StarCrossed. Part 36

LIAR'S MOON

PART I.

KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN.

CHAPTER ONE.

I'd have gotten away if that little guard hadn't cracked me in the eye. His elbow hit me sharp against my cheekbone and sent me reeling. I stumbled backward, blinded, straight into the waiting arms of his partner. The captain.

An arm clamped around my neck and I couldn't pull away. Squirming in his grip, I kicked out and promptly had my legs seized by the little one and a third man, who hoisted me high between them. One of them whipped out a rope and had my feet tied together before I had a chance to struggle. I opened my mouth to scream, and the captain shoved a filthy rag in my mouth. I gagged, and the men laughed.

"Got her. Easy night's work. Let's get our goods delivered and get home to our wives." The captain twisted hard on my arms until my whole body shrieked with pain. All I could see was his leering face, swimming above me as he swung me easily over his shoulder. I fought back nausea as we bounced along; the last thing I needed was to choke to death on my own vomit before I managed to learn what was happening to me.

It had been a normal night, more or less. I'd dodged the curfew and set up my patch on the riverfront, near some of the seedier taverns belching out their night's clientele of drunken merchants' sons and slumming n.o.bs. Their purses were emptier this late at night, but pickings were easier with them well lubricated. n.o.body would get rich off scrum like that, but I couldn't afford to be picky these days.

Shadows gathered beneath the unlit flamboys; the city had stopped paying to light our less prosperous neighborhoods. I was settling into the darkness when three dark figures melted out of the alley and strolled past me, the wrong direction to have come from one of the bars.

I heard a voice say, "That's her," and didn't even think to be nervous.

Until the blackjack hit me squarely in the back and sent me facedown into the gutter. For a moment I was too stunned to move, just lay there, breathless, the voice echoing in my brain, all wrong. That's her. That's her. Not him - and I was dressed in men's clothes, filthy trunk hose with a ridiculous codpiece, my hair tucked up in an oversized cap. There was nothing feminine about me. Oh, h.e.l.ls.

I scrambled to my feet and spun around. Three of them, in red uniforms. This was not a fight I could win. Still, I dodged and swung out hard, catching the middle guy in the gut. I shoved him into the biggest one, the one with the gold badge on his chest and the blackjack swinging casually from his meaty fist. I turned to run - and that's when the little one came out of nowhere and clipped me in the eye.

We trotted along at a pretty good pace, but I couldn't track our location, not with the world lurching past upside down. Gray cobbles, dark pinkish cobbles, gray again - oh, very useful. I craned my neck to see if I could recognize the footings of any buildings and nearly pa.s.sed out from dizziness.

"Keep your head down, thief." And as if I needed help with that, a stinking hand shoved me hard in the face.

"Easy there. We don't get paid extra for bruises."

For some reason, that sounded notable, but the blood rushing through my brain made it hard to focus. How had they found me? Why? I thought I'd been careful, but maybe they'd finally tracked me down, linked me to the rebels.

But the Night Watch didn't bother Sarists and magic users. Even through the roar of blood in my head, something about this didn't make sense.

The captain came to an abrupt stop, swinging me partly around as he turned. I caught a glimpse of pale stone wall, nearly white in the waning moonslight, and an impossibly tidy flagstone walkway, and I felt every aching muscle in my body tighten.

This wasn't the Cages, the city gaol. And, of all the stupidity - these weren't Watchmen. Red-and-gold livery meant royal guards, and the high white wall topped with its iron spikes and shattered gla.s.s was the Keep. The king's prisons.

"Mmmph!" I struggled then, flailing at the captain with my feet and bound hands.

"That's enough of that," one of the others said, and clapped me hard on the side of the head. The captain shucked me off his shoulder and plucked out the gag, and I stood, wavering, just inside the ironbound gatehouse of the Keep. A bristly, one-eyed guard pawed at me, turning my head to look under my chin, patting at my legs and chest. For weapons, I hoped. His grimy fingers lingered too long against my throat, and I slapped his hands away with my bound ones.

"Boy's a fighter, then," the guard said. "He'll be popular with them n.o.bs."

Well, at least my disguise had worked on somebody.

"What is this?" I demanded. "Why are you arresting me?" Though kidnapping might have been more accurate.

The guard shrugged and flipped through a battered ledger book. "Take it up with the magistrate at your trial date."

"No!" My voice verged on panic. "Let me go - I haven't done anything!"

