Chapter 17

CHAPTER

17

“Your mother might get the wrong idea if she finds out I’ve been taking you out this late at night,” said Luca.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Piere,” said Dinah. “If she’s really suspicious then I’m the one who’ll get dragged to the Guildhall to do the handwashing ritual and pray to Osta fifteen times, for being so unprofessional as to sleep with a boarder. You’ll be all right. Mama likes you. And she knows if you were paying me any attention I didn’t want, I’d be giving you two weeks to find a new place to live. Or two hours, depending on how handsy you’d gotten,” she added, with a sharp grin.

The midnight air was thin and fresh, as though it had crept in from the sea or flowed out here from the inland mountains and was making itself at home in the city while it slept. Or didn’t sleep—the occasional hired carriage rolled by, including empty ones whose drivers gestured questioningly at Luca and Dinah, offering a ride. They’d passed a group of men almost on the doorstep of the boardinghouse, and now they still saw the occasional person on foot. People coming home from jobs, like Stefan’s, that stretched on into the night. Physicians going to or returning from urgent calls. City guardsmen, making swing-footed patrols. But it was a quieting time. Even most drinking houses in this well-to-do neighbourhood would be closing up and booting out their stragglers at this hour.

Luca and Dinah stuck to the well-lit main streets, and Luca was aware of his empty belt. He’d left all his weapons at the boardinghouse. A sword would get in the way. He’d considered tucking his dagger inside his jacket before hearing Master Carriere’s voice: Wearing a weapon you can’t use is asking for trouble . Luca had no training in dagger fighting without a sword in his other hand, and even that kind of duelling was considered a flourish variant on high formal, rarely requested.

It had been two days since Perse’s interruption and the fight that had shattered all the happiness Luca had made for himself in Glassport. Since then he’d found himself waking early and unable to get back to sleep; he’d found himself walking in the direction of Matti’s house and then turning around, cowardly. He didn’t want Matti to look at him like that again. He didn’t want Matti to have the chance to refuse to see him in the first place.

His best plan was to keep his mouth shut and try to make it up to Matti in actions instead of words. To that end, a hastily scribbled letter from Luca to their mother was racing its way back to Cienne under priority franking, followed—at a more reasonable pace—by Perse. Barring delays, the letter should have arrived by now, crammed full in equal weight of apologies, questions, and proposals. Every time Luca thought too hard about it, he felt shaky. But it was done. Luca would give Matti what he deserved, whether Matti forgave him or not.

“This street,” he said to Dinah, and they turned onto it.

“This is exciting.” She gave a skip. Her arm was firm through his.

Luca had found the Kesey townhouse during the day, then spent nearly the whole afternoon wandering the neighbourhood to hammer the route into his feet so he’d be able to find it again.

Yesterday Luca had tried to discover if there was a central record of warehouses. At the city registry he’d been told that half the warehouses in the city were rented out, just as ships were hired, for short-term use by various Houses. Temporary leases were far more common in Glassport than in Cienne, given the amount of goods entering and leaving the city via the harbour. And there was no central record of these leases; they were all direct arrangements between the Houses concerned. If Luca wanted to find out something specific, the clerk had said, he’d have to talk to the Houses directly.

Talk to the Keseys. Luca had, for a brief, wild hour, considered doing just that. It would be a tricky dance. He’d met one or two Keseys at the Half Moon Ball, and there was a high chance Simeon Kesey and any number of his senior agents had also been present, as prominent members of Matti’s Guild. Pretending to be someone other than Luca Piere was out. Luca could try to spin a tale for the Keseys that made him out to be exactly the kind of spy Matti assumed him to be: lay out his suspicions as a form of blackmail, something to give Harte the upper hand in Glassport’s market.

But secret-keeping was the best signal he could send to Matti that he had no intention of betraying him, and for once Luca was making himself think all the way through to the end of his schemes. He didn’t think he could lie his way out of this without building a further teetering edifice of disaster.

No, Luca was going to do the thing that had worked when it came to Corus Vane.

He was going to break in and go snooping.

