The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter Read online

  She tossed the key, letting it skip across the stone into the corner.

  Genny heard someone. Quick steps rushed up and flew into the room on the other side of the locked door. She held her breath. This was it. Whoever had come was there to end her life. The door would open and she would see a knife, or a sword, or a—

  “Can you write?” Mercator asked.

  Genny was confused.

  “Do you hear me? Can you write?”

  “Are you talking to me?” Genny asked.

  Mercator was moving around outside the door, shuffling loudly. She appeared to be in a hurry. “Of course I am!”

  “Don’t take that tone with me. How am I supposed to know? I’m locked in a room.”

  Mercator paused, took a breath, and began again. “My apologies, but I’m in a bit of a rush. And you should be, too, if you want to get out of here.”

  Get out of here? Is this a trick? Doesn’t make sense. Why trick me?

  “Yes, I can write.”

  “Wonderful! I need you to do something for me, and for yourself.”

  Genny slid to the door and peered out the central knothole. Outside, Mercator flipped over piles of wool. She was searching for something in a mad dash.

  “I need you to write a letter to your husband.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.” Mercator found a feather and cut the end of the quill with a small knife.

  “Why, I’d love to, dear. Can I tell him where I am, and give him your best wishes?”

  “Do you know where you are?” Mercator set the knife back down, then reconsidered and stuffed it in her belt.

  “No.”

  Mercator found a sheet of parchment and grabbed it up. “Then I suppose not.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell him what we talked about; ask him to do what is right; and mention something that only you two share, so he’ll know the message came from you.”

  “Wait. What? Leo doesn’t know I’m alive?”

  “There’s a rumor to that effect.”

  “A rumor? You don’t know? Why don’t you know? By Mar, are you serious?”

  Mercator opened the door and set the parchment and quill before Genny. “We think the duke never received our first note and that’s why he hasn’t done anything. But if you can convince him . . .”

  If that’s true . . . does that mean . . . could Leo love me after all?

  Genny’s heart leapt as she took the paper and quill. Then she hesitated.

  No . . . she thought. It doesn’t explain everything else: him keeping his distance, our separate beds, his failure to defend me.

  “Leo doesn’t love me,” she told Mercator, an admission that brought tears. “He married me so he could be king. This won’t change anything.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Genny bowed her head and sniffled. “Yes, I do. I pretended he cared, but it’s not true.” She set the quill down and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

  Mercator sat down opposite her. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he doesn’t love you, and only married you to better his chance for the crown. Makes sense. But he still needs you if he’s to become king. And if he’s crowned, then you’ll be a queen.”

  “I don’t care about that. Never have.”

  “You should.”

  “Why? Why should I care? If he doesn’t love me, if this has all been a charade, if all he wanted was a crown—”

  “It could save your life.”

  “I’m not sure I want it saved. If the only person who ever said they loved me, doesn’t . . . I’m not sure life is worth living.”

  Mercator’s tone lowered, her eyes growing stern, nearly angry. “It’s not just your life at stake.” She changed from hectic jailor to disapproving teacher scolding a petulant student. “If the duke doesn’t agree to reforms, there will be an uprising followed by a retaliation. Hundreds will die, maybe thousands.” Mercator picked up the quill. “I don’t care if the duke doesn’t love you, and right now you shouldn’t, either. You have the power to save lives. Your Ladyship, isn’t that worth pretending he loves you for at least one more day?”

  Genny looked down at the parchment and sniffled. “As pathetic as it sounds, you’re the closest thing I have to a friend in this city. Call me Genny.” She sniffled again and reached out and took the quill. “I need ink.”

  “I don’t have ink.” Mercator said, then smiled and looked at her arms and hands. “But, Genny, I think I can manage something.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Jiggery-Pokery

  Royce waited in the shadows between two stone giants, torturing himself.

  Standing in the dark, narrow street dividing the imposing Imperial Gallery from the immense Grom Galimus, he watched people carrying lanterns and moving through the sprawling riverfront plaza, celebrating a festival of rebirth. The populace danced and sang in joyous abandon as they said goodbye to winter the way a squirrel waved farewell to a frustrated dog thwarted by high branches. They wore bright colors and waved streamers of green, blue, and yellow. Giddy as children, they were oblivious to the dangers around them. They were prey. He’d grown up in a city like this: old, dark, and decrepit. Royce was a panther in the grass, gazing out at a watering hole after a drought, but he wasn’t there to hunt. He was waiting for Mercator.

  As unpleasant as it was to ignore the temptation to act when the revelers were such ripe pickings, they weren’t the source of Royce’s agony. What needled him was the way the stakes of their job had risen while the payout hadn’t. What Royce suffered was the contradiction that was Hadrian Blackwater.

  While he hoped that his friend survived the night, he also felt, in a purely theoretical way, that Hadrian deserved to die. The fool had willingly surrendered to a mob of revolutionaries. A group that believed he had killed one of their own. That was stupidity taken to an art form, like giving up higher ground or leaving an enemy alive. And yet, this was only a symptom of a larger, more perplexing issue, that irritated Royce like an infected splinter. He couldn’t ignore that their lives had been saved by a random act of kindness that Hadrian had once shown to a total stranger.

