The Secret Texts Read online

  And that would be an incident, wouldn’t it? The drunken bride-to-be and three Gyru “princes” caught together in some back room or stable stall a week before the wedding? Kait set her goblet on a marble rail and pushed through the crowd, abruptly and totally furious.

  She caught her cousin just as the girl had begun to run her fingers along the lacings of the tallest man’s shirt. “Isn’t he lovely?” Tippa asked as Kait’s hand clamped around her wrist, and the man, who didn’t look in the least drunk, said, “Unless you want to join our party, little parata, just move on. But don’t be spoiling our fun.”

  The anger that was always in her, anger that sought to break free from the tight chains of self-control with which she bound it, slipped toward the surface. She turned from the Gyrus with difficulty. “Tippa, we have to leave early. The Naming news from Calimekka will be arriving soon, and we need to be there for our devotions. The carriage is waiting.”

  It was a lie, but it was at least a plausible lie.

  Tippa, oblivious to the scene she was about to cause, leaned forward farther, and whispered in Kait’s ear loudly enough that Kait, the Gyrus, and probably most of the guests could hear, “Then go back without me, Kait. I’m having a . . . good . . . a good . . . time, and I’ve made some . . . some nice friends. Aren’t they cute?” Her smile when she leaned back spoke of too much wine as loudly as her whisper. “They’re Prince . . . um, Ersti, and Prince Keera . . . er, Meerki, and Prince . . . Prince . . . I can’t remember. Ah, Prince Latti.” She smiled hazily. “Right?”

  “I’m sure they are,” Kait growled. “But you will have to visit with these . . . royals . . . another time.” How could Tippa have gotten so drunk? The chaperones should have prevented that. And where were they, anyway? She hated sloppiness, but this suggested more to her than that.

  And a prince’s hand suddenly gripping her shoulder, too rough and insistent to be mistaken for anything but a threat, screamed to her that the incident had been planned. Somewhere. By someone. The man said, “Leave her alone. We’re having a good time. Just go back to your Family, where you belong, girl.” He spit out the word “Family” as if it meant “garbage.”

  Kait’s anger broke half of its chains, and she twisted out of the man’s grip and turned to face him, and her fury (or am I slipping . . . have I lost control?) sent him a step back wearing shock on his pale freckled face. “Don’t press me,” she said, so softly that only the three Gyrus could hear her. She heard in her voice the dark timbre of that second self that begged to be set free. Her skin grew hot; it tingled over muscles that longed to shift and slip, over bones that yearned for violent force and violent change. She stood fast, permitting no flash of teeth, no growl, no tensing of muscle. She forced her anger to whisper, knowing that she dared not let it shout.

  She stared, and all three Gyrus glared back at her. She felt the growl starting in the back of her throat, and the last of the chains weakened. But the men saw something in her, something that warned them. All three backed away.

  Furious, Kait turned on her cousin. She pulled Tippa’s outer blouse closed, then grabbed her wrist and yanked her to her feet.

  “But I don’t want . . .” Tippa started to say, but stopped herself when the edge of Kait’s anger seeped through the wine haze. Her eyes went round and her mouth clamped shut. She followed, unprotesting, as Kait pulled her toward the breezeway that led into the House, and eventually toward the grounds where the carriages waited.

  Kait glanced back to be sure the Gyrus weren’t following them. She didn’t want to cause an incident; wanted no one dead, no difficult questions, not now when she was finally, finally on her own and working as a productive member of the Family. The three of them were huddled together, faces flushed and tight with anger. She tried to listen to what they were saying while still moving toward the door, and she told herself that was the reason she ran right into the short young man who stood near the archway. She hit him hard, but she was the one who staggered back—he was solid as a tree, and seemed to be as thoroughly rooted to the earth. She caught her balance. Tippa wasn’t so fortunate; she tripped and went down. Both Kait and the stranger moved to help her. Kait took Tippa’s arm but the man planted one hand on either side of Tippa’s waist and lifted her to her feet. “I’m so sorry,” he said, loudly enough that anyone who had seen the girl go down could hear him. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

  Kait started to smile at him, appreciative that he’d made an attempt to cover her cousin’s drunkenness to preserve her reputation, when she became aware of something noticeable only by its absence.

  The ache in her head and behind her eyeballs was gone. The crawling sensation of her skin was gone. More, the pervasive sense of stalking evil that Kait had felt all night had been lifted and removed, like someone pulling a heavy counterpane off a bed. She felt better. Safer. Her volatile emotions, fed by the aura of danger that had surrounded her, calmed. She took a slow breath, and smiled at the man, and had the presence of mind to thank him for helping her cousin.

  “Think nothing of it,” he said. He had a pleasant voice. A nondescript face, an ordinary smile, kind eyes; when Kait turned away from him, she was halfway to forgetting him already.

  Then, three or four strides away from the place where she’d run into him, with Tippa dragging along in her wake, Kait felt the full brunt of crawling nighttime evil drop onto her shoulders again. The headache grabbed her; her skin prickled and she shuddered involuntarily, and she gasped from the pain. She wasn’t prepared. Not prepared at all. The change caught her in the gut like the kick of a street fighter, and for just an instant she almost couldn’t think.

