Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (8 page)

Reece felt his eyebrows shoot up his forehead. “Nivy? The Westerner girl you’re charading as your fiancé?”

His stepbrother’s laugh sounded more than a little numptified. “Oh, she’s no Westerner.”

Reece waited to feel the sensation of surprise that had been pouncing on him all day. Nothing. Part of him had suspected Nivy was something…else.

“You know, I’d be more prone to agree to your terms if you were a little less vague and a lot more likable.”

“Nevertheless, I need your word, unreliable though it may be. You can’t let her out of your sight. She has no one else.
I
have no one else. In fact, the only reason I’m involving you at all is because you’re already involved.”

Thinking of the dropped gun, Reece stepped forward so he and Liem were only a hand apart and asked in a low voice, “How involved, exactly?”

Liem hesitated. “More involved than you know. And if you promise me this, I doubt there’ll be any turning back. It only gets deeper from here. I learned that the hard way.”

“And that’s supposed to make me want to say yes?” Well, if he was going to be wading in something, he might as well know if it was water or engine grease. “Alright. You have my word. I’ll keep your
fiancé
out of trouble.”

The tension slid off Liem’s face, and he relaxed, slumping as if he’d been held up by marionette strings. Reece glimpsed a liquor flask stuck through the back of his belt. He thought that tea had smelled a little off, earlier.

“I don’t know if you’ll be able to do that much. Nivy’s very—” Liem broke off to glare at something out the window with an expression of disgust.

Reece sidled along the carriage’s edge till he was before the window. They had been in the tower longer than he’d thought; Nix, Telesto and Atlas were high on the horizon while the sun was sitting low, wreathed in smudges of warm color. Hayden and Gideon were still waiting on the dock—Gideon was pacing up and down it, and by his steps, Reece could tell he was uptight—and Nivy was with them, a slight figure sitting with her back to a post.

“One more thing,” Liem began as he pressed the button that started the translocator rasping back down the tower shaft. Reece could already tell that this thing was not going to bode well for their tenuous truce. “Keep your Westerner friends away from her.”

Teeth grit, eyes determinedly locked on the bookshelves, Reece made himself ease up his stony grip on the carriage railing. Because he knew Hayden wouldn’t approve of him nobbling Liem, he pretended he hadn’t heard that. With effort.

It was a long, slow ride down the tower.

Reece knew he was glowing—not a happy glowing, but a burning embers glowing, as he stomped
towards the pond with his hands in his pockets, Liem a few carefully-measured paces behind him. The rim of the sun was sinking into the western hills, and Emathia would have been under heavy blue shadow if not for the servants bustling about, lighting the oil lamps lining the estate grounds. Everything flickered under their light.

“Reece,” Hayden sighed, clearly relieved to see him, but just as clearly stunned to see a harried-looking Liem hurrying up behind him. “Is everything…okay?”

Reece made a noncommittal noise and scanned the dock. Gideon was towering behind Hayden, watching Liem. In the far corner, Nivy had something cupped in her hands and held at eye level so she could stare at it intently.

“Nivy,” Liem said sharply, and clucked his tongue. “Come. It’s time for tea.”

“Haven’t you had enough ‘tea’?” Reece muttered. Liem’s jaw tightened.

Nivy looked at Liem sideways, impassive, before unfolding her hands. A glowbug crept over her palm, and she blew it away, sending it into the air like a tiny shooting star. Taking her time, she stood, dusted her hands, and then strode past the lot of them as if they were invisible. Liem made an indignant noise and stalked after her without another word.

“What did she want?” Reece wondered aloud.

“Nothin’ I can figure.” Gideon shrugged. “Just came and sat there. Think she was spyin’?”

“For Liem? Unlikely. She’s not his fiancé.”

Hayden looked surprised. He didn’t like to think of people as liars, as they generally were. “No?”

“No. She’s his…” Reece began slowly, trying to make sense of all he had learned in the tower. It was like looking under a Dryad’s communication board and trying to pick out the one snaking red thread in the tangle of panel feed wires. “Actually, I don’t know quite
what
she is.”

