I looked around and eventually noticed a pair of bulkhead doors set into the ground. One had been cracked open a few inches, and the edge of a golden mask flashed in the glare. “Come on, then.” My contact. “We haven’t much time.”
I lowered myself into dank, dripping darkness.
For a second or two, once the doors were shut tight, we were smothered in shadow and I heard only my harsh breaths. Then: the striking of flint on firesteel. A murmur, and the sizzle of a flame responding. Light flared, illuminating the lion’s gold visage. He was a Sparkmouth.
“This way,” he said, leading me by his candle’s glow.
He was dressed in his black servant’s uniform again. “I suggest we keep the masks on, in case someone sees you.”
I swallowed. “Is that likely?” I said, my voice thin.
“Shouldn’t be,” he said cheerily. “We’re going to the lowest levels.”
He beckoned me down a steep, spiralling stair. The air got colder the deeper we went, and when I touched the wall, my hand came away wet. My contact must have heard my intake of breath, because he said, “Cool and damp. Best way to store wine.”
Eventually we came to the bottom of the gloomy stairwell. Ducking through a door, we emerged into a wide, echoing space, filled floor to ceiling with shelves upon shelves.
“Down here’s where we keep the good stuff,” he said, stepping to a shelf and inspecting a bottle. “Some of these date back to King Judan’s reign. Unless we’ve got someoneverywealthy upstairs, we shouldn’t be disturbed…Still, I can’t linger long.” He turned to me, placing the candle on a shelf. “So let’s get right to it. Do you have the final tally?”
I fished in my bodice for the crinkled parchment. Plucking it from me and smoothing it out, he stared at it in focused silence for a moment.
“And there’s something else,” I ventured. “Two things, actually. First, you should know there are visitors on the island. House Cormorant. I think they’re staying until archwater. They have Orha with them. I thought, if your people…”
His cheek twitched, his blue eyes still fixed on the parchment. “Not a problem if they’ll be gone by next pallwater, which it sounds like they will.”
“All right,” I said, feeling slightly reassured. “But the Shearwaters, they have…well, I don’t know what to call it. I’ve been thinking of it as—asfalse laconite.”
That did give him pause, his eyes flicking up to me.
“It looks just like laconite, feels just like it, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’tdoanything.”
He stared at me, the candlelight wavering on his mask, then shook his head. “I don’t know what that’s all about. But it doesn’t matter. We only need to know about the stuff thatdoeswork. And you”—he gestured at me with the parchment—“have answered our questions. Thank you for that.”
He glanced at the candle, muttered something under his breath. A spark jumped out, arcing toward him, and it lit the paper, burning it to a crisp.
I let out a breath. My information was good, and he clearly had no concerns about the Cormorants. The false laconite still niggled at me like a hangnail, but if the Cage weren’t interested, maybe it wasn’t so big a deal. Now my part was done, they had to give me what they’d promised.
“Now,” he continued, flashing me a genial smile, “for what we need you to do for us next.”
I stared. “What do you mean,next? That wasn’t the deal!”
“You agreed to help us,” he said casually.
“I agreed to get you this information. Andyouagreed to give me information about my friend.”
“And then—what? You’ll go back to trailing after the Shearwaters? You’ve found you like being a Hundred’s Orha?”
I fell silent. I didn’t like that I couldn’t see his face, but I was glad, right now, that he couldn’t see mine.
If there was one thing this placement had helped me understand, it was why so many of us liked shadowing the Hundred. To be immersed in such luxury, to feel part of this gilded world…For some, the drudgery was just about worth it for the expensive livery, the elevated rank, the balls, the soirées—even if we were just observers.
His words had caught on something inside me: a splinter of doubt. I pushed it down. “Of course I don’tlikeit. They’re insufferable, spoiled—”
“All the more reason to aid us,” he replied.
“I’ve done what you asked,” I said angrily. Desperately. “I’m not getting mixed up in anything else. An information exchange, remember? That’s what you agreed.”
I did want change. How could I not? I knew better than most that the way things were was wrong—my father killed in a noble’s pointless skirmish, a mother who’d been only too happy to be rid of me. And over half my life shut up in Arbenhaw, told day in and day out that my only worth was in service.
