Episode Three:
Heavenly Bodies

Joel Derfner

 

Had the Duke Tremontaine noticed the anxious care with which his wife chose her gown that morning—silk the color of pale irises trembling open at the break of dawn, lace as fine as spider webs gathered at the cuffs, the bodice almost as exquisite as the collarbone it was cut to reveal—and the equal care she devoted to selecting the unutterably drab cloak with which she covered up all that silk and lace, it might, perhaps, have occurred to him to wonder exactly what impression she was trying to make, and why it was so vital that she do so. If he had seen her frown almost imperceptibly at the confusion her footman displayed when, rather than her own carriage, she bid him order an unmarked one from the hotelier in Napier Street, if he had overheard the strange address to which the driver was instructed to bear her, if he had observed the driver’s respectful assertion that he must have misunderstood and her subsequent denial of that assertion, he might have taken a moment to ask himself with what urgent aim, as the carriage wheels began to click and then to clatter over the cobblestones, she was leaving the ducal mansion.

Then again, he might not have. The duke had spent the better part of two decades not noticing things about his duchess, after all, and, unbeknownst to him, it had served him well.

Alas, that the good fortunes of men do not always remain so.

 

Someone was destroying Rafe’s room.

It was giving him a headache.

“If you are going to insist,” he said, burying his face as deeply into the tangle of bed linens and brown wool blanket as he could manage, “on entering my chamber in the middle of the night, by means of what blandishments do you suppose you might be prevailed upon to approach the task with slightly less vigor?”

“Develop a little talent for observation, pet.” Ah, the baritone voice meant the situation was as he’d feared. Rafe heard the sound of the curtains being flung open and squeezed his eyes shut tight; they were in no condition to be assaulted by the cold morning light. “The University bells rang fully two hours ago.”

“How barbaric. Have we been suddenly transported to Arkenvelt without my knowledge?”

“Oh, pigeon, do I have to do everything for you?”

Footsteps approached the bed. Rafe knew what was coming next, but moving quickly enough to prevent it would make his head hurt even worse. He therefore resigned himself to misery as he felt the bedclothes slip pitilessly off his naked body. He groaned and rolled onto his back, his arm flung over his eyes. “Besides,” said the invader, “I want sausages.”

“Joshua,” said Rafe with all the patience he could muster, “this is Liberty Hall. You are most welcome to procure yourself as many sausages as you like, and, having done so, to insert them with gusto into your—”

“I see you’re having one of those days again.” His dear friend’s voice was as smug as ever. “If you listened to my advice, you know, you’d have far fewer of them.”

“If I wanted a big brother I would have asked—”

“Yes, yes, you would have asked your father for one long ago. As well you should have.” A shuffle of foolscap pages. “‘On the Causes of Nature,’” said Joshua. “You couldn’t pick a drearier title for your book, pigeon?” This was unworthy of a reply. “My, you certainly have scratched these equations out savagely. I take it last night’s measurements were of no more use than the rest?”

Rafe groaned.

“That bad, was it?” The groan grew more fervent and finally trailed into silence. “What was his name?”

“Matthew,” said Rafe. Joshua was silent. “Anthony. Seth, Robert, Giles, the Horned God, your sister.”

“Which one?”

“The giggly one. How in the Seven Hells should I know what his name was, when neither one of us asked and neither one of us offered? And how, for that matter, could you suppose I give a whore’s left tooth about it in the first place, especially after all that port?”

“Well, you should give a whore’s left tooth about it.” Rafe could feel disapproval radiating from Joshua like heat from winter coals. “Go through every man in Riverside and half the dogs, Rafe, and I’ll raise a glass to you. But sooner or later, when it happens with the same man a second time—”

“On the day the river flows uphill. Through what perversity do you still refuse to believe me when I tell you I have sworn an oath that such a thing will never come to pass?”

“Sooner or later,” continued Joshua, as if Rafe had not spoken, “when it happens with the same man a second time, you won’t know what to do with yourself. You’re annoying enough as it is when you’re not infatuated.”

“I,” said Rafe with extreme politeness, “am not the one who is being annoying.” Joshua said nothing. “Aren’t you going to ask me how he was?”

“How was he?”

“Satisfactory.”

“Which college?”

This was enough to move Rafe to lift his arm from his face and open his eyes—in a squint, to be sure; there was, after all, only so much light the human body was designed to take in at this unfortunate hour. Through strands of hair so black it was almost blue, he saw his roommate standing over his bed far more judgmentally than was at all called for.

“You’ve gotten into the Fool’s Delight again, haven’t you?” said Rafe. “I’ve already had everybody in the other colleges worth having, and the few times I’ve been with anybody from Natural Science it’s made me long for the disastrous night you and I spent together lo these many years ago.”

“Good god. How awful for you.”

“You have no idea.” Rafe attempted to raise himself from the lumpy bed and had to close his eyes against the pain that blossomed in his head. “No, I’ve been going down to the docks for months. Do keep up.” He opened his eyes again and sat up much more carefully.

“Pigeon,” said Joshua, prim as new lace, “I gave up trying long ago. I can’t count that high. Now get up, put on your robe, and let’s go. Sausages. And chocolate. Then de Bertel.”

“And what do you think either one of us could possibly have to learn from His Excrescence of the Swine?”

“Look, whether or not you’ve outstripped him in understanding as far as you’ve outstripped the rest of us—”

“Oh, much further.”

“—you don’t go to de Bertel’s lectures to learn; you go because if you miss any more of them you’ll offend the entire body of magisters so deeply they won’t even let you sit your exams, much less pass them, and you’ll never found your school.”

Rafe assumed the expression he had developed to madden his father, his lips pressed tightly to one side. Joshua sighed and pushed back his hair, the color of good beer. Oh gods, beer. Even the thought of it—

“Ah,” said Joshua. “Your I’m-unwilling-to-admit-you’re-right face. I’ll take one step more, then, and tell you not only to come to the lecture but also to keep your mouth shut while de Bertel is talking. After your performance last night you don’t need to push him any further.”

Oh dear. “What did I do last night?” Rafe’s forehead creased helplessly, though it was a pose; any actual effort to remember would be doomed to failure.

Joshua’s face was incredulous. “You can’t be serious.” He grinned. “I’m sorry to say, love, but you were in splendid fettle. He walked in just as you were reaching the climax of a woefully accurate impression of him. I sent Anselm over to stop you, but you bit him, so we left you be. Then, when you finally saw de Bertel, you called him a blind, mentally defective sloth who mistook shit for information and flung both at his students indiscriminately, which, you said, was an issue with most of the doctors at the University, but the problem with de Bertel was that his aim was so much more accurate with the shit.”

Rafe sighed mournfully. “If only I weren’t such a perceptive drunk.”

“That’s one way of looking at it. But please don’t alienate him further, pigeon. You never know which way the Board of Governors is going to vote on the committee question.”

“Don’t be ridiculous; we’ve got weeks left before the vote, and with enough protests like last week’s they’ll have no choice but to vote it down.”

“Oh, in the same way that de Bertel had no choice but to change his mind and agree with you about the movement of the heavenly bodies once you showed him your calculations?” Rafe did not dignify this with a response. “Come on, pigeon. Besides, I meant it about the sausages, so we’ll need time to stop by the Eagle. Cheer up; we can get extra and throw them at de Bertel.”

“How will we tell which is de Bertel and which the sausage?” With great effort and greater care, Rafe finally stepped out of bed, poured half a pitcher of cold water over his head, drank the rest, and toweled off with the edge of the bedsheet. He reached unsteadily for the robe hanging on the wall, black and clean enough for even the most respectable of scholars.

As he bent to dig for clean breeches, he felt Joshua’s hand on his arm. “Your revolutionary school is a splendid idea, pigeon. But you’ll need that doctor’s robe if you want to acquire any students. Be careful. You tend to ruin things for yourself.”

Rafe was silent for a moment and then nodded. “You needn’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“Good.”

“Micah! Thad!” he called into the next room. By now Rafe was able to speak at a reasonable volume without fearing his head would split open. Sausages, too, would help. “You’d better hurry, or we’ll be lucky enough to miss de Bertel’s lecture entirely.”

* * *

Xamanek’s light, it was cold! If this was the spring, Kaab shuddered to think what the winters were like.

Are you ill, little bee? Her mother’s voice in her head gave no quarter, cold or no. Or have turkeys been coming in the night to peck at your head? Because otherwise I cannot think of a single reason you would consider doing again exactly what you did in Tultenco, heading into the worst part of town seeking out trouble. The voice was as melodious as the River Ulua flowing into the sea, which only made the criticism sting the more sharply. You have said you wish to work in the service. Why, then, are you risking everything on a whim? Make a mistake this time, and you will compel your father to choose between making your banishment permanent or calling you back home where you will be tossed out of the service for good.

It would not help to object. Even from the houses beneath the earth, Ixmoe’s spirit would have no patience with Kaab’s protestations that this city would not see her repeat the errors she had made across the sea.

Kaab meant things to go well here. But she was coming to realize that it was one thing to learn about the natives of this land among the shining temples and plazas of Binkiinha thousands of miles away; quite another to come east across an ocean and be surrounded by them.

Oh, but if only Ixmoe could have seen them—the beautiful Local women with their strange, exotic skin the color of ant eggs, their thousand and one fascinating shades of hair—then, then she would have understood. Especially in Riverside, where Kaab stood now under the decaying houses bedecked with peeling paint and crumbling gaud. These women, unbound by the rules even of this city, behaved in ways that would shock her modest friends walking the white paved sacbeob ways of her homeland.

