Chapter 69

Chapter 69

Their informal council broke up hastily. Song needed to write down her a report and seek another meeting with Wen and Brigadier Chilaca to share their fresh suspicions, while Angharad had to prepare for the banquet she would be attending tonight. Possibly the very same banquet where Ambassador Gule would be arrested. She took Tristan aside to pass him a slip of paper, however, under Maryam’s curious gaze/

The thief looked bewildered after reading the contents.

“How did you learn all of this?” he asked.

“I asked,” Angharad Tredegar replied without batting an eye.

Maryam suppressed her amusement as she watched him open his mouth, think again and close it.

“Many thanks,” he tried.

“It was my pleasure,” Angharad beamed at him.

He was left standing in her wake, poleaxed.

“What’s on the paper?” Maryam asked.

Tristan scratched his chin.

“A few facts about friends I’ll soon need to pay a visit to,” he said. “Which are not nearly interesting as the fact that she got her hands on them in the first place.”

“It’s fine,” Maryam assured him. “She has a contract so she can’t signify. If she wants to beat you lot at everything else I don’t mind.”

“As always, your unconditional support is a comfort in these trying times,” he drily replied.

Song was rolling her eyes at them as she tidied up her notes, so they left her to it. Now that the business of the Thirteenth was handled they could see to their own.

They ended up in the kitchens.

Tristan suggested the roof garden, openly worried and watching her like a hawk, but Maryam had no interest in revisiting the green. She had spent long enough there today, and in her current state the running water and grass did not help anywhere as much as they usually would have. The cooks needed little prompting to put them in a corner away from the bustle. Large bowls of soup, bread and cheese were pressed insistently into their hands and no argument otherwise was accepted.

Tristan tore into his portion with enthusiasm, feeding Maryam’s suspicion about how he had been treated when a hostage. She picked at her broth without enthusiasm, which did not go unnoticed. He cocked an eyebrow at her as he swallowed a mouthful.

“Too much lemon for you?” he asked.

“It is fine,” Maryam shrugged. “I’m simply not all that hungry.”

Or thirsty, even though she could feel her lips were dry. She knew why. Earlier Maryam had been starving, but that was only the beginning of the process. They were deeper in now.

Naming the entity had empowered her and Hooks was gnawing at her very self through the nav to which they were both bound. Physical urges would be sapped first but it was only a matter of time before Hooks started nibbling away at memories too. After that would come thoughts, and by then it would be too late. Even knowing that she would be strongest when beginning the ritual at the exact time she had named the entity, Maryam felt the urge to start it early.

It was harder to ignore the rats in the larder when you’d opened the door for them yourself.

“Lack of sleep does that, sometimes,” Tristan said. “But abstaining does not help.”

He pointedly broke off a piece from the loaf, thickly spread that wet goat cheese Asphodelians were all wild about over the bread and plopped it down on her plate. He then gave her a charming, unmoving smile she could tell would not break until she had actually taken a bite. Rolling her eyes, Maryam took a nibble. She methodically chewed through his offering, swallowed, then cocked an expectant eyebrow at him.

“I’d rather you polished off the soup as well,” Tristan said, “but I know a lost cause when I see one.”

“Lots of that going around,” Maryam mused. “It has been a rough few weeks for the Thirteenth.”

“Like how you and Song refuse to make eye contact, or that Tredegar now looks like she wants to apologize every time one of us offers her simple courtesy?”

“You got yourself abducted and cut up, only narrowly avoiding being eaten by devils,” Maryam flatly replied. “Don’t try to remove yourself from the list, Abrascal.”

“My mistake,” he drawled. “I am trying to get in the habit of crossing names off these, but it has been slow going.”

“Do you think putting on the charm and implications of murder is going to get you out of that?” she asked.

Tristan smiled winningly at her, breaking off another chunk of bread and slathering cheese all over. Maryam grunted in displeasure. Fine, so maybe it would.

“You are on thin ice,” she lied.

“A good thing I’ve been eating light, then,” he laughed.

She hummed, studying him. He was all smiles and agreeableness, moments away from spinning up a tale for her entertainment, but there was something about it... The cast of his shoulders, the way his feet under the table touched the floor as if they itched to begin tapping. The way his eyes avoided looking to the left of her, above her shoulders – ah, no, she knew what that was. Maryam broke off a piece of bread, raised it high and cleared her throat.

“This offering I dedicate to the great goddess Fortuna, may her patient forbearance last forever,” Maryam announced.

She leaned past the edge of the table, getting a look at one of the hearths, and tossed the bread piece into the flames. She got an odd look from the cook stoking them, but withdrew to the table just in time to behold Tristan getting verbally bodied by his own patron deity.

“-every time I use the contract it’s a prayer, if you think about it,” Tristan defended. “And she offered you a piece of bread, not a head of cattle, it’s not exactly-”

Maryam smiled like the cat that had dipped the canary in fresh ajvar.

“It’s not the Festival of Gifts come early, is all I’m saying,” Tristan defended to thin air, hands raised, then winced. “Oh come on, you know I can’t just walk into an Orthodoxy temple and make an offering to you. The priests would-”

Maryam cleared her throat.

“Familiarity breeds contempt, I fear,” she said.

Tristan shot her a plaintive look, silently asking what he had done to deserve this. He sagged a moment later, rubbing at his forehead.

“Now she’s going to be in a snit for hours,” he said. “Was that truly necessary?”

“I did this mostly because I enjoy seeing you bullied,” Maryam noted, “but to be honest it is unusual that you make your patrons so few offerings. The only other contractor I know who behaves that way is Song.”

