House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(66)

“Felicita.”

I am on my hands and knees, gasping. Harun has gone down on one knee to help me up. I let him take my hand.

“What did you see?”

“I’m not sure.” Certainly, whatever is happening now, Jannik is sitting for no portrait. Fear eclipses me, makes my breathing ragged. It is real. It is real. “He’s definitely underground–”

“Isidro?”

I shake my head. “It was too fast – a blur.” I take a deep breath and pull my hand out of his. “I’m fine, thank you.” But I’m not, not really. Ghost pains linger across my chest. The scratches of a wild animal. “I need to move.”

“You?”

I take the little pouch from my pocket and hold it out, and say nothing. He will understand why I didn’t tell him what I decided to do if anything should have happened to Jannik. Or he won’t. It’s not my problem. He has a dinner to attend, after all.

Harun half snarls at me. “Was this your damn plan? To go roaring into House Eline like a tornado? This isn’t Pelimburg, Felicita. You kill a single person in his household, you’ll be tried and executed.”

“So what exactly would you suggest?”

“I cancel this farce of a dinner, and we both go in to collect our property, and leave.”

“Ah, and Garret it going to hand them over when we ask, consider it all a huge misunderstanding? How fortunate for us he’s so reasonable.”

“I’ll think of something.” Harun shakes his head. He knows that they will never listen to him, that Garret will never even admit that he has Isidro. He will laugh off our accusations, calls us insane. Jannik and Isidro will turn up months from now, disfigured and dead.

“Trust me,” I tell Harun. And I need his trust to bolster my own. I need to believe that I can do this. Oh, I see this going very well, Owen says. At least this time you can’t destroy half a city and murder your own flesh and blood. I suppose it would have been foolish to expect that the voice in my head would have any faith in me. I almost laugh. And then I take that voice and I lock it away. In that safe space that Jannik taught me to make, in my memory of my room in the Pelimburg tower, I turn Owen’s words into a silver hairpin with a jewelled green leaf. All my memories from those last days in Pelimburg are centred on that hairpin, and I remember every coil and tarnished whorl. I can almost feel the weight of it.

Keep quiet, I say.

Owen is silent, silver.

In my mental room is a little jewellery box filled with childish hairpins I outgrew years ago, and the new hairpin joins them. I lock it with a glass key, then crush the key under my heel. Specks of powder-fine glass are ground into the carpet, and lost.

There. Jannik would be proud.

I’m proud.

I can do this.

“Harun,” I say, newly calm, with a force inside me hot and strong as iron. “I leave in a moment.” I gather my velvet night cloak from the stand.

“It’s a foolish idea.”

“I am not walking in there unarmed.” My voice is firm. “And if it makes you feel better, I promise that I will not use it unless I’m pushed into the very worst of circumstances.” I think. I’m sure. After all, I’ve managed to go this long without any. I tuck the pouch carefully into a pocket hidden deep in the many folds of my dress skirt, clasp it tightly, then make myself let go. “I’ll bring them back,” I promise him.





THE LARK


Harun walks me to the small private coach I’ve hired and helps me in. “Take them to your apartments, and I’ll send Master Gillcrook with news when it’s safe to move.” He is doing what I’m doing – talking as if the deed is done, that it is going to be as simple as walking into a garden and twisting a leaf from a branch.

My coachman already knows what we plan to do. We have had to bring a number of the servants into our confidence, but Sallow has proven himself a man of worth many times, with a closed mouth and sharp mind.

“I don’t like that you’re putting yourself in danger, ma’am,” Sallow tells me when we draw up on a side street that leads to the close where House Eline’s manor commands the top of the circle. “I could go for you–”

“And if you were caught, Master Sallow? What then? I can talk my way out of a misunderstanding. You would lose your hands sooner than the sharif could shout, ‘Thief!’”

And I have a plan. Now that I have the scriv in hand, that old need is rising in me. It would be so easy. Not to kill anyone – but to hold the air silent. I could be a ghost in their house. There is a reason House Pelim is one of the four Great Houses. We are of the finest War-Singers in Oreyn, and even though I am untrained, I can do this little magic. I’ve done it before; only that time I was sneaking out of a house rather than into it.

I itch. I want the taste of scriv in the back of my throat, the subtle and vicious power that comes with it to flow through me.

The last time I took scriv, I betrayed an entire city.

If so, let this be the time I make up for it. Back then I could save no one, it seems, but me. This time will be different.

The knot in the black ribbon is tight. Cursing under my breath, I pick at it with my nails in the darkness before finally one edge of the ribbon works loose enough for me to pinch it between index and thumb fingernail. The pouch opens, spilling the sharp scent of scriv into the night air, perfuming it with the headiness of bitter-citrus groves.