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Because she was not Alta Renata Viraudax, daughter of Letilia Traementis. She was Arenza Lenskaya, half-Vraszenian river rat, and even with a forged letter of credit to help, pretending to be a Seterin noblewoman wasn’t cheap.
But she’d spent five years in Ganllech—five years as a maid under Letilia’s thumb, listening to her complain about her dreadful family and how much she dreamed of life in Seteris, the promised land she’d never managed to reach.
Her hands trembled as she worked. Those five years in Ganllech were also five years out of practice. And all her previous cons had been short touches—never anything on this scale. When she got caught before, the hawks slung her in jail for a few days. If she got caught now, impersonating a noblewoman…
“You’d model and sell them,” Tess said stoutly. “If you want.” Tess would be happy in that life. But Ren wanted more. This city owed her more. It had taken everything: her mother, her childhood, Sedge.
her cosmetics were imbued by artisans like Tess, people who could infuse the things they made with their own spiritual force to make them work better. Imbued cosmetics might be more expensive, but they would stay in place, blend until their effects looked natural, and not even irritate her skin. Imbuing didn’t receive the respect given to numinatria, but compared to the pastes and powders Ren had used back when she was a Finger, these seemed like a miracle.
Tess had never been an alta’s maid. While Ren had run herself ragged satisfying Letilia’s petty demands, Tess had been sewing herself half-blind in the windowless back room of a grey-market shop.
Just a touch of condescension. To the Seterins and Liganti across the sea, Nadežra was a foreign backwater. Letilia had never hesitated to heap scorn on it, and her daughter wouldn’t have shed those prejudices entirely.
But Renata Viraudax knew nothing of Nadežran mask traditions. “How odd,” she said, drifting toward the display as if it held no particular allure. “I’ve never seen anything like this in Seteris.” “That’s because Seteris doesn’t have Nadežra’s long and storied history with masks.”
wares. “Masks are worn for many Nadežran festivals, and sometimes ordinary occasions, to sweeten the air and protect the skin. The Tyrant became quite attached to them in the latter stages of his… illness.” He gave a delicate shudder. “Even our most infamous outlaw, the Rook, is known for hiding his face. One can’t visit our fair delta and not acquire a mask.”
“Derossi Vargo. Apologies for my presumption, but I had to make the acquaintance of the most stylish woman to grace this year’s Gloria.”
Where her childhood mask had been clumsily painted with a rainbow of colors, this one was hammered prismatium, shimmering like the tail of a dreamweaver bird. The mask-maker had sculpted the metal into gentle waves, ebbing and flowing like the River Dežera. It wasn’t anything Renata Viraudax needed… but Ren wanted it so badly it took all her will not to let the yearning show.
“What makes it so Nadežran? Or Vraszenian—whichever.” She dismissed the quibble over terminology with a flutter of one hand. If she’d wanted to persuade them she’d never been to Nadežra in her life, she couldn’t have chosen a better method. Both men bristled, brothers in indignation. Serrado might be a slip-knot, but his ancestry was as Vraszenian as they came, while Vargo looked like a typical Nadežran, mixed Vraszenian and Liganti blood—and neither of them appreciated being lumped in with the other.
“Nadežran because the dreamweaver bird is a symbol of the city. They flock here every spring to mate, when we celebrate the Festival of Veiled Waters. Vraszenian because the Vraszenian people say they’re descended from those same birds, so they flock here as well.”
Vraszenians did not consider dreamweavers their ancestors, but the symbol of one: Ižranyi, the youngest and most favored daughter of Ažerais, the goddess of their people. She and her siblings had founded the seven Vraszenian clans. The Ižranyi clan was lost now, slaughtered centuries ago in a divine cataclysm that left their entire city a haunted ruin. But their emblem was still honored.
Whoever Derossi Vargo was, he flung money around like a cuff and had the marks of a Lower Bank rat.
It was only when Giuna was pointing out the eldest son of Eret Mettore Indestor that Leato intervened. He took a delicate sculpture of blown blue glass from Giuna’s hands and put it back on the table. “She doesn’t need to know Mezzan Indestor, and you shouldn’t know him, either. Not after what he did to that actor.”
