I get through three more towns by the time the first of Dequasi is waning. I’ve made some good coin throughout the day, which has gone toward a full meal in each town and then to the mail carriers, arranging for pamphlets to travel to all the hamlets in their jurisdiction. My supply is dwindling, with only a dozen or so left in my saddlebag, but much of my work is done. My essay is slowly traveling outward like tendrils from a vine.
I’m sitting on the porch of the inn at Bearberry Crossroads, just south of the outskirts of Tolukum, enjoying a cheese bun, when two figures on mules come trotting purposefully up the track. I don’t recognize them at first, wrapped up oddly tight in their cloaks despite the warmth of the evening. Then I see the edge of the rapier peeking out from a hem, and my gaze goes back to their faces. I set down my bun in surprise. They don’t see me at first, studying the signpost and its many markers, when Soe looks toward the inn and does a double take. She exclaims to Iano, and when he sees me, he spurs his mule in my direction.
“Tamsin!” He hikes his leg over the saddle and jumps to the ground. Unlike our last such reunion in Pasul, however, when he ran straight for me and gathered me in his arms, this time he stops short a few feet away. Like Pasul, though, he doesn’t seem to know what to say.
I take him in as he does the same to me, almost seeing him for the first time. Three weeks away from Tolukum have changed him. Where I’ve finally gained some of my weight back, he’s lost a little, pinching his cheeks. His beard has officially filled in, accenting the angled line of his jaw. He has scratches on his face and hands from rough travel, and his hair is loose and windswept. His clothes are plain and muddy, and both earrings are gone.
Soe comes to join him, leading both the mules. “Tamsin—are you all right?”
“Uah.” Where’s Veran?
“He left for Tolukum yesterday, and we haven’t heard from him since,” she says. “You heard Lark was captured?”
I nod grimly. I hoped she might get away, but when Rat came to me . . .
We all look down at Rat, stretched at my feet.
How did you find me? I ask, though I think I already know the answer.
Iano digs in his pocket and pulls out my pamphlet, creased in half.
“We followed your trail,” he says, sounding almost stunned. “We spent the whole morning searching the woods for you, until we decided to chance Giantess for news. And we found the place buzzing over your pamphlet. We asked which way you’d gone, and they pointed up the road. It was the same in Purituka, and Ossifer’s Pass, and Blue Joy.”
I look back to the mules. They’re unfamiliar, not the two Soe uses for her cart. Where did you get these?
Iano suddenly becomes guarded, almost sheepish. “Giantess.”
I squint at him, hardly daring to believe it. With what?
“Well, my earrings paid for one . . .”
“He stole the other,” Soe says with undeniable pride in her voice. “Orchestrated the whole thing. Right out from under the ostler’s nose.”
My mouth drops open in delight, and I use the sign Lark taught me back during our first session in the cabin. You’re an outlaw!
He winces and looks at his scuffed, muddy boots. “I’ll pay them back. But . . . what was I supposed to do?” His gaze jumps back up to me, anguished. “Our horses gone—your horse gone, no sign of you or Rat, and we couldn’t go back to the cabin . . . once we realized where you’d gone, we had to follow you.” He glances at the pamphlet. “But . . . I don’t understand. When did you make all these? How did you make all these?”
Last night, I say. Same way I did the first.
“Where . . .”
I gesture to Soe.
“But the guards were there . . .”
I got there later, I say. They’d left.
“How many did you print?”
I wave my hand. About two hundred.
He stares to be sure he’s reading my signs right. “Two . . . two hundred?”
I would have done more, but the stamps kept breaking.
Iano turns the paper delicately in his fingers, as if it’s a dangerous item, a shard of glass. “I . . . I had no idea . . . I just thought you wanted a way to write without holding a quill . . . I didn’t think about . . . just how many—”
My fingers move sharply, accompanied by an appraising look I can’t hold back.
I know.
There’s a heavy silence. Soe pauses for a breath too long, and then blurts out, “I’m going to water the mules.”
She turns and guides them away toward the trough at the far side of the porch, leaving Iano and me alone.
The silence persists for another few moments. He rubs the back of his neck. Finally he gestures again to the pamphlet.
“Have you given them all away?”
Almost. The last few are going to . . . I point up the road toward the city of Tolukum.
He absently reads the first few lines on the paper, lines he must know by heart now. “There’s powerful stuff in this, Tamsin . . . people are going to feel it. Already people are feeling it, all through the towns we passed through. I expect if they’d known who I was I’d have been mobbed.” He rustles the paper. “You’ve given them a weapon.”
I am not sorry, I say firmly.
“I know.” He finally looks me in the eyes. “And I’m grateful for it. You were right, the other day. I was beginning to worry we’d created something too big, too wild. Something out of our control. But . . .” He looks at the paper, his face equally bleak and relieved. “That’s your point, isn’t it? It’s not meant to be controlled. We do it or we don’t. And this—you—you’ve gone and pushed the rock over the edge. We’ll have people howling at our gates come tomorrow morning. Weekly petitions are going to be chaos. There’ll be riots. Half the court will be calling for my blood before my reign has even begun. I was afraid of all that, before.” He lifts his gaze—not to my eyes, but to my lips. “But I let myself forget that you’d already spilled blood for it. You took the first blow. I’m sorry, Tamsin. I wasn’t as brave as you. But I think I can be now. Can you forgive my doubt?”
