Fearing she had stretched her lie past breaking point, Ilsa opted for distraction.
“What does a lieutenant do ’round here anyway?”
Aelius wasn’t about to fall for that either, but he smiled knowingly and indulged her. “That entirely depends which lieutenant you ask, Ilsa my darling. Dear Cassia here is our genius treasurer. Oren is envoy to our people.”
“And what ’bout you?”
Aelius grinned. “I am a merchant.”
“What’s being a merchant got to do with leading the Changelings?”
“I trade in knowledge. I barter for secrets.”
Cassia cut in. “I think in the Otherworld, you would probably call it intelligence. And I’m not sure merchant is a good analogy, considering Aelius is banned from entering the Trade House.”
Aelius, grinning wider, didn’t even glance in Cassia’s direction. Ilsa had the feeling he had counted on her to expose him; had baited her with his choice of words. She had known pickpockets like Aelius; boys and girls who wore their past sanctions like badges of honour. Trouble was, she had never known whether to admire them for it or check her pockets.
“What got you banned?”
“The unanimous decree of the faction leaders, my darling. In the days before I plied my trade for the Zoo, I did so for the highest bidder. And what better place to harvest secrets than in a fortress of iniquity like the Trade House.” He sighed, as if remembering those days fondly. “For the harvest, the Changeling has the perfect bag of tricks, of course – a different face every day. But for the sale, I needed to be recognised in order to be trusted, and eventually, recognised I was.” He flashed that grin again. “When one plays both sides, one is running down the clock. That is the game we play when we deal in deception. For years I made regular sales to regular customers, heedless to the way alliances were shifting and pacts were being forged. Enemies became friends and got to chit-chatting about their sources. Their sources were, of course, yours truly, and my game was up.
“Thankfully, no magic can match a Changeling’s for running from the consequences of one’s actions. A Wraith may excel at fleeing the scene of their crime, but they cannot cease to be the culprit altogether. I proved myself hard to identify and thus catch, and they were forced to settle for publicly banning me from a multitude of interesting places, including the Trade House, on pain of several flavours of torture and death, depending which lucky individual caught me.”
“That’s rough,” said Ilsa, wrinkling her nose.
Aelius tapped her on the head with his cane; perturbed, Ilsa tried to duck out of reach, but she wasn’t quick enough to stop him. “My sentiments exactly. However, where I saw defeat, your own ingenious mother saw opportunity. Reinvent yourself, she told me. You’ve done it two dozen times a week for a lifetime. Lyander didn’t see the sense in wringing my neck when there were so many more interesting uses for me. So she spun me a line about duty and honour and, I must confess, hooked me with it. I’ve run the Zoo’s, as we like to say, communications ever since. When Lyander was so brutally taken from us with most of her lieutenants in tow, Hester gave me the position I keep now.”
Ilsa frowned at him. Her mother had been dead seventeen years, and Aelius didn’t look old enough to have reached adolescence by that point. But then, Ilsa had gotten herself banned from plenty of places by the age of twelve, and perhaps Aelius had been equally precocious. Then again…
“Don’t your face twitch when you change it?” said Ilsa, earning a curious glance from Cassia, but a slow smile from Aelius. “When I change mine, I get all these… little spasms.”
Aelius shrugged. “An unavoidable fact of your magic, and mine, and that of every Changeling I’ve ever known.”
“Then how d’you fool anyone?” She studied his profile, but if he truly wasn’t wearing his own face, like she suspected, there was nothing to give him away. “It’s one thing me looking like I got some mad tic in the Otherworld. I bet here everyone and his mother’s wise to it.”
“But that’s precisely what makes it so delicious!” said Aelius, bringing them to a halt. Cassia muttered something that sounded like heaven and earth and glanced longingly down the corridor as if plotting an escape. “Animals are all good fun, but changing faces is an art. Have you used a disguise before? Have you needed to pass for someone other than yourself?”
“All the time.” Ilsa told him about the show; about how she would become The Great Balthazar for the finale.
“Oh, bravo! And tell me, how do you avoid detection by your enraptured spectators?”
“The lighting washes me out,” said Ilsa. “We designed it like that on purpose.”
“Lighting! The very first tool.” Wearing a smile loaded with mischief, Aelius casually jostled the rim of his boater while stepping subtly to the right, out of the shadow and into the sunlight pouring in. And in the split second his hat was displaced and the sun shone on him, Ilsa saw it; the tremor just above his left eye. When he stepped out of the light and let the rim of his hat shadow his face once again, it vanished. If Ilsa scrutinised the spot, she swore she could see the twitches, but only because she knew they were there. “Know your lighting. It’ll go a long way. Your angles too.”
He turned as if to go back the way they had come, and brushed a thumb along his jaw, drawing attention to the twitch by the right corner of his mouth. Only for a second, before he turned around again and the weakness in his magic was hidden from view. Ilsa was astounded. He had chosen to walk on her right before the conversation had come up. He lived these deceptions; had probably been doing so for so