  Her first thought when she could breathe again was that the helpful stranger was the cause of the aura of evil that filled the night. Her second and more logical thought was that he was somehow immune to it—or somehow protected from it. She stopped, turned slowly, and stared at him. He looked back at her, and she could no longer understand why she’d thought him nondescript. She could still see that outer shell of inoffensiveness, but underneath she could see a man as complicated and fascinating as that mechanical marvel the Dokteerak artist had unveiled for the Naming Day party. Her expression told him something he didn’t like, for the “I’m no one of consequence” smile gave way to an expression of fear in his eyes, and a look of understanding that unnerved her. The fact that she had looked twice at him told him something about her. He knew. She didn’t know what he knew, but she had to find out. If her secrets got out, they would kill her.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  His eyes tracked from one corner of the courtyard to the other. “No one of importance. Just a guest.”

  “Tell me. I’ll find out one way or another.” She didn’t mean for that remark to sound like a threat, but the second the words were out of her mouth, she knew it did.

  “You probably will.”

  She moved back toward him, and seemed to step through a wall when she did. On the outside, her nerves screamed that something terrible waited to attack. Inside, the evil vanished as if it had never been. “How do you do that?” She kept her voice low; she sensed that whatever his secret was, it probably wasn’t one that he wanted bruited about to the world.

  That weak smile again, and eyes that darted left, right, left, checking to see if anyone was listening. Or watching. He said nothing.

  She had to know. She said, “The wall around you. The one that keeps out the foulness of this place. How do you do it?”

  His face went slack with fear then. A man with a knife held to his throat by a madman could not have looked more frightened. “Not here,” he said. “By all the gods, not here.”

  “Your name, then. And where I can find you.” She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t lie to me. I can smell lies.”

  He nodded. “I have a shop in the west quarter. Hasmal’s Curiosities. It’s near the wall, on Stonecutter Street.”

  “You’re Hasmal?”

  “The Third. I work for my
father.”

  Sons of shopkeepers rarely found themselves invited into the Houses of the Five Families. And if they did, they would be there as workers, not guests. Yet Hasmal the son of Hasmal, sipping at his wine, dressed in his Naming Day finery, certainly looked like a guest.

  She tightened her grip on Tippa’s wrist and said, “I’ll be by to talk with you tomorrow.” Then she turned, braced herself against the malevolent night, stepped out of his circle of sanctuary, and dragged Tippa out of the courtyard.

  * * *

  The paraglese of Dokteerak House, Branard Dokteerak, balanced the tip of his dagger on the corner of his desk. With his index finger pressing against the emerald in the pommel, he rocked it slowly back and forth, gouging a tiny scar into the wood. Across from him, standing next to the chairs because Branard had not bidden him sit, the Sabir messenger stared at the rocking knife as if he were a chick in its nest watching an approaching snake. The paraglese was aware of the Sabir’s attention. He kept his own eyes fixed on the tiny chips of wood that he worked loose from the desk. He was waiting for the messenger to fidget, or sigh, or in any way express his impatience, but the man had been well trained. He gave away nothing. At last, Dokteerak, still watching his knife rocking back and forth, said, “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  The messenger said, “My Family sends off the troops you requested; they will depart at the first light of dawn tomorrow, and the pigeon must have time to reach them if you have any last message you will send. They require any final information that you can give—anything that has happened that might change the number of troops required, or the route they must take, or the necessary supplies.”

  The paraglese, disgusted, said, “Anything that might change the number of troops required, eh? Well, what about this, then? My House is full to the rafters with Galweighs getting ready to celebrate the marriage of their damned daughter to my son. As host of this farce, my place is out there with them, acting the part of doting father and eager ally. Instead I’m in here with you, and you cannot think for a moment that one of their number hasn’t noticed that. Further, if you’re seen here and recognized, all our work will be for nothing. They’ll call off the wedding, get their people back to Calimekka, and go on the defensive. If they do that, neither your people nor my people nor the rest of the countryside combined will rout them out of that House of theirs, and we will lose this fine opportunity—which the senior members of your Family and I have been planning for three years—to take it. Your presence here, and your demand for my presence here, could be the tiny breeze that topples our tower down upon us.”

  The Sabir envoy spread his hands wide. “My people required a final reassurance. My paraglese asks me to remind you that we risk more than you do, Paraglese Dokteerak—if we fail at this we risk Galweigh retaliation more than you do. You don’t share Calimekka with them, whereas our House lies inside the same walls as theirs.”

  “Indeed. But when this is over, we will share the city with you, and I ask you to remind Grasmir that he and I will get along better if I haven’t lost the best of my fighters and my sons needlessly through his carelessness, or his impatience, or his pointless worrying.” He felt his anger getting the better of him. He shoved harder on the knife, and it dug itself deeply into the wood—he allowed himself no other display of temper. “Nothing has changed. Nothing. Now leave before you give us all away.”

  The envoy bowed gracefully and said, “Enjoy your party, Paraglese.”

