Caris nodded grudgingly at that point. Nathaniel and Portia guided her farther into the parlor. She sat gratefully on the chair that Dureau vacated. Portia took the spot off to her right on the sofa, while Nathaniel remained standing beside her chair. Caris adjusted the collar of the linen blouse she wore, the same one from last night’s excursion to the Pemberry neighborhood. Belatedly, she realized she’d forgotten to put on shoes and curled her toes into the rug.
When Caris looked up, she found every eye in the room on her. “What?”
“How are you feeling?” Meleri asked her.
“Like I crashed a racing carriage, but I’ll be all right. It’s just a headache.”
“And magical exhaustion, which isn’t something to ignore,” Blaine said.
Meleri shot him a sharp look that would’ve made anyone else clamp their lips together. Blaine stared her down in silence, and he wasn’t the one who looked away first.
Lore cleared her throat, drawing everyone’s attention. “Some of my cogs returned to the apothecary earlier this morning. The establishment is closed up, and everything inside is gone.”
“Were you able to find anything?” Brielle asked.
“The workroom was situated over a cold storage room, though it’s doubtful the space was used as such. My cogs said it looked more like an interrogation room, and there were spells for silence set in the earth.” Lore paused and took a deep breath. “One found a bucket filled with rotting human hearts down there, but no bodies.”
Meleri went a little green in the face, lifting one hand to press over her chest. “That sounds less like interrogation and more like torture.”
“Do you think the shop was used by the Collector’s Guild?” Dureau asked.
“There’s no way to tell. The man I saw in the back room looked more like a warden, and they aren’t supposed to have any interaction with the Collector’s Guild,” Lore said.
“One would think they’d have no interaction with a Blade.”
“Speaking of Blades, Princess Eimarille’s lady-in-waiting saw my face. I don’t know what they’ll do with that information, but my cover as a professor may be untenable now,” Blaine said.
It was strange to think of him as someone other than the professor who had guided her through her engineering classes. Caris was beginning to realize she didn’t know him at all and never would’ve known he kept secrets if they hadn’t raided the train together.
The ambassador said something in E’ridian, to which Blaine responded in kind. Caris’ eyebrows crept toward her hairline at that show of fluency. She’d known he’d gone to university in that country, but he seemed far more comfortable with the ambassador than a citizen of Ashion would normally be.
“If we crafted you a new identity, you wouldn’t be able to stay in Amari,” Lore said.
“I was hoping you could take over the manifest run, but that may not be possible now. There’s enough focus on my family’s company that my parents are becoming nervous. They’ve sent my sisters out of the city as a precaution,” Nathaniel said.
Caris looked at him, squinting against the light. Her head still ached, but she had no intention of leaving. “Why is your company being targeted?”
Nathaniel blinked down at her before jerking his gaze to the duchess. “You didn’t tell her?”
Caris scowled. “Tell me what?”
“She wasn’t in your chain. She didn’t need to know,” Meleri said.
Nathaniel offered Caris an apologetic grimace. “My family was recruited by the Clockwork Brigade when I was a child. We move debt slaves out of Daijal by way of our trains. The raid has brought Daijalan oversight onto my family’s company.”
Caris’ mind turned that information over and over, fitting all the bits she was being told into a picture that still missed so many pieces. But there was enough there to sketch out the whole of it. She realized, in that moment, how much she didn’t truly know about the people around her, for all that they’d taken her in and made her feel like family when her own was back in Cosian.
“You could have told me,” Caris said through clenched teeth, unable to keep the hurt out of her voice.
“No, he couldn’t have. You were not in his chain. You were not a cog he was connected to,” Meleri said.
“He called on me socially. You could have let us know the truth about each other.”
Nathaniel reached for her but aborted the gesture when Caris stiffened in her seat. “Forgive me, Caris. I never meant to hurt you like this. I had no idea you were a cog until this morning when the duchess rang me and requested my presence.”
Caris knew in her heart that her anger was misplaced when it came to the workings of the Clockwork Brigade. But she was twenty, and she cared for Nathaniel in a way she’d never learned to care for anyone else. That sense of betrayal burned like the starfire she’d called forth last night.
Her mind took an intuitive leap, the sort she was used to when holding a clarion crystal in one hand and a crystal-cutter in the other. The knowledge sang to her the way clarion crystal did, guiding her hand for the perfect cut.
