Chapter Five: The Current
I found out who really hired me.
I wish I hadn’t.
“Your mother,” I repeat.
Caius doesn’t look at me. He’s watching the pale blue light rise out of the fountain, his face washed silver by it.
“I had a brother,” he says. “Evander. He was heir before me. A hundred years ago, he married the last tithe bride. A girl from your shore named Hanne. She was clever and loud and she laughed at everything, even my mother, and I was a boy, and I thought she was the most wonderful person I’d ever met.”
He flexes the fingers of his left hand slowly, as if checking they still work.
“On their wedding night, Evander was found dead in the bridal chamber with a shore-made knife in his heart. Hanne was holding it. She swore she hadn’t done it. Nobody believed her.” His voice doesn’t change. “The court demanded vengeance. My mother gave it to them. That winter, the sea rose over the town of Harrow and drowned half of it.”
Harrow. Where Pip is locked in a cell built on the ruins of the old town, the part that flooded a hundred years ago. We learned about it as children. The Great Tide. An act of the sea. An accident of nature.
“Hanne was executed in the throne hall,” Caius says. “I tried to stop it. I ran out in front of the whole court and grabbed the executioner’s arm.” He smiles, very slightly. “My mother broke my arm in three places, in front of everyone, so that I would remember that heirs don’t interfere. It never healed right. I think she preferred it that way.”
The fountain hums. I realise I’ve stopped breathing, as much as you can stop breathing through a shell.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you asked.” He finally looks at me. “And because I’m tired of being the only one who remembers.”
He stands, and for a moment he looks less like a prince and more like a man who hasn’t slept in a hundred years.
“Goodnight, Wren,” he says, and leaves me alone with the light.
The fourth trial comes two nights later, and it takes Ada Cotter.
It’s called the Trial of Currents. The Warden takes us to the edge of a great underwater cliff where the seabed simply drops away into blackness, and tells us to cross it on a line of stone pillars, each one standing alone in the open water with nothing between them but the current. The current is strong and cold and it comes in surges, and between the surges you swim, and during them you cling to the stone and pray.
Ada was holding Nell’s hand when the big surge came. Nell says afterward she had a grip on the pillar and Ada had a grip on her, and then she didn’t. That’s all. One moment she was there, and the next she was a shape tumbling away into the dark, getting smaller and smaller until the dark swallowed her.
Nell doesn’t cry afterward. She doesn’t speak at all. She sits in her room with the door open and stares at the empty bed across from hers.
Five of us left. Me, Tam, Maren, Hollis, and Nell.
That night I lie awake again, but I’m not thinking about the trial. I’m thinking about Caius’s brother. About a girl called Hanne standing over a dead prince with a shore-made knife in her hand, swearing she hadn’t done it. About a flood that drowned half a town. About the queen’s pleasant, patient face in the gallery, watching me kill.
About the note in my boot. Remember why you came.
A hundred years ago, someone put a knife in the hands of a shore girl on her wedding night. The court got its war. The queen got rid of a son.
I don’t like patterns. Patterns are how smugglers get caught.
I get up, pull on my boots, and go to find out who’s been leaving notes on my pillow.
I don’t have to wait long.
I’ve been watching Maren for days now, the way I watch everyone. She has habits. She eats little and sleeps less. She goes out walking every night after the others are asleep, and she always comes back smelling faintly of something sweet: flowers, or perfume. There are no flowers at the bottom of the sea.
Tonight, when she slips out of the Tithe House, I follow.
She’s careful. She doubles back twice, stops in doorways, checks the water behind her. But I’ve followed customs men through the back alleys of Corlen in the dead of night with a crate of brandy on my back, and she’s not as good as she thinks she is.
She leads me through the palace, through corridors I haven’t found yet, up a narrow twisting stair and through a door of pale green glass.
On the other side is a garden.
It shouldn’t exist. It’s a dome of glass, like the ballroom, but smaller, and inside it isn’t water. It’s air. Real air, warm and still and thick with the smell of flowers. There are flowers everywhere: roses, jasmine, lilies, things I’ve only seen in the windows of rich men’s houses. They grow in beds of dark earth that must have been carried down from the surface, one bucket at a time, for years.
The breath-shell on my throat flutters and goes still. My lungs remember what they’re for. I crouch behind a bank of white roses, pressing my hand over my mouth to muffle my breathing, and I watch.
Maren walks along a path of crushed shell toward the centre of the garden, where a woman is waiting on a stone bench beneath a tree covered in pale blossoms.
She’s wearing a plain dark robe instead of a gown, and her black hair is loose instead of wound with pearls. But I know her. There’s no mistaking that face.
Queen Nerissa.
And standing behind her, half in the shadow of the tree, is a man in grey who smells of cold water.
“She’s performing beautifully,” the queen is saying. Her voice is low and warm, nothing like the bell-voice she uses in the throne hall. “Better than I hoped. The court adores her. Did you see them tonight, when she crossed the pillars? They were leaning over the rails.”
