Una killed Dad. Una, who taught him to swear in Ynglotta and roughed out bits of grit and gravel from his scraped knees when he was eight.
This makes no sense. This makes no sense at all.
This, says that horrible voice in the back of his mind that sounds uncomfortably like his own, makes all the sense in the world.
He wants to scream. He wants to hit something again.
Instead, he watches Griff pacing the floor beneath Amphitheater Messalina, and her face is an impassible mask. Una watches her, too, bound at the wrists to a crumbling arch, held at gunpoint by the pistol Theo liberated from the dying Darius Miranda. Long-since shut down under the pretense of renovation, the abandoned steps and inner allées of the Amphitheater are a haven for the unhoused and the ill, the abandoned youth and poppam addicts, the black marketeers and those—like them—with business they’d rather went unheard.
Finally, she kneels, level with the other woman. “Why?”
Una shrugs, and looks away. Like a crack of lightning Griff’s hand darts out to snatch her chin, to force her back to look at her, and it’s with a low simmer like an earthquake that she repeats herself—“Why?”
Arran doesn’t understand this rage, not coming from Griff, but he does understand it. It roots him down where he stands, infecting every pore and vein.
This time, Una answers, but it’s barely more than a sneer. “Did I need a reason? I was his prisoner. I was his slave.”
His gut sinks as confirmation floods in. Griff lowers her hand, but this time Una keeps her gaze, daring her to refute it. A long, searching moment passes between them, and then Griff says, “No.” Her voice is level once more, but a roil of some turbulent, unknowable thing stirs beneath the surface. “I don’t think that’s it. Revenge is sweet, but you wanted more than that.”
“I did,” she agrees, calm like she knows there’s no getting out of this now. “I wanted you to keep your word. You said you’d find my family. Get me home safe. You promised. But it was taking too long, so I found someone else who’d do it.”
Arran understands the bewildered sort of disbelief as Griff shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says, unexpectedly.
“Sorry’s not good enough any—”
“No, I am sorry,” says Griff, and that roil is closer to the surface now, and oh is she angry. “Sorry that I put my trust in someone too blind to see the bigger picture without needing it spoon-fed down her throat like a godsdamn child.”
He takes a step back. He’s furious too, but the anger of a quiet woman is a terrifying thing.
“I’m not a child.”
“You’re right. That was an insult to children, and I owe them an apology. You’re a grown woman. A cowardly, self-serving, Ynglot bitch who—”
“Who wasn’t working alone,” Theo’s quiet voice breaks through.
Una doesn’t bother denying it. But neither does she say anything else.
“You told Darius Miranda that the Consul wouldn’t let him arrest you,” says Arran, speaking for the first time in what feels like days. “Why would Palmar care? Why would Palmar even know who you are?”
Una has been doing a commendable job of pretending she doesn’t know him up until now, pretending he doesn’t exist, pretending she didn’t just give him a black eye. And she doesn’t respond to him now, either, but she doesn’t have to say a thing for Arran to know his hunch is right. The answer is written in her silence.
He and Theo told Griff everything the moment they arrived, Una hauled in between them—told her all about how Selah has the Iveroa Stone after all, and how Tair was with her, and their plans for finding Diana Ontiveros because without her the Stone is just a pretty piece of rock. They tried to explain about the glyphs and the atlas and how it could all be connected, but Arran isn’t entirely sure they’ve done it justice.
In one fluid motion, Griff slips a short blade from her gray jacket sleeve and brings the tip to rest just under Una’s chin. The entire echoing allée seems to hold its breath.
“How long?” she asks, calm efficiency returned. A moment passes, then two, and the blade presses in, just enough to dig pressure into the soft skin. “How long have you been working for Cato Palmar?”
“Why should I tell you?” asks Una, barely daring to move her throat. “You’ll kill me either way.”
“She won’t,” Arran hears himself saying, and doesn’t back down from Griff’s steely glare, from the way Theo’s slight jerk of the head seems to say shut up.
“That’s not your—”
“She wants to go home? Fine. We dump her outside the city after this. Find her own way back in the wilds. Good luck with that. But you said it yourself, you don’t kill unless you don’t have another choice.”
“I was speaking about your father,” says Griff, and he can hear the danger percolating there. “Not some backwater bitch.”
“So, what, you’re just going to kill her?” he asks.