He started walking away from the dock, down a path that would circle up to the front of the mansion after it meandered through a plot of forest perfect for muffling what he had to say. Gideon and Hayden followed and listened.

Neither said much, but it wasn’t for lack of thought, because at the end of the path and the end of the story, when the friends stood waiting for the servants to retrieve Hayden and Gideon’s bims, Gideon said, “Here,” and held out an Automatic Laser Projector that could’ve fit in Reece’s palm. Count on Gid to find a way to pack at least one gun, even if it was the smallest in his arsenal.

“Might want to be keepin’ that close. I got a feelin’.”

Hiding the ALP in his waistcoat, Reece raised an eyebrow. Gideon’s telltale feelings rarely missed their mark.

“Be careful, Reece,” Hayden added, pointedly avoiding looking where he had slipped the ALP. “If it looks like—” He nearly leaped right out of his clothes as a terrible crack of thunder cut him short.

Looking skyward, Gideon frowned. “Don’t recall hearin’ any storm warnin’s.”

A raindrop, fat and cold, caught Reece on the cheek. “Me neither.”

Even this far into the countryside, the foul weather foghorns in the city of Caldonia blared at unnecessary decibels. Maybe they’d been too immersed in their conversation to hear. Or maybe the foghorns were just one more thing that wasn’t quite right about these days.

VII

Glances

After Gideon and Hayden’s taillights had disappeared into the heavily dark night, Reece jogged around the mansion till he came to the private iron staircase climbing to meet the door of his personal chambers. He’d have to have a death wish before dragging his soaking wet self through Emathia with Abigail on the prowl, looking for something to bite after her spat with Liem.

His suite was sprawling and luxurious, neat bordering on the absurd. Its green-quilted canopy bed (three times the size of his bunk at The Owl) was made perfectly, no wrinkles, no crooked pillows. The rest of its furniture, nightstands and bookshelves, a wardrobe, desk, and leather armchair, had probably never seen a mote of dust. There was nothing of
Reece
to the room at all. He didn’t dare keep out the drawings Sophie had made him, or his borrowed book on Handling, or even his lucky riding gloves, because he’s made that mistake before, and it seemed the servants all had orders from Abigail to sequester anything that suggested he had any more personality than the rest of the Sheppards. Sighing, Reece pulled out Gid’s ALP and slid it between his two mattresses.

In the suite’s head, he dropped his clothes on the floor and closed himself in the water closet, letting the warm water from the spigot wash down over him. He nearly fell asleep right there, and would have if the thunder hadn’t kept rumbling the closet walls.

When he finally sank into bed and pulled a blanket over his still-wet head, his dreams were of playing Pantedan foxtail with Liem, who wouldn’t stop drinking his tea long enough to make a return pass with tail. Reece tried yanking the teacup out of Liem’s hands, and was disgusted when he slopped some on himself and saw that it wasn’t tea at all, but black, bubbly tar, like—

Disoriented, Reece leaned up out of his sleep to the sound of a scream, tangled in his blankets. He panted, listening with his heart in his throat. Another scream. Abigail! He rolled off the bed and thrust his hand between its mattresses, gripping the ALP in a hand slick with cold sweat. He’d never heard his mother scream like that before.

Abigail screamed a third time, a horrified wail, and Reece hurled open his bedroom door, sprinted down the hallway, and launched himself down the southern stairwell. On the landing of the second floor, he broke off into the dimly lit corridor he usually tried to avoid. Portraits of the duke’s ancestors lined the walls in identical golden frames, all with the duke’s probing chocolate eyes, painted with unsettling realism. Those eyes seemed to spring off the canvases, to Reece. They had always been another good reason to avoid visiting Liem’s rooms.

Liem’s rooms.

And suddenly, the rest of the hallway came into focus. A photon stand was tipped up against the wall, its shade sitting on it like a crooked hat. There was a smell in the air—like sulfur, like hot, smoky metal. Burstpowder? Had there been a gun fight?

