Chapter 9

CHAPTER

9

It turned out that every house that Luca had broken into before now had stood on its own piece of land, with at least a slip of space on either side, whereby one could get at convenient windows or at least find access to a back door. That was the sensible way to build houses, Luca had declared.

That was a waste of good inner-city real estate, in Matti’s opinion.

Here in Glassport even the grandest houses lived happily pressed up against one another, and Corus and Adrean Vane did not live in a grand street. Their small dwelling with its dull brick facade was cramped among a long row of similarly dull ones, without even the hope of a back garden. It backed directly onto a row of shops the next street over, and anyone trying to access the second level would have to dance on the roof of one of those shops.

“Which I am not opposed to in theory, ” Luca had said thoughtfully, “but it’s hard to think how the thing might be accomplished with any sort of stealth.”

All in all, Luca had seemed relieved when Matti mentioned that his father held a spare key to the Vane house. It was a normal thing for a friend to do for a friend: a small and domestic gesture of trust. The irony wasn’t lost on Matti.

Matti was breathing hard by the time he met Luca at the arranged spot. He’d been waylaid by his mother on the way out of the house, picking up a conversation they’d been having about a new chemical additive for fabric crabbing, which a friend of hers at the university in Manisi had written to her about. Matti had then almost forgotten the all-important key, and had to make an excuse to duck back up to Tomas’s study to fetch it from the safe.

His mind was scattered. He hadn’t slept well, anticipating the usual business meeting with their most senior agents, including Corus Vane. The meeting had taken place that morning. Matti kept pulling his memory of it worriedly through his mind like a rough strand through sensitive fingers, wondering if he’d somehow given away what he knew. He’d had a lot of practice keeping his emotions and his thoughts to himself, but he’d never had to be on guard against this kind of resentment before. It was almost hatred, a word with hot spikes to it. Matti was unused to spikes.

Soon enough he’d know if it was justified.

“We must stop meeting at these odd hours,” said Luca upon Matti’s arrival, with an absurd glance up through his pale lashes. “I’m going to start suspecting your motives are the ulterior ones.”

“Noon isn’t odd,” Matti said, though it was, a bit. One hardly thought of crimes as being committed in the middle of the day. The sky was cloud-strewn and glutinously bright. A voice calling instructions in a tired, cranky tone drifted through an open window above their heads. A man carrying a toddler trudged down the street away from them and passed another man, struggling with a covered handcart, who paused every so often to wipe his fingers on his trousers and glare at the cart’s handle.

Matti was overdressed for the neighbourhood. Luca, slouched against the wall in an uncharacteristically casual posture, wearing a plain shirt and no waistcoat, was not.

“Would you have preferred daybreak?” Matti asked.

“I was awake at daybreak on your account anyway . Sword lessons and counterespionage in a single day, all on your behalf. I am a professional, you know. I could have been seeking out actual paid employment.”

“I think you’re glad of the entertainment.”

Luca flashed a smile at him, sharp-edged. “And you? What was the excuse you used this time?”

“I invented a meeting.”

“Scandalous behaviour, Mr. Jay.” Luca straightened and looked pleased, as he did at any suggestion that Matti might be unbending. Luca thought Matti’s sense of duty rendered him hopelessly stuffy and dull; there was no getting around that. It was a terrible idea for Matti to be doing things just because they called up a smouldering glee in Luca’s grey-brown eyes.

Matti felt he was on a downhill slope of some kind. He was fighting the incline the whole way, but the ground was smooth and treacherous beneath his feet, like frost on long grass. He’d crossed a boundary marker when he let himself stay in the boardinghouse room for a precious stretch of time after Luca had fallen asleep, reluctant to move his leg and lower Luca’s head to the bed. At first Matti had been breathing his way through a mood that kept switching back and forth between relief and disappointment. He’d anticipated… well, something . The ice on the slope was the way Luca glanced at Matti’s fingers; the way Matti went tense when Luca was close, awash with wanting.

But after a short while of sitting there with Luca’s soft wild hair under his hands, Luca’s restlessness dissolved into sleep, Matti had just looked. He’d let his eyes travel over Luca’s closed lids and the constellation of pale freckles that he knew half by heart. He’d felt like a child having crept down to the pantry after a festival feast, stuffing small handfuls of leftover sweets into his mouth.

He’d felt that there was nothing disappointing at all about the chance to sit there, on a narrow bed in a rented room, with Luca Piere asleep in his lap, for the long bittersweet hour before he surrendered to the reality of his life and crept out of the boardinghouse.

That was the angle of the slope. Matti didn’t know what to do with it. It was dangerous, that much was certain.

