Page 78 of The Space Between Stars

With trembling hands, she peeled away the seal and unfurled the note. That handwriting was familiar, now—for eighteen months it had annotated their work. She scanned the first lines, looking for the words that would tell her she’d made the worst mistake. That something had gone wrong. That Thedexemore was dead.

Her gut uncoiled as she read, and relief hit her with such force it knocked tears from her eyes. She set the scroll down and wiped them away with her forefingers. Then she returned to the top of the message to read through it in earnest.

The note. It was…

It was poetry.

What—with all four Fates as her witness—the fuck?

“Pinto?” Attilatia banged harder on the mahogany door when he didn’t answer. “Pinto!”

A scraping of locks sounded behind the wood and the old man cracked the door, wincing against the light filtering through the stained glass of the building’s stairwell. “Atti… you are early,” he groaned. “It is still nighttime for most of us.”

The sun had traced nearly half its route into the sky, but it was poor grace to throttle an old man in the comfort of his own home. Especially one she was growing fond of. “Early is for bootlickers and bureaucrats. I’ve been sitting on this for five cups of tea and I need to get it off my chest now, not when your retirement schedule allows. I also need to use your bathroom.”

The crack widened, and Attilatia wedged herself inside.

“I’m going to go make myself presentable,” Pinto grumbled, lavender robes cinched tight as he hobbled from the foyer into a side room. “The wash is to your left.”

Attilatia relieved herself, rinsed her hands in a tortoiseshell washbin, and pressed cool water against her eyes. It was nearing the time she usually slept. Not that she could with everything running through her mind: Pinto’s informant on the Shadewalker, and now this—this torture Roskaad was putting her through.

Rather than settling into her usual armchair, she paced. Hundreds of glass eyes followed her from the wall housing Pinto’s doll collection. She wished they wouldn’t. It was hard enough to muddle through this without an audience.

Nearly twenty minutes passed before Pinto emerged in saffron robes, smelling of sandalwood, his white beard braided and beaded beneath his chin. Attilatia bit back any snark and held out the note.

“What’s this?”

“It’s poetry.” The words came off her tongue like sap—sticky and reminiscent of wanting to be lost in the woods.

His eyes widened. “This is from the man you are seeing?”

“I would hardly call it seeing, unless you are referring to my eyes. In which case the answer is still no.” She thrust it into his hands. “Read it.”

Pinto did, and the further he went, the more one eye squinted.

“What do you make of it?” she urged.

“It’s not very good poetry.”

“You’d be hard-pressed to find worse from patrons of Shrokan Whorehouse.”

“And you are angry?”

“I am…” She was one wrong question short of kicking something. “Frustrated.”

“Not all men can be poets, Atti. But if you are so invested, which it doesn’t seem that you are, there are surely other redeeming—”

“Pinto, why would he send this? It came over a thousand miles through blistering conditions, not to mention reckless purse strings, in less than a moon. For this.”

The old silk trader’s eyes crinkled. “How does one respond to that without offering insult?”

She raised her hands. “Don’t even get me started.”

Pinto seized his middle in a silent fit of laughter.

She lanced him with a glare. “Help me with this, Pinto, because it’s making my hair grow back sideways. Let’s assume for a moment that this is a very intelligent man.”

“With that as evidence”—Pinto nodded at the note, abandoned on his mosaic tea table—“I’d argue we can assume no such thing.”