Liar's Moon (13 page)

“Tell
that to Barris. I’m sure he’d find this all fascinating.”

“
Barris
? The Ceid know about Evalia? Well, they’re obviously using that incident from Durrel’s past to frame him.”

I shook my head, looking around at the cobbled alleyway, anywhere but Raffin’s too-intense gaze. “I’d like to believe that —”

“Then believe it,” Raffin said, grabbing my arm again, but with urgency this time,
not with malice. “Talk to him. Talk to Koya. Find out what really happened. Because you know as well as I do, Durrel Decath couldn’t hurt anyone.”

“He lied to me,” I said. “
You
talk to Koya. Maybe she’ll explain how she and Durrel happened to buy the poison together. Temple Street. I talked to the potioner. You are more than welcome to continue this ‘investigation’ where I left off.” I twisted
out of his grasp and straightened my rumpled dress. “Because I am heartily sick of the whole pack of you.”

Raffin just looked baffled, wounded. “Look, I’m not saying he’s not an
idiot
,” he said. His voice sounded desperate. “But he’s not a murderer. You have to help him. He needs you.”

“He
needs
me?” That drew a laugh. “All the world’s power and money and resources at your disposal,
and a thief from the back streets of the Seventh Circle is the best you can come up with? You boys really are in trouble.” The low sun had shifted, leaving the alley in weary shadows. I was tired and just wanted to go home, and this stupid Greenman was in my way.

Raffin leaned over me again, and his face had gone red. “Look,” he said, his voice harsh. “I
told
you, something else is going
on here —”

“I’ve heard that line before. I don’t care anymore.”

“You would care, if you knew what was really happening.”

“And if you have something to tell me, then tell me,” I said. “Enough of these games and —” I threw up my hands. “I’ve had enough, Raffin.”

“Please,” he said. The word surprised me, but I wouldn’t look at him. I was afraid I’d see those sad hound eyes pleading
with me. “Can’t you at least think about it?”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll
think
about it plenty. Let me go. I’m serious. Your partner will be wondering what’s taking you so long, and unless you really do mean to go through with this
pretense
, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me back my papers.”

Raffin looked disappointed, but he pulled them from his green doublet. “I shouldn’t,” he said. “I ought
to hang on to these, as a little incentive for you to help Durrel —”

I snatched them back from him. “Help him yourself. You believe him,” I said. “Good day, Guardsman Taradyce.”

I was tucking my papers back inside my bodice when I passed Raffin’s partner, still waiting in the neck of the alleyway. He gave me a leering grin as I stepped out of the shadows. I felt a shudder of disgust;
Raffin’s ruse had worked in part because it was so common as to be almost beneath notice, but the Greenman apparently read it as something else — and he took the opportunity to slap me, hard, right on my backside. It took everything I had to grip my fingers together and not smack his hand so hard his grandchildren’s fingers would sting. I bit my tongue and forced a tight smile.

“The Goddess’s
blessings on you, Guardsman,” I said in a thin voice through my teeth, and edged out onto the street, where I could get away from the whole blasted lot of them.

Nobs. Greenmen. Pox.

Despite Raffin’s loyalty, I still wasn’t convinced Durrel wasn’t involved — even a little bit, even perhaps unwittingly. I knew him well enough to guess what his attraction to Koya would have been; even if they were both telling the truth and it never went anywhere beyond sad, longing glances across the Bal Marse court, the fact was, Durrel just couldn’t resist
a girl in need. And whatever this story about the courtesan in Tratua meant, well, it certainly didn’t help my impression of him. Even if I couldn’t bring myself to picture Durrel strangling a girl in cold blood, I knew blood didn’t always run chill when Marau was nearby. Mine had been
boiling
during that snowstorm in the mountains. Maybe I’d been wrong all along; maybe anyone could kill.

That same evening, as I sat in the stifling top-floor heat of the bakery apartment, soaking wine labels in a mixture of onion skins and rusty water, Aunt Grea huffed her way up the stairs to tell me that “Some tart in a pleasure barge is calling for you.”