Mezzan Indestor looked to be a few years older than Leato, with straw-blond hair and a slate-blue coat unsubtly brocaded with five-pointed stars. That was the emblem of the Cinquerat, where his father held the military Caerulet seat. But such stars were also associated with power and leadership… and therefore often worn by people who didn’t understand either.
Perhaps she did resemble her mother in that respect, but Renata Viraudax hadn’t been what he’d expected. Beautiful and elegant, yes—but she was also shrewder than she let on, plucking the strings of the Gloria like an expert harpist. And he unnerved her. Not as a man or as a Vraszenian; it was the unease of someone being watched by a hawk. She’d hidden it well, even tried to divert him by flirting… but he’d once hidden that same unease, back when he and Kolya first arrived in Nadežra.
His appearance was too off-putting for that, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a corpse. “Help me,” he said in a bloodless whisper, staring at Ren without blinking. “I can’t sleep anymore.” For an instant she was a child again, begging for comfort after a nightmare. Mama, I can’t sleep. Hush, Renyi. It’s all right. I will lay a thread around your bed to keep the zlyzen from you.
Who could scarcely breathe for delight. A menace to the nobility, a wanted man to the hawks, a troublemaker to many law-abiding citizens… but to the people of the streets, the Rook was a hero. She’d never thought she would see him in the flesh.
The Rook straightened slowly. Even close enough to touch, she could make out almost nothing through the darkness of his hood. The deeper shadows of his eyes, the line of his jaw; like the stars, she saw more when she didn’t look directly. Then a glimmer of a smile came into view. In two hundred years, no one had unmasked Nadežra’s outlaw. Seeing him now, Ren was certain the hood was imbued to hide his face. The Rook could have been anyone: old or young, Liganti or Vraszenian or Nadežran. His voice sounded masculine, but who knew where the magic ended?
The Rook murmured, “She can make gloves out of it. Uniat.” His blade swept down and up to a high stance as he spoke the opening challenge. Mezzan’s grin slipped. The Rook might claim ignorance of noble rules, but he knew the proper terms and forms for dueling.
“A shame to ruin a fine scent with canal water, don’t you think?” He tucked the glove into his coat and looked down to the canal, where Mezzan was splashing and sputtering. “Indestor. Next time you think to beat anyone, remember this night—and know that any injury you give to someone, the Rook will repay in kind.”
“That boy,” she whispered, her lips gone numb. “I—I saw him in Suncross Plaza earlier. He said he couldn’t sleep.” “You spoke with him?” Whether he intended it or not, she heard recrimination under Serrado’s words. You left him.
“By now I suspect you’ve realized that the Traementis reputation for insularity is well-earned. But it’s possible I can give you something to sway them.” “Out of the goodness of your heart? Which is, no doubt, the same reason you gifted me that mask at the Gloria.” The mask had been a whim, but even Vargo’s whims were calculated. He’d seen the sparkle in her eyes when she donned it. His real gift hadn’t been the mask; it had been liberation from whatever made her hesitate to buy it.
“Your seat of government is called the Charterhouse, is it not?” She showed more interest in the tiered tray of food than the direction of the conversation, selecting a marbled egg and a dumpling folded to look like a moonfish, shifting them to her plate. “Led by a five-member council, the Cinquerat. The way it’s described in Seteris sounds very inefficient, but my impression is that everything—trade, defense, construction, and so forth—is handled through charters granted by the council to noble houses.”
“That’s another strange quirk of our charter system. You don’t have to be a member of a noble house to advocate in the Charterhouse; some of the best advocates are delta gentry licensed to do so on a noble’s behalf. I imagine House Traementis would be grateful to someone who could assist in repairing their fortunes.”