A clatter to the southeast. Kaab’s hand flew to the hilt of her dagger, dark, reassuring obsidian in the hidden pouch she had sewn into the insufferable Local gown without which Auntie Saabim refused to allow her to leave the house. When she looked around for the source of the sound, she saw only a pair of young men, remarkably similar in face and dress, arms entwined, sauntering through the narrow streets of cracked and broken cobblestone, stepping lightly over murky brown puddles, paying no heed to anyone but each other.

She kept her hand on her dagger as they passed. A third man was coming down the street; when he was closer, she recognized him—a gold-headed wonder of lace and red velvet—as the man who had pinked her in her first duel last week, the day she arrived. What was his bizarre name again? Pem . . . no, Ben.

Kaab stepped quickly into the shadow of a narrow, twisted alley, lest he spot her. She needn’t have worried; his mind was obviously on other matters as he ambled by, whistling something that he apparently thought of as a tune.

Curious, she followed him, watched him enter a tavern and leave again soon after, a black cloth tied around his arm. There was no harm in going in, was there?

Kaab opened the tavern door and breathed in the lingering perfume of stale alcohol. Other than the few scattered, ancient derelicts seated among the mismatched jumble of chairs and the two comely barmaids bound up far too tightly in faded cotton wiping the battered tables, the place was empty. The girls, one a tall thing with hair the color of maize, the other short, stout, pale as peeled cassava, stopped their work when Kaab entered, but she had grown used to the staring by now. She waved the maize-haired girl over, ordered a beer she had no intention of drinking—not after her first taste a few days ago of the watery piss these people called beer—and touched the girl’s hand when she brought it in a chipped red clay mug. The sight of her cheekbones filled Kaab with thoughts of Citlali, the girl with the divine . . . ah, but the disaster of Tultenco, the forged treaty, the treachery of the Nopalco court, the desperate flight before dawn—it was all too recent to bear thinking about.

“Haven’t seen you around before,” said the barmaid. She smelled faintly of sweat.

“That,” said Kaab with a small, aloof smile, “is because I have not been around before.”

“No, Cassie,” one of the old men farther back in the tavern said, his voice heavy with drink despite—or perhaps because of—the early hour. “Don’t you remember? Not a week ago this filly lost a duel to Ben over Tess the Hand right outside here.” Kaab whipped her head around to look at him, her eyes narrow, ready to take umbrage. But he tipped in her direction, respectfully, an impossibly rumpled felt hat of an indeterminate shade, and she relaxed. “You made him work for it before he won, though,” he said. “Never seen a girl with a sword do that.”

“Tess the Hand?” said the girl, her eyes not leaving Kaab. “Then she’s got good taste.”

If the beautiful prostitute went by the name Tess the Hand, she was a beautiful prostitute worth discovering more about. “Tell me about her.”

“Why, have you got custom for her?”

The Balam were the first family of Traders among the Kinwiinik. Kaab knew better than to appear too eager. “Perhaps.”

“Well,” said the girl, twirling a lock of her thick hair around her finger and giving Kaab a wink, “she’s the best there is.”

Kaab felt unaccountably warm, a thousand thanks be to Ahkin in this miserable cold. “I am not surprised,” she said. “She had the air of a talented woman.”

“What do you want from her?”

Kaab thought for a moment. “Does she have particular specialties?”

“Oh, she does it all. Like I say, she’s the best there is.”

“And how much money does she ask for?”

“Depends on the job, really. You’d have to ask her.”

This was growing more tedious than a game of Nine Bean with only three players. Really, a girl dressed like that in an establishment like this had no business being coy. “Oh? One deals with her directly, not with her—with the—” The idea the crippled sailmaker had explained on the voyage over still made no sense to her; no wonder she couldn’t remember the word, either. “The man who manages her? Ben?”

The girl obviously had no idea what she meant. “What would you want to talk to Ben for? She can conduct her own business, thank you very much.”

Well, that was a relief. “I am glad that at least some here do their prostitute work without the assistance of managers.”

At this the girl threw back her head and gave herself over to full-throated laughter like a gibbon. “Is that what you think Tess— Oh, that’s so—” But here she lost herself in hilarity again, while Kaab forced her fingers not to drum on the table. The girl gave a last chuckle and wiped her eyes. “Tess isn’t a whore. She’s a counterfeiter. And Ben’s not her pimp; he’s her protector. She’s a talented woman, like you said. A lot of people would take advantage of her skill if they could. Ben’s sword makes sure nobody does.”

Far too basic an error to make, little bee. Kaab clenched her fists and restrained herself from banging one on the dented chestnut-brown surface of the table. “I see. That is an amusing misunderstanding. So Tess and Ben are lovers?”

“Hardly. He’s not her flavor, nor she his, if you catch my drift.”

Kaab’s heart began to beat against the tight cage of her bodice like the wings of a hummingbird in flight.

“Though,” said the barmaid uncertainly, “he’ll indulge in any flavor he’s asked so long as there’s enough money in it.”

“His preferences are not of interest to me,” said Kaab. “But her—do you know where I might find her?” After all, if Tess—Tess the Hand—was a skilled counterfeiter, a closer acquaintance with her could be of use to Kaab’s family.

“Not here, that’s for sure, at least not till later tonight. She’s out on a job. So’s Ben, for that matter. He just ducked in here so I could tie on his mourning band—lost his father, you know—and he was dressed so fancy I couldn’t help staring. ‘Heading to the Hill, are you?’ I said, and the Green God take me if he didn’t say, ‘Why, yes I am,’ pretty as you please, and waltz out the door.”

Kaab would have been happy to tarry longer, but she had promised Juub that she would demonstrate the swordplay she’d learned on the ship, and if she was any judge of adolescent boys, then the longer she kept her cousin waiting the more irksome he would be when she got back. “Thank you for your time, which I appreciate greatly,” she said, standing and dropping a handful of minnows onto the table.

“What are the chances you’d take fifteen minutes and show me how much you appreciate it?”

Kaab looked her up and down, taking in the orange dress, the crimson petticoat underneath it, the blue eyes sparkling above it all. “Alas, lovely woman. In another place, at another time, I would cut your hair short for thinking fifteen minutes sufficient time to spend with me. But today my path leads toward other directions.”

The girl grinned and shrugged. “She’s lucky, whoever’s in those directions.”

Kaab grinned back, and out the door she went.

Her beer remained on the table, untouched.

 

The light streaming into the lecture hall from the high, leaded-glass windows dimmed, thank the gods, as it made its way down toward the students, and Rafe, fortified by sausages, found himself more than equal to it. There was Doctor de Bertel, waving his arms, eyes wide, stalking to this side of the podium and then that. “I see he’s being subtle today,” Rafe said as he walked in with Joshua and Micah, Thaddeus having preferred, wisely, to stay abed.

“Why don’t you shout a little louder, pet?” said Joshua. “I don’t think they can hear you in Chartil.”

“What are you talking about?” said Micah, exasperated. “They wouldn’t hear him in Chartil no matter how loud he talked.”

“I don’t know where you picked this one up,” said Joshua to Rafe, who was failing to suppress a grin, “but I like him.”

“Ah well,” said Rafe, but he said it more quietly. “At least de Bertel is enjoying himself, the poor dear.” The three settled themselves onto a sparsely populated bench in the back of the hall.

De Bertel, meanwhile, whose reputation as an entertaining lecturer not even Rafe could discredit, had worked himself into such a state he hadn’t noticed their entrance. “. . . and thus the learned Chickering enters into a disquisition on the failings of Rastin—Rastin, of all people! This from a man who almost murdered his mother because of his grief over the death of his dog.”

“There is another appropriate response,” murmured Rafe, “to the death of one’s dog?”

Alas, the snicker this elicited from Joshua finally caught de Bertel’s attention, and his smile when he saw Rafe was uncomfortably reminiscent of something hungry. Rafe met his gaze long enough to communicate insolent disdain and then set about ostentatiously examining his fingernails.

De Bertel, for his part, seemed to be considering something. “But I think we shall depart from our intended subject,” he said finally, “and discuss instead a set of even more extraordinary claims Chickering makes: that the earth itself—rather than being a fixed object at the center of the firmament around which the heavenly bodies rotate—that the earth itself moves.” His voice was tinged with false wonder. “Now, after reading the second book of Rastin’s Considerations, what might you say to a person who averred such a thing?” He nodded at a young man in the front row. “Master Pike?”

Pike, tall and gangly in his front-row seat, had already stood. “I should say, sir, that he was barking mad.”

“And what proof might you offer, Pike, as demonstration of his lunacy?”

Rafe clucked his tongue. “Poor Pike. He couldn’t even get through book one of the Considerations.”

“Now, now, pet. Pike could have hidden depths.”

Rafe sighed wearily. “I am in a position to be able to tell you with the utmost confidence, Joshua, that there is far less to Pike than meets the eye.”

“We know, as a first principle,” said Pike, apparently unaware of the spray of contumely behind him, “that a larger object falls more quickly than a smaller one.”

Rafe snorted. “Yes, because we’ve investigated the question so closely.”

“If the earth had the same kind of movement as other bodies,” Pike continued—why, oh, why must he insist on speaking through his nose like that?—“then it would fall out of the heavens, leaving all other objects that rest and move on it, heavy and light, animals and humans, floating in the air.”

De Bertel looked as pleased as if his dog had performed a trick correctly. “Quite so. But it pains me to have to say that the moving-earth crowd are hardly the worst offenders against the legacy of Rastin.” Ah, so this was where he was heading. “Of late, an idea has arisen that makes Chickering look like Fontanus.”

“And here we go,” Rafe muttered.

“With what?” said Micah.

A few more of Rafe’s classmates looked back at him to catch his expressive eye roll. “Those who espouse this new idea,” continued de Bertel, “suggest not only that the earth moves, but that it moves around the sun—and that it therefore cannot be the center of the world.” Gods, how thick was he going to lay the naïve amazement on?

