Liar's Moon (15 page)

“Short? A thief?”
Magical?
“What does that mean?”

“A sort of — spy, I think. Or at least she knew dangerous men, men with a lot of power and secrets, and she learned things that she shouldn’t have. She came to me for help —” His jaw tightened. “And I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know
what
to do. It was already a scandal, we weren’t supposed
to be seeing each other, and I swear by Marau I did not realize how much danger she was in.” Durrel looked out into the cell, his gaze lost somewhere between the shadows and the bricks. “She was strangled with a lace from my sleeve. I’d given it to her to tie her hair back.”

And there it was, at last — the haunted look that had been missing when he’d spoken of his wife’s death. He may not
have strangled the Tratuan girl, but in his mind he was guilty. She’d died because he hadn’t saved her. “Is that —” I swallowed, trying to decide what I wanted to ask. “Is she why you helped me?”

“No.” He turned to me, but his look was distant. “Maybe.”

I didn’t know what to think. Looking at him now, I
wanted
to believe him, but there were too many coincidences. I thought about what
Fei had told me — the man she’d heard bragging about possibly killing a noblewoman — but that story seemed to pale compared to the apparent evidence against Durrel. “It looks bad,” I said. “But if we have information that could clear your name, we have to tell somebody. You need to tell your father, at least.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“No, listen — I might have a new lead. It’s practically
worse than nothing right now — just some rumor about a guy boasting in a bar — but if it can help —”

He didn’t answer, just stared at his hands.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You’re acting like you don’t want to get out of here.”

“Of course I do,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

“Then
explain
it to me.”

Durrel sighed. “When Eva died, my father was the
only
person who believed
in me. He risked a lot, getting me out of trouble there.”

“Then you must welcome the chance to tell him that you’re innocent.” He was stubbornly silent, and I wanted to shake him. I paced the cell, trying to make sense of this man. “Why won’t you do something? Say something? You know you didn’t do this. How am I supposed to help you if you won’t tell me the truth?”

Durrel’s next words
were cold. “If you’re determined to accuse Koya, then you
can’t
help me after all.”

“Why are you protecting her?”

“Koya didn’t kill Talth!”

“And neither did you!”

“Good,” he said curtly. “I’m glad we have that established, because a moment ago, I wasn’t sure.”

I felt stung. I wasn’t even sure what we were fighting about. I rose and moved across the cell, into the shadows
at the far end. After a long moment, Durrel spoke again. “I’m sorry, Celyn. I know you’re trying to help me.”

“At least tell your father. He would help you, I know he would —”

“I can’t. Tell him I bought the poison? He’d never understand.”

But I did, finally. It had taken me this long, maybe because I didn’t have a lot of experience with fathers, but I thought I had it at last.
“You would rather risk execution than disappoint him.”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. I knew his father only a little — and
I
didn’t want to disappoint the man. “You’re crazy. You’re his son. He loves you.”

With his face set, Durrel looked at me. “Exactly.” He rubbed his face, looking impossibly weary. “You don’t understand, Celyn. He’s the Lord of Decath. That means
everything
to him. He would never understand how I could do anything to shame our house. I didn’t kill Talth, but I
am
involved. I made a mess of the marriage my father arranged between two honorable houses — the first real responsibility I ever had — and it doesn’t matter what the truth is. I’ve lost his trust, and I’ve lost his respect.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said, but it didn’t matter. Durrel
believed it, and nothing else I could say that day would sway him.

Out in the world again, I felt bad for leaving him like that. I was an orphan who’d grown up hating and fearing her only family (witness that afternoon’s congenial encounter), but Durrel was a bighearted nob who loved
easily and cared deeply for his family’s honor, believed in duty and nobility and all those grand ideals that meant little to a gutter rat scraping out a living on the street. He’d looked so lost when I left, like he was losing the people who believed in him, one by one. I should have stayed with him and looked into his eyes and told him I believed him, that I’d find a way to prove his innocence,
without implicating Koya or revealing too much to Lord Decath. I should have said everything would work out.

I used to be that good a liar.

I walked all the way back from the Keep, my thoughts wrapped so tightly around each other that I didn’t pay attention to where I was putting my feet. At the bakery, Rat had food waiting, thick, steaming rabbit stew (probably
not
rabbit, but I hardly
tasted mine anyway). From the look on his face when I sat down, I knew he’d heard all about Werne’s visit from Grea.

“You’re not here,” he remarked after a while, pushing a pitcher of small beer toward me. I shook my head, and he just shrugged and ate in silence. I couldn’t put the ugly pieces of the day into sensible order, and I didn’t like the direction my thoughts kept pointing. I had
every reason not to trust Durrel, and yet —

“I think I’ve managed to convince myself that Durrel isn’t guilty. Again.”

