Page 13 of Honey Cut
The archbishop, I think. My first kill. Rome.
So this isn’t about Ys?
I’d thought I’d heard him wrong, that I hadn’t understood the word he’d actually said. When I’d returned to my seedy, anonymous hotel room on the outskirts of the city, I’d searched the wordYson the web, spelling it every way I could think of.Ees. Is. Ies.
The only thing that came up was a long-ago legend about a French city that flooded after a deceitful princess opened the dikes. Nothing that an archbishop would mention in his last moments of consciousness.
Nothing that would matter to Mark or his sister now.
Ys started the game.
One thing is certain to me, and that is that Mark must have killed Lackland and that Melody suspects as much. Andwhyhe killed him has to do with a dead husband who I hadn’t known existed until now.
Does Tristan know? About this dead husband? And about what Mark did while they were in Singapore?
“Ah, my child. There you are,” says a warm, Irish-inflected voice, and I turn to see my uncle Mortimer striding toward me, his scarlet-trimmed black simar moving around his feet. An overwhelming sense of relief swells in my chest as he gives me one of his wide, gap-toothed smiles. His mismatched blue and green eyes are sparkling and kind. “Is everything okay?”
I dip my head, almost a nod. “Can we talk?” I ask him. I know better than to peer wildly around, than to look like we’re having anything other than a sweet familial moment.
“Walk with me,” he says, and he laces my arm through his, tucking my hand in the crook of his elbow and patting it while we walk. I am not a tall woman, but my uncle is shorter than me by an inch, and so our pace is evenly matched as we take the stairs down from the terrace to a covered balcony looking out toward Midtown.
Once we’re alone, I tell him everything I’ve just heard, about Lackland’s death, Mark’s dead husband, and Ys. I bring up what the archbishop said to me the day I killed him, in case Mortimer had forgotten that detail—a detail that, at the time, he’d told me to dismiss as the rantings of a poisoned sinner.
My uncle puts his hands on the railing, a frown on his face. He’s wearing his pectoral cross, a simple silver one, in keeping with the current pope’s penchant for austerity, and it reveals the steady rhythm of his breath while he thinks.
This exact moment is why the pope kept my uncle in his role after he was elected; it was why the pope’s predecessor lifted my uncle into his position in the Curia in the first place. His calm, his brilliance. His ability to sift through information and find the hidden threads linking it all together without letting emotions interfere.
“Ys is a myth,” my uncle finally says.
I stand with my own hands at the railing, but I flex and lift and gesture as I speak, so that it seems like we’re talking about something to do with the city or with my dress or with the party upstairs. The Laurence bride sharing all her plans with her beloved uncle. “I know it’s a myth,” I say. “That’s why it makes no sense. A drowned city off the coast of Brittany?—”
“No,” my uncle says. “There is a different myth.” He looks at me. “That day in Rome, I didn’t tell you the truth about Ys. The entire truth, at least.”
“Why?” I ask, utterly bewildered.
Saints are supposed to know everything. It’s ourjobto know everything.
He shrugs, a simple, humble gesture. “I hoped I was wrong. I hoped you’d heard incorrectly or that Stitt had been delusional in his final minutes. The alternative was too outlandish—and dangerous—to consider.”
“Dangerous,” I echo. “What exactly is this different myth, then?”
“I suppose it’s less than a myth, if we’re being specific. Ys is a whisper, around for a few decades now. A secret society—or an organization, if you’d like—comprised of politicians and arms dealers and whatever other influential people are convenient to accuse at the time.”
“We’d know about it if it were real, though,” I point out. “There’s almost nothing you don’t know.”
My uncle slowly twirls the ring on his thumb, his gaze out onto the city. “Almost,” he agrees. “Almost nothing.”
I think about this. “You want me to find out what Mark knows about Ys?”
“If the information is anywhere, it’s in his head and in the server room at Lyonesse.”
The server room. I’ve crept into armed compounds, onto private jets, and inside the Vatican itself, but the vault of Lyonesse would be a challenge even for me.
“I’ll do my best,” I say finally.
“You have more tools at your disposal than only theft,” my uncle reminds me.
“Something tells me it would be harder to pry information out of Mark than his underground server room.”