“I didn’t have to come at all. I could have just given you the key this morning,” he said, turning to lead the way towards the Vane house.

“Not a chance,” said Luca. “Everything about this approach works better if it’s Mr. Mattinesh Jay wielding the key.”

“What about the neighbours? What do we say if someone asks what we’re doing?”

“Nobody is going to ask, because you have a key . And even if they do, I can think of five good stories off the top of my head!”

“Pick one,” said Matti.

“Stick with the truth. Your father is this man’s employer, and you own a key to his house. People can make whatever assumptions they wish. Or, if you absolutely must have something lined up… your father wants to surprise Mr. Vane on the next feast of Huna with a new piece of furniture, or a set of woven wall hangings, as thanks for his many years of loyal service. You’re sneaking in to measure the place up and make a decision about what would match best.”

Many years of loyal service. Yes. The resentment pricked at Matti’s heart again.

“And you are…” he prompted.

“A serviceman.” Luca curled his shoulders in, looking as he did when he was showing Matti a mocking version of Matti’s habitual posture, which was—apparently—just one of the endless sources of pain that Matti provided as a student of the blade.

The street was deserted, though faint sounds of habitation floated in the air, when they knocked on the front door of the Vane house. There was no answer. They weren’t expecting one; Corus had left for an overnight trip to the town of Loford to threaten some sense into the head of an enterprising toll-taker who’d illegally hiked up the levies on commercial goods passing through the canal lock. Corus was good at putting out those kinds of fires.

As for Adrean, Matti knew that he spent as little time here as possible. He split his time between a duelling club in an equally grubby corner of the city, and the back room of a coffeehouse, where he could commune with like-minded artists and compose odes to the beauty of other people’s betrotheds.

The door went unanswered. Matti let them into the house. He wouldn’t have wanted to spend much time in there, either, given the choice. It was clean but there was a dingy smell to it, as though some sort of damp had set in and never been fully banished, and the lack of windows made the interior dim.

“If I were taking bribes, I’d hope to live somewhere nicer than this,” said Luca.

“Not everyone cares about that,” said Matti, though he’d been thinking the same thing. “If you don’t do business out of your house then there’s no reason to show it off, especially if you care more about—I don’t know. Transient things. Food. Experiences.”

“Sword lessons,” said Luca, throwing him a smile.

“I’m sure he’s paying for Adrean’s,” said Matti. “All right. Where do we start?”

“The only items I’ve liberated from houses have been valuables, not secrets. He’s your employee. You decide.”

They explored. The stairs creaked loudly as they climbed, sending tension shooting up Matti’s spine. The townhouse was two storeys and narrow, and the third bedroom that served as a study was barely larger than the laundry room at Matti’s house. The wallpaper in the study was a greyish blue that once might have been stripes, faded and stained, and a tidy desk was shoved up under the window, the external side of which was crusted in enough dirt and cobwebs to create an uneven pattern of light on the desk’s surface.

“And the gods smile,” said Luca softly. He was crouched in a corner of the study, running his hands over a squat document chest with a padlock attached to the front. “There weren’t any other keys on that ring, were there? No. Too easy.” He didn’t look discouraged. He pulled a small roll of fabric from his pocket.

Matti had the absurd urge to laugh. “So,” he said, “this skill set you mentioned.”

“Turn your back, oh respectable son of a respectable House,” Luca intoned.

Matti would rather have crouched down and watched Luca work, half out of sheer curiosity and half out of the desire to watch Luca’s clever hands do something new. But he turned his attention to the desk instead. He hesitated, feeling as grubby as the window. He was about to go through another person’s private papers.

“I can hear that moral crisis you’re having from all the way over here,” said Luca.

“It’s just that—”

“He’s your enemy, Matti. You’re not doing anything he wouldn’t do to you.”

Matti could call up any number of occasions when Corus Vane had stood next to Matti’s desk, or Tomas’s desk, and stirred the papers there with a casual finger, casting his sharp gaze over their contents as though he had every right to do so. Because he did have the right. He was trusted.

That was enough for Matti’s conviction to solidify within him, as resentment stole between the bricks of his doubts. The few loose sheets on top of the desk were full of nothing in particular, each one a quilt of scribbled abbreviations and times and lists of names and places, all in Corus’s narrow hand. Matti read them carefully but could find nothing unusual or striking among those references he recognised. They were the usual sorts of notes busy people wrote for themselves as reminders, or as thoughts arose in the midst of other work.

