Rain hit the cobblestones of Alabaster Hollow in cold, silver sheets that turned the cliffside paths into rivers of reflected lantern light. Renata Corwin stepped off the hired coach and felt the salt wind bite through her traveling coat, sharp enough to taste on her tongue. She paused on the cobblestones, boots finding purchase on slick stone, and drew a breath of brine and woodsmoke that hung heavy over the harbor town.
The driver touched the brim of his hat, water streaming from its brim. "Manor's up the eastern rise, miss. You sure you want to be walking it tonight? Storm's only worsening."
"I've walked worse roads for worse reasons," Renata replied, her voice even and unhurried. She passed him the fare and an extra coin for his patience. "Wait at the tavern on Wharf Street until morning. If I haven't sent word by dawn, ride back to the capital and tell Ambassador Dorian Fenwick that the solicitor's residence has been compromised."
The driver's mouth thinned, but he pocketed the coin and snapped the reins. Hooves clattered into the curtain of rain, and Renata was alone with the town and its secrets.
Alabaster Hollow clung to the cliffs like a barnacled hull, its whitewashed houses stacked in precarious tiers above a black, restless sea. She had not visited since she was nineteen, since the summer her godfather, Thaddeus Corwin, had sent her away with a leather satchel and a single instruction: never open it until he was dead. Now, fifteen years later, she had received a letter from his solicitor informing her of his passing and summoning her to the reading of his will. The letter had been postmarked three weeks prior. The journey from the capital had taken her four days by rail and another by coastal coach. Someone had wanted her delayed.
She climbed the eastern rise, her satchel heavy against her hip. The storm had torn leaves from the elms that lined the lane, and they plastered themselves against her coat like drowned hands. Lightning strobed over the sea, briefly illuminating the silhouette of the manor at the cliff's edge, a sprawling structure of pale stone and dark gables that locals called the Alabaster. It had been in her godfather's family for generations, a repository of antiquities and, she had long suspected, other things less easily named.
The front gate hung ajar, its iron scrollwork buckled where someone had forced it. Renata did not touch it. She stepped through the gap and crossed the gravel drive, gravel crunching wet beneath her boots. The manor's windows were dark except for a faint, unsteady glow somewhere in the east wing, perhaps a fire left unattended, perhaps a lantern left burning. The wind carried the faint tang of seawater and something else, something burnt, something that prickled at the back of her throat.
She tried the front door. It was unlocked, which told her everything she needed to know about the state of the household. Thaddeus had been meticulous, a man who slept with a revolver on his nightstand and a cipher lock on his study. For his door to be left open, something had either killed him or driven him from his routine.
The entrance hall swallowed her. Marble floors gleamed with tracked mud and rainwater. A grandfather clock ticked in the darkness, its pendulum swinging with metronomic indifference. Portraits of Corwins, men and women with sharp cheekbones and guarded eyes, lined the walls, their gilt frames dulled by dust and neglect. Renata paused beneath the largest portrait, that of her godfather as a young man, and studied the face she had not seen in fifteen years. He had looked at the painter with the same expression he had worn when he gave her the satchel, patient, sorrowful, as if he already knew what would become of them both.
She moved deeper into the house. The sitting room off the hall had been ransacked, cushions slit open, drawers pulled and upended, a harpsichord stripped of its sheet music. Papers from the desk lay scattered across the floor in a drift of torn parchment, some half-burned, the edges curling to black lace. Renata crouched and lifted a fragment. It was a letter, dated two months prior, in a hand she did not recognize, the ink blurred by rain that had blown in through a shattered window. She could make out only two words: sovereign and hollow.
She pocketed the fragment and continued toward the dining room, the room where her godfather had always taken his meals, where he had taught her to play chess and to read the patterns of men. The double doors stood open. Beyond them, the long mahogany table was set for a meal that would never be eaten, plates and silver arranged in perfect order, candelabras unlit, decanters of wine standing sentinel at each place. At the head of the table, placed with deliberate precision on a square of black velvet, lay a single playing card.