  From Royce’s perspective, the best insurance for a long life was murder. Potential threats—even remote or indirect—had to be eliminated. Not broken, not reduced, but burned out of existence. Royce left no hatred to smolder, never granted revenge the potential to return to roost. He wouldn’t have violated the blond mir, either—the very idea was repugnant—but given the circumstances, he imagined he would have seen her dead. When you’re part of a force that wipes out an entire town, you don’t leave anyone alive. Not even a young girl.

  Back in his Black Diamond days, when Royce was a member of the infamous thieves’ guild, he had been one of three assassins the BD employed. The other two were his best friend, Merrick, and Jade, Merrick’s lover. Jade had been a young girl, too, and just as sweet as Seton, but she had become one of the most feared assassins in the known world. Not despite her gender, but because she was female. Men always underestimated her.

  Was Jade a mir, too? Thinking back, he couldn’t help wondering. Not all mir have elven features.

  Since meeting Hadrian, he’d recognized that the man was unnaturally lucky, but that thought, that excuse, was too consistent an occurrence. It had become less a rationalization and more of a truism, which irked Royce.

  If it had been me, if I had saved her life, Seton would have spent the last seven years training to kill, and one by one she would have seen to it that each of the duke’s soldiers who took part in that raid died a horrible death. Then, when I showed up, she’d be overjoyed to find the one guy that got away. My reward would have been a vivisection.

  But it had been Hadrian, and he received a tear-filled oratory of appreciation and an advocate for his defense.

  That was the problem with life; it often failed to be consistent. Nothing could be relied on. Royce was positive that if he dropped a rock enough ti
mes, he’d eventually see it fall upward. He was also certain that this event would coincide with the worst possible moment for it to occur. What others saw as miracles, Royce perceived as dumb luck. Still, there was a problem with that, and its name was Hadrian Blackwater.

  By all accounts, the man shouldn’t have survived childhood. Maybe he had caring parents who watched over their son—yet another example of the universe showing preferential treatment. Still, after he left home, he should have died within a week, a month at best. Ridiculous skill with a sword can protect someone from only so much.

  Tonight is a good example. We both should have died, but we didn’t. Why?

  This was the puzzle that frustrated Royce, the embodiment of the sliver. It challenged his very clear and proven worldview.

  Aside from Hadrian’s professional soldiering, during which he apparently killed the equivalent of a small county’s worth of men, he was unusually kind, empathetic, and forgiving. Everything in Royce’s life had convinced him that those three idiosyncrasies were synonymous with swallowing brews of arsenic, cyanide, and hemlock all in a single gulp. Even if the result wasn’t suicide, such attributes should result in massive handicaps when trying to survive in a world that claimed to value such qualities but in reality punished people who possessed them.

  Except in Hadrian’s case, it hadn’t, and by virtue of being with him, Royce had been rewarded. The worst part was that Royce couldn’t pass it off as a rock falling up. This wasn’t the freak singular occurrence. Four years earlier, the idiot had made the worst mistake of his life by staying to save Royce when they were on top of the Crown Tower. Hadrian had the opportunity to escape, but he had stayed, performing a suicidal defense on behalf of a man he hated. Anyone else would have paid for such an error with their life. Not Hadrian Blackwater, and again, by virtue of being with him, Royce had lived, too. Then there was Scarlett Dodge. She was another person Royce would have killed if Hadrian hadn’t been with him, another example of a good deed rewarded. Royce and Scarlett had once laughed at Hadrian’s naïveté, his moronic integrity. But given how things turned out in Dulgath, Royce didn’t find it funny anymore.

  Once could be explained as a fluke. Twice was a coincidence. But three times? Three times was a pattern, wasn’t it?And if it is, what does that pattern reveal?

  Royce pushed the thought away. It didn’t expose anything. Weird stuff happens all the time, doesn’t prove or disprove anything. Even a rock will eventually fall upward, right?

  He was making too much out of nothing. Something he criticized others for doing. People spot a goose heading south in early fall, and they expect an early winter. They see a squirrel amassing nuts and convince themselves the winter’s snows will be deep. All this from an overeager goose and a greedy rodent. One thing doesn’t dictate the other. Hadrian was lucky, that was all. Except . . .

  I don’t believe in luck.

  Luck, as it was understood by most people, was some supernatural force that benefited one person more than another. An incomprehensible, impetuous power that blessed certain people without reason, and would abandon them just as inexplicably. What a load of nonsense. Luck was a word insecure or envious people used to explain events they didn’t understand. What they didn’t realize was that everything had a certain probability. Those people described as lucky were merely individuals who increased their odds of success either by their actions or lack thereof. A man who lives on a mountaintop but isn’t hit by lightning isn’t lucky, he simply didn’t go outside in a storm. People made their own luck. This, too, had been an axiom that Royce had believed. Now these two established principles were slammed against each other, and he didn’t care for the new landscape the collision left behind. The pattern was wholly strange, an alien thing that challenged all he knew to be true, everything he’d learned. If Royce didn’t know better, he would almost conclude that—

  Mercator appeared, moving through the crowded plaza. She had added a blue shawl to her attire and dropped part of it over her head. Does she own anything that isn’t blue?