“They adore a good hunt,” says Maren. “They don’t care who the hound is.”
“Nonetheless.” The queen trails her fingers along a lily. “A shore girl who kills without blinking. Who charms the heir. Who wins trial after trial. When she puts a knife in my son on their wedding night, nobody will be surprised at all. They’ll say they saw it in her from the start.”
I can’t move. I can’t breathe. My heart is beating so hard I’m sure they’ll hear it.
“And the prince?” says the man in grey. “He’s taken an interest in her, Majesty. He’s been seen with her. Alone.”
“Of course he has. He did the same with the last one.” The queen sighs, almost fondly. “Caius has always had a weakness for strays. He thinks if he’s kind to her, she’ll spare him. Let him think it. It’ll make the ending sweeter.”
“She may not go through with it,” Maren says.
“Then you’ll help her,” says the queen. “As you were told.”
A silence. I watch Maren’s face, and for the first time since I met her, she looks like she’s afraid of something.
“And after?” she asks.
The queen smiles. It’s that same lovely smile I saw on the first night, the one that doesn’t reach her eyes.
“After, the court will need someone to punish. They’ll have her. We’ll do it in the throne hall, the way we did last time. It’s good for them to see it.” She plucks the lily and turns it in her fingers. “Then the sea will rise over her pitiful little town, and the shore will remember why it pays the tithe. And I’ll have a new heir to raise. One who doesn’t ask questions.”
“And the boy?” says the man in grey. “Her brother. The contract promised—”
“Thane.” The queen looks at him with gentle reproach. “We don’t keep promises to the dead.”
I don’t remember deciding to leave. One moment I’m crouched in the roses, and the next I’m backing away through the flowers, one careful step at a time, my hand still pressed over my mouth so hard that my teeth cut into my lip.
The contract was never a job. It was a script.
My client didn’t hire an assassin. She cast one. She chose me the way you’d choose an actor for a part: for my face, my history, my knife, the blood on my record that would make the court believe it. She picked the only woman on the shore desperate enough to take a job like this, and she dangled the one thing I’d do anything for.
Pip.
Pip, in his cell, in Harrow. Harrow, built on the bones of the last town she drowned.
I reach the green glass door. I ease it open. The water beyond it rushes in to meet me, cold and heavy, and my breath-shell stirs against my throat and starts to flutter again.
I get as far as the stair before my legs stop working.
I sit down hard on the bottom step, in the dark, and I shake. I shake the way I didn’t let myself shake after my father died, or after my first job, or after Sable. It comes up from somewhere very deep, and I can’t stop it.
She was never going to pay me. She was never going to free Pip. She’s going to put me in front of the whole court, in the same hall where she executed a laughing girl named Hanne a hundred years ago, and then she’s going to drown my brother along with everyone else I’ve ever known.
And she’s going to use my hands to kill her son.
I press my palms against my eyes and I think, very clearly, the way I always do when the fear gets too big:
Look first. Decide later.
So I look.
The queen wants Caius dead. The queen wants me dead. The queen wants the shore to drown.
The queen doesn’t know that I know.
That’s something. It’s not much, but it’s something. I’ve built plans out of less.
I’m still sitting there, putting the pieces together, when a hand closes over my mouth from behind.
I react without thinking. I twist, reach for my knife, drive an elbow back—and it’s caught, easily, and I’m pulled back against something solid and cool, and a voice speaks very quietly into my ear.
“Don’t. They’ll hear.”
Caius.
He holds me there in the dark at the bottom of the stair, one hand over my mouth and one arm around my waist, while above us a door of green glass opens and closes. Footsteps. Maren’s light tread and a heavier one, the man in grey, passing down another corridor. Fading.
Only when they’re gone does he let go.
I scramble away from him and turn, knife in my hand, and point it at his heart. My hand is steady now. Steadier than it’s been all night.
“How long,” I say, “have you known?”
He doesn’t reach for his sword. He doesn’t even step back. He just stands there on the stair in the dim light, his silver hair drifting, and looks at me with those ice-coloured eyes.
“Since the day she chose you,” he says. “I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you ever since.”
“And the note? Remember why you came?“
“Not mine. Maren’s. She’s been told to keep you on course.” His mouth twists. “But she’s right. You should remember why you came. You came to save your brother.”
“She’s never going to let him go.”
“No,” Caius agrees. “She isn’t.”
“She’s going to kill me.”
“She’s going to try.”
I lower the knife, just a little. “And you knew all of this. From the start. And you still wanted me to win.”
“Yes.”
“Why?“
He comes down one step. Then another. Until he’s standing right in front of me, close enough that the point of my knife is resting against the black shell of his armour, right over his heart.
“Because there’s only one way to stop her,” he says. “And I can’t do it alone.”
See next: Chapter Six: Trial of Memory