Chapter 18

CHAPTER

18

The Guildhall looked very different, that morning, to how it would look at Matti’s wedding in two days’ time. The quilts and tapestries covering the walls nearly floor-to-ceiling were all in different styles and colour palettes, each crafted and donated by a different House. Followed clockwise around the hall they told the story of when Huna had walked the world in disguise and been challenged by one of the old queens to weave the loveliest cloth in the world for her son’s naming day. Huna had woven for a day and a night without pausing for food or drink.

“That was something out of the ordinary, wasn’t it?”

Matti looked around from where he was gazing, without really taking in the details, at the tapestry donated by Jay House several generations ago. The man who had stepped up beside him was short even by the standards of people who weren’t Matti’s family, though a hedge of springy grey curls were doing their best to add to his height.

“Good to see you, Alfonso,” said Matti. Madra House was based in the Cantala territories, where they bought and processed cotton; Alfonso Madra ran their local office and also served as the Guild secretary in Glassport. “What was out of the ordinary?”

Madra tutted. “This is what you get for standing in the corner, lad. I’m doing my duty, spreading the talk of the room to you virtuous outliers. I meant, what did you make of Sim Kesey’s announcement?”

A smile surprised Matti by trying to twitch onto his mouth. It seemed like such a long time since he’d felt like smiling that he almost didn’t manage to hide it. “Nobody can say that Kesey House wasn’t doing the honourable thing, making a public statement as soon as they became aware of what was happening.”

“Yes, indeed. Such a pity about all the bales they’ll have to withdraw from sale, while they investigate just how long this buyer of theirs has been giving false instructions and pocketing the difference.”

“They’re maintaining the high standards of their House” was all Matti said.

Madra gave Matti a wry look of disappointment that Matti wasn’t going to play along. The man had a love for gossip that could quickly turn sour-tongued and vindictive if he took a dislike to you. The Jays had always been careful to stay on his good side. “I suppose you’re right. Now, look at that full plate. I’m keeping you from breaking your fast! Don’t stand on ceremony with me, Matti. Eat.” Madra used a tiny fork to skewer what looked like a mushroom dusted in chilli powder on his own plate, and encouragingly popped it into his mouth.

Matti smiled politely. “Another few minutes of anticipation won’t make much difference, and I’ll savour it all the more.”

Mushroom safely swallowed, Madra gave a guffawing laugh and patted Matti’s arm. “As for food, so for a wedding, hey? Not long to wait now!” Having delivered this well-meaning innuendo, he wandered away.

Matti’s plate was full of all the things he usually loved, many of which his family had long been going without. Red-spiced flaking smoked fish. Chocolates with caramel centres. Tiny cheese tarts. Slices of fresh early-autumn pear sprinkled with nutmeg. Soft milk-glazed bread in an intricate knot. He’d dutifully fasted all of yesterday, but the look and smell of the food weren’t rousing his appetite at all. A week ago he had been looking forward with pleasure to inviting Luca to this feast, held when they would usually be mid-lesson. Matti would have walked Luca around the walls and told him the story. Luca might have improvised his own version based solely on the wall hangings, turning the plot ridiculous when he hit some of the more abstract representations.

Except Luca, a fellow child of Huna, would have already known the story as well as Matti knew it himself.

Or Luca would have come up with an excuse to avoid the breakfast feast entirely, knowing that at least a handful of Harte House agents would be present. Matti looked around the room, trying to find their faces and drag their names out of his memory. His father would know. Matti had little reason to interact with the silk merchants at anything but these large Guild events, but Tomas would surely be friendly with some of them.

Matti gave himself a mental shake. What did he think he was he going to do, exactly? Accost a member of Luca’s House and demand to know how they’d managed to stay ignorant of their House heir’s presence in the city for the past few months? Luca had been, in his own theatrical way, careful. He’d avoided coming face-to-face with his own agents and the Head of Duvay, his main rival silk House, at the Half Moon Ball, though Matti hadn’t recognised it as avoidance at the time. He’d certainly have kept clear of the Harte offices here in Glassport.

