“what’re you doing?”
Before the woman finished yelling, Sicarius had pulled Amaranthe into the aisle adjacent the one with the charging intruders. He clenched his knife between his teeth, gripped the shelving unit with both hands, and heaved. It wobbled for a moment, hundreds of pickles quivering, before succumbing to its fate and toppling. Shelves and jars thudded into people and crashed to the floor amidst startled grunts and cries of pain.
One man had reached the end of the aisle before the unit collapsed, a fellow in a gray uniform and carrying a short sword. It wasn’t the same uniform as Amaranthe had once worn, but she knew an enforcer when she saw one. Sicarius did too. He pounced on the man like that alligator in the swamp. The enforcer hit the desk, and rabbit cages toppled. The Pickle Lady skittered backward. Amaranthe, hoping the woman wouldn’t notice in the chaos, grabbed the notebook.
Sicarius slammed the enforcer’s head into the desk. The man’s eyes crossed, and he slumped to the floor. The Pickle Lady screamed for the enforcers.
In the collapsed aisle, broken glass and shelves shifted as men tried to climb free.
“Leaving would be good.” Amaranthe headed for the door.
Sicarius slipped past her before she could lead the way outside, but she supposed she couldn’t fault him for being protective when she was armed only with a notebook. Thanks to the imperial day of mourning, there weren’t many passersby on the cobblestone street outside, so she and Sicarius slipped into an alley and out onto the next block without anyone noticing. He lifted a hand to stop her, then climbed a drainpipe to the roof of a two-story warehouse next to the public docks. Scouting the neighborhood and seeing if any other enforcers were about, Amaranthe guessed. She eyed a sternwheeler ferry docked at the last pier, wondering if the Forge people might have passed through the area on the way out to their island. More likely, they had arranged private transportation from a private dock.
“Your new friend is loose,” Sicarius said from behind her shoulder.
Amaranthe almost dropped the notebook. “That was fast. I thought you had better tying skills than that.”
Sicarius leveled a cool stare at her. Just when she’d thought they were to the point in their relationship where he’d stop doing that.
“Never mind.” She patted him on the arm. “He was an engineer. They’re crafty.” She waved to the rooftop. “No more enforcers coming?”
“That may be the town’s entire complement. They’re regrouping outside the pickle store.”
“Perhaps we should take to the woods.” Amaranthe lifted the notebook. “And hope the answers we seek are in here.”
“Agreed.”
Amaranthe yawned and squinted at the real-estate notebook, trying to read by the predawn light. She sat on a boulder perched on the water’s edge with gentle waves lapping at the base. From the surrounding trees, birds chirped a variety of songs. The spot would have been peaceful if she weren’t straining her eyes, anxious for the sun to come up so she could read what the pages held.
The day before, Sicarius had insisted on putting a few miles between them and Markworth’s enforcers, and twilight had fallen over the lake before they reached a suitable-to his vigilant eyes-campsite. They’d have to be doubly careful now that the law knew he was around. Perhaps Amaranthe shouldn’t have let her curiosity draw her to that research station. She hoped nobody in the Forge group was paying attention to the goings on in Markworth or keeping tabs on enforcer reports.
Amaranthe held the book up, angling the pages toward the brightest section of the sky.
“Millcrest,” she murmured, starting to be able to pick out words and names. Unfortunately, the unorganized notebook contained far more than recent real estate transactions. Rentals, within-family transfers, and boundary adjustments were all recorded, and not simply for the islands but for the numerous properties in Markworth and all around the lake as well. “This’ll take forever.”
She needn’t read every page, she reminded herself. She could simply skim through and look for names she recognized. Thanks to Books’s research and rooting around in Retta’s head, she knew quite a few Forge members. She could also look for properties purchased in the names of businesses as a way to hide personal ownership. Larocka Myll had done that back in the capital.
Bertvikar. Amaranthe pointed to the name. That was familiar, one of the founders.
“You found something,” Sicarius said from behind her.
Startled by his arrival, Amaranthe almost fell off the boulder. Even after she recovered her balance, her heart pounded in her chest. She gripped the cool stone beneath her and silently cursed her body’s overactive reflexes. She’d known he was about. Was she going to flinch at everything now?
Sicarius did not comment, though he must have noted her response.
Amaranthe cleared her throat and lifted the book, holding the pages close to her face. “Maybe. I recognize this name, but it doesn’t seem to be for a plot of land. It’s a… ” She flicked an annoyed glance to the east, wondering why the sun was taking so long to peek over the distant mountains.
“Should I have searched for spectacles to accompany your costume?” Sicarius asked mildly.
“Absolutely. If I were clearly near-sighted, people might assume I’d picked out that hat on accident. I… ” Amaranthe lifted her head as something dawned on her. “Did you just tease me?”
“Yes.” Sicarius stood beside her boulder, his hands hooked behind his back. “Are you offended?”
“No, no, I approve. I’ve been teasing you for months.”
“I’ve noticed,” he said dryly.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what might elicit a smile from you.”
“Knowing Sespian is safe.”
It would be tough to make that happen; as long as he was the emperor, there’d always be people plotting against him. Though she couldn’t imagine Sespian continuing to accept his position once he learned the truth about his parentage. Maybe Sicarius would be happy, or at least willing to smile, if he and Sespian could walk off somewhere and spend time together, not as emperor and imperial assassin, but as father and son.
“We better work on making that happen then.” Amaranthe handed him the open notebook. “Can you, with your superhuman anatomy, read this page?”
Sicarius accepted the book. “The Bertvikar entry?”
“Yes.”
“Bertvikar acquired the mineral rights in a… freehold estate.” He lifted his eyes.
“Ownership in perpetuity rather than for a fixed time period,” Amaranthe explained while she drummed her fingers on her thigh. Mineral rights? She wasn’t sure whether to find that interesting or dismiss it as a dead-end. Buying mineral rights might be what had brought the lake to a Forge person’s attention in the first place, but she couldn’t imagine all these wealthy people holding their meeting in some dingy mine shaft. “Which island is it, do you know? Those are map coordinates listed in the entry rather than the metes and bounds way of defining things that most of the parcels down here use.”
Sicarius gazed out upon the lake, running calculations in his head perhaps, as he considered the mouth of a river and a few dark islands silhouetted against the predawn sky. He flipped to a map at the beginning of the notebook. “It’s a trapezoid between Forestcrest, Arrowcrest, Marblecrest, and Duncrest Islands.”
“ Between? As in the land under the lake?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve heard of mining dry lake beds, but how would they pull minerals out from under all that water?” Amaranthe scratched her head. “It must have to do with the hot springs. The same power the military academy is researching could push minerals to the surface.”
Sicarius handed her the notebook. “It is unlikely this has anything to do with the meeting.”
“I know. I’ll keep looking. I-did you say Marblecrest Island?”
“Yes.”
Amaranthe switched from drumming her fingers on her thigh to drumming them on the open pages of the book. “Pabov said there was a Marblecrest Island, but I’d dismissed it as being too blatant a choice for a secret meeting, given that they’re Ravido’s allies. Of course, it’s not widely known that Forge has a link to the Marblecrests.” It wasn’t even widely known that Forge existed, Amaranthe reminded herself. “We didn’t know