And Song was not nearly as subtle about how she despised her patron god as the Tianxi thought she was. It was not truly fear, either, but the seething anger of a matron who knew that blood ties would force to keep inviting to the new year feast that one cousin who shat on the table and complained the whole time about the spread.

“They way I hear it our gods have a few things in common,” Tristan said, then grimaced. “And I don’t mean it as a disrespect to Fortuna, it’s just we never...”

“Settled into that groove?” Maryam suggested.

He nodded.

“I was too destitute to offer much of anything when we first contracted,” Tristan said. “And afterwards there never seemed to be a point.”

“Most contractors offer sacrifices to draw the attention of their god to them,” she said. “I supposed given that she is constantly with you there is no need.”

He hesitated, then grimaced.

“I know there are things off about our contract,” Tristan admitted. “It’s been made clear to me that visitations as frequent as hers are... unusual, as you say, but there are a few more details. The Odyssean could not feel me until I acted, and on the Dominion when I encountered the Red Maw –”

“You what?” Maryam hissed.

It was good he recognized the oddity for what it was, but that second part? He blinked.

“Did I never tell you?”

Her answer stare was distinctly unimpressed. Out of reflex she tried to feel him out with her nav, but it barely twitched an inch forward before Hooks yanked twice as hard the other way. Maryam mastered her anger, knowing that getting into it with her enemy early would do more harm than good.

“Well,” he said. “I ran into it, Fortuna mouthed off and I got treated to a lovely moment of its full attention. When we came back to the Old Fort, after, the sniffer said-”n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Never mind what the sniffer said,” Maryam bit out. “The god focused on you?”

He slowly nodded.

“Fuck,” she feelingly said. “Tristan, that should have shredded your mind. The Red Maw wasn’t some middling street god or even a temple deity, it was firmly on the upper end of third order. It ate other gods for centuries.”

Gray eyes looked around, as if seeking his goddess to interrogate, but they kept moving without pause. She must still be gone. Tristan swallowed.

“As part of my test to get a Mask instructor,” he quietly said, “I had to get into Wen’s house and have a look at some of our records.”

Maryam stiffened, but he waved his hand.

“Didn’t look at yours,” he said. “Though I caught what might be your mother’s name in passing.”

That would be enough, Maryam thought, if he thought to ask anyone passingly familiar with the Malani occupation of Juska. Izolda Cernik had come closest to driving them off the shores of the continent than anyone before her. That he evidently had not thought to do so – or more likely that he had decided not to – was a comfort. It was not that she wanted to hide it, at least not entirely.

But she liked it better, not having that weight on her shoulders when she sat with him.

“The part that matters,” he said, “is that for some reason the Watch both suspected and then firmly ruled out that Fortuna could be a second order entity.”

“Visitation draws from a god,” Maryam said. “It does imply she has power, to be there so often. Yet you claim she has no other worshipper?”

“That I know of,” he shrugged. “And she’s nearly always around.”

“Existing simultaneously is not particularly difficult for a god, or even an Akelarre at the peak of their power,” Maryam cautioned him. “But I see your point.”

A pause.

“When we return to Port Allazei I could ask Captain Yue-”

“I’m not nearly good enough a swimmer to survive that,” Tristan firmly declined. “We’ll figure it out, she and I. For all that she keeps claiming entire kingdoms worshipped her in a showering orgy of golden gifts-”

Maryam’s brow raised.

“- her words,” Tristan specified, “and beyond the boasts she does seem to be lost a lot of the time. I think that on occasion she avoids answering me not because she keeps secrets but because she genuinely doesn’t know.”

And since Fortuna was proud and vain as a cat, Maryam thought, the goddess would rather pass as scheming than admit ignorance. The gray-eyed man cleared his throat.

“And that’s my interrogation done, I think. Are you going to tell me what actually has you irritated now?” he asked.

She sniffed.

“You just came back,” Maryam said. “What has you already itching to leave?”

He leaned back into his seat.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Why were Song and Tredegar convinced you would be headed up to the palace later? You should no longer have a reason to go there.”

“She told you something,” Maryam said, eyes narrowed.

Which ‘she’ hardly mattered.

“Tredegar mentioned it’d be sensible for you two to share a carriage since the streets will be packed closer to the Collegium,” he easily replied.

Her eyes narrowed even more. He sighed.

“And Song might have mentioned a concern or two in passing, before she went to fetch you earlier,” Tristan said. “Something about your using the Thirteenth’s name to conduct a Gloam ritual on palace grounds. A dangerous ritual, at that.”

“It goes both ways, Tristan,” she reminded him. “Answers for answers.”

The Sacromontan clenched his teeth.

“I have a time and place for where the Nineteenth will be,” he said. “I am looking to wrap up those loose ends.”

“Song has done that for you,” Maryam told him.

“Has she?” he skeptically asked. “I don’t see them clapped in chains.”

A telling choice of words, she thought. Betraying his exact fear.

“She has done hard work on your behalf,” Maryam said. “Even commandeered Angharad to do some of it. At least sit down with her first.”

“I was going to do that anyway,” he irritatedly replied. “I won’t go haring off in the night just yet, Maryam, it’s the middle of the bloody day.”

She studied him for a long moment, then her brow creased.

“You actually mean that,” she said, sounding surprised.

“She’s grown on me some,” Tristan conceded.

Maryam grinned at him, but he cleared his throat before she could say anything.

“Angharad, is it now?” he said. “Glass houses, darling.”

