8.

Greatduke Jonathan Roland stood nearly as tall as the Old Bear, despite his rounded shoulders and stooped posture. He was young—or youngish, anyway. Rowena supposed nearly everyone she met seemed younger than her Bear, who wasn’t so much old but somehow outside of time, weathered and inscrutable. Roland, she guessed as she tried to hide a thoughtful squint behind a yawn, was probably less than forty.

Lord Roland stood to greet Rowena, muttering some pleasantry over her hand as he bowed her into the room, trailing her past the Old Bear seated in a chair beside the unlit fireplace. How many hands had he been forced to kiss and how many to shake that night, Rowena wondered. There were no fewer than three hundred guests or she was the Governor’s wet-nurse. Hardly sanitary. And to think the quality called folk from her side of the street dirty.

Still, Rowena said, “It’s an honor, milord,” though perhaps a moment later than she ought to have. The Greatduke eyed her curiously. She wondered how long she’d left him waiting as her mind wandered.

“Rowena Downshire,” she blurted, managing a wobbly curtsy on her aching ankle. Master Meteron cleared his throat. She blinked at him, then realized he’d almost certainly already given her name.

“I’m sorry,” she added stupidly.

The Greatduke had grace enough to pretend he didn’t hear her second—third?—gaffe of their brief acquaintance.

“This is my lady wife, Greatduchess Simone Roland,” he said, gesturing to a woman.

The woman, Rowena realized. Pregnant, and very far along, too. She had the wide, round face and opalescent eyes of someone born far from Amidon, her near-black hair arranged in a topknot, studded with dangling copper bells that tinkled softly as she nodded her greetings.

Afraid of another misstep, Rowena kept her response to a curtsy and a held tongue.

Roland turned to the bar where a statue-still lanyani draped in a robe of cascading moss awaited his orders. It looked very much like one of the statues arranged in the grottos of the Rolands’ indoor gardens. Slowly, it dawned on Rowena those “statues” might very well be lanyani instructed to stand sentinel and spy on the guests’ comings and goings—especially in a place where they might assume themselves to be alone. You should have been more careful, she scolded herself.

With a gesture, Roland directed the lanyani’s attention to the assemblage. The creature set about pouring five flutes of vinas from a tall silver ice bucket into even taller crystal cups. It made a circuit of the room, setting glasses on tall, inlaid tables set between the guest chairs near the empty fireplace.

Rowena took a smaller wing chair between Master Meteron and the Old Bear.

“We’re very grateful you could accept our invitation, Master Pardon,” Lady Roland began.

“The pleasure is all mine,” the Old Bear answered. There could not have been less pleasure in his voice if Lady Roland had just dropped a set of balances on his foot.

“My husband and I will always be grateful for your service to our house,” the lady went on, unperturbed. Rowena noticed that she had an accent—very light, carefully schooled. She wondered where it came from. She imagined more lovely women like her, wherever that place was, their eyes wide and cheeks smooth as velvet. “Without you and Master Meteron, I would never have arrived safely in Amidon.” She touched her belly. “My lord and I are expecting our fifth child. I’m hoping to Reason it’s a daughter. This house could hardly stand another son, though I’m sure my husband is happy to know his line rests so secure.”

“Indeed,” the Old Bear said flatly.

An awkward silence followed. Rowena bit her lip.

“You understand, my lady,” Meteron said, his voice pouring honey over the sour moment, “that our experience on the Aeropagi was a less happy one than yours. But we’re glad of the happiness it’s bought you since.”

Roland bristled at those last words. Bought. He leaned in, scowling. “You were paid for your pains.” His gaunt hands curled into the arms of his chair. “And you knew the risks.”

“We did,” the Old Bear agreed. Rowena saw the tightness in his jaw, grinding his anger. “My wife paid them for all of us.”

Something stirred inside Rowena, pressing her to soothe him, or silence him, and she knew at once that it wasn’t herself.

