The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(58)

Numeen pushed himself up from his workbench, wiping his palms on his apron and then hanging the apron on a hook over the anvil. “Come on. If you don’t need to be back right away, you can come have a meal with my family.”

Out in the city, among its people. The idea of it called to me, pulsed in my blood like the sweet strains of a violin. “Are you sure?”

“Or you could go back to the palace and eat a rapidly cooling meal in your room alone,” Numeen said, his voice a grumble. “I made the offer. Take it or leave.”

“I’ll go,” I said before he could rescind.

He only nodded and went to the door. I hurried behind him and waited as he locked it. The air outside had the petrichor smell of rain after a long dry season. The eaves of the nearby buildings still dripped from the afternoon’s storm and lamplight reflected off the cobbles of the street. The dry season had broken in a spectacular way.

My spy construct hadn’t gone far. I could feel its presence, a tickle in the back of my mind. It followed us as we moved, as though expecting something. I pulled another nut from my sash pocket and offered it. The creature scampered down, took it and then climbed back to the rooftop to eat it.

“Don’t tell them who you are,” Numeen said as I fell into step behind him. “And don’t let that construct follow you inside.”

“I’m not stupid.”

He gave me a sidelong glance over his shoulder.

“I’m doing the best I can with what I have. Tell them I’m a visitor who frequents your shop.”

Numeen shook his head. “You are the daughter of a wealthy patron, but the steward of your household forgot to check your roof before the rains. Your dining hall is a wet ruin and since you were at my shop to pick up a lock and key; I invited you to dinner. Lin is a common enough name.”

“Very well.”

We picked our way through the streets of the city, farther from the palace walls and toward the ocean down below. The moon had risen, and it cast a silver glow across the water. I thought I could hear, even from here, the knock of ships against the docks, the creak of rope as docking lines were pulled taut.

I kept in silent step behind Numeen, my mind wandering. I’d been reading from the green-covered journal, trying to glean what useful information I could. Most of it was the dithering, excitable words of a young girl. Had I truly been so carefree at some point? Younger me had delighted in koi ponds, in mountain bamboo, in the goats she’d seen one sunny afternoon in the countryside, climbing a tree. Present-day me cared only for the keys and for establishing myself in the palace. “What did you know about my mother?” I said.

He took a moment to answer. I couldn’t read much from his back. A slight tilt to his head, which could have read as either confusion or digging deep into old memories. “I only know stories, rumors, gossip.”

“What sort of gossip?”

“Just that she was more clever than she was beautiful, a governor’s daughter and that it was an advantageous political marriage. But they said your father could do better if he’d chosen to. He was always too immersed in his books and his constructs. So handsome as to be beautiful, but wasted within the confines of his library. Keeping us safe, they said, so they admired him.”

“They. Who is ‘they’?”

“Most people,” Numeen said.

But not him. “And you?”

He shoved soot-blackened hands into his pockets. “How honest do you expect me to be? You are seeking the Emperor’s throne, to take over the Sukai Dynasty. You could become the most powerful woman in all the known islands, and you ask me to speak ill of your family?”

“Please.” There was so little I knew. I grasped the whispers from the servants the way one might grasp spiderwebs in their hands. I could not weave a tapestry from these threads. “I won’t get angry.”

“What are you hoping to gain?” he asked, rolling his shoulders in what could have been a half-hearted shrug.

Everything. Knowledge. A past. A connection to a father who treated me more as a pet than a daughter. I couldn’t tell him the truth about my memory. “I want to know what people say about my mother and father. What everyone says.”

“It’s not pretty, and it’s not romantic. If you’re looking for beautiful stories, I have none. From what I heard, your father didn’t like your mother much at first either. And then something changed, maybe a year into their marriage. I don’t know what it was; no one does. But after that, the Emperor heaped both affection and praise on her. He brought her into the city and paraded her about. So I suppose it was romantic in the end.”

They could have fallen in love – it happened often with these political marriages. At first both parties were indifferent, but familiarity bred comfort and comfort bred closeness and the end result of all this was love. But such a thing seemed too simple for Father. There was something about him, the way he disappeared into locked rooms, the way he dealt with both Bayan and me, that spoke of secrets even darker and deeper than Ilith’s lair.

“Nearly there,” Numeen said. His broad back was like a mountain in front of me. We turned into a narrow alleyway, and then he stopped to unlock the front door of a fairly large house. A rush of warm air hit my face as soon as it opened. The smells of cooking fish and steamed vegetables assailed my nostrils, making me remember I hadn’t eaten since late morning. I followed him inside and left my shoes and construct at the door.