Chapter 11
We shouldered through the press of a drinking establishment on the periphery of Old Harrow.
I was familiar with the place, as the reader may be.
Called The Three Trees, it is named for the ancient trees (the remnants of an imperial orchard) which battled for purchase in its narrow courtyard.
Their rattling limbs and half-barren branches reached over the heads of those gathered outside as Harden and I passed through, they smoking and drinking without mind for the old fruit crushed beneath their boots.
That fruit filled the air with a sharp scent, just on the edge of rot, overriding even pipesmoke and beer.
It gave way as we entered the main door and made our way to a corner table.
The inside of The Three Trees, through some trickery of the proprietors, smells eternally of pine and rosemary and sparecrust (that is, the baked dish of bread, bacon, and buttery onions).
Harden sat with his back to one wall and I the other, each surveying the room from our own vantages. He saluted someone, presumably one of the other patrons—I could not see the fellow, or lady, whoever they were—and turned in towards me.
“Does Mr. Stoke know what you are?” he asked.
“No pleasantries or talk of the weather, then,” I observed.
“Why waste time?”
I resisted the urge to clear my throat. I did sit back though, folding my hands in my lap and crossing my ankles beneath the table. We were far enough from the other patrons that I doubted the nuances of our conversation could be discerned, so I said, “No, he does not.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Amply. But he knows what you are?”
“Aye, I assume so. Being a detective and all,” he replied, cocking his head to one side.
“Are you inferring that he has discovered my secret?”
He shrugged expressively, like a stage performer determined to be seen by the back row. The expression turned into a grin as a girl of perhaps sixteen appeared with two mugs, which she deposited before us after giving the table a quick wipe with a cloth.
“Ale, unless the lady prefers otherwise?” she said, patting Harden on the shoulder with brief familiarity and casting me a genuine and unpossessive smile.
“Ale will suffice,” I said, too distracted by her and Harden’s mannerisms to smile back. “Thank you.”
“Somethin’ to eat?” She glanced from me to him.
“Not tonight, Lottie, love.”
She smiled again, flicked her cloth at Harden in parting, and disappeared back into the tables.
“A bit young to be your sweetheart,” I noted.
“My niece,” Harden replied, a flicker of amusement in his eyes. “Jealous creature, you are.”
I frowned over my ale at him, first in exasperation (only slightly feigned) and then in increasing distraction. “Lewis told you of our arrangement?” I said, repeating his admission from earlier.
He nodded and took a drink, now watching a nearby table. The occupants leaned close to one another conspiratorially, snickering over something in the newspaper. “Aye.”
I hesitated, but my curiosity, my need to know what Lewis had said of me, made me press on. “What did he say, precisely?”
“Said it was a match made by them, with some strategic influence by your sister. He helped you escape and you flitted off for a few years God knows where. Then you met again by chance in Sarre Grand, at which time you commiserated over your mutual unhappiness and decided that leaving it all behind was the best choice, rather than trying to change anything for the better.”
His words were obviously intended to jab, but I was too interested in Lewis to pursue that now. “And?”
“He turned to smuggling, as they pay him nix, and you came to Harrow and found Mr. Stoke,” Harden finished.
“That is all?” I said, trying not to sound disappointed.
“You were expecting something more?”
It was my turn to shrug and take a drink. The ale was very good, dark and satisfying, and yet left a sick feeling in my stomach.
“No,” I said, resigning myself once more.
I conjured a smile and cast it across the table at Harden, silently forcing myself to consider the fine line of his jaw, the focus of his gaze, and the breadth of his shoulders.
I would not moon over Lewis when another interested—and attractive—party sat across the table from me.
I would not. “I simply need to know how much you have on me.”
“A fair bit,” he observed.
“Yes, and I am at the disadvantage,” I admitted. I sat forward, set down my mug and tapped the pads of my fingers absently against its cool side. “How have you managed to evade them?”
His eyebrows rose. “You are bold, asking me that in public.”
I gave him a flat look. “My past has already been aired, why not yours?”
“Your and Lewis’s past, not yours, individually,” he pointed out. “Not yet, anyhow.”
“You first,” I prodded.
“I was tested, as a child,” he said after a moment. “Labelled an Affinate and left to my own devices. Turned out I was no Affinate.”
“Oh?” I was startled. “They do not often make such mistakes.”