I take a breath. I’m not done yet, I say. I want him to understand, to realize what I’m going to do to his palace and his court—and his country—before he comes looking for my forgiveness. There’s still the ashoki to consider.
“You think you can convince her?”
No. But it doesn’t matter. I’m going to . . . oh, there are so many words I’d like to use here, if I only had more poetic signs. Undermine. Dismantle. Deconstruct. I sigh. I’m going to take her power, and I’m going to give it to our people. I wave to the pamphlet. I’m going to work on a new press. I’m going to set it up in the scribes’ shop, and I’m going to write more of these. And I’m going let other people use it, too.
“Use it . . . to write . . .” He struggles to comprehend. “Just . . . whatever they want? In these kinds of numbers?”
I nod.
“But . . . that kind of power . . .”
It’s the power of the ashoki, I say. Too much for one person.
“It was your power. It still could be, with this kind of technology. You could write instead of sing. I could argue to negate Kimela’s appointment on those grounds.”
I shake my head. She’s been appointed. Let her stay. It won’t matter. I’m giving the power of her position to the people of Moquoia. This country has been at the mercy of the ashoki for too long.
He blows out a breath, looking weary. I wait for his anger, or perhaps his sense of betrayal. The painful protestation that once upon a time I was on his side. The decisive declaration that he and I are through now.
He closes his eyes. “Okay.”
I cock my head. “Okay?”
He nods. “Okay, let’s do it.” He opens his eyes. “I trust you.”
“Why?” I blurt out before I can stop it.
“Well, for one thing, because I know whether or not I agree with you isn’t going to stop you from doing it anyway.” The corner of his lips twitch. “And all told, if this is your plan, I’d rather be on your side than against it.”
The wryness disappears from his voice, and he looks again at the pamphlet. “And because I know you have Moquoia’s best interests in mind. And . . . because I know you see things I don’t see. You’ve lived things I haven’t lived. It’s no different from when you first started singing for the court, Tamsin. Once you showed me the problem, I wanted to help make it right. We were partners then.” He folds the pamphlet and meets my gaze again. “I know things are different from what they were before, that our emotions have changed. But that doesn’t mean this work has to change. It shouldn’t change—too many lives are at stake to rest on whether you and I are in love. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is . . . I’d like to still be partners, if you would. Professional partners. And partners trust each other.”
I smile. Yes, I like that idea.
He takes a breath and holds out his hand. But before I take it, I sign again.
You know I will always be grateful to you searching for me, I say. For sending Lark and Veran to rescue me.
“I know,” he says. “But it’s not a debt.”
And there it is, that strange feeling I haven’t been able to identify, that unsettling mixture of guilt and helplessness and singleness of purpose—he moved mountains to find me. And I felt that I owed him my heart in return.
I take his hand with one of mine and then wrap my other arm around his shoulders. He hugs me back, with no awkwardness where we touch. As I lean against him, I’m surprised by the surety I feel—a different beast from the heady infatuation we operated on before. The times we met alone to discuss policy or draft letters were the only times we could touch, or kiss, or romance the other, and so they were laced with a feverish excitement. This—this feels different. Where that felt like a bonfire, this feels like a forge.
Something useful.
We share one last squeeze before breaking apart. Soe has finished her conversation with the innkeeper and is heading our way.
“Are we okay?” she asks.
“We’re okay,” I confirm.
“Good, because we need to get going.” She nods toward the signpost. “The innkeeper says it’s just a half hour to the city gates, but they lock them at nightfall.”
The urgency of Lark’s plight hits me again, and I start to bundle up my things. Iano helps me finish.
“I suppose we’ll have to try to go straight to the palace,” he says, stuffing the last few things in my bag. “None of us have the money for room and board in the city. But . . . aside from trying to halt Lark’s execution, I don’t know what we can accomplish. We still haven’t found our enemy.”
I have a lead, I say.
“You do?”
I nod. Inside Kimela’s coach was my old maid, Simea.
“Simea? I thought she died in the attack . . .”
I did, too. She fell on me. She said it was to protect me, but now I realize it was to keep me from escaping. I gesture to his rapier. She attacked me again in Kimela’s stage. Lark killed her.
He pauses with my bag in his hands, his face paling. “By the colors . . .”
Even if Simea wasn’t the mastermind, she knew about the attack, I continue. We head toward the horse and mules. Rat gets up and lopes after us. We’ll need to talk to her colleagues, to Fala. She must have left some kind of trail behind. If she was working alone, then our threat is gone. If not, we’re a lot closer to finding out who it was.
“Or you put yourselves right back in their reach again,” Soe points out.
I nod reluctantly. Or that.
“But if we’re the only ones who know Simea may have been behind the attack, and Lark killed her in front of witnesses, then the ministers will be all the more anxious to execute her,” Iano says. “Even if it puts us in danger again, we can’t afford to abandon Lark.”
There is Veran, I point out.
He winces. “Not that I don’t think Veran’s heart is in the right place, but if we get to the palace and he’s not sitting in the next cell over, I’ll be very surprised indeed.”
“Well, let’s get going, then,” Soe says.
But as we’re still a few paces away from the mules, someone steps around the corner of the porch, blocking our way. We halt. It’s a woman in a dark palace cloak, stained with mud from the road. Brass glints beneath her hems.
Her eyes narrow, one lid rumpled by an old, puckered scar.
“Not so fast,” she says.