4

The Face of Weaving

Kingfisher, Lower Bank: Colbrilun 13

Almost two weeks after the debacle in Seven Knots, the Faces finally looked kindly upon Ren.

Dalisva Korzetsu’s list didn’t just name Branek and his key supporters, the ones who had backed the amphitheatre bombing. It also named Idusza Polojny, the channel through which Mezzan Indestor had provoked that bombing in the first place, as well as the person who’d belatedly tried to stop it: Koszar Andrejek.

Ren knew the former leader of the Anduske had been badly injured in the schism. Some of the rumors said he was dead, and certainly no one had seen him since Veiled Waters. But if he’d lived, his allies might have sought treatment for him, so Ren—as Arenza—was scouring the bonesetters and herbalists of the Lower Bank.

After opening far too many mussels, she finally found a pearl. “I know not if it’s the one you seek,” an old Meszaros gammer told her, “but I saw a fellow around that time taken to Alinka. Beat up, he was, and bad. Those with him, not much better.”

“Where can I find Alinka?” Arenza asked, and received directions to a tenement in a part of Kingfisher hard by the border of Seven Knots.

It was one of the buildings that used to house a wealthy Vraszenian family in the days before the Tyrant’s conquest, two stories tall and built around a courtyard. Now it was carved up into many smaller dwellings, usually with shops or workrooms on the ground floor and sleeping rooms above. Ren had lived in a similar place as a child, and her throat tightened at the memory.

Especially since there was a child outside the door she sought, playing with dolls on the cracked flagstones of the courtyard.

Bloodthirsty play, from the speech one doll was making to the others. “—won’t let these Liganti pigs treat our city like a sty,” the girl declaimed. Her toy was a strange study in contrasts, with a beautifully carved face and wooden limbs and hair of braided burgundy silk, but wearing a stained patchwork coat of rags and tattered ribbons. “To the river we will drive them, and stand on their shoulders till they drown in their own muck! On rooftops we will dry their bloated bodies, and burn them in the fens! We will not rest until the clans hold Nadežra once more! Who stands with me?”

The girl gave a whispered roar for the crowd’s response. If the clothes and hair hadn’t given it away, the speech would have. The doll was meant to be Elsivin the Red, born a son of the Kiraly, later becoming a szorsa. Like some who chose the path of the rimaše, her interest in pattern reading was lackluster at best. But she’d been a dedicated revolutionary, determined to take back Ažerais’s holy city. Fifty years had passed since her revolt failed, but Vraszenians still paid the price in increased tariffs, while Elsivin’s name was still honored in whispers. And apparently, in children’s stoop games.

Ren’s confidence in her lead solidified. The child had learned to play at sedition from someone; this might well be a Stadnem Anduske safe house.

The girl looked up as Arenza approached. Her sun-streaked hair was coming out of its two braids, and her clothes were patched and dusty. “Are you looking for my mama?” she asked, squinting into the sun.

“If your mama is Alinka, yes.”

“MAMA!”

Arenza wouldn’t have been surprised to see that bellow blow the front door off its hinges. Instead, after the pigeons squawked and settled, the door opened to reveal a careworn young woman. Her hair was kept out of her face by a practical crown braid, and both strands of the marriage token braided into it were the grey of the Kiraly raccoon. When she saw Arenza, she hurriedly wiped her hands clean on the frayed panel sash that decorated her skirt. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Arenza Lenskaya Tsverin,” Ren said in Vraszenian. “I seek some friends of mine, and I heard that to you they might have come for healing.”

The curiosity in the woman’s expression closed into guarded caution. She glanced past Arenza, searching the courtyard—not busy, but by no means empty. Untying a cord from her sash, she tugged a toddler out from his hiding place in her skirts. “Yvieny, keep watch over your brother,” she instructed, tying the cord around the girl’s wrist. “And wander not from the stoop. It’ll be supper soon.”

Ignoring the girl’s grumbles, Alinka gestured Arenza into the workshop and closed the door. The lamplit interior seemed doubly dim after the brightness outside. Ren smelled the herbs before her eyes adjusted to see them, a mix of floral and medicinal, fresh and pungent, one step off from the incense and resin that had scented her childhood home.

The counter running along the back of the room had been transformed into an herbalist’s workbench, but hanging alongside the curtain that veiled the stairs going up to the sleeping rooms were coils of cording in every color of the dreamweaver. Finished knots dangled from a beam: the tight budded rose of Ažerais for good luck, the seven-lobed wagon knot for longevity, the simpler triple cloverleaf for family. The table dominating the center was long instead of round, better to lay sick clients on than patterns, but the pot kept warm by the hearth steamed with the starchy scent of cooked rice, and the chairs around it were padded with thickly embroidered pillows.

It felt like home. Simultaneously a soft embrace, and a knife of grief between the ribs.

Alinka didn’t move farther into the room. Likely she’d only let Arenza in to keep their conversation secret from her children and anyone who might be loitering in the courtyard. “A healer should not speak of her patients to strangers,” she said. “Who are your friends?”

If this were a Stadnem Anduske safe house, Arenza would have been asked for a password. “Idusza Nadjulskaya Polojny is my friend, but Koszar Yureski Andrejek is the one who needed help. I have for them a warning.” She straightened her shawl, drawing Alinka’s attention. It was the fine shawl the Rook had given her, and while the hidden knives were no use here, the embroidery was.

Alinka’s eyes widened when she recognized it as a patterner’s shawl. Immediately she stepped back, hand to heart as though Arenza were an honored guest. “You are Idusza’s szorsa friend! Apologies for my rudeness. It is only… not all who ask after friends are truly friends. Will you take some tea?”