Renata approached. The candlelight from the hallway did not reach this far, but a sliver of lightning through the tall windows caught the card's surface, and she saw it clearly. It was the glass sovereign, the figure of a crowned figure rendered in translucent enamel over a field of black. In the old deck her godfather had taught her, the glass sovereign was the highest trump, the card that could not be beaten, the card that meant the game was over before it began.
Someone had left this for her. Someone who knew her history with the deck, who knew she would recognize the significance. Someone who wanted her to know they had been here first.
She did not touch the card. Instead, she circled the table, examining each place setting, each decanter, each chair. The wine in the nearest decanter was dark and still, no sediment, no bouquet rising from its surface. The chairs were pushed back at odd angles, as if the diners had risen in haste. At one place, a plate had been cleared, the silverware placed crosswise in the manner of an interrupted meal. A woman's place, she noted, set to the right of the head. Thaddeus had been expecting a woman, someone he wished to honor, and she had not arrived in time.
The floorboards creaked behind her. Renata did not turn. She reached into her coat and closed her fingers around the grip of the small pistol she carried in a shoulder holster. Her pulse remained steady. In her previous life, she had learned to make her body a still point in the center of a turning room, and that discipline had not abandoned her.
"You're earlier than I expected," a voice said from the doorway.
Renata turned. A young woman stood framed against the hallway light, rain dripping from a sodden shawl, a leather bag clutched to her chest. She was slight, dark-haired, with sharp cheekbones and eyes that held both warmth and wariness. Her clothes were the plain, practical garments of a working apothecary, stained at the cuffs with the greenish residue of tinctures. She looked as if she had run through the storm without hesitation, and she looked as if she regretted it now.
"Petra Halloway," Renata said. She did not lower her hand from beneath her coat.
"Aye, and you must be the heir." Petra's accent marked her as coastal, the vowels rounded and quick. "I've been tending the household since Master Corwin took ill. He sent me to the village for willowbark the night before last. When I returned this morning, the place was like this."
"You found him?"
"I found the ransacking. I didn't find him. There's no body." Petra stepped into the room, her eyes flicking to the card on the velvet. Her expression tightened. "That card. Where did it come from?"
"It was here when I arrived."
"Don't touch it." Petra moved around the table as if the glass sovereign were a coiled snake. "Master Corwin kept a deck like that. Said it was a family relic, something older than the house. He'd lock it in his study at night. If it's out here, then whoever came knew where he kept it."
Renata studied the apothecary. The girl's posture was guarded, her shoulders angled as if ready to bolt. Yet there was something in the way she positioned herself near the card, not reaching for it but standing sentinel over it, that suggested she understood its importance. Renata filed the observation away.
"You said he took ill," Renata said. "What afflicted him?"
"Couldn't say. He'd been fading for weeks, but the night before last he took a turn. Fever, tremors, the kind that come on quick and don't let go. He was lucid enough to send me for medicine. When I came back, the gate was forced and the house was empty."
"Did you inform the authorities?"
Petra's laugh was short and without humor. "In Alabaster Hollow? The constable answers to the harbor master, and the harbor master answers to men you'd rather not know. I sent word to a friend in the rebellion, but no one's come yet."
The word hung between them. Renata did not let her expression change. "You admit to ties to the rebellion quite freely."
"I admit to what serves the truth. You're Renata Corwin, the operative who became the reluctant queen of the glass realm. Half the coast knows your name, even if the capital papers pretend you don't exist. If you're here for the reading of the will, then you're here because Master Corwin trusted you with something. And if you don't find out what, then whoever left that card will."
Renata considered the woman before her. Compassionate, stubborn, impulsive, Petra had the warmth of someone who had chosen her allegiances carefully and would not abandon them under pressure. There was also something in the way she spoke about Thaddeus, a familiarity that suggested more than professional distance.
"You cared for him," Renata said.