“I believe that in one day you managed to take the Gloria by storm, set the heir to House Acrenix scrambling to assert her dominance over you, and bested the heir of House Indestor and fair Nadežra’s most famous criminal. All using only your sleeves and a glove.” He laughed quietly. “Alta Renata, I’d far rather have a woman like you as an ally than a competitor.”
said. Reaching into her purse, she brought out a gold ring set with a baroque river pearl and laid it on the table between them. “Mother never gave me much of her jewelry, but I always loved this one, and pestered her until she let me have it,” she said quietly. “The style is Nadežran, isn’t it? Mother never used the word ‘stole’; by her lights, she was only taking her due when she left. But I suspect that ring never belonged to her, and therefore it doesn’t belong to me, either. I’d like to return it.”
Pavlin Ranieri was a sunwise man, born a daughter to his parents, but now a son. With his silky brown hair and delicately pointed chin, he could have had a lucrative career on the stage even if he couldn’t act his way out of a puddle. Instead, for reasons surpassing Grey’s understanding, he’d chosen to become a hawk.
uniform. “What have you learned?” Grey asked, leaning against the other side of the pillar. It shifted slightly, his weight counterbalancing Ranieri’s. “Not a lot,” Ranieri said. “Tess is as loyal as they come, and she’s Alta Renata’s only servant, so there’s no one else to talk to. Sir, I—I don’t like doing this. Pretending to make friends, just so I can snoop.”
Why did Grey Serrado have to pick that moment to visit Coster’s Walk? Dressed like a proper Vraszenian, talking to some pretty youth she would have taken for a night-piece trawling for customers if he hadn’t seemed so painfully shy. She’d been tempted to eavesdrop, but self-preservation took priority. The last thing she could afford was for Serrado to notice that the nearby szorsa looked oddly like Renata Viraudax.
She shouldn’t have taken the risk—but she’d been out there all day, hoping to snare one person in particular. Nikory, the leader of the Fog Spiders, who street rumors said operated under Derossi Vargo’s command.
Vraszenians believed that aža dreams were little echoes of those true visions, but most Nadežrans didn’t use aža for such lofty purposes; they just wanted a brief, pleasant escape from their daily woes. Since the Cinquerat did their best to strangle the trade with their control, smugglers like Vargo made good money selling aža to Vraszenians and Nadežrans alike. The inscriptor had chosen Vargo’s aža depot to scribe their numinat, and stolen Vargo’s aža stores. And Tuat was the numen of intuition and dreams.
But he knew her through the makeup, and she knew him through the scars. Ren whispered, “Sedge?” “Ren.” Surprise scrubbed years from his features, making him young again—as young as they’d ever been. He’d been big for a boy in the rookeries, gangly limbed and rawboned. Whatever grace he’d gained growing into manhood abandoned him now. He lurched to his feet, never taking his gaze from hers. “How… I looked… They said you…” Left. She and Tess had left—because Sedge was dead. Ren saw his body, broken and unmoving in the half-dry canal where Ondrakja threw him. She never would have abandoned him
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Ren’s heart thudded painfully. He knows not. Of course. From his perspective, they’d vanished like the river fog. “Sedge—Tess is alive. She’s with me.” More beer sloshed onto the table, its sour-spiced scent perfuming the alcove. The steel of Sedge’s gaze turned brittle, the muscles of his jaw, his neck, his forearms corded with the effort not to shatter. “You’ve been together. All this time. Safe. And together.” No matter how he tried to disguise it, Ren could hear the hollowness at the core of his words. She’d had Tess. Sedge had been left to carry on alone.
Before she could apologize again, Sedge shook himself. “Where? I looked everywhere. You weren’t in Nadežra. Where did you go?” “Ganllech. Though not on purpose.”
“After you… died… I fed Ondrakja meadow saffron, then conned a captain into believing Tess and I were experienced ship’s monkeys. Got us out of the city, but he soon realized I lied, and at the next port of call put us off.” “Fed her…” A grin split Sedge’s face, pulling at the scars crossing it. “So Simlin didn’t lie. Heard Ondrakja got sick, but he said you’d poisoned her. And everybody believed him.” Then his grin faded, as the weight of it hit him. “Shit. You poisoned her.”
Ondrakja would have known, and then she never would have drunk the poisoned tea. So Ren had fallen back on the best weapon in her arsenal—her ability to lie. But it meant no knot would ever take her again. Not unless she reinvented herself as another person.