“Last chance to change your mind, Miss Vaunt,” he said, slowing them down as they approached the house. He’d told her most of the truth: that the Keseys were up to no good, and that to help Matti Jay he intended to find proof in a less-than-legal way. She’d agreed to help with an alacrity that didn’t surprise him. He’d recognised some of his own adventure-seeking spirit in Dinah Vaunt a long time ago. He wondered if he ought to recommend the benefits of changing your name and running away, but Dinah seemed to enjoy her life on the whole, and was a dutiful child of both Osta and her mother. Besides, it wasn’t as though Luca could hold himself up as a shining example of that plan ending in any sort of success.

Dinah released his arm and shook the folds of her light, elbow-length cloak to lie neatly. She was wearing her best dress, a flattering plum velvet, and she had a dusting of gold on her eyelids, her hair in twists; she looked like a House daughter on her way home from a party.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “This is much better theatre than the tedious history play Stefan’s company is staging at the moment.”

Luca stayed where he was. Dinah walked ahead, her shadow long and dense in the lamplight. She ran up the steps of the Kesey townhouse and lifted her hand to knock on the door. It seemed to take a long time and a lot of knocking before the door cracked open. Luca could see only a candle glimmer and the eerie underside of a man’s face.

Luca held his breath during the conversation that followed, during which Dinah gestured earnestly over her shoulder and down the road in Luca’s direction. Luca crouched as though tying his bootlaces, hiding himself in the shadow cast by a devotional statue that stood just off the street in another house’s frontage. The story was that Dinah was nearly home and was afraid she was being followed, and she hated to disturb anyone at this hour, but could she just sit in their entry hall for a few minutes, to gather her nerves and wait for her possible pursuer to give up and pass by?

Dinah had done a version of this back at the boardinghouse that had made Luca want to applaud and cry laughing at once: high-strung, dim-witted, and blushingly trying to talk around the fact that a young woman walking home alone at midnight might have been doing something her family was unlikely to approve of.

Finally Dinah stepped forward, admitted into the Kesey townhouse, and the door closed behind her. At once Luca stood up and walked to the house, quickly and on light feet, and climbed the same steps. He had barely stopped in front of the door when it opened again. Dinah beckoned him inside.

“Asked him for a glass of water, like you said,” she breathed. “He’s gone for it. Quick.”

As Dinah eased the door closed, Luca took in the dark entry hall. He chose the closest doorway to the right, which after some squinting he found led into a sitting room. Only the slightest glow of moonlight and lamplight slipped through the curtains. Luca hid himself behind the door, leaning on the wall, and stood as still as possible. At once he found his fingers drumming on his black trousers, but they made no sound. He sent a prayer to Huna that his stomach wouldn’t gurgle. Today was a fast day in her calendar, and Luca was feeling a desperate need to try to make amends with his patron goddess, along with all the others he’d managed to annoy. He had stuck to water and tea all day.

He remained behind the door as a stiffly polite man returned to the entry hall with water for Dinah. Dinah kept up apologetic chatter in a whisper. After a minute she claimed she felt able to continue on her way, declined the offer of a chaperone to her destination, and was gone. The front door closed a final time, and Luca heard the bolts of it slide home. The man’s footsteps faded into the back of the house.

Luca’s heart was racing. His palms were slick and he wanted to laugh. Dinah would find herself a carriage back to the boardinghouse. Luca’s part was just beginning.

He murmured a silent thanks for the fact that these enormous Glassport townhouses seemed to follow a roughly consistent layout, slipped back into the hall, and climbed the stairs, being slow and careful with his weight to avoid anywhere that promised to creak, or in case there was a trip-step set at a different height to the rest. By the time he reached the next floor his eyes had begun to adjust to the deeper dark. He began with the doors that were ajar rather than closed, and on his second try hit one with the look of a central office, including a large desk and some looming wooden blocks that seemed likely to hold files.

Luca eased the room’s door closed. He pulled matches and a candle with a holder from inside his jacket. Illuminated, the study had a warm, chaotic, lived-in feel to it. Luca exhaled slowly and went to work.

It took him some time to work out the filing system, which was what Perse would have crushingly called idiosyncratic . Luca would have preferred not to be working with a naked flame, either, but it was what he had. He carefully opened and replaced books and folders full of auction purchases, payroll forms, insurance contracts, letters of legal advice, and reams of receipts for everything from dye to loom parts. He found copies of shipping contracts, but nothing that added to what he’d already discovered at Lior House’s offices.