The drawers held pens and ink cartridges, stubs of sealing wax, string and scissors and buttons and loose wine corks. A wooden ruler with the name VANE etched shakily into it. Folded newspapers. A pile of yellowing letters, the edges of the paper curling up, which Matti realised with a guilty stab were signed Isabeau. Isabeau Vane. Adrean’s mother, Corus’s wife, and dead for many years now. Matti hurriedly returned the letters to their drawer and neatened the ribbon that held them together.

Once he’d poked into every corner of every drawer he slid the last one home. “Nothing much here. Would he even keep physical evidence that would be incriminating?”

“Locks are usually there to safeguard something,” said Luca. Matti turned in the chair to look at him. Luca was sitting on the floor with one leg stretched out and the other bent up, the foot of it tapping rapidly, one arm hooked around his knee as he leaned close to the chest and jiggled two pieces of metal in the padlock.

“Progress?” Matti asked.

Luca glanced over at him. “Patience, sir .”

Matti’s face heated. The query had come out in his clipped business voice, the one he used with Jay House’s employees. Corus’s paperwork had put him in that mood.

He ran a hand through his hair, but he had no excuse to turn back to the desk. He watched as Luca bent his head to the task again. One lockpick was returned to the roll and a new one selected.

Matti went over and knelt down himself, holding the padlock firm and steady against the upended chest. He could feel the delicate work of the metal picks, tiny scrapes and vibrations like a line of violins over the ragged drumbeat of Luca’s foot and the occasional soft huff of Luca’s breath as he frowned at the lock.

Matti felt the moment the tumblers gave way. He lifted his hand.

Luca said, “Hah,” sounding smug as he twisted the padlock and pulled it clear so that he could right the document chest and flip the lid up.

Matti had been lowering his expectations during his fruitless search of the desk, telling himself not to hope for anything. This was a gamble. Life didn’t always serve up what you wanted, let alone what you needed. The goddess might look at you, down in the dust, and not hesitate to compound your woe.

The bundle of papers in the chest was less a bundle and more an uneven pile, from Luca turning the chest and righting it again. Luca unceremoniously split it in half, handed one resultant sheaf to Matti, and settled his own on his knees, where he began to leaf through it with the air of a schoolmaster hoping to be surprised by the quality of an essay.

Part of Matti still couldn’t believe he was doing this, but Luca’s impulsive efficiency was like being bundled along by a strong wind. And Matti honestly couldn’t think of any other options. If they didn’t find anything pointing at betrayal, Matti would at least be able to tell himself that he hadn’t ignored the possibility, and he’d shoulder the guilt of having doubted one of his House’s senior agents.

He skimmed his eyes over Corus’s personal documents one by one. Some related to the lease on this house, or the accounts Corus held with one of the banking Houses. A piece of paper with an embossed border turned out to be the wedding certificate of Corus Vane and Isabeau Perrault, signed in dark purple ink.

When Matti found what he was looking for, it took him a while to recognise it as such. It was five pieces of paper clipped together, looking almost like a journal: a column for the date, and then a brief entry of words. The ink of each entry was the subtly different shade that came with different ages, sometimes switching from blue to black, and the dates themselves were often months apart.

Each entry was short, and although some were cryptic enough that Matti couldn’t immediately tell what they referred to, those that he did understand were damning. They ranged from Allowed overcharging for Haxbridge mordant to Delay in labour hire to move goods from transport .

The chemist in Haxbridge who supplied the Jays with mordants had been increasing his prices gradually over the past few years, but that wasn’t unusual. And there were always a few bales of raw wool, or a few bolts of completed fabric, lost to damp-rot whenever a large amount had to be moved from place to place. Nothing on here would have showed up on its own. None of it had . All were small oversights, small tweaks, small mistakes that wouldn’t be recognised as mistakes, affecting every aspect of the Jays’ business from carding to spinning, crabbing to dyeing, weaving to sales. Together they were a field of tiny holes poked in the base of a barrel, letting water leak slowly out.

The last entry read: Passed on details of planned neg. with CQ over new contract. It was dated a few weeks prior.

City quartermaster, Matti thought. He felt numb.

“Your face has gone strange,” said Luca, breaking across the cold ocean of Matti’s thoughts. “I take it you’ve found something?”

Matti passed the pages over. “It’s as though he’s keeping an account. Something that will be totted up.”

Totted up and paid for, one way or another. This wasn’t the kind of simple or even complex embezzlement that every House was familiar with and knew to be on their guard against. None of these actions would have gained Corus anything on their own, nor allowed him to skim anything off the House’s profits. They diminished those profits, every single one. Given how much Corus’s own earnings and status stood to fall as Jay House teetered on the brink of ruin, they were the actions of a man suspended on a tightrope and sawing at the rope with a knife. Dangerous and incomprehensible.