De Bertel turned, of course, back to Pike. “What, Pike, are we to make of their claims?”

Pike said nothing; hardly surprising, as he hadn’t read the answer in a book. But de Bertel was in a generous mood. “Don’t worry, Pike, I won’t keep you on the hook. I’d be disappointed, in fact, if you’d devoted enough time to such nonsense to be able to answer my question.”

“No matter how well the scorned lover knows that scorn returned will avail him nothing,” sighed Rafe, “he still finds himself powerless not to strike back.”

“Someday you’ll be a scorned lover, pigeon, and then you’ll sympathize.”

Rafe rolled his eyes. “On the day the sun declines to rise.”

“Of course, such a notion is preposterous”—finally de Bertel was looking directly at Rafe, as were, for that matter, most of the others in the room—“an insult to thinking men everywhere, and its benighted adherents dreamers lost to reason who make mock of true scholarship.”

“Oh, pigeon.” Joshua’s voice combined sympathy and regret. “I should have insisted Anselm try harder to stop your oration in the tavern.”

“I would have just bitten him harder.”

“I am grieved to know,” de Bertel went on, looking more and more like a cockatrice with raised hackles, “that there is one among us who has so abandoned his senses as to subscribe to this feculence.”

“Gods, how long is he going to take with this?”

Joshua patted his hand. “Come now, pigeon, you’ve had far worse beatings than this.”

“Yes, and enjoyed them far more. I think I shall have to move things along at a somewhat quicker pace.”

Joshua was a mother hen solicitous of her wayward chick. “Rafe . . .”

But there was Micah to consider. The boy didn’t deal well with unpleasantness, and Rafe had no wish to unsettle him. “Remember how upset you got two days ago,” he said, touching Micah’s shoulder, “when Matthew and I fought about his absolutely ridiculous theory of circular motion?”

“Well,” said Micah, “your theory was ridiculous too. But Matthew got really mad.”

“The fight I’m about to have is going to be much worse.”

“I’d better go, then.” Like a shadow, Micah’s small form moved along the wall and down the stairs.

De Bertel ignored him, caught up in his oration against the unnamed “one” who espoused such absurd notions of celestial place.

Rafe sat straight and gazed, expressionless, at the high-vaulted ceiling. “‘O, how his hope-spent mother’s heart would grieve,’” he said, his clear voice cutting effortlessly through de Bertel’s gravelly one, “‘to hear such wibber-wash as yon fool prateth!’”

All noise ceased at once, and it was not without satisfaction that Rafe noted every eye in the room on him.

De Bertel, for his part, had gone quite still. “You know, Fenton,” he said casually, “I find myself recalling your perplexity a few days ago in the matter of—was it Chesney? Yes, I believe it was. You said you were utterly incapable of determining, after reading Observations on the Nature of Heaviness and Lightness, whether he was actually insane or simply a cow of dubious intelligence.” He looked so pleased with himself that he had to be preparing a lightning bolt of no ordinary proportions. “Allow me to suggest that you should be the last among us to be perplexed by the question, since you have in fact shown yourself to be both.” The class laughed, but Rafe felt the air in the room grow more charged.

“You have to admit, pigeon, that wasn’t bad.” Joshua sounded apologetic.

Rafe looked at the ceiling again. “He does have his moments. But then, so do I. And I’ve read more poetry than he has.” He recited:

 

“The cowherd told his talking bull, ‘The day

Thou best my wit, I die by mine own hand.’

‘Then live,’ the bull replied, ‘thy wits unmatch’d.

Debate thyself, whilst I attend thy wife.’”

De Bertel acknowledged the sally with a very slight bow. “Your wit, Fenton, admits of no equal.” He assumed the air of a man who has just remembered something of mild interest. “You have your examination still to sit, don’t you?”

“Indeed, sir, and never has a prisoner eyed his jailer’s key ring with greater fervor.”

“I have the honor of informing you that the Board of Governors met this morning and, piqued by the ill-advised and bombastic gathering last week, decided to vote on their proposal immediately.”

“What?” Rafe stood so fast he almost fell, swayed, and threw his hand onto Joshua’s shoulder for balance.

“Needless to say, it passed, by what I am given to understand was an overwhelming majority. And, now that it occurs to me, I realize I’ve been remiss in my duty to you and to the University. I’ll have to make sure I’m one of your examiners. After the enlightening time we’ve spent together in my lectures, I shall enjoy testing your mettle to discover whether you’re qualified to become a Master.”

“My school—!” The color had vanished from Rafe’s face. His hands were trembling.

“Oh, pigeon,” whispered Joshua.

“I’m sure, Fenton,” continued de Bertel pleasantly, “that you’ll have no trouble whatsoever convincing each and every examiner of your qualifications.”

Rafe finally found a response. “As fascinating as this lecture is, doctor,” he said, his voice shaking only very slightly, “you’ll understand if I decline to stay for the rest of it. I have a great deal of true scholarship still to make mock of, and I must go take the bull by the horns, lest I continue to be bested by intelligent bovines.” He turned and, over his classmates’ laughter—for they respected grace in defeat—left the room.

Disaster, calamity, ruin—language didn’t contain the word that described this. His eyes brimmed. His school, the dream he’d cherished for years, his reason for being here, his reason for living. Gone. Forever out of his reach. Tears spilled over his lids and ran freely down his face as he careened out of the building into the light, headache be damned, walking, speeding up, running, heedless, over the flagstones and down the steps, right into the Duke Tremontaine.

This man was the last thing he needed. “Oh, for the Land’s sake,” he spat. “Out of the frying pan, into the imbecile.”

“Now, now,” said the duke, placing his hands on Rafe’s shoulders. “And after you saved my life last week and then told me you wanted never to see me again.”

“Get out of my way.” Rafe’s stomach clenched; he couldn’t think.

“Or what?”

“I don’t know! Or I’ll hit you!” He hadn’t hit anyone since his little sister broke his toy galleon.

“Won’t that be fun!” Rafe looked for mockery, but the smile on Tremontaine’s face was genuine. “Please, I insist.” The duke stepped back and offered his face, all privilege and cream. Rafe shrugged off Tremontaine’s hands and shoved past him.

He didn’t get very far before he stopped in his tracks and turned around, his anger stopping the flow of his tears. “If you knew what you and your damned Board of Governors have just done,” he cried, his voice hot and tight, “you wouldn’t be issuing that invitation with quite so cavalier an air.”

“Oh, you mean the examination committee decision?”

“You know damn well I mean the examination committee decision. Which way did you vote?”

“Why on earth should it matter?”

“Which way?”

“Come take chocolate with me and I’ll tell you,” said Tremontaine, and immediately looked startled, as if he’d said something completely different from what he’d expected to say.

Finally the duke made a gesture and spoke. “My carriage is this way.” He paused. “If, that is, you’re willing to enter it.”

“I’d consider it,” said Rafe savagely, and stalked toward the carriage.

 

Oh, Holy Ixchel, not the baby again.

As Kaab entered the room, Chuleb was once more on the floor, enraptured by the offspring of whatever cousin or aunt or sister the infant had come from. “Yes, widdle baby . . . where’s the wattle now?”

Kaab smoothed the wide cotton belt she wore over her blouse, embroidered with the double-eagle pattern—Ixmoe’s favorite—and thanked Xamanek that, if she had to face this scene, at least she could do so in civilized clothing.

“Where is it? Where’s the wattle?” The creature’s eyes widened as it began to search for the acacia-wood toy that Chuleb, chuckling, had moved just west of its line of sight. Making stupid faces, waving its fat little arms, it looked like nothing so much as a party guest playing Blinded Hunter. An ugly party guest. “Is it east? Southwest? Where’s the wattle?”

Kaab looked up to the alcove in the red south wall at the goddess Ixchel, jade inlaid with cinnabar and feathered with gold, and repeated under her breath the blessing carved in intricate glyphs on the statue’s forehead: Protect us, Ixchel, from the spear by day and the jaguar by night. And, she added, babies. She had no idea what mystical power they had to transform adults around them into drooling idiots, but she, for one, was relieved to be immune to it. Chuleb looked ridiculous.

Well, at least Auntie Saabim, at her dark cedar desk, a single xukul nicte flower over her east-facing ear, reading Trading records with the eye of a matriarch reviewing a treaty, seemed far enough away not to have succumbed.

The door to the room opened too forcefully and hit the wall behind it with a thud. The baby hiccupped. Please, Kaab thought, looking heavenward, please do not begin wailing like a spider monkey.

The baby, in its infinite mercy, deigned to grant her request.

But her uncle and aunt were looking at Dzan, standing in the doorway. “Forgive me, master. There is . . . a woman here to see you. She says she is the Duchess Tremontaine.”

“Today?” Saabim exclaimed, and Kaab looked immediately in her direction. It was clear from the catch in Saabim’s voice, the way Chuleb shifted his weight, the quick glance the two exchanged, that her aunt and uncle were surprised and, if not frightened, then unsettled at her arrival.

Chuleb rose, straightened the velvet of his Local-style doublet, white as the limestone stucco that covered Kaab’s house in Binkiinha, and cleared his throat twice.

“She is waiting for you in your office, master.”

“What does this woman want from us, Uncle?”

“That, Kaab, doesn’t concern you,” Aunt Saabim said.

“Forgive me, but as a first daughter of a first daughter of the Balam, I believe that a visit important to our interests here concerns me deeply. I would like to meet this duchess.”

“Absolutely not,” Chuleb said. “You made enough mischief in Tultenco. I think, for the moment, that you are safest here, watching the baby.”

Ixchel preserve me. “But Uncle—”

“In our house, I think you’d best take our counsel.” Kaab looked down, knowing when to stop. “Dzan, prepare chocolate.”

