Her shade did not answer. I had not expected anything. I had made this most unfortunate farewell.
Rising, I threw down Federo’s cloak. “Where is my silk?” I asked in my own words. He and the Dancing Mistress stepped forward to array me as carefully as any squires in a courtly tale of olden tourneys.
I walked along Coronation Avenue between the two rows of peach trees gone bare in the autumn damp. My cloak of bells wrapped me close. Beneath it, I wore dark tights and a calf-length shirt, as if I were prepared to dance in some mummer’s play. I carried no weapon and held my head high.
Look at me, I thought. Here is your bounty. The Factor’s emerald comes.
People aplenty were on the street. Wagons and carriages clattered by. Even a few of the great cog-carts, balanced with flywheels and driven by strange logics patiently punched into the endless loops of goatleather rolls stored within their guts. Tradesmen and servants passed, on the business of the great houses that lined the approach to the Ducal Palace.
It was almost too much. I had not seen so many people at once since my arrival at the docks nine years earlier. Too many faces, all of them half-familiar, all of them strange as statues in the dark. I saw them through the eyes of my training. Virtually everyone could be marked out by their clothing, their stance, the tools or equipment they carried, their headgear.
In ordinary times, I might have fled to a quiet alley, but my purpose guided my steps. I was glad as the crowding thinned as the street grew wealthier.
A pair of mounted guardsmen rode by without even glancing at me. The gentlemen and ladies on their business took no notice, either. I enjoyed a strange species of invisibility, difficult to understand or describe. I wondered whether these people would have looked at me had I been naked and armed with a flaming sword.
Where was the hue and cry that Federo and the Dancing Mistress had promised? Three days ago, patrols had been going through the warehouse district building by building. Now their attention had moved to some other urgency.
Everything worn was a badge, a signal, a symbol of what role the wearer played in life and how they intended to be treated. My attire signaled that I did not belong, that I was a strange person in a stranger land. My bells told my story to anyone with the ears that knew how to hear it.
No one on Coronation Avenue had those ears, it seemed.
The Ducal Palace loomed ahead. The building’s face was a vast sweep of marble in the Firthian style, with more windows than I would have imagined any structure having. I was accustomed to the blank walls of the Factor’s house. It seemed as if this building stared across the city with a hundred eyes. A great copper dome towered above the center. Smaller domes of the same metal topped each wing.
I was not sure of the distance, having spent my life behind walls or on night runs, where everything was only a step or two in front of me, but it did not seem I had so far to go to just walk right through His Grace’s front door. As I approached the palace, the street grew emptier. Quieter. My bells rang louder.
What might have been my wedding if my life had been different would instead be my funeral. I wished I could have ridden Endurance toward this end, much as my grandmother had.
From one moment to the next, I was surrounded by angry-faced guardsmen with swords drawn. They came upon me in a sudden swirl of rushing feet and shouting. My captors forced me to my knees, then down on the pavement. Someone kicked me twice, setting my bells to shivering all over my body. A blade’s point was leaned against my neck. I bit back my cry of pain at that, just as I bit back my anger at the rough treatment.
Save your passion for the Duke, I told myself. You will be lucky to have even a single chance. Do not spend it needlessly here.
A runner sprinted away. His sandals slapped the street. The man with the sword knelt close behind me, though I could only see his knee and part of the ringmail of his skirt. “May’s well be comfy, chit,” he whispered. His hot breath was prickly on the scabbed-over notch of my ear. “You ain’t got much left to live for.”
“Conspiracy,” I said to the cobbles. My mouth was half-pressed shut against stone that tasted mostly of shoeleather. “Against the Duke.” That was my tale, meant to be told and carried to the place bearing me on its shoulders.
“Sun rose in the east, dinn’t’t?” He laughed. “Course there’s conspiracy.”
After that, they acted almost like normal people. Some told jokes about the wife of an officer. Others asked after one’s sick horse, and complained of the food in their mess hall. Except for the sword pressing in my neck, I might have been nothing more than a street-corner idler listening to the chatter of men at their work.
No one was interested in me. I was just their capture. Meat, a thing, knocked down to be kept against possible future use, like a venison haunch in an ice room.
My anger began to boil again. These men were brutal and thoughtless in a way that Mistress Tirelle had never managed. Her cruelty was the calculated personal abuse of years. For the Duke’s guards, I was only the trouble of a moment.
They didn’t even care. At least she had.
It all flowed from the Duke. Everything wrong, poorly done, every hurt and hatred emanated from the way he bent the fate of Copper Downs. I kept the words in my head, waiting for my chance to use them against him.
In time, the runner returned. The men gathered in a whispered conference, speaking in awed terms of the bounty. They knew who I was now. I was dragged to my feet by a hard hand clawing into my shoulder. A man with a mild face and watery eyes threw a maroon duty cloak over my head. He laughed as he did it, then cinched a rope around my neck. I was tossed over an armored shoulder and hauled away.
We were heading to the Ducal Palace. Thus far, this was according to plan.
Or so I fervently hoped.
The gait of the guardsman rocked me with a bumping irregularity that jangled my bells out of all time and tune. The men’s chatter was gone, so I caught no further clues from them. We soon ascended a broad, shallow flight of stairs. I could hear other people moving, muttering, gathered around.
Whatever my humiliation was to be, it was beginning in a very public way. I decided to be encouraged by this. Their treatment of me seemed less likely to be a quick walk to a slit throat.
When they set me down, my captors were almost gentle. My feet slipped slightly on what felt like stone through my soft leather boots. Someone took my hand and led me stumbling through more hallways of stone. My training Below with the Dancing Mistress prepared me to recall my path, should that happen to matter sometime later.
As I walked, I could hear the echoes of the walls around me, and how they altered every dozen steps as we passed a recessed doorway. My bells still rang, but