20
They hid the phaeton in the silver lining and returned to the Claritas in high spirits. Leo laid out the evening’s gains across the table, while Felix watched with a look somewhere between disapproval and amusement.
Knew it, Myria thought with a grin. We’re starting to corrupt him.
“Splendid work, one and all,” she said. “We’re just about ready to begin.”
“Already?” Felix asked.
“It’s been a while in the making, old boy,” she reminded him. “Now, Cass, you’d better start work on the phaeton. Lysander, rest. Leo, trot along and sell some of those bottles before you start on the forgeries. Felix, go with him. Make sure he doesn’t drink it all.”
“Oi,” Leo muttered. Myria gave him a stern look, hoping he’d take the message. Get the prefect out of the way. It seemed to pierce through, as Leo sighed and relented.
“In it for the money. In it for the money,” he muttered, running his hands down his face. “Soldier boy, you’re going to need some plain clothes.”
Felix nodded and took off in a blink, like a bored dog after a stick. The night had evidently stoked up whatever erratic energy fueled the man. He’d even left his satchel behind. Cassia’s and Leo’s eyes darted to it as they followed him out.
“Quick. Go through his things,” Cassia whispered, grinning, then swung through the door.
Myria nudged open the satchel. Felix wasn’t fool enough to leave anything valuable lying about, but it was the principle of the thing.
Sure enough, there was nothing much. A dagger, his prefecture badge, a roll of honeyed sesame . . . but there, amid the miscellany, she spied a leather folder of loose papers. A familiar scent of decay lashed her memory.
The harvesters’ shop. Those must be the records he’d spoken of. In all the chaos, she’d forgotten.
By perverse instinct, she opened the folder and flicked through until she found her name. Myria, Cadessius Lane, 8–11: memories, hair, faculties to market—arcana to the Bloodwrights, 2 lyrin—deceased.
It was odd to see it written there so plainly. Her memories and faculties bottled up and sold to some faceless client, her arcana drained away to fuel . . . what?
“Lysander,” she said mildly, “does the Bloodwrights ring any bells?”
“Yes. Hadria’s old crew,” he said, looking up from his book. “Before the crimson summer, when they still had names.”
An anchor dropped in her stomach. Slowly, quietly, she folded up the papers and slipped them back into Felix’s satchel.
Hadria’s crew. Hadria? That didn’t make sense. Her teacher had never bought arcana from those filthy harvesters. Hadria and Vixius had found her on the corpse pile, discarded after the ordeal that should’ve killed her. They’d saved her.
Wait. Vixius.
“She and Vixius were in the same crew back then, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” said Lysander. “Back before he was anyone worth knowing.”
If the intelligence sent waves crashing through the millpond in her head, she wouldn’t show it. Inside, though, grit jammed the wheels of her mind. It was there in plain ink. Vixius and Hadria’s crew had bought her arcana.
They’d lied. Hadria had lied.
But did she? She drew breath, her wits clawing frantically for balance. No. Slow down. You don’t know the whole story. Why would they do any of that?
“Why do you ask?” Lysander added, closing his book.
For a moment, she wanted to tell him—to beg him for any scrap of a clue that Hadria might’ve given him. As he spoke, though, she heard the catch in his voice. She looked up and saw the sheen across his turquoise eyes. A responding grief rolled out of nowhere and seized her by the throat.
He’s got nothing left but her memory. Don’t tarnish it.
Without thinking, she moved to her friend and took him in a gentle embrace. He flinched, taken aback, before adjusting to her hold with that charming awkwardness of a well-bred gentleman.
“It’s nothing. I haven’t had a proper chance to speak to you, in all the rush,” she murmured into the shoulder of his coat. “You must be in a sorry state. So long in that dreadful place.”
“I’m healing,” he said quietly. “Those potions work wonders.”
“I didn’t mean the mortal frame, old boy,” she replied. Silence hung between them for a moment before he spoke.
“If it’s any consolation, I don’t remember a great deal. Time passes strangely in the eternity cells. Like a dream.”
Myria shook her head against the velvet.
“Or a nightmare. No need to make light of it. I can’t imagine it, but it must’ve been hell.
All the same, there’s one part of it I can understand a little better.
” She drew back, smoothing down the lapels of his coat, unsure how to say quite what she meant.
“I know you’ve more reason to hate Vixius than any of us.
I have some notion of what Hadria meant to you. What you meant to her.”