Because that’s not good enough. Yes, Una murdered Dad. She poisoned him, took him away from everyone who loved him because she wanted to, she felt like it, left Arran here with too many questions and not even a map to the answers, and he knows why she did it.
Alexander Kleios was two different men. He wasn’t the man who sang off key to his children, not to her. He wasn’t the man who taught Arran how to sail and got overexcited about Ante Quietam poetry and forgot to eat until Gil threw a sandwich at him. Arran’s seen too much in too short a time—children torn from their mothers and underground singers and tattoo ink burned into skin—and he knows why she did it.
He still hates her. Hates her with every fiber of his being. But he understands.
A moment passes, then two, and then a small sort of smile tugs at the corners of Griff’s lips as she snaps the knife back into its handle, then stands.
“All right,” she says, and pulls something small from the pocket of her coat. “You do the honors, then. Straight from the horse’s mouth, and then we’ll decide.”
The bottle is tiny, nestled in the dip of her palm, so tiny it barely makes a dent as she slaps it into Arran’s hand. He’s only seen this in illustration before, but from the pale blue tonic twinkling through the dark, the laurel sigil of Cato Palmar’s Consulate, he has a strong feeling he knows what this is. But he’s never seen it used.
“It won’t hurt her,” says Griff, as if she could hear his thoughts out loud. “Truth tonic my ass, flumene’s just a relaxant. Fucking strong one. It’ll make her more susceptible to the power of suggestion. Makes people compliant as hell, though you have to be willing to put up with whatever random thoughts come through their head.”
She doesn’t need to tell him any of this. He knows what flumene does. He wants to ask instead how in the savage Quiet she got her hands on it, highly regulated as it is, near-impossible alchemy for even the most skilled hands. But even without the warning in Theo’s eyes, he has a feeling he’s already tested the woman’s patience more than enough for one day.
There’s a calm efficiency to Theo’s hands wrenching open Una’s protesting mouth, and as Arran pours the meager contents of the tiny bottle down her throat, he tries not to wonder if this is really any less of a violation. Within moments, the Ynglot woman goes slack.
“Better,” says Griff, nudging the woman sitting in the dirt allée with the toe of her boot. “It should kick in right away. What’s your name?”
“Montana,” comes the answer, halfway between a mumble and a sigh. “They gave me a different one, but it’s not my name. Names are important. Mine’s Montana Satterfield.”
Arran doesn’t know what to make of that. It’s the strangest name he’s ever heard. But Griff just rolls her eyes. “I’ve heard weirder,” she says. “Ynglots aren’t indigenous, not really. Not like my people. Ynglots are settlers, same as the Romans, they just don’t see it that way because they got here first.” She crouches, then, and grips Montana-who-was-Una by the jaw. “Why did you kill Alexander Kleios?”
Montana Satterfield’s mud-brown eyes gaze easily into Griff’s. “Because Cato Palmar told me to,” she says, monotone, and Arran locks eyes with Theo as the final puzzle piece slides into place. You can’t arrest me. There’s only one thing that would make a serva say those words to the Chief General of the Cohort Intelligentia with so much certainty. “He said if I did it, then he’d find my family, help me go home. I was supposed to give the Historian small doses over time, make it look like his health was going downhill on its own. Palmar didn’t want anyone to suspect. . . . Kleios must have done something to make him angry, want him out of the way.” Through the flumene haze, her lip curls. “But I just wanted him dead. I gave him too much. An overdose on water hemlock looks the same as parcae, you know.”
“Palmar must not have been happy about that.”
“No. That’s why I told him about the Iveroa Stone.”
And the world seems to freeze.
Because that has no part in this puzzle at all.
“What,” asks Griff, ice singing in her voice, “do you know about the Iveroa Stone?”
“Only what you told Theo,” Montana answers, completely unconcerned. “I stayed behind, that morning in the Regio Marina. Right before the viewing. I heard what you said. A weapon that could overthrow the Imperium.” And, somewhere from the depths of her relaxed mind, “I’m a canary. I’m good at listening in.”
“Why? Why tell the Consul?”
“He was so angry with me. He wasn’t going to help me get home. I thought about leaving on my own, I thought about it so many times. But I wouldn’t last a day alone out there. I don’t remember how to fight, and other bands don’t care if you’re Ynglot, too, not as long as you have something they can take. But the Stone . . . I needed Palmar back on my good side. I thought handing him something that powerful would change his mind. So I went and told him all about it and he agreed that if I got it for him he would hold up his end of the deal. But Imarry would have found it in my things if I’d taken it myself. So I got someone else to do it for me.”
