Jerin sat tailor-style on the floor of the little bedroom. He sat silent, statue-still, a box and a book both open on his lap, a scrap of paper dangling in his hand, nearly slipping from his fingers.
“Jerin?”
He looked up, pale, his eyes wide with shock. He gazed at her, seemingly too stunned to move or speak.
“Jerin? What’s wrong?”
“I-I thought I might find out who Keifer’s lovers were.” He held up the paper and book to her. “I was searching for clues.”
It was thieves’ cant, written out on a piece of good stationery. Three neat symbols. There was also a lexicon for translating it, the simplified symbols expanded into pictures a child could understand.
“ Keifer’s stupid, Ren. He’s a cow!” Trini had sneered her contempt of their husband. “ I know you don’t marry men for their brains, but there’s a limit!”
Keifer’s lover had apparently known his mental limits as well as Trini had. The book left little chance for misunderstanding. Ren looked at the quality of the stationery and the lexicon with its careful renderings of the palace, its occupants, and the daily life of gentle society and realized the truth. ‘This isn’t thieves’ cant. This is the personalized cant of the cannon-stealing gentry that nearly killed Odelia.“
The color drained out of Jerin’s face. “The ones that killed Egan Wainwright?”
Ren flinched in memory of the mutilated, raped man. Had Jerin’s sisters told him about that? “Yes.
Them.”
“How could they get into the gardens to get to the bolt-hole door?”
Ren knew that the gardens weren’t perfectly secure despite the wall and the guards. It was unlikely, however, that such a vast number of women scaling the wall could go unnoticed. The Barneses? They had access to the gardens. No. The Barneses never left the palace in any large number-they couldn’t have been the ten women escorting the cannons on the Onward. Nor had one of the Barneses vanished mysteriously when the red-hooded thief had been killed.
Only palace guests could have been in the garden unobserved.
And the only women invited to the palace, prior to the Whistlers, were from noble families. During Keifer’s short time in the palace, the royal family entertained often. He liked parties where he was the focus of powerful women. Keifer flirted with everyone; those who had the decency not to return the attention were never asked back.
Ren flipped through the lexicon, hoping for a clue to the family’s identity. There was the picture of the executioner’s hood, and a translation for colors, but nothing as damning as a woman’s face with “black hat” transcribed beside it. She cast the book angrily aside and looked into the nearly empty lockbox. All that remained was a small square of fine white paper, folded carefully into an envelope, as you might receive from an apothecary- Powder shifted inside the envelope, creating sand dune shadows as she held it up to the light. A circle overlaid an X to obscurely label the substance. Ren started to unfold the envelope, only to have Jerin catch hold of her hands with a yelp, squeezing until she stilled her fingers.
“It’s poison!” Jerin cried. “Don’t open it! It could kill you if you breathed it in or got it into your eyes.”
She froze. “Poison? How can you tell?”
“The cant. It’s marked poison. Skull and crossbones.”
“What was Keifer doing with poison?”
Jerin picked up one of the abandoned slips of paper. “Ren, I think he killed your father.”
She found Kij and flung the note into her face. “Look at this!”
Kij took the note, unfolded it, gazed at it for a long time, and then asked carefully, “Am I supposed to understand this?”
“This is the note that your brother received along with a packet of arsenic to kill my father!”
Kij forced a hollow laugh. “Oh, be serious. Keifer would never do anything like that!”
“Keifer was a whoring, murdering slut!” Ren snarled. “After murdering my father, he fucked women in our wedding bed!”
In a fiat, emotionless voice, Kij asked, “Are you sure?”
“Yes! The evidence is everywhere, once you start looking!”
Kij sat still, controlled. “What do you want me to say, Ren? ‘I’m sorry’ does not seem to be large enough for this.”
“You can tell me who!” Ren shouted. “Who killed my father? Who laid waste to the Wainwrights, nearly murdered Odelia, and butchered forty of my troops with grapeshot? Who was fucking your brother?”
“I don’t know!” Kij cried, spreading her hands. “He flirted with everyone. I don’t know who could have seduced him to that level. Even if Eldest knew that he was being unfaithful, which I’m sure she didn’t, who could have guessed that anyone was using him for treason? Keifer? He wasn’t intelligent, Ren!”
Intelligent, no, but cunning, yes. He should have been on that stage that night. What a performance he wove for such a young man. During the courtship, he pretended to be blindly in love with Eldest. He fooled the Queens into thinking he would make their daughters a fine husband. His fits of anger were just illusions to cover his infidelity.
“I need to know who was using him, Kij. He might be dead, but they’re continuing their treason.”
“I don’t know. It was six years ago, Ren, and I wasn’t Eldest at the time. I tended family business. I was always either on the Destiny or at Avonar. Eldest stayed here in Mayfair, but she couldn’t have known.
Do you think she would let him chance destroying our connection with the crown? We gained so much influence when we became your sisters-in-law; we’d have lost it all if you returned him to us.”
Ren sighed. If Keifer had kept his secrets from her own sisters, right under their noses, she supposed that his sisters could have been just as fooled. They would have seen him only at social functions and occasional joint family dinners. “Raven will be by to interview your staff and sisters. I’m sorry, but we’ll have to make this public in hopes of information surfacing. We need to track down my father’s killers.”
Kij frowned. “Is that truly wise? There will be rumors that Keifer picked up something and spread it to you. I know what that’s like, Ren. People don’t want you sitting on their chairs, afraid they’ll catch something.”
“If rumors are all I have to deal with, Kij, I’ll be happy. It has yet to be seen if Keifer has left death behind him. But I will find these women, and then, heads will roll.”
The thunderstorm started with the longest thunder Jerin had ever heard, as the cloud boiled off the plateau and struck the river valley. It went on and on. and finally died. He went to the window and watched as the thunderclouds claimed the sky until only the farthest horizon remained clear, a slice of gold in a sky of rolling gray. Raindrops began to fall on the gray flagstone of the balcony, a splattering of dark spots. And then the rain started in earnest, in driving sheets.
I was so happy. Jerin opened the door and walked out into the pounding rain. It was too good to be true. Keifer was probably diseased. Ren and Odelia and Trini are going to die.
If they did, he couldn’t bear going on too. It would be more than just the grief of losing them. No one would think him clean, not even his own family, who knew of his indiscretions with Ren. Everything balanced on an edge of cascading disaster. If Ren was infected, the Queens couldn’t allow him to marry Lylia and the younger princesses. If his family had to give back the four thousand, they would lose the mercantile, and would have to pay the penalty.
His sisters had planned to stop in Annaboro for a few days before going on to Heron Landing. With a quick boat, the Moorlands could fetch back Cullen with his reputation fairly intact. With four brothers, why would his sisters need to visit a crib? The public opinion would be that, unlike Ren, his sisters were clean and thus Cullen was safe, regardless of any dalliance.
But Jerin’s brother’s price would be worthless forever. The betrothal notice had gone to the newspaper before his sisters left. His return to his sisters-and the reason why-would be equally public. Returning the four thousand crowns would be a crippling blow to his family. Much as his sisters loved him, they would have no choice but to set him up in a crib, servicing strangers for ten crowns a night.
He stared down at the bleak drop below the balcony, a storm of dark emotions raging through him. My life has been ruined by a man already dead.
