the body under a flowering bush, and taken his place for the whole night, memorizing the floor plan of the building.
'How long do we need to stand out here?' Alina asked.
Ferremo revised his estimate-midautumn at best. He looked up at a window on the second floor, far from the kitchens and the ballroom and the gardens, and mentally charted the path he would take to reach it. He hoped in two days it wouldn't be raining.
'Not long,' he said. 'Wait here and look like you belong.'
He walked away from the manor and cut through an alley, so that if anyone was watching, he would seem to come at the house from a different direction. While out of sight, he pulled a tricorn hat from his pocket, popped it up, and settled it on his head. He turned his cloak inside out to show the green lining, adjusted it so that it hung open over his right arm, and slid around the knives he wore to lie beneath it. By the time he came out onto the road, he looked respectable and vaguely shabby-from head to toe a haggard messenger from another house, out too late.
As he approached the gate, a face coalesced out of the iron. The curls coiled into eyes and stretched into lips, the metal shrieking faintly as it did.
'Well met and welcome to the House of the Laughing Star,' the face in the gate said. 'Are you expected?'
'Well met. Unfortunately no,' Ferremo said. 'I have a message from my master for the goodwoman.'
The gate was silent for a moment. 'Enter,' it creaked, and swung open, its face splitting in twain. Ferremo stepped onto the path and hurried toward the front door, which was already opening. A dour-looking woman in a well-cut but boring gray gown held the door-the goodwoman's chamberlain, Agnea Palthas, he knew from previous experience. She stopped him on the last step.
'Well met. I understand you have a letter,' she said. 'You can give it to me. I'll bring it to Goodwoman Mrays.'
Ferremo drew back a little. 'I've been told to deliver it only to Goodwoman Mrays's hands.'
A shadow fell over him. A half-orc the size of a small hill, with a neat beard and clad all in silk. A waste, Ferremo thought, and smiled up at the bodyguard chief he knew was called Jorik. The pair of them were the gatekeepers of the house, Nazra Mrays's eyes and ears. The half-orc folded his arms over his chest.
'No one comes in at this hour,' Jorik said. 'Hand over the letter and we shall see it to our mistress's hand.'
Ferremo eyed the half-orc long enough to give a good show, then held out the letter. Agnea snatched it from him.
'A good evening to you,' she said, and shut the door.
Ferremo stood for a moment, staring up at the windows and the fine mist of rain drifting through the light. The fools thought themselves better than him. He smiled again, and turned and walked back down the pathway.
'Master?' he said as he passed through the gate. 'We're ready.'
The envelope is within?
'Yes.'
Are you certain?
Ferremo pursed his mouth briefly. 'It is hard to mistake.'
We will test it when you return, his master said. Hurry back. We have only two days to prepare.
Tennora lay in a bed made of many blankets, the chair, and the trunk she had still not opened, staring up at the ceiling. A shaft of moonlight eased through the window and painted a stripe across the floor. Her hands wrapped around the pouch at her throat, and she chewed thoughtfully on her lip.
Above her, in the loft Tennora usually slumbered in, Nestrix slept.
Or at least Tennora hoped she was sleeping. She hadn't worked up the nerve to check. Only now, in the night, was she rethinking her plan.
Her aunt and uncle's admonishments about Tennora's fanciful tendencies argued with her mother's voice telling her to trust her instincts, and the warring voices churned up her thoughts, making it almost impossible for Tennora to sleep.
It was as good a time as any to see what was in the trunk.
She lit a candle and pulled it out into the center of the room. The lock that dangled from the latch was old and corroded. A few quick strikes with the bone hilt of a knife knocked it open. A shiver ran over Tennora's arms as she opened the chest.
The top was a shallow bed lined with mildew-spotted fabric that might have once been green. A layer of tarnished coins, a thimble, a tindertwig long past its usefulness, some cheap but pretty jewelry-Tennora picked them up, one by one, wondering at their importance, their meanings to her mother. They had to be from before her mother married, a time Tennora knew little about.
Liferna Hedare hadn't been a noblewoman when she met Tennora's father-Tennora knew that much. She told Tennora her people had come from the west after the tumultuous time following the Spellplague known as the Wailing Years, and that she had lived all her life in Waterdeep, in Field Ward.
She had no siblings. Her parents were dead. That was that.
Tennora imagined a younger version of her mother delighting in the red glass beads of the bracelet or the bright brass locket on that necklace. Sewing her clothes with the little thimble on her thumb. Tying up her blonde hair with the strap of leather that had since hardened into a stick. She pulled out a trio of small freshwater pearls on a string-her mother had loved pearls.
Tennora pulled the tray from the trunk, setting it on the floor beside her.
A new smell mingled with the mildew-the smell of tallow and beeswax. The deeper part of the trunk held several cotton-wrapped bundles, neatly packed and only faintly stained. Tennora pulled a long, thin one out and laid it in her lap to unroll the fabric, giddy as a child opening a gift.
The bundle held a dagger.
Tennora was so startled to see it she nearly dropped it. The sheath was tooled with a carving of a phoenix. She took the hilt in a trembling hand and drew the blade. Well oiled and untouched by the mildew or rust. Sharp too, she found, touching the end of it.
She didn't know much about weapons, to be certain, but she knew it was not a blade for a girl in the Field Ward. Not a blade for chopping vegetables, cutting lengths of rope, or even gutting fish. It could have done all those things, but it was too fine to be wasted that way. Tennora slid it back into the sheath.
A family heirloom, perhaps? Something carried over from the nebulous west, cared for so carefully and tucked away? She nodded to herself, imagining a man with her mother's brown eyes and blond hair in war-scarred armor, with the dagger at his hip. That made the most sense.
Tennora took out the next bundle, which held a leather vam-brace. A good sturdy one, scarred over so much that the black leather seemed to be tooled with waving grasses.
A family heirloom, she thought, though the surety wavered. It was fit for a slim woman's arm. Slimmer than her own. Slim as her mother's.
Tennora laughed. Her prim and painfully proper mother. Dressed in leather armor and carrying a sharp dagger. The woman whose daily refrain to Tennora was to smile and be polite, to not upset Old Lord Hedare or her grandmother. The old man would have had a fit of shock if he could have seen his daughter-in-law in leather armor.
More bundles revealed more pieces of armor, each carefully treated and wrapped away from the change of seasons. A pair of boots with crepe-soft soles that could have walked through a forest in autumn without making a sound. Gloves with a faint and mediocre enchantment that had unraveled slowly in the years since its activation. They seemed so pristine that Tennora paused to check the trunk for the telltale traces of a spell that would have preserved the leather. Nothing. Liferna had known how to pack such things away.
Tennora's heart was starting to pound. What were these things? Why had her mother had them? Liferna had been in the ground five years, yet Tennora felt the sudden urge to find her-to dig her up with her bare hands-and demand to know what these artifacts of her old life meant. What she had kept from her daughter.
She took the last of the bundles from the chest, one that was small and streaked with rust. She unrolled it to find a smaller cloth roll nestled inside. Inside the smaller roll were thirty-two badly rusted wires. Tennora pulled one