Besides, there had been no sign from any quarter that Luca had made himself known to anyone but Matti. No sudden surge of gossip. No whispering about Jay House’s fortunes, beyond the usual. It seemed everyone in this room was still expecting Matti to stand up and be married to Sofia Cooper in two days’ time, and they expected a redheaded nobody of a duellist to stand up next to him.

Matti’s secrets were still secret. He didn’t know what to think.

And he couldn’t stay skulking in the corner with food either. There were at least three business conversations that he needed to have before the end of this feast, and one conversation that took precedence over them all.

Matti set down his plate on one of the tables but plucked the bread from it. He needed to force something down if he was going to make it through the day without fainting. He methodically pulled it to fluffy white pieces and ate them, washing them down with coffee. Then he went in search of Corus Vane, whom he found talking with Roland’s mother, Tomas’s younger sister.

Corus caught Matti’s eye and, as Matti had expected, began to wrap up his conversation. He smiled at Matti as he did so. He’d given that same smile last night, when Matti told him the fabricated story about the new technique from Manisi. Corus’s smiles had always been quick; he’d always stood in pleasant contrast to his sullen son.

Before any of this started, Matti wouldn’t have thought himself naive, but now he felt wounded, ginger-peeled, a raw surface of himself laid bare to be damaged by the world. Corus Vane. Kesey House. Lucastian Harte, who’d told Matti that most people were decent, and who’d been lying about that as much as anything else.

For now, Matti smiled back at Corus. Matti knew how to do this too. He’d learned it far more thoroughly than he’d learned how to handle a sword: How to smile without meaning it. How to project calm control, when all he wanted was to throw plates to the ground and shout. The art of seeming .

Perhaps there weren’t many decent people in the world at all.

“Matti,” Corus greeted him in an undertone. “When were you thinking of doing this demonstration? Do you need help setting up?”

Matti made an apologetic face. “I’m sorry if you were looking forward to seeing it, but there’s been a complication. Mama’s contact at the university got greedy and made the mistake of talking to a patent lawyer. Now they’ve been told to keep the whole thing hushed up until they can shove the paperwork through. We’re not supposed to even tell anyone it exists, before then.”

Corus should have won a prize. His eyes didn’t dart sideways for even a moment. The look he dragged over Matti’s face was quizzical.

“Ah,” Corus said finally.

Matti’s next line in this was to shrug and wander away again. But anger was prickling in his palms. He made a decision more impulsive than any since he’d first told Luca, I want you to teach me.

“A pity, isn’t it?” Matti said. “After what Simeon found out. It would have been interesting to see what happened with the swatches I have.”

Corus’s gaze sharpened. Matti held it.

“Matti.” Corus sounded neutral. It had been driven home to Matti, during his efforts to untangle the knots and set planks over the marshes that were Corus’s many small sabotages, that Corus Vane was a very smart man.

Matti would have liked to stand up on a table in the centre of the Guildhall, planting his feet between the caramels and the cakes, and yell insults at the top of his lungs. He wanted to call the man in front of him a smear of shit on the paper of the world, a fucking traitor, a thrice-cursed whistleweed worm squirming in the dirt of his own ingratitude. He wanted, more than anything, a sword in his hand and the ability to use it.

He let himself imagine that. He set it aside.

“Did you want to ask me something, Corus?” Then, when met with silence: “Or tell me something?”

They looked at each other. Matti’s blood pounded a few times at the base of his throat and he watched the flickers of movement in the lines around Corus’s eyes.

“I’d like to think,” Corus said, very softly, a man feeling his way across wet cobblestones, “that I’m still valuable to your family.”

Matti had discussed this with his mother and father, when he’d laid his findings about Corus and the Keseys bare. He’d left the vague prospect of Martens House’s involvement out of it; he’d left Luca’s true name out of it, for now. One crisis at a time.

