything, please, please, please don’t send me away . . .” Wesla dissolved into sobs.
Galiene heaved a sigh.
“. . . I have no place to go . . .”
“Nobody is going to throw you out,” Galiene said. “Return to your room. I will speak to you later.”
Wesla got to her feet and fled.
“All of that over sweets.” Hade rolled her eyes. “That child has no sense.”
“Yet she can calculate a month’s expenses without paper,” Galiene said.
“If it’s not Orrem or Wesla, it has to be Arale. Search her room,” I said. “There might be a small purple pouch hidden somewhere in it. If you find it, do not open it.”
Ten minutes later two guards led Arale in. The fairy princess from the first floor, the first person in the Garden to speak to me. She had traded her gown for a red robe and her hair was undone.
“Is this about the shipments?” Arale sighed. “I had nothing to do . . .”
The mage approached Galiene’s desk and placed a small purple pouch on it.
“What is it?” Galiene asked me.
“Poison. The plan was for you to be taken away by Hreban and for her to take your place. Since that failed . . .”
In the original storyline, Arale took over Galiene’s job, but she kept making mistakes.
Shortly after the failed raid, Hade died suddenly.
A purple pouch containing traces of poison was found in her room.
I’d always thought Arale was the one who’d done it.
Without Hade she had free rein, and within a year she had run the Garden into the ground.
“You just couldn’t help yourself, could you?” Galiene said.
Arale looked at Hade. She must’ve seen something terrifying in the old woman’s eyes because she flinched. She caught herself in an instant, but we all saw it.
“Everything I have done was for the sake of the Garden,” Arale said.
Boom, there she is.
Hade stared at her, and the old woman’s eyes were dark and cold.
Arale raised her chin. “Why her? She is neither beautiful nor skilled.”
She must’ve decided that arguing her innocence was a lost cause. Her only chance was to convince Hade that she’d betrayed Galiene for the benefit of the Garden.
“She isn’t even from Kair Toren. She’s from a backwater village, and yet she holds herself apart as if she were better than us. Everyone looks down on her. They are just too afraid to voice it.”
More words, deeper hole.