“We have an accord of sorts,” Maryam grunted back.

The spoilsport.

“And so do we,” Tristan said. “Tell me about your ritual.”

“It will fix my signifying,” she told him. “Permanently.”

He straightened.

“Good news,” he said, and her heart twinged a bit. “It has been gnawing at you since we first got off the docks on Allazei.”

The second part wiped out the unease of the first, to her mute relief. He’d befriended her without knowing she was a signifier, she could not forget. He had no expectations to betray.

“Song wouldn’t begrudge you that,” he noted. “So what’s the part that concerns her?”

“It involves killing and eating my parasite,” Maryam said. “That is what the ritual was for.”

“I still don’t see the problem,” Tristan admitted. “That’s what Yue gave you those rake-rings for, isn’t it? To bleed and eat the creature one cut at a time. If you have a method to hurry up the process what’s the trouble?”

“Exactly,” Maryam hissed. “I will not lie, consuming the entity all at once will be more dangerous than taking my time, but what I receive from it will be qualitatively better.”

“You’re still using our contract with the throne as a pretext to conduct a shady ritual in one of the most heavily restricted rooms within the rectors’ palace on false pretenses,” Tristan pointed out. “So Song is absolutely correct to be concerned, Maryam. It’s not like there’s no Gloam users on Asphodel, if the Lord Rector figures out you lied so you could have a spot of witchcraft in his private archives-”

“I have a plausible excuse for it, and tonight is the last time I’ll need to visit the archives,” she said. “The room makes a difference, Tristan. It serves a filter between myself and what I consume, a strong one.”

He leaned forward.

“To prevent a fit of mania, like the one I saw,” Tristan said.

She nodded.

“And I’m guessing an equivalent won’t be easy to find abroad,” he continued, eyes narrowing.

She nodded again, beginning to feel like a hen pecking at grain.

“It sounds like a calculated risk,” he muttered. “And the ritual itself...”

He trailed off, looking at her expectantly. And for a moment, Maryam hesitated. Thought about staying seated here and telling him everything, all the things even Song had not been able to put together. About how she had made a thing into a person to better murder her, how she was afraid that even if everything went perfectly taking so much of the Cauldron would... but then she felt it, on the tip of her fingers. That gnawing, nibbling sensation.

Hooks was trying to eat her too. Right now. It was kill or be killed, too late for doubts. And if Tristan wanted to be part of this then he should have been there.

“I have limited the risks as much as I can,” Maryam said, which was true.

If she lied, she fancied he’d be able to tell.

“If it goes wrong, the entity could take things from me as I will take from her,” Maryam acknowledged. “And I can’t promise everything will be fine, but...”

“When can we ever?” Tristan rhetorically asked.

Yet he was frowning, as if troubled. Whatever it was he’d sniffed out, though he didn’t ask about it. He reached for her hand, and she was surprised enough she let him thread his fingers with hers.

“Promise me you’ll be a coward,” the rat asked. “That you won’t double down if it looks bad, that you’ll cut your losses. I know it matters to you, the Signs, but it’s not worth you.”

He squeezed, and even knowing he was doing it to rein her in – love was lovely but a bridle all the same – she squeezed back. It was a heady thing, knowing Tristan would always be on her side. Even if that sometimes meant he’d get in her way.

Heady enough she could forget all the rest.

--

Maryam hadn’t noticed it, but at the end she tipped her hand: she’d called the entity her instead of it.

That warranted a visit to Song, though Tristan found the captain was otherwise occupied. By the time he got to her room she was in Brigadier Chilaca’s office, presumably informing him that while Tratheke was still going to shit the Thirteenth had done some work in unpicking the particular manner of the sewer’s overflow, which had him at loose ends. He checked on his gear, took a proper bath and tempted as he was to take a nap he instead saw off Maryam and Angharad when they boarded their carriage.

Apparently Lord Menander had mentioned on his invitation that Angharad should head out very early, given a new rash of precautions at Fort Archelean – a sign the Lord Rector knew enough to fear attack, that, given that the fort guarded the only material way into the palace. Either way, for guests heading up that meant hours in line while inspections happened and arrivals through the lifts were staggered to ease cordoning them off. Easy enough for the lictors to justify, given that there had been two attempts on Evander Palliades’ life mere weeks apart.

Anyhow, there was no guarantee that Maryam would be spared the wait even if she came in black so off she went as well. Feeling oddly slighted by the way everyone was gone what felt mere moments after he’d arrived, Tristan headed back up straight into an ambush. Song Ren, in full array of war with journals and formal reports and bookmarks, was waiting to bring him into her investigation of the Ivory Library and all that entailed. The Maryam business could wait until the end of that, he supposed.

Now, Song was telling him important information and he was paying this the attention that was due. But Tristan was also noting how she had placed the paper sheets in a particular order, which perfectly matched what she was saying at the right time. He waited for a lull in the presentation to clear his throat.

“Yes?”

“Did you rehearse this?” Tristan asked.

“I just informed you that two members of the Ivory Library have been unmasked, that one turned and the other is under effective house arrest,” Song Ren flatly replied, “and the only question you can think of is whether or not I rehearsed this?”

Tristan cocked his head to the side.

“Did you, though?”

“Obviously yes,” she bit out. “Don’t let it go to your head, I prepared it for Brigadier Chilaca.”

“I would never dare,” he said, hand over heart.

