39

THE NEXT MORNING WAS BRIGHT AND FRESH WITH NEWLY FALLEN snow. I had returned home in the small hours of the night, neither Theodor nor I wanting anyone aside from the sympathetic servants aware of our tryst. I threw open the window and breathed deep drafts of freezing air, clearing my head and filling my lungs with the new day. For the first time in weeks, I felt that there might be a future to look forward to. I had no word from Pyord, and the streets had been quiet. Though I had no more messages from Kristos, that word—safe—felt more like a promise this morning than it had yesterday. And I allowed myself the fragment of a dream that, perhaps, I would not lose Theodor. If anyone could work his way out of an arranged marriage, it was him. He said he had a wisp of an idea—and that was all I needed to stoke the hope I had allowed to spark within me.

I almost ran to the shop, finishing most of my day’s work before Alice or Emmi even arrived. I set them to work finishing Annette’s court gown—its perfect lines and silvery trim made me smile, the first time I had appreciated my own work in weeks. As I erased our work board and began to reassign tasks, the door banged open.

“Just a moment, I’ll—”

“No rush,” a familiar voice answered.

“Viola!” I dropped down from the stool I had to stand on to reach the board. “This is a surprise, I—” Blushing, I glanced around the shop at the mess the morning’s work had already left in its wake.

“It’s quaint. So bright and clean,” she said honestly. “A true artist’s atelier.” Her voice dropped. “I came to talk privately—I hope that can be arranged?”

“Of course,” I said, swiftly sending Alice and a gawking Emmi out the door to buy our lunch. “Is there something wrong?” I realized I was gripping my chalk, and let it drop to the countertop.

“No, not precisely. I have something for you,” Viola said. “My father found a packet of papers addressed to you among Nia’s letters.”

He must have had her home searched looking for clues, I surmised. I was desperately curious to know if he had found anything that would tie the murder to Pyord, but of course I couldn’t ask.

“It’s a few pages of notes about curses and charms,” Viola continued. She watched me for any reaction. “It looks like a first draft—there are notes in the margins and bits crossed out.”

“Yes, I—she translated a few pages of Pellian for me,” I replied. “Everything I learned was passed down from my mother, so I was curious what books on the subject might say. Nia was helping me.”

“I see.” Viola traced the pages with a light finger. “Curses, Sophie. You—you don’t meddle in that, do you?”

“Of course not!” The force in my reply shocked even me. I flushed. “The only written work on charm casting is in Pellian, and ancient Pellians cast curses, too.”

“My father—he didn’t want to give these to you because of how much the pages talked about curses.” She smiled. “I convinced him to let me ask you about them.”

“I was only interested in the theories,” I assured her. Of course the Lord of Keys had a right to be concerned. Pellian immigrants importing an ability to cast curses had added to the legal code of Galitha, and though that self-important set of documents couldn’t lower itself to specifically mention curses or charms, the Lord of Keys was certainly well aware of the laws dictating that any harm caused by “overt or covert maleficence, natural or supernatural” be prosecuted.

That counted for regicide, too. I tried to forget about that.

“Well, I hope this is helpful.” Viola handed me the papers. “Poor Nia—still nothing on why she was killed or who killed her.”

I shook my head. “I wish I could do something,” I lied. I could have done something. But going to the Lord of Keys meant admitting everything and being hung for treason—if Pyord didn’t find and kill me and my brother first. “Is there anything … new? In the case?”

“I’m afraid not. The palace wants to get some answers, and hopes that those answers don’t make Galitha look like a festering cesspool of crime. Or worse, revolt. The Allied States are one of our strongest military allies—we can’t look weak in their estimation. Unfortunately, they’re reading Nia’s death as linked to the revolutionary movement.”

“And it isn’t?” I said.

“Why would it be?” Viola watched me with a cocked eyebrow. “I should be leaving—Annette wanted me over for lunch. I think she’s having a hard time with all of this, honestly,” she added.

“Thank you,” I said. “For Nia’s papers.”

“You’re welcome,” Viola replied.

The girls weren’t back yet, so I opened the packet of papers with a deep breath.

The Pellians tended toward a warrior culture, Nia wrote by way of preface. I could hear her tone take on the erudite lecturer’s cadence she had used in the archive. They were highly competitive—most of their cultural pursuits were contests. Horse races, public boxing matches, and even arena fighting. It doesn’t surprise me that they’d be more inclined toward cursing one another than casting charms, or that they would attempt to undo charms in an effort to displace them with curses.

