Lin felt suddenly lonely. She had thought perhaps she would go to the House of Women when she returned from the Maze, to see Mariam, but it was too late; she did not want to wake her friend. Instead, as she left the Kathot, she found her feet pointed in a very different direction.
As always on the rare evenings that Mayesh was present in the Sault, he was sitting on the porch outside his small, whitewashed house, enclosed in a cloud of lilac pipe smoke. His heavy rosewood rocking chair had been a gift from a Shenzan emissary; when Lin was very small, she had liked to run her hands over the intricate carvings of birds, flowers, and dragons.
In the moonlight, Lin climbed the porch steps. Her grandfather watched her from beneath his thick eyebrows, seeming not at all surprised to see her. “Were you at the wedding?” she asked, perching herself on the porch railing. “Mez and Rahel’s?”
Mayesh shook his head. “I was at the Palace,” he said. “The Ambassador from Malgasi required greeting.”
There was a time when Lin would have been angry. Of course he had not been there, she would have thought. That was Mayesh, ever more dedicated to those outside the Sault than he was to those within it. But she could not summon that anger now. She herself had forgotten Mez’s wedding; she herself had stood among the remains of the feast, the ghost-memory of the happy dancers, realizing that the river of life in the Sault went on, and she stood on the banks, watching from a distance.
“I heard you’ve been making trouble again,” said Mayesh. “Bothering the Maharam about access to the Shulamat, is it?”
“I suppose Chana told you.”
“I am too much of a diplomat,” said Mayesh calmly, “to reveal my sources of information.”
It took Lin a moment to realize he was joking. A grandfather who made jokes. Well. “I thought you didn’t even like the Maharam.”
“It’s not our job to like each other,” said Mayesh. “It’s our job to serve the Sault, albeit in different ways.” He set his pipe down. “You are rather like your mother,” he said, and Lin stiffened. “You never stop pushing, refusing to accept things as they are. You are always fighting. For something else, something better.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Not necessarily,” Mayesh said. “The Sault is a good world, but it’s a small one. That’s why I became Counselor.”
“The Sault was too small for you?” Lin intended to sound contemptuous, but the question came out as curious instead.
“I had a sense,” Mayesh said, “of how small we were, and because of that, how vulnerable. We serve our roles as Ashkar—remaining in the Sault, providing small magics to the people of Castellane, but never being of them. Content to give counsel to others on the topic of laws that do not apply to us, rights that are not ours. There is only one voice that speaks for the Ashkar outside the walls, only one raised to defend our people in the halls of power.”
“Your voice,” said Lin.
“The Counselor’s voice,” said Mayesh. “It need not be me. It has not always been me. I will not be Counselor much longer, Lin. At some point, I will need to train a replacement. Perhaps someone clever enough to get themselves into Marivent against the Prince’s will. Perhaps someone else who finds the Sault a little bit small.”
Lin blinked. Surely she was misunderstanding him. He was looking at her very steadily though, the reflection of the moon a pinpoint light in each of his pupils. “You mean . . .”
Mayesh rose with a groan, settling his hands in the small of his back. “It is late, and time for an old man to seek his bed. Rest well, Lin.”
It was a dismissal.
“Rest well,” she said, and let him go. On the way back to her house, as she passed through the Kathot, she spied a small gray mouse, nibbling on a crumb of honey cake. It glanced up as she approached with tiny, fear-bright eyes.
Worry not, little mouse, she thought. We are neither of us sure of our welcome here.
Kel had intended to stop on his way back to the Palace to leave a message for the Ragpicker King. He told himself now, as he turned his steps toward the Hill instead of the Warren, that he would reach out to Andreyen soon; he needed to puzzle through what he had learned in the Maze first, and above all, needed to understand how Antonetta Alleyne could possibly be involved.
Upon his return to Marivent, Kel found the Palace was dark, only a few lamps burning in the upper windows of the various buildings. The single window of the Star Tower was ablaze with light, like a narrow eye gazing down on Castellane. Kel imagined the King in his tower, watching the stars, guarded by Fausten. He had underestimated the little man, he thought, recalling that Jolivet had once told him that the smallest serpents were the most venomous.
Kel trudged across the wet grass of the Great Lawn, nonplussed and bone-tired. Prosper Beck had not been at all what he had imagined. That sense of wrongness, of something being off about the man, nagged at him. He wondered, too, if Conor had been puzzling over where he’d gone, or if he’d been drunk enough not to notice. Kel hoped Falconet had taken him seriously when Kel had said: Keep him distracted.
Lost in thought, he nearly bumped into a carriage that had been left inside the courtyard of the Castel Mitat. It was massive and dramatic, shiny with dark lacquer, its sides sweeping up in the shape of great, dark wings. It seemed to crouch there in the moonlight, hunched and waiting, like some black beast of the night. Upon the doors was the silver blazon of a snarling wolf.
Malgasi, Kel thought. So the Ambassador had arrived. He thought of what Charlon had said: She’s here to try to talk Conor into marrying that girl, the Princess. And he had been right enough, in his clumsy way. They would be swarming soon enough: Malgasi now, then Kutani, Sarthe, Hanse, and the rest. All of them, he thought, with a weary smile, underestimating how stubborn Conor could actually be.
Kel trudged up the stairs of the Castel Mitat to the rooms he shared with Conor. There were Castelguards posted at the door, as usual; Kel nodded at them and slipped inside, closing the door soundlessly behind him.
Conor was asleep on his bed, a shaft of moonlight falling crosswise upon him. He was in shirt and trousers and, for some reason, one shoe. Kel half wanted to shake Conor awake, to demand of him the manner in which he had somehow managed to pay off his debt. But curled half upon his side, his arm beneath his head, Conor looked young and careless in sleep, and vulnerable. Wrists, eyes, throat: Kel was acutely aware, as he sometimes was, of all the places Conor could be hurt.
When they were younger, Kel had felt every bruise on Conor’s skin as a weight of guilt, a failure on his own part to protect, to be the Prince’s shield, his unbreakable armor. That had been a time when he had thought Conor kept no secrets from him. He knew better now.
Conor rolled onto his back with a sigh, though he did not wake. Kel sank down upon his own bed, staring into the dark. Had it done him any good to uncover Conor’s secret—the debt, the connection to Prosper Beck? Conor had repaid the money without his help, and Kel had learned nothing from Beck.
Not yet, at least. And if he wanted more information, he would have to betray Antonetta. But that pathway was a dark one. Was it not part of his duty to Conor to betray Antonetta—to take her necklace if that meant he might learn more about protecting House Aurelian? Was that not where his duty lay, even if he did not like it?