“Thank you, yes.” There were shoes by the door, and Alinka was wearing slippers; that and her liquid accent marked her as not from Nadežra. A southerner, with the customs and speech patterns of a true Vraszenian, born and raised away from Liganti influence. It made Ren feel out of place as she surreptitiously wiped her boot soles and stepped across to the table. “I understand your caution. I’ve searched since the terrible business during Veiled Waters, but they have hidden themselves well.”

“Yet pattern brought you here. You are as gifted as Idusza claimed.”

Play my skill up, or down? “Pattern, and a good deal of searching,” Arenza said with a laugh. “I hope you can shorten my quest.”

Alinka had busied herself with brewing the tea. It wasn’t just hospitality; she was hiding trembling hands. “Koszar was badly injured, and then infection set in. Several days he lay here, before they could move him. I know not where they took him after that.”

The tea she brewed was soothing, fragrant with chamomile and mint, as though Alinka could tell Ren had been living the lives of three people with the hours of only one. But the steaming cup thunked a little too hard onto the table. You know exactly where he is, Arenza thought, blowing across the surface of the tea. Alinka was right to be cautious, though. Any woman with the right kind of shawl could claim to be Idusza’s szorsa friend. “Have you some way to send them a message?”

Alinka brightened. “Certainly!”

“I would be grateful.” The mug had a small crack on the far rim. The room was cozy and clean as such places went, but Alinka’s clothing was patched like her daughter’s, and there wasn’t a lot of food on the shelves. Once upon a time it would have looked ordinary to Ren… before her adoption into House Traementis.

The same impulse that made her offer to aid the Rook drove the words out of her without thinking: “I can pay for your help.”

“What? No, no.” Alinka waved her hands in front of her. “To reunite friends, I’ll take no money—and doubly not when helping a szorsa. This city has not changed me so much that I forget to honor those blessed by Ažerais.”

It had been a clumsy offer, more Liganti than Vraszenian. With outsiders they haggled, but among themselves, debts took a different form. Arenza said, “Then let me thank you with a pattern.”

Delight bloomed in Alinka’s expression. But as Arenza reached for her deck, Yvieny’s voice pierced the walls again—this time in a shriek of delight—and a moment later, the door opened.

To reveal Captain Grey Serrado.

In rumpled clothes that were neither his dress vigils nor his patrol slops. He had the toddler balanced on one hip, a basket overflowing with greens on the other, and a shrieking Yvieny riding his leg as he dragged them all through the doorway.

“Mama! Mama! I got honey stones, see?” Yvieny released her grip to hold up a cone of hard, sticky candy.

Serrado set down the basket, freeing a hand to tousle the little girl’s hair into even wilder tangles. In Vraszenian he said, “Scold me not, Alinka. I know you wish her to…”

His words faded as he caught sight of Arenza sitting at the table. Ren hoped desperately that her face wasn’t showing what she felt: the free-fall horror of realizing exactly what she’d stumbled into.

Grey Serrado had worked with Idusza to stop the bombing. Of course he’d helped the wounded Koszar afterward.

I’m sitting in his house. And Alinka is his wife.

Kingfisher, Lower Bank: Colbrilun 13

“You… have a client.” Grey’s words thudded like cobbles, inelegant and stupid. Yvieny had warned him that someone was with Alinka; he’d been braced for anybody other than the woman in front of him. She found me. She found us. How the hell did she figure out the Rook’s secret?

He diverted his attention to Jagyi, who had seized his ear and was tugging like it would detach if pulled hard enough. Hopefully, that would cover for his flinch on seeing Ren—Arenza—sitting blithely at Alinka’s table. He had to get her out of here before she said anything she shouldn’t… but first, he had to act like everything was normal, so Alinka’s suspicions wouldn’t be aroused.

What was normal in this situation? “I meant not to interrupt—”

“You interrupt nothing.” Alinka sorted through the basket he’d brought. “And a dinner of rice alone would be bland. Watercress. Taro. No lotus root?”

“There was none to be had.” He shifted to keep Arenza in his peripheral vision while pretending to listen to Alinka’s scolding. Her gaze was on her tea, chin tucked low to hide her face. As though she was afraid he’d recognize her.

Relief and doubt warred within him. If she was hiding, she didn’t realize he knew she was Ren, and Renata. Which meant she had not, in fact, unmasked him as the Rook.

Except Grey had seen firsthand how good of a liar she was.

He was chasing his own tail, the usual mental divisions that kept his life separate from the Rook’s falling apart like cheap paper in rain. He hadn’t yet figured out what to do when Alinka took Jagyi from him, saying, “Let go of your uncle’s ear, bibi,” and Arenza’s gaze came up in startlement. It flicked briefly to Alinka’s marriage knot, then to Grey’s hair, too short to hold a braid, before skittering away. He nearly laughed. She thought Alinka was my wife.

Then a shadow passed across her expression as she tied the threads together. Grey was a northerner, Alinka southern, so they couldn’t be born to the same family. That meant Alinka must be Kolya’s widow.

Normally Grey was able to juggle these kinds of situations like a master street performer. But it was too much, with too little warning: the collision of what he knew, what Ren knew, their assorted identities and secrets. He needed space to think it all through, without her watching; he couldn’t trust his own mask right now.

Since he couldn’t throw Arenza out, Grey took the vegetables from Alinka instead. “I’ll deal with this. You should see to your client.”

“Actually, I am her client,” Alinka said. “She offered to pattern me—”

The chair scraped across the floor as Arenza stood up. “My apologies; I just remembered I have not the time today. And you are busy besides. But I will come back, if I may. And you will pass the message to Idusza…?”

She was looking for Idusza? True, they’d met during the riots—but no, that had been Renata, not Arenza. Did she know Koszar was upstairs, still bedridden from his wounds? What in eleven hells was going on?