The text talks about the light matter tied into the charmed object. It says to untie the light from the object. (Literally—the word is the same as untying a knot), she added in the margin. Though the process of creating the charm is falsely understood to be physical, it is in fact mental. As one could cast a charm without the physical tie, though difficult, so can one untie a charm from its object.

Therefore, one may untie each strand of charm from the object and replace it with a curse of their choosing. Though it is easier to have an object in hand for focus and precision, it is not necessary, though it must be visible to extract the charm. It will be easier to learn non-tactile casting on a previously charmed or cursed object, as such items are more willing vessels than virgin objects.

I reread her final paragraph. It could be done—I could undo the curse in the shawl. I imagined Nia tracing each Pellian word with a gloved finger, reconstructing the sentences of long-unspoken words. She had given me the key, and she had died for it. All I had to do was figure out how to undo curses and then find a way to see the shawl again—in the next week.

I stitched a sloppy charm into a scrap of fabric. Easy as breathing—the charm was done in a couple of minutes, a glowing circle of backstitches on the plain linen.

Then I stared at it and tried to think about undoing those sparkling stitches. Untie the sparkling line with my mind. I had never attempted to engage with charms without handling them, and so doing anything with my mind rather than my fingers was not only foreign but also confusing. Even when I tried moving my hands in the motions I would use to pick out stitches, it was like grabbing at air. I couldn’t latch onto anything. I concentrated, but all I succeeded in doing was tightening my temples into the beginnings of a tension headache.

Perhaps, I thought, Nia had mistranslated or misunderstood the lack of physical contact with the charm. I picked up my needle and the charmed scrap and focused on unbinding the charm from the fabric as I snipped through the knot I’d worked in the end and plucked out each individual stitch.

What was left was a pile of dimly glowing thread scraps and a piece of fabric that looked smudged with light. The charm had stained it—though it would certainly be less effective now, it remained embedded in the cloth.

So part of what Nia had read was true—the charm wasn’t merely attached to the stitches. It wasn’t a purely physical tie. It was bound to the item with something deeper.

Maybe, I thought, a curse would be easier for me to undo. I’d want to pull the dark from the object I’d created more than I wanted to remove the light, by my own instincts. I whipped out a quick curse, an angry little wish for bad luck, in another scrap, ignoring the dull nausea that accompanied the task.

I set it against an unlit candlestick and thought about it. Instead of lifting my needle, I imagined the smooth metal sliding under a stitch and plucking it up, drawing it from the fabric. I imagined the stitch as a line of dark sparkle rather than thread. I wrinkled my brow and stared at the line of shadow stitches, willing them to loosen. Without meaning to, I pantomimed the actions with my hand, picking at a stitch and working it loose.

Before my eyes the dark line rose from the fabric, one piece at a time, and hovered over the table.

I gasped—I could do it. Learning this new skill had been easier than learning curse casting, as though I had strengthened some unseen muscle in developing the ability to curse as well as charm. I had felt, odd as it was to describe, more dexterous, more flexible in the invisible maneuverings that produced charms in recent weeks. But what now? The curse hung in a cloud instead of being tied to the fabric, but a floating curse wasn’t much better than a bound one. I waved my hand. The cloud dissipated slightly. Could I just dissolve it back into the ether? After all, it had come from somewhere—it could go back to where it came from, couldn’t it? More theory—and even if I’d had time to explore it, I couldn’t read the ancient texts I would have needed to answer all the questions my experiment raised.

I swirled my hand, and then made a movement like erasing a chalkboard. The particles of darkness separated from one another and dispersed, growing smaller and fainter until I could no longer see them.

I repeated the experiment with the smudges of light left on the cloth, drawing them into a cloud above the table and then waving them away. So it could be done, and without touching the item itself.

Victory surged briefly in my mind before I considered the sheer expanse of the queen’s shawl—thousands of stitches.

Emmi and Alice returned, mugs of street-vendor soup and thick brown bread in hand, laughing and gossiping about the upcoming Festival of Song. Behind them, a scrappy boy wearing a red cap rapped on the door. I handed the errand boy a coin for a tip as I took the folded paper from him, but I wanted to rip that cap from his head and box his ears for being foolish enough to wear the symbol of revolution.