The breath caught in his throat, and he stiffened like a thief in the searchlight. To spare him the need to keep his countenance, she closed her eyes.
“No need to speak of it. But . . . grief hidden, deaths unmourned . . . they rot you from the inside out. If you ever want an ear to bend, I’m here.”
She kept her eyes closed. If there were tears on his face, they were his. Then, quite unexpectedly, he leaned his brow against hers.
“Three years. I thought I’d have learned to remember her without shattering,” he said in a soft, strained voice. “Someday . . . yes. Let’s find a very strong vintage and talk of her till we’ve forgotten how to speak Carinth. Until then, let’s break that devil. Bone by bone.”
“That, I promise,” she said, pressing him close before releasing him.
He nodded, and something set like a waxen seal inside her. It was a promise she’d keep, even if it killed her, and the time for proving it had come. At last, they stood on the precipice. Tomorrow, she’d throw out the line, and pray it caught a traitor.
The day dawned bright and clear above Carintheum. Sunlight gilded the Praetorium and lit the skyborne rails that crossed in golden threads above the city. The world of business threw down the throttle and roared up to speed.
Myria sat on the edge of the Fortuna Fountain, at the center of the amphitheater that lay before the Divitorium. A stranger shimmered back at her from the water.
She’d become a woman of Aerin—or Celadonius Magna, as the empire had considerately renamed it.
Her hair was set in long black waves, and her eyes were tinged blue with colored lenses.
She’d carved hollows in her cheeks with careful paintwork, and built up her cheekbones with costumer’s wax.
Threads of gray ran out from her temples, and crow’s-feet edged her eyes.
It was a disguise made for Vixius, not the pretty popinjay whose face he’d stolen.
That woman was sharp and hard, three inches taller and fifteen years older than the creature beneath.
She wore a black business gown with squared shoulders and a mercilessly fitted bodice, which flared into angular tails above the skirts.
It was all unornamented black and white; immaculate tailoring was the best display of wealth to a discerning eye. Vixius had that and more.
Her heart jumped as an Imbrium phaeton swept around the circuit. Not his, she thought a moment later. Nonetheless, her pulse beat faster. Years of whittling that anger into a point sharp enough to kill, and it all stood or fell on the next few minutes.
The hook will catch. It will.
Myria forced out a long breath and sank into the moment.
White orange blossoms rustled above her head.
Pin-sized lizards flicked along the branches.
The air was sweet with pine and blooming fig flowers, carried in from the mountains on the breeze.
Nearby, a fanwing pecked aggressively at the coins in the fountain.
That’s the spirit, she thought, watching the bird snatch a copper from the pool. What he thought he’d do with it was anyone’s guess. She sympathized.
Then something pricked at her sixth sense. Instinct spurred her to her feet before she knew quite what she’d seen.
There he is.
A handsome scarlet-coated gentleman was approaching on foot from the neighboring park. His facade was impeccable, but something betrayed him nonetheless. A true Carinth praetor strode like all the world could wait for him, but Vixius . . . he still walked like a man with wolves at his heels.
From opposite directions, they plunged into the crowd. Two lines traced out in Myria’s mind, heading on a collision course toward the Divitorium steps.
The moment was upon her. Myria reached the stairs a pace ahead of Evander, fiddling with the clasps of her briefcase. A man with his nose in his news scroll turned abruptly.
Sterling timing, Cass.
They struck shoulder to shoulder. Cassia shoved on past, knocking Myria back and sending her briefcase flying from her hand.
It burst open, and her files went spilling down the steps.
She whipped after the man with an Aeren curse on her lips.
Then, seeing her papers picking up on the wind, she turned back and planted one heel atop them.
With that, she found herself face-to-face with Praetor Evander. He’d already ducked to help gather the papers, only to find a sharp black shoe heel spearing down between his hands.
Evander paused. For a moment, she could see the other man behind those false gold eyes, sizing her up like an undertaker measuring a corpse.
Her nerves spun tight. Without warning, there it was—that prickle on her skin, that pull, as if a compass needle in her deepest instinct had spun suddenly toward him.
Stop that. What the devil was wrong with her?
Then, as though seeing Evander for the first time, Myria reined in the show of anger and knelt to retrieve her papers.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, voice hard and husky. “Carintheum hasn’t changed in six months.”
A smile twitched one side of his mouth. “It hasn’t changed in six hundred years,” he said. “I hope you weren’t expecting better.”