He plopped a pair from a new bowl grapes in his mouth afterwards, enjoying the savor of fresh fruit. How quickly these little comforts became expected – there was no poison so insidious as luxury. Still, better than leaving the second bowl he’d asked for go to waste. Sakkas had waddled away having doubled his body weight in fruit from the first and the magpie was unlikely to reappear until he felt like it again, which left these a loose end for him to tie up.

“First off,” he said after swallowing, “it was a good use of my marker with Bait, so you’ll get no talkback from me on the matter."

Song sighed, standing across the table with her arms folded behind her back.

“I almost wish you would leave the man alone,” she admitted.

And that almost was why her judgment had risen in his esteem: sentiment tempered by practicality. Maybe she would prefer Adarsh Hebbar not be dragged back onto the hook at the first opportunity, but having someone in the Fourth to hit up for information ranked higher in her priorities than pity.

“There’s no one else in the Fourth I’d risk leveraging,” Tristan said.

Alejandra Torrero would burn his face off at the first sign of blackmail and even if Expendable were not a Skiritai capable of savaging him in single combat with the use of only half his toes the Malani did, you know, suck lemures into his soul. Then turn into them and eat a concerning amount of fresh meat during communal meals.

“As an aside,” the thief mused. “Considering Expendable – Velaphi – does not seem to control the shape when he turns into that horrifying Malani hyena monster do you figure he...”

He spun his finger suggestively.

“Ate someone before the Watch recruited him?” Song grimly said. “Very likely. Between that and his lack of control over a dangerous contract it would explain why someone with his potential ended up in the Fourth Brigade in the first place.”

“Best to continue avoiding eye contact, then,” Tristan drily said. “I already got out of being supper once this week, I’ll not roll the dice on it again.”

“Locke and Keys,” Song grunted. “You did well to escape their grasp, but I fear they remain a potential problem. The Stheno’s Peak garrison sent investigators to look in on the harpoon those two took an interest in and I find it difficult to predict how they will react should they consider this interference.”

“I suspect if they wanted that harpoon they would already have it,” Tristan replied. “It is whoever gave that artifact to the cult that’s their quarry. That points them straight at the Ecclesiast, and with a little luck their digging the man out will make an exploitable mess for us.”

“Luck is a fickle thing,” Song unhappily said, then glanced behind him.

She cleared her throat.

“No offense intended, Lady Fortuna.”

“Taken,” the Lady of Long Odds darkly replied. “To be so insulted by mere blackcloaks when prayers sung in my honor once silenced a storm, why-”

“Never apologize for saying the truth, Song,” he solemnly interrupted.

The silver-eyed captain cleared her throat again, visibly choosing not to read the lips of a loudly squawking Fortuna.

“Regardless,” Song said, valiantly pressing on, “I struck a deal to cover your execution of Lieutenant Apurva. When a formal report is made of this entire incident, you will be able to admit to it without consequence."

Tristan drummed his fingers against the tabletop. He kept his thoughts off his face long enough to sort them out. Song had cleaned up after him. Song had cleaned up after him and she was telling him of it as a report, a statement of fact, instead of... a bargain, maybe, or simply talking of it as a debt he would need to repay. She had said she would, that it was her role as his captain, and he had acknowledged her as that.

Still. He might have struggled to swallow that for a while longer, if not for the realization that he had been silent for too long and she was beginning to look concerned.

“For which I am grateful,” he said, coughing into his fist. “And the Nineteenth?”

“Brigadier Chilaca agreed for them to be arrested the moment he has on hand a cabal to take on their contract with the throne,” Song said. “Their patron has not been informed but the Watch officer who holds command in the Lordsport has orders not to allow them to leave the island if they attempt to board a ship.”

“That won’t stop them,” Tristan replied without batting an eye. “Not unless the Grinning Madcap’s been seized.”

“As it is not a Watch ship, the brigadier decided we cannot,” Song admitted. “The ensuing ruckus would be sure to bring in the lictors and thus the Lord Rector, which is exactly what Chilaca wants to avoid.”

“Pretending nothing’s gone wrong until we wring the throne out of every possible concession,” Tristan said, fingers clenching as he forced a calm smile. “Fair enough. When does Chilaca believe there will be a cabal on hand?”

Her lips thinned.

“Stheno’s Peak is sending men, as I mentioned earlier,” Song told him. “Once they are done with their assigned duty, Chilaca will have the authority to reassign them.”

“The same who are meant to investigate the harpoon,” he said. “When are they arriving?”

“Within days,” Song said.

“When will they be done?” he pressed.

There she grimaced, and did not answer. She did not know.

“So we have a stretch of days, perhaps as much as a week, where there is nothing at all keeping the Nineteenth from grabbing me,” Tristan mildly said.

“If you went missing-”

“You’d know, it was them” he bit out. “You’d come for me. I am aware, Song. But all it takes is them smelling complications and deciding to make a run for the ship, or other means of passage, then to trade me in to the Ivory Library for a fresh start somewhere else.”

“It cuts both ways, Tristan,” she said. “If they suddenly die, all fingers will point to you.”

“But you secured protection, you said,” he pressed.

“For the lieutenant, not a killing spree,” she bit back. “There would be no hiding that, Tristan, or burying it.”

Finely dressed in her Asphodel best, the Pereduri gripped her walking stick as if it was the only thing keeping her from drowning while staring at the closed window of the carriage. There had been a time where silence between them was counted a boon by Maryam, but tonight she... There was a feverish energy to the pale woman’s limbs. Nerves regarding the fight ahead of her, yes, but there was more to it than that.

Between Song’s hard-nosed concern and Tristan’s extracted promise, she could not help but feel uneasy. Two were harder to dismiss than one. A conversation would be a welcome distraction. She just needed tinder for the flame, surely. Maryam cleared her throat, Angharad’s gaze turning to her.

