Chapter 23. Now Maris
NOW: MARIS
It had taken Zuri triple the drachmas to convince the legionnaires posted at the south bridge to look the other way for a second day in a row.
It was a bribe they wouldn’t have taken if they’d known he was crossing the river with a Magistrate.
There wasn’t anyone on either side of the river who wouldn’t string all of us up on the bridge for that.
The sun had set by the time I was walking the streets of the Citadel District again, and I was grateful for the cover of darkness.
I kept to the alleys that ran behind the abandoned market until I reached the steps that led to our villa and crept up silently.
When I reached the door, I slipped inside.
There was a still silence before I heard the sound of bare feet brushing over the mosaic tile in the atrium and my uncle’s voice lifted on the other side.
“Maris?”
I exhaled, pressing the door closed behind me.
Nej appeared in the forest of potted plants, and as soon as he saw me, his hands dropped to his sides, his shoulders sagging in relief. “Thank the gods.”
It was maybe the most vulnerable look I’d ever seen on the man, but he almost sounded angry.
“Where the hell have you been?” He ground out the words.
The birds bounced in their cages, wings fluttering in a movement that mirrored my pulse.
“Out,” I said, immediately headed for my room. I was already untying the cords of my chiton as I crossed the gallery.
“Out?” He followed on my heels. “You’ve been gone since last night. You missed the portraitist this morning. You’re lucky a tribunal wasn’t called!”
When we passed the open door of my mother’s room, I stopped, eyeing the blankets that were coiled up in a heap on her bed. The lamp was lit.
I turned to my uncle. “Did you sleep here?”
“Of course I did. I was worried. I came to find out what you could have possibly been thinking.”
I stared at him, confused.
“With what you pulled with the Consul last night!” He appeared to be genuinely distressed, and I felt somewhat guilty. He wasn’t a warm man, but he looked as if he’d stayed up half the night waiting for me to walk through the door.
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it.
I continued to my room, where moonlight was streaming in through the windows, casting a pattern on the marble. Nej stopped in the doorway, turning his back to give me some privacy before I let the chiton drop to the floor.
“Well?” He waited.
“I asked of the Consul what any Magistrate should be asking. I’m the only one who seems to think we’ve lost this war.”
“I don’t think you understand what’s happening here, Maris. You’re a Magistrate now. People are watching you. What you do and say will not go unnoticed. Especially when you disappear into thin air.”
I didn’t need to see him to know the look on Nej’s face was an exasperated one.
He had promised to mentor me as a Magistrate and guide me through the politics of the Citadel, but there was more going on here.
And I knew that his help also had to do with his own designs.
What those designs were, I didn’t know, but if I caught the ill favor of the Consul, neither of us would get what we wanted.
I could find myself bleeding on the Forum floor just like the Philosopher Vitrasian had. Maybe Nej would, too.
“This is no time for secrets. If something is going on, you need to tell me,” he said.
The blank message from the Citadel’s aviary burned in my mind, and I weighed the cost of showing it to him.
The Consul was talking to someone outside the city walls.
It was possible that Nej had even been the one to pen those messages.
But asking him about it now felt too precarious, and I didn’t want to risk Nej.
Not when he was the only person in the Citadel District that I had left.
“I could say the same to you,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
I glanced at the doorway, where he still stood with his back to me. “What’s between you and the Consul?”
“What exactly are you asking?”
“What is he? Your lover? Are you something more than a scribe to him?”
He hesitated. “I’m an advisor. He trusts me.”
There was no waver in his voice. Nej was an expert at tightrope walking, especially when it came to the Forum.
Among the players that warred in the Citadel, he was one of only a few who had maintained ambiguous allegiances.
In a way, he was everything that was wrong with the Citadel while also avoiding the worst of its acts falling on his shoulders.
He had no judgment stone to cast, but there was no doubt that he influenced the outcomes of the votes.
That was one of the reasons my mother had retained so much power.
“Are you at least going to tell me what happened to your face?” he asked, more gently.
I examined the cut on my lip in the mirror, gently pressing a fingertip to the bruise on my chin. “Does it really matter?”
He thought about that for a moment. “Everything we do right now matters. Every decision we make.”
I went to the washing bowl beside the window. He was right. I knew that. But I’d crossed the Sophanes anyway.
“Everything is about to change, Maris. In just a matter of weeks. You and I need to be sure we’re still standing at the end of this. The gods have turned their faces upon us. I can feel it.”
“Days,” I corrected him.
“What?”
“It won’t be weeks. The New Legion is going to cross in three days, Nej.”
He fell silent for several seconds. “And how could you possibly know that?”
I dropped the washcloth back into the bowl and went to the chest against the wall, opening it. I chose the first chiton my hands landed on, a copper-hued silk trimmed in gold.
After the last few days, the scene that surrounded me had become even more ridiculous.
Fine tapestries hung from the windows over the bed and the dressing table was littered with vials of perfume and strands of pearls.
Only hours ago, I’d stood in Luca’s humble tent, aching for him to put his arms around me.
I tugged on the chiton, fastening the brooches and letting the gold godsblood chain drape down my back.
“As stubborn as your mother,” Nej muttered.
He wasn’t wrong, but the words still stung. I’d vowed to take the Magistrate’s seat with honor and integrity, but in the day since I’d put on the white robes, I’d already committed treason.
He finally turned around, leaning one shoulder against the doorframe so he could look at me. “Medallion.”
I glanced up, finding him in the mirror. “What?”
“Your medallion, Maris.”
I reached up to my throat as I remembered it was gone. I found it on the window ledge, letting it swing in the air before I clasped it at the nape of my neck. It hung heavily just beneath my collarbone, the metal cold against my skin, and Luca’s voice came back to me.