But the guard had turned away to the rear of the gatehouse, where he now worked a ma.s.sive hand-crank set into the stone wall. From above came an unG.o.dly screech and clank of metal on wood; at our feet, the splash and ripple of ink-dark water. The Keep sat on an island in the middle of the Llyd Tsairn, the Big Silver river, a bowshot from the king's royal palace. The only access was by way of a drawbridge mounted on the opposite bank and operated from the guardhouse. Or on the coroner's barge, sailing out from the executioner's block.

The red guards who'd nabbed me lingered outside the gatehouse, as the captain emptied out a purse among his fellows. I frowned, but the bridge slammed down with a shudder that shook the whole gatehouse and drew my attention elsewhere. The maw of the Keep doorway across the river gaped black in the distance as two more guards in royal livery stepped onto the bridge, an iron chain swinging between them. Smoky torches made long shadows on the narrow wooden planks. The gatekeeper hauled up the gate and gave me a little nudge toward the landing.

"Get on, then, boy," he said. "No way out now but over." The iron bars crashed down behind me once again. I felt cold all through. Everyone knew the trial was a fairy tale; people thrown to the Keep waited months or years for a magistrate's appearance that might never come. The guards crossed over the river in practiced, easy strides, and just when I'd more or less decided to take my chances with the Big Silver - not that I could swim with my hands bound - they shoved me before them onto the narrow, railing-less bridge.

I cast one last glance at the water behind me as they pulled me through the prison gates.

"That's two marks," the guard at the gate said to me. They charged for everything in the gaols, including, it seemed, the privilege to be dragged off to your cell.

I lifted my chin and glared at him. "Bite me," I said, and another heavy fist clapped into my head.

They led me through a twisting knot of noisy corridors obviously designed to upset one's sense of direction. But I kept my eyes open, counting the turns and staircases and committing them to memory. After a long, spiral stair winding up the core of the tower, the guards let me out onto the top floor of the Keep. Sallow torchlight flickered wanly, illuminating a long, gloomy pa.s.sage lined with st.u.r.dy, ironbound doors, one tiny, barred window set high in the wall at the very end letting in the ghost of the moonslight.

My guard stopped before a cell and banged on the door. "Your lordship," he called, and I could hear the sneer in his voice, "someone's sent you a present. Quite a pretty lad this time." A finger stroked along my ear, and it took all my restraint not to bite him. He heaved the door open, and I stumbled forward, pitching headlong into the cell and landing hard on my knees. The door clanged shut behind me. Scuffling through the filthy rushes, I got my back against a wall and set about trying to wriggle out of my bonds.

"d.a.m.n it." I heard a soft voice from the dark recesses of the cell. "This stopped being amusing several days ago." Another sound - quick and light, a flint striking - and the cell wavered into a faint, sickly glow. I blinked and reached instinctively for any weapon, but they'd taken my knife and there wasn't anything else at hand.

"Stop right there," I said, but I didn't sound terribly convincing.

"Look, I'm not going to hurt you," said a tired voice, and my cell mate stepped forward, bending low over me. "They'll get tired of the game eventually and move you down a level, so you'd better enjoy yourself while you're up here. There's fresh water - well, relatively fresh, anyway - on the table."

I stayed where I was, my thoughts tumbling. My companion - your lordship, my guard had called him; a n.o.b, maybe? - crouched before me. He didn't look much like a n.o.b, in his torn shirt and no doublet, with unshaven cheeks and a fading bruise under one eye, but he held out his hand.

My head pounded brutally, and I felt disoriented. In my confusion, my cell mate looked almost familiar.

"That's a nasty gash," he said, reaching for my face. I knocked his grubby hand away. "Easy," he said. "I won't hurt you, but you need to relax so I can see what they've done to you. You must have put up quite a fight; they don't usually come in quite so . . . used up. Here, sit up into the light."

Warily I let him draw me forward to a plain frame table and benches in the middle of the cell. Something about the smooth curve of his jaw, the bend of his neck as he leaned over me . . . I winced, trying to shake my head.

"What's your name?" he said.

I paused, considering. Who should I be this time? Maybe I could play this - and my wealthy cell mate - to my advantage. Boy or girl? Would tears help? I sat forward and pulled off my hat, letting my braided hair, coiled round my head, show I was a girl.

"I don't believe it." My companion held up the candle. "Am I delirious?"