Unless he knew he had a net to tumble into.

“Huna’s swollen tits, ” said Luca, turning a page. Even lacking Matti’s familiarity with Jay House’s dealings, Luca didn’t seem to have any difficulty in following the implications. The story the ledger told was hardly complicated. Any child past the first few years of school could have drawn a diagram with the words increased materials cost in one circle, and the words decreased market share in another, with an arrow leading from the two to another drawn around the words oh fuck . Or the child-appropriate equivalent.

“Yes, indeed,” said Matti. “What about your pile? Is there anything that would link Corus to Lysbette Martens?”

“No, but—does the name Kesey mean anything to you?”

“Yes.” Matti’s heart gave a sharp kick. “They’re one of our major local competitors. Kesey House. They’d benefit—they did benefit from some of these, almost certainly, and they’re in the running for that Glassport army contract.” They were one of only two other Houses who’d be interested in undercutting the Jays on that front, in fact. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. The nauseating fury that Matti felt at the back of his teeth was unexpected.

“Simeon Kesey?”

“He’s their Head of House. What is it?”

“Simeon. Sim,” said Luca, thoughtful. “ That was the name. I’d forgotten. It does make a lot more sense for a local wool House to be behind this than Martens.”

He handed Matti back the clipped pages and picked up an envelope, unsealed, from which he slid out a single sheet of folded paper. It wasn’t Corus’s handwriting; this was the painstaking lettering of someone who didn’t have to write many documents as part of their daily routine. Matti glanced down at the signature. The name was vaguely familiar, but Rivers was a common surname in Glassport, and Rob a shortening of many different first names.

Rob Rivers, by his own scribed admittance, was a worker on a Kesey House carding floor. Matti’s family employed plenty of carders; it was a job that called for strong hands and patience, and no imagination. The document was a concise statement. It said that as supervisory carder in his shift, Rivers had been provided with sacks of what were clearly a combination of hard waste fibres and pulled wool. He and his team had been instructed to card these fibres along with the high-grade fleeces they were working on, and to send these on to the spinners with no alteration to the grading label.

Rivers concluded his statement with an awkwardly phrased but damning admission that this practice had been introduced after the advent of mandatory labelling of finished fabrics, and that the majority of fabric being produced by Kesey House carried a classification label that overstated the percentage of long, high-crimp fibre by at least twenty percent.

“What’s pulled wool?” asked Luca.

“It’s from animals slaughtered for meat,” said Matti. “Pulled, as opposed to shorn. You would use it for—rugs, maybe. Not for fabrics.” He stared at the paper, trying to process. His mind was churning with the attempt to take this in on top of the preceding shock. “Is Corus working for the Keseys or against them?”

“It’s collateral, I’d say,” said Luca coolly. “The kind of man with the brains and guts to turn spy for a rival, in such a senior position, would be smart enough to make sure he held something over the head of his true employer. Just in case they backed out of their end of the deal.”

“This kind of mandatory labelling is recent,” Matti said. “It came out of the Guildband two years ago. All the Guildmasters in delegation voted on it, so the same standards apply across the whole continent.” Regulation, for the most part, was left up to the individual Guilds to enforce at the level of the Guildband, the same standards being applied across Thesper. “Some of the other fabric industries have started taking it up as well. But it was my father’s idea first,” Matti added, with a stab of pathetic, bittersweet pride.

“Is there some kind of objective test?” Luca asked. “How do you prove this kind of fraud?”

“With difficulty,” Matti admitted. “Once a fabric’s been crabbed, getting a sense of the average fibre length that went into it is so inexact as to be useless, if the percentages are tweaked on that level. Ah, it’s to do with—interlocking,” he said, at Luca’s questioning look. He laced his own fingers together, then flattened the fingers to the back of each opposite hand. “Crabbing means wetting the fabric, at heat, and keeping a constant tension as you pull it over rollers. The fibres lock down and the pattern won’t get distorted when you process the fabric further.”

“Fascinating as that is,” Luca said, “if you can’t detect something like that, the whole labelling system turns into an honour code, doesn’t it?”

Matti shrugged, uncomfortable. “Investigation would be based on reports from buyers, when the fabric doesn’t hold up to wear over time. But the penalties laid down in the bylaws are very strict. And I don’t…” He struggled. “There’s no honour in producing poor product. It tarnishes your entire House.” Most people in trade would rather face a penalty from a city council than go against Guild law. A city-state didn’t hold anything against you, once you’d paid for your crimes. But to have your reputation blackened within your Guild could break the spine of a House, or destroy an independent merchant’s dreams of aspiring to House status.