  She entered from Vintage Avenue, but that didn’t mean anything. Royce had known Mercator for only an hour and already he knew she wasn’t stupid enough to travel in a straight line from where Genny Winter was being held. The best he could determine was that the Duchess of Rochelle was somewhere in the city or on the outskirts—somewhere Mercator could have gotten to and back in less time than it took Grom Galimus to chime twice.

  It took her several minutes to cross the plaza. Because this was the night before the big feast, it seemed everyone was out. Royce watched as Mercator threaded her way through the crowd, looking for anyone who might be following. She seemed unobserved, and Royce met her in front of the cathedral.

  “That didn’t take long. Are you certain you have ample evidence? You realize we won’t get a second chance at this. If he isn’t persuaded that she’s alive, this whole thing fails.”

  Mercator presented Royce with an understanding smile, the sort an adult would offer a child who has just said something stupid. “This will do the trick.” Mercator drew out a folded parchment.

  “A letter?” Royce was disappointed.

  “Were you expecting a finger?”

  Behind Mercator, not far from the fountain, a Calian man was juggling flaming torches that made muffled whump sounds each time they spun.

  “To be honest, yes. A fresh-cut finger shows the victim was recently alive. And there is the added bonus of indicating the seriousness of the kidnapper.”

  Mercator continued her patient smile. “You’ve done this sort of thing before, haven’t you?”

  “Hadrian and I weren’t hired for our looks.”

  “Nor for your intelligence.” The insult was presented without malice, making it sound more like constructive criticism.

  Royce was never one for criticism, constructive or otherwise, and certainly not when it came to his area of expertise. The presumption of this mir was astounding if she thought she could educate him on blackmail and coercion. She looked to be the type to spend most of her days scrounging garbage for food or begging for handouts in the street.

  A ring of people in colorful clothes held hands and danced in a circle as a trio of fiddlers played in the center. All the dancers were red-faced, from either the exertion or drink—likely both. Royce found it hard to believe that he and they were the same species.

  “The duchess wants us to succeed,” Mercator said. “Given that her life weighs in the balance, and since she knows her husband better than either of us, it’s sensible to assume she is far more capable of providing us with the means of convincing him to act. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Royce didn’t answer. As simple as that concept was, he reran it twice through his head looking for an error. He couldn’t find one beyond the possibility that the duchess might encode a message only Leo would understand, which would convey her whereabouts. This, however, seemed unlikely.

  “What?” Mercator asked.

  “Nothing.” Royce shook his head.

  “You’re shocked. I can see it on your face. You didn’t believe it possible a mir could think.”

  Royce shrugged and gave a glance at the revelers laughing and dancing as if they were mad from fever. “Don’t take it as a slight; I’m usually shocked that anyone can think.”

  “But how much harder to accept from me, a mir and a female. You assumed I was incompetent, didn’t you?”

  She was right, and such an admission wouldn’t have troubled him a year ago, but a year ago he’d thought he was human. Discovering he was also a mir made it difficult to think that those with mixed-blood were inferior. Difficult, but not impossible. The fact that he didn’t exhibit elven features allowed Royce to believe his blood was only slightly tainted. This was a weak, impractical argument, but prejudices were a form of fear, and fear was often senseless. Groundless anxieties permitted ludicrous rationalizations. At least they did in the quiet, controlled spaces of his own mind. Such carefully crafted constructions
tended to fall apart when facing the reality of a blue-stained mir who showed no evidence of inferiority.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  No offense or anger surfaced on her face. Instead, she nodded while maintaining that understanding smile. “So, what now?”

  “We’re waiting on Roland Wyberg. The captain of the city guard is supposed to meet us here. He wasn’t at the guardhouse, but I told one of his men that I’d found the duchess, and he anxiously volunteered to fetch him, immediately. I hope he didn’t lie or exaggerate.”

  “You didn’t mention me, did you?”

  “No, but would it have been a problem if I did?”

  Mercator sighed. “It could. People have a lot of preconceptions about my kind. We’re not what you think, you know. We didn’t cause the destruction of the empire. We aren’t lazy or stupid, nor are we abominations. We don’t carry disease, aren’t cannibals, don’t steal babies or worship Uberlin. We’re the same as everyone else, except more destitute because the rest of society hates us. They keep us dirty and desperate, then condemn us as if we chose our circumstances. The irony is that long ago we were considered superior to humans. I’m guessing you didn’t know that. The term mir comes from the word myr, an Old Speech word that originally meant son of. It was also an honorific, like sir added before the name of a knight. If you put those two things together, you must conclude that we are descended from pretty good stock. It was only after the fall of Merredydd, a province of the old empire that was governed by mir for mir, that the term became derogatory.”

  “No offense, but all of that contradicts history as I understand it.”

  “That’s because the history you know is wrong. History isn’t truth. You’re not too foolish to recognize that, are you?”

  The dancers moved away as acrobats tumbled into the center of the square, encouraged by applause. Men in tight clothes jumped and rolled and climbed onto one another, creating human ladders of various designs.