That chin tucked down, hiding her face. He’d seen that posture before… in the pretty young patterner he ran off a street corner months ago. And Idusza had sought Grey out because an unnamed szorsa told her to.

He’d assumed he’d discovered all of Ren’s games. More fool me.

Ordinarily Alinka would have pressed a guest to stay for dinner, but with the dangerous secret just above their heads, she offered only assurances and farewells as Arenza departed. Once the intruder was gone, she pulled on gloves to clean the taro root and said, “I know you distrust szorsas, but that one has Ažerais’s gift. How else to explain how she found us?”

Grey feared the explanation had nothing to do with Ažerais. Ren was resourceful, and no matter how careful he’d been, someone could have noticed Andrejek’s midnight arrival. “We cannot keep him here,” he said, gaze straying to the stairway.

“Ask me not to move a man so injured. When his eyes focus and his speech stops slurring, then I’ll consider it.” Kneeling, she gathered Yvieny into a hug and kissed her daughter’s thistle-wild hair. “You did so well, alča. Keeping watch and keeping secret. Can you continue doing that for Mama?”

More interested now in her honey stones than in the stranger upstairs that mostly slept, Yvieny mumbled agreement around sticky fingers. Alinka met Grey’s eyes. “And can you take a message to my patient’s friends? Perhaps a szorsa can help them where we cannot.”

“I will,” Grey said, giving Alinka a kiss on the brow and calling out a farewell to Yvie and Jagyi.

He was halfway out the door before Alinka realized he was leaving. “I meant not for you to go now—”

“Best not to wait, and I still have a pile of Vigil paperwork to get through. Wait not for me. Likely I will sleep in my office again.”

Grey closed the door on her objections, worn thin after over a year of living on top of each other. After his brother’s death, Alinka had needed support, and Grey couldn’t afford to pay for both his rented room and this place. But neither could he risk her or the children catching him sneaking out at night. Dodging his fellow hawks was easier.

It wasn’t the Aerie he headed to, though, nor Idusza. After the Black Rose’s warning in Seven Knots, and knowing Indestor had chosen Ren for his ritual because she’d been conceived during the Great Dream, Grey was inclined to agree that she had uncanny insight and luck. Was this the first time a szorsa—a true one, blessed with the gift—had ever patterned the Rook? Had the hood really been enough to hide him from the eyes of a goddess? What if Ren took it into her head to pattern Grey?

He cut through Kingfisher with rapid strides, toward the townhouse of the person who knew the Rook the best… because she used to be him.

Kingfisher, Lower Bank: Colbrilun 13

Ryvček’s silver-shot hair was damp with sweat, and she hadn’t bothered putting down her practice sword before opening her door. “Szerado. You look like a zlyzen is on your heels.”

“Don’t joke about that,” he muttered, sliding past her into the entryway.

“Would you like to come in? No, worry not; I was sitting idle when you arrived.” She shut the door behind him and headed for the back of the narrow townhouse. “Whatever it is, you can talk while I practice. Though why I bother when every two days some idiot hires me, the Masks alone can say. Has everyone forgotten how to settle grievances without steel?”

The back room was Ryvček’s training space. She might be one of the top duelists in Nadežra, but only fools thought that meant she didn’t have to practice anymore. In addition to teaching her students, she spent at least two hours a day here, stretching, drilling footwork, lunging at the wall until the paneling cracked and had to be replaced again. The eyebrow she arched at him asked silently whether he was as diligent, and Grey hid a guilty wince. Most of his “practice” took the form of either Vigil or Rook business.

He slouched against the wall, well out of reach from his former teacher’s sword. “Two weeks ago, I escorted Alta Renata on a trip to the Lower Bank. That night, the Rook ran into the Black Rose in Seven Knots. And just now, Arenza Lenskaya was having tea with Alinka. In her house.”

Ryvček’s blade thudded into the wall a good three inches above the usual mark.

She retreated from her lunge and stared at him. “She knows?”

“I’m not sure.” That steady gaze made him feel like a new student who’d never touched a blade. Ryvček had worn the hood for over twenty years before she’d passed it on to him, less than two years ago; compared to her, he was as green as spring grass. “She had plausible reasons for being in all three places, and today she rushed out like she was afraid of being recognized herself. But in Seven Knots, she told the Rook she’d patterned him. And she knew things we don’t talk about.”

The stillness of Ryvček’s body was that of a swordswoman, preparing to strike. “You wondered about her success. Think you that she knows these things because of pattern? Or because she has one of the medallions?”

The possibility had crossed his mind before. “The Traementis started falling to ruin when Letilia left. And started improving when Renata returned. A medallion might explain the shift.”

He didn’t want to contemplate it. Ren had been an ally to him and the Rook both; if it weren’t for her help, Veiled Waters would have ended very differently. The thought that she might hold a piece of the Tyrant’s corruption—the same corruption the Rook fought against—made Grey feel sick.

For once, talking about pattern was preferable. “As for the reading… she is born of Ažerais. I don’t think she’s a charlatan.”

“Unlike all the others?”

Grey met Ryvček’s smirk with a glower. “Perhaps.” She knew a little of his life before coming to Nadežra, and why he disliked frauds. But his teacher was good at putting boundaries between the past and the present; she didn’t really understand why bygones might still scar him now.

Ryvček resumed her lunges, the point of her sword beating a steady rhythm against her wall, undoubtedly to the annoyance of her neighbor. “Then what will you do?”

He’d come to her because he didn’t know. But while Ryvček tolerated him asking for occasional advice, in the end, she was no longer the Rook. She’d walked away from it—something very few of their predecessors had managed.