Luca was looking at him in a way that Matti couldn’t interpret. “Then the question is, if they’re willing to stoop to espionage and sabotage, do you think the Keseys would draw the line at committing fraud on top of that? Especially if it would be difficult to catch them doing it.”

“I don’t know,” said Matti. “But it’d be easy enough to find out if this man Rivers is still—”

“What are you doing?”

“Was there anything else in your pile that I should see?”

“This was the important one,” said Luca. “And again, what are you doing?”

Matti was tidying the papers back into a single pile, which he placed neatly in what seemed the most likely place in the chest. He’d been absorbed in the enormity of what they’d discovered, but now he wanted to be elsewhere so that he could process it.

“Corus can’t know we’ve seen these. Besides, it’s not as though we can take any of this out of here.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s stolen, ” said Matti. “Because any magistrate will ask how we got it, and we got it by trespassing and then picking a lock!”

“Not even to show your parents, then?”

“They’ll believe me.”

Luca glanced up at him in a way that wrung something in Matti’s chest. Luca was surprised. Luca, quite transparently, would not have been able to rely on the fact that he would be trusted, not even by his own family.

Matti had to remind himself, with an effort that felt like lifting his sword at the end of an exhausting hour, that he didn’t trust Luca. He’d gone into this venture with that fact held high in his mind. Holding it there now felt… well, like the same effort. Something heavy held aloft for no true reason. A set of words with no emotion beneath it.

“We— I —need to think about this before doing anything,” Matti said.

“Never been my specialty.” Luca’s expression gained a sparkle. “You said it yourself, Matti. If you’re aware he’s a spy and he doesn’t know, there are all sorts of ways you can play—”

“Stop.”

“I’m serious, what—” Luca’s eyes flew wide as Matti’s hand covered his mouth.

Matti had his other hand uplifted, straining his ears. “I thought…”

In the quiet, noise came again. This time it wasn’t the rattle of a key in the front door that Matti had heard the first time, but the distant creak of that door opening, along with the abrupt sound of a conversation in progress. The words were not discernible. The speaking voice, however, was.

“That’s Adrean,” said Matti.

Luca took hold of Matti’s wrist and tugged Matti’s hand away from his face. Matti’s heart seemed to have taken up residence in his throat, threatening to choke him with a surge of panic.

“Move,” Luca said softly. He closed the chest and reached for the padlock, fastening it again. “We can’t stay in here. Move, Matti.”

Matti stood, rubbing his hands on his thighs, trying to focus. Luca was right. The tiny study wouldn’t have been a good hiding place for a child, and it held absolutely no possibilities for two grown men.

Luca set the chest back in position where they’d found it, cast a glance at the desk as though to reassure himself that Matti hadn’t left its contents strewn over the floorboards, and then led the tiptoeing way out of the study and back into the dark upstairs hall. One of Luca’s hands was clamped hard around Matti’s forearm.

Adrean’s voice mingled with that of another young man. The two of them were moving around.

“In here,” Luca said, barely more than a breath now, “I saw— yes, ” as he pulled Matti into the larger of the two bedrooms. There were sheets of paper scattered thickly on both the bed and the corner desk, and a battered-looking guitar leaned against the wall, along with a collection of weapons that had clearly seen better days.

“This one’s Adrean’s room,” Matti whispered. “We should try—”

“No. We’ll have to risk it. The one in the other bedroom’s not big enough.” Luca had led them right up to the wardrobe of scratched dark wood. He made a gesture, the meaning of which was plain.

“You must be joking.” Matti wasn’t sure what he was protesting. The ridiculousness of the entire thing, probably.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“You’re enjoying this,” Matti accused, but he didn’t have a better idea, and the footsteps on the stairs were getting louder and closer. He sent out a prayer that the hinges wouldn’t creak, tugged the door of the wardrobe open, and stepped up and into a sparse flock of hanging clothes.

It wasn’t a large space. Matti crammed himself back and sideways to make room, but the speed with which Luca stepped in after him caused an unfortunate rebound effect, like apples bumping in a barrel of water. The beginning of a hissed curse fell from Luca’s mouth as Luca began to overbalance back out of the wardrobe, grabbing at coats. Matti’s pulse pounded in his temples. He did the only thing he could think of and snaked an arm around Luca’s chest, pulling Luca awkwardly back against himself.

“Door,” Matti said, a strained breath against the top of Luca’s ear.