"He was good to me when no one else was." Petra's voice softened. "He gave me work when the guilds wouldn't. He let me read from his library. He never once asked me to betray the people I tend."
Renata released the grip of the pistol but did not withdraw her hand entirely. "Show me the study. Then show me where you found the forced entry."
Petra nodded and led her out of the dining room, through a servants' corridor that smelled of lye and old soap. The narrow passage opened onto a back stairwell. As they climbed, Renata listened. The storm battered the manor's western face, and the wind found every gap in the old stonework, whistling through cracks with a sound almost like speech. She could not shake the feeling that someone else was in the house, someone who had not yet revealed themselves, someone who wanted her to know she was being observed.
The study door was closed. Petra produced a key from her apron and unlocked it. The room beyond was smaller than Renata remembered, lined floor to ceiling with shelves of leather-bound volumes and rolled charts. A fire had been laid in the hearth but not lit. The desk at the center was of dark walnut, its surface bare except for a single sheet of paper weighted down by a brass compass. The cipher lock on the desk's side drawer hung open, its tumblers exposed.
"He kept it locked," Petra said. "Always."
Renata approached the desk. The paper bore a single line of handwriting, her godfather's, she recognized the careful, slanted script. It read: The glass sovereign falls to the heir who does not claim the throne.
She read it twice. The phrasing was precise, the kind of phrasing Thaddeus had used when he wanted to impart a lesson disguised as a casual remark. The glass sovereign falls to the heir who does not claim the throne. In the old deck, the sovereign was the card of rule, of dominion. To not claim the throne was to refuse the crown. To be the heir who refused was to be the one the crown could not touch, the one who could move freely while others were bound by the game's rules.
Petra read the note over her shoulder and frowned. "He was talking in riddles even at the end."
"He always talked in riddles," Renata said. "The trick was knowing which ones mattered."
She moved to the shelves and began to examine the volumes by touch, reading the spines without looking at them. She was looking for the satchel, the one he had given her fifteen years ago, the one she had never opened. It was not here. Whatever he had meant to pass on to her, it was either hidden elsewhere in the manor or it had been taken by whoever had ransacked the house.
She turned to Petra. "Is there anywhere in the house he would have gone if he felt his end was near? Somewhere private, somewhere away from the main rooms?"
Petra hesitated. Her fingers tightened on the strap of her leather bag. Then she said, "There's a chamber beneath the cellar. He called it the reliquary. He never told me what he kept there. But when the fever took him, he asked me to bring him down there. I couldn't carry him alone. I went for help, and when I came back, he was gone from his bed."
Renata felt the weight of the satchel she had brought with her, the one she had carried unopened for fifteen years. It was still heavy, still sealed with wax that bore her godfather's sigil. She had not opened it. She had promised him she would not open it until he was dead. He was dead, or as good as dead, and she had still not opened it. Perhaps that had been his intention all along. Perhaps the opening of it was not meant to be her act but someone else's.
"Then we go to the reliquary," Renata said. "But first, tell me everything else he said in those last hours. Every word, every pause, every strange look. If we're going to find what he left me, I need to know the shape of his mind before he left it."
Petra drew a breath and nodded. She set her bag on the desk, pulled out a stool, and sat, the leather creaking beneath her. Renata remained standing, her back to the hearth, her eyes on the door. Outside, the storm pressed against the windows, and somewhere in the manor's depths, a shutter banged against its frame in a rhythm that sounded almost like a heartbeat. The glass sovereign waited in the dining room below, patient and certain, the card that could not be beaten.
Renata had not come to Alabaster Hollow to play games. But someone had arranged the board before her, and she would have to decide whether to be a piece or a player.
Petra had not expected the housekeeper to be waiting at the foot of the staircase. No one had warned her that Alabaster Hollow kept its own kind of sentry, and the woman who stood there in the dim of the lower hall had the posture of someone who had been waiting for hours rather than minutes.