Frowning, I peered out the window. Sure enough, a familiar boat was moored alongside the Bargewater Street landing, and I could just make
out a hem of watery blue skirt over a leg propped casually on a cushioned seat, bejeweled chopine hanging half off a dainty, stockinged foot.

Koya. Just what I needed. With a scowl, I followed Grea downstairs and stepped outside to see what the Ceid wanted now.

“Celyn!” Koya waved lazily from the boat, her slim, graceful body draped like a shawl over the plush seats. The Koyuz boatman,
in curious livery that looked green one way and violet another, sat silent and unruffled, his back to his mistress. “You’re not wearing
that
, are you?”

I looked down at my linen kirtle, creased and rumpled from bending over the table, working on Rat’s Grisel labels. “What’s wrong with it?” Even as I said that, I knew it was somehow the wrong question.

Koya just lifted one fair, arched
eyebrow at me, and pointed back to the bakery. “Change,” she commanded. “That dress you had on at Hobin’s will be fine.”

“What do you want?”

She jerked upright. “Just to talk. Come with me.”

“We can talk here.”

That gay, careless laugh. “Oh, Celyn. Don’t be like that. It’s a beautiful night, the wine is cold, and I have something I want to show you.”

I had no interest
in following Koya’s whims, but it was
hot
in the bakery, and at least out on the water there was a semblance of a breeze. And wherever she was going, dressed like a courtesan, there were probably going to be other rich folk there — meaning jewelry and purses and (usually) good food. “Damn, damn, damn,” I muttered as I turned on my heel and went back to change my clothes.

Back at the landing,
Koya had shifted aside to make room for me, her silk skirts spread around her. She handed me a molded-paper mask on a long handle, glass beads cascading from its beribboned edges.

“What is that for?” I asked.

“Get in the boat, silly thing, and I’ll tell you.” She had a bottle of wine open beside her, and I thought the picture would be complete if only the boatman stripped off his doublet
and shirt and fanned her with the vast confection of frosty white plumes and gilded ribs that lay in her lap. I lifted my skirts in
nothing
like a ladylike fashion, hopped down into the boat, and grabbed the bottle. I took a long swig before even noticing what it was — some ghastly sweet thing flavored of apples. Shuddering, I handed it back to her.

Koya laughed. “It’s from Breijardarl,”
she said. “Stantin imports it. Apparently it’s quite popular in Brionry, though I can’t imagine why. Oh, dear Celyn, tell me you didn’t have other plans on this
gorgeous
evening.” She leaned even farther back in her seat, dropping her head and exposing her thin, pale throat to the air. With a giggle, she straightened. “I am going to introduce you to the best Gerse’s nightlife has to offer.”

“I can’t wait.”

“I knew you’d be skeptical. Onward, Henver — to Cartouche!” She announced that last to the boatman like a queen giving a royal order. He soundlessly steered us into open waters, and Koya trailed one hand over the side of the boat. “Barris said you’ve been to Mother’s warehouse,” she said. “Have you found any
clues
?”

Had I discovered that she and Durrel had conspired
to murder her mother, did she mean? The subject had lost its fascination for me, but I obliged her. “I talked to Geirt,” I said.

Barely a flutter of those wispy eyelashes. “Gossipy little thing, but she did know how to dress Mother, which was a feat. What did she tell you?” She sounded eager, hungry — and not because she was desperate to know who killed her mother. More like she wanted to
hear the latest scandal, and she didn’t even care how it might involve her or her family.

“She insists she saw Durrel leaving your mother’s bedroom before the body was found.” I heard a dark note creeping into my voice.

“Before the body was found?” Koya sat up in the seat, balancing the wine between her knees. “Didn’t anyone tell you who discovered her? It was
Durrel
.” There was the
faintest tremor in her voice, and for a moment I almost saw a crack in her mask of frivolity. “Can you imagine how horrible that must have been for him? For
him
?”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, and I really didn’t care. “I know what happened in Tratua,” I said curtly, and something very much like anger flashed across Koya’s face.

