Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(51)

“I’ll take the leads,” Claire said when they cleared the quarter’s edge. “You can sleep.”

The offer confused Matt. He had not considered letting someone else drive his cart, because he never had someone else to do so. Navigating the morning with this girl beside him made his whole routine, the road and the cart and the mist, seem strange. “I can’t sleep once I’m awake,” he said. That sounded like a riddle told by those head-shaved kids who studied with the Shining Empire sages down on Bleeker, so he tried again. “I mean, I don’t nap.”

“I’m the same,” she said. “I asked because it’s boring to sit here with nothing to do.”

The golem trudged through the muck of unswept streets.

“You’ve worked golems before?”

“We have one.”

“We’ll switch off. No sense just one of us being bored.”

She accepted the leads. Her hand wasn’t so steady as Matt’s. She took corners harder and stopped faster, and hummed tunelessly as she drove, notes crushed and skewed and not at all like her sister’s song. But she watched the road. Donna always made fun of Matt for his caution with the leads. Came from the business: eggs were strong, but he didn’t like to jostle them. A carton broken was a carton lost.

“You drive often?”

She let the wheels roll the question under and golem feet trample it. When he thought it crushed to death, she spoke. “I drive most days. Dad doesn’t tend to wake this early. When he’s sick, I go. When he isn’t, I pretend I’m sleeping.”

When she said “sick,” he heard hung over, and remembered Corbin’s foul look in the stalls of a morning. “It’s good of you to take care of him.”

“I take care of the girls.”

He almost asked what she meant by that, by not including herself with her sisters, but he had an idea. “It’s not fair that you have to do so much.”

“How’s your head?”

He didn’t understand the question. She touched her own left temple; he mimicked her, and felt the bandage there and the scab beneath. It was a dull ache.

City gave ground to country as grudgingly as the night surrendered to dawn. Trees replaced sidewalks, grasses invaded the gaps between buildings. The sky crushed houses down to soil. They made good time thanks to Claire’s driving. Fields opened, with dirt roads winding into them, and they followed those roads, collecting from her suppliers and his. “Didn’t know you had a girl,” Cummings said when Matt picked up his eggs.

“I don’t,” Matt said. “Just doing a favor for—” A friend? Was Rafferty a friend? Was he doing this for him? “Just doing a favor.”

Cummings came from people who didn’t talk much and spoke mostly with their faces: brows raised, lips pursed, cheeks hollowed, breath drawn through the nose. He spit into the dirt. “Mighty fine. Mrs. Cummings made more coffee. You want some?”

“Could use some, thank you, Samuel.”

Cummings brought two mugs. “Bring ’em back tomorrow is all.”

“Thank you,” he said, and she said to him when he brought the mugs to her. The coffee wasn’t as good as Claire’s, but it passed.





26

The runner from the Church of Kos found Tara an hour and a half later. She’d mainlined two more cups of coffee-adjacent liquid to stop the glyphs from squirming beneath her knife as she carved them. The cinnabar was the good stuff after all. Once Tara was in motion, she found the chill invigorating.

Occasionally as she worked she added up the fees she would have billed for this job in private practice—like humming, only with regret instead of music. She could be off with Ms. Kevarian in the Archipelago, jetting from case to case rather than miring herself in local politics. Certainly she’d have made more progress on her debt. But then who would have been left to help these people? Or deal with Gavriel Jones?

Or to swear a blue streak when she opened the sealed scroll the runner brought her and read: representatives from Grossman and Mime arrived to meet with Cardinals, come at earliest convenience?

Cat spun around and dropped into a fighting crouch when Tara stormed onto the deck. “What the hells is going on?” She had to sprint to catch Tara.

“I’m done downstairs,” she said, and tossed Cat a scroll. “Get Raz’s signature; this will wake them when the time’s right. Meanwhile, make sure no one goes inside, and if anyone does, don’t let them touch anything. I have to leave.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll explain later.” She ran down the gangplank to the docks, past the Blacksuit cordon into a haze of spice and silk and shouted sales pitches. A kid tried to pick her pocket but she caught her wrist and let her go. Past the market, she raised one hand and swore to pass the time until a cab arrived.

Abelard met her at the sanctum doors. He paced outside the front steps, leaving little holes in the gravel when he turned. Just like old times.

“Bede’s meeting the Craftswomen now,” he said. “They arrived an hour ago. Took a red-eye from Dresediel Lex, they said. Two of them. I didn’t get their cards. They just showed up and demanded to speak with the Cardinals. The senior’s a woman named Ramp.”

He led her through the forechamber with its stained glass and pointed arches and vaulted columns and kneeling faithful. No amount of people gathered here could possibly make the place feel full, but the pews were packed, and even side shrines occupied. Abelard led her at a jog down a hall so narrow it seemed more like a fissure in rock than a space built for humans. “Madeline Ramp?”