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-”

“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.”

“There would not,” he evenly agreed. “If Asphodel were not about to be plunged into chaos, anyway.”

She caught onto his implication immediately.

“The coup,” Song said. “Or at least the throne putting down the coups. You want to use that as cover. They remain gone for their investigation and later the corpses turn up during the chaos. Nothing to do with you, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

They both knew the restoration of order was unlikely to happen without bloodshed. Who was to say that a few souls might not go missing during the mess? He would prefer to be entirely off Asphodel when it all happened, but the odds of that were looking increasingly low.

“No loose ends,” Tristan told her. “No knives left at my back. How many times do you expect me to spare those who would put me in a box and sell me, Song? I can live with one cabal. Knowing there will be watchmen out there who know my face and would put a bullet in my skull given the chance.”

His fingers tightened.

“But I will not sow a garden’s worth of enemies and let them ripen out of my sight,” he said. “Much less allow them to scheme against me unimpeded.”

“I am not asking-” Song began heatedly, then bit off the words.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

He watched her, the way she mastered her breath and counted down. Kept herself calm.

“I am not asking that,” Song finished. “But there are only so many bodies I can bury for you, Tristan, before the grave grows full.”

Part of him wondered if it was testing her, that he genuinely told her what he intended instead of simply agreeing, smiling and doing whatever he wanted. If he was passing his hand over the candle to see if it burned him this time. And as the silence stretched out, as his implicit refusal hung loud in the air and with every additional breath Song Ren did not order or threaten or twist his arm, Tristan was forced to look a fact in the eye.

It was a test. And she had passed it without even knowing there were stakes.

He breathed out slowly.

“It is more urgent a situation than I implied,” he admitted. “When Hage gave me their location and a time they will be at their safehouse he also gave me a list of aetheric devices and materials they requested for some sort of ritual with the Odyssean.”

Song’s eyes narrowed.

“You think it’ll be turned on you,” she said.

“I think Izel Coyac is a tinker on the Deuteronomicon track and if they are going to trap a god they are sure to make some use of that entity.”

“They wouldn’t kill you,” Song said. “But if they asked for an arm instead, or just a broken leg…”

“I was thinking more along the lines of my location,” he said, “considering the gods’ aptitude for finding strangers to slay them by surprise. If they have the boon and a trapped god, what is left but to grab me and leave Asphodel as quickly as possible?”

“They don’t know the Odyssean is the Hated One,” Song pointed out. “This could blow up in the face quite violently.”

“Or they could get exactly what they need and go on a hunt for me that very night,” Tristan said. “Tozi’s contract should prevent them making the worst kind of mistakes.”

Song mulled that over for a moment.

“Officer Hage gave you that information?”

The thief nodded.

“And you think he knows…”

“He knows too much for my comfort, that included,” Tristan said. “But he did give me, well, a warning of sorts.”

He cleared his throat.

“That the Krypteia does not deal in laws but in necessity.”

“He’s testing you,” Song said.

“Maybe,” Tristan grunted. “But I’m not sure what the test is – or if cleaning up the Nineteenth would mean failing it.”

He smiled mirthlessly.

“And it is a Mask who taught me how to deal with loose ends in the first place, Song. Hage is a teacher, but his are not the only lessons taught by the Krypteia.”

“But he will be watching,” Song said.

He nodded. But will that be watching the decision or the execution of it? That was yet uncertain. Song’s chin set.

“What time?” she asked.

He blinked.

“What does it matter?”

“Because I will need to clear my schedule,” Song said. “If it proves necessary to kill them all, I will not let you at it alone.”

He swallowed, mouth dry. It’d been easy with Maryam. Like falling, the current of the world pushing him into it. And looking at Song Ren’s expectant face he could still remember thinking about how to kill her, being uncomfortable standing in the same room. The disgust on her face after they fed the traitor to Scholomance. And now she was offering to kill for him. Another gift with no strings in sight.

Madness.

“Six,” he croaked out. “Tonight.”

Her face fell and his stomach tightened.

“Shit,” she said. “I need to be on the other side of the city at the same hour.”

What an ugly thought, to be relieved she would take it back. It still burrowed in him like a hungry worm. Only a moment later did the calm part of him, the thinking one, catch up to the words. ‘Need’ was not a word that Song Ren would use lightly and he could not think of many who would be able to twist her arm against her will.

“The Yellow Earth’s calling in its dues,” he said.

Her face tightened. After a moment she nodded.

“Hao Yu was killed this morning,” Song said. “Ai now leads the sect. She is… less patient.”