Grey scrubbed at his face. “She knows there’s a poison lacing through this city. She offered to help. I didn’t find a medallion when I searched her townhouse after the Night of Hells, but I could have missed it. If she does have one, it’s possible she doesn’t know what it is. Which means she might actually work with me.” Maybe that was what her reading meant: the chance to finally break through a wall that had stood for two hundred years.

Even if it was a slim chance, it made his answer clear. “I think I need to risk getting closer. If she trusts the Rook, maybe she’ll tell him something.”

Ryvček paused again, this time in thought. “You were concerned that she cannot defend herself—not as a noble should. I have begun training her. A chance it might offer me, to learn something useful.” Familiar amusement flared in her smile. “If nothing else, I’ll have a few afternoons of getting sweaty and close with a lovely young woman.”

His teacher had always been good at surprising a laugh from him. “I almost wish I could watch. She might not be much with a sword, but when it comes to verbal sparring, I think you’ll find you’ve met your match.” He grinned. “Especially if she drops the Renata act and fights dirty.”

Ryvček’s dark eyes twinkled as though she would like nothing better. Then they dimmed. “And if she starts to see through your act?”

It wasn’t the first time someone had gotten close to discovering the Rook’s identity. Grey had centuries of ways to deal with it that he could draw upon. And he might not like szorsas, but he knew how they worked—not the ones with the true gift. The charlatans.

He said, “Then I’ll give her a better performance to distract her.”

Isla Traementis, the Pearls: Colbrilun 14

Too many nights awake and days sleeping had thrown off Donaia’s old habits. Exhaustion dragged her eyelids down as she sat with Tanaquis and Renata in the salon, abetted by the afternoon sunlight dancing on dust motes and Meatball draped heavy in her lap. And the gentle burr of Tanaquis’s voice as she went over the astrological charts of the petitioners for adoption…

Donaia jerked her head up from its dip, dragging herself back to Tanaquis’s words. “I can’t recommend her. Bad fortune from now until Ninat claims her. Nencoral Fintenus, on the other hand…” Tanaquis shuffled one chart off onto an empty chair co-opted for that purpose and presented the next one. “Very promising. Prime in Quarat True with an Alter in Tricat, and both Paumillis and Corillis full at her birth. I wouldn’t be surprised if House Fintenus counteroffered in a bid to keep her.”

“I’ve no interest in getting mired in a bidding war,” Donaia said, pinching her brow in an attempt to ward off sleep. “House Traementis is established enough that people should fight to join us.”

She felt guilty for asking Renata to sit in on this meeting. The girl was run ragged these days, handling their Charterhouse business; Donaia ought to hire another advocate to take some of the burden off her. Another advocate wouldn’t have Renata’s style, though, her gift for reading people’s moods, her ability to lure people into believing her foreign origins made her an easy mark.

But when it came to evaluating candidates for adoption, Donaia knew the waters best. She couldn’t hand this task off to Renata. At the same time, she was strongly considering taking Scaperto up on his offer of time away, in his bay villa—which would mean leaving Renata in charge of the house. The girl would need to know who she was dealing with. Her and Giuna both; after all, whomever they adopted would be their new cousins.

“It needn’t be a bidding war,” Renata mused. “I’ve met Nencoral a few times. I suspect we could offer her some… nonmonetary benefits. After all, she wouldn’t have applied if she were happy in House Fintenus.”

That was the other reason to have Renata here. She looked at these people and saw potential. All Donaia could see were flaws.

She didn’t want new family. She wanted the family she’d had. The family she’d lost.

Donaia pressed one hand against her belly. Last night she’d dreamed she was bearing, and in the way of dreams, it had been both her pregnancy with Leato, and a new child coming. Only when she went into labor, she gave birth to one of those hideous monsters that had killed him. A zlyzen.

Renata and Tanaquis kept talking, moving from chart to chart. Donaia was so glad to see a friendship growing between those two. Renata had plenty of friends in Nadežra, but sometimes she wondered if the girl felt at all close to any of them. Superficial entertainments were no substitute for a true bond. She’d learned that all too sharply when House Traementis’s false friends had fallen away.

“Would you consider it?” she asked.

The question popped out without her thinking, and cut through the conversation like an imbued knife. Tanaquis blinked. “Consider what? Adopting Algetto myself? I don’t think he’d accept demotion to gentry status. And House Fienola, all one of me, has even less to offer him than House Traementis used to.”

Renata shifted in her chair, and Tanaquis blinked again. “I suppose that sounded bad. Don’t worry. I don’t mind being the last; everything dies eventually.”

“No, I meant—” Donaia struggled for a more polite phrasing, recalled that it was Tanaquis she was speaking to, and cast delicacy aside. “If we offered to adopt you. Would you join House Traementis?”

Renata’s lips parted on a soft “ah,” her hazel eyes darkening as she ran social calculations at the speed Tanaquis could run astrological ones. But it wasn’t Renata’s approval Donaia wanted. If she was going to open her house and her register, let at least one of the new entrants be an old friend.

“Hmm. Ninat does lead to Illi. The death of the old makes way for the birth of the new,” Tanaquis mused, oblivious to Donaia’s shiver at the mention of death and birth together. “My chart should be acceptable. And you’re no longer cursed. You have more than enough room at Traementis Manor for more people… but my observatory is set up just how I like it.”

Tucking a stray wisp behind her ear, Tanaquis gave Donaia the same look Meatball had when he didn’t understand a command. “I see no significant flaws—but also no profit to you.”

“Not everything is about profit,” Renata said.

Donaia’s emphatic gesture at her niece took the place of the words welling up in her throat, crowding too close to get out. As Tanaquis’s brow furrowed, her grey eyes shifting back and forth between the two of them, the knot untied itself enough for Donaia to say, “You’re a friend. And you’ll stay a friend regardless of whether you accept the offer—but I want the chance to choose one person for something other than mercenary reasons.”

