10

“YOU WERE WEARING THE CAP, WEREN’T YOU?” THE FIRELIGHT played on the wall, and a bird outside the window sang a merry tune, but I wasn’t in a laughing mood. My brother almost died—I almost watched someone shoot him. My hands felt like lead in my lap, and I couldn’t quite erase the image that wormed its way into my thoughts, of Kristos with a bullet wound in his chest, pouring blood onto his white shirt.

“Yes,” he said.

“At least—thank you,” I whispered.

“It was supposed to be by lottery,” he added, and I snapped to attention.

“I told you to wear it,” I said, an edge in my voice. “You. Because I made it for you.”

“It didn’t seem fair. We had enough for only a few of us. It didn’t seem fair,” he said again.

“I don’t care about fair!” I shouted, suddenly enraged. He would put himself in danger and not even show me the courtesy of doing the one thing, the one simple thing, that could help him avoid harm? “I made the caps so you could stay safe, not because I give a whit about your cause or that rabble out there.” While he envisioned grandiose schemes and waves of change, all I could picture was his unprotected figure on the square. He was the only family I had left, and if he died … I shuddered. I didn’t know what I would do.

Kristos had already latched onto a new argument, however. “Rabble. They’re rabble to you.”

“They were willing to let you get shot,” I said, voice low but simmering. “They weren’t going to help you. And they weren’t behaving in a very dignified manner, shouting in the streets. So yes. I would call them rabble.”

Kristos pushed his arms close against his chest, folded as though pressing whatever he wanted to say back in. I breathed slowly. I’d always known that my charms worked—I’d seen them work. I’d seen people struggling to pay their bills come into small fortunes. I’d seen people ignored by their sweethearts married within the year. I’d seen people who couldn’t get work to save their lives employed after a luck charm.

I had never watched a musket misfire, watched one of my charms cripple a weapon intended to kill the person wearing it.

“Please stay out of trouble,” I whispered. Dusk had gathered in the corners of our little kitchen, darkness a welcome mask to a pair of faces that didn’t want to fight but didn’t want to let this go, either. “The soldiers aren’t going anywhere. You can’t stand up against that with words—or bricks,” I half spat.

“I can’t abandon this, Sophie. Not now.”

“You could go about it differently. Am I the only one who thinks this is getting out of hand? That it’s getting dangerous?”

“It’s getting serious,” Kristos countered. “We have real plans now, real organization. Venko says—”

“Oh yes, Venko. What was he doing for your glorious cause today, anyway? He could have spoken to the officer, I’m sure. They would listen to a university professor, wouldn’t they? But he just … disappeared.”

Kristos flared again. “He has to protect himself, too. He’s able to help us from his position. Because of it. If he loses his position at the university, he couldn’t do as much for us.”

“What exactly is he doing for you? He seems to—I don’t know, direct you all somehow. I thought the League was for workers.”

“He doesn’t direct us,” Kristos shot back, and I knew I’d scraped against a sore point. Venko was asserting himself as a leader, in ways Kristos didn’t necessarily appreciate. “He’s a good planner, good at seeing the flaws and the benefits in any plan. And he’s funded us.”

“He taught you how to ask for money. You could have learned on your own.”

“None of us knew how to invest money. How to invest it so that we’re not at risk ourselves, not tied to it personally.”

“Well, that just sounds illegal.”

“It’s not illegal,” he snapped. “It’s just using opportunity, the way entrepreneurs and speculators do. And he has connections. With merchants. With Kvys patrician families.”

I pounced on this, ready to demand answers. “Kvys are funneling you money? Why?” For some reason this disquieted me more than Galatine merchants casting a lot in with the Red Caps. What interest could foreigners have in the Red Caps’ aims?

“And some Fenians. They’re funding the printing of new ideas, of applied political theory, of—”

“That’s what you’re calling your writing? Applied political theory?”

Kristos simmered with anger but kept his voice controlled. “Pyord Venko is an invaluable asset to our cause.”

“What does he get out of this?” I asked. “I mean, really. Why throw in his lot with the Laborers’ League?”

“The university system is as unbalanced as the rest of the economic system,” Kristos said. “He should be running the College of Antiquities, not stuck in a lecturer position.”

“According to whom?”

Kristos didn’t answer, but I knew—according to Venko’s clearly elevated opinion of himself. “But he really believes in what we’re doing. His heart is Galatine, Sophie, a Galatine who’s educated himself in all the ways in which we’re failing as a nation. He believes it can be better, that we can emerge from this dark age of noble stranglehold stronger.”

“I don’t trust him.” I hadn’t meant to say it so bluntly, but his calculating manner and self-preservation both unnerved me.

“Because he’s Kvys? Because he’s an academic? Why?”

“Because he’s …” I searched for the right word, the term that could capture the unnerving superiority I had felt from him. “He’s very distant,” I finally said. “Let me ask you this—does he trust you?”

“Of course,” Kristos snapped, but he looked away.

I could have pressed, seeing in my brother’s narrowed eyes that there was some weak point in the leadership of the League. I didn’t. I envied him, a little, for really believing in something. I didn’t believe for a minute that their protests and talking and pamphlets would change the regime. A strong monarchy and an oligarchy of nobles who ran everything? How could a few printed fliers make a difference against that?

