Chapter 20
When the date of my second meeting arrived, the sea was choppy, riled by chill autumn winds.
I’d spent most of the day either racing through my chores or standing idly by while the Shearwaters and Cormorants played mallet ball in the rose gardens, practiced archery in the outer ward, or talked excitedly of the amateur theatricals they were planning.
By the time the sun was midway to the horizon, they were hotly debating which play to put on: Catua’s choice was deemed too satirical, Emment’s too racy, and Llir’s too tragic.
Llir was arguing good-naturedly with Morgen, countering her objections with a lopsided smirk.
The sight oddly irked me, and I was glad when, finally, I could make my excuses and hurry away.
My heart pounded as I readied the boat. I had to take a few moments, draw on Zennia’s old trick, to calm myself enough for the wind-tossed waters to heed me.
I didn’t need much propulsion—the strong gusts helped me along—but I could already sense a fickleness to the ocean.
Pallwater was waning now, and archwater beginning its slow and ominous encroach.
I stared fixedly at the mainland, at the shadow of Port Rhorstin, as I traversed the final mile or two of the crossing. I’d gathered the information my contact had asked for. I’d translated my code onto a fresh piece of parchment. Now the Cage had to hold up their end of the bargain.
It transpired, when I arrived first at Madam Mora’s, that Vercha had left strict instructions not to let me spy my own gown before the ball.
The seamstress insisted on blindfolding me before helping me into it and standing me on a stool.
She then commenced pinching and pinning it all over, occasional low murmurs escaping her lips.
The garment felt cold and tight on me already; its stiffness, its rustling, alien and unsettling.
At last she disappeared into a back room with the dress, and I was permitted to tug off my blindfold. But the alterations dragged on longer than I’d expected, and when she finally returned, my eyes were on the windows, nervously watching the sun meet the horizon.
After stowing the dresses in a cart at the stables—tipping the stable girl every coin I had on me to guard them—I hurried out into the red-gold streets.
Across town, the Veil was strung with lanterns, which peeped from the vines climbing its timber-framed walls.
A sweet, spicy scent filled the air—wine and sugar—tinged with woodsmoke from the half dozen chimneys.
I changed rapidly in the same alley as before, my bluebird mask rasping against my face, my whole body wound taut with expectation.
What was it my summons had said? Around the back.
I circled the building and entered the yard where Emment and Turnstone had bet on the fight.
The memory brought a sharp, vinegary anger, sitting at the back of my throat like bile.
No young men filled the yard this time—the fights clearly happened late, past midnight—and there wasn’t a guard on duty this evening.
Perhaps my contact had arranged some distraction.
I looked around and eventually noticed a pair of bulkhead doors set into the ground. One had been cracked open a few inches, and the edge of a golden mask flashed in the glare. “Come on, then.” My contact. “We haven’t much time.”
I lowered myself into dank, dripping darkness.
For a second or two, once the doors were shut tight, we were smothered in shadow and I heard only my harsh breaths. Then: the striking of flint on firesteel. A murmur, and the sizzle of a flame responding. Light flared, illuminating the lion’s gold visage. He was a Sparkmouth.
“This way,” he said, leading me by his candle’s glow.
He was dressed in his black servant’s uniform again. “I suggest we keep the masks on, in case someone sees you.”
I swallowed. “Is that likely?” I said, my voice thin.
“Shouldn’t be,” he said cheerily. “We’re going to the lowest levels.”
He beckoned me down a steep, spiralling stair. The air got colder the deeper we went, and when I touched the wall, my hand came away wet. My contact must have heard my intake of breath, because he said, “Cool and damp. Best way to store wine.”
Eventually we came to the bottom of the gloomy stairwell. Ducking through a door, we emerged into a wide, echoing space, filled floor to ceiling with shelves upon shelves.
“Down here’s where we keep the good stuff,” he said, stepping to a shelf and inspecting a bottle.
“Some of these date back to King Judan’s reign.
Unless we’ve got someone very wealthy upstairs, we shouldn’t be disturbed…
Still, I can’t linger long.” He turned to me, placing the candle on a shelf.
“So let’s get right to it. Do you have the final tally? ”
I fished in my bodice for the crinkled parchment. Plucking it from me and smoothing it out, he stared at it in focused silence for a moment.