Not now, she begged. Please, I can’t right now. I’m sorry.

“It was business,” Roland was saying. The glass of vinas the lanyani had set beside him sweated in the summer air. “I can appreciate the depth of your loss. That’s why I was disinclined to heed my wife’s request that we hire you again.”

That, at least, is probably true, the voice in Rowena’s mind murmured.

Meteron regarded Greatduchess Roland. “As to that point, I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding, Milady. We’re retired.”

The lady smiled. “I’ve heard that. I also heard of something happening at the Old Cathedral last fall. Something involving two unusually well-prepared campaigners. And a girl.” Her gaze met Rowena’s before settling on the Alchemist. Her expression twisted with sympathy. “I can imagine how seeing me brings you pain, truly. But we’ve come into a situation that requires specific help—yours.”

The Alchemist fingered his vinas. Rowena had never seen him drink the stuff. He studied the glass turning in his hand. Lady Roland wasn’t wrong. Something in him ached so bitterly, Rowena could feel it rising from him like heat. The voice that had lived in her for months began to quietly weep.

But the Alchemist said nothing.

Master Meteron leaned forward. “Who has asked after us? Why?”

“In recent years, Lady Roland and I have been in the business of funding experimental research,” Lord Roland replied. “Most of it has been more based in practice than theory, but after the Decadal Conference, we decided to focus more pointedly on . . . investigative branches of Holy Reason.”

Rowena joined her companions in an exchange of glances. She read in them the whole play of possibilities: suspicion, interest, worry, hostility, hope. She wasn’t entirely sure what look she contributed, but it wouldn’t be anything simple. Of that, she was sure.

“Investigative,” the Alchemist echoed. He had lost his feigned interest in the vinas. His hand twisted around the neck of his cane. “Any specific cause of that new interest?”

“Things are afoot,” Lady Roland replied. “We intend not to be left behind.”

“The Decadal Conference, for all its scandal, represented an opportunity,” Lord Roland continued. “A sea-change in the relationship between the peerage and the Ecclesiastical Commission. Some efforts have been made to suppress the details of what happened the night the keynote was to have occurred, but conjecture offers its own explanations.” He sat back, studying his guests intently. “And we have good reason to believe this conjecture nearly as useful as fact.”

“What manner of investigative research?” the Alchemist pressed. Rowena realized he had moved almost imperceptibly closer to her, shifting in his seat as if his shadow cast across her were some kind of ward.

“We have a certain sympathy for displaced scholars,” Lady Simone said quickly. More uneasily than before, she smiled. “I was one, back in Khmer, before . . . Well, before.”

“I remember.”

Rowena glanced at Master Meteron. The conversation seemed to be flowing between the Rolands and the Alchemist in a straight line, as if neither she nor Meteron were there to hear. Was this what it had been like, back when they had campaigned? The Old Bear—the Younger Bear, she supposed—brokering the deals, and Meteron playing the silent partner? It was utterly the reverse of what she expected. At any moment, the Anselm Meteron she knew was due to break into the conversation, piqued at being disregarded, and disarm the lot of them with some deadly verbal riposte.

But he didn’t. He watched, instead, and Rowena caught only the barest glance from him, a flicker of his steely gray eyes.

Just listen, they said.

And so she did.

“I had to approach him, you see,” Lady Simone was saying. “After I read that paper, I knew something had gone very wrong. It was a lie. It takes an excellent scholar to lie so very poorly in print, you know. It’s a sign of how much dissembling in his research is against his nature.”

“Bloody Proof,” Meteron groaned. “You mean Chalmers.”

“He had a project to carry out, and it required travel,” Roland said, nodding. “To Lemarcke.”

“We sent him and heard nothing more, for a time. Then, four weeks ago, he sparked us,” Lady Roland explained. “He had found materials quite important to his continuing studies but needed to make a rather . . . challenging journey to make use of them. He felt he needed protection.”