Mrs. Petra Halloway was broad where the manor was narrow, solid where the walls seemed to breathe. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that it pulled at the corners of her mouth, and her apron, though clean, had been mended in three places with thread that did not quite match. She held a lantern in one hand, though the hall was not so dark that she needed it, and she held it high, so that the light fell on her own face rather than on whoever approached. Her eyes were pale and very still, the color of weak tea, and they did not blink.
"You'll be the apothecary," she said. Not a question. Her voice was warm in tone but absolutely flat in affect, the kind of warmth that came from years of practice rather than feeling. "From the village. The Master sent for you three days ago, and here you are at last, in the middle of the night, with a stranger and no explanation."
Petra inclined her head. She did not correct the name. She did not offer the stranger's name either. "The Master," she said carefully, "sent word that he was unwell. I came as quickly as the weather allowed."
"The weather." Mrs. Halloway repeated the word as if she were tasting it, finding it slightly off. "Yes. The weather. And the condition of the roads, which are, I am told, washed out in three places between here and the village. And yet here you are. You must have wings under that cloak, or perhaps the road mends itself for pretty young women with satchels."
"I have a strong pair of boots," Petra said. "And the Master paid me very well the last time I came."
"Did he." Mrs. Halloway's gaze slid past Petra and found Renata, who had come to stand at Petra's shoulder. The lantern light moved with it, a slow sweep across the hall, and Renata felt the heat of it on her cheekbones like the touch of a hand. "And who might this be?"
"My assistant," Petra said, before Renata could speak. "She carries my heavier supplies."
"Does she." Mrs. Halloway looked at Renata for a long moment. Renata returned the look without expression. She had been looked through by better women than a housekeeper in a half-dead manor, and she knew how to make her face into a wall. "Well. The Master is dead. Perhaps you did not hear on your quick journey."
The words landed in the hall like a stone dropped into still water. Petra felt the shock move through her in a physical wave, a tightening across her shoulders and a cold that started at the base of her skull and ran down her spine. She had prepared herself for many things. She had not prepared herself for this.
"Dead," she repeated. The word came out before she could shape it into anything more sensible.
"Three days ago." Mrs. Halloway raised the lantern a fraction higher. "A heart attack, the physician said. Very sudden, very peaceful, in his sleep. I found him myself in the morning, with his hands folded on his chest as if he had been arranging himself for company. A tidy death. He would have appreciated the neatness of it."
Petra swallowed. "Then we are too late to be of use to him."
"You are too late to be of use to him," Mrs. Halloway agreed. "But you are not too late to be of use to me. I have questions that no one in this house will answer, and the physician has ridden back to the city and will not return until the roads clear. You are a healer. You have seen death before. You will tell me whether what happened in this house was what it appeared to be."
The request was so unexpected that Petra nearly laughed. She had walked into a house of mourning expecting to tend a living man, and now she was being asked to investigate his death by the woman who had found him. "You suspect the physician," she said.
"I suspect everyone," Mrs. Halloway said simply. "Including you. Including your strong-booted assistant. Including the cook, who has cried for three days without eating, and the stable boy, who has not cried at all. Including myself. I have not slept in three nights. If I have done something and forgotten it, I would like to know before the constable arrives from the city and asks me the same questions in a tone of voice I will not enjoy."
Renata spoke for the first time. Her voice was low and even, shaped to carry no more than the words themselves. "Where is the body, Mrs. Halloway?"
The housekeeper's gaze returned to her, and this time there was a flicker in it, a brief spark of something that might have been respect or might have been irritation. "An excellent question," she said. "The body, which is to say the coffin, which is to say the box in which the body was placed, is in the family crypt beneath the east lawn. It has been there since the morning after his death. It was locked. I locked it myself, with the key that has hung on a hook in the Master's study since before I came into his service. The crypt is stone. The lock is iron. There is no other entrance."
"And yet you say the question is excellent," Petra said.
Mrs. Halloway inclined her head a fraction, the smallest acknowledgment of a point scored. "And yet," she agreed. "This morning, when I went down to place the wreath the Master would have wanted, the coffin was closed but the lock hung open on its hasp. The body was gone. The lining of the coffin, which was new linen, had been folded and set to one side. There was no smell of decay. There was no disturbance of the dust on the floor. There was nothing."