You can’t be a Casperia anymore.
When the New Legion took the Citadel, Magistrate blood would spill. There would be no hiding then.
“How can I convince you to trust me?” Nej asked softly.
I turned to face him, guilt curling like a snake in the center of my gut. He was right. I’d seen Nej and my mother playing the games of the Citadel my entire life, and I knew him. He was slippery and changeable, out for his own gain. But Nej wasn’t a liar like my mother had been.
“What do you know about the Citadel sending messages from the aviary?” I asked.
“Messages?”
Again, I debated with myself, trying to decide how much I was willing to tell him.
But I wasn’t sure I had a choice anymore.
If the New Legion was crossing the river in three days, maybe I was already out of time.
Nej wasn’t without fault, but he was one of the few in the Citadel who wasn’t particularly hated for any specific thing.
He had connections and relationships that others didn’t. That meant he had information.
I sank to the floor, riffling through the chiton I’d taken off until I found the pocket sewn into the skirt. I reached inside, finding the message I’d taken from Luca’s tent. I held it out to him.
His brow wrinkled before he took it. “What is this?”
“I was hoping you might know.”
Nej’s bottom lip jutted out as he thought. “You’re sure it came from the Citadel’s aviary?”
“I’m sure.”
He looked even more confused now.
“They’ve been leaving the Citadel by the dozens. The New Legion has been shooting them down.”
Nej didn’t ask how I knew that and I guessed he didn’t want to know.
“You really expect me to believe you haven’t heard anything about this? Nothing at all?” I searched his face, looking for the lie. “The Consul still believes that we’re going to win this war, Nej. Why? How?”
“I have no reason to lie to you. I have no idea who the Consul could be talking to.”
“You pen his messages, Nej.”
He turned the parchment around, holding it out to me. “There is no message, Maris. For all I know he’s writing messages to the gods. The man’s mad enough for it.”
If he was telling the truth, then he wouldn’t like the idea of something going on in the Citadel he didn’t know about. He had his hands in everything. There wasn’t a single Magistrate whose ear he didn’t have.
I took the unrolled scroll.
Nej came to stand before me, his voice taking a wary tone. “Maris, the gods are at work here. It would be a grave mistake to interfere.” His hands came up on either side of my face, his expression softening. “Let me deal with the Consul.”
I stared into his eyes, trying to sift the meaning from the words. Nej wasn’t a pious man, but even he could see there was more going on here than we could know.
“In the end, you and I—we need to be on the same side.”
I nodded and his hands dropped, a look of relief flooding his face.
“And no more visits to the Lower City. Not until this is over. I have enough to worry about without you committing treason.”
My eyes snapped up, face flushing hot. So, he did know where I was.
He met my gaze for a long moment before he finally turned and left. His footsteps trailed through the villa and then he was gone.
But Nej was wrong. Only the day before, as I’d sat across the table from the Consul, the look in his eyes hadn’t been crazed or delirious.
It had been steady and purposeful. He’d always been that way, and that was why my mother had feared him.
If the man was mad, the Magistrates could have risen against him long ago, overturning his seat to someone who could be controlled.
It had taken half the city turning on him to disrupt the hold he had on Isara, and even now, with the New Legion on the banks of the Sophanes, he still thought he had it.
He wasn’t a madman; he was a man who was sure he’d won.
I looked down at the blank parchment in my hands. I’d seen a message just like it on my mother’s desk, not long before the truth about the harvests got out. I was sure of it. And that wasn’t the only thing I remembered.
I waited several seconds after the door closed to step back into the hallway, following it to my mother’s study. I pushed the doors open and they hit the wall, hinges rattling.
The key to the cupboard was on the windowsill, and when I unlocked it, I stared at what lay inside. The tincture of godsblood was still there. The last one my mother had.
A gust of wind blew in through the window, filling the study as I stepped down.
I smoothed out the blank message on the desk before I unstoppered the small glass vessel.
My hand shook as I let the shimmering liquid drip onto its surface.
The godsblood beaded on the parchment before I smeared it with my thumb.
It was only a matter of seconds before I could see the markings coming to life in a faint color as the parchment wrinkled.
The pattern didn’t make sense, the letters forming an arrangement of words that I didn’t recognize.
The Citadel and its scribes loved their puzzles, and some of them were familiar from my time transcribing for my mother or the Priestess.
But this one was stranger than the ones I’d seen.
Still, there was something familiar about it to me.
I’d seen the symbols before. It was one of the old languages, no—it was the first language.
But the way the characters were spaced and stacked, the message appeared to be a cipher.
And in order to read it, I’d need a key.
There were thousands of official scrolls and papers in the Citadel District that could be used for that purpose.
It could be anything. Geographical records, planting plans for the fields, or even sacred texts written by the priests.
The randomization and obscurity of the text ensured its secrecy.
I looked up to the shelves that covered the wall behind my mother’s desk.
I walked toward them, unblinking, and began to pull armfuls of scrolls from their places.
I let them unroll over her desk, dragging a finger down the length of each one, eyes scanning the markings.
When I reached the bottom, I opened another.
And another. I tore through them, scroll after scroll, looking for anything written in the first language.
I was standing in a sea of curling parchment that filled the study’s floor when I dropped the last one, and I looked around me, to my mother’s trinkets glimmering from their places on the shelves.
Treasures she’d hoarded from the markets and gifts from other Magistrates or the Consul himself.
If there was anyone who might know what the Consul was up to, it was her.
But whatever secrets she’d had, she’d taken them with her.