“This must be killing him, Celyn. How
anyone
could
believe Durrel could murder someone —”

“And I found the potioner’s shop.”

Her mouth closed, lips pursed together briefly. “And?” she said, her voice a whisper.

“I know you and Durrel bought the Tincture of the Moon.”

For a moment there was surprise on her face, and she wasn’t quite quick enough to cover it. “Well, it wasn’t to
kill
anyone with,” she said. “I just —” She gave
a wan smile, looking somewhere past me, out into the fading evening. “Don’t you ever just get tired, Celyn? Tired of the masks, of the acting? Of nothing being real? Don’t you sometimes think, ‘I could go to bed tonight, and if nobody wakes me up tomorrow, it won’t matter’?”

“What are you saying? That Durrel bought you the poison so you could kill
yourself
?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said,
and her voice was short. “He would never have agreed to anything like that. I didn’t tell him what it was for, and that is the truth, Celyn. He just bought it because I told him I needed it. And I
know
you understand that.”

Well, she was right on that account. Give Durrel a need to fill, and he would kill himself to fill it. But she still hadn’t told me why she’d bought the poison. “All right,”
I said. “Maybe Durrel didn’t do it. Maybe you killed your mother on your own.”

She didn’t react, just nodded thoughtfully. “But I was at my grandfather’s house. And what reason would I have?” She sounded as if this were a plausible theory she was hearing for the first time, and not an accusation of murder. “It wasn’t for the money; I didn’t inherit anything from Mother, and Stantin keeps
me very well. And then what was my plan going to be? Take out Stantin also, but what a shame Durrel was arrested before I could manage it?”

Well, said like
that
, it did sound a little far-fetched.

“I don’t know how the poison ended up in my mother’s glass,” Koya continued. “But I can tell you it wasn’t Durrel Decath’s doing. Or mine,” she added, sounding strangely sad when she said it.
“Do I wish Durrel and I had met three years ago, before either of us was married? I won’t deny it. Did I conspire with him to kill my mother? Of course not.”

She looked out over the water, silent for a long moment. Watching her, I thought she knew more than she was saying. “Maybe it had to do with her business, then?” I suggested, thinking of those falsified manifests we’d uncovered. “Was
your mother involved in smuggling anything illicit?”

“Goodness,
I
don’t know!” she said, her voice almost merry again. “You would have to ask Barris. I had exactly one role in this family — to marry well — and once I had done that, Mother hardly thought of me.”

“Maybe that was your motive,” I said, but Koya only laughed.

“Celyn, my dear, if you had
met
my mother, you would know
that having her forget your existence could only be a good thing.” She reached for the wine again. “It’s good we have that unpleasantness out of the way,” she said brightly. “Because we’re here!”

The boat had drawn to a stop near a square building, stuccoed pink, with a crowded courtyard outside. Bright banners emblazoned with images of Tiboran and Zet flew above the arched entrance, baldly
proclaiming this a pleasure palace for the rich and noble. This must be the infamous Cartouche. People were even now milling about outside, looking alternately bored or curious, as servants in pink livery passed among them with bottles and trays of food.

Koya was obviously well known here; the crowd swelled forward as overdressed young men jostled to be the ones to hand us out of the boat.
“Don’t forget your mask,” she whispered to me, before disappearing into the press of bodies, her hand on the arm of a young man in a bead-encrusted doublet. Wait — she wasn’t going to
leave
me here? Shaking off the attentions of a slim gentleman who’d taken my arm, I pushed my way inside, through the tangle of limbs and fine fabrics and the hot smell of wine, smoke, and sweat, and the perfumes
heavily applied to mask all of that, but Koya had been effectively swallowed up.