“Where do you go from here?” I asked. “You had your assembly in the square. You’re printing your pamphlets. What else can you do? What else does Pyord say you ought to do?”

Kristos shifted, positioning his face, already half in shadow, farther from me. “You know enough,” he said.

“Kristos …” I didn’t have the words to argue everything I wanted to say. “I just—I don’t know what I would do if something happened to you.”

He paused. He had been ready to deliver one of his fiery speeches, as though he were debating a pro-monarchist on the street. Instead, he slumped in his chair.

“You know how to win me over.” He sighed. “This is what I care about, Sophie. I’ll never have work I care about—at least, not in the world we live in now. You care about your work, I know.”

“There just … there must be a better way,” I offered weakly.

He leaned into his hands. His profile was outlined by the flickering candlelight, and he looked strangely stoic and gallant for the long moment he sat thinking. “Maybe there is another way. Maybe in the end, it would be better. If only because it’s necessary.” He gazed into the candle flame without seeing it, suddenly looking much older, lines furrowed into his brow where I had never noticed them before.

A light rap on the door forced us both to our feet. I immediately feared the worst—the City Guard had come with a warrant to arrest Kristos. But he crossed our kitchen in three easy strides and swung the door open, unconcerned.

It was just Jack, not an armed soldier ready to drag my brother to prison. What kind of life had Kristos brought us into where it wasn’t complete hysteria to consider that it could have been?

Jack wrung his red wool cap between his hands. “I just wanted to make sure you two were both all right.”

“Of course we are,” Kristos said with more swagger than he needed to.

“Figured you were. But I worried Sophie might have been a little shaken up, so …” Jack didn’t carry a grudge—I could grant him that. Despite our last parting, he bore no residual anger.

“I’m fine, Jack.” I slumped back into my chair by the fire. The cane seat creaked. “Thank you for coming by,” I added in rote courtesy.

“I’m going to get some water,” Kristos announced, grabbing our mottled ceramic pitcher. He was out the door before I could protest.

Jack and I stared at the fire’s low coals. I scanned my thoughts as though inventorying the bolts of fabric on my shelf at the shop—what could I possibly talk about with Jack? Something polite, something that wouldn’t encourage him in any half-baked romantic notions.

“It’s getting cold early this year” was the best I could muster.

“Hmm? Sure is. It was a short autumn.” He turned back toward the fire. Maybe he preferred the quiet. I was almost getting used to a nearly amicable silence when he cleared his throat. He began to speak again, stopped himself, and then exclaimed, “Don’t you worry what people will think?”

“What?”

“About—everything. Not helping out more with the League, not getting married. Doesn’t it bother you?”

“People already think of me as—as different.” It was true—a charm caster, a woman who owned her business, a commoner who tied her fortunes to the nobility, a Pellian by birth who lived like a Galatine. “I am different.”

“I don’t—I’m not a gossip, but people are saying things.”

“Things.”

He shifted. “Just that you seem more invested in the nobility than in your neighbors.”

“The nobility pays my bills,” I answered. “My neighbors don’t.” I sounded more distant than I meant, and more callous.

Kristos banged through the door, water pitcher in hand. “It’s so cold I think this froze halfway between here and the well!” He laughed. Then he saw Jack’s pinched face and my blanched one.

He cleared his throat and changed the topic. “Jack, you did well getting so many of the field hands into the city for the demonstration.”

“Wasn’t too big a trick—they’re all out of work except the few hired to tend winter wheat. You were right—this is the right time.”

I took the water jug from Kristos and absently traced the stoneware handle. It held the cold of the winter night outside and chilled my fingertips. The right time—for what, exactly? Jack’s tone implied that the League’s plans depended on more complicated clockwork than simply gathering a few dozen demonstrators or printing pamphlets at a haphazard pace.

“Of course I was right,” Kristos said with a grin. “We had good advice—Professor Venko said the same about exploiting the slow season for workers.”

“He’s an odd one, but he’s yet to steer us wrong once,” Jack agreed.

Kristos nodded. “And he understands politics. He sees a revolution, not just a loose organization. We have to press any advantage, convince the nobility that they’re better off coming to a parley.”

Those were military terms, I realized as I set the kettle on the stove, the lid rattling under my shaking hand.

“I should be going,” Jack finally said. Kristos stood to walk him out, but I stopped him.

“Jack,” I said as we stepped outside. “I’m sorry. I really am. I—I wouldn’t make you happy.”

He nodded, still dejected. I wished there was something I could say to assuage the hurt in his face, but I just let him wish me a good night instead.

I returned to my chair, watching the heat rise off the coals in our pathetic little stove.

“I don’t blame you, you know.” Kristos settled into the chair beside mine.

“What, you don’t want to marry Jack and curate an impressive collection of small towheads like him, either?”

Kristos smiled ruefully. “No, not particularly. But—well, if I don’t understand you, I’m guessing poor Jack Parry never will.”

I picked up Kristos’s red cap, his initials embroidered into the edge. “You come closest to understanding. So don’t get yourself shot. Fair?”

“I can be careful. And you,” he said, his teasing grin returning, “can make more of those caps. Since they work so well.”

I smacked his arm, but I unearthed the red wool from its pile on a high shelf and cut out another dozen caps that night.