Dzan grimaced. “I suppose you want me to ruin it by dumping it full of cream?”

“Cream?” said Kaab, mystified. “Why on earth would you put cream in chocolate?”

“Cream in a pitcher on the side,” Saabim ordered from her desk, and then, to Kaab: “It is not our place to tell Locals what to do with the product we sell them.”

Chuleb stepped to the western threshold of the room. “That,” he said, turning back for a moment, “doesn’t mean that I don’t want to.” And he closed the door behind him.

Kaab stood. Yes, she had made mistakes. But to prevent her from using her powers of observation to further the family’s interests was nonsense. What could have so worried Chuleb and Saabim?

And she absolutely didn’t want to watch the baby. She stood up.

Chuleb would be furious, but Kaab wasn’t worth the maize it took to feed her if she let a trifle like that stop her, so after a quick change of clothes and a brief word with Dzan, reminding him of a certain indiscretion with Bapl the cook that she had witnessed a few days earlier and remarking on how unhappy Saabim would be were she to hear about it, she took a deep breath, held her arms out for the tray he carried, turned, and walked through the door.

“. . . of course, my lady. Ah, this must be Dzan with the choco—” Chuleb stopped, his eyes widening almost imperceptibly and his lips pressing together only very slightly.

But she knew what her uncle looked like already. She was much more interested in the woman sitting across the desk from him, whose expression was so bland and impassive that it could only have been achieved under great control. This was not a woman to be underestimated.

Conversely, it would be quite wise to allow the woman to underestimate her.

“Forgive, master,” Kaab said, thickening her accent until she sounded as she had when she was five, first encountering the spiky vowels of this language, “but Dzan been sent errand, warehouses. I serving chocolate instead.” She deposited the tray on the north-wall table beside the niche altar to Xamanek, took hold of the chocolate grater, and turned to the duchess. “How you taking chocolate, mistress?”

The woman smiled at Chuleb as if he were the one who had spoken. “Since I am your guest, Master Balam, I should think it a wasted opportunity not to take chocolate in your people’s own fashion. I understand that the merchants who banqueted with you recently were fortunate enough to do so.”

“You are a kind woman,” said Chuleb, “and a courageous one.” The duchess inclined her head, and he turned to Kaab. “No cream. Chili, corn, and allspice.”

The block of chocolate, solid in her hand, wove its odor through the sharp scents of the spices, filling Kaab with a sharp pang of longing for Binkiinha, which she might never see again, and for her mother, might they one day be reunited in the houses beneath the earth. But this was hardly the time for reverie. She served the duchess first, the cup delicate in her steady hand, and then Chuleb, looking him in the eye, neither of them betraying any emotion. Picking up the tray again, comforted by its weight, she went to stand by the door. The duchess paused, her cup halfway to her mouth, looked at Kaab, looked at Chuleb, raised a perfect eyebrow.

It would be much better if the duchess thought her incapable of understanding the implications of the gesture, but if she allowed her uncle to speak he would certainly send her out of the room, so she chose the smaller of two jaguars. “In our country, mistress, bad luck servant leave, chocolate not finished.”

Chuleb’s face was as impassive as the duchess’s. “Have no fear, my lady,” he said. “My servants are as silent as the grave.” He looked over at Kaab mildly. “They know how severe my anger is when their foolishness leads them into error.”

Her hand on her heart, she bowed to the duchess as Chuleb sipped his chocolate; the duchess gave a very small shrug and joined him.

The duchess took a sip of chocolate, shut her eyes. This woman could never have tasted a chili pepper in her life; the burning sensation in her mouth had to be frightening, and yet she smiled with satisfaction, as if the liquid pouring down her throat had exceeded all her hopes. No. Not a woman to be underestimated at all.

“Delicious,” she said. “I must try serving chocolate this way at my next party.” She put the cup down and breathed a barely audible sigh. “The duke was speaking to me the other day about some Council matter or other—a tedious subject between husband and wife, but he likes to try his thoughts aloud—when he happened to mention the crushing import tax burden under which you labor.”

“Ah.” Kaab admired Chuleb’s composure. The tax was high, and the Kinwiinik had tried before, unsuccessfully, to get it lowered. The chocolate import tax ensured that it remained a luxury good in the City. But its inhabitants were developing more and more of a taste for it and would gladly buy more, if prices were reasonable. The Balam had had occasion to bewail how easy it would be to sell them a lower grade of chocolate for less; but Xanamwiinik taxes did not distinguish between the different varieties, and so all of it, from the rarest of Caana down to basic south coast street cacao, was priced accordingly.

“At first I was certain I had misheard him; it was the ridiculous number he gave that caught my attention to begin with. But when I asked him about it, he explained more thoroughly, and I must say I find it shocking.”

“One might.” Chuleb gave nothing away.

“And hardly a way to show courtesy to those who venture on the perilous seas to bring us such delights! As I say, I take no interest in politics, but I do think justice should be served. The duke has a great deal of influence in Council. I feel confident that, if I were to help him see how unjust the situation is, he would feel it his duty to exert that influence in an effort to do something about the tax.”

This time it was Chuleb whose eyebrow rose. “That would be a feat indeed.” The duchess’s only reply was to incline her head. “If you were to extend such abundant courtesy to the Kinwiinik, as guests in your city we would be most grateful.”

“It would be nothing. A matter, as I say, of justice.”

“As you say.” He toyed with a writing brush on the desk. “But in our country, a guest who is received with courtesy must show courtesy in return.”

The duchess’s eyes widened. “As if I would allow you to do anything in return!” Chuleb cocked his head, waiting. She took another sip of chocolate. “Yes,” she said, “this drink is truly remarkable. But perhaps I was wrong about serving it at a party. I think few of my fellow nobles would appreciate this particular blend as I do.”

“With all respect,” Chuleb said, “I think you may be right.”

Kaab kept her eyes on a mural celebrating the exploits of Kinwiinik heroines in the service. This was a game between two very skillful politicians. She must not betray herself.

“You come from far,” the duchess said, “and have seen much of the world. I myself have never left these shores. Your knowledge of the ways of many peoples is much greater than mine. Tell me: How do folk in your country respond to gifts there?”

“That would depend on who the giver was. From a mother, a kiss! From a patron . . . good service.”

“And from a friend?”

“Why, friendship in return. And a promise to share all other gifts equally, as good friends should.”

“Ah.” The duchess nodded. “I see your people, too, have a fine sense of justice. No wonder there is sympathy between us.”

Chuleb leaned forward. “You honor me. I rejoice in it, and will speak of it tonight to my evening star, Ixsaabim.”

“Oh?” A faint note of surprise suffused the duchess’s voice.

“My wife.” Chuleb was altogether too pleased with himself, Kaab thought. Love did strange things even to businessmen. “She is the second daughter of a first daughter of the Balam. I am but a minor noble in my own right, who had the fortune to marry into the first Trading family of the Kinwiinik. Ixsaabim is a woman well traveled, who knows the customs of many lands, and the value of friendship.”

“She sounds delightful. I must take chocolate with her someday, your . . . evening star? What a poetic name. You must have many such endearments in your tongue. I’m sure our poor language cannot compare. Doubtless we could learn much from you.”

Not a muscle in Kaab’s face moved. But this was a slip. By one who could not possibly be given to slips. The duchess was very, very worried. About what, Kaab could not guess. Yet.

“Perhaps my lady will honor us with another visit someday?”

“I will await your invitation, Master Balam, and that of your people.” To her credit, she drank the last of her fiery chocolate. Then, in a flurry of silk fine as a flower’s petal, Duchess Tremontaine stood, setting the Kinwiinik cup down on the table beside her.

Uncle Chuleb rose with her. “It has been a very great honor to have you in my home, Madam Duchess.”

“The honor has been mine. Few in the City have been so privileged as to taste chocolate of this singular quality.”

Chuleb inclined his head, just like a Local. “To our great friends, we serve none but the finest of cacao.”

“Then I hope,” the duchess said, “that our friendship may long continue to prosper.”

She looked around the room, her gaze passing over Kaab just as it passed over the furniture and the cotton feathered-serpent wall hangings. “It has been a delightful visit, Master Balam. Thank you for the invitation.”

Kaab seized her opportunity, having no particular interest in being subjected to Chuleb’s opinions of her subterfuge. “I show you door, mistress,” she said.

“No,” said her uncle. “Dzan has certainly returned from his errand by now. He will escort the duchess to the door. I wish to speak with you on another matter.”

Kaab bowed again as the duchess walked through the door. Then she and Chuleb stood very still, looking at each other. The murmur of voices in the hallway, the opening and closing of the front door. How angry would he be? Silence. Stillness. This was becoming unbearable, but Kaab knew better than to move too soon. Ten more breaths. Ten more.

And then Chuleb exploded.

“What in the name of the gods and their parents were you thinking?” he shouted. “That woman is as subtle as a jaguar in the night! I invited her to come tomorrow, and she arrived today to catch me off guard. I have no idea what she really wants, but you can be certain that she would happily slit every Kinwiinik throat in the City if it suited her purpose.”

“Which is why,” Kaab countered, her chin high, “it was better that I be here.”

“I have half a mind to expel you from the service and make you chief nursemaid to all the children for the rest of your life. If you’ve imperiled our trade here—”

This was not a serious threat. She knew it, and she knew that he knew she knew it. “Don’t be ridiculous. If she saw me at all, she saw a barbarian servant. When it comes to dealing with her, you’ll be better off with my help than without it. You appear, for example, not to have caught her mistake.”

This brought him up short. “Which was?” he said after a pause.