“And there’s something else,” I ventured. “Two things, actually. First, you should know there are visitors on the island. House Cormorant. I think they’re staying until archwater. They have Orha with them. I thought, if your people…”
His cheek twitched, his blue eyes still fixed on the parchment. “Not a problem if they’ll be gone by next pallwater, which it sounds like they will.”
“All right,” I said, feeling slightly reassured. “But the Shearwaters, they have…well, I don’t know what to call it. I’ve been thinking of it as—as false laconite.”
That did give him pause, his eyes flicking up to me.
“It looks just like laconite, feels just like it, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t do anything.”
He stared at me, the candlelight wavering on his mask, then shook his head. “I don’t know what that’s all about. But it doesn’t matter. We only need to know about the stuff that does work. And you”—he gestured at me with the parchment—“have answered our questions. Thank you for that.”
He glanced at the candle, muttered something under his breath. A spark jumped out, arcing toward him, and it lit the paper, burning it to a crisp.
I let out a breath. My information was good, and he clearly had no concerns about the Cormorants. The false laconite still niggled at me like a hangnail, but if the Cage weren’t interested, maybe it wasn’t so big a deal. Now my part was done, they had to give me what they’d promised.
“Now,” he continued, flashing me a genial smile, “for what we need you to do for us next.”
I stared. “What do you mean, next? That wasn’t the deal!”
“You agreed to help us,” he said casually.
“I agreed to get you this information. And you agreed to give me information about my friend.”
“And then—what? You’ll go back to trailing after the Shearwaters? You’ve found you like being a Hundred’s Orha?”
I fell silent. I didn’t like that I couldn’t see his face, but I was glad, right now, that he couldn’t see mine.
If there was one thing this placement had helped me understand, it was why so many of us liked shadowing the Hundred.
To be immersed in such luxury, to feel part of this gilded world…
For some, the drudgery was just about worth it for the expensive livery, the elevated rank, the balls, the soirées—even if we were just observers.
His words had caught on something inside me: a splinter of doubt. I pushed it down. “Of course I don’t like it. They’re insufferable, spoiled—”
“All the more reason to aid us,” he replied.
“I’ve done what you asked,” I said angrily. Desperately. “I’m not getting mixed up in anything else. An information exchange, remember? That’s what you agreed.”
I did want change. How could I not? I knew better than most that the way things were was wrong—my father killed in a noble’s pointless skirmish, a mother who’d been only too happy to be rid of me. And over half my life shut up in Arbenhaw, told day in and day out that my only worth was in service.
But I hadn’t forgotten Owyn. The threat of the gallows. And the siblings’ gossip, the night I’d eavesdropped. Poisonings. Murders. A Cage hideout, blown up. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t like these people.
“I should have known you’d go back on your word,” I said. “Do you even really know anything about Zennia?”
He surveyed me, lips quirked thoughtfully. “What have you been told?” he asked after a moment.
“That she came here with the eldest, Emment Shearwater, one night. That she saw one of those Orha fights you host here.” At the twitch of his eyebrow, my own gaze narrowed.
He hadn’t expected me to know about those.
“And she got into trouble on the crossing back. Drowned in a sudden squall that blew up.”
He pondered this, nodding shallowly.
“That was it, wasn’t it?” I said hopelessly. “That was the information you were going to give me. But I already found out about it myself.”
“No,” he said softly, shifting in the darkness. He pulled something out of his black doublet.
The hammered metal shone in the golden light from the candle. A brooch, imprinted with the image of a sailing ship. My chest constricted. The last time I’d seen it, Zennia had been packing it into her trunk at Arbenhaw before coming here, to Bower Island.
I lurched forward, darted a hand out instinctively, but the blond man stepped back, coolly inspecting it. “Pretty enough trinket,” he said, turning it over.
“Give that to me,” I gasped, wanting to rip off his mask; wanting to read, in his face, how he’d come to have the brooch.
“Certainly,” he said. “After you’ve heard me out.”
Every breath was a rasp in my throat, and my head was spinning—but eventually I nodded.
“The tale you’ve been fed is wrong,” he said bluntly. “Or, at least, it leaves plenty out. Whether whoever told it to you realizes that…” He shrugged. “In any case, I can give you the whole story, if you agree to do one more thing for us.”
I stared at the shadows moving over his mask. “They already suspect me,” I said reluctantly. With an icy prickle, I thought of Tigo. Of Llir.