“Did you know,” she said, “that Antheia’s Ring is named after Antheia Pelagid, the first rector of the Pelagid dynasty?”

Angharad looked baffled.

“I did not know this,” the other woman said.

“Only she did not build it, not really,” Maryam elaborated. “The work began two rectors earlier, under the early Archeleans, but it was only finished after she seized the throne so she named it after herself.”

Angharad frowned in disapproval. The Izvorica almost patted herself on the back. Interesting history and an act that would tickle the Pereduri sense of honor? That ought to get her talking.

“There is no honor in claiming the work of others,” she said. “Though this Antheia rose against her liege lords and usurped her throne, so perhaps I should expect nothing more.”

“Malan has had rebellions against the Queen Perpetual,” Maryam pointed out.

Goading, just a little. Not that it landed.

“Shameful things,” Angharad somberly agreed, “and also ancient ones. Only when her reign was young and her honor not yet beyond doubt did such foolishness take place.”

The noblewoman hesitated.

“That I know of,” she added, reluctantly.

Maryam hid her surprise. Considering that the vast majority of Malani learned their history through the isikole, even the nobles, it was widely suspected outside the Isles that their undying ruler allowed onto the record only the parts most flattering to her. That Angharad would even obliquely acknowledge such a possibility, though, was rather unexpected. Maryam suspected her uncle’s hand at work, though she suspected Osian Tredegar would not need to do much.

Angharad’s own code would bind her to begin coaching her language like she had if she even suspected what she’d been told might not be true, and that was a circle that closed itself. Doubt stated repeatedly grew, whether you liked it or not. It was not fundamentally unlike the way the practitioners of the Craft taught their ways to pupils, using thought-paths that incited the correct beliefs in the student without them ever being stated.

“History’s a tricky thing,” Maryam said, offering an olive branch. “Back home, all three peoples of the Triglau agree that it was a bloody quarrel that saw us part ways but none of the stories agree on who exactly fought whom.”

And honesty compelled her to admit, at last inside her own mind, that her people’s own version – that the peaceful, virtuous Izvoric had settled furthest to avoid being dragged into the petty quarrels of the Toranjic and the Skrivenic – was the least plausible. The Toranjic probably had the truest telling, she figured, since they proudly boasted of having drawn blades first.

“It is a matter of some debate among our scholars which parts of the Great Works are imagery and which are genuine chronicles,” Angharad said. “Though I never had much of an appetite for those books, I’ll admit. I found even the most exciting of them rather dry.”

“I liked the teaching stories passed down by the Ninefold Nine, but my father’s attempts to have me learn the histories of Volcesta sunk into a swamp of disinterest,” Maryam admitted. “I wish I had listened, now. Some of those tales might be lost forever.”

Mood soured by the reminder – both of the loss and of who she was sitting across from – she looked away, staring at the closed window the same way Angharad had. Much had been lost but tonight she would get some of it back, she told herself. It was cleaning a wound on a corpse but still better than nothing.

“You are afraid.”

Blue eyes swiveled back to the woman facing her.

“Excuse me?” Maryam coldly said.

“You have been bouncing your knee,” Angharad clinically said. “They way you often do before you use Signs.”

“That doesn’t-”

“Twice you reached for the pocket where you keep your rake-rings,” the other woman informed her. “Something is weighing on you, and that something has you afraid.”

“Nervous maybe,” Maryam grunted, full of ill grace but reluctant to lie outright. “It’s a signifying matter, anyway.”

Angharad’s lips twitched.

“Did that work with them?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“Saying that to Song and Tristan,” she elaborated. “Putting them off with the technicalities of the act, as if those were the important part and not your reasons for it.”

Maryam swallowed. Opened her mouth, then closed it. Her cheeks burned at the realization that she was simply too taken aback to think up a believable lie.

“I do not want to talk about it,” she said.

“Then why are we talking?” Angharad gently asked.

Maryam’s fingers clenched. She almost reached for her rings – for the third time, apparently – and had to swallow a curse.

“The ritual I will be doing,” she let slip. “It has risks.”

“I was under the impression,” Angharad delicately said, “that all signifying bears risks.”

“Exactly,” Maryam exploded out. “Song has been on me about them, but she doesn’t seem to understand that nothing about being a Navigator can be tidy. Not the way she likes things to be. The Akelarre manage risk, they don’t avoid it. It simply cannot be avoided.”

Angharad opened her mouth but Maryam cut in before she could start.

“I know she does it out of concern,” she said. “I know. But she’s decided in her head that my doing this is somehow the same thing as fucking a king when already in bed with the Yellow Earth. Some decision made in the heat of the moment. It isn’t, Angharad. This will fix my signifying.”

The Pereduri started in surprise.

“Fully?” she asked.

Maryam nodded.

“Maybe even improve it,” she said. “Captain Yue was convinced it would improve my nav at least – my sixth sense – but she hadn’t discovered the whole of it. I will, at least, retrieve a great many of my people’s Gloam rites.”

She grimaced.

“Tristan got it,” Maryam complained. “He trusts me to handle it.”

“He did not express concern?” Angharad asked.

Brow creased. She was surprised. Maybe not without reason, considering her viper had been more nagging about her signifying than anyone else since they came to Asphodel.

“He made me promise not to be reckless,” Maryam conceded. “But he trusted me to discern that on my own.”

She looked at the Pereduri, whose lips were set in the fine line of someone who had something to say but was not sure she should say it.

