36

EVEN WITH A SUN OBSCURED BY HAZY CLOUDS, THE AFTERNOON was still relentlessly hot. I surreptitiously daubed sweat from my brow. My straw hat was already damp on the inside brim. The acres of channels, pools, and waterfalls making up the water gardens had been remarkably engineered and particularly striking given its location on a high plateau overlooking the sea. From some angles it looked as though the gardens meshed with the ocean, one continuous display of water, perhaps all created, perhaps all part of the natural landscape.

I kept to myself, never too far from the group, never quite in the middle of it, either. For once the distance I had been treated to by many of the delegations’ women worked to my advantage. I tried to at least look as though I were enjoying the scenery and the scent of water lilies and flowering trees punctuated by the salt of the breeze, tried to look as normal as possible.

But I found myself starting at each sound, whipping my head around at each flicker of movement in my peripheral vision.

As our tour guide began a lengthy lecture on the history and architectural significance of the water gardens, I settled on a bench next to a pond teeming with multihued fish.

Alba, still wearing her Kvys religious order’s plain gray clothing, joined me. She hadn’t been with the tour group. I edged away, instinct driving me from sharing space too closely with anyone. “Variegated carp,” she said.

“What?” I asked, cautious. She could be hiding a dagger in her skirts, a vial of poison in her pocket. She could be a distraction, drawing my attention so someone else could stalk me. She might have been the informant who spread the half truth of my curse research at the library, after all.

Or she could be a harmless Kvys nun.

“The fish. They’re variegated carp.”

“You didn’t come here with the group,” I said. There was a question there, hanging over the still water of the fishpond.

“I did not. I had some business at the compound, and it brought me here.” She traced a finger in the pool. The fish, contrary to my expectation, flocked around it, some aqua and blue, others peach and orange, and a few flecked with black, like pepper flakes. “They’re used to being fed, I think.”

“Giving a new meaning to ‘spoiled fish,’ I suppose,” I said, watching one royal-blue carp circle Alba’s fingers. “They won’t bite, will they?”

“If they do, they haven’t much in the way of teeth.” She glanced around us. “That’s more than can be said of plenty in Isildi.”

I started, but Alba had gone back to swirling the water with a fingertip. Was she voicing a threat, solidarity, or was her comment unrelated to what had happened to me?

“Why did you come here?” I asked quietly.

“I needed to find you.”

She couldn’t know. No one knew. Everything around me continued as though nothing was amiss. The man giving the lecture, a short Serafan with tufts of white hair over his ears, continued speaking, now explaining the use of pipes and siphons in creating the ever-flowing water in the gardens. The ladies in attendance listened, eyes trained on him politely. I scanned past them, around the gardens.

“It was Merhaven,” she said quietly. “The poison.”

I edged away from her.

“Not directly, he paid one of the servants, of course.”

“How—” I clamped my mouth around my questions. She couldn’t know. She could be trying to pit me against my own countrymen for some Kvys gain.

“I would advise returning to the compound as soon as you can,” she added in an impossibly gentle voice, “because my inquiries also revealed that he was leaving. Today. Your ship is called the Gyrfalcon, yes?”

“Impossible,” I breathed. “Suppose you’re telling the truth—why?”

“Not here. You look like you’ve seen a jimji—that’s a wicked little Kvys water sprite,” she said with a placid laugh and a pointed glance at two Serafan ladies passing us. “Now. We can go back to the compound quietly, unobtrusively.”

“I can’t—” I swallowed. “I shouldn’t trust you.”

“Very good. You shouldn’t trust anyone you don’t know well. But we’re in a terrible bind, and we haven’t time to rectify our lack of friendship at the moment. You’re not in danger from me, or even, really, the Serafans, though they’ll gladly help. It’s your own people you should fear.”

“That’s what you’d say if you were trying to kill me,” I replied, trying to sound clever and failing as a tremor passed through my voice.

“Fine. He said you’d be suspicious.” Alba pressed a piece of fabric into my hand.

Not plain fabric—a cap. Red wool. Hands shaking, I turned the edge up and traced the initials stitched into it—and saw the faint glow of a charm in the seams.

“How did you get this?”

“You know what I’ll say. That he’s here, that he gave me this as a way to make you believe me. You’ll doubt that reason, too. Make your decision.”

I had no reason to trust Alba, and she could have come by Kristos’s cap in myriad unsavory and ugly ways. My fingers worried the wool, finding the charmed seams and wishing I had some other gift—the fantastical divination of storybooks or even the commonplace ability to discern when someone was lying. I had neither.

At the moment, however, Alba seemed like my best option. From my limited understanding of the international tangle of trade and policy I was now bound up in, a Kvys stood the most to gain by protecting me. And there was the cap, a flimsy and unsubstantiated tie to my brother, but a tie nonetheless. He had betrayed me once, but I still trusted him more than I trusted the strangers I was surrounded by.

I stood, arranging my skirts as though nothing was wrong. “Very well,” I said with a forced smile.