The former highwayman trailed a finger along the frame of a painting, which depicted a shipwreck on an icy shore. “No clue. A lover?”
“Maybe.” I discreetly shoved the shortbread into my mouth. Powdered cinnamon immediately caught in my throat. “I—ahem—can’t imagine anything else.”
Startled, Grant turned and smirked as I coughed and choked. I’d just caught my breath and sunk onto the painfully firm sofa when the door opened and a woman breezed in. She was the lady from the portrait, older and harsher in life. Her thick, curling black hair was shot with grey and pinned in looping coils about her ears beneath a structured, circular scarlet cap. She looked as though we’d caught her on the way out the door.
The steward closed the door while his mistress removed her gloves, but not her cloak.
Grant immediately wiped the amusement from his face and bowed. I rose, hastily brushed any traces of cinnamon from my lips and produced a rusty curtsy.
“Ms. Firth and Mr. Grant,” she said, her accent light, with each word intentionally arranged and pronounced. She held her gloves in one hand atop heavily embroidered skirts. “I apologize to have kept you waiting, and I hope you will not detain me long. You come from James Demery?”
Grant nodded. “Yes. We have embarked on a profitable venture across the Stormwall and are in Hesten to outfit our vessel and seek investors.”
“Investors of the gambling sort?” Phira’s hooded eyes traveled over Grant, assessing him like a racehorse and finding him wanting. Her gaze lingered on his cheek, where his new beard failed to hide his scars. “Or the professional?”
I realized there was still cinnamon on my fingers and hid them behind my back.
“Both,” Grant returned, unbowed by her scrutiny. “Captain Demery desires to speak to you about this himself, but sent us ahead, as a show of respect.”
“As well he should.” Phira looked at me with the same assessing gaze. “You are capable of taking a vessel across the Wall, maugia?”
Maugia. I might not speak Usti, but I knew that word. Mage. Witch. Either Demery had mentioned my station in his correspondence, or Phira had a very discerning eye.
I nodded, blocking out memories of unruly winds and Bailey’s disgust. My mother’s rescue was, naturally, not part of the story we would be sharing with investors. So to anyone who asked, I was the one who would sing us across the Wall.
“I am, Lady,” I affirmed, hands clenched behind my back.
Phira pursed her lips at me. “Tell your captain he will receive an invitation to my Midwinter Frolick, which is next week. He can plead his case discreetly, with whomever may listen, but I will not otherwise endorse his cause.”
“Pray, would there no sooner opportunity?” Charles inquired. “My captain had expressed a desire to speak with you tomorrow.”
“No,” Phira replied without emotion and began to pull her gloves back on. Sensing our audience was at an end, Charles reluctantly bowed. I curtsied, and Phira left us with a short nod.
The steward reappeared as his mistress’s cape and skirts whisked out the door, catching Charles in the middle of giving me a highbrowed ‘Well, how do you like her?’ look. Charles immediately snapped his expression into a polite smile, but the steward had already seen it.
I blanched, imagining all Demery’s efforts expiring here and now. But the corners of the steward’s mouth turned up conspiratorially.
“I will show you to the door,” he said.
We fell into step behind him, leaving our tea to cool and taking our cloaks from a stand by the entryway’s hearth.
As the steward put a hand on the outer door, he spoke again. “If your captain seeks investors, allow me to extend a second invitation.”
“Oh?” Charles inquired, arranging the lace at his throat with one eye on a nearby mirror.
“I know a group of individuals as… monetarily affluent, but less recognized than those your captain will meet at the Frolick,” the steward said, casting his gaze between the two of us.
Criminals, an aloof voice at the back of my mind supplied, as if I hadn’t started out this journey on the gallows for highway robbery and subsequently fallen in with pirates.
“We meet for cards and dice and the like,” the steward said. “Nearly every evening. Would the pair of you be interested?”
Grant’s eyes glinted, and I recalled it was his gambling debts that had put him in Kaspin’s hands. My eyes drifted to the scars on my companion’s cheeks, and a knot of worry wedged high in my throat. Grant was not my friend, I reminded myself. He was a dubious ally, at best. I should not care what he did with his time.
Still, I jumped in before Grant could speak. “We can bring it to our captain,” I said with a smile. “Thank you…？”
“Mallan,” the steward supplied. His gloved hand closed on the door handle, and it opened in a rush of cool air and slice of golden evening light. “If you are agreeable, simply join us at The Drowned Prince by ten. Ask for me.”
Grant doffed his hat and grinned in a way I instinctively distrusted. “We will be there.”
MORGORY—A small, predatory creature related to a huden, possessed of multiple long fins, a feathered ruff and an equine aspect. Morgories are almost always found to be in ravenous schools and have been known to devour entire ships. First documented in 1624 by their namesake, Captain K. P. Morgory, whose bones were never recovered.
—FROM THE WORDBOOK ALPHABETICA: A NEW
WORDBOOK OF THE AEADINES
TWENTY-SIX
The Drowned Prince
MARY
A few hours later, another door opened with a wash of rumbling, clinking, perfume-and-cigar-scented lanternlight. Charles strode ahead of me into The Drowned Prince, pulling his gloves off and surveying the establishment through glistening, elated eyes.
“Ah, there’s our fellow,” he murmured in my ear. His gaze fastened on Mallan, at his ease across the room in a dark blue, fur-lined kaftan—legs open, fingers laced around a cup as he laughed at some joke.
Here, he wasn’t Phira’s servant. Here, he was someone of note.
I fiddled with the clasp of my cloak—Rosser’s cloak—in the sudden heat. I loathed to take it off, particularly because Grant had insisted I wear no shawl or neckerchief tonight, dressing down the gown I’d worn to visit Phira. It wasn’t that I felt exposed, but I felt false, out of my element in a world where Grant thrived. A world where tattoos crept across the throats and hands of dice-tossing patrons, where carefully displayed brands on the back of necks marked various Usti gangs, and the only punishable crime—according to Grant—was lawfulness.
As Demery had said when we told him of Mallan’s proposal, “We may find our most liberal investors under the table, as it were—though if that is literal, do make sure they’ve enough wit to sign in a legible hand.”
Demery himself was now gone, off to track down the promised Sooth and Voyager somewhere out of the city. Until the Frolick in one week, Athe was in command of Harpy, and Grant and I in charge of finding investors.
But when I’d volunteered for this mission, I hadn’t imagined we’d start at the bottom of the barrel. My expression was cool as I surveyed the company, but inside I ached for the touch of the cold wind, the rustle of leaves and scent of woodland air.