“Oh. I hadn’t considered that aspect.” After a moment’s more hesitation, Tanaquis reached over and awkwardly covered Donaia’s hand where it rested on Meatball’s ruff. “It’s a kind offer. I should consider what the consequences for us both might be, and I’ll need to cast more charts… but I will think about it.”

Splinter Alley, the Shambles: Colbrilun 17

Vargo didn’t know the Shambles as well as some of Nadežra’s other slums. It was a rabbit’s warren of stalls and squats and seedy shops servicing the merchants and mercenaries who traveled the Dawn and Dusk Roads, everyone squeezed between the Cinquerat’s taxes and the local fire crews. The only organized activity that made any profit in the Shambles was the off-book brothels fronted by papaver dens, and that was one business that Vargo did his best to stay out of.

The brothels, and the children caught in them.

Vargo might not know the Shambles well, but he knew not to walk its streets in his usual finery. He’d forced himself into the unwashed coat and shirt of one of Nikory’s crew—his skin itching at the inevitability of lice—and he’d donned a cheap mask despite the urge to take his disease-preventing one instead. The Shambles was no place for Eret Vargo.

Even with those precautions, he drew the notice of the beggars and pickpockets working the spaces between stalls. The knot of artfully hollow-eyed waifs that flocked around him looked hungry, but not for food. Pity-rustling must be more lucrative than he remembered, if they depended on makeup and dirt smudges to ply their trade.

“How long has she been in operation?” Vargo asked Nikory, who flanked him opposite a frowning Varuni. Since the events at the amphitheatre, he hadn’t been allowed to take a shit without her standing sentry. He might have been touched, if he didn’t know she was just protecting her family’s investment. They relied on him to get their goods past the tariffs.

“Started hearing her name about two years back,” Nikory murmured, his split tongue flickering out to wet his lips as he eyed the children. They’d swelled in numbers, which might have been more threatening if any of them came higher than Vargo’s elbow. Even so, Varuni’s chain whip clinked as she studied the gathering crowd.

Vargo side-eyed Nikory. “And you didn’t tell me about her because…?”

“She was an eleven-year-old brat!” Nikory’s voice went high with incredulity. “We was supposed to take that seriously?”

I was eleven.

::And definitely a brat.:: Vargo hadn’t expected the reply, and he flinched. He hadn’t meant to think that loud enough for Alsius to hear.

He flicked his collar, where the spider had hidden himself away. Takes one to know one, old man.

Smiling at the mental sputters that followed, Vargo stopped before a run-down building not much different than all the others lining the narrow, winding alleyway. A plank hanging from one corner was carved with a crude, four-petaled flower, smoke curling lazily up from its center. The vermilion paint had long worn away, remnants of it clinging only in the deepest grain of the wood, like veins of heart’s blood. Tarry soot blackened the window on the inside, but Vargo spied the twitch of a curtain parting and then falling back into place.

At his nod, Nikory rapped on the door.

The speed and efficiency with which they were let in, searched, and divested of the few weapons they’d brought was impressive. Varuni was allowed to keep her chain, but only after her look promised pain for the large boy who’d tried to take it from her.

Vargo wasn’t worried. Over two years, Arkady Bones had risen to become the biggest—and youngest—knot leader in the Shambles. Hurting Derossi Vargo, leader of half the knots on the Lower Bank, would be stupid; this girl had proven she was anything but.

Once the door crew was satisfied that Vargo and his people posed no danger to their boss, a guide led them through a main room packed with nests of blankets. Some of those were occupied by multiple children snuggled together for comfort. From beyond a curtain-veiled doorway came the meaty aroma of steamed dumplings.

But their guide led them past that, up a curving flight of stairs to the balcony that ringed the main floor. There sat Arkady Bones, in a recessed alcove that gave her a view of most of the room. Her high-backed chair was too big for her spindle-thin frame: a tyrant in miniature, surveying her domain.

Her knife-cut hair stuck out in jagged points from under a bright red cap. A patched coat hung over the back of her chair; both of her bare arms were bound from wrist to elbow with thin, braided cords. The same cords worn on the wrist of every child he’d seen since entering the Shambles, in an array of colors as diverse and clashing as Master Peabody’s abdomen.

Had she sworn individual knot bonds with every child in her crew? Vargo marveled at the madness.

“Eret Vargo,” she said, as overly solemn as an actress cast in a role too large for her skill.

Keeping his smirk at bay, Vargo bowed with a hand over his heart, equally solemn. “Mistress Bones.”

A tense moment passed. Then the girl grinned, sharp as a dagger, and twisted on her throne. She kicked her legs over one arm and leaned back against the other. “You en’t looking half bad for a cuff whose back was shredded worse’n a night-piece’s skirts. I figured you for Ninat’s pyre after Veiled Waters. Glad to see you’re upright enough for fucking.”

“… Thank you,” Vargo said, nonplussed. In the back of his mind, he heard laughter. Alsius?

::Don’t mind me, my boy. Just feeling nostalgic.::

Fuck you.

“How’d you do it?” Boots thunking to the floor, Arkady leaned forward, sharp gaze searching Vargo like she could see under his borrowed coat. “They say you’re some chalk-eating inscriptor. You use a numinat to save your ass? You got scars? Can I see ’em?”

This time, the snicker was out loud, and it came from Varuni. Arkady had managed to crack that impenetrable facade? She was dangerous.

“Yes, I am. No, I didn’t. Yes, I do. No, you may not,” Vargo said sternly—only realizing after the words were out that he was acting as Alsius had in their early days. Which was probably a mistake.

