“Meet me near the Goldoka bridge when the pleasure boats on the palace canals set up for the evening crowd. If I don’t arrive, it means I’m dead, and if I am, don’t linger. You’re resourceful. Find a way back to Zaredis’s camp. Use what leverage you have to bargain with him. Estred’s well-being for protection of his twin against the eater of ghosts.” He slipped the boot onto her foot, hiselegant hands those of a poet or scholar, not an assassin. Or so she’d like to fool herself into thinking. No doubt they were as capable of writing beautiful prose as they were of wringing a neck.
“Why wouldn’t Zaredis send his sorcerer with us? Wouldn’t it be easier for him to learn the lay of the palace and take the artifact instead of waiting for us to return to draw some map?”
Busy buckling the boot closed, Gharek paused and looked up, wearing a faint frown. “Have you forgotten what he looks like? There isn’t a crowd large enough or a street deserted enough for him to go unnoticed. Besides, he’s too valuable to the general to risk on such an endeavor. He’ll need him when he launches his attack on Domora. This isn’t Zaredis’s only plan for taking the city; it’s just the easiest one with fewer casualties for his army.”
In short, they were expendable if things went wrong—and the sorcerer was not. “How do you know the general has more than one plan?”
He tightened the straps on her other shoe, taking his time buckling them. “Because it’s military strategy and men like Zaredis, who’ve risen in the ranks to such powerful positions, always have more than one plan.”
Golden bars of morning sun streamed through the open window, highlighting similarly colored strands amid the darker brown ones in Gharek’s hair as he bent to fit her shoe. The angle of his head shielded part of his face from her. She saw just the tip of his nose and chin, and the jut of his lower lip. She’d always thought him handsome, if coldly grim, with an aristocratic nose and nostrils that flared wide when he was angry or displeased, which was often. High cheekbones made more hollow by the thickening of his beard and narrowed eyes lent his visage an even harder cast.
The few times she’d seen his face soften had been reserved for Estred, and those rare occasions she’d seen him truly smile and then laugh had taken her breath away. In those ephemeral moments she’d caught a glimpse of what he might once have been like before life, circumstance, and the role of henchman for the Spider of Empire had changed him.
“Done,” he said, and rose in one lithe motion. “We can’t linger. You’ve a market to explore,” he said in a mildly bored voice as if he’d spend his time doing nothing more than harmless sightseeing.
Siora stood when he did, and the space between them was thin and hummed with tension. Her skin tingled from her feet to her scalp, a feeling not entirely unfamiliar when she was this close to him. It had suffused her entire body when they shared the bed last night. Sleep had been long in coming, finally weighting her eyelids shut while she counted the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.
Fear? Attraction? The first made sense. The second, not at all. Not with what she knew about him, what she’d seen, and yet the two feelings entwined together. He had, since the first moment she’d met him, fascinated her. Her reason told her such a thing made for bad choices. Her emotions seemed not to care.
She’d bargained with Zaredis to help Kalun if he promised Estred’s safety while she was Zaredis’s hostage. The dead needed her as well, including her father. She didn’t dare speak his name or even think it just in case it somehow summoned him and made him vulnerable to whatever was devouring ghosts. But she missed his nebulous guidance terribly. And she worried.
She might have stepped back to put more distance between her and Gharek, except the chair on which she’d sat blocked her.It was Gharek who moved away, nostrils flared in the telltale sign of annoyance. He didn’t say anything, only set to completing his own dressing. She was struck once more by the profound change in the way he looked simply by covering his head with the head wrap and hunching his shoulders in such a way that he looked older, weaker, and not at all like the formidable cat’s-paw.
“I see why the empress relied on your skills,” she whispered. “I’m only surprised one of Zaredis’s men actually recognized you.”
He shrugged. “I was careless.”
They took the servants’ narrow staircase to the kitchens instead of the grand one reserved for patrons. That led to the greeting rooms on the ground floor where the prostitutes who worked for the Blue Rat draped the furniture in languid enticement and gauzy fabrics to please their customers. Except for the servants going about their tasks and the new pair of door guards manning the front entry, the brothel was quiet. Gharek sent one of the scullery boys to fetch the madam.