“When you told her you would have to ask Auntie Saabim about her proposal, she began to chatter. She had not thought Kinwiinik women to have authority in our houses. And if she didn’t bother to learn before she came that the Balam are nobility, then she believes us unimportant and more easily dealt with than is the case. She may be a jaguar, but she is not the jaguar you think she is.”

Chuleb said nothing; he only stood, fuming.

“Fine,” he snapped finally. “But if you’re going to impersonate a servant then you can do so for the rest of the day. This office is a disaster. I want it as spotless by dinner as if Chaacmul had washed it with the sea.”

It would not do to show her glee. She schooled her face until she resembled a statue guarding the royal tomb. “As you wish.”

 

Micah was exhausted.

People kept getting angry at her. Sometimes it was when she told them why they were wrong. Sometimes it was when she asked them questions; sometimes it was when she didn’t ask them questions. Sometimes it was when she answered their questions. Sometimes it was when she did what they’d told her to do. She wasn’t acting any differently, but for some reason things that seemed to be fine on the farm were not fine here, and she often wanted to squeeze herself into a tiny ball in the corner and disappear.

But the exhaustion and the tension were worth it, because when they weren’t getting mad at her for doing or saying the wrong thing, the people here were talking about numbers and calculations and shapes and patterns and all the incredible ideas that her family seemed not to care about at all—not just talking about them but loving them, respecting them, understanding how beautiful they were. And it turned out that those ideas, the things she spent all her time thinking about, had names! Seven-siders were actually called heptagons, for example, and twelve-siders were dodecagons, but that was just the beginning. The shapes and everything else made her mind move faster and faster and faster, until her body was filled with light. And if she had gained the key to so much in such a short time, how much would she learn if she stayed longer? In three days Uncle Amos would start sowing the early peas for spring, and she felt both that she wanted to be there to help and that she wanted to stay here, which was awful. That was another exhausting aspect of being here. Every time she tried to figure it out, her head started to throb in time with her heart, and she had to do numbers until she could calm herself down.

Micah reached for a pen and a sheet of foolscap.

Dear Aunt Judith and Uncle Amos, she wrote. Sorry I’m not back yet I love it here even tho the people are confusing sometimes. Twelve-siders are actually called something I don’t know how to spell yet, but they have a name and now I know it. Don’t forget to plant the peas in three days I will see you soon. Love, Micah.

 

“But if you despise him so,” said the duke from the blue damask couch by the window, as Rafe paced around the library of Tremontaine House, his long stride made longer by impatience, “then why continue attending his lectures?”

“If I’d known I was going to have to pay for my chocolate by rehearsing my unpleasant and embarrassing career in the College of Natural Science, I don’t think I would have stepped into your carriage, after all.”

The chocolate had been amazing, better than the finest he’d ever tasted at his father’s table. If this was what Tremontaine served to casual visitors, Rafe couldn’t imagine what he brought out for special occasions. And somehow it had only made Rafe’s mood worse.

“The chocolate is gratis. The rehearsal is entirely at your discretion.”

Rafe stopped pacing and sighed. He was above rudeness for the sake of rudeness, or he ought to be. But he was distracted by the exquisite cut of the duke’s black breeches against the deep red velvet of the couch. “He’s brilliant, for one thing,” he finally brought himself to say. “His take on planar geometry, his work on elliptical motion, his commentary on Delphin’s mapping of the stars. He thought I was brilliant too, until I realized that the College’s guiding principle—and his—was wrong.” The delicacy of the man’s hands as he brought his chocolate cup to his lips was extraordinary. Rafe turned away from Tremontaine to face the crackling fire. “He’s also the only one left.”

“Pardon?”

Rafe sighed, defeated. His shoulders slumped. He ought to turn back around and face the duke again, but for some reason he was reluctant to do so. “I started with de Bertel, when I first came to the University,” he said to the fire, and rubbed his hands together. “Then I abandoned him for what seemed greener pastures. But gradually I’ve gone through most of the other magisters, breaking with each one as I grew more and more cognizant of their mistake. I ended up back with de Bertel, who forgave my betrayal at first, but now that I have the knowledge to back up my intuitions, it’s worse with him than it ever was with any of the others. Today’s fracas was the inevitable result of the last several years of my life.”

“And what did it concern?”

He turned back to the duke, and his eyes suddenly filled with the sight of cheekbones. “The fact—not the idea, my lord, but the fact—that the earth revolves around the sun. I’ve been driving myself mad trying to prove it, but I can’t. No matter how many observations I make, no matter how many measurements, the math never works out right.” His hands had started moving again, in ever-larger sweeps and circles. “Or it does, but only because I add some lunatic number of epicycles, which simply compounds the problem I’m trying to solve.”

“Which is?”

“Our current, stupid, stupid cosmology has the universe rotating horizontally with respect to the earth, but also moving on an epicycle oblique to that orbital rotation, so—” Rafe felt himself begin to step forward, thought better of it, stopped.

“Never mind. Go back to the magisters. You’ve worked with most of the others?”

“The ones whose lectures I never attended are idiots.”

“Then I don’t understand. How were you planning to find anyone to sit on your examination board who would pass you, let alone sponsor you for a mastership?” The duke turned over a questioning hand palm up, his wrist framed by elegant lace. “If every magister in Natural Science either hates you or is an idiot?”

“Oh, I had it all worked out,” said Rafe, closing his eyes. “The examiners were going to be Chauncey, Martin, and Featherstone. Chauncey is an idiot, but I’m almost certain he agrees with me, alone of the magisters, though he wouldn’t dare say it out loud. Martin is also an idiot, but he’d pass me if he thought it would increase his chances of getting me into his bed, which, by the by, it wouldn’t; I may be free with my favors, but I don’t do charity work. And Featherstone hates me, but he’s a coward and invariably votes with the majority. He’d vote with the majority if they proposed to draw and quarter his daughter.” He opened his eyes, only for them to be drawn again to the breeches. “Which means that if I had Chauncey and Martin, then I’d have him, too.”

“I see. But with de Bertel on your committee—”

“Exactly! That was the only possible combination of magisters.”

“And so you think your chances of passing the exam are shot.”

Rafe emitted something that bore as little resemblance to a laugh as he could manage. “Oh, how delicately put.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. Finally he strode toward the duke, who stood as he approached the couch. “No, you oaf, I don’t think it.” He tossed his head. “That was the only permutation of examiners that would have allowed me to pass. And now you’ve made it impossible, and I’ll never found my school, and my life is ruined, and it’s all your fault!” He was standing quite close to Tremontaine now, breathing hard, his face crimson, his index finger stabbing the offending air.

The duke seemed poised to step forward. Rafe, filled with an inexplicable sense of alarm, immediately crossed to the other side of the library and made a careful inventory of the books on the shelves before him. He heard Tremontaine walk to the chair by the fire and settle himself. “Tell me about this school you want to found.”

Rafe turned again but stayed where he was. “Describe your education, my lord.”

“Why, I had a tutor until I was . . . I don’t know, fourteen?” Tremontaine shrugged, the emerald green velvet of his doublet broadening his shoulders. “No, sixteen. When I came to the City. And since then I’ve merely read whatever has piqued my interest.”

“And describe the education of your architect, say, or your portrait painter.”

“Grammar school until twelve or so. If the parents are comfortable. Maybe even a tutor.”

Rafe seemed unable to look away from the duke’s shoulders. “And then?”

“Apprenticeship, I suppose. To learn a trade. To make a living.”

“Well, what if his education continued?” Rafe wrenched his eyes from Tremontaine’s shoulders to make a very close examination of the crown molding along the ceiling. “What if there were school at fifteen, at sixteen, seventeen? For people without tutors who wanted to keep learning without going to University? Or to be better prepared than most of the sluggards who start there now?” Rafe’s head turned back to the duke. “And here’s the beauty of it, the real point: If I got to them early enough, then the University’s antiquated, stultifying point of view could never take hold in the first place, and educated men would finally approach the world with the proper perspective!”

“Which is?”

Rafe sighed, his hands beseeching, his face alight. “Oh, my lord, there isn’t enough time left in the week! A new day is coming—has come! For hundreds of years, Natural Science has consisted of exactly two things, and two things only: Rastin, and commentaries on Rastin.” The duke’s eyes had darkened, Rafe noticed, his face limned by the fire behind him.

“Ah yes. I thought Chesney’s On the Velocity of Falling Bodies was particularly ingenious.”

Rafe snorted. “Certainly, if by ‘ingenious’ you mean ‘putrescent.’ Do you have it here?” The duke pointed, and Rafe crossed swiftly in front of him, scanning the books on the shelves as he approached them. He pulled a book out of the wall and gestured with it. “Chesney was wrong.” He pulled out another book. “Fontanus wrong.” Another. “Chickering was wrong too, though at least in an interesting direction.”

“Say more.” Tremontaine stood up and walked over to take the books from Rafe’s hands. When their fingers brushed, Rafe drew his away with a hiss. Good god, were the man’s hands iron pulled from a fiery forge?

Rafe crossed quickly to take a seat on another couch. “What’s Rastin’s central principle?” he said, looking toward the books on the shelves to his left.

“Oh my. It’s been years since I’ve read Rastin. Let me see . . . It’s the mind and the senses, yes? Nothing in the mind but what is in the senses . . . no, that’s not right.” Well, the Tremontaine library certainly had a varied collection. Trevor here. Geographical Exotica there. Delgardie. “Would you stoop to reminding a poor pupil?”

Rafe saw no reason to stop looking at the books. “Nothing exists in the world, my lord, that does not first exist in the mind and in the senses.”

“Please be so good as to stop calling me that.” Tremontaine sat on the other end of the couch. Rafe turned to face him but immediately cast his eyes on the space between them on the couch, where the blue of the damask shone vividly between violet stripes.