Rat eyed me levelly. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“Then what’s the problem?” I didn’t answer, just played with my food, not eating it. Rat leaned back on one elbow and looked at me appraisingly. “You
like
him.”

My head shot up. “Don’t be
stupid; he’s a nob.”

“And therefore unlovable on principle?” I made a face and ignored him, but Rat wasn’t through. “Admit it, Digger — this isn’t just some old debt you’re paying back. You
want
to help him.”

“Of course I want to help him. But he’s been lying to me from the start. About the murder weapon, about Koya —”

“And that bothers a devotee of Tiboran because . . . ?”

“What?”

Rat shrugged. “So he lied to you. Everybody lies. What’s the big deal? Unless you feel betrayed for some other reason.”

My face
hurt
from scowling so hard. “Not by half.”

“You ran straight to him when your brother spooked you,” he said. “It’s obvious how you feel about him. It’s been almost a year,” he added, his voice so gentle it hurt. “You can move on.”

It felt like
he’d kicked me, straight to the gut. “This has nothing to do with Tegen!”

“Right. I forgot, because we can’t talk about Tegen. We can’t talk about your brother, we can’t talk about the prince —”

I shoved my chair back and stood up from the table, but Rat’s voice dragged me back down again. “You’re not doing yourself any favors with this life you’re living. Is this really what Tegen would
have wanted for you?”

“He died for me.” I pulled away from Rat. “He died for me, and I will not cheapen his memory by flinging myself at the first pretty boy who crosses my path.” I slammed the door behind me and stalked out into the deepening twilight.

I knew where I was without
even looking; the very
feel
of this place was imprinted on my bones forever. Just a shady street near the palace, where a tidy town house sat circled by a service alley and an arched wooden doorway set back from the cobbles, flanked by potted ferns, long dead. The owner had been arrested, some months back, and the house had the lonely, haunted feel of empty homes all over Gerse. I knelt to the
ground and touched my fingers to the road, but nothing happened. There had been no magic here that night, nothing but two unlucky thieves and a company of Greenmen lying in wait.

It had been dark as ink, the moons in shadow, our clothes equally black. We’d come out that door, stepped blithely, carelessly into the night, barely even looking as we slipped outside, Tegen’s arm around my waist.
He’d laughed and kissed me — and then green-gloved hands had torn him from me. I closed my eyes, and I could
hear
them; my knee throbbed with a remembered blow from a nightstick. And then Tegen’s knife — as clearly as if it were happening before me now — plunged into the guard who held me, sealing his fate.

I sank to the cobbles and bent my head to my knees.
Oh, Tegen, why did you do it?
But I knew why. So the Greenmen wouldn’t capture the girl with magic. He’d been the only person I trusted with my secret after I left the Celystra, and there was no doubt, no hesitation, not a moment’s pause before he drew his knife and shouted my name. And instead of standing and grabbing my own knife and fighting alongside the man I loved, I had turned away into the night, and run.

I closed
my eyes, breathing deeply, as if I could catch some part of him that was left behind here, some last wisp of the life I had lost. But the darkness betrayed me, and all I saw were flashes of another man’s face. Rat was an idiot — I loved Tegen, would
always
love him, in that deep and soul-searing way that made him still a part of every breath I took. Durrel had been kind to me once, but he was
nobody,
nothing
compared to that.

But Rat was right about one thing. I’d been angry and scared, and the first place I’d run to was Durrel Decath’s side.

Pox and hells.

The weather that week continued sticky and hot, and today’s gossip was all about a new company of soldiers being posted in the city. As if Gerse needed more Green Army men at large — we were drowning in them, they were so thick in the streets these days. Barracks were overflowing, and the army had started seizing abandoned properties to house them, or — worse yet
— forcing the soldiers on ordinary families, who had to give up a room or a floor or a whole house to billet Astilan’s troops. Rat said Hobin refused to talk about it, and he kept his office locked, but it didn’t stop everyone else from having an opinion on the matter.

“You’ve got a visitor,” Grea said when I came in that afternoon, pointing a dough-sticky hand toward a corner of the common
room. I barely recognized Fei; she’d buttoned her smock up high around her neck and pinned her hair beneath a demure coif. She would have looked respectable, if it weren’t for the bite to her eyes or the little twist to her lip. She was seated at a table, picking at a small, round loaf and tapping her foot impatiently. I slid in beside her.

“Well?” I said when she hadn’t spoken after a minute.
She looked toward the ceiling, past my shoulder, down at her bread — anywhere but at me. “You’re drawing attention to yourself,” I said quietly. “These are regular marks, and they’ll wonder what you’re up to. Stop flitting around and tell me what you’re doing here.”