Tristan slipped into the boots of someone who saw Song Ren as a disposable tool, for a moment. What would they ask, how would they spend her? Not as a blackcloak, even as a brigade captain. It was too little, she gave them nothing a skilled spy could not in her place.

“They want you to kill Palliades,” he said.

There was a moment of stillness, then she laughed. It was a bitter sound.

“Close enough,” Song said. “They want me draw him down into the city, where they will be waiting.”

Probably to kill him, Tristan though, though if they were clever they would keep him alive instead. So long as he remained breathing Palliades loyalists would not easily consolidate behind another noble, which would keep the aristoi split into multiple sides. Mind you, Ai had not struck him as the most strategic of thinkers. He eyed Song curiously.

“What do they have on you, that’d you even consider it?”

She raised her brow.

“Why did you murder Cozme Aflor on the Dominion?”

He did not hide his surprise quite quickly enough. Or his concern. He had not thought Maryam had told her of that.

“You didn’t give anything away,” Song reassured him. “It was what Zenzele didn’t talk about that let me put it together.”

He acknowledged it with a nod and she looked away. Considered the matter closed, the question she had asked more a reminder that they all had their secrets than something she expected him to answer. And yet.

“He killed my father,” Tristan said.

Silver eyes whipped back to him, wide open.

“It was a mercy by then,” the rat said. “Sparing him worse. But if you guide a man down a dead end and then put him out of his misery when he reaches the wall, the only word for it is murder. So that is what I dealt him out in return.”

“The Cerdan,” she guessed. “They were involved.”

“It was their enterprise,” Tristan said. “The matter is not yet finished. I have names, Song. A list.”

“Revenge, huh,” Song muttered, leaning back into her seat.

“I prefer to think of it as spring cleaning,” he replied with a charming smile.

If she were Maryam, she would have played off that. Made some pun about springing a few murders for cleaning, maybe, or accused him of having never held a broom. Not Song. The Tianxi simply sat there, staring off at the wall.

“I wanted revenge, too, when I was a child,” Song finally said.

“On who?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Song mused. “On my grandfather, the face of the Dimming?”

She snorted.

“They lashed him to death.”

Tristan considered himself hard to trouble. The flat, matter-of-fact way Song spoke of her own grandfather being publicly whipped to death still had him wincing.

“Those who blame us?” she wondered. “Jigong is a ghost town, its lands overrun by lemures and hollows. Those who fled abroad were ruined, if they were even allowed through the border. There is no revenge to take there.”

“Those who decided the republic could no longer be graced with a Luminary,” he suggested.

“We don’t have kings, Tristan,” she tiredly said. “A decision like that would not be trusted to a republic’s chancellery alone – their Secretariat would vote on it before giving instructions to the envoys, maybe even the general assembly. Hundreds of people for every republic, maybe thousands.”

She smiled mirthlessly.

“No one is to blame,” Song said. “Everyone is to blame. A little of both, I think. But that isn’t a comforting thought, when children point at you in the streets. When men leave the rooms you enter, when you are refused entry to shrines. That anger, it wants something to aim at.”

“A trigger to squeeze,” he murmured.

She nodded.

“So I understand it, why my brother went over to the royalists,” Song said. “He decided it was the republics that were our enemy, and that he could put the hate to rest by burying them.”

From there, the angle was not hard to figure out.

“They caught him going over,” Tristan said. “And your royalists are in bed with the Someshwar, everyone knows it. If a Ren, any Ren, is seen to clasp hands with the rajas then your family is finished.”

Because Tianxia hated the Imperial Someshwar to the bone. When the Izcalli attacked Tianxia nowadays, it was not to conquer – the Sunflower Lords came for serfs and plunder, to blood themselves in the Calendar Court’s name. It was different with the Someshwar, because it had never quite given up its ambitions to restore its conquests from the peak of the Cathayan Wars. The maharajas had held two thirds of the peninsula, once, all but the three southernmost republics.

Izcalli’s raids were a passing plague, while the Someshwar had no intention of ever leaving if it got its foot past the door. For a family as reviled as Song’s to going over to them would be…

“I took the black to beat the curse,” Song exhaled. “To bring about so great a good it would blot out my grandfather’s mistake. But Ai can end all that before it begins with a single letter and she has sworn to, if I do not do what she asked.”

Tristan reached inside his coat for Vanesa’s watch, clicked it open. Nearly three.

“You don’t have long to decide if you’re going to send a letter back,” he noted.

“I am aware,” Song tiredly said. “As it is I will be bound to send it straight to the palace as Watch correspondence for it to be on time, which there is no way the Yellow Earth will miss.”

He let out a low whistle.