“Who?”
“Tair. You remember that skittish thing? You had me run her out of Breakwater a few years ago. Her and not me.” A shot of anger slides through Montana’s lazy eyes.
Through the murky dark, Theo catches his eye, and the answer to a question he hadn’t even known to look for clicks into place. The thief, that night of the viewing. That had been Tair. She must have taken the Iveroa Stone from Breakwater, and he watched as Selah went tearing after her into the Hazards. Those two have been attached at the hip for seventeen years. Once the Stone brought them back together, once they decided to work out what it was for themselves, Montana and Palmar never really stood a chance of getting it back.
But Montana isn’t done. “She was perfect for the job—knows Breakwater House better than I do, probably, and I have the right dirt on her. And the Consul, he knew what the Iveroa Stone looked like, so he knew how to describe it. He must have read about it somewhere.” Griff frowns hard at that. “I went straight to the Kirnaval. Paid a kid to deliver the message. Tair has no idea it’s me. Got a beating for being late, but it was worth it. Once she hands it over, all I have to do is bring it to the Consul. He’s expecting me. He’ll have to kidnap Selah, after that—you said you needed her. I told him about that, too.”
“No,” says Theo, sharp. “No, Griff said we didn’t need to kidnap her. She wanted—fuck, never mind, but she didn’t fucking say that.”
“Oh,” she says, still hazy. “Well, maybe I’m not that good at listening in after all.”
Arran had thought once, only earlier that day, that he might very well be facing down the woman who murdered Dad. He was wrong then. He isn’t now. And now she’s dragged his sister into this mess, too. Cold fury trails down his spine. Fury and panic, because Selah is in danger, and Selah is headed to Cato Palmar’s house right now.
Griff stands and looks straight at him, as if to say, This is what you get for being soft.
“I’m not surprised to see you here,” Montana says, and with a jolt he realizes that she’s looking at him now. “I thought maybe it was a matter of time. Out of respect for your mother, at the very least.”
Okay, no. They’re not doing this. She’s already put his sister in danger. She’s already taken his only parent from him. She doesn’t get to drag the other into this. “Keep my mother out of your mouth,” he says, deathly calm even as his heart races. He needs to get to Selah before Palmar does. “You never even knew her.”
“No, but servae talk. We know the truth.”
The truth. The truth was buried, like Alex Kleios buried her, and barely spoke her name again. Like he buried a nineteen-year-old infatuation, because nineteen-year-olds are always in love, but that doesn’t mean it matters. Wouldn’t even look at the kid, the whispers said. Ended it herself.
“The truth is postpartum depression,” says Arran, pulsing with the memory of the day he forced Gil to sit down and explain what it meant that he didn’t have a mother. He doesn’t have time for this. “It happens.”
“It does. A good story for when you’re trying to cover something up.”
He’s highly aware of Griff and Theo. Highly aware of the thrumming beneath his skin. Highly aware that Montana, or Una, or whatever her name is, is a proven liar. Highly aware that the flumene makes that fact utterly irrelevant.
“So, what?” he asks, eyes narrowing. “You’re saying my dad killed her?” It’s the most far-fetched thing he’s ever heard in his life. Dad used to trap spiders under teacups and escort them to the window of his study.
Montana shakes her head, and somewhere beneath those glazed and easy eyes is pity. “No,” she says. “But maybe that would’ve been better. He sold her.”
Two options occur to him in that moment. The first is to take the heavy hunting knife in his hand and shove the blade directly into the center of Montana’s pale, sagging, lying face. The second is to laugh. He does neither. Because Montana’s a liar, but flumene is not.
Arran stares, breathing in, then out, then in again.
His mother is dead. She’s dead. He knows so little about her, outside the bare facts, outside the occasional story slipped from Gil, stories that belong to a stranger, no matter how much he wants to hear some mirror of himself in them. She was a serva, an orphaned thief picked off the streets at the age of nine. She dyed Imarry’s teeth blue once with dogwood bark and cornflower in her tea. She had his dark hair and his high cheekbones and his constellation of moles and beauty marks. She was funny and ferocious and not at all nice.