Definitely a mistake. “Guess we know where you stick your chalk when you en’t using it,” Arkady muttered.

Vargo snorted and matched her insolent expression. “My edge and my compass fit up there, too.”

Grin returning, Arkady asked, “And your self?”

“A man can but try.”

Arkady cackled. “Butt try!” Her laughter launched a wave of giggles from the children ringing the balcony. Vargo could almost feel Varuni rolling her eyes, and he knew Alsius was doing the same—all eight of them.

The tension broke with the laughter. Arkady grabbed a round pear from a bowl at her elbow, then tossed one to Vargo as well. “Guess we should stop shitting about and talk business. I en’t stupid. You want to take my crew, and nothing I can do to keep it from happening. But you try doing it by force—” She held up both arms, voice descending into a hiss. “And I will ‘but try’ to fuck you with your own cock for every one of these you make bleed.”

Before Vargo could find words, Arkady smiled again. He was beginning to realize that all her smiles were knives. “Or we can do this peaceful-like. You leave my people alone, and maybe we can work something out. I don’t come cheap, but I’m worth more to you here in the Shambles than floating belly down in the West Channel.”

Covering his surprise with one hand, Vargo tapped his lip and pretended to consider. “I believe you might be.”

::Vargo, we didn’t come for this.::

No reason we can’t use it. He had no interest in taking over Arkady’s tangle of knots—but she didn’t know that.

“We can work out the details later,” Vargo said, glance traveling over their audience. Stick-thin legs dangled from every space along the balcony ring, wide-eyed faces pressed into every gap between the rails. He suspected Arkady would make him pay well for her cooperation, but that was always more profitable in the long run than bleeding a new knot dry. “In private. But as a gesture of goodwill, I have a question and a favor to ask.”

Arkady crossed her arms, chin lifting as though she feared what he wanted but wasn’t going to let it cow her. “Sure. En’t this an old papaver den? First toke comes free.”

She needn’t have worried. Vargo’s request was as soothing and easy as poppy smoke. “I understand you’re friendly with the Black Rose. I want to know what you know about her. And I want you to pass on a message.”

Westbridge and Kingfisher, Lower Bank: Colbrilun 18

There was an ostretta, the Laughing Crow, where Arenza had said she would look for messages—and it was there that she found word from Idusza, four days after she accidentally walked into the Serrado house.

The reply was unwritten, just a verbal message from the bartender: “The bridge south of where you two met. Noon tomorrow. And she says to be careful.”

Luckily, Ren knew how to be careful.

A small laundry stood at the foot of the bridge, adding its steam to the heat of early summer. Arenza wasn’t surprised when Idusza popped out and beckoned her inside. But she had to applaud the ingenuity of the plan; Idusza led her past the women churning the washing tubs with their heavy wooden paddles, to the hatch where they dumped wastewater. It jutted out over the canal, and by the simple expedient of hanging upside down out the hatch until a splinter-boat went by, Idusza was able to arrange for a ride.

“For weeks I’ve searched,” Arenza said as the skiffer began poling them up the canal, away from the river. “I thought—”

Idusza waved her to silence. So Arenza waited while the boat took them deeper into the Lower Bank, finally depositing them at a canal stair in Kingfisher. Only when they were off the boat did Idusza say, “Was that necessary? Who can tell. I know only that I wouldn’t want to learn the hard way that I should have been more careful.”

“I feared you were dead,” Arenza admitted, covertly studying the other woman. Idusza had always been a hard bite in a deceptively soft wrapping, but now that softness looked tired and worn around the edges. The braid that had once curved around her head to drape over her shoulder had become a simple straight plait, as if there was no point in doing anything prettier. “It was the cards only that gave me hope. The last place I expected to find word of you was in the house of a hawk.”

“You’re no more surprised than we were to be there. But Szerado is Kiraly, and those gutter cats are never without their masks. I think his might be made of feathers rather than fur. He defied even the ziemetse to help us.”

Feathers rather than fur. Ren was so used to seeing him as a hawk… and as a slip-knot, currying favor with the Liganti rather than holding fast with his own people. But he’d protected them after the Night of Hells, and defied Mettore Indestor to rescue people from the amphitheatre. It couldn’t be easy, standing between two worlds like that.

She glanced around and realized she recognized the neighborhood. “Masks have mercy. Tell me you are not living in that hawk’s house.”

The smile Idusza flashed in return was too tight for real humor. “The last place any would look for us. But no—only Koszar is there. And that only because he cannot yet walk well enough to leave. He dislikes putting the children in such danger.”

Ren didn’t like it any better, and she could hardly imagine the Serrados did, either. She silently followed Idusza back to the courtyard house, but this time not to the front door. Idusza led her around to the back entrance, and knocked in a specific pattern before opening it.

Alinka rushed to meet them, hands twisting when she saw Arenza. “My apologies, szorsa, for not trusting you before. But—”

Arenza waved the apology away. “But you must be cautious. I fault you not. Why bring me here, Idusza? Anything this healer has not done for Andrejek, I am unlikely to do.” She hoped Idusza didn’t expect the kind of miraculous—and wholly staged—changes she’d once wrought in Sedge.

The answering scowl said it wasn’t healing Idusza had in mind. “Koszar asked you here for your insight. But I will let him tell you. If he is awake?” That last was directed at Alinka, who nodded and gestured them to the staircase.

In all her dealings with Idusza, Arenza had never met Koszar Andrejek. The man waiting in the room upstairs was younger than she expected, though made older by the thin face and lank hair of a recovering invalid. Despite his splinted leg, he made as if to rise and greet her, only to be pushed gently down by the man at his side. That one she recognized: Ardaš Orsolski Ljunan, whom she’d met when she advised Idusza on how to steal Fulvet’s saltpeter. His name, like Andrejek’s and Idusza’s, was on Dalisva’s list.