Luca shifted around to hook a toe beneath the wardrobe door and yanked it towards them with enough force that it snicked closed. A sudden and stifling darkness enveloped them. The wardrobe smelled of fabric, not all of it clean, and there was a mothball edge to the air.

Silence. Matti strained his ears for the sound of footsteps or voices. His breathing and Luca’s both seemed abominably loud, quick and out of sync. His hand was pressed over Luca’s heart and he could feel it faintly shoving at his palm through bone and flesh and skin and shirt.

Matti nearly bit his tongue when something touched the back of his hand, but it was just Luca’s own hand, flattening Matti’s even more firmly against his chest. Matti sucked in a long breath, which was perhaps a mistake. His nose and lungs filled with the smell of Luca’s hair.

The footsteps were definitely in the upstairs hall now. Their conversation was still hard to make out.

The pressure of Luca’s hand lightened. Now Luca’s fingers were moving on the back of Matti’s hand, making slow circles and patterns; for a moment Matti wondered if Luca was making letters, trying to communicate, but the patterns were aimless.

Or not aimless. Matti realised that this was Luca’s outlet—that Luca’s restlessness was beginning to bubble up, trapped as he was in this small space. Luca was already shifting his weight from foot to foot, small movements that did nothing for Matti’s composure or the tingling fire that was beginning to crawl through his body.

Before he could stop himself, Matti moved his free hand to the side of Luca’s waist, his smallest two fingers curling around and encountering the jut of Luca’s hipbone.

He’d wanted Luca to be still; instead a shudder went through Luca’s whole body and he pressed back farther against Matti. There was no way, no way at all, that he would have missed how Matti was hardening in his trousers. Or how he hardened further, helpless, at the feel of Luca’s arse sliding up against him.

This is not the time, Matti wanted to yell at his own anatomy. But Luca was all slim muscle and there was no air between their bodies, barely enough room to slide a letter opener, and Luca’s escape-artist hair was in Matti’s face, tickling his nose and mouth. If Matti bent his head, he could nose at the place where Luca’s collar rose. He could stir the hair at the nape, imagining what Luca might be feeling: the sensation of hot breath on skin. This was it, the crest of the icy slope, and Matti was moving too fast to stop now.

That tingle of fire had become an unbearable crackle. Luca’s breath was coming rapidly. If Matti moved the hand on Luca’s hip only a little, he would be able to discover if Luca was just as hard as he was. Luca would be trapped between Matti’s body and palm. He could try to move, but Matti would have him pinned; Matti could make him shudder again, and again…

Matti’s own cock twitched. Luca stilled, and then melted even farther against Matti in silent encouragement.

Matti was going to lose his mind here in this wardrobe smelling of sweat and mothballs. He had never been so aroused in his life. He was—

“—slap in the face, on top of everything else.”

“But you’re going to go anyway?”

“I won’t turn down the chance to see her. To talk to her.”

Luca’s fingernails dug painfully into Matti’s hand in unnecessary warning. The voices of Adrean and his companion were suddenly loud and comprehensible. They were in the room.

“Do you need a hand?” The man who was not Adrean sounded bored.

“No, it’s here somewhere.”

Papers were rustling; someone was moving from place to place. Desk to bed, Matti presumed, looking for whatever it was. He had no idea whatsoever what he would do if Adrean opened the wardrobe. He tried to imagine it and his mind was a pale sheet of terror.

“Besides,” Adrean added, “I’ll get to meet this best man that nobody seems to have heard of.”

Luca’s head moved in a kind of twitch, knocking against Matti’s chin. Matti winced.

“I still don’t know why he didn’t go for the best the city has to offer,” said Adrean’s friend.

“I told you, it’s an insult,” Adrean said. “And a calculated one. He could afford the best, and he’s gone for something less. He’s saying I’m not worth it. Well, that’s his folly. He’s not even seen me fight. He knows nothing about duelling. I’ll destroy this newcomer, whoever he is.”

Luca was now shaking with what Matti suspected was laughter. Matti pressed his fingers warningly into Luca’s hip. It wasn’t that funny.

Though Matti was relieved, despite everything, to know that Adrean didn’t suspect how badly off Jay House was. That Corus had kept that secret, even from his own son.

“ Where is this shitting— Oh, here we go.” Yet more rustling.

“Take your time,” said Adrean’s friend, with a hint of sarcasm. “I don’t know him, but from what people say about him, Mattinesh doesn’t seem like that kind of person.”