Luca yawned. His excitement had settled, and its head-clearing effect was beginning to wear dangerously thin. He pinched his own hand and forced himself to think about his discovery in Andri Baudrain’s house—the shouts as the alarm was raised—the frantic chase across the garden, and Luca’s lurching fright as he heard the far-off growl of dogs. The garden wall, gritty under his hands. The moment when Margot recognised him. The moment after that, dropping into the alley and barely registering the pain in his heels, when the possible consequences began to sink their fingers into his mind.

Yes. That helped.

He reached for a folder that was simply labelled CONTRACTS (MISC.) . This one only held a few sheets of paper. Luca froze midway through a cursory flick and leaned closer to the candle, which had burned halfway down by now. The name LYSBETTE MARTENS sprang out at him in stark black ink beneath a fluid signature.

Luca read the short paragraph on the paper twice through. His hand twitched with the desire to fold it up and carry it away with him, but he made himself put it back. Even if it could be raised in front of a magistrate without accurate accusations of housebreaking coming into play, it was vague enough that it could be twisted any number of ways. But it was, finally, something other than circumstantial evidence. A concrete link between Martens and Kesey.

Not long after that, Luca was digging in the other pocket of his jacket for the paper where he’d written the date of the Lady Jenny ’s arrival into Glassport. He laid it on the floor and began to flick through the much thicker folder he’d found. Building rentals. Some of them might have been temporary workshops, but by now Luca knew Glassport’s harbour quarter well enough to guess at which ones were likely to be warehouses. And of those, only one of them had a date of lease commencing in the right month.

Luca had forgotten to bring a pencil. Feeling weirdly more intrusive than he had reading the Keseys’ private papers, he plucked one from a glass holder on the desk and wrote down the warehouse’s address. Another step closer.

The house had a slumbering deadness to it as he crept downstairs again, tiredness banished by both his buoyancy at success and the renewed risk of being out, exposed, in the halls of the house.

His fingers had just touched the bolts when someone knocked on the front door from the outside.

Luca froze. He had the giddy instinct to obey the knock’s request and open the door.

The knock came again, this time a slow insistent pound that showed the knocker’s intention to stand there for as long as it took. Luca’s feet unstuck from the floor and he quickly returned to his hiding place in the sitting room. Mad scenarios raced through his mind. Dinah had been accosted on her way to flag down a carriage, and now she was back, truly seeking help. A wakeful neighbour had seen Luca sneak in and sent for the city guard.

“ Now what?” came a sleepy, irritated female voice from upstairs. “Is someone trying to plague us out of our sleep?”

“I’ll deal with it, Mrs. Kesey.” That was the same man who’d let Dinah in. His feet scuffed against the floor as he walked to the door, slid back the bolts, and opened it.

“ What? ” he demanded. “Who are you?”

“Corus Vane. I need to speak to Simeon. It’s important.”

Every one of Luca’s nerves pricked up, alight.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you that Mr. Kesey doesn’t take meetings at this time of night.”

“He’ll take this one, if he doesn’t want his House’s name dragged through the dirt in front of the rest of the Guild,” said Vane.

“Corus? Have you lost your wits?” That voice, too, was raised to carry down from upstairs. Simeon Kesey had a deep voice rendered rough by sleep.

“You need to hear this, Simeon,” said Vane.

Footsteps as heavy as the voice descended the stairs. The wavering candlelight that spilled into the sitting room became abruptly more complex, as another light source joined it. The front door closed.

“All right, Carstan, you go back to bed,” said Kesey. “You couldn’t have sent a damn message, man?”

“It couldn’t wait until the morning post. And I could hardly be seen knocking at your door in daylight, earlier today,” said Vane.

“Very well.”

Fear throttled Luca as he wondered if Kesey would take this impromptu meeting into the room where Luca was hiding. But the light settled, as though Kesey had set his candle down on a hall table.

“It’s about what you’ve been doing in the country workshops,” Vane said. “Mixing fibres.”

“Corus.” There was a nasty note of warning in Kesey’s voice.