She tutted as she approached. “You both look refreshed, something I don’t usually see after a night in my establishment.” She eyed Gharek with faint contempt and Siora with a touch of puzzlement as if she considered them an odd, rather pathetic-looking couple. There was no pity in her expression when she once again held out her hand for the balance of payment. Her “Enjoy your stay in Domora and at the market” confirmed every one of Gharek’s suspicions that eavesdropping was alive and well at the Blue Rat.
Once outside in the street, among the bustle of other city dwellers, Siora hooked her arm with Gharek’s. “You were right.”
The sly half smile he gave her almost made her jaw drop. Had he ever smiled at her before? “Of course I was right,” he said. “Nobrothel hoping to compete in Domora neglects its eavesdropping. It’s practically a sport.”
Even outside the brothel, they were careful not to speak too freely. Gharek guided her toward the sprawling marketplace in the city’s center, its byways already crowded with shoppers and pickpockets. “Browse and listen,” he instructed her. “You’ll be amazed at what you’ll glean simply by keeping your ears open to other conversations. You know where I’ll be.”
“And where I’m to meet you,” she said.
He nodded. “My visit will take all of today. Tomorrow we go to the royal library.”
“To see your friend?”
“And do some research. If we’re lucky, my friend will give us some guidance without asking too many questions.” He frowned for a moment. “We’ll have to stay in rougher lodgings tonight if we want to make Zaredis’s coin last.”
Siora smiled. She’d spent more days of her life sleeping under open sky, in barns, and on quiet streets than she had inside such places as houses, inns, and brothels. “I don’t mind.”
The corner of his mouth lifted for a moment. “I didn’t think so.”
He pulled her into a loose embrace, startling her, but only for a moment. The unexpected gesture and his closeness sent her heartbeat thudding in her ears. Obviously for show among a crowd that likely didn’t notice, Siora seized the opportunity and slid her hands over his wide shoulders in a return embrace. She tilted her face up to his. “I’ll see you soon, husband,” she said, her voice carrying just above the din.
Gharek’s expression, guarded and a little startled as well, quickly adopted a false affection. He bent to brush his lips acrossher forehead in a brief kiss. “Don’t shop all day,” he said. They parted ways after that, Siora doing her best not to reach up and rub the spot on her forehead where the skin tingled with the memory of his touch.
Domora was much like it had been when Siora fled from it months earlier. The lives of the common folk altered little when the seat of power transitioned to someone else, at least after the fighting was over. Life continued amid and beyond the grieving, interrupted by the occasional plague, rebellion, or a draga eating an empress. To any who surveyed the city now, it seemed like none knew or cared that an army advanced toward them, that the Kraelian throne would once more become the prize for whichever armies would slaughter each other so that one person might rule and enjoy the benefits of power bought with blood.
The sun beat down on her head as she made her way through the market, moving slowly from stall to stall, pretending to browse and engaging in chitchat with the merchants. Most of their conversations consisted of the usual cajoling banter and tactics meant to manipulate a reluctant shopper into parting with their coin in exchange for that one thing they suddenly couldn’t live without. Amid the bluster and empty praise, she winnowed out details about the city’s feel overall, the tense waiting for something to happen, the beginnings of hoarding just in case there would really be a siege, the conjectures concerning what was happening in the illegal market known as the Maesor. It was an open secret everyone knew, but no one admitted to knowing if questioned by Kraelian soldiers or palace guards. A place where magic of every kind—from simple and beneficial to dark and complex—traded hands, and buyers and sellers risked life and limb to do business there.
Siora tucked each tidbit into her memory as the day waned, and she wondered if Gharek had success with sneaking into the palace to retrace the path to the Windcry’s hiding place. She dare not think the worst. This was the cat’s-paw. The empress might be dead and no longer in need of his skills, but that didn’t mean he’d lost them. This was a man who knew how to survive.