“I know he’s trying to guilt me into being careful by offering trust,” Maryam sighed. “I’m not a fool, Tredegar. And he’s not that subtle, either, he’s just good at running distractions.”

“Then it sounds as if you have a full grasp of the situation,” Angharad said.

“I do.”

A pause.

“What is there to fear, then?” Angharad asked.

Maryam narrowed her eyes at the Pereduri.

“You are being unusually slick,” she accused.

Angharad half-smiled.

“Happenstance,” she said. “We might be standing on the edge of a different cliff, but I fancy I recognize the wind at your back. I feel it against mine.”

Maryam folded her arms around her chest.

“Your mess with the Lefthand House,” she said.

She hesitated a moment.

“I am surprised you would mention it to me.”

It was one thing for Angharad to suspect Song would have told her of it, another to bring it up herself.

“Do you know,” Angharad chuckled, looking up at the ceiling, “I think you might just be the person I can most easily trust in the Thirteenth, at the moment.”

Ouch. It was a rare thing, feeling sorry for Tredegar.

“You don’t want anything from me,” Angharad continued. “And I do not think you truly want me gone, at least not enough to go out of your way to get me arrested.”

“That’s not much to go on,” Maryam said.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Angharad murmured. “Indifference is, I think, somewhat underrated. I have come to learn that even care can feel like a burden.”

Maryam said nothing, for a moment, and silence stayed. But curiosity burned.

“Your uncle,” she finally asked, “or Song?”

“Both, in different ways,” Angharad frankly replied. “My uncle has put everything he is and has built on the line for me. I love him, of course, but I cannot help but remember we have spent more time together since leaving Port Allazei than we did in all the years preceding.”

“You don’t feel like you deserve it,” Maryam tried.

“I know I do not,” Angharad simply said. “And I still used it to drag him into this wreckage, knowing that for love of my mother he would not refuse.”

She stared down at her hands.

“It was not dishonorable,” the Pereduri muttered. “There are even some who would praise me for the maneuver.”

“But,” Maryam said.

“But it was wrong,” Angharad said. “I knew it while I was doing it, Maryam. That it was wrong. But I did it anyway, because I could tell myself that it did not breach honor. It followed the rules.”

She clenched her fingers.

“And now Song, who it was so easy to be angry with, Song does it too,” Angharad bit out. “Hands me rope already tied around her neck and tells me she trusts me not to hang her.”

“And it’s a lovely thing to be trusted,” Maryam quietly said, “but then you have to carry it.”

“Yes,” Angharad fervently said. “Exactly. If I had done something to earn it, maybe, but I-”

She bit her lip.

“I took every measure I could to keep the Thirteenth away from what I did,” Angharad said. “But I cannot know, cannot promise, that nothing will reach you.”

Maryam met her gaze straight.

“I will sell you out even if it’s just to keep the slightest bit of mud off my shoes,” she honestly said. “Know this.”

To her mild horror, the words set Angharad Tredegar to giggling. And Maryam couldn’t even be angry about it, because Angharad wasn’t disbelieving her, or mocking her. It was just... relief of sorts. Of a sort she could understand.

“It would be easier,” Angharad said after calming, “if it were all like that. If I could move towards what I know needs to be done with... clean breaks. But instead it all grows more tangled by the day.”

She smiled bitterly.

“It is too late for clean breaks, I fear,” she said. “Now no matter what I do someone ends up bleeding who isn’t me.”

“That’s what a sacrifice is, Angharad,” Maryam told her. “Children who begin to learn the Craft, they often tell themselves ‘I would be different’. If the gods offered me a bitter bargain, I would not bleed my brother on the altar for power. I would offer my own arm instead. Or this, or that.”

She rolled her eyes.

“They miss the point,” Maryam said. “It isn’t a sacrifice if you are willing to give it. It has to bleed you, the trade. It has to cost you something, to stay with you, otherwise all you’re offering is air. And why should you get anything for air?”

Dark eyes studied her.

“And what will it cost you, your ritual?”

Maryam almost refused to answer. Almost.

“I don’t know who I’ll be, when I come out on the other side,” she quietly admitted. “Some parts of me that are missing will be returned, but I will be inheriting... more.”

She breathed out.

“It may be I am still myself, after,” Maryam said. “I expect I’ll still think that, whatever happens. Or...”

Or tomorrow I could look at Song, at Tristan, and think of them as people I used to know, she thought. People who used to know me.

“Perhaps our cliffs are not so different, after all,” Angharad murmured.

Blue eyes turned to her.

“When this all began,” the noblewoman said, “I told myself that to avenge my house I would go as far as I needed to. Then that to rescue my father I would pay any cost.”

She scoffed.

“And now here I am on the edge of the cliff,” she said. “Wondering how many lives I can ruin in the name of my own ruin – my uncle, Song, Cleon, even Theofania! - before I become the man I am sworn to kill. Before I am to others what those butchers are to me.”

She sucked in a breath.

“Before I find myself on the same end of the pistol he was that night, pulling that trigger,” Angharad said. “It’s what the Fisher wants from me, I think. To take the best of what my parents gave me and put it to the service of the worst in what I am.”

The Pereduri looked at the floor.

“If I walk down that road, Maryam, does it end with some boy pulling a trigger at me to silence his own ghosts? An oath is an oath, but...”

“It matters, how you fulfill it,” Maryam quietly said.

“It does,” Angharad softly agreed. “But then no one else can balance those scales for us, can they?”

Her stomach clenched.

“No,” Maryam said. “Only us.”

