Justin Tabor, red-eyed from a night at the Griffin’s Egg, stood in a grimy alley between two battered marble mansions, looking across the street at Tormalyne Palace. The mansions had seen better days. Clothes fluttered, drying, on balconies where once banners had hung. Children wailed above his head, cats fought, men and women shouted at one another. The alley stank. The palace, behind an iron railing spiked with black lilies, held no life at all.
Two griffins guarded the gates; one had lost a wing, the other its head. The gates sagged under the weight of massive chains wound between them, locking them shut. Skull-like, the palace regarded the world out of empty sockets, charred black where fire had billowed out from every window. Only a brilliant shard of glass still clung, here and there, to a rotting edge of frame, flashing unexpected color within the ruined face. A bottle with a few dead marigolds in it sailed out of a window overhead, smashed at Justin’s feet. Slivers of crockery and water sprayed his boots; a battle above him escalated furiously, voices locked together and clawing. Picochet and viol, he thought sardonically. The picochet had the last word. A door slammed; a burly man passed him a moment or two later, muttering, blind with anger. He ground the marigolds into stone without noticing them, or the young man watching him within the shadows of the alley.
Justin’s eyes went back to the palace. Once every few weeks, very early in the morning, a ribbon or a scrap of cloth blew against the gate and clung there. Invariably the cloth was black. It wrapped itself unobtrusively around a lower hinge, hung there until noon, when a musician carrying a lute in its case over his shoulder stopped beside the gate to shake a pebble out of his shoe. The musician was Justin’s firebrand cousin Nicol, who had drummed the history of their House into Justin’s head since they were small. Nicol was named after the second son of Duke Raven Tormalyne. Nicol Beres knew everything there was to know about Nicol Tormalyne, who, together with his two small sisters, had suffocated in a marble bathroom during the fire in the palace. There had been no question of their identity. Another child had been found huddled against the blackened remains of the favorite dog of the duke’s heir, Griffin Tormalyne. The dog had been identified by the stones in its collar. The child was burned beyond any kind of recognition, though Raven Tormalyne, dragged out of the dungeons below Pellior Palace, was commanded to try. After seven days of imprisonment, the duke himself had been battered nearly beyond recognition. He had lost an eye and his right hand; he could barely walk. He could still cry and curse, which he did; his tears were considered identification enough. He was permitted one last glimpse of his wife, haggard and maddened with pain and grief, as she was slain in front of him. The executioners of Pellior House removed the duke’s remaining eye, and then his life.
Duke Arioso Pellior had emerged from the bloody brawl between four Houses with the crown of Berylon in his fist. He named himself Prince of Berylon, promised death to any members of the other Houses found bearing arms within the city walls, and pardoned the scattered remains of the Tormalyne family for their relations. Two years later, in a magnanimous gesture, he invited the survivors to his birthday feast.
Over three decades later Tormalyne Palace was still empty and the birthday feasts had turned into an autumn festival which the entire city celebrated, or pretended to. Justin, a scion of Tormalyne House whose own father barely escaped the Basilisk’s War, had his imagination inflamed from an early age by his cousin Nicol. Nicol inflamed well, even better, Justin thought, than he played the lute. He had become a magister at the music school, which Prince Arioso had appropriated, down to its last demisemiquaver, for the good of the city, though he at least allowed it to keep its three-hundred-year-old name. Nicol taught the lute and the harp, gentle instruments that disguised his true soul. His bitterest moment in life had come early, when he realized he had been named after the wrong son. He was a griffin, born to fight the basilisk, and toward that end he left black ribbons on the gates of Tormalyne Palace, summoning his followers.
Justin watched his cousin make his customary stop at the gate, bend to loosen his shoe, let fall an imaginary pebble, then free whatever he had left on the gate and drop it into his shoe before he pulled it back on. He was never careless; he would no more fill the weedy palace yard with windblown scraps of black than he would have let a light show from within the charred maze of cellars and dungeons on the nights they gathered there. Griffin’s Claw, they called themselves, the scions of Tormalyne House whose parents had managed to elude the Basilisk’s eye. Their parents, stunned by the devastation of the House, were content simply to be alive and left unnoticed. In secret, their children dreamed the downfall of Pellior House. For years they did nothing but dream. Gradually, growing older and more astute, they began to buy arms.
Nicol straightened, and Justin slipped out of the alley. They walked a block or two apart, before Justin crossed the street and gave his cousin a genial greeting. Nicol, an ascetic, red-haired hawk, seemed even leaner in scholar’s black. He answered Justin somberly. He rarely smiled, and had little patience with common social noises.
“There was trouble on the Tormalyne Bridge last night while you were playing at that place—that Griffin’s Beak—”
“Egg.”
“A man died.”
Justin’s brows rose. “How?”
“His horse threw him off the bridge.”
“That’s unfortunate for him, but hardly trouble.”
But Nicol still frowned, walking rapidly even in his magister’s robe. He saw trouble everywhere, Justin knew; he was seeing it now, trying to make trouble out of a horse unnerved by the drumming echoes of water welling up beneath the bridge.
“They were armed.”
“Who were?” Justin asked, used to Nicol’s elliptical habits.
“Three men, riding across the bridge. All of them trying to carry weapons openly into Berylon.”
“Perhaps they were strangers to the city. They didn’t know.”
“Or they didn’t care.”
Justin was silent, puzzled. Nicol, striding vigorously on the scent of motives, mysteries, possibilities, blind to the world, did not enlighten him. It was a wonder, Justin thought, the cobblestones he never saw under his nose didn’t send him flying.
“Why should we?” he asked finally.