The lantern guttered in her hand, and she steadied it with a motion that had clearly been made a thousand times. Outside the hall, the storm pressed a branch against the window with a sound like a hand laid flat on glass. The air in the house seemed to have drawn tighter, the way air does before something breaks.
"You understand," Mrs. Halloway said, "that I cannot report this. I cannot write to the constable and say that the master of Alabaster Hollow has been stolen from his own coffin in a locked crypt by no one and nothing. They would think me mad. They would think me guilty. They would close the house and seal the records, and whatever it was that took him would go free, and I would be left in an empty manor with a mystery and no one to answer it."
She looked from one to the other of them, and for the first time her composure cracked at the edges, a hairline fracture that ran through the words she chose. "I am asking you to help me. I have never asked anyone for help in my life, and I find I do not enjoy it. But I am asking."
Petra glanced at Renata. The look lasted no longer than a breath, but in it was the whole of the conversation they could not have in front of the housekeeper: the danger, the opportunity, the strange alignment of a theft with the godfather's final instructions. Renata gave nothing back in expression. Her face was a closed door.
"We will help you," Petra said. "But we will need to see the crypt ourselves. Tonight, if you will allow it."
Mrs. Halloway studied her for a long moment. Then she nodded once, a single dip of the chin, and turned toward the passage that led to the back of the house. "Bring your lantern," she said over her shoulder. "And mind the third step. It has been loose since the autumn and the Master would not let me have it mended."
They followed her through the kitchen, where a fire had been laid but not lit and the smell of yesterday's bread hung faintly in the cold air, and out through a side door that opened onto a path of crushed shell. The storm was louder here than it had been at the front of the house, a steady pressure of wind that pushed at their cloaks and tried to find the skin beneath. The lawn beyond was a grey sweep of grass that moved in the wind like the surface of a dark sea, and at its far edge, where the land dropped away into a hollow, Petra saw the low stone roof of the crypt, its door shut, its shadow deeper than the night around it.
Mrs. Halloway produced a key from her apron pocket and fitted it to the lock without fumbling. The key was old and heavy, and the mechanism turned with a sound like a small bone breaking. The door swung inward, and a breath of air came out to meet them, cold and dry and carrying with it the smell of stone and dust and something else, something faintly sweet that Petra could not immediately place.
"Lavender," Renata said quietly, answering the question Petra had not asked. "And something under it. Something older."
They went down the steps single file, the housekeeper first with the lantern, then Petra, then Renata. The crypt was small, as family crypts often are, a single chamber cut from the living rock with niches along the walls for the coffins of generations. Most of the niches were sealed with stone slabs. One, at the far end, stood open, and the coffin that belonged to it had been drawn out onto the floor.
It was a handsome coffin, dark wood polished to a dull gleam, with brass fittings that had been cleaned recently. The lid was closed. The lock, as Mrs. Halloway had said, hung open on its hasp. The new linen that had lined it lay folded on a nearby shelf with the precision of a napkin set for a single guest.
There was no dust disturbed. There were no footprints. There was no sign of violence, or of haste, or of any human presence at all.
Petra knelt beside the coffin and laid her hand on the wood. It was cold, but not as cold as the stone around it. She closed her eyes and let her breath slow, the way her teacher had taught her, the way she had taught herself when the teaching was not enough. Beneath the smell of lavender, beneath the smell of stone, she caught the faintest thread of something she did recognize: the residue of a tincture she had once made for a dying man, a mixture of poppy and willow and something older that she had learned from a book she no longer possessed.
She opened her eyes and looked up at Renata, who stood very still at the foot of the coffin, her face unreadable.
"He was not stolen," Petra said. "He was helped to leave."