“Then what should I call you?” Rafe looked up. The duke’s eyes were a deep cornflower blue. Rafe tried for lightness. “My friend Joshua calls me pigeon, but somehow I don’t think that’s right. Hawk, perhaps?”

“Most certainly not.” Tremontaine’s voice was almost offended, the curve in his lips slight. Rafe felt feverish. “Call me”—the duke cleared his throat and paused—“do you even know my first name?”

“You mean it isn’t My?” No, the eyes weren’t just deep blue. There was a touch of the green sea in them as well.

The smile broadened. “Would that I were so lucky. No. It’s William.”

“All right.” Rafe shifted toward him on the couch. Why on earth should he feel a small thrill run through his chest? “William. So Rastin’s point is that reason is our guide in the search for truth, and observation nothing more than her handmaiden.” His hands illustrated his eloquence, animated, urgent. “The idea of isolating nature, of experimenting, to discover whether the conclusions to which reason has led us have anything to do with reality, is looked upon with horror. Observe nature out of its context, say Chesney and Chickering and Fontanus and all the rest of them, and it ceases to be either nature or an appropriate subject for Natural Science.”

“And you feel differently.”

Rafe swallowed. “How could any thinking man not?” His voice was thick with something that had to be frustration. “The earth orbiting the sun is only the beginning.”

“But aren’t you doing the same thing, coming up with an idea about the truth first and then using observation as its handmaiden?”

Rafe inhaled sharply. William smelled of apricots and cinnamon and something else he couldn’t name. “Absolutely not. The endeavor I’m engaged in is completely different.”

“Really?” William’s voice was mild. “Because it sounds to me as if you were indulging in exactly the failure of logic you find in your university doctors.”

Rafe’s breath caught in his throat, and he sat up, very straight and very still. Suddenly Joshua’s voice rang in his head. You tend to ruin things for yourself. But his tongue would not be held.

“As if you cared at all anyway,” he said, his voice low, “about any of it. No, you just want to waltz on down to the University, slum it there until your moronic amusement is sated, stop for a moment and destroy the students, and come back to your fine house on the fine Hill to drink fine chocolate.”

He stared at William, his nostrils flared. In one fluid motion, William reached out, put his hand on the back of Rafe’s head, and drew their lips together.

For some time the spitting crackle of the fire was the only sound to be heard in the library of the Duke Tremontaine.

“I’ve always envied University men their hair,” said William at last, softly, fingering the leather tie that sent Rafe’s hair neatly down the nape of his neck. “I keep hoping that at some point long hair will come into fashion on the Hill.”

“How long have you lived on the Hill?”

“Twenty of my last thirty-seven years.”

“Someone is an optimist,” said Rafe.

William’s only response was to rearrange a stray lock of hair over Rafe’s forehead. “This is not at all the direction I was expecting our conversation to turn.”

“Nor I.” Rafe’s tone was casual, but he still felt as if he’d drunk far too much chocolate far too late in the day. “You still haven’t told me which way you voted today.”

“Other matters seemed more pressing.”

Rafe shifted his balance and a slight gasp escaped William’s mouth. “And now seem more pressing still.” This earned him a chuckle. “Nonetheless, I would very much like to know.”

“I suppose I could be persuaded to tell you.”

“And how might I do that?” He repositioned his hand. “Would this help?”

“Oh, most definitely. But what would be even more persuasive would be to . . . yes, that. Oh yes.”

And for a time Rafe was unable to speak, and then it was William’s breath that had grown ragged. “But I am discomfiting you,” said Rafe, his eyes wide and innocent. “Forgive me, good my lord. I don’t know what could possibly have possessed me.”

William’s fingers moved to unbutton Rafe’s robe and allow it to fall, to untie and toss his shirt to the floor, forgotten, to run smooth hands up and down his skin, caressing peaks of muscle and valleys of sinew.

Rafe leaned back on the couch, closed his eyes, and smiled the small smile of the cat who has come upon a dish it thought empty and found it full of milk. His pulse slowed and he breathed more easily, now that he was back on familiar ground; this was a pose that he knew well. Joshua would be scandalized and delighted in equal parts. To say nothing, of course, of how Rafe might make use of what was happening to influence the choice of magisters on his committee. This man could probably exclude de Bertel with a flutter of his little finger. Smiling, Rafe extended his arms above his head, his eyes half closed, as William’s mouth found chest, collarbone, neck, throat, earlobe—

And then stopped. Rafe opened his eyes. William had pulled away from him.

“Where are you?” asked William.

“What do you mean?” Rafe, languid, pulled William’s hand lazily to his mouth, tasting on his fingertips the slight, faint bitterness of the chocolate they had so recently grated. Rafe’s eyes were heavy, his lids half closed, his face relaxed in an expression that frequent and effective use had made second nature. “I’m right in front of you.”

William withdrew his hand and Rafe’s brow creased. “No, you’re not. This is somebody different. Where’s the man who ran to my bookshelves two minutes ago to show me how putrescent my books were?” Rafe’s skin felt warm, and his breath began to quicken. “He’s the one I want to be with.” William was looking at him with disapproval. “Not you.”

Rafe jerked as if he’d been punched, his stomach tightening, his hands clenching. “God!” he said, and stood up, his lips twitching. “Tell me how in the Seven Hells you voted!”

“This,” said William, “is much more to my taste,” and enfolded him again, and this time the feeling was one with which Rafe was entirely unfamiliar. All thought of de Bertel and Joshua and the movement of the heavenly bodies left him, to be replaced by the greedy hands on his shoulders, on his back, lower, the wet breath quick between the two of them, the delicious sting of teeth on his lips.

And then he leaped back at William, devouring everything he could touch, as if he were starving, fast, quick, careless, lingering nowhere, taking in as much as possible, with an abandon that frightened him, fingers splayed, now standing, now lush carpet, soft as a kitten, on his back, skin hot as fever.

“This?” William’s voice was quiet but steady.

“Yes.”

“And here?”

Rafe stiffened. “I only—I’m always the one who—”

“Shh.” William stroked his face. “Allow this.”

And Rafe could only melt, and they moved together, and over the heat in his belly he started making sounds he’d never heard before, and William’s arms tight around him always, keeping him safe and releasing him at the same time, and oh, the pain, so sweet in surrender, and finally he gave a small cry and shuddered and William stiffened and there was paradise and then again the room was silent except for the sound of the fire and of the breath of the two men as it gradually slowed.

After some minutes, William rolled over onto his side and caressed Rafe’s face with the feathery touch of two fingers. “This school. How are you going to go about starting it?”

“Once I’ve figured out where to get the money to do it, I’ll rent rooms somewhere.”

“Who else will teach there? And how will people find out about it?”

“I don’t know; they’ll just . . .” When no answer came to him, he brought William’s fingers to his lips instead.

“It’s a compelling idea, but you seem to be somewhat vague on the specifics.” Rafe said nothing. “Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

“Oh?”

“Well. I can’t fund the whole thing myself, but I can certainly help. And the Tremontaine estates are not a school, but I do have some little experience managing things. For example, you—”

Rafe tried to focus on the school, but the odors of apricot and cinnamon and sweat in his nose made it impossible. “Time enough for that later.”

“To be sure.”

“In the meantime, is it possible now to tell me how you voted?” Flirtation rather than a real question; it was obvious the man with him had stood against the measure.

“Well,” said William. A pause. Longer. Finally: “I voted for the measure.” A sudden dizziness came upon Rafe even though he was lying down. He tried to sit up, failed. “I thought we couldn’t trust the doctors produced by the University if they could manipulate their teachers like so many pieces in a game of Shesh.” The words kept coming, tripping over themselves. “But after listening to you, I see I was wrong. I’ll start working immediately to reverse the decision.” William swallowed. “If I can.” Silence. “The Board of Governors doesn’t meet again until the fall, though.” More silence. “So nothing will happen until at least next year.”

Rafe finally stood, rigid. His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment until he was able to speak. “My lord.” He reached for cold rage, fumbled for it in the whirling tumult of his emotions. Found anger of a sort, but only mixed with agitation, confusion, doubt. “I fear I must take my leave. I’m late for . . . I have a . . .” And without finishing the sentence, he put on his clothes and left the room.

He staggered down the grand stairs, the paintings on the wall of Tremontaines past in their gilded frames mocking him, the odor of salmon wafting up from the ducal kitchens, the smooth grain of the wood balustrade under his hand, the creaks and sighs of the ancient house settling mocking him. Oh, how great a fool he had been played for! His face tightened, his chest constricted, his skin hot, his breath unsteady, and he all but collided with a woman in silk and lace ascending the stairs.

“Pardon me,” she said, and even he could hear the frost in her voice.

Rafe found the rage he’d been searching for. “I don’t think I shall!” he cried. “Why should I? You’re all the same, toying with our lives and then discarding us when you grow bored and going back to your damned chocolate! The world is changing, you know, and soon none of this”—he gestured wildly at the grandeur around them—“is going to matter at all! If it even lasts.”

She paled, which only spurred him on.

“That would just serve you right, wouldn’t it?” he said. “I hope you lose every last stick of furniture you have, I hope you have to wander the streets, begging for scraps of food like the rest of us, while the people with power turn you into their playthings, your hopes and dreams and desires nothing but cards in a tiresome game played for minnows!”

She swayed slightly on the stairs, her face completely white. A meaningless victory, but a victory nonetheless. Rafe grinned viciously, ran down the rest of the stairs and out the door into the street, where servants and coachmen looked curiously at him as he passed.

 

Her meeting with the awful student was not, to the sorrow of the Duchess Tremontaine, the most difficult moment she was to face this day. She was already on edge about what would happen to her resources, even to her marriage, should her efforts with the Kinwiinik fail to bear fruit: for to lose Highcombe, the great Tremontaine property she had staked as surety against her secret but substantial interests in the ill-fated trading ship Everfair would be a humiliation too great to contemplate.