When she met my eyes at last, I recognized the twitchiness as fear. She pinched a bit of bread between her fingers so tightly
I thought she might draw blood. “I saw him again,” she said — and we both knew who she meant. The scary fellow who’d bragged about killing Durrel’s wife. “Today, at the Bat.”

I nodded, my mind a blank. I’d asked for this information; now what was I supposed to do with it?

“He agreed to drink with me. Tomorrow night. At the Temple. You can see him then, see if you know who he is?”

“Uh, yes,” I said finally. “Well done.”

“Did he really kill that woman?”

“I have no idea.” Somehow it didn’t seem right to say “I hope so.”

“Don’t worry,” I added, because Fei was biting her lip, dark eyes wide and nervous. “You won’t be in any danger.”

“What if he saw me with him? With your Decath boy?”

“So what if he did? Fei, I don’t think there’s a killer out there
stalking the streets, preying only on women Durrel Decath shows interest in.”

She scowled at me, clearly neither convinced nor amused. “You’ll come?” she said finally.

“That’s the plan.” I was just kind of amazed she’d set it up.

At night, the Temple was all lit up, candles
burning in colored glass lamps set into the walls, and massive iron chandeliers hauled up to the beamed ceiling. I almost smiled when I stepped in the great open doorway. (The Temple had doors, but only closed them in
really
inclement weather. Like an avalanche.) It looked like a festival.

I headed upstairs to the upper gallery, at a table just above where Fei was already sitting, her hair
now spilling down her shoulders again. She was a little old for such a girlish display, but I had to admit, it worked. If I leaned forward just slightly, I had a wide, clear view of the chair opposite Fei’s, while still completely concealed by the balcony floor and railing. Fei had done her job well.

I’d already waved the serving girl away twice by the time Fei’s heavy came in, ambling through
the common room. He was just as she’d described, big, strong, and scary. He had a curious sort of uneven gait, and as he swung himself into the chair across from Fei, I saw why. The sole of one boot was built up with blocks. Over the noise of the crowd and the unending raucous music, I couldn’t hear anything they said, but I saw everything. He looked to be in his sixth or seventh age, a little
soft from hard living — but hard enough that I doubted the softness ever affected him much. He had thin, sandy hair, veined cheeks, and an uncertain beard that may have just been from neglecting to shave for a couple days. He planted his meaty fists on the table and ordered a drink.

I was ready to leave as soon as he sat down and I got a clear view of his face, but that didn’t seem fair to
Fei. I’d roped her into this; I’d stay as long as she would. As I watched her smiling and drinking with him, my impression of her skills only grew. She was a natural actress, and no idiot either. After a few minutes, three more girls “happened” by her table, squealed with delight to recognize Fei, tossed their heads, and grinned a little less than demurely at the heavy, until his grizzled chin was
nearly in his ale. If one of them hadn’t looked straight up at me, holding eye contact just barely long enough, I’d have thought it was a real coincidence. A minute later, Fei barked out a crass, unappealing laugh, shoved back, and stood up. She excused herself and slipped into the crowd. The other girls slid right into place, and Heavy probably never even noticed the difference.

Impressive.
It almost made me miss having a partner.

A minute later, I spotted Fei near the stairs. She gave me one steady, significant look, then took a shadowed table in the back. I fed my way through the crowd and caught up with her.

“Well?” she demanded, her voice low and rough. “Did you see him?”

“I saw him,” I said evenly.

“His name is Alech Karst, and he works —”

“I know where
he works,” I interrupted her. She looked surprised — but not quite shocked enough. “He works for Ragn Decath. He’s a guard at Charicaux.”

Fei’s expression was so wary and guarded that as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized she’d been going to say something else entirely. “Fei?”

“I don’t know about Decath. You might be right.”

“But that’s not where you saw him.”

More fidgeting. A decision, a deep breath. “He’s a Ferryman.”

I let out all my breath in one rush. She was serious. “Did you know that when he bragged about killing Talth Ceid?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. They come into the Bat sometimes, because it’s near the water. I hear them talking, usually about the money or the runs they do, out to Wolt or sometimes Tratua. Once I heard him say
something about leaving a cargo locked in the hold of an impounded ship. They never went back for it.”

She said “it,” but I knew, from the haunted look in her eyes, that she really meant “
them.
” Sarists, or other unfortunates desperate enough to trust their fates to Ferrymen, trapped in a cargo hold, for days or maybe weeks. If they were lucky, Marau had gotten to them before the Greenmen
did. For a moment, I couldn’t decide who I hated more — the Inquisition’s thugs who forced people to such desperate actions, or the Ferrymen who took advantage of them.

“Do the Ceid have dealings with Ferrymen?”

She drew a circle on the table with a nervous finger. “I never heard that,” she said. “But some of them — they’re local crews, but run by a bigger operation.”