“Matti met with me this evening,” Vane said. “We were going over some of the recent sales to local tailoring houses. Nothing unusual. But he told me—” A sigh, as though he didn’t know how to come at it. “Nessanesh has contacts at the university in Manisi. One of her sisters put her in touch with someone who does materials research there, and Nessa corresponds with them. There’s a group working on all kinds of things—dyes, mordants, better ways of treating the wool at various stages.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“A chemist has found a way to test wool fibres, from swatches, even once the fabric’s been fully treated. Some kind of accidental discovery by a group looking at ways to straighten human hair, of all the frivolous things.”

“This still doesn’t sound urgent, Corus,” said Kesey.

“Matti’s got his hands on the thing. He wants it to be a surprise for Tomas, given that he was the one who shoved that legislation about mandatory labelling through the Guildband in the first place. They’re planning a demonstration.” A pause. “Tomorrow.”

“What?”

“The feast—”

“Oh, gods,” Kesey groaned. “The breakfast.”

“The whole Guild will be there,” said Vane. “Matti was going to keep it a secret, but apparently Nessa’s been chatting, and it’s already leaked out to a few people, so he wanted me to know. He’s already ordered swatches. From the highest-grade fabrics.”

“From—”

“Every House in wool,” Vane said, inexorable. “And even the smaller independent merchants too. You see the problem now?”

Luca was fighting the dangerous urge to laugh. Clever, Matti. Very clever indeed. He strained to hear what happened next, but heard only footfalls as Kesey paced, and a low mutter of what could have been curses.

“Do you think it’s legitimate?” Kesey asked eventually. “This technique?”

“Matti Jay is the most careful person I know. He wouldn’t organise something like this unless he was sure about it.”

“And you’re telling me the truth?”

Luca rolled his eyes on Vane’s behalf, thinking about the report from Rob Rivers in Vane’s lockbox. Vane would hardly invent something that jeopardised the main source of leverage he had over the Keseys. Of course, his warning Kesey had also just done that, and Vane would need new leverage now. Luca wasn’t surprised at the tight irritation when the man spoke. “ Yes . How many times do I have to prove myself to you?”

“All right,” said Kesey. Pacifying. “Our deal hasn’t changed, Corus. When Jay House is ruined, you’ll be plucked out of its ashes.”

“And my son will bear your name.”

“Yes, yes. The Jays still haven’t offered, have they?”

“No,” said Vane, and Luca wanted to recoil at the poisonous resentment in that single syllable.

“And they never will. It’s against Tomas’s precious hypocritical reformer’s principles,” said Kesey. “Men like you and I, at least we’ll admit to knowing the value in a House name. And by the time we give Adrean ours, it will be worth twice the value of the name Jay.”

So that was it. That kind of adoption was not unheard of, but it was rare, and the Jays seemed decent enough to be upfront about whether they would meet that kind of expectation, given that Adrean himself wasn’t an employee.

Unless the expectation was unspoken. Unless it was simply assumed, seething and fermenting over the years.

That was why Vane thought it worthwhile to take down his own House: because it wasn’t his own House, not in name. He’d sold Matti’s family out for a chance to give his son what he felt he’d been cheated out of. House status.

And that was why Corus must have quietly acquired that report from Rob Rivers in the first place, Luca realised—to ensure that Simeon Kesey kept up his end of the agreement, once Jay House had been brought to its knees.

“Well,” said Kesey. “You were right to bring this to me. It was Mattinesh who told you? Today, the night before the feast?”

“Yes.”

Kesey paused. “Do you think… do they suspect my House?”

“I don’t know,” said Vane. “Most people wouldn’t be able to tell, from the finished product, but the Jays eat and drink and breathe their business. If they had a reason to get their hands on your cloth and inspect it closely…”

“ Fucking Tomas,” said Kesey. “It’d be just like the self-righteous, moralistic prick, always with his eye out for someone else’s faults. All right. We assume the worst. We assume Matti’s grand demonstration tomorrow is either a plain prestige display, or a way to score points by exposing us.”

Or a blatant lie, thought Luca. Oh, Matti. You’d probably hate how proud I am of you.