  And then he was gone.

  The paraglese sat staring at the closed door for a moment, and wondered if that hint of irony he heard in the Sabir envoy’s last words was in the envoy’s voice or in his own mind.

  Chapter 2

  The stone walls, rough-hewn and slime-coated, gleamed in the torchlight. The chill of the place, and the stink and the darkness and the skittering sounds of the rats, wore on Marcue’s nerves even when all the cells were full and the men in them talked and quarreled and wondered about their futures. Now the dungeon was empty except for one prisoner, and that was a girl—a child, really—and she rarely spoke, but frequently cried. Her crying was worse than the rats.

  She was crying at the moment.

  “Your Family will ransom you,” he told her. He wasn’t supposed to offer comfort to the enemy, but he had a hard time thinking of a little girl as an enemy, and an equally hard time understanding how his employers could justify treating her as one, to the point of locking her in the lowest dungeon in Sabir House for more than a month.

  The girl said nothing for a few moments, but she did sniffle a bit and take a few slow, deep breaths, as if she were trying to get herself under control. Then she moved a little way out of the shadow that hid her and looked at him. “I thought . . . I thought they w-w-would, too,” she said, and started sobbing again.

  Marcue winced. Poor girl. She was so young and pretty, and so very helpless. And she obviously didn’t understand how these things worked. Families didn’t hurt little girls.

  He had no compunction about holding warriors and diplomats in the cells. He didn’t lose sleep when he had to kill one for trying to escape, either; the warriors and diplomats of the world had chosen to be where they were, doing what they were doing, and they knew the risks involved in their work. This girl, though, had been kidnapped from her bed while she slept, and had been dragged into this cell in the month of Brethwan, during the Festival of the Full Circle. And there she had languished while his employers and her Family bickered over the price of her return.

  If I had such a daughter, the guard had thought more than once, I would pay any price for her safe return. But he had discovered long ago that the ways of the rich and powerful were not his ways. From everything he had heard, her Family was demanding not only her safe return, but also an exorbitant punitive payment to reimburse them for the anguish they had suffered from her kidnapping. He thought, though he hadn’t dared to say it aloud, that her Family didn’t know a damned thing about suffering if they could leave a daughter locked in a cell while they screamed for compensation.

  The girl rose and came to the gate. Even dirty and unkempt, with the tattered blanket she’d been given wrapped around her delicate shoulders, she was impossibly beautiful. Dressed still in the silk pajamas she’d been wearing when she was kidnapped, she looked so fragile he wondered again how she had survived a month in the cold, dank, filthy cell.

  “You could release me,” she said to him. Her little-girl voice was soft and tentative, and tinged with hope.

  Her voice could have broken the heart of a stone, and Marcue was no stone. He looked at her sadly, though, and told her, “That I cannot do, though if I dared, I’d do it in an instant.”

  She gripped the bars and glared at him. “Why can’t you? You admit your employers have taken me wrongfully, and that their behavior is shameful.”

  He’d said those things to her a few days earlier, and now wished he hadn’t. He’d meant them; he thought what he’d said was completely true; but if she told any of the Sabir Family about his indiscretion, his head would be decorating a post at the west gate of Sabir House.

  She leaned closer and her voice dropped to a whisper. “If you helped me, you could have anything you wanted from the Galweighs.”

  He moved toward her, though no closer than the line of the no-pass zone carved into the stone floor. He kept his voice low and prayed no one was listening. “I know I could, but I still can’t release you. Not for fear of my own life, but for the lives of my parents. Both my mother and my father work in the Sabir kitchens. If I set you free, whether I stayed on or ran with you, both of my parents would be killed the moment my betrayal was discovered.” He stopped and reconsidered. “No, that isn’t true. The Sabirs would torture them first, then kill them.”

  She seemed to sag and shrink in front of his eyes. “That’s it, then. You were my last hope. And you say exactly the same thing as the other five guards who have watched me—‘I’d help you if I could, but they would kill my
family . . . or my wife . . . or my sister . . .’” She looked, for just an instant, furious. “I’d think, when the Sabirs told you what stories to tell your prisoners, that they would have told you to try to be a bit original.”

  He was startled. She thought he was lying to her? He shook his head and almost moved across the line to explain to her, but remembered himself in time and kept back of it. “Girl—” he began.

  She cut him off. “Danya. My name is Danya. I want you to remember it, since you won’t help me. Remember it, so that when they do whatever they’re going to do to me, my face and my name will haunt you for the rest of your life.” She flung herself away from the bars, facedown into the straw.

  He winced. “Danya,” he said, “you think we were all told to tell you a story . . . but that isn’t so. How do you suppose the Families ensure the loyalty of their guards? Eh? Have you ever thought about that? They choose only those of us who have something to lose . . . someone, actually. And they make sure we know, from the day we don these uniforms, that our loved ones are the reason we were chosen to serve—and that they will be the price we pay if we fail.”

  Danya rolled over and sat up. She glared at him and brushed loose tangles of hair back from her face. “Perhaps that is how the Sabirs do it—”