“The Jays are good at seeming,” Adrean said, scathing, and for a panicked moment Matti wondered if he’d been wrong about what Adrean knew. But Adrean went on, “They’re the same kind of snobs as the rest of them. Think their shit smells of heartsease and honey. Tomas offered me a job, a few years back, did I tell you? Ah. Found it. It’s only a draft, but I think it’s the best I’ve done this year. Better than Hattie’s incoherent mess of a song; I can’t believe she found someone willing to put music behind that drivel.”

A noncommittal hum from the other man. “What kind of job?”

“What? Oh, something for a handful of bronze in the logistics office,” said Adrean. “Everything my father’s done for that family, and that was the best they could do. The man looked as though he thought he was doing me a favour. Patronising prick. And Matti’s no better. He’s always disliked me—boring, self-righteous prig that he is. He’s jealous.”

Luca’s silent laughter had subsided. Now his fingers slid against the gaps between Matti’s own, back and forth.

“Hardly surprising,” offered the other, “given everything.”

“It’s not just Sofia. He can’t stand to think that some of us have talents and interests outside his precious House, or that Sofia might prefer someone with a personality to someone who thinks that his name should get him everything he wants.”

Matti felt as though he’d been punched. Anger at the unfairness of it, mingled with a tiny ember of guilt—he had been jealous, on one level, Adrean was right about that—wanted to burst out of him. As for the job, Adrean had never expressed any interest in trade; he still appeared to have none. Anyone with no experience would start at the lowest rank of clerkship. Matti wanted to throw the wardrobe door open and defend his father, defend himself.

He wondered if this was how Luca felt all the time: this unbearable need to move.

The reassuring caress had stopped. Luca’s fingernails dug in again. This time Matti clung to the warning, forcing himself to focus on the sting of pain. Some of the rage seeped out of him as the subject changed back to the poem that Adrean had written, and the possibility that the other man might help him compose a tune to go with it. Matti was afraid they’d settle in for a long discussion, but it seemed the visit to the house had just been to recover the paper, and they were heading out again.

Matti’s muscles had begun to cramp. He forced himself to stay still while the two men left the room, and while their footsteps faded back down the stairs. Eventually the front door closed with a slam.

Luca removed his hand from Matti’s and pushed the wardrobe door open. Matti’s eyes creased at the sudden light. Luca stepped down with a single soft foot, then another, head cocked. Matti listened hard until he’d convinced himself that there was nobody moving or talking anywhere downstairs.

Then he followed Luca out of the wardrobe, and they stood an arm’s span apart on the floor of Adrean’s bedroom. The lack of Luca’s warmth on Matti’s front was as momentarily unpleasant as the light had been.

“What an insufferable little glob of worm spit,” said Luca. His voice was clipped and dismissive, as Matti had never heard it before. “What a self-satisfied arse.” Now Matti could hear that the haughty control was a milk-skin over some other emotion. Luca doubled over, hands on his knees, and gave a long spout of laughter that sounded like it was being wrung from him. For a moment Matti remembered Sofia, shaking and laughing and apologetic on the street outside Matti’s house. “That was a close one,” Luca added.

“You did enjoy it,” Matti accused, but weakly. He could still feel the delirious buzz of anger and desire and alertness in his own veins.

“Oh, certainly. By all means. I live for the thrill of danger. I relish the prospect of being discovered committing acts of criminal daring on someone else’s property.” Some more of that laughter that seemed to come from Luca’s gut and shred his pipes on the way out.

“I’m sure it was very inconvenient for you to have to manage me as well.” Matti didn’t know what to think. This was Luca’s chosen career, or at least a large piece in the strange patchwork of things that comprised that career. Luca had moved swiftly and decisively, and hidden them in the only possible place, and they had remained secret. It hardly seemed like something that would warrant this reaction.

Luca straightened. His mouth was loose with laughter as he stared at Matti, that direct and stripping stare that found all of Matti’s faults. Now it was doing nothing but making Matti remember, with perfect clarity, how Luca’s hair had smelled and how his nails and fingers had felt on Matti’s hand.

Luca swallowed. Matti watched his throat move.

“Manage you,” Luca said. “As if I’d dare. Come on. This part is known as making our escape .”

Matti’s pulse and erection had both settled themselves by the time the escape was properly made. They let themselves out via the front door, locked it, and strolled—with a casual pace that took all of Matti’s concentration to maintain—two streets away.

Luca ducked into a small courtyard between townhouses. The same kind of yard could be found all over the city, small spaces for neighbourhood children to play skipping games and skin their knees and generally burn off some energy after school. This courtyard was shielded from the street by a wall topped with wrought iron detailing. It was empty, ramshackle, with the small piece of earth gone to knee-high whistleweed and dry dead grass. What had been an area of paving stones was now a battlefield of broken rock where a tree’s roots had erupted in knots, forcing their way through.