The message was just an address, my brother’s name, and an unwritten but unequivocal summons.

“I have to run out on an errand,” I said, my voice strange even to me. Alice nodded, but Emmi tilted her head at my strained words, curious. I knew that both could read me well enough to know that this was no ordinary errand, but neither pressed me.

I found the address in Pyord’s message and stood before an imposing charcoal-gray townhome in an older part of the river district. The entrance was flanked with carved dragons with stone flames protruding from their gaping mouths—the effect was more tacky than terrifying in broad daylight, but I wondered if they looked more sinister at night.

I rang the bell and a liveried servant, wearing clothes twenty years out of fashion, entered and led me to a dour study. The only cheerful thing in the room was a fire roaring on the hearth. Otherwise, it was filled with precisely shelved books and dark furniture and drapes that kept too much sunlight out.

Two tall wingback chairs faced the fire, and I saw that both were occupied. Pyord rose from one, gesturing for me to sit on an ottoman placed between the chairs.

But when the other person rose, there was no way I could have done anything but launch myself at him.

Kristos beamed as I hit him, full force, knocking him back into the chair.

“I was so worried,” I cried, “that you’d be hurt!”

“I will be if you don’t keep your elbows out of my rib cage,” he said with a broad smile. “It’s good to see you, too.”

“You said—your note—that you were hiding,” I said, brow knitting. “That you were safe.”

“I was, Sophie. I was hiding here, and I was safe. I promise.” He grinned and caught my shoulders in his large hands. I should have felt safe in his arms, but I didn’t.

“It is done,” Pyord said, nodding to me.

“Yes. It’s done. I’ve done everything you asked me. Now you can let my brother go.”

“Well, Kristos. You heard her—everything done according to plan.”

They shared a smile.

I froze.

“Kristos,” I said slowly. “You knew about what he was making me do? You’re not angry?”

“Sophie, I know that this is going to seem difficult to imagine, but you casting a curse—that was my idea.”

My legs buckled, and I finally sat on the ottoman. “Your idea? Then you—you weren’t being held hostage?”

“No,” he said, horribly gently. “Pyord supplied the details, but I knew you had an in with the nobility when you told me about Lady Snowmont. I knew you’d never use it to accomplish anything without a push. Believing I was in danger gave you that push.”

My heart hammered against my corset, echoing into the void where my trust had been.

“I never had any intention of hurting Kristos,” Pyord said. “He’s one of the greatest natural leaders I’ve ever met—his disappearance inflamed the Laborers’ League so much that I’ve had to request that they curb their rush for violence.” He smiled. “They’ve even devised assault plans on the Stone Castle when we circulated the rumor he was held there—entirely their idea, entirely based upon their loyalty to Kristos. I of course recommended they not attempt such suicide.”

“I don’t care about that,” I snapped. “But Kristos—you used me. For something awful. You made me help you try to … kill people.” Saying the words out loud made them even more horrible. I almost gagged.

“Sophie, this has to be done. In order for a new, fair government to be enacted, we need a vacuum of power. Pyord taught me that. No change in regime has ever, historically, been enacted without unbalancing the power already in place.” Pyord nodded as though observing a recitation. I seethed. “With the king gone, we’ll have the opportunity we need. The king will fall, and we will strike quickly to assert a new government. Pyord has a brilliant plan, and Niko and the others have organized the Red Caps to carry it off, but it needed a stroke of luck. You’re that stroke—you’re the final words in the greatest plan ever written.”

“I am not,” I said. “I didn’t want anything to do with this—I was only protecting you.” I felt sick—I should have withheld sending the shawl until Kristos was freed. I was an idiot for not doing so, and an idiot for not seeing that Kristos had all the pieces except my motivation to get what he wanted.

I had just never believed that he could be so cruel to me. That he could betray my trust and lie to me and force me to be disloyal to my own principles. And I certainly never believed that Kristos was a killer. He was a writer, an idealist. Something had changed. I glanced at Pyord. He had changed my brother, corrupted him into something as single-minded as himself.

“And …” My voice nearly left me. “And Nia. You—you must have known about her, too.”

Kristos looked, blessedly, confused, and Pyord sighed. “I handled that breach of confidence on my own.” He looked almost sorry for it, but the detached words—breach of confidence—enraged me. Nia was a person, a brilliant woman, and Pyord had treated her as disposable.