But when her maid handed her the sealed paper a gentleman had given her, a gentleman waiting below, who had vowed that it would ensure that the duchess would wish also to see him, and Diane opened it, she was utterly unprepared for the shock of terror that ran through her body.

The gentleman—if one could call him that—was shown up. He was wearing a most vulgar striped jacket of which he seemed inordinately proud, but his bright hair, pretty face, and nonchalant manner made it clear that he expected to charm her, as he showed her a certain object that had long been in his family’s possession; an object, he was sure, of the greatest interest to her.

The duchess held it in her hand. And in that moment she knew that, however precarious her previous position had been, she stood now on the edge of a blade sharper than that wielded by any swordsman. Before, she had been facing humiliation. What Diane de Tremontaine faced now was total destruction.

The gentleman asked one question, and, without hesitation, the duchess gave him the only answer possible.

And so it was with a light heart and a light step that Benjamin Hawke left Tremontaine House and walked in the direction of his own, whistling again the air that Ixkaab Balam had overheard earlier that day in Riverside.

But the Duchess Tremontaine, her hands trembling, sat frozen in a brocade chair that—along with every other part of a life that she cherished—she might very soon see for the last time.

* * *

Doctor Volney was talking about triangles, which were Micah’s fourth-favorite regular shape, after octagons, hexagons, and triskaidecagons. Of course, she had a separate list for irregular polygons; you’d think that would go without saying, but then one day she had been drawing with a stick in the dirt out in front of the house and Aunt Judith had asked her whether she liked the regular heptagon better than the concave hexagon (of course, Aunt Judith hadn’t known their names then, and neither had Micah) and had been absolutely unable to understand why it was a ridiculous question, so there you go.

“And so we see,” said Volney, “that the ratio of the length of each side to the sine of its opposite angle is the same as the ratio of the length of each other side to the sine of its opposite angle. Which means what, in terms of our earlier discussion? Milner?”

“Given the derivations we’ve just been through, sir, the ratio of the length of any given side of the triangle to the sine of its opposite angle is twice the radius of the circumscribed circle.”

“Good for you.” Micah looked at Rafe on the bench beside her, about to grin, and then realized his mouth was still scrunched up and his eyebrows drawn together, just like when he’d walked into the room, and that meant he was upset about something.

She would ask him later what it was. Because right now she was just too happy to think about it. Of all the lectures Rafe had taken her to, Volney’s delighted her the most, because it was Volney who talked most about the kinds of things she had always spent all her time thinking about. Sine. Cosine. Tangent. The very words tasted delicious.

“It should be clear, then, that, if we know the radius of the circumscribed circle, all we need to learn the length of any side is the angle opposite.”

Circumscribed circle. This, this was why she was willing to put up with people who got upset with her. Amos and Judith and Seth never talked about circumscribed circles.

“Given that,” Volney continued, “suppose a right triangle with an additional angle of sixty degrees. Suppose further that the radius of the triangle’s circumscribed circle is seven and one part in two. Now, lay the triangle we have hypothesized on a sphere. What then is the length of the side of the triangle opposite the other angle?”

Silence as students around the room scratched on their slates. Micah caught sight of what Rafe was writing and was surprised to see that he was on the wrong track. She grunted softly and, when he looked up, gestured to his calculations and shook her head, at which point he stopped writing, his hand hovering in the air with the pen.

Finally a voice from somewhere in the room called out, “Three and three parts in four.” Micah sighed: This was exactly the same error Rafe had been making.

“Just right, Pearson.”

Micah’s brows knit in consternation. Why was Doctor Volney teaching them something wrong?

“The trick here is in recognizing—since we started with a right triangle, a known radius, and an included angle—that the hypotenuse of a circumscribed right triangle is always equal to the circle’s radius.”

Micah began breathing hard. She pulled urgently on Rafe’s sleeve, but she knew from the expression on his face—confusion was an easy one to recognize—that she was on her own. She felt an immense pressure somewhere deep within her. She knew this feeling well and she hated it fiercely, but she could never seem to control it. The pressure built and built and built. She had to do something. The pressure was almost crushing.

“Now, if we assume that—”

“No!” She knew it was the wrong thing to do, but she couldn’t help herself. “That’s wrong!”

And now everyone in the room was looking at her. She wanted to make herself tiny, or run away, or disappear into thin air. The horrible pressure was now joined by a hideous embarrassment. Her breath came even faster, and she began rocking back and forth very quickly, her eyes wide with fright.

Rafe put his arms around her and squeezed hard. “Want to do angles?” he said, and she nodded, grateful. “Tell me the angle in an equilateral triangle,” he whispered in her ear.

“Sixty,” she said at once, deeply grateful to have something else to focus on.

“In an equilateral pentagon.”

“One hundred eight.”

“Square.”

“Ninety.”

“Breathe, breathe slowly. Hexagon.”

“One hundred twenty.” She saw the shapes as he named them, and, though her breath was still heavy and her hands gripped the bench no less tightly, at least she was able to stop rocking.

“What, if I may be so bold to ask,” said Doctor Volney, “is your name?” She knew the answer but somehow couldn’t speak to say it.

“Octagon.”

“One hundred thirty-five.”

“Breathe. Decagon.”

“One hundred forty-four.” Micah remembered telling Rafe that this helped her. She also remembered that if she breathed deeply it helped her calm down, so she inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled.

“Did I fail to speak clearly?” Doctor Volney again. She needed to answer him. “What is your name, boy?”

She could breathe again now, so she could speak. She shrugged Rafe off, and he stopped whispering. She could do this. “Micah, sir. Micah Heslop.”

“And, Master Heslop, would you be so good as to honor us by explaining yourself?”

That one was easy too.

“Your conclusion. It’s wrong.” She was glad he had asked her. Immediately a small pulse of relief diminished her urge to rock.

You could have heard a feather fall. “Oh? How so?”

But she had to continue; speaking made it better. “How can you not see it?” She couldn’t keep the frustration out of her voice. “The numbers you’re talking about are right if the triangle is on a flat surface. But if you’re on a sphere, the surface changes, and the number of angles in any triangle would have to add up to more than one hundred eighty, which is impossible. You can’t lay a flat triangle perfectly on a sphere without breaking it somewhere, and then it’s not a triangle anymore. The question doesn’t even make sense.”

There. She was still agitated, but her breathing, if fast, was at least even, and most of the pressure had gone. She looked up at Rafe and saw that his eyes had gone wide.

“Damn me for a dead swordsman’s lover!” he said.

“In twenty years of teaching at this University,” Doctor Volney said, his expression yet again altered, this time to something with narrowed eyes she found difficult to comprehend, “no student of mine has ever had the brazen effrontery to contradict me with such abysmal insults. You, Master Heslop, may take your leave, and you needn’t bother to come to future lectures of mine.”

This was confusing. “I’d rather stay. I mean, a lot of the things you talk about are pretty obvious, but there’s also lots that I’ve never thought about before.” She felt that something more was expected of her. “It’s interesting to be here.”

Without a word, the magister stalked down the aisle between the benches and out of the room.

Immediately, the silence in the room was broken by the rush of dozens of voices. The pressure she felt broke with it, mercifully, but people were still looking at her.

“Can you believe it?”

“What on earth was he talking about? Angles aren’t different on spheres.”

“Whether they are or no, Volney has had that coming for a long time.”

It was all too loud, and she turned, mute, panicked, to Rafe.

“You,” he said, with a grin on his face as wide as the river that flowed past Uncle Amos’s farm, “are a prince among men—nay, a king, an emperor, a god. This calls for kidney pie. And a great deal of beer.”

“No,” said Micah.

“Oh?”

“Not kidney pie. Tomato.”

“As long as the beer comes with it.”

 

Kaab pushed open the dark, weathered tavern door. Chuleb’s office was passably clean, but when she’d gone back to Riverside in search of Tess the Hand, the sun-haired girl had still been nowhere in evidence. “She might be up at the University buying paper,” someone had said, so here Kaab was at the Inkpot. Not unlike a Riverside tavern: the same dark, heavy beams hanging overhead, the same tables scarred from years of abuse, though what littered these was not just mugs but also tiny bowls that looked to contain spices of various kinds: cumin, aniseed, fennel. This place was much fuller—only appropriate, given the time of day—and its clientele was composed almost entirely of long-haired young men wearing black robes in varying degrees of repair talking very, very seriously. The serving girls here were also less attractive.

Tess was nowhere to be seen, but there was the amusing boy, the merchant’s son she had met the day before her welcome banquet a week earlier, along with his friend, the short, stocky, easily flustered girl Kaab remembered from the protest the same day.

“Ho, there, Kaab!” the boy called, and leaped up so enthusiastically as she walked to his table that he might have been a dancer at the Festival of the Silent Ones. “Micah has just answered the greatest conundrum of the age!”

Kaab slid onto the bench as Micah moved down to make room for her. “What’s that? Discovering why you Landers prefer your food without flavor?” She looked around her. Two boys at the next table were staring at each other, rapt, and talking softly as if every word were a treasure. One of them had hair almost as red as that of Tess the Hand.

“Funny. No. He has solved the mystery of the heavenly bodies!” It still wasn’t clear to Kaab why he might be referring to Micah as “he”—perhaps it involved some strange Xanamwiinik custom with which Kaab was unfamiliar.

“I do not understand.”

“Well.” Rafe’s brow creased. “This will be difficult to explain.”

“Try.” Without ordering me a beer, she thought.

