An Illusion of Thieves Read online

  In an hour of desperate boldness, I gambled half of our remaining silver to buy a small, ramshackle storehouse on the Ring Road, a few houses down from the Duck’s Bone tavern, and just around the corner from our house. Neri cleaned it, shored up the roof, and moved my shelves and a new writing desk in. Now people could find me. Perhaps even a few shopkeepers or artisans from the Asylum Ring, those who would never venture down a Beggars Ring alley, would patronize a reputable scribe in a respectable shop on the main thoroughfare.

  To earn another month of sword training from Placidio, Neri built a shelf of ten locking boxes that people could rent from us, using them to exchange private messages or parcels with family or business partners. He cut a hole in the front wall for the boxes and built their own little roof to keep the rain off, so they could be accessed when I was not in the shop. We promised discretion and security with Neri to guard the boxes, and I no longer had to host writing clients in my bedchamber. The boxes were so popular, he added a second shelf of ten more.

  I carved a small lettered plaque that read:

  L’SCRITTÓRE

  COPYING, LETTERS,

  CONFIDENTIAL MESSAGE EXCHANGE

  My father had used the old designation for a scribe. It seemed fitting I do it, too, leaving off the appellation virgine that Notary Renzo had given me so many months ago. I knew my business now.

  I hoped. Copper solets seemed to flow through our fingers and vanish before they could join the fourteen orphaned silver coins remaining in Sandro’s purse.

  * * *

  One morning Neri burst through the door only an hour after he’d left. He planted himself in front of my writing desk like a lawyer before a magistrate. “Placidio had a last-minute summons, so no lessons today.”

  “Mmm.” I was in the middle of a rare contract from Lawyer Garibaldi, trying to unravel the mysteries of his scratched notes, crossed-out phrases, and arrowed lines. The more the man trusted me, the less finished the documents he gave me to copy, and in thin times I wasn’t going to complain.

  After a moment, I glanced up. Neri hadn’t moved. His expression was solemn, but his flushed cheeks said he’d either run all the way from the wool house, or something more exciting than canceled lessons had happened. Unworthy visions of stolen rubies or one of his feminine admirers announcing that we would have a new mouth to feed pummeled my aching head.

  “What have you done, Neri?”

  A grin of purest joy illuminated Neri’s face. One would think the sun had rolled into the door to visit. “I got work.”

  Though I could scarce believe the news, I could not but share his delight. “Doing what? Where?”

  “Fesci wants me to keep order at the Duck’s Bone.”

  Now I was truly astounded. “Throw the drunks out, you mean? Stop the fights?”

  “Aye. She says she’d heard I was working hard at getting stronger and faster. She’d asked Placidio if that was true…”

  “Placidio recommended you!”

  Neri rolled his eyes. “He told her I could likely wrestle a small dog to the ground on my best day. But then she said he’d never spoke so much for anyone else, so it must be high praise. And as I’d not been slobbering drunk nor in a scrap for a few months now, I didn’t have any lingering enemies among her customers, so I could be fair if needed. I’m to go in every morning so’s she can tell me if she needs me that night or not, and she’s going to pay me two coppers for a night’s work—evening bells to midnight. Is that good pay?”

  There was no way to express the relief his news gave me. Two coppers a night wasn’t going to refill our purse or even pay my bill at Fedig the pen seller’s, but certain it would help. And the value to Neri was incalculable. I walked round the table and squeezed his shoulder. “That is fine pay to start. And you’ll do very well at it.”

  “I just—Romy, I want to—” His color deepened.

  I didn’t make him say what was stumbling around his tongue. Just ruffled his hair and returned to my stool. “I knew you’d find your way. Maybe we’ll survive after all.”

  Spring Quarter Day could hardly have been more different than our last trek to the Palazzo Segnori. Blue skies. No condemned sorcerers. No beheadings. Nullifiers, though, and their sniffers gliding along behind. We saw them frequently nowadays. It was difficult to refrain from running the opposite direction or darting into an alley. Always I wondered if one of them might be the sniffer who’d seen our faces—the shivering man imprisoned in green silk. Had Neri’s luck charm prevented him detecting the magic inside us? I wanted to believe that. More likely he just wanted to get out of the cold.