That’s all any of us were to Pyord—disposable. I clamped my arms around myself—would he dispose of me, too? Would Kristos even care enough to try to keep me safe?

“I thought—I thought I meant something to you. I chose you, Kristos—I chose saving you and compromising what I believed in. I became tied up in all this for you.”

He shifted. “I know it was against your code of ethics, Sophie, but that code—it belongs to a different world. Not this place, not this time. Not when you were so needed.”

“It belongs to me!” I shouted. “It wasn’t yours to corrupt.” If nothing else, the injustice of bending one’s actions to fit someone else’s beliefs ought to have resonated with him—but he would have never committed such a treasonous act of compromise, I thought bitterly, even to spare his own sister.

“You know that Penny was arrested,” I said flatly. “Do you even care?”

He threw his hands in the air. “All of us knew the risks. She knew. She’s safe now.”

“And if I had been caught? If I had been arrested, if they had discovered what I did? What I created with my own hands?”

He rocked back on his heels, and then flat on his feet. He could never keep still when Mother lectured him, when he knew he’d done something wrong. As a child, he’d fidgeted as though he could wear an escape hatch into the floor.

His movements were more controlled now, but I knew why he couldn’t keep his feet from worrying the thick carpet. He knew, from the outset, that I could be caught; he knew I could be killed, and he’d risked that anyway. In whatever calculation he used to justify himself, I’m sure that the chances I would end up on the gallows were slim. But he knew the chance existed. Silent, I turned to leave.

Kristos reached for my hand. “I’m sorry that you don’t understand this now, Sophie, but I know that someday you’ll see how vital this was. How important you were.”

“I will not,” I shot back at Kristos, jerking my arm away from him. He cared more for ideals and words on a broadside than he did for me—for my business, for my ethics, even for my life. “I will only see this as the day I lost my brother.”

“Once we get home, we’ll straighten everything out,” he said, begging me silently for another chance.

“You’re not coming home with me. You can stay here if he’ll let you, or go to one of your Red Cap friends’ houses. But you’re not welcome in the home I pay for any longer.”

“Sophie—”

“No. You lied to me and used me. Alice was hurt because of you. Nia died for what you did. And some poor messenger boy, too—one of the people you would claim you want to help! Don’t speak to me.” I ran from the room, stumbling on the edge of the carpet.

Footfalls stalked me—Pyord, not Kristos. “I am quite disappointed in this turn, Sophie.”

“What did you expect?”

“Reason. In truth, I had hoped that at some point you would come to understand what a great benefit someone with your skill could be to our new government, to the entirety of Galitha. I had imagined, to be honest, an elevated position for you.”

Conscription was a more apt term. “I don’t want any role in your revolution or anything that comes out of it.”

“As it’s too late for that, I’ll have to resort to fear. Even though I have no intention of harming your brother, I still have leverage.”

I already knew. “Don’t tell or you’ll kill me.” I swallowed bitter rage that made me shake, down to my fingertips. “If you’d kill Nia, I know you wouldn’t hesitate to dump me in the river.”

“I wouldn’t enjoy it, but yes, I would do it.” He sighed. “It’s not just me anymore, Sophie. Niko Otni, for instance—I have no doubt that he would intercede if he thought you were liable to compromise us.”

I turned my face away, unwilling to hear what Pyord had to say about one of my brother’s friends, but he continued anyway. “He suggested certain measures be taken when I discovered your little stunt with the shifts. Of course your brother would never agree, and hiding that from him would be … difficult. I insisted that the situation be addressed without dispatching you, but don’t doubt that if you disrupt this revolution further, I can’t continue to advocate for you, and in any case, someone might make decisions without my approval or your brother’s input.” His eyes seemed to swallow all of the light in the room. “The wheels have begun to turn, and the road is clear. I won’t allow anything to obstruct it now.”

“If you weren’t threat enough, the gallows would be,” I answered. Whether I liked it or not, I was bound to remain loyal to Pyord’s secret, or my life was forfeit. Pyord smiled the prepared smile of a man who knew his hand would win the round of cards. He’d gotten his way.

I snatched my cloak from a peg on the wall and ran out the door, past the frozen dragons, and marched along the street as though I had some purpose, some mission. Pyord had won this battle, but he hadn’t won the war. I couldn’t change Nia’s death or Alice’s broken fingers. This wasn’t like sewing—I couldn’t unpick my stitches and start over. But I could decide what to do next.