At least this crisis he was presenting along with a solution. His mother and Sofia had refined the story about the fibre test between them, ready to be dropped into Corus’s hands. Matti had watched another year’s worth of worry lines carve themselves into Tomas’s forehead, as the Head of Jay House sat with the betrayal committed by a man he considered a close friend. Matti felt no qualms about using Corus to carry their own deception into the enemy camp.

It was another double-edged balancing act. Corus knew exactly how badly off the Jays were, even if their fortunes were poised to change, and firing him would leave him with no reason to keep it secret. Both sides still had the ability to hurt.

“I’d like to think that too,” said Matti.

Corus nodded. He didn’t say anything else.

And that, Matti thought, was your chance, Corus Vane. Whatever happens now, you’ve called it onto your own head.

“Mr. Matti Jay?”

Corus stepped away as Matti turned to see who’d spoken. A tall boy stood there, perhaps fifteen, quick-eyed and poorly dressed.

“That’s me.” Matti let the smile rise back to his face like the bob of an apple held underwater. “What can I do for you?”

The boy held out a folded letter sealed with the green wax that proclaimed a personal missive, and Matti took it.

“Hand-to-hand delivery, already paid for,” the boy said. “Now I’m done. Though he said there’d be a lot of good food around,” he added meaningfully.

Matti had been wondering if the letter was from Sofia. Now a chill ran up his arm.

“Try the cheese tarts,” he said, with a nod towards the tables. The boy grinned, bowed, and darted through the crowd with the air of someone prepared to inhale two platters without pausing for breath and then fill his pockets with whatever was left.

Matti went and found a chair to sit in. The moment before he sat, he realised he’d picked one set beneath a silk-ribbon tapestry, but moving to another chair on that basis would have been bordering on absurd. He sat, decisively, and broke the seal before he could talk himself out of doing so.

The lettering was slanted and uneven, as though the writer were impatient to dash out the door and to some activity much more exciting than letter writing.

Matti,

I’m sorry I lied. I swear on Huna’s hands and my mother’s name that I never intended any harm to you, your family, or your House.

I’m going to make it up to you.

I’m still your best man.

—Luca

Matti’s hand was halfway to closing into a helpless fist, crumpling the letter within it, when he caught himself. He smoothed it out again. The fierce shard of hope in him refused to be talked to, refused to be smothered. He missed Luca with all the hunger that he hadn’t felt for the food.

He ran a fingertip beneath the word your .

Someone settled into the seat beside his. Maya. “I saw you with— Matti?”

Matti passed her the letter. Wretchedness sat on the back of his neck like a weight. He wanted to swim for hours and lose everything of himself in the action, and he was tired, so tired.

“Tell me what to think,” he said, soft.

A long hiss of a sigh from his sister. “I can’t. I’m a bit stuck there myself.”

Matti looked up. Maya was looking at him as though she were seeing something completely new in his face.

“He could still ruin us,” she said. “He could throw the duel.”

“He could have ruined us already. He hasn’t.”

“He hasn’t given you an explanation either.”

“Are you afraid I’m going to go knocking on his door? I’m not.” Saying it felt like laying steel over his bones.

Maya handed the letter back silently. Matti folded it small and tucked it into his coat.

“Then we wait,” Maya said. “He’s going to make it up to you? He’s got two days to do it.”

“I’d avoid putting weight on that ankle for a couple of days,” the physician said, straightening up.

Luca tried to find a more comfortable position on the pillows. There were no comfortable positions; he’d learned that during the mess of agonising broken sleep that had been the previous night. He tried anyway. Mrs. Vaunt had provided extra pillows in light of his injuries, instructed Luca not to bleed on them more than was absolutely necessary, and then gone off to oversee the weekly exchange of clean linens for soiled ones when the girls from the laundry shop arrived.

“A couple of days,” Luca repeated.

“A couple of days?” Dinah was indignant, but also sparkling-eyed at the excitement of Luca’s situation in a way that Luca was not finding altogether comforting. “He’s fighting a duel! He’s the best man at a wedding!”

