Shane shook his head. “Not under that name. The poet prefers to remain anonymous.”
“Hmm. Someone must know who it is. I wonder if I could poke around the publisher and find out.”
Indecision crossed his face. “I am torn between intrigue and a desire to respect their privacy,” the paladin admitted.
“Ah,” said Marguerite lightly. “A commendable virtue. Not one I possess, mind you, but I admire it in others.” She winked and left him at the railing, feeling as if she had scored a minor victory.
That didn’t go too badly. Now, is there something else we can do to keep him from brooding at the railing for the rest of the trip?
Inspiration struck a few hours later, as she heard Wren chatting with the barge owner in Harshek, a language she was only somewhat familiar with. Language. Yes. She rounded up the pair of paladins.
“Do either of you speak Dailian?”
“I do,” said Wren, in that language, “although my accent is the worst kind of country bumpkin.”
Marguerite laughed delightedly. “Where on earth did you learn to talk like that?”
“Growing up, believe it or not. Dailian is what we speak where we live, although it’s so far from what they speak in the cities that it’s practically a different language. They’re very clipped, and we
drag our vowels out into next week.”
“But that’s wonderful! We want people to think you’re a minor rural noble, and you sound perfect.”
“My humiliation is the Rat’s gain,” said Wren.
“Bah. None of them will know the real you. You’re playing a role, like an actress. Everyone will think you are harmless and dismiss you and that means they won’t guard their tongues around you.”
Marguerite glanced at Shane. “And you?”
He frowned. “I speak…little,” he said haltingly. “Speech is taught…in Temple. I listen more than speak.”
Marguerite nodded and switched back to the common tongue of Archenhold. “Most people at the Court of Smoke won’t actually use it. The higher nobles have taken to it as an affectation lately, claiming it’s a more civilized tongue. Might be useful on the job.”
“So what is this job actually going to entail?” said Wren. “Daring midnight raids? Blackmail?
Torturing the secrets out of someone?”
“We are paladins. We do not torture secrets out of people,” said Shane sternly.
Marguerite snorted. “I think you have the wrong sort of idea about what I do. I’m not some kind of military infiltrator. I just talk to people and listen to what they say and pay attention to things. Very rarely am I…oh…stealing the invasion plans off someone’s desk in the middle of the night, say.”
“But you have done that?” asked Shane, with the faintest lift of one pale eyebrow.
She chuckled. “Stolen something off a desk? Once or twice, I suppose. Never for an actual invasion, though.”
“So you’re just listening to people?” asked Wren. “That’s it?”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Ughhh, fine. Can we still blackmail people?”
Disapproval radiated off Shane so strongly that it was practically visible, like heat haze.
Marguerite stifled sudden annoyance. You used to chop people to pieces for a living. What gives you the right to disapprove?
“If I have to blackmail someone, I certainly will,” she said, hoping perversely that would annoy him. Judging by the lines around his eyes, she succeeded. “The real problem is figuring out who. So we’ll go to court and listen to a lot of people and hopefully someone will casually drop who Magnus’s patron is.”
“And then?” asked Wren. “Do we blackmail them?”
The disapproving silence from Shane’s direction got even louder.
“Well, then it gets trickier. I’ll talk to them and perhaps we’ll get lucky and they’ll casually drop where Magnus is hiding over a cup of tea. Or perhaps they won’t, and then yes, anything’s on the table. But it all starts with just listening.”
“Ugh,” muttered Wren. “I had no idea being a spy would be so boring.”
Marguerite laughed. “Yes, and I have to pretend to be interested, that’s the worst of it. But ninety percent of the job is just learning who to talk to, sifting through gossip, and putting it together in useful ways. For example…oh…we once had a tailor who was bragging that he’d found an incredible new designer and that he was going to be the hottest thing next season. He wouldn’t say a word about what the designs were like, just that they were amazing. And he was smart enough not to leave the designs where a cracksman could get to them. So I went in and talked to the people who lived along the same street as his warehouse, and they all wanted to complain about the traffic coming and going. Watching the street got me the name of the people shipping the materials to the warehouse, and some chatting with a driver at a bar told me that they were delivering lace. There are only so many sources of lace in large quantities, so I simply strolled into a clerk’s office and asked what their current price was.
The third one told me that a buyer had locked up their supply, and when I dropped the tailor’s name, they confirmed it. That was enough for my employer. They cornered the market on lace in advance of the season, and when the designs hit big, they made a fortune.”
Shane’s grunt was definitely disapproving. Marguerite rolled her eyes. “Look, most of the time we’re dealing with merchants, not the fate of the world. I prefer it that way.”
“But people kill for it nonetheless,” said Shane quietly.
“Yes. Often. The amounts of money involved are extraordinary.”
“For lace.”
Marguerite shrugged. “Or salt. Or food. Or iron. Lace may seem frivolous to you, but to the people making or losing a fortune, it’s deadly serious.”
Shane grunted again. After a moment he asked, “Will there be others attempting to stop you?”
“There will be agents of the Red Sail there, yes,” said Marguerite. “And I’ll be listening to them.
And they’ll be listening to me.” She felt her lips twist. “If we’re lucky, they’ll drop something and we’ll figure out what it means before they do. If not…well, we’ll see. And there are likely to be other operatives around as well, pursuing their own lines of inquiry, and if they learn something interesting, they may be willing to share it. That’s the difficulty of keeping an operation completely quiet.
Someone might go to the Sail rather than me because they don’t know that I want the information. So one has to weigh how much that they want to make known.”
“Could the Sail be dangerous?” rumbled Shane.
“Yes, but that’s why I have a bodyguard.”
She expected another grunt, but he nodded instead. After a moment he asked, “When you say
‘anything is on the table,’ what do you mean?”
And here is where you crawl into your armored shell and disapprove at me for the rest of the day, my boy. She lifted one shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. “Bedding, blackmail, breaking and entering…whatever it takes to acquire the information.”