Blood on his carriage wheels, Kel thought. Aloud, he said, “You are not making learning this secret very appealing.”
Andreyen set the bowl down. “If you do not wish to know it, I won’t tell you. But it may be the only thing that will help the Crown Prince.”
Kel leaned back in his chair. “I wondered,” he said. “Why me? Why offer me the task of spying for you? You seem to have plenty of informants on the Hill. You knew Lin Caster treated me, you know I’ve been wandering the Palace grounds; you surely know more than I do about the various political machinations of the Charter Families. What have I got to offer that a dozen others might not?”
Andreyen looked at him silently.
“Is it because putting myself in danger for Conor is my vocation? Because if you suggest that his life is threatened, I must say yes to whatever you ask?”
“Loyalty,” said the Ragpicker King.
“Not to you.”
“It does not need to be loyalty to me.” Andreyen reached inside his black coat and drew out an envelope. “There has been a Ragpicker King in Castellane for as long as there has been a King on the Hill,” he said. “I inherited the title from another, just as your Prince will inherit his title from Markus.” Kel squinted, but could not see what was written on the envelope; only a blank square faced him. “A wise king knows that there will always be crime,” said Andreyen. “As long as there are Laws, people will break them. But criminals are not anti-monarchist by nature. Many of them are quite patriotic.”
Kel snorted, and Andreyen gave him a cool look before resuming.
“Most criminals wish only for their businesses to prosper, like any guildmaster or merchant might. A wise king knows that he must encourage the right kind of crime, and thwart the wrong kind.”
“So you are a sort of Charter member,” said Kel. “But your Charter is crime.”
Andreyen looked amused. “You could think of it that way. My Charter is crime. The wrong kind of criminals don’t fear the Vigilants or the Arrow Squadron, but they fear me.”
“What does this have to do with the King on the Hill—King Markus?” Kel asked. He sensed they were coming closer to the secret Andreyen wished to tell him, though they were still circling it like ravens circling the Star Tower.
“When King Markus inherited his throne, he inherited an ancient contract—between the King on the Hill and the Ragpicker King. The agreement assures that my larger operations will not be touched. I will never be hauled before the Justicia; I will never be dragged to the Tully. In turn, I make sure that the kind of crime that does not threaten the King or the city is allowed to flourish—in a controlled sort of way—and that the kind of crime that is unwanted in Castellane does not. It is an arrangement that has withstood the test of time. It has always remained secret, as it must. But now . . .”
Andreyen turned the envelope over in his hands, and with a jolt, Kel recognized the royal seal: the wax dyed with the royal scarlet, the lion rampant. He strode across the room to Kel, offering him the letter.
This is it, Kel thought. The secret that could cost me my life.
But it was a cool, detached thought. He had no choice. Not if, somehow, all this could help Conor.
When he took the letter, he found the paper heavy and stiff—paper, the Raspail Charter—and the moment he unfolded it, he recognized the handwriting immediately as the King’s.
The message was short, and addressed to the Ragpicker King.
There are few who hold Castellane as precious as you and I do. The city is in danger, I am in danger, and my son is in danger. You and I must meet.
Kel read the few lines several times, as if they might give up more of their import in the repetition. At last, he looked up at Andreyen. “What does this mean?”
“I never found out. I sent back a message with a suggested time for meeting, but it is my belief that the King never received it. The messenger was a Castelguard. That night, he was found dead in his room—”
“Dom Guion,” Kel said, remembering. The reason he had gone to Merren in the first place. A Castelguard he could not recall ever having spoken to, and yet because of his death—all this. “It was put about that he was murdered by a jealous lover, a woman from Sarthe—”
“Guion was not interested in women,” said the Ragpicker King, “though I doubt many knew that. He was an intensely private person. He had to be. He was one of three people in the city who knew of my contract with Markus. It was something I learned when I first came to the Black Mansion. There is always a messenger.” He threw himself back into his chair. “But not now. No messenger has come in Guion’s stead; there has been no word for me from the Palace. I believe Markus thinks I never replied to him.”
Kel narrowed his eyes. “Are you asking me to be your new messenger? Why not one of your spies who is already on the Hill or in the Palace? Why me?”
“As I told you before,” said the Ragpicker King, “loyalty. Not to me, but to House Aurelian. When I first made my offer to you in the carriage, I wanted to see if you would accept it, or remain loyal to the Prince. You passed that test. I believe you will keep this secret, for his sake. And . . .?”
“And?” Kel said, through his teeth.
“And then there is the Prince’s loyalty to you. Guion was murdered. His death was easy to sweep away, to dismiss. Should I choose another of my spies to try to contact the King, who can say if they, too, will not be killed before the objective is reached? Whoever did this is clever—clever enough to know how important you are to the Prince. It is one thing to murder a guard, and another to slay the Prince’s cousin, who has hardly left his side for over a decade. They must know that if they harmed you, the Prince would hound them to the ends of the earth. He would never stop seeking revenge.”
And Kel knew that was true. Slowly, he turned the letter over in his hands. “King Markus says here that Conor is in danger,” he said. “And you believe Prosper Beck is that danger?”
“Prosper Beck was already growing in power when Markus sent me this message. Making sure that I cannot reach the King, nor he me, is in Beck’s interest. He is exactly the sort of criminal—chaotic, oblivious to the normal rules of engagement—that the King on the Hill would work together with me to eliminate. The King says his son is in danger, and now Beck is willing to threaten the Prince. No criminal who answers to me would touch a member of the royal family.”
Kel said, “If Prosper Beck arranged for your messenger to die, then he must know about this contract. So there were not three people who knew of your arrangement, it seems. There were four.”
Andreyen inclined his head as if to say: very true. Kel wondered where his preternatural calm came from. Mayesh always said graciousness paired with viciousness was the domain of the nobility, but Andreyen was certainly not that. Then again, it was impossible to determine his class. He stood apart from such things.
“That is what I need you to find out for me,” said Andreyen. “Normally, with the assistance of the Aurelian King, it would not be so difficult to discover who Beck is, and how he knows what he knows. But without it . . . I need to understand what the King wished to tell me at that meeting. If there is a thread that can unravel Beck’s growing empire, I need to know how to find it and draw on it.” He fixed Kel with an unnerving stare. “So. You’ll do it?”