39

I WAVERED BEFORE THE DOORWAY, ARCHED PLASTER COVERED with layers of thin net. My brother? The thought of seeing him again—rich and full and yet bitter. We had not left on good terms—I could forgive his betrayal in an abstract sense, knowing I would never see him again. Now that he was just past this flimsy curtain, what would I feel? The last time I saw him, there was relief he was alive; with that assurance long established as a comfortable fact in my mind, would the hurt and anger surpass anything else?

I pushed aside the curtain and strode into the room with more confidence than I felt.

It was brightly lit, unlike the bar it hid behind, and open above and with only partial walls that made it more of a courtyard than a proper room. Several people sat or reclined on cushions. There were books stacked in tidy corners and an abandoned game of cards on a table. I swallowed, taking another step, forcing myself to scan faces instead of objects.

The first face I saw was Penny’s.

“Sophie!” She leapt up, her brilliant smile illuminating her face and then quickly fading. Our last meeting had not been on good terms, and I saw her face transposed, not on the sunlit Serafan courtyard in front of me, but in my shop on a wintry afternoon, collecting her final wages and leaving. The expression was the same—regret and loss, pride and conviction.

I hesitated, but Penny didn’t. “You look well,” she said. “We read about you in the Galatine gossip pages of the magazines,” she added with a laugh.

I couldn’t help but smile in return. “I can’t be so well-known as all that,” I said.

“Well, they don’t always use your name,” Penny replied with an impish grin.

And then Kristos strode into the courtyard and I found myself short of breath.

He had grown a beard, common enough in Serafe if terribly gauche in Galitha, and his hair was longer, clubbed in a queue. Instead of the Galatine workman’s clothing I was used to, he wore loose Serafan trousers and no waistcoat under his linen coat. He hardly looked like Kristos at all, older and foreign. It made it easier, somehow. He had left his old life behind, the life we shared in a drafty row house, and had made himself into a new person, a new actor in a new life.

“Sophie.” He didn’t move toward me, or I toward him. “I’m sorry this is how we had to meet.”

“How long have you known I was here?” I asked. Pragmatism felt easier than addressing everything unsaid between us.

“Since before you arrived.”

Penny cracked a smile. “Like I said, gossip pages.”

“Please,” Kristos said, as though remembering himself, “sit.” He gestured toward a quartet of chairs huddled around a fat ottoman. I obliged.

“How long have you been here?” I asked. “The beard is new.”

His smile was thin. “Not so new—I started growing it as soon as I left Galitha City. Turns out I’m terrible at shaving on shipboard. I only stayed in Fen long enough to save up some money, working for a small foundry. Then I came here. I’ve been studying at the university under a professor of politics and ethics for four months now.”

“Where are your novice robes?” I joked. He flicked his hand toward a rumpled pile in the corner—pale gray robes. “Fair enough. Your professor knows who you are?”

“Not quite,” he admitted. “But he knows I was involved in the revolt and doesn’t care.” He tilted his head, considering his words. “Or at least doesn’t allow it to interfere with his sponsorship. The revolt wasn’t exactly popular in Serafe.”

“So I gather.” I watched a beetle with jade-green wings traverse the tufted ottoman, falling into the divots and struggling to right itself. “Why didn’t you reach out to me?”

“When I arrived here?” He shot me one of his smiles, the rakish, uneven grin I recognized, even half-hidden by his beard. “I was given fair warning by your intended not to give the Galatine authorities any hints on my whereabouts. Extradition from Serafe is a real thing, you know.”

“I meant when I arrived.”

“It seemed more prudent to wait.” Kristos sighed. “In case you hadn’t noticed, your delegation is as full of rats as the wharfs on the far side of Galitha City.”

“I hadn’t, in fact, until quite recently,” I replied. “How do you know more than I do about all of this? And how—” I stopped myself from finishing. How do you know at all? How can I trust you?

“That’s where I enter this conversation,” Alba replied.

“You’re not really a nun, are you?” I said. “You’re some—some kind of Kvys spy.”

To my surprise, Alba laughed riotously, and even Kristos joined with a badly concealed chuckle. “I really am a sister of the order,” she said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye, “and no one has ever suggested that I was anything but a meddlesome one, at that. But yes, I have been, shall we say, placing myself at the summit to be of service for you when the time came.”