Matti was settled. In fact, Matti was feeling quite calm about the whole business as he sat down on the yard’s tiny bench, greyish wood flecked with the old white of pigeon and gull droppings. Now he would think. He would plan. He would decide on the next step.

“Matti,” Luca said. He sounded uneasy. He didn’t need to. Matti was calm.

Matti was—looking down at the tree roots, the turbulence of the pattern, the way the flat stones had given way to the simple brutality of nature, cracked right open and lifted their dusty insides to the sky, and—

And then it was Matti giving way, as though some insistent buried force had been straining against the rock of him for hours, maybe years. His vision blurred. He could hear the air sucking in fast through his nostrils. He leaned his elbows on his knees and willed himself to find normality, but he was brittle and breakable and this, here, stupid and small, was his breaking point. What a fucking joke.

“Matti?” Luca sounded outright alarmed now.

“It’s not just because of me.” It came out somewhere between a gasp and laughter. It sounded worse, even more uneven and strange, than Luca’s laughter in Adrean’s room. “It’s not—my fault. Oh, Huna. Oh, fuck.”

The pause seemed to stretch on for minutes, while Matti shook with a relief so tangible it was like walking into crashing surf. First it refreshed you, and then your feet were swept away and your mouth filled with salt.

Finally Luca said, incredulous, “You mean, your family—your House? You thought it was all because of you ? But you told me—you said you knew what you were doing. You said it was an accumulation of bad luck.”

Matti didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t have said it even if he did know. His arms were shaking from the shoulders down, and his chest felt overfull, like a pair of bellows being prised wider and wider and never allowed to close and blow. Stars danced behind his eyes. His heart was going to explode. He was going to die here on this bench covered in bird shit while Luca Piere watched over his last breaths.

“Responsible fucking Matti Jay,” said Luca, with an odd tension in his voice. “You don’t do things by half measures, do you?”

And then there was a warmth against Matti’s forehead, and two more on his shoulders. Luca had stepped close and he was tugging Matti against his own body.

The first instinct in Matti was to wrench himself away—to try harder, try better . To centre himself, regain control, and be the person he was supposed to be. He could cope. That was what he did.

“All right. Um,” Luca said. “I think… deep breaths? Probably? Breathe, Matti. Nobody’s looking, you can take your time.”

The hands on Matti’s shoulders tightened, guiding him, settling Matti’s forehead against Luca’s lower ribs. A button of Luca’s shirt was a small, hard focus point against Matti’s skull. There were fingers brushing through his hair, thumbs at his temples, soothing.

This was worlds away from the agonising closeness they’d shared inside the Vane house. This was a touch that offered no increase in tension but instead seemed designed only to calm, to warm, and to be a small haven where Matti could press his nose into fabric and inhale thinly past just enough pressure, feeling the dreadful bellows of his lungs begin to slowly relent.

He knew, intellectually he did know, that he couldn’t be single-handedly responsible for his House’s failures. That certainty was held firm by a part of him rooted in the fact that he was loved unreservedly, that he was respected.

Matti was coming to realise that this part had been at war, for a very long time, with the part of him that had nothing to do with intellect and everything to do with his parents’ decade-long worry, and with knowing that he would do anything and everything to rescue them from it. That everything he could do, everything he had done, was not enough. Love was a sword with two edges.

Take your time.

Matti wasn’t sure how long he sat there, breathing, with his face against Luca’s stomach and Luca’s fingers stroking his scalp. When he felt fully himself again, his head was aching gently. He could smell Luca’s body through his shirt. Matti lifted his head and pulled away, half expecting to see damp patches where his eyes had been, but the shirt was dry.

Luca stepped away as well, giving Matti space. Matti ran a hand through his hair once, and then again. He braced himself for eye contact.

“I’m—”

“If you fucking apologise to me for that,” Luca said at once, “I will break your nose with my knee.”

Matti was startled into a snort of laughter. He made a decision, then, between one second and the next. Luca had done so much for him today. He was going to do something for him in return, even if the importance of it was lost on Luca. It would balance the columns of obligation, remove some of the weight.

Matti said, “Instead of coming to Tolliver’s tomorrow morning, meet me somewhere else.”

“I see, I see. Is this what I am to you now? Pick one lock for a man and suddenly he has a list.” But Luca was smiling, tentative.

“No locks to be picked. I promise.”

He was gambling on the same curiosity that had dragged Luca along today. The need to know why, and what, and how.

“All right,” said Luca, easy. “Tell me where.”