Page 138 of The Ragpicker King
Mariam shakes her head. Themagalat her throat glitters, and Aron realizes belatedly what it means: It had been Lin’s. But Lin is no longer Ashkar, and cannot wear it, so Mariam will wear it for her. He remembers the dazed time after Asher’s exile, how he had wanted to cling onto the things Asher had owned—his books, his papers, a green shirt that had matched his eyes.
“I know that isn’t true,” Mariam says. “I saw the way you looked at Lin when she healed me. I know that you saw the Goddess in that moment.”
He stares at her. It is not what he expected her to say—perhaps because seeing the Goddess seems to him such a private and personal thing. Perhaps because it is true.
“I saw her, too.” Mariam raises her chin. “It may be that because we are a people who have been so long waiting, you have forgotten that your purpose is not to be a politician. Not to keep the Maharam happy and our people complacent. Your purpose is to help mend the world by protecting the Goddess when she returns. And if you fail here, you will render purposeless not only your own life, but also the life of every Exilarch who comes after you.” Mariam folds her arms over her chest. “So what are you going to do?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Kel woke up in the Trick.
He didn’t realize where he was immediately. He was lying on a hard surface, he knew that much. His head ached and the shadows seemed to crisscross each other at strange angles. For a hallucinatory moment he imagined that this was a dream in which he was locked in a cage, iron bars all around him.
Slowly he sat up. His stomach lurched, bile rising in the back of his throat. He sucked in a gasp of stale air, gazing around him: Bare stone floor. A straw-tick mattress and ragged blanket. A cheap clay pitcher. Three stone walls rose all around him, a gap of light high above—a barred window, through which moonlight spilled. A ceramic pot on the floor, for obvious purposes. And instead of a fourth stone wall, bars ranged from floor to ceiling. They seemed to glow with a dull light.
Kel rolled onto his knees. He did not think he could stand up without vomiting, so he crawled across the floor until he reached the bars. He wrapped his right hand around one, felt the faint vibration pass through his palm, like static electricity.
Sunderglass.
He was inLa Trecherie.The Trick. Treason Tower. Its variousnames rolled through his mind like carriage wheels carving bloody tracks, and he barely managed to crawl to the chamber pot before he was sick in it. He coughed and spat, rocking back on his heels, bitterness flooding his mouth.
Conor.It was coming back to him now, in disjointed pieces. Anjelica’s room in the Castel Pichon. The Castelguards bursting in. Falconet. The look on Conor’s face as Falconet presented his evidence, painting Kel as a murderer, a liar, a traitor.
Kel crawled over to the straw-tick mattress and rolled onto it, seizing the pitcher. Thank the Gods, it was nearly full of dusty water. He drank down half of it before realizing he had no idea when it would be refilled. Reluctantly, he set it down.
First, assess the extent of your injuries,Jolivet had always said. So, in the dim light of the window, Kel set about examining himself. There was a knot at the back of his head where he’d been hit, still sticky with blood. He was still wearing the same clothes he’d come to the Little Palace in, though there were tears in them now, some edged with blood. He imagined he’d been dragged across the grounds while unconscious, and this was the result.
Otherwise, he was unhurt. He wondered how long he had lain here. Was it still the same night, or had he been unconscious for a full day? The thought made him feel utterly disoriented, as if he had become unmoored in time. Then again, now that he was a prisoner, it no longer mattered what hour it was, or what day. It was not as if you had appointments to keep—save the last appointment of them all, the one that all men and women kept in the end.
It was as if he could see the Dark Guide and the gray doorway before him. Kel closed his eyes, but that was hardly better. Printed against the back of them was that look on Conor’s face in the Castel Pichon. The look of one who had been dealt a mortal injury. A child abandoned in the dark.
Stop,he told himself. There was no point sitting here havingfeelingsabout what had happened, what Falconet had done. The ache in his head was starting to recede a little, and he could think.Ask questions,he thought.Imagine you are standing in front of the Ragpicker King, piecing together the bits of a mystery, finding the puzzle piece that fits the gap in the picture.
The first piece. That note. The Ragpicker King had not written it. He had been tricked into going to the Little Palace by someone who had known Anjelica was leaving. Someone who had planned what would happen if he was there when she did.
The obvious answer was Falconet. Someone had also taken his clothes, his amulet, and hidden them in the Little Palace so it would look as if Kel were fleeing from Castellane. He thought of the amulet glittering in Joss’s grasp, something so intimate, so personal to Kel and to Conor, used in such a way.
Falconet had pretended well. Pretended that he did not know Kel was not Kel Anjuman, but Kel Saren, Sword Catcher. Kel wondered how long he had known. When had Elsabet told him? How long had he been in league with Malgasi, and when had he decided he needed to rid himself of Kel—the person who was uncovering the truth about the conspiracy, circling ever closer to Falconet’s name?
He thought of Joss in the carriage by the canals.Didn’t you talk to him at the Solstice Ball, Con? Did he ask you for any royal favors—paying off gambling debts, doing away with an enemy or two?
And Conor, replying,I don’t think I spoke with him at all. He seemed busy keeping Esteve away from Beatris.
Falconet shrugging it off.Well, I was very drunk. I must have misremembered.
But he had not misremembered anything. He’d been confirming for himself that the Conor at the Solstice Ball was Kel. Perhaps confirming what Elsabet Belmany had told him: Kel Saren can become Conor anytime he likes. He’s probably fooled you a dozen times. Joss was vain; he would have hated that. And he would have wanted to test anything Belmany told him for himself. Such a small mistake for Conor to make; such consequences.
Kel passed a shaking hand across his face. There was more. Falconet had been the one to tell them about Cabrol’s death.
Kel’s head spun. Ciprian had approached Kel at the ball, wanting to unburden his soul about the conspiracy. Falconet had discovered it was Kel that Cabrol had talked to, not Conor. And that Cabrol, desperate to shift blame, was a liability. Perhaps he had even found out about Kel’s meeting with Ciprian at the Caravel. Either way, both Kel and Ciprian had been revealed to be threats to the conspiracy. And a day later, Ciprian was dead and Kel was in the Trick.
Kel almost had to admire the work, it was so neatly done. At the same time, he wanted nothing more than to cut Falconet into small pieces and distribute them around the Maze. He sank back onto the prickly mattress, staring into the dark. All his realizations, he thought bleakly, had come too late. He could not warn Conor. He could not reach the Ragpicker King.My friends have no idea where I am, or that anything has happened to me. Gods, what do I do?
Lin woke to daylight streaming across the foot of her bed. No, not her bed. It wasabed, the shape and feel of it unfamiliar. Was she in the Etse Kebeth, or a patient’s house?
She blinked and sat up. She felt dizzy and tried to breathe carefully as the world swung around her. There was dust in the air, bright motes dancing in the light that came from high windows. As everything stopped spinning, she realized she was in a strange room, bare save for a desk, a trunk at the foot of the bed, and the bed itself.
The walls were smooth and dark.The Black Mansion,she thought.I’m in the Black Mansion.She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, her head pounding, an ache like a wound behind her eyes. She rested her face in her hands for a moment, struggling to remember the last thing that had happened.The Shulamat,she recalled. Images began to filter back into her consciousness. Mariam,lying with her hands crossed over her chest. The elders surrounding her, unspeaking, staring. The look on Aron’s face. Mayesh, his expression bleak. Her mind spinning with visions of words, with shining equations. She recalled the feeling of power flooding out of her like a river, her last desperate attempt to control it, to form it into a weapon that might burn away the threatening shadows that had haunted her dreams.