The physician did not look impressed by this. “I’m sure his agency contract has stipulations for providing a replacement if he’s incapacitated.”

“I’m not incapacitated!” Luca protested. “Ow!” As he tried to sit upright, the entire left side of his rib cage flared with pain.

It was true, more or less. The physician had looked him over thoroughly and proclaimed him lucky. There was a sickly bruise across one cheekbone and wrapping up the side of his eye, and his lip had split, but they hadn’t broken his nose. He had more bruises down his arms, and scrapes on his palms from catching himself against the ground, but his right hand’s grip was still firm and his wrists were hale. One knee had been knocked sideways but hadn’t swollen up, and the pain was already settling. Luca was most worried about the ribs—possibly cracked, possibly just strained, but it hurt like hell to move around and to lift his left arm—and the ankle. A mild sprain, when he’d landed on it and it had rolled inwards. He’d had worse. But he hadn’t tried to fight on worse.

Luca didn’t think it was luck, or incompetence. An incompetent fighter was more likely to do more damage than intended, not less; that was how people got killed accidentally, when their opponents were strong and unskilled. Andri Baudrain’s men had delivered a very calculated beating indeed. If Luca had been left with any broken bones, any real damage, Luca’s mother would have been forced to take action about it if she found out. Baudrain wasn’t in this to create a feud.

No, Baudrain hadn’t wanted to damage him. He’d wanted Luca taught a lesson, wanted him hurt and shaken and humiliated, and the fact that Luca knew it didn’t mean it had been any less successful. Remembering any of it made him flinch and shiver. It had torn something casually out of him, realising how easy it was for them to hurt him and how useless he was at hurting back. His own version of fighting had never been so businesslike, so… joyless . Which was an odd thing to think. But every other physical hurt in Luca’s life, even the careless slice that had opened his skin and left him with the scar that Matti had touched, had been earned for the love of it, when he was trying to improve himself.

The thought swirled through his mind: And I’d thought I had nothing left to lose. What kind of stupid fucking hubris .

“I can still fight,” Luca said, holding himself stubbornly in a sitting position. “I’ll show you.” He swung his legs sideways over the edge of the bed—or tried to. The physician caught his good ankle and stopped him.

The physician sighed, rummaged in his bag, and pulled out another length of bandage. “If you’re not going to be sensible about it, which I see is altogether probable—” He proceeded to show Luca a different way of bandaging the sprain, to give it as much support as possible.

“Has there been any mail?” Luca asked Dinah, once the physician had taken his leave.

“I haven’t left your room since the last time you asked.”

“What are you doing here? I’m sure you have things to do.”

Dinah crossed her arms and leaned more pointedly against the wall. She was wearing a sash of woven silk ribbons in many different colours, a cheerful rainbow splash belting her black tunic over her black skirt. “You’re waiting on a letter?”

“I’m waiting on part of the wedding present,” Luca said, which was true. By now his mother would have responded to Luca’s letter. A possible answer to at least half of Matti’s problems was in some fast courier’s saddlebag, drawing ever closer to Glassport, and all Luca had needed to do was bait the hook with himself.

Though this wasn’t going to be one of his meaningless cons. He couldn’t slither away at the first sign of consequences, or cheerfully siphon off what he wanted with one hand while making amends with the other. He was buying a future with a future. As bargains went it was practically mythic, and nobody escaped intact from myth. The gods made sure you paid in the end.

“Morning mail’s due soon,” said Dinah. “I’ll let you know if there’s anything.”

“Thank you.”

“ If you show me what’s in it.”

“You are the worst gossip in this city, Dinah Vaunt.”

Dinah’s smile was equal parts smug and sunny as she let herself out.

Luca’s ankle sent up pain in small warning bursts as he hobbled over to the desk, but at least it showed no signs of crumpling under his weight. He gathered pencil and blank paper and took a slow, steeling-himself breath.