“Come out in front of it,” said Vane. “Before the ceremony. It’s the only way. You know how the Guildband feels about quality assurance. Announce you’ve just discovered this fraud perpetuated in your House’s name, and you’re shocked and dismayed. Pick someone to take the fall.”

“Huna’s arse,” said Kesey. “No, you’re right. Someone embezzling? Selling the good quality stuff on the side?”

A short, humourless laugh from Corus Vane. “You work out the story. I’m going home to bed. We’ve got an early ceremony to attend.”

Once Vane had left and Kesey had carried his candle back up the stairs, Luca waited. He stood behind the sitting room door until the house once again had the stillness of sleep, stifling more than one yawn against his own hand during that time. Then he tiptoed to the front door, which had probably seen more post-midnight traffic tonight than in its entire prior existence, and let himself silently out.

The night was cooler than it had been, but not uncomfortably so. Luca made himself walk briskly to the nearest street corner before he leaned his shaky hands onto his knees and laughed, all the tension bubbling out of him and leaving him exhausted. It took him longer than he’d planned to make his way back to the boardinghouse, tired and faint as he was with not having eaten all day. As he approached it, his reflexes were dulled with the need to be horizontal between his sheets.

So when someone stepped up beside him and pressed a knife to his ribs, it took Luca almost two heartbeats to recognise it as such.

He halted in his steps. Cool fear drenched him. His hand fumbled at his belt and encountered… nothing at all.

“That’s it, Mr. Harte,” said the man holding the knife. The fear turned to outright ice, getting itself into the hinge of Luca’s jaw and his fingertips, setting them tingling. “Keep your mouth shut, and just step over here with me.”

Luca respected weapons, and respected the people on the other end of them when they handled them with this sort of confidence. He didn’t even consider trying to run. He didn’t recognise the man’s voice, and a stranger who knew Luca’s name and where he lived in Glassport could not have his basic decency gambled upon.

For a long, mind-blanking moment of hysteria, as Luca followed the knife’s prod towards a dim side street, he wondered if Matti had decided to have him killed. He thought about Corus Vane saying Matti Jay is the most careful person I know.

Stop it, Luca told himself fiercely. You’re being stupid. You can’t afford that. Open your eyes and take in your opponents, and think. You can win a point before swords touch, if you’re looking closely enough.

What he saw, with his eyes open, did not inspire hope. The dark, narrow street held three more men, all of them taller and broader than Luca. Luca opened his mouth to offer them his purse, remembered that he wasn’t carrying it and also that they knew his name, and closed it again.

“You’re a difficult one to catch up to, Lucastian Harte,” said the shortest man in the alley. He stepped forward into the meagre light coming from the main street’s lamps; he had a practical, rough-hewn look to him, like an unfinished carving. “But Guildmaster Baudrain was quite firm on the fact that you should be found.”

Luca’s palms were sweating. They were all standing in a loose circle: men having a meeting. The knife was still tucked between two of his ribs, at the back, but friendlier now. A reminder not to move. Across Luca’s mind darted a pure and specific fear of pain.

He said, proud of his voice for only shaking a little, “I thought Mr. Baudrain had come to an understanding with my Head of House.”

“Due to your mother’s generosity and Mr. Baudrain’s respect for the name of your House,” said the practical man, singsong like a child reciting vows at their naming, “he’s agreed not to take charges before a magistrate, and to laugh it off. In public. But you, Mr. Harte, still need a reminder that a thief is a thief. No matter his name.”

The knife had gone from Luca’s ribs, but he could feel the solid threatening heat of the man behind him. Luca tried desperately to stay aware of four bodies at once, as the men flanking the speaker began to move with purpose. He found the words I’ll tell my mother in his mouth, and managed to choke them back.

The man’s lip curled as if he’d said them anyway. “Pathetic,” he said. “You House brats think you can buy or bully your way out of anything. Speaking of which, aren’t you going to offer me money?”

Luca thought of Matti, standing still and shocked in a drinking house while Luca held up his own broken watch.

“I haven’t got any money,” said Luca.

He was tensed for it, but the first blow—blunt and fast, to the side of his ribs—still came as a shock.

The ones after that were less shocking, but they hurt just as much.