  While we were inside the Palazzo Segnori, I applied to be the official scribe for the Beggars Ring. Our district had never had one, which meant Beggars Ring citizens were always at risk for violating laws they didn’t know about. My application stated that my service would enhance the good order of the city as its governors wished. Notary Renzo and Lawyer Garibaldi had written statements vouching for my skills.

  Though the clerk laughed at me, opining that even if someone in the Beggars Ring could read, none would ever abide by the law, she approved my application. It would earn me a copper a page. Poor pay, but steady and much less complicated and precise—thus less time consuming—than law writing.

  Thus in addition to my normal work, I wrote innumerable copies of the REGULATION OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES decree to post in Beggars Ring shops on the first day of every month, just as they were posted in every other shop and marketplace in Cantagna and its tributary towns. Whenever one of il Padroné’s REGULATIONS FOR GOOD ORDER regarding sewage or pigs or the use of public wells was released, I made copies of that, too. Those who could read would spread word of the rules.

  For the first time in almost a year, I added a silver solet to our purse.

  Even as I read his words and accepted his city’s coin, I stopped hearing Sandro’s voice asking what I thought of his rules, or why the Flax Guild so despised his limits on shipments to Kairys, or what I thought might be the best way to deal with men who beat their wives. I told myself it was time and work that muted the hurt, but in truth it was the wine.

  The amount of wine needed to numb the memories of that other life seemed to grow by the day. With Neri working at the tavern every evening, there was no reason to moderate it. Once I was done with writing for the day, wine filled the void of company, of conversation, of curiosity and study. I knew it was stupid and wasteful of the education Fortune had granted me. Some nights, instead of sitting alone with the wine flask, I would try wandering through the night market to find some conversation. But after three nights running fending off lusty bargemen wandered over from the docks, I retreated back to my own company.

  Then came a night when Neri found me collapsed in the alley, unable to get up. I lied to him that I had a fever.

  On the next morning, Placidio stood in our doorway waiting for Neri to finish choking down a cold meat pie. Neither of us had waked until Placidio thumped on the door. Neri never woke until I shook him, and it had taken me a great deal of wine to fill the caverns of the previous night. Which was why I’d gone out to the alley to heave and collapsed instead. Something had to change.

  “I want you to train me in sword work, too,” I blurted. “I know some prudish masters don’t like training women or think it might somehow damage our delicate bones. But I don’t break.”

  “Guessed that.”

  “I had a few lessons when I was younger.”

  “Guessed that, too. Not many Beggars Ring lads—or their sisters—are born knowing the Santorini Thrust.”

  I wished the swordmaster’s head to pound as dreadfully as mine did.

  The duelist registered no surprise, but no eagerness either. “Had some threats, have you, lady scribe? Maybe Beggars Ring folk are not so fond of the law as you seem to be. Or maybe it’s would-be suitors?”

  “None of that. Well, some of that. But I just—I like to take care of myself. And I won’t get anything to eat around
here if I can’t defend my share.”

  My attempt at humorous riposte drew guffaws from both Neri and Placidio. Which just made my head hurt worse.

  Placidio swallowed his humor quickly as always.

  “I won’t go easy because you’re the one pays me,” he said. “And I won’t go easy if you wake feeling poorly.” His boot nudged the three emptied wine flasks waiting by the door to be refilled. “I’d advise you come clear-headed.”

  I wanted to frame a proper retort to the man I’d met swimming in his own vomit, but the pain in my skull dulled my wit. Besides, Neri might be tempted to mention that I’d done the same.

  “Every third day,” I said. “I’ve no more time than that to spare.”

  “We’ll start tomorrow. After your brother’s lesson. Half his fee; pay in advance.”