He shook his head. “Was no mistake. I was promptly recruited into the Common Force.”
My bewilderment must have been obvious.
“The Separatists,” he said, lowering his voice. “The Guild Inquisitor had sympathies and was funnelling young people into the Separatists. So, I was protected.”
I sat back, pondering. “I suppose I should not be surprised. There are those within with Rogue affiliations, like Lewis. Why not Separatists?”
He nodded and drank while I continued to muse.
“So you were taken by the cause at a young age,” I surmised.
“Seven,” he affirmed. “I left for a time though, I’ll admit.
My feet took to roaming, as the feet of the young are wont to do.
The Force encouraged it, in truth. They want us to see the world, to see that not every country lives this way.
” He waved a vague hand at our surroundings, encompassing Harrow and the City States as a whole.
I glimpsed something in his eyes then, something that reminded me of Pretoria, and perhaps even Madge. Drive. Burden. Conviction.
He carried on, “Lewis and I met in The Sarre, as you know, and we found ourselves a mutually beneficial business opportunity.”
“Smuggling.”
“Aye. Soldiers far from home have wants, and Baffin’s army is laced tight enough to strangle. A Guild-loaned officer like Lewis has more freedom than most, more access. And I have the skills to see it all through.”
I considered all this for a moment as the volume in the pub rose. Someone noteworthy had entered, apparently, and half the crowd seemed to want to greet them. I could not make the newcomer out.
Harden squinted across the room, too.
“Are you back for good now?” I asked once things had settled down.
He took another moment to return his focus to me. “Yes. We need all hands, with the situation as it is.”
“Like the Zealot Queen Incarnadine framing you for bombings,” I noted, citing the newspaper’s tawdry title for the woman.
He nodded. That drive was still there in his expression, but darker, more fixed. “Aye. Along with Baffin quietly funding her.”
I could not help a sharp intake of breath. There had been rumors, of course, that Baffin’s perceived passivity towards the Zealots might be calculated. But to hear him claim Baffin was funding them? The repercussions were frightening and terrible.
“Why would he do that? Risk that?” I asked. “Allowing them to weed us out is one thing. Funding them is another.”
“They are doing what he wishes he could.” Harden shrugged. “Beating, tormenting, and murdering Entwined is a passion of his. But I believe it’s more than that. Baffin is setting the stage.”
“For what?”
“To save Arrent again. To foster anti-Entwined sentiment to the point where civil war will bloom, the Guild will be forced to act, and he has enough leverage to oust them.”
“Baffin cannot oust the Guild,” I asserted. “Their existence is a pillar of the armistice. It would mean far more than bombings and riots, it would be outright war.”
“Precisely,” Harden said. He started to go on, but I had more to say, and kept speaking.
“Nor would the Guild be foolish enough to risk a scrap of their power, not for Affinates and Rogues. You do not know them as I do. What proof do you have, of any of this?”
“That’s above me,” Harden said. He made a conciliatory gesture and went on, evidently changing tack, “Regardless, the situation in Harrow is worsening. We need Adepts. The Zealots may not have magic, but they have money, guns, and Baffin’s blind eye.
The police will not stop them. If we Separatists are routed?
A few Affinates swinging from lampposts will be the good old days. ”
All at once, the ale tasted sour on my tongue. If I was honest, the grim reality he painted was not the only reason. It was the realization that his interest in me, as a person—as a woman—might be a ploy. That would leave me unwanted again, and it made me feel pitiful indeed.
“There is no hope for Harrow,” I stated. “Your admission just reaffirms that.”
Something harder entered his voice. “So you’ll abandon your home without a care?”
“That is presumptuous.” I lifted my nose, reminding myself passingly of Madge. “I do care. But this is not my home.”
That seemed new information. “Where is, then?”
“Ummi?” My smile felt brittle. “As much as any place is. Home implies belonging, and I have never belonged to anywhere.” I almost said more, needing him to see my pain and my reasoning, to understand why I needed to leave. I barely knew the man, but I could not stomach his judgement.
I was treading dangerously close to admitting who I was, too—the only fact that Lewis, it seemed, had neglected to share with his criminal compatriot. So I said no more.
I expected Harden to respond callously. Separatists were all the same, in that regard. They were blind for their cause and determined to erase the individuals within, to assimilate all into a single organism with a single goal.