She had no intention of handing them over. If Ažerais truly had created the Black Rose for a purpose, it wasn’t to fight people like these.

Biting down on obvious pain, Andrejek said, “Szorsa Arenza. I am Koszar Yureski Andrejek of the Anoškin. Thank you for coming. Few enough friends I have these days; it is a relief to count you among them.”

“What happened?” Arenza asked, not hiding her concern. “The tales I have heard—”

By way of answer, he unbuttoned the collar of his shirt with his good hand and dragged it open, revealing a complex piece of knotwork around his throat. “Inspect it if you wish. You will find stains, faded colors. My knot I have worn without pause since I was twelve; those of my predecessors, since I was nineteen. The cut charm Branek displayed was a fake.”

“Then you were still tied in when they attacked you?” Arenza whispered, fingers clenching in her skirts like they had the day Ondrakja lurched at Ren with fever-poisoned fury. “They were still tied in? When they tried to kill you?”

Idusza snarled another curse. “Branek should have his name stripped from him, and be called Zevriz from now until death.”

Her condemnation sent a trickle of cold sweat down Ren’s back. On the streets, a knot oath was only as strong as the people who took and kept it, but the threads led back to older Vraszenian traditions of clan and kureč. Bad enough to be cast out, as her mother had been… but to be called Zevriz—to lose one’s name entirely—was the worst condemnation possible. Such a person was cursed to receive neither food, nor drink, nor shelter from anyone, until the day they died.

She hadn’t believed what Dalisva said about a Cinquerat pardon, but Andrejek might have cut his knot when he realized those he led would no longer follow him. Instead he’d been betrayed, and blasphemously so.

The way Ren had betrayed Ondrakja.

Unaware of her bleak thoughts, Andrejek gestured at a truckle bed piled with colorful patchwork blankets—no doubt where the children slept. “You came seeking us, but it is we who need your guidance, if Ažerais will bless us with a pattern.”

It was the least she could do for him. Ren had read some of the seditious pamphlets the Anduske printed in secret, and she’d heard Idusza’s tales about their leader. She didn’t agree with everything Andrejek argued for, but he was somebody she would enjoy debating. He seemed like the kind of man who would listen to contrasting views and consider them before making a decision.

Now the organization he’d led was in the hands of Branek. Even if Ren was a hypocrite for condemning anyone’s blasphemy, she had no problems with condemning Branek’s other actions. The other day a family of Liganti glassblowers had tried to adopt a Vraszenian orphan, but a group of Anduske had stolen the child away, leaving the would-be parents bleeding and half-conscious.

She hadn’t brought a bowl for the offerings, and Andrejek didn’t have any coin on him. Idusza passed him a few centiras, then took them back when he injudiciously tried to lean over and lay them on the truckle bed. She put them next to Arenza’s knee as Andrejek said, “I cannot leave the Anduske in Branek’s hands. How am I to win back my people, though, when so few will even listen to me now? Perhaps your cards can say.”

Arenza had healthy confidence in her skills as a pattern-reader, but Koszar might be asking for more than she could provide. Nevertheless, she gave the cards an honest shuffle, praying one by one to the ancestors of the clans, and Ižranyi last of all. If only the Ižranyi could fix this… She doubted they could have. But in the centuries since their clan was wiped out in the destruction of Fiavla, people had taken to speaking of them as if they’d had miraculous powers. The Ižranyi could have stopped the Tyrant. The Ižranyi could have won back Nadežra. The Ižranyi could have healed all the rifts that separated the clans and the kretse, mending the tears that kept Vraszan divided and weak.

“This is your past, the good and the ill of it, and that which is neither.” Her breath huffed out at the first card. “The Face of Stars: You have been a very fortunate man, favored by Ir Entrelke.”

Andrejek grunted, trying and failing to find a comfortable position on the bed. “Not always fortunate.”

“No one is,” she agreed, touching the card in the veiled position. Four Petals Fall, the card of nature. The flower it depicted was beautiful, but already fading, and its dropping petals were as white as snow. “Some disaster in your past… in the mountains?” She knew he came from one of the trading kretse, which traveled the Dawn and Dusk Roads. It was a hard life, and full of danger. “You lost many people to nature’s wrath.”

“A rockfall.” The grief that shadowed his voice was old enough not to bleed, but the scar remained. “Two of us survived. The other never walked again.”

Bereft of a kureč, he’d come to Nadežra. Much like Ren’s mother had. To Nadežra, and the Anduske—represented by The Mask of Mirrors at the center of the line. Secrets and lies. Trying not to choke on the irony, Arenza said, “And so you entered a life full of deception. But some lies are necessary. Force of arms has failed to take Nadežra back, more than once; perhaps more-subtle means might succeed.” Someday.

For his present, the good was Three Hands Join, and she exchanged a wry smile with Andrejek. The card of aid needed no explanation, when he lay hidden in Alinka Serrado’s house. The other two were a matched pair, The Face of Light in the middle, and the eyeless shape of The Mask of Nothing on the left. The two aspects of Gria Ežil Dmivro: Gria Ežil representing rationality and the future, and Gria Dmivro, madness and lack of control.

“Branek?” Andrejek asked, nodding at The Mask of Nothing. Then he grimaced. “Apologies, szorsa. I should not presume.”

She sighed. “You are not wrong, though. He believes that bold action alone will suffice—that if he shows his strength, others will rally to it. Blind faith, as the Mask itself is blind. But it means not only him.” She tapped The Face of Light. “This is the crux for you, and your whole pattern. Against Branek you burn to act… but you must have patience. Now is not the time for action, and not only because your body is still weak. If you wish to defeat him, you must be careful, and you must plan.”