The brass key lay where Petra had set it, catching the weak light from the stairwell in a way that made it look almost deliberate, almost staged. Renata did not touch it. She studied the arrangement of the room with the particular attention of someone who had once been paid to notice such things, and what she noticed was the absence of the things one would expect. No overturned candles. No scattered earth. No hurried fingerprints in the dust of the shelves. Whoever had done this had done it cleanly, and with time, and with a familiarity that suggested practice.
Petra was watching her. Renata could feel the attention without turning.
"You knew," Petra said. It was not a question.
"I suspected." Renata chose the word with care. Suspected was a thing one could defend later, if defense became necessary. Knew was a thing one could not. "My brother was a particular man. He did not love easily, and he did not leave without reason. If he has chosen to go, then he has chosen it. If he has been taken, then the manner of the taking is meant to tell us something."
"What manner?"
"The manner of a man being carried out by people who respected him." Renata lifted her gaze from the key to the open niche, to the shelves, to the careful absence of chaos. "Whoever moved him took the trouble to fold the linens. Whoever moved him replaced the lock on the hasp so that it would be found in the morning, as if it had simply fallen open of its own weight. This was not theft. This was a removal. This was a passage granted."
Petra was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had lost some of its warmth, and what replaced it was not coldness but precision, the voice of a woman accustomed to sorting symptoms and deciding which ones mattered.
"There is something else," she said. "The tincture I smelled. It is not a common preparation. The poppy and willow I could find in any healer's shop in the lower city. The third ingredient is older. It comes from a plant that grows only in one place I know of, and that place is a garden that does not officially exist."
Renata's hand, which had been resting on the edge of the coffin, went still. "Describe it."
"A walled garden behind a house on Ash Lane. The house belongs to a man named Dorian Fenwick. He is listed as a court ambassador. He is listed as a number of things." Petra paused, and the pause was not hesitation but emphasis. "He is also, by rumor, a man who keeps certain favors in certain jars, for certain patrons who require the kind of help that cannot be entered into a ledger."
Renata lifted her hand from the coffin and looked at her palm as if she expected to find something written there. The palm was empty. The crypt was empty. The only thing left was the question.
"Then we will have to call upon Mr. Fenwick," Renata said. "And we will have to do it before he calls upon us."
They left the crypt in the order they had entered, Renata first, then Petra. Renata paused at the door to pull it closed behind her, and she stood for a moment with her hand on the latch, listening to the silence of the place as if listening for a breath that was no longer there. Then she released the latch, and the latch fell into its place with a small, definitive sound, and they went up the stairs into the rain.
The rain had thickened while they were below. It came down in sheets now, drumming on the cobbles, running in rivulets along the gutters, turning the street into a network of shallow streams that caught the light from the few gas lamps and held it in trembling pools. Renata pulled her cloak tighter and turned up the collar. Petra did the same, and they set off at a pace that was not quite a run and not quite a walk, the pace of two women who had somewhere to be and something to do and did not wish to be noticed doing either.
Halfway down the lane, Renata stopped.
Petra stopped a step later and turned. "What is it?"
Renata did not answer immediately. She was looking across the lane, at the fog that had gathered there despite the rain, a low bank of it lying along the opposite pavement like something that had been placed there by hand. The rain should have thinned it. The rain had not thinned it. If anything, the fog seemed to be feeding on the moisture, growing denser as she watched, taking on a shape that was not quite a shape, a darkness within the whiteness that suggested a figure without committing to one.
"Across the lane," Renata said, very quietly. "By the wall of the old milliner's. Do you see it?"
Petra looked. For a moment she saw nothing. Then the fog shifted, and within the shift she caught the outline of a man, standing quite still, quite at ease, as if the rain were not falling on him at all, or as if he had made some private arrangement with it. He wore a coat of dark charcoal that ran darker at the shoulders where the water had gathered, and he held no umbrella, and he made no move to shelter himself. He was watching them. There was no doubt of it. The angle of his head, the stillness of his posture, the patience of his stance, all of it spoke of a man who had been watching for some time and was content to continue.
"Do not look directly at him," Renata murmured.