“Care?” Nicol stopped abruptly, gazing at his cousin; someone behind him nearly fell into his lute. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we shouldn’t. I only wondered how far from Berylon you would have to come to try to ride armed through the Tormalyne Gate.” He paused, lowered his voice. “Gaudi has been trying to find them.” As abruptly, he began to walk again. Arms, Justin thought coldly, and caught up. Nicol scented them like some aberrant animal.
“I don’t think it could have been personal.”
“What?” Justin asked patiently.
“I mean an angry husband, an act of passion, revenge, something like that. That would have begun within the city, or close enough to it that they would have hidden their weapons.”
“Were they allowed in?”
“They had to have the body brought up, identified. . . . Of course their weapons were taken at the gate. They were questioned, but accused of nothing. Armed men trying to go unnoticed would have crossed another bridge.”
“So either they were ignorant, or they were trying to be noticed.”
“Or they didn’t care,” Nicol said, with his bloodhound persistence.
Justin drew breath, held it. “Well,” he said finally, “that’s one bridge they’ll never cross again. Why wouldn’t they care about having the Tormalyne Gate slammed in their faces?”
“If they were deliberately creating a diversion, sending a message that they are willing to bring arms for a price into Berylon.”
Justin was silent again, refusing to rise to that bait. Nicol could find portents everywhere, even in someone careless enough to be tossed into a ravine. Nicol took his attention off the faceless stranger in his imagination and looked at his cousin suddenly, as if he had just noticed Justin. “You could find out about them,” he said. “You have nothing else to do.”
“I play nearly every night,” Justin protested. “I dragged myself out of bed early for you—”
“I don’t have time to stop to eat.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
“You’d be far more use to us if your life was less erratic. You’re throwing your talents away on drones up to their ears in ale and so sotted they probably think you’re twins.”
“Or that I’m playing a double bass.”
“You should work. Or study, and teach.”
“I do work!”
“Nicol, if this is leading toward an argument about what is real music, I’ll be forced to remind you who comes in her magister’s black to play with us every week. She thinks it’s real music.”
“She plays the picochet,” Nicol objected absently; the frown inched down between his eyes again. “That mocks her other talents.”
“You play together. Do you think her talents are questionable?”
“They’re formidable,” Nicol conceded. “It’s her taste that’s in dubious—taste.”
Justin snorted. “She risks her formidable reputation to play with us, for no other reason than that nobody at the school can stand the picochet.”
“It only has one string. It refuses to mingle in harmonious fashion with anything. Besides, there is no proper music for it.”
“So she is forced to take down her hair and bare her shoulders and knees to drunken tanners.”
Nicol blinked. “Really?”
“Just to play an instrument that caught her heart.”
“Her heart. Nobody plays the picochet by choice. Except in the barbaric provinces. Maybe she spies for Pellior House. Beware of her. Give her nothing. What do you talk about with her?”
Justin evaded the question. “Nicol, do you think I would babble in a tavern about—”
“Lower your voice. You get drunk there. How do you know what you say?”
“She comes to play the picochet,” Justin said tightly. “We talk about ballads. Nicol—”
“Don’t trust her,” Nicol said peremptorily. “Never trust anyone not of the House. That reminds me, though, of something you might do with your life. We could use someone coming and going in Pellior Palace. For legitimate reasons.” He ignored Justin’s sidelong stare. “You could work there.” His hand, closing on Justin’s shoulder, checked an exclamation. “They want—”
“No.”
“Listen to me.”
“No.” He unclenched his jaw after a moment. “Be satisfied with my life, Nicol. I’ll change it for myself, but not for you.”
“Listen,” Nicol said.
“I’m not working for—”
“It’s the music library from Tormalyne Palace.” He paused; his grip suddenly became uncomfortable. “They stole it.”
“I thought it had burned,” Justin said blankly.
“So did the school. Three hundred years’ worth of manuscripts and scrolls so valuable that they were not even kept in the music school. Veris Legere sent word to the school that he needed a librarian to sort and catalog them. Just that. No excuses, no explanation—they burned children, but not before they rescued the music library—”
“Yes,” Justin breathed, his eyes flicking down the walk. “Nicol. Why did they wait thirty-seven years—”
“Did he bother to explain? Does he think there is anyone left to care? Someone opened a closet and there it was, a treasure in manuscripts, smelling of smoke, a trifle bloodied, and now he wants a librarian.” He shook his head a little; his hand opened, dropped. “I’d do it, but I don’t trust my temper,” he admitted with rare candor. “But you—”
“Me,” Justin said thinly. “I’m just the one to stand around in Pellior Palace trying to read three-hundred-year-old signatures on music stolen from Tormalyne House. Thank you. I would rather gut fish.”
“It would be temporary,” Nicol said, with his infuriating obtuseness, and for a moment Justin felt the family temper shimmer behind his eyes. Then he laughed, which was easier than fighting Nicol, and which Nicol found equally baffling.
“No. You’ll have to use what talents I have. I can keep an ear open in the taverns for gossip about the riders on the Tormalyne Bridge. But sorting musty manuscripts in some marble room in Pellior Palace—I might as well be dead and buried. I’d get drunk from boredom, pass out among the scrolls, and Veris Legere would drop me out the nearest window like a bawdy song.”
“Well,” Nicol said, unconvinced. “Think about it. We can speak later.” They were, Justin found to his surprise, nearly at the steps of the music school. “Everything has its dangerous edge. Even you.”
Justin watched him. Among the students he moved gently, gracefully, giving out spare, melancholy smiles to those who greeted him, People trailed after him up the steps; even here he had his following, mostly pale, limpid-eyed, mouths daintily pursed as if they carried quails’ eggs on their tongues. Justin turned finally, wrestling with the familiar knot of exasperation and affection that Nicol invariably left in him, and crossed the street to the tavern there to find breakfast.