“Now you work for Vargo?” His boot thunked to the floor. “Yeah. Guess we need to talk about that.” Bracing himself with another gulp of beer, Sedge tugged his sleeve up, revealing a charm of knotted blue silk tied around his wrist. “I’m with the Fog Spiders now. They’re kind of his main crew. So, uh, don’t go asking me nothing you shouldn’t.”
look into his business only. Not in a way you should worry about; just figuring out if, like he claims, he’s gone legitimate. My impression is, not so much.” “Why do you care about his busi— Oh, fuck. Oh, Ren. Oh no.” Sedge’s head sank to the table. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The pitcher and mugs rattled each time his brow hit the wood. “Please tell me you en’t Vargo’s Alta Renata who’s gonna get him his fucking charter.”
“I need somebody who knows Vargo. I seek not to pry into his secrets—only that I never heard of him when we were with the Fingers.” “No, we wouldn’t have. He took over the Spiders—used to be a Varadi gang—right around the time you left. There was a bunch of turf wars all along the Lower Bank then, but he mostly stayed out of them.” Sedge grimaced. “Well. That’s what it looked like. Turns out he was the one starting them. He’d let his rivals tire themselves out fighting each other, then wrap up the remnants, replace the leaders, and welcome them in like he was doing them a favor. That’s how he
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“She may be Letilia’s daughter, but… Leato’s told me about his aunt. Is it possible she didn’t land in the feathers after all? That Alta Renata learned from her mother how to put on a show? That she came here hoping House Traementis could provide the luxury she was raised to believe she deserved?”
The entrance hall of the Charterhouse was even more crowded, full of advocates and clerks, messengers and scribes touting for work. Over them towered five statues. A poet, a minister, a merchant, a soldier, and a priest, bearing five mottoes: I speak for all; I counsel all; I support all; I defend all; I pray for all. Below them stood desks for each of the Cinquerat’s five seats: Argentet for cultural matters, Fulvet for civil, Prasinet for economic, Caerulet for military, Iridet for religious. Livery-clad secretaries for each member of the council sat at the desks, looking harassed.
Alsius answered him with sober precision. ::We know this so-called ash has hallucinatory effects like aža, but nightmarish. It allows the user to disregard cold and pain, and gives them tremendous strength. And it seems they can be hurt by their hallucinations.::
It looked nothing like ash.:: True—ash was a powder. “It could be an interim stage. They used that numinat for something dream related.” ::But this isn’t numinatria,:: Alsius insisted. ::It’s more akin to imbuing—if you could imbue aža to be nightmarish.::
Imbuing, which couldn’t be integrated with numinatria in a stable fashion. An inscriptor who imbued a numinat fed it their own energy, burning them from the inside out. That was how the river numinata worked for nearly two centuries, and why the broken one was a fucking nightmare to replace. That was what Alsius had been terrified Vargo would do tonight. And when a crafter inscribed a numinat on their work, it might make the product incredibly potent, but only for a few moments. Not long enough to be useful for a street drug. And certainly not the sort of thing that could— Vargo stopped dead
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other’s throats these days. He’d assumed the prison ship was just another flimsy pretext—but what if there had been something there? Something that had to be relocated in a hurry afterward. Mettore Indestor had a good inscriptor to hand: Breccone Indestris, the grandnephew of Iridet’s seat holder, Utrinzi Simendis, and married into Mettore’s house through some cousin or another. He was capable of what Vargo had seen in the lace mill.
Vargo threw open the door. Sedge and Varuni were too well-trained to flinch at the bang of it hitting the wall. “We have a new priority,” he said. “I want to know everything about this ash. Who’s buying, who’s selling, who’s making. I want to know if Novrus’s people found any remnants of numinatria during the anti-Anduske raid in Floodwatch. And get me a list of Indestor’s holdings, official or otherwise. Any place they might be storing aža.”
One of the lihoše, then: born a woman, but taking on a male identity so he could lead his people. Only sons were allowed to be kurec leaders, and if there were none—or if all the available ones were incompetent—then a daughter would become a son instead.