“We would never have suggested you,” Roland interrupted. The words could’ve come off as a slap, but he seemed the sort of comfortable, scientific bloke who spoke facts without much regard for feelings. Blunt. Direct.

“He demanded you,” Lady Roland explained. “Insisted. Given the nature of the work, he said it had to be the two of you, or he would abandon the project entirely.”

Meteron sat back in his chair, his thumb running circles over the stump of his missing finger. “What project?”

Roland snorted. “You can dispense with pretense, Meteron. We know. And so do you.”

The Alchemist and Meteron exchanged a guarded look. It grazed over Rowena strangely, lingering for an uncomfortable moment. She tried to place what was wrong about it.

“I think,” Meteron said at last, “we need a moment to confer. Alone.”

The Rolands rose, the lady still smiling with unnerving calm. She’s sure they’ll take the job, Rowena realized. She doesn’t care a whit about flouncing off to humor them. She knows she’s got them already.

“There is some urgency to the decision, you understand,” Lord Roland said.

Given the grit of the Old Bear’s jaw, Rowena was shocked he hadn’t cracked a tooth. “Ten minutes.”

And thus, the Rolands turned to depart.

“My lady,” the Old Bear called.

They turned. Lady Roland’s head tilted, curious as a spaniel.

“Might I trouble you to take Miss Downshire with you, for the time being?”

Rowena started, staring. “Bear, I—”

“Of course,” Lady Roland answered. “My dear?”

She extended a hand toward Rowena, waiting. It was too far away for Rowena to simply take it. She considered pretending the gesture hadn’t been clear—that she hadn’t noticed it.

“I was there with you,” Rowena hissed at her companions. “I know all about it, remember?”

“He’s right,” Meteron cut in. “Go on, cricket.”

Rowena stood as if propelled from her chair, wobbled on her bad ankle, and swore. Over her shoulder, she heard Lady Roland hiss at her effrontery. Rowena glared down at the Old Bear. The gas lamps flickered, catching the stone in his gaze and the horizon line of some inscrutable emotion, just out of reach.

Rowena turned, ignoring Lady Roland’s hand, and cut ahead of her hosts, sharp as a knife. She’d seen the door already and didn’t much care if it was indecorous or uncouth to pass through it first. She only cared about getting away from those two old bastards and their secrets and stares before something welled up in her eyes—something knotted up and complicated.

Rowena did have the presence of mind, at least, to pause on the threshold and hold the door to the anteparlor for her host and hostess. When she let it fall closed, she saw the Old Bear levering himself from his chair and Anselm Meteron eyeing the waning space between the door and the jamb, his face troubled.

“So,” Rowena said, leaning as close to the Old Bear as the carriage’s jostling gait allowed. “Are we taking the job?”

“You have this fascination with the word ‘we,’” Master Meteron drawled. He stared out the window at the shadow of Corma proper passing by. The city grew as the carriage rolled along, the spires and colonnades of the manor houses dotting its outer limits blurry in the pale hues of dawn.

Rowena crossed her arms and flounced back. Fine. If Master Meteron wanted to take up the Old Bear’s part of the conversation, he was welcome to it. The Alchemist had been all but mum after the ten terrible minutes she’d spent alone with the Rolands. They had stretched into twelve, actually, but Rowena had done her best not to crane her neck toward the anteparlor’s mantel clock more than once or twice.

Or three times.

The Rolands, as it happened, weren’t really so awful. Lady Roland had asked questions, trying to be civil and curious about Rowena, but the more she probed for the sake of hospitality, the more Rowena’s stomach seized with worry. Some of her questions and statements made no sense: whether she remembered much about her mother, and how the lady was sure she’d have been proud to see her grown into such a fine young woman. And then it dawned on Rowena that Lady Roland had mistaken her for Erasmus and Leyah Pardon’s adopted daughter. She must have known they had a child. Apparently she hadn’t any idea that Rare was already Rowena’s age when Leyah and the rest of the Corma company went off on whatever job it was that spelled the end of their campaigning days. Rowena only knew it had ended badly, in blood and searing light and terrible pain. Some kind of an explosion on an airship. It had killed Leyah and concussed an emotional hole in the Old Bear and her brother, Anselm—one that had never properly healed. Even seeing the Rolands again battered at nerves they’d probably thought dead for years.