Silence kept them company all the way to Antheia’s Ring. The carriage came to a halt, the driver hammering at the wall twice to tell them to get off. They hesitated a moment, before Angharad offered her arm.

“Good luck,” Angharad said.

Maryam clasped it.

“And you,” she replied.

And off they went, to find the truth of the weights on their scales.

--

Tristan’s steps slowed as he approached the street corner.

Not for need, for though Fidia Avenue – which lay right ahead - was thick with people it was broad enough he could easily have slipped into the crowd. No, it was fear that slowed him. The knowledge that once he reached the corner he would be exactly at the halfway point. The crossroads.

Down Fidia Avenue led to the southwestern district and the Nineteenth’s safehouse. Up it led onto the Three Dia Roads where one could catch one of the many carriages that might take him to Fort Archelean and the palace above it. He reached for the watch tucked away in his pocket, as much for the excuse to delay as because he wanted the time. Three thirty-three, he saw, and he traced the paths in his mind.

On foot – and a carriage was a trail he could not risk - it’d take him the better part of an hour to get to the safehouse. When he was there he would still need to set up, to kill them, to rid himself of the evidence and prepare the bodies to be ‘found’ at a later point. If he got lucky finding a carriage afterwards, got lucky with the roads and the lictors gave him little trouble, he could make it in time to catch Maryam before she began her ritual.

Assuming nothing went wrong and she did not start early and he did not end up a battered prisoner of the Nineteenth Brigade instead of their murderer.

If he went straight for the palace... He had coin and a pack containing a regular’s uniform. He could change into it when on the carriage and expect wearing the black to help him cut through some of the lines that would be forming around Fort Archelean. Odds were very good he’d catch up to Maryam before she went up to the private archives, or at least before she was done setting up, and then... Assuming she allowed herself to be talked out of something she badly wanted to do, that she had lied to him about- teeth clenched. Assuming that, and that it was done within an hour, if he hurried back down to the safehouse...

It might be easier to go down than up, he figured. But that would not make the carriages clogging the streets around Fort Archelean disappear, meaning he’d have to leave on foot and probably make his way to the edge of the Collegium before he could catch a ride to bring him south. No matter how he weighed the numbers, it was too long. The Nineteenth would be finished with their ritual, with whatever they were scheming.

Going for them by then might well be serving himself up on a platter.

Three thirty-five, the watch in his hand read. Vanesa’s watch. A match to the pistol under his coat, Yong’s old piece abandoned and returned to his hand by Maryam along with a warning about the nature of choices. She lied, he reminded himself. To my face, barely an hour ago. And even if she was not in her right mind Maryam was not a fool. She would not attempt the ritual if she did not believe it would work. How much did he owe, when it came down to it? On the table before him he saw only two maybes, neither all that better than the other.

His hand tightened around the bronze watch, fingers paling at the knuckles. All of them.

“You should take your chances.”

He did not turn. Fortuna’s back was pressed against his, and for all that she should be facing the street behind them her words had been as clear as if she had whispered them in his ear.

“You always say that,” Tristan replied.

“And it always works out for us,” Fortuna said.

“Because I pick my gambles,” the thief said. “Roll the dice only on what I can afford to lose. I don’t know if...”

If Maryam was something he could afford to lose, he did not quite dare finish. Because the rat in him knew better. It did not matter how much you cared about someone: any rope was a noose if you allowed it around your neck. And Abuela, she had taught him better too. You couldn’t catch a ghost, couldn’t kill it. But that shelter demanded you lived like one – passed through the world traceless. And what had Hage to say about it? Little, he thought. The old devil’s warning was about the balance of necessity, not anything like this.

Three thirty-six. Hesitation was burning the wick, every wasted breath a closing door.

“This is unlike you,” the Lady of Long Odds said. “Even when you make the wrong decisions, you still make them.”

“I don’t know what’s like me anymore,” Tristan murmured, leaning his head back into hers. “I am a long way from the Murk, now. The rules aren’t the same.”

He kept being handed priceless things. Trust and affection and help, just... dropped onto his lap. As if it were nothing. And maybe that was the trap, that the lack of strings was a string itself. But even for him that felt a line too far, to call sincerity a ploy. It wouldn’t be easy, to make that choice. To go to Maryam from the start. But it’d feel good, he thought. Even if he ended up regretting it, it wouldn’t be the bitter kind of regret.

But oh, that was the song of the fat and the safe. Of the well-fed rat with a hole in the larder, forgetting it was not and never would be a guest. There was no such thing as a happy regret, because if you made mistakes you did not live to regret them. He owed Maryam, and debts must be paid. But survival was the only debtor that could not be bargained with, and how long was he going to keep breathing if he just kept just... pardoning his enemies, like some infanzon making a show of mercy.

Tristan Abrascal was not an untouchable prince living behind the walls of the Orchard. He was down here, where the animals ate, and he was already being hunted. Song thought that proof and reports and the rules of the Watch would settle this, but he knew better. The Obscure Committee was already aware there was a bounty on his head and their only answer had been silence. Abuela had promised that he would only have to deal with students, but whatever deal had been struck the Ivory Library cared not to uphold it.

There had been three of them in the delegation, three, and the only one that was truly out of this game was the one Tristan had killed himself. A signed confession, house arrest – those only mattered if they made it out of Tratheke. If more officers above them cared for the truth than whatever the Ivory Library would offer to keep this whole affair quiet. So long as the Nineteenth were out in the streets, Tristan was one moment of inattention away from being snatched.