He wrote a number at the top of the page, and an equation beneath the number. That part wasn’t a problem. Luca knew the range of interest rates that would apply to a loan, from the safest and longest-term at a banking House to the coercive terms squeezed from the desperate by back-alley loan rats. They were just the names of numbers. Words thrown around in conversation.

The problem was that the difference between memorising an equation and being able to use it was like the difference between lifting a sword, as Matti had lifted his sword the very first morning in the practice room, and fighting your way to the end of a bout. Luca chewed on the pencil and tried to focus. He knew the principle of interest, he understood what compounding meant, but trying to apply it to real numbers was like listening to Matti’s twin siblings natter on in their mother’s tongue. It had always been that way. Perse could talk himself exasperatedly dry about how smart Luca was. Luca knew better.

Painfully, Luca moved the pencil. Two lines later he drew a cross through the whole thing, muttered a curse, tugged at his hair—winced, at the resulting complaint from his ribs—and started again.

He couldn’t have said how long it was before someone knocked at the door of his room and then opened it without waiting for a reply. Luca flicked the pencil across the desk with a sigh. There was a number at the bottom of the paper, and his head had discovered a new kind of pain like a laundry peg being pinched between his eyes.

“Mail,” Dinah sang. She held out an envelope to Luca. “Feels bulky. Come on, then. What is the other part of this present?”

“Something expensive,” said Luca, grabbing it from her.

“Mr. Piere.”

Luca grinned at the whine in her tone. “Miss Vaunt . You’ll have the whole story, I promise you. As soon as it’s all mine to tell.”

Luca tore open the envelope. A tension he hadn’t been aware of dissolved away as soon as his fingers touched the scrap of fabric that was folded within. He pulled it out, and the letter with it.

“What’s that?” Dinah asked as he read.

“It’s silk.” Luca held the silvery stuff out to her, and Dinah rubbed it between finger and thumb.

“That’s your present?”

Luca nodded. “It’s not just silk. It’s something true.”

“Ooh,” said Dinah. “You should write for the theatre .”

Luca made a rude gesture at her and continued with the letter. He skimmed it hungrily, then forced himself to go back and chew over each line, making sure he’d understood it. Jacquelle Harte hoarded her favours, and she certainly didn’t give them away for free, not even to her indulged younger son. All of Luca’s pain was shoved aside as he sat there, lightheaded, working through what he’d promised and what he’d won. A future for a future.

It wasn’t quite enough. It wasn’t everything.

He drew another piece of paper towards him on the desk. It was crumpled from having been folded in his pocket, after his time spent combing through Kesey House’s files last night, and then crumpled further from the encounter with Baudrain’s men. Luca smoothed the paper with his fingers, looking at the address of the warehouse. He stood up and transferred most of his weight to the bad ankle, testing its stability.

“What are you doing, you idiot? Mr. Mattinesh Jay won’t be in the mood to appreciate your present if you screw up your leg, lose the duel, and stop his wedding from happening,” Dinah pointed out.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to call your boarders idiots,” said Luca, absently bouncing on that leg.

“I am,” said Dinah, “when they’re being idiots. Get back into bed, Luca.”

Luca glanced over at her, startled. Her mouth was a curl of exasperation but there was something in her eyes that reminded him of how young she was, and how easily she’d withdraw this overture of friendship, if he let her.

“Can’t do that, Dinah.” Her freckled face lit momentarily with relief, and Luca added, “The wedding’s in two days, as you pointed out.”

Dinah gave him a knowing look that Luca, who hadn’t had cause to apply the word in a personal context for sixteen years, could only describe as sisterly.

“Is it an errand? I’ll run it. I’m going to the market for Mama later.”

“It is an errand, but I need to do it myself,” said Luca, thinking of his lockpicks. He touched the paper again. “Though I could use your skills at distraction one more time, if they’re on offer.”

Dinah laced her fingers together and grinned. “All yours. What are we stealing today? Something else true?”

“No,” said Luca. “We’re going to steal a lie.”