Reece felt…asleep. Like he couldn’t make his mind catch up to what his eyes were taking in, and his thoughts were all shorting like a bad connection. Earlier today, Liem had said a time would come when the two of them might never see each other again. Reece hadn’t thought that would really happen, let alone happen so soon. And he would never have thought it would feel like…this.

In a daze, he walked down the corridor and turned into Liem’s open doorway.

Abigail stood in the middle of the suite in her nightdress, clutching her arms around herself. All around her lay the debris of Liem’s life. His clothes, torn out of his dresser, his books, ripped from his shelves, his desk drawers, dumped and left upside down. But there was no Liem.

Servants were digging through the mess or waiting on the weeping Abigail, bringing her tea and then a bottle of bourbon when the tea wasn’t strong enough. The world moved around Reece. He stood in the doorway and watched.

The soundproof shutters on this floor were all closed; that was the first thing to warn him that the growing rumbling he heard wasn’t thunder. The noise swelled for two or three seconds, and then like the crack of a giant bullwhip, broke over the mansion. Abigail dropped her glass of bourbon with a shriek and clutched her ears while the servants dove to their stomachs as if to hide from the terrible sound, but Reece ran for one of the windows and pushed back its shutters, sure he would see the aft burners of a ship disappearing into the hills. That deafening boom had come from an aircraft breaking the sound barrier. Whoever had taken Liem had had a ship close by, maybe even on the roof of the house. A small ship then, Nyad or Furies class.

“Reece,” Abigail’s tremulous voice called him away from the window. He turned. She looked like a specter, willowy and pale. “W-we must hail the duke. We must tell him. Liem. Oh, Liem.”

After a hesitant pause, Reece stepped over the refuse littering the floor and put a hand on her arm. Abigail sniffled and nodded as if this was a good thing for him to do, then, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, mumbled, “Who could have done this? The Palatine First. What are we going to do without a Palatine First? If Liem is dead…” As her eyes grew round, she lowered her handkerchief and looked at Reece thoughtfully. “…if Liem is dead,
you
are the Palatine First.”

Reece flinchingly drew back his hand. “If Liem was dead, they’d have left the body. That boom? That meant they were running, and fast.”

“Then hail Thaddy,” Abigail said. “Send him a log and tell him to come home.”

“Where is he?”

“Cronus Twelve. He’s speaking at the inauguration of their new prime minister. Nine days out, by Stream.”

“I—maybe you’d better do it.” Reece wasn’t scared, not of the duke. It just seemed a shame to break their spell of silence with this kind of news.

Abigail scowled at Reece as she snatched the bottle of bourbon from one of the cowering servants. She pointed a finger at him with the hand clutching the neck of the bottle, for all her superiority, looking more like a drunk than a duchess. “I don’t care about your petty feud and your…your big, stupid head! You will hail him, and you will do it now, or so help me, the box-dwelling, bottom-feeding Westerners in Caldonia’s filthiest brig will be your envy! Now stop staring and MOVE!”

The gulp was just to wet his throat. Not because he was nervous.

There was a log interface just down the hallway, in the guest room that had been Liem’s study for as long as Reece could remember. The room had suffered as many casualties as the last by way of gutted shelves and trampled books. Reece tiptoed around the chaos. It felt wrong to disturb it, disrespectful.

The log interface was a wooden box on the wall with a bulbous lens protruding from its top and a speaker mouth from its bottom. Easing himself into Liem’s desk chair, Reece flipped the switch on the side of the box that turned the dull blue light behind the lens on with a soft buzz. At the same time, part of the wall behind the desk folded aside like a stiff curtain to reveal a blinking screen.

He didn’t bother recording the moving pictures of himself that usually supplemented the audio half of the log. The first time he saw the duke again, he wanted to be in uniform so as to have something to present of himself, not in his nightclothes with his hair as messy as a jumble of underengine coil wires. And if that was a selfish thing to think at a time like this…it could be chalked up to the fact that Reece was still having difficulty believing any of this was real.