Her name was Qaia and she was a serva and she must have liked Dad enough for Arran to have been born because otherwise Gil would have told him, right? But Gil is Dad’s oldest friend and Dad’s client and used to be Dad’s verna, and maybe there are some things you just keep quiet about to keep the peace. These are the things Arran has pushed down ever since he learned what it is to bring a child into the world against your will, the things he’s refused to entertain because she killed herself she killed herself and he’s never thought to question that before because wasn’t postpartum depression explanation enough?
“Talk,” he says through gritted teeth, and it doesn’t mean he’ll believe her.
“It’s not a long story. After you were born, your father started bothering the Consul about reform. Citizenship for all at birth. Very utopian.” She leans back, quirking a corner of her lip. “Funny how patricians start to care when it touches their lives. Their kids.”
Arran doesn’t bristle so much at that. Doesn’t startle so much at this new information—the idea of his father as a reformist, an idealistic individualist. It doesn’t add up, but it’s not the most ridiculous claim Montana’s made so far. And he’s waiting for the part that matters.
“He wasn’t the Historian then. Not yet. Delena was still around, so Palmar didn’t really pay much attention to him. That’s what they say at Breakwater, anyway. But then she hacked her way to death from smoking fever, and Alexander got some power, and he started getting loud. Trying to rally others in his crowd to back him up. Not that anyone took him very seriously. But I guess the Consul did take him kind of seriously, because this is the part we’re not supposed to talk about.
“He gave your father a choice, in the end. Get what he really wants out of all this—freedom for his son, but give up the girl and shut up about it. Marry a nice patrician lady and move on. Or keep on how he’s going, and lose you to the system instead. He chose you. Obviously.”
Vaguely, Arran is aware of a ringing in his ears.
Desperate. She’s desperate, and she’s drugged. Pulling at his frayed heartstrings, unasked questions and a history of loose threads and stories that just don’t add up, grabbing onto one last hope of getting out of here alive. Trying to turn his anger around, away from her, back toward her victim. Another story, that’s all it is. Cruel and inventive and sick, but a story all the same.
And yet.
Flumene relaxes inhibition but it doesn’t addle the brains. He studied it, once, briefly in school with Gil.
Gil.
The stories just don’t add up. The way Gil always talks about her—Qaia, his mother—like a sister, a best friend he and Dad both had loved and lost. The way Dad barely said anything about her at all. But in Gil’s stories, Dad is always there, the third of some wayward trio forever protected by the magic of childhood—and that too, just doesn’t add up. Dad never had those stories. Gil was just a client. Qaia was just a ghost.
Everyone protects their heart in different ways. Some learn to fight, in body and in mind. Some learn to perform, to endear themselves to a hostile world. And some retreat entirely. Unable to escape their physical circumstances, they spin a new narrative so tight around themselves that it becomes inextricable from reality, even to their own mind. They have to, to survive that kind of pain. Suddenly Arran feels sick.
“Gil,” he hears himself saying. “Gil knows.”
Montana nods. “I think he’s probably the only one that knows all the details anymore. Aside from Qaia, wherever she is.”
Because that’s what this means. Because if he can entertain this, if he can comprehend the notion that his mother didn’t actually die, and make that fit into his understanding of what’s true and real, then logically the only alternative is that she’s still alive. Somewhere. Maybe.
He has to put that away. He has to, because Theo is closing their hand around his, steadying or comfort or a reminder that they’re running late, they have to go. Because Griff is staring at Montana, stone-faced and ready and all but done with this particular diversion. Because he can’t do this. He needs to talk to Gil, he needs to sit somewhere and think because his mother could be out there somewhere, alive and waiting and alive, and that means Dad lied he lied he sold her but wasn’t it her or Arran? A zero-sum game. An impossible choice.
Arran grips tight to the handle of the hunter’s knife, heart beating so fast he thinks it might just tear itself out from under his buzzing skin, and grabs Montana Satterfield by the throat.
He wants to kill her. He’s never wanted something like that before. With Darius Miranda it had been different—that was an accident, the heat of the moment as he came to Theo’s rescue, and he hadn’t realized his own strength. He hadn’t let himself look as the blood seeped from the blackbag’s head. But now . . . now, Una—Montana, whatever—hasn’t stirred. No protest. No fight. She can’t. She’s still high on flumene.
Arran releases his grip.
“Do whatever you want with her,” he says, venom dripping from his voice, as he cuts her bonds and pushes Una toward Griff. “Just leave me out of it.”
His sister is more important. He needs to get to Belamar before she does.