Irritated, I considered going back out to the boat, but that seemed like a waste of a good evening. I was already here; might as well make it worth the trip. I stuck the handle of my mask into my bodice and set off across the club, looking for spoils.

Cartouche seemed to be the domain of Tiboran, run wild.
There was a play — I saw performers onstage, looking vaguely put upon — but nobody was paying it any mind. An amorous couple had shifted from their seats to the edge of the stage, where they were in danger of interrupting a dice game between a young nob and an obvious confidence sneak with a deep-bosomed accomplice. I plucked a few gold marks and an uneaten meat pie from a fat man in red, mulling
over what Koya had — or hadn’t — told me. None of it mattered anymore, but I couldn’t shake the image of Durrel and Koya in that potioner’s shop together.

As I crossed the crowded common room, a scene in a far corner, away from the bar and near a back exit, caught my eye. A dark-haired beauty leaned over a table, speaking urgently to a pair of young, daft-looking boys in conspicuously expensive
clothes. She moved subtly, lifting a hand to shift aside her hair, and I saw deep, smoldering eyes, a smudge of bruise on her cheek, cut by a tear — and a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, half hidden by her sleeve.

Oh, yes. Celys had built this one
precisely
to be impossible for Durrel to resist.

I shoved my way through the cluster of bodies and dropped down into an empty seat beside
her. “Well met, Fei,” I said cheerfully. She stared daggers at me, and one of the pretty boys at the table said, “Hey!”

I took a swig of his wine. “So I hear you’ve been pretending to be a Sarist refugee. That’s beneath even you, Fei.”

The boys looked confused. One of them said, “Do you know this person?” as his companion choked out,
“Pretending?”

“Go away, Digger, I’m in the middle
of something,” Fei said, but she knew she was blown, and when the boys packed themselves and their drinks (and their purses) up to leave, she barely looked at them. “Haven’t seen you around in a while. How did you find me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. “I was in the neighborhood.”

“This doesn’t really seem like your sort of place,” she said. There was an insult in there, but it
could be one of so many that I just ignored it. Fei’s accent was real, but nobody was quite sure from
where
— Talancan, Vareni, hells, maybe even Tigas with that coloring. It suited her to give a different birthplace any time she needed one. We’d done a couple of jobs together, back in Tegen’s day, and we hadn’t liked each other much then either. I wasn’t surprised to see her in a place like this,
running this kind of scam.

“You took a friend of mine for five hundred crowns,” I said. “If the Greenmen hadn’t caught you, he’d still be waiting to hear from you and your ‘father,’ safe in Talanca.”

“Oh, him,” she said, a languid smile spreading across her face. “I thought he was nice. Very . . . noble.”

“He’s a big dumb puppy; he’ll follow anything that wags its tail at him.”

“Well, not just anything,” she said. “I see
you’re
alone. Did you really come here to tell me to keep my hands off your boy? Again?”

“I think you mean your talons, don’t you?”

Her eyes narrowed, and she pushed away from the table, but I put out an arm and blocked her path. “A friendly warning, that’s all this is. Find another line of work.” I didn’t quibble about the money; chances
were she really did need it a lot more than Durrel. But still. There were principles.

“Let me go.” Her voice was thin and tense, but I didn’t budge.

“You’re lucky the Greenmen let you off,” I said quietly. “I hope you realize that.”

Fei tried a different tactic. “Maybe I should speak to them. Maybe they’d be interested to know about a man who paid so much money to help a Sarist.
That might be profitable too.”

“Maybe, but you’re a little late,” I said. “Or hadn’t you heard he’s in jail already?”

When she didn’t snap back with a catty reply, I frowned at her. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Fei? What do you know?”

“Hist! Do you have to be so loud about everything?”

In fact, my voice had been so low it was a wonder
she’d
heard me. But I hid my surprise and
dug one of the fat nob’s coins from my dress. After five hundred crowns, you wouldn’t think a mark would be that tempting, but Fei was a magpie, attracted to anything that shone gold. “You know something about the murder? Tell me now.”