“But why?” I asked, growing a bit exasperated. Fighting back the resurgence of loss and pain over my brother had left me with little patience.

“The Kvys are sympathetic to the aims of reform in Galitha. Unlike our friends in Serafe. The reasons for this are, as I’m sure you’ve discovered already, complicated and include plenty of practical economic concerns and machinations for beneficial alliances. And as for me, I am an egalitarian, personally. Motivated by a fool’s dream, perhaps.” I assessed her as she spoke; she sounded like she was telling the truth, but a truth almost too neatly packaged. “I have been in contact with Kristos since I first read his work, last autumn.”

Kristos nodded. “And I’ve built a small network here. Including some contacts within the diplomatic compound. I’ve kept an eye on you.”

“Well, that isn’t disturbing at all,” I shot back, resorting to the kind of jokes I was used to lobbing at my brother.

Kristos shrugged. “What can I say? At least I’m not using my reach and influence to become a first-rate Peeping Tom.”

Alba shook her head at both of us. “Our… shall we call it monitoring? It is not nearly as disturbing as the fact that your own countrymen have attempted to dispatch you.”

I eyed them both warily. I had underestimated Kristos before, but was I to believe that a Kvys nun and an expat scholar were more capable of protecting me than the security in the diplomatic compound? Yet, here I was, a near victim of poisoning and stalked through the city by the thin shadow of a promised assassin.

I threw my hands in the air. “This is absurd! All of it. I’m a common seamstress. Why do away with me?”

“It’s a very widely held belief that Prince Theodor’s insistence on reform is at your behest,” Kristos said. “I know reading isn’t your favorite pastime, but you’ve at least seen the cartoons?”

“The Witch Consort? The Rebellious Curse Caster? The Prince’s Commoner Whore? Doxy of the Pellian Cabal?” Kristos received my best icy stare. “Yes, I’m aware of what’s said about me. Theodor would have pushed for reform without me, too.”

“If you say so.” Kristos shrugged, unimpressed. “But something doesn’t have to be true for it to gain traction and push people to act. A little destabilization—and knocking off the so-called witch holding the prince’s puppet strings will thoroughly destabilize things, along with the obstruction in Galitha—and the nobles get their way.”

“And Serafe will support them,” Alba added.

I slouched into my cushion as much as my stays would allow. The Serafans had their reasons to dispatch me, too, but merely knowing about Serafan music-based casting could be a death sentence. I wasn’t sure who, or when, or how much to tell. “And now what?”

“Now it isn’t safe for you to go back to the diplomatic compound,” Kristos said. “We’ve a fair network of folks here in the university quarter who are happy to put you up. For now. You know one already—Corvin.”

“How?”

“I confess he may have been planted,” Kristos said with a grin. “He’s one of my good friends here. When I heard you were arranging a tour of the archives, I guessed what you might be after, and I made sure he stayed within earshot.”

“And how did you hear I was arranging a tour?”

“Dira Mbtai-Joro.” Alba smiled. “She and I are acquaintances of a sort—I brought her into our fold. Mutual distrust of Serafan maneuvering, you see.”

“Dira!” I suppressed a shocked laugh. “Dira hated me.”

“Ah, dear, no. Dira is cold, I’ll grant you, but the Allied States are keen to see the old guard of Galatine nobles shaken up a bit.” I recalled what Theodor had said about the Open Seas Arrangement, and that all of these nations had their own complicated plans in which I was only a footnote.

“I have the most helpful friends.” Kristos grinned.

“You are a devious snake, Kristos Balstrade.”

“Good thing I’m on your side, isn’t it?”

“Well, snake? What next? And what about Theodor—does he know where I am?”

“I’ll make sure he gets a message.” His voice was gentle; in fact, he was quieter, more staid than how I remembered him. There were worry lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before the revolt, and he seemed less poised to speak or act and more inclined to contemplation.

“We were leaving as soon as we could,” I said. “Returning to Galitha.”

Penny hovered just beyond our earshot, waiting for us to finish. “I was thinking—Kristos, your sister is probably hungry. Maybe Mairti has something? One of her hand plates?”

Kristos nodded. “And bring wine,” he said with half a grin.