“All right,” he said. “But you need a beer.” Kaab sighed as he waved to the barmaid. “A beer for my friend!” He turned around, spoke to the boy at the next table who did not have red hair, accepted something he offered, turned back to her, and began to speak. “It may be hard to conceptualize,” he said, holding up the orange he’d taken, “but, though we seem to be walking on flat ground, the earth itself, taken as a whole, is a three-dimensional body.” He began turning the orange this way and that. “Now, my teachers at the University believe, as has been thought for three hundred years and more, that the sun is also such a body, and that it, along with the other fixed stars, orbits the earth. I have recently come to think, however, that—”

“I am sorry,” she said. His words made no sense whatsoever. “You believe that the sun circles the earth?”

“Well, I don’t,” he said. “But everybody else. The idiots at the University.”

Xamanek’s light, how barbaric could he possibly think she was? “But everyone knows that the matter is exactly reversed.”

His mouth dropped open so wide it looked like the lip of a small bean pot. He put the orange down next to his beer. “Everyone knows? You mean to say that heliocentrism is an accepted tenet in Kinwiinik society?” The boy with red hair threw his head back in joyous laughter.

The barmaid arrived with the beer and set it down in front of Kaab. Perhaps she could spill it. “The University is a center of learning, no?”

“According to the University.”

And these people thought her home was uncivilized! “The University needs perhaps to reconsider its opinion of itself.”

“You’ll find no argument from me on that point.” He shook his head in apparent wonder. “Anyway. I’m the only one here who believes what you say everybody in your land knows—even my friends think I’m a crackpot about this—and I’ve been trying to prove it, but I could never get the math to work out right. And now, because of my brilliant friend here and his geometrical insight, I know exactly what to do!”

“Well,” said Micah as Rafe lifted his mug, “not exactly. All I said was that it couldn’t be a triangle anymore. To know exactly what to do you’d have to figure out what it actually was, and if that’s the same every time or not, so I guess you’d have to start by measuring the—”

“The details,” said Rafe airily, “are immaterial. The point is, I’ve been doing all my calculations as if the heavenly bodies were revolving in a horizontal plane. But, cretin that I am, it never occurred to me to question the most basic assumption of Rastin’s cosmology—but get rid of that and posit great circles that can start at any arbitrary point, and the numbers, at least those from last night, can be made to fit, because if you find the right oblique angle you can replicate the ecliptic! Now all we have to do is find that angle!” He glanced at Kaab’s beer mug. “Don’t you like it?”

Kaab brought the mug to her mouth and pretended to sip it. “It is delicious.”

“The problem,” said Rafe, “is that I could only make it work by positing another ecliptic, which—”

“I understand perfectly,” said Kaab, not understanding at all. It was clear he was talking about the mysteries of the Four Hundred Siblings. But beyond that he was using too many words she didn’t know and, she suspected, would never need to know.

Rafe shook his head. “I still can’t believe it. You know the universe is heliocentric. Will wonders never cease?”

That was it. Evidently there was no end to these Xanamwiinik’s arrogance. She would put him in his place. But first she would get rid of this disgusting drink. She reached for her beer and knocked it casually into her lap, making sure to start as the cold liquid hit her.

“Oh no! Here, I’ll get you a new one.”

“There is no need whatsoever.” But as the beer began to run down the dress, and the petticoat against her legs grew sodden, she thought, No more. Locals or no Locals, Auntie Saabim or no Auntie Saabim, I’m not going out dressed like this again. “But as far as the earth circling the sun—of course we understand that. If we didn’t, how do you think we would find our way here?”

The two boys had stopped talking entirely and were now only gazing, rapt, into each other’s faces. Then Rafe began laughing and did not stop.

“What’s so funny?” asked Micah.

“I must be drunk,” he said finally.

“Why?” said Kaab.

“Because the first thing that occurred to me was that my father would be particularly interested in finding this out. And when I find myself caring about what my father would be particularly interested in, something has gone dreadfully wrong. Tell me how it works, navigating from there to here.”

Kaab froze. How could she have been so stupid? This boy’s father was a merchant. He made his living through people sailing places where he could buy and sell goods. And if these Xanamwiinik ever learned how to sail west, what would happen when they reached the shores of her homeland? When they found the cacao trees? What would that do to the Balam monopoly? Dear Chaacmul, what would it do to the Kinwiinik’s ability to withstand the aggression of the Tullan Empire? She was a fool not to have considered this. She would be expelled from the service for sure, the Tullan would invade, and she would join Ixmoe in the houses under the earth far sooner than she’d expected.

“Oh,” Kaab said hurriedly, “I do not know anything about the navigation. It is a matter only for the men of our people, the sailors. I have simply heard my father speak of such matters.” Damn it!

The boy was too perceptive by half; his eyes had narrowed at her sudden discomfort. “And what, when he speaks of them, does he say?”

Xamanek’s light! “I pay no attention. It doesn’t interest me. I am sorry.”

Rafe turned to Micah. “How difficult could it be, to understand how angles are affected when transferred from flat surfaces to spheres? What if we—”

Ah, here was something! If not a way out, then at least a stalling tactic. “Wait,” she said, “your people think the earth is a sphere?”

Rafe and Micah stared at her. “You said the earth was round,” said Rafe.

“Of course I did. To make sure you didn’t think I believed it was flat. If you will forgive me, your people sometimes have very odd notions about mine. But of course, we Kinwiinik know it is a . . . Oh dear! I do not know the word. It’s so complicated.” She thought for a moment, took the orange from the table, and threw it hard at the ground, where it landed with a satisfyingly dull thud. She reached down, picked it up, and squeezed it in the middle to make something that looked like an egg. An orange egg, cracked and dripping juice. “It is like this.” Would he believe her? Protect me, Ixchel, she thought, from the spear by day and the jaguar by night. And from the consequences of my own folly.

“Ellipsoid?” Oh, thank the immortal gods for the look of bemusement on his face! “The earth is ellipsoid?”

She shrugged apologetically. “That is what my father and the other men of the family say.”

“Will wonders never cease?”

He believed her! Oh, thank Ahkin! She felt her heart began to slow.

Micah was looking at Rafe with fierce attention. “Ellipsoid? That’s an ellipse in three dimensions?”

“It is.” He drained his beer. The two boys at the other table had finally disappeared. She smiled to think what they must be doing. And what she would like to do if she ever found Tess.

“Well, Micah,” Rafe said, “perhaps if the spirit takes you to discover how all this works, my father will finally have a son he’s proud of.” He stood up. “Thank you again, a thousand times. I’m off to take my nightly measurements.” He grinned. “Now I’ll actually be able to use them!” And with that, he was gone.

“I don’t like Rafe’s father,” Micah said. “He sounds mean. Is your father nice?”

“Yes,” Kaab said. She absently wrung out the beer in her skirt. But she’d have to make sure that neither Saabim nor Chuleb ever found out about this conversation.

 

Rafe stood at the dusty intersection, perplexed. He’d been standing there for some minutes, and he couldn’t understand in the least why he wasn’t turning left. In that direction, after all, lay his lodgings, his orrery, his measurements, his calculations, and ultimately the path to his school—now closer than ever, thanks to Micah’s brilliance.

So why wasn’t he moving?

It wasn’t as if the time he had spent on the Hill earlier had been anything out of the ordinary—his partner’s rank excepted; and he cared nothing for rank—until the hideous betrayal at the end. Nevertheless, there were other things to consider. If he played his hand carefully, he might so inflame the duke with desire for him—unfulfilled desire, after the afternoon’s stab in the back—that neither de Bertel nor his father’s unwillingness to help him set up his school would pose any further threat to his plans. In which case William should be unable to find him for at least a few days. There was, in other words, no reason whatsoever not to follow Joshua’s instructions not to ruin this for himself. Besides, there was his oath to consider.

And yet here he stood.

Finally he sighed, set his shoulders, and turned right, toward the Bridge to the Hill.

“I wonder,” he said when the door opened at his destination, “whether the duke is in.”

 

Not far away—not far at all; in the same house, in fact—the Duchess Tremontaine sat in her boudoir.

A letter from the Trader Master Chuleb lay on her escritoire. My lady, it read. My evening star shines bright upon our friendship. We long to share with you the finest cacao that friends can offer, as long as friends can share as equals. But you have stars of your own to consider. How brightly might they be convinced to shine down upon not only yourself, but upon those you honor with your friendship? And how should we know their light? Perhaps you can advise us, as strangers in your city, how we might draw nearer to its source, to know the pleasure of its light and favor?

Nothing was easier; she had already begun making preparations to provide a spectacular answer to his question. The difficulty to which he provided the key, however, was now as nothing in comparison with the far greater one that had superseded it.

And so, as the sun sank beneath the horizon, sending indigo fingers creeping into the indulgent sky through which it passed, Diane, Duchess Tremontaine, decided upon a course of action. She summoned Reynald—among her house swordsmen, the one least likely to ask questions about an order he was given—and waited. When he came, she spoke a few words to him; he nodded, bowed deeply, and left the room.

Diane rose, stretched, and rang for Lucinda to dress her for dinner.

 

Much later that night, as Rafe was breaking an oath he had, up to that point, quite sincerely believed himself incapable of breaking, as Kaab pretended not to be annoyed at the bawling of her newest cousin, as Micah sat in her room and gazed, unseeing, at the wall, lost in the beauty of the ellipsoid that occupied her attention, as the Duchess Tremontaine sent the spray of her laughter over the other guests at the dinner table where she sat—on the other side of the City, in Riverside, something being carried slowly down the river caught a branch on the west bank and stuck, the calm flow of the current rippling softly around it as nearby crickets sang their children to sleep. Now fabric bobbed above the water, now leather.

Now flesh.

For the thing that had come out of the river was quite easily recognizable as the body of a man no longer among the living.

Or it would have been, had there been anyone there to see it.