Rowena did her best to play along with the lady’s assumptions. She’d never been more grateful to see Master Meteron’s face when the door finally opened. He’d stood on the threshold, offering the little bow that was really a nod, and said only, “Send the papers in the morning. Use the old address.”

After that, everyone murmured goodbyes, and Rowena found herself swept along to the carriage house, where the footman and driver were busy smoking themselves to cinders. She wondered how long they’d been told to keep the clockworks wound and the wheels unbraced.

Now she was spoiling for a fight. She’d come to the ball entranced, only to grow bored, then find herself knocked down the stairs and then . . . Well, she didn’t even know what had happened with Julian. And now this.

“Is there a problem with my thinking of us as a ‘we’?” Rowena demanded.

Master Meteron shook his head. “Nothing beyond it being impractical, naïve, dangerous, foolhardy, and ridiculous.” He yawned, lolling his head toward his partner as if a proper turn were too much exertion. “Am I missing any appropriate adjectives?”

“We’re taking the job,” the Old Bear said.

Rowena blinked. “We three, or we you?” She braced to be told she’d have to stay behind. She wondered what they’d do with her. Find some finishing school? Set her up in the Mercy Home down the hall from Mama? Had—oh, Proof forbid—had the Rolands offered to take her in as a cut-rate governess to their brood of snot-nosed lordlings?

“We three.” The Old Bear looked up from his pipe, which he’d been handling with obsessive attention the whole ride. It was close quarters for smoking. He was trying to be conscientious. He also had a look on his face that said he’d throw a man under the carriage wheels for a slow pipe and a deep drink.

Rowena looked back and forth between them. She’d been ready to fight. During her exile with the Rolands, better than half her brain had been assigned to assembling case points and rebuttals. The carriage ride was to have been her battleground. She was almost disappointed.

“But why?”

“For God’s sake, cricket,” Meteron cried, “isn’t this what you want? The sort of thing you’ve griped for in the past?”

“Well, yes.”

He threw up his maimed hand in disgust. “You’re bloody welcome, then. You’re in. Once we reach Lemarcke, you’ll be a licensed, bonded, and insured campaigner. It’s your rutting mercenary bat mitzvah.”

Rowena looked back at the Old Bear. “I don’t understand.”

“The standard contract names all the parties involved,” he explained. “There are always spaces to allow the core contracted group to write in additional parties—subcontractors, if you like. Not every core group covers every needed skill set, and so it’s wise to give your campaigners latitude to hire additional muscle at their discretion. We’ll be writing you in when the papers arrive.”

Rowena smiled. “I’m the ‘additional muscle’?”

“It’s fucking hilarious,” Meteron complained. “The Rolands will think you’re mad, Bear, and I’m inclined to agree.”

“This was your idea?”

The Old Bear arched an eyebrow. “Is that so surprising?”

“En’t you usually the one trying to keep me from losing my head or getting into scrapes?”

“I am,” he allowed. He wrenched the window open a few inches, at last, stuffing his pipe and lighting it. The smell of marjoram and fennel filled the carriage box. “But . . .” He sighed. “I can hardly do that if I’m on the other side of the Western Sea and you’re back here.”

Meteron smiled wanly. “I was going to pass you off to Mrs. Gilleyen, down at Coventry Passage rectory. I understand she has some horrid, horse-faced granddaughter who runs a girl’s school outside Southeby.”

“Another niece of yours?” Rowena quipped.

He snorted.