  Placidio started me running and jumping, and I hated it as virulently as Neri had, especially as spring brought rain and sultry heat. The toll of the wine shortened those early lessons, as I spent the second half of the hour spewing whatever I’d eaten the day before.

  I felt awful all the time and came very near quitting. Nausea did not help my concentration when I returned to my writing work. But I had told Placidio I didn’t break. He seemed to believe me. Just as he’d warned, he gave me no quarter.

  So I didn’t quit. As the days moved toward summer, tiredness often drowned my worries faster than the wine. On those nights, I slept without dreams and woke with my mind clearer the next morning.

  Training to fight was no magical balm to heal the hollows grief had carved out inside me. But I liked the clearer head. Our sessions were the only time in any day I felt alive.

  * * *

  And then, one steamy night in late spring, just past a year from my banishment, I was sitting at our table, finishing a bit of writing work I’d brought home from the shop. An insistent knock on our door popped me to my feet.

  I dropped my pen and drew my dagger. Neri, already drowsing on his pallet, was instantly on his feet, sword in hand.

  My clients never sent for me in the night hours, and those who rented the message boxes would never look for me at home. Which meant our minds could not but turn to the demonfire in our veins. I had never shaken the sense that the sniffer had seen our faces on Winter Quarter Day.

  “Who’s there?”

  No one answered. Hand on my dagger, I pulled open the door.

  A ragged, red-haired boy stood waiting. “Please, dama, I need work,” he said. “Haul ashes. Haul water. Sweep. Empty slops. Don’t matter what.”

  “We’ve no work to give,” I said.

  “This is Lizard’s Alley, right?”

  “Aye.”

  “And you’re the one called Romy?”

  “And if I am?”

  “I was told that Romy of Lizard’s Alley has help to give those in need.”

  My name was no secret, yet hearing it sent spider feet crawing up my arms.

  “It depends on the need and who’s asking,” I said. “Who told you that?”

  He cocked his head, like a curious bird. “Folk higher’n me passed it on. So are you the one?”

  “I am Romy.”

  “Well, all right then.” He didn’t even twitch, though I suddenly got the sense that he was no street urchin, but an experienced messenger.

  He held out his fist. “I was told to give this to no one but Romy of Lizard’s Alley and to say, ‘Midnight on the Avanci Bridge. Alone.’”

  He dropped a small bronze disk in my hand. Its fine engraving depicting three intersecting arcs—one concave, one convex, one sinuous—bracketing a tightly coiled spiral. My luck charm.

  “Is that all?” I yearned to ask whose hand had passed it on. Whose voice had spoken my name. But even an experienced young messenger would know nothing of importance. A chain of anonymous go-betweens would link him and il Padroné’s little wife.

  “I was told to say, ‘He needs your help.’”

  Warmth flowed through my veins that had naught to do with wine. Color charged the woven blankets I’d hung on our walls and cleared the stench of the Beggars Ring from my nostrils.

  “I’ll be there.”

  11

  YEAR 988: SPRING QUARTER

  DAY 0—MIDNIGHT

  A sultry breeze blew down the Venia, bearing scents of river wrack laced with the heavy sweetness of wisteria and lemon blossoms. The midnight anthem would ring at any moment, the clangor confusing my dithering anticipation even further than it was already.

  For an hour, hidden in the shadow of the cityside abutment of the Avanci Bridge, I had revisited every choice I’d made since the red-haired boy vanished into the night. To stand exposed or remain hidden. To carry my knife or forgo it. How to greet her. How to greet him, did my mad, unbidden, impossible imagining prove true. How to summon enough cold reason to judge whatever was asked of me. How to face a nullifier and his sniffer if the Shadow Lord had chosen that to be my fate; the luck charm in my pocket would hardly divert their attention if Sandro sent them to greet me.

  Neri, horrified by my tale of the foolish Gilliette and my rash promise to her, had begged me not to go. I had silenced his protests with assurances of safety I could not fully support.