Izel Coyac had done him a favor, once, at his own risk. He could have the antidote. The rest were enemies. And by what right should he be asked to gamble his own life for the principles of others? Principles that did not seem to matter so much, either, when they were put to the test.

“You used our contract more, when you were younger,” Fortuna said.

“I needed it more,” he replied. “It filled the gap where skill had yet to grow.”

“Not just that,” she said. “You used to enjoy it, flipping the coin. Taking the risk.”

“That was desperation, Fortuna,” Tristan said. “It was the coin or an empty belly.”

She laughed.

“And you’ll tell me you never enjoyed it, pulling on the string that unravels the impossible into the possible? That unseen upset, the long odds brought home.”

His jaw clenched.

“It is easier to bet everything you have,” he said, “when you have little.”

“Do you?” Fortuna asked.

He frowned.

“I don’t follow.”

“Do you have anything at all, Tristan Abrascal?” she asked.

And he turned, but she was gone. Not that she had ever been there.

Three thirty-nine, the watch read. Do you have anything at all, he repeated. What kind of a riddle was that? He tried to pry open the sense, but it was senseless. There were costs to either decision, it was the very reason he wrestled with it. Should he head to the safehouse he was risking that Maryam- oh. Oh.

“If I am willing to wager us,” Tristan quietly said, “how much can ‘us’ truly be worth? That’s your meaning.”

The goddess did not reply, not even by the faintest of touches. She had said all she would. He looked down at the watch again, the fingers holding it. Maryam would have two phalanges missing until the day she died, because she had bet on saving his life. It had cost her, that bet.

And it was the reason he was alive.

Tristan put away Vanesa’s watch. Maybe it was time to-

“- see that!”

A commotion on the avenue. Frowning, the thief stepped out of the alley. Dozens had stopped milling about and were pointing south at the horizon. Or, more specifically, at the massive column of smoke that could be seen there.

“The Lordsport, mark my words,” he heard a man say. “What else is there to burn down south?”

And he felt it then. The animal inside, rearing its head up. Reaching around as Tristan’s mind raced down the tracks, piecing the details together. And that scared wild thing, it found out the same thing he did.

They were in a grave again.

Cordyles ships had pursued a merchant ship, the one carrying Song’s letter, when going around the east of the island. Greed made for a simple motive, but that still left the question of why the ships had been there in the first place. Triton Cordyles’ privateers could not trouble merchants too much without the Lord Rector coming down on them. Their piracy was practiced away from Asphodel, against the ships of Rasen and other island-states. The answer was: they were sailing to the Lordsport. Why were they sailing to the Lordsport?

To seize it.

He and Song and Maryam and Angharad, they had been fools. They’d known, known that the cult of the Odyssean was lying to both coups. That it wanted them to fail, to devolve into civil war.

Why would they then believe the timeline given by either coup as to when they would strike?

Tonight, gods, it was tonight. The magnates and the ministers, the whole violent mess. It was erupting right now, with noble ships making a play for the Lordsport – a lifeline that the Trade Assembly could not ignore, the bottleneck through which all their wealth passed through. They would have to rebel, or they would be choked out.

Tristan closed his eyes, the sounds of the uneasy crowd washing over him. Past him. The moving parts, how would they move? The magnates would go for Fort Archelean. The nobles would go for the palace – and it might well be that the concert and banquet were an excuse to get the right people inside. Maryam and Angharad, assuming they were already in the palace, were now stuck in there. Only the lifts let people in or out and the fort commanding access to them was soon to be under attack by rebels.

Maryam and Angharad would be in the middle of the coup. A woman with hollow’s coloring and a Watch cloak in the middle of a cult’s bloody play for power, fuck. And Angharad was up to her neck in the conspiracy, but at least some of the nobles knew she was Watch. If she was outed in the middle of the coup, they might well put a bullet in her skull just to be safe.

Song? Song would be on her way to the Yellow Earth’s trap, and even if she managed not to get grabbed as a hostage by the Tianxi it’d be impossible to find her unless she let herself be found. And since the capital was hours at most from utter chaos, she might well be stuck out in the northeastern ward for the rest of this entire fucking mess. Black House? No, he couldn’t risk that. Everybody would keep an eye on Black House. Neither coup would tolerate the Watch getting involved, much less the cult.

He was alone. There would be no reinforcements. And his hunters, his enemies, were waiting in their safehouse with their sharp knives and their aether machine. They would notice, sooner or later, and while the rat had thought of the chaos as an opportunity for him it was just the same for them. Tristan Abrascal was always underfoot, wasn’t he? It wouldn’t be that suspicious if he went missing during a coup. He could see it, the outline of the way out for the Nineteenth and their collaborators.

Song’s ties to the Yellow Earth would disgrace her. Angharad was dancing oddly around the matter of the infernal forge and Maryam had no strong backer. If the signed confession went missing during the chaos, if the investigator had an accident, that left only Brigadier Chilaca. A demonstrably corrupt man who’d been delaying doing anything about the Ivory Library even when given proof. The traitors had a way out of their own grave, if they were ruthless enough.

And some of them were.

How to make it fit? How to do anything without that knife at this back? Take stock, he ordered himself. Organize. Match the means and the ends, the outcome to the tools. And yet no matter how he shuffled it around, how he assembled it, there was only one path to a tolerable outcome. One manner of acceptable risk. His hand was empty, but when his fingers clenched he almost thought he could feel the coolness of a tile. There was no way through this without breaking something.

Tristan Abrascal opened his eyes, breathed out, and began walking down Fidia Avenue.