Even as she spoke, she knew it would frustrate him. For one brief flash, Andrejek reminded her of Donaia: not a parent, but someone who cared deeply for the people under his care. Not being able to help them would be torture.

Sure enough, he said, “Plan for what? And with what? You see here the extent of what Three Hands Join has brought me.” He gestured at the two people with him, the family downstairs that courted danger by hiding him.

Her mind was beginning to work, pulling together the threads, both in the cards and beyond them. “Of the Black Rose I’m sure you’ve heard—that she saved the wellspring. But have you heard the more recent tales?”

Idusza made a small, enlightened noise. “They say for Branek’s allies she’s been causing trouble.”

“It seems she has no love for those who would slaughter for the cause. Be patient, and let her do her work. Your enemies she will weaken for you.” Not that she’d managed any significant successes yet… but Ren had some thoughts about how to make that happen. And if it bought Andrejek time to plan, so much the better.

“Once I can move—” Andrejek growled in frustration. “Always I must wait for that. But perhaps, szorsa, you can guide me to this Rose.”

The last thing Ren needed was to meet him in both personas. But had she expected him to say anything else? Rather than answer, she turned over the top line. The good of his future was The Mask of Hollows; the ill, The Mask of Ravens; that which was neither, Storm Against Stone. “Six Faces and Masks,” she murmured, glancing down at the rest of the pattern. “The deities have taken a strong interest in you, Ča Andrejek.”

“Koszar,” he said. “And I would make offerings to them if I could walk a labyrinth. But tell me—what do they say?”

The Mask of Ravens was hatred and war. “Divisions run deep, within the Anduske, within Nadežra, within Vraszan. This is where Branek would lead us… but not only him. By your own actions you might go there, if your heart is fed too strongly by revenge. Focus not on taking down Branek—though that may happen—but on bringing the Anduske back to your side.”

Idusza muttered a soft curse. “As if that will be easy.”

“I never said it would be. Many forces stand in the way of that.” Arenza shivered, looking at Storm Against Stone. During the Night of Hells, in the pattern laid out by the dream of her mother, that had been the central card. An unstoppable force, a tempest howling around the Charterhouse—and Mevieny, the blinded szorsa, had been desperate for Ren not to give into it. “This is not simply a problem for the Anduske, or even for Vraszenians. Nadežra itself struggles. For you to succeed…” She was losing herself in the pattern, trying to feel what lay hidden in its threads. “Other things must change. Things beyond your control.”

Koszar smacked one hand against the bed. “Mean you that I cannot succeed? But I have a good fate as well. The Mask of Hollows—what must I lose?”

The starving mien of that card did represent loss… but not only that. “Revealed, this says your strength will be in those who have little. Ča Andrejek—Koszar—”

She hesitated. It was one thing to carry out a short-touch con on the street, or even to pass herself off as a Seterin noblewoman to Nadežra’s elite. This was harder. Ren had always thought of herself as Vraszenian, but spending time with people like these only reminded her of how much she wasn’t. She needed makeup to hide her mixed blood, practice to make her Vraszenian speech fluent again. They welcomed her because they thought she was one of them.

And that was one of their problems.

Softly, she said, “To the people of Nadežra, the Anduske are Vraszenians, fighting for Vraszenians. And that is not wrong. But how many here trace their ancestors to more than one land? Those people suffer also under the Cinquerat’s control. The poor laborers, the knots on the streets… How often have you considered that they, too, might be your allies?”

Her thoughts had been on the politics of Nadežra, not on planting any specific idea in their heads. But by the brief conversation Idusza, Koszar, and Ardaš had, all in nods and headshakes and eyebrow twitches, she’d struck an unexpected chord.

One that resolved into a sigh from Koszar. To his allies he muttered, “That one can hardly be called ‘one who has little’—but very well.” He turned his attention back to Arenza. “Vargo. He had people looking for you some months ago. Rumor says he found you, and yet you walked away unharmed.”

“You think to ally with him?”

“Not if you advise against it,” Andrejek said. “We seek your wisdom in this.”

Her fingers curled around the deck. The logic made sense: Branek and many of those who followed him were Stretsko, and kin of those same Stretsko were causing Vargo problems up and down the Lower Bank. Hadn’t she herself pursued Tserdev Očelen in the hopes of finding Dmatsos? Common enemies had created stranger allies.

Once she wouldn’t have hesitated to tell Koszar to work with Vargo. Now…

Now, I can use this.

At least she had a cover for her knowledge of him. “I laid his pattern when we met. He is a dangerous ally; to bind yourself in his web risks becoming his prey. But above all, he desires benefit for himself. Show him there is profit in alliance, and with you he may work.”

Possibilities were starting to take shape in her mind. She let a little of her distaste show and added, “A man like him wants assurances up front, though. Likely you will need to give him some aid unasked before he’ll consider your words.”

Given the state of Koszar’s tiny faction, she wasn’t at all sure they could offer much. But Idusza brightened immediately. “Tserdev Krasnoskaya Očelen of the Crimson Eyes plans a strike against Vargo’s home, on the night of the solstice. We had word of this from one who remains loyal to us, hiding among the traitors. Would a warning persuade him?”

“It might,” Arenza said, concealing her satisfaction. “I can take word of this on your behalf, if you wish.”

She wasn’t stupid enough to walk up to Vargo again as Arenza… but she didn’t have to. Only way I’m getting close enough to know Vargo’s business is if I save his Lig-spitted ass—that was what Sedge had said. While this wasn’t quite saving Vargo’s life, it might be enough to get Sedge’s foot in the door.

With a final prayer, she swept up her cards and tucked them away. “What else can you tell me of Ča Očelen’s plans?”