  But as the first tones of the anthem struck, a mortal clarity settled me. I knew Sandro better than anyone in the world. The person awaiting me would surely be Ettore, Sandro’s favored assassin, dispatched to make a quiet ending to the Shadow Lord’s sentimental mistake. Gilliette had most likely yielded Sandro the luck charm in the first hours of her girlish triumph. My satisfaction must be that it had taken him a year to use it.

  I could not regret the year, nor even the inevitability of its end. Neri, stronger, more mature, more settled, could now take care of himself. He knew how men with gifts like his had to live in order to survive. Wherever they were, my family was as safe as I could make them. And I had proved to myself that I could survive on my own. Yet I could not envision growing old writing other people’s words, and no other course had presented itself. Lady Fortune would see me dead of boredom, drunk and alone.

  I climbed over a false buttress and found the plain door in the mold-blackened undercarriage of the bridge. My fingers had not forgotten how to release the tricky lock that allowed Sandro or his favored associates access to the stair hidden in the massive abutment.

  The first time he’d brought me here I was near paralyzed with fear, thinking he’d discovered my secret and planned to throw me into the river. But all he’d wanted was to show me the wonders of the full moon on the one night a year that it rose exactly along the course of the Venia. He’d asked me if I would like to take a boat down that golden path someday and did I think it would sail down to the sea or into the moon itself. I was but fifteen and still in awe of him. A month it had been, and he had not so much as touched me.

  A quick climb, another hidden lock released, and I strolled onto the narrow bridge that connected the city walls to the Mausoleum Tower across the Venia. Archers used the Avanci Bridge and its downriver twin, the Vinci, to defend Cantagna’s docks from river-borne marauders.

  The damp wind teased my hair from its braid as I reached the center of the span. When a dark-cloaked figure appeared on the Tower side and two more on the city side, I commended my soul to the Night Eternal. No use running, even if I’d somewhere to go. If what I feared was true, postponing it would make no difference. Either way, I had to know.

  Only one of the three walked out. It was difficult to judge size in the mottled gleam of the lanterns hung on the bridge, but Ettore was not so large as his fearsome reputation suggested. Nonetheless, he would need no assistance to deal with me. I gazed out on the powerful surge of the water below, already half dizzy, when words, not a knife blade, touched me.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come, Cataline.”

  I spun toward the woman’s voice so quickly, I had to grip the parapet to keep my balance.

  Gilliette, sober, earnest, stood beneath one of the bridg
e lamps. “I’m in such terrible, wicked trouble and had nowhere else to turn. If Alessandro learns what I’ve done, he’ll kill me.”

  Her hood was lowered, else I’d never have recognized her. In the year she’d grown a handspan taller and matured in many ways. Her childish cheeks were now slender, yielding dominance to eyes of lustrous midnight. Her thick black hair was bound with jewels, womanly, graceful. I wondered if her spirit had matured as impressively.

  “What sin could you possibly commit to offend him so deeply, segna?” I spoke politely, but did not bow or bend. Certain it was curiosity and no concern for the girl prompted my question.

  “You gave me fair warning,” she said. “But I acted stupidly, thinking to please him. And before I could tell him what I’d done, he had pledged his own and his family’s honor to the matter. I dare not tell him he pledged a lie to one of his enemies!”

  “Divine graces, lady!”

  Her desperation was not that of a child, but of a woman who perfectly understood her danger. I could not even rejoice in such a disaster, for she was right that she had likely found the single offense for which Sandro might kill her with his own hand. The foremost truth people spoke of il Padroné—whether friends, enemies, or those who could not decide which they were—was that Alessandro di Gallanos was a man of his word. Should reports of his compromised oath be proved and circulated in Cantagna and beyond, the foundation of his power would crumble, without sound or dignity, without recourse.

  “What in Night Eternal did you do?”

  “I listened and learned as you told me.” Her glance at my ink-blackened nails prompted a careful examination of her own slender, jeweled fingers. “He does not yet confide in me as he did with you, but when I ask him serious questions, he answers. It pleases him, just as you said, which pleases me. And it is not too boring.”