"I am looking directly at him."
"Then look at something near him. Look as if you are looking past him. Walk as if you are walking past him."
"That is the sort of thing you used to be paid for."
"Yes."
Petra began to walk, and her walk was good. It was the walk of a woman hurrying home through rain, head down, shoulders set, attention on the slick of the cobbles. Renata walked beside her in the same manner, and they passed the mouth of the lane and the bank of fog and the figure within it, and the figure did not move, and the rain drummed on, and they turned the corner onto the broader street and did not stop until they had reached the awning of a closed tobacconist three buildings down.
Under the awning, in the dry dark, Petra let out a breath that was almost a laugh and almost not.
"That was Dorian Fenwick," she said.
"You are certain."
"I have seen him twice. Once at a court function, where he was introduced as a man of particular refinement. Once at a healer's gathering in the lower city, where he was introduced as something else entirely. The face is memorable. The coat is memorable. The manner of standing in the rain as if he had invented it is, I confess, particularly memorable."
Renata said nothing for a moment. She was watching the rain fall past the edge of the awning, watching the street, watching for any repetition of the stillness they had left behind them.
"He knew we would be there," Renata said at last.
"He could not have known."
"He knew. The lock was found open this morning. The discovery was not made by us. The discovery was made by a household already in possession of information we did not have. He knew we would come. He positioned himself to be seen. He allowed himself to be seen. He wished us to know that he was there."
"To frighten us?"
"To inform us." Renata turned from the rain and looked at Petra. In the dim light under the awning, her face was all planes and shadows, and her eyes held the particular steadiness of a woman who had decided on a course and would not be turned from it. "My brother is alive, Petra. I believe that now. I did not believe it when we went down. I believe it now. Whatever has been done to him, he is alive. And whatever Mr. Fenwick's arrangement with my brother's departure, he has chosen to let us know that he is the one to whom we must speak. That is not the action of an enemy. That is the action of a man who wishes to negotiate."
Petra was quiet. The rain went on drumming on the awning above them, and the street was empty, and somewhere in the distance a bell began to toll the small hours, three slow notes that hung in the wet air like questions.
"If he is alive," Petra said at last, "then he has been somewhere these three weeks. Somewhere with walls and a door and a bed and someone bringing him food. Somewhere that required poppy and willow and that third ingredient, which means somewhere he has been in pain, or somewhere he has been made to seem in pain, which is almost worse. Somewhere Mr. Fenwick either owns or has access to. Somewhere we can find, if we are willing to look in the right way."
"Yes."
"And you intend to look."
"Yes."
Petra pushed the damp hair back from her forehead and looked at Renata with an expression that was half impatience and half the particular affection of a woman who had decided some time ago that the woman before her was not entirely sane and had chosen to remain attached to her regardless.
"Then we look," Petra said. "But we do not look alone. We go to the glass throne room. We tell The Watcher what we have found. We ask him what he remembers. He has been bound to that room for a very long time, Renata. If anyone knows the older arrangements of this court, he does. And if your brother is part of some older arrangement, then The Watcher will know of it. He will know, or he will know how to begin to know."
Renata considered this. The rain fell. The bell finished its tolling and left behind a silence that felt larger than the bell had been.
"Yes," Renata said. "We will go to him. But not tonight. Tonight we go home, and we dry our clothes, and we think about what we have seen. Tomorrow we go to the throne room. Tomorrow we speak to The Watcher. Tomorrow we begin."
"And if Mr. Fenwick moves against us before tomorrow?"
"Then we will know that he is more afraid of us than we are of him, and we will proceed accordingly."
Petra gave a small sound that was not quite a laugh. "You are a very strange woman, Renata Corwin."
"I have been told."
They stepped out from under the awning and into the rain, and they walked together through the empty streets toward the lights of the lower city, and the fog behind them, where the bank of it still lay along the lane, did not move, and the figure within it, if there had been a figure, was gone. But the rain had not thinned the fog. The rain had not thinned it at all.