"Not unless we both are," I said. Because I was looking into the haunted eyes of Durrel Decath, a young man who'd once saved my life.

CHAPTER TWO.

"Celyn?" Durrel sounded tentative, incredulous. He'd known me only by that name, a silly last-minute alias I'd concocted on the spot (and then had to live with) last fall, when he'd whisked me aboard a boatload of his n.o.b friends and gotten me out of the city after I'd run afoul of Greenmen during a robbery that had ended badly. A friend had died on that job - more than a friend - and I was still making up for it, months later.

I hadn't thought to meet the scion of the House of Decath ever again. Certainly not under such circ.u.mstances. Though given the twisted humor of the G.o.ds, why was I surprised?

"Milord," I said, cautious. He'd changed since I'd seen him last, grown thin and ragged and almost unrecognizable. "What's going on? What are you doing here?"

"I don't know," Durrel said. "This is very odd. You're injured." I touched my face, which was streaked with blood from the cut under my eye. "Let's get you cleaned up, at least."

"I don't -"

"Hist." He helped me untie the ropes on my wrists and ankles, then dabbed at my cheek with a rag dipped in water, wincing as he looked at me. "This should have st.i.tches," he said.

"Stop. Will you explain? Why are you in prison? Why am I in your cell?" The rising weirdness put me on edge. The guard saying, "That's her," the money changing hands at the prison gates, getting dumped in a cell with a n.o.bleman I almost knew . . . Fickle Tiboran, G.o.d of thieves and liars, might love coincidence, but I was suspicious.

Durrel dropped the rag on the table. He looked older than I remembered; he was twenty-one, but there had been something boyish about him that was gone now. "Unfortunately I'm afraid I can't answer the last question. I'm just as perplexed to see you." He held my gaze steady. "But in regard to your other question, they think I murdered my wife."

I sat back, stunned. When I'd left him last fall, he was heading off to be wed, in an arranged marriage to one Talth Ceid, a woman much older than he was. The Ceid had been ruthless in their conquest of Gerse's waterfronts a hundred years before, while the Decath were nothing if not respectable. Durrel's marriage linked one of the city's most powerful merchant families with one of its oldest n.o.ble houses, and it had all seemed like a completely sensible match for rich folk.

Still, I'd known Durrel wasn't exactly happy about it; he had, in fact, fled the betrothal ceremony in a drunken escapade, sailing out of the city with his cousin and two other n.o.bs. It was that debauched party I had blundered into, those sauced-up young n.o.bles who'd given me refuge. A few months later, I'd heard the marriage had gone through, and though it was clearly never going to be a love match, it hadn't seemed likely to end in murder.

Durrel saw the expression on my face and gave an attempt at a wan smile. "It surprised me too." He wrung out the rag and wet it again in cleaner water.

"Let me do that," I said impatiently, tugging it out of his hands. "You just talk." I held the cloth hard against my throbbing cheekbone.

He stood up and paced into the shadows, disappearing for a moment. "It's difficult to explain," he said. "Even now I hardly believe it's happening. One moment I'm a married man, and the next I'm in here, a murderer."

"Tell me what happened," I said gently, because there was something wrong here beyond the obvious.

"She was poisoned. A - a fortnight ago, I think. What day is it?" He pushed his unkempt hair from his forehead. "It seemed like suicide, at first, but I didn't believe it. I found her, the next morning -" He faltered, taking a swig of his water like he wished it was something else. "It wasn't pretty. I didn't know what to do. I sent for my father and the surgeon, but it was too late. The coroner identified the poison as something called Tincture of the Moon."

"I've heard of that," I said. "It's rare. Expensive. Hard to distill, harder still to get hold of." They said you went numb and cold, bit by bit, until the poison reached your heart - unable to speak, unable to move, until you drowned in your own blood. Hours of silent agony. "It wouldn't be anybody's first choice for suicide." That was only half the story, though. "But why you? How could anyone think you'd killed somebody?"

"Isn't it always the husband?" A twisted smile tried to form itself on his lips, but died prematurely. "They found a vial of the tincture in my rooms. But it wasn't mine -" He turned back. "They're going to execute me, Celyn."

A chill washed through me. My knowledge of n.o.b murder trials was only sketchy; commoners were liable to be summarily executed as soon as the Watch reviewed the evidence. More than one bar fight had ended when the instigators were strung up on makeshift gibbets outside the tavern door. But for someone of Lord Durrel's stature, and a victim as important as a member of the House of Ceid, they'd probably be a little more careful. n.o.blemen accused of crimes were tried before the king, in royal courts - but the king was ill, maybe dying, and all royal courts had been suspended because of the war.