A powerful
family like the Ceid would be just the outside support a crew of Ferrymen could use. “What
have
you heard about the Ceid?”

Fei shrugged. “I don’t know about Karst, about Ferrymen, but once I heard someone bragging about how he’d ripped off a shipping family on the Silver. Said he and a couple of skells took them for some cargo that was supposed to go to the army. Medicines, I think. They
sold them right out of the crates on Temple Street. Temus never said the name of the family, but it wasn’t hard to figure out.”

“Wait — did you say
Temus
?”

She glanced past me, as if waiting for a threat to melt out of the shadows. “He’s just a Temple Street lowlife, nobody special. I haven’t seen
him
in a few weeks, though, so don’t even bother asking.”

“No,” I said slowly. The
hum of the crowd seemed to dissipate, until all I could hear was a shrill, nasal voice crowing,
Give Temus a taste, sweetling!
“I can track him down. Did Karst tell you anything useful just now? Anything else about killing Talth Ceid?”

She shook her head. “I asked him, but all he would say is that the job wasn’t finished yet. He also said Lord Durrel would never go to trial, but I couldn’t
get him to tell me what he meant.”

I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. I palmed a gold crown from my sleeve and slipped it into her hand. “You can go. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about Karst. He won’t bother you.”

“I made sure he won’t,” Fei said, her voice fiery. “And this finishes the debt between us. Don’t come looking for me again.”

I nodded, watching her slip back
into the bar. As she crossed the gallery, her skirts slipped, the hem falling lower, and she twisted her dark, loose hair around the back of her head and tightened up the laces of her bodice. With that closed, prim posture she could walk right past Karst’s table, and he’d never even see her. I wondered what she’d do now; she might not be able to go back to the Bat for a while. But I didn’t worry.
Fei had a way of working things out for herself.

What did it all mean? Why were
Ferrymen
patrolling the Charicaux grounds? There was no way I could believe Lord Ragn was involved with those people. But Talth? That was a much more credible leap. Though what did Durrel’s neighbor at the gaol have to do with any of it, and what had Karst meant when he said Durrel’s case would never make it to
trial?

The next day I was back at the Keep as soon as they lowered the drawbridge. Something was wrong here, very odd, and I should have seen it days ago. The top floor of the gaol was for prisoners like Durrel, nobs and courtiers, gentlemen, ambassadors. Not a seldom-bathed gutter
boil like Temus. Some local trash ripping off the Ceid, and getting a prince’s accommodations at the Keep in return for it? No wonder he’d seemed so cheerful as a prisoner. Maybe he’d hit on a way to cancel his debt against the Ceid — by spying on the man accused of killing one of the family. At any rate, Temus was involved, and I was going to find out how.

I paid off the guard and rushed
down the cell ring, almost eager for Temus’s entertaining abuse today. Not that I thought I had a rat’s chance in a Gerse kitchen that he’d answer my questions, but —

Things were too quiet. I could still hear the Talancan spy, weeping piteously down the row, and that annoying drip of the rooftop gargoyles, but no rotten vegetables flung into my path, no rude whistle, no screeching cackle
as I approached. I stopped to peer inside Temus’s window, bracing myself for the slam of his filthy, wiry body against the door, but there was nothing. Raising myself up on tiptoe to look into the cell, I saw that it was empty.

Something was
very
wrong.

Slowly I turned to Durrel’s cell and tapped gently on the door. After a pause, I heard the sound of Durrel peeling himself off the
bed, then leaning heavily against the door. His breath was ragged as he coughed out my name.

“Where’s your neighbor?” I demanded, not bothering with greetings. “What’s happened to Temus?”

I heard the quirk of amusement in his voice, even now. “He said you’d miss him.”

“You’re not funny. What
happened
to him?”

“He got out. What in Marau’s name’s the matter?”

I yanked myself
up to the window. “He got out? When? How?”

Durrel was staring at me as if I were the deranged one. “Yesterday. Said it was time for his hearing, and a guard I’d never seen before led him away.”

“What kind of guard?”

“Celyn, what is this —”

“What kind of guard?”

Durrel looked at me, a furrow beneath the fall of hair. “Big fellow, ruddy, losing his hair.”

“Karst,” I
breathed. “Pox, pox,
pox.
”
The job’s not finished yet.
I spun back to the hall, looking down toward the guards’ station. It took so little — a gold crown, a couple of silvers — for me to bribe my way into Durrel’s cell whenever I wanted. What was the price of a guard’s uniform and a blind eye? “That wasn’t a guard,” I said. “He’s a Ferryman. And he’s been claiming to have killed Talth.”

He was silent for a moment, just looking at me through the bars, digesting this. “Then what does he want with Temus?” was what he finally said.