Still, the biggest risk I could see came not from the king's justice, but the Ceid's. Everyone in Gerse knew what they were capable of, though n.o.bs and officials turned blind eyes. Foe, friend, family - it didn't matter, if you crossed the Ceid. A blade in the back, a pistol shot to that downy head; Durrel looked scared, and he had reason to be.

"I didn't do it," Durrel said.

I glanced up into his shadowed face. "Of course you didn't," I said. "You couldn't have killed anybody. I don't believe it."

Durrel looked hard at me for a moment, then everything in him seemed to slump. "Thank you," he breathed. "I don't think I realized how badly I needed to hear that."

"You can spare your grat.i.tude." I tried to say it lightly. "Your cell mate's word probably doesn't carry a lot of weight."

"It does with me," he said, and there was something low and urgent and desperate in his expression. I pulled away and left the table, crossing the cell and peering into corners, tapping at the edges of the door, kicking aside the filthy rushes with my toe.

"Keep talking," I said, giving the lock on the door my attention. Of all the idiotic times to leave my lock picks at home. "Why did you have the poison?"

"I didn't. I don't know why they found it in my quarters. I have no idea how it got there. What are you doing?"

"Looking for a way out." The lock on the door was solid and huge, but that just meant the tumblers inside were bigger and easier to reach. Of course, that left the problem of what to do once the cell door was open.

"We're locked in a cell at Bryn Tsairn Prison. There's no way out."

"Ha," I said. "You've never been locked up with me before." Although, strictly speaking, I'd never actually escaped from a prison cell; the two previous times I'd been arrested, my business a.s.sociates had bailed me out. I grabbed the bars on the cell door's little window and hauled myself up to peer into the hallway. One lonely torch burned out of sight, splashing ominous shadows on the walls and ceiling.

"Hey." Durrel's voice came gently through the stifling darkness. I dropped back to the ground and gave the locked door one last tug. "Easy, Celyn. We're not going anywhere, at least until morning. And you need to rest, with those injuries. Come back to the fire and sit down."

"The fire?" I tried to scowl, but my face hurt too much.

"The candle, then." He held out his hand, creased with prison dirt though it was, and I let him lead me back to the table. I sat obediently, but my mind was still turning over the problem of the lock and an escape.

"Talk to me," he said. "Tell me what you've been doing since I saw you last. I thought you were going to stay out of trouble."

That startled a laugh out of me. "I try, milord. Can I help it if trouble has other plans? And besides, who sent me into the nest of Sarist rebels?"

"Ouch!" Durrel's hand flew to his tattered shirt, as if I'd wounded him. "How was I to know my aunt was going to start a war? And from what I hear, you were not wholly blameless in that affair. I looked for you," he added, sobering. "Meri told me you came back to the city, but I didn't know how to find you."

"I -" I faltered. I never knew what to say about last winter, about the Nemair, the family who took me in and sheltered me from the Inquisition; about witnessing the start of the civil war that now spread through Llyvraneth like flames through a library; about Prince Wierolf, and Meri, and all the others. About not wanting to be found again. "I don't know what you heard, but -"

"You were a hero," he said. "You saved Meri's life. You saved the prince." He leaned closer, and there was a strange, earnest spark in his eyes. "Is that why you're in here? Something to do with - the rebellion?"

Durrel mouthed those last words, and I scowled, considering. Was it possible? I'd been on the wrong side at the Siege of Bryn Shaer; perhaps the king was rounding up everyone with any tenuous Sarist connections, as he'd done before. And mine were rather more than tenuous, or at least they had been.

"I thought so, but it doesn't feel right," I said. "They grabbed me off the street in the middle of the night. Traitors to the Crown are usually arrested with a little more ceremony, so everyone can quake in fear of the king's wrath. This feels more like Greenmen - but these guys weren't Greenmen."

"And even if you were arrested for your ties to the rebels, it's highly improbable for you to end up in here with me. We're not so overcrowded at Bryn Tsairn that we need to double up on accommodations."

He was right. There was something else here, something lower and stranger than royal politics. "Somebody apparently paid a fair coin for the privilege of sending you a thief," I said. "The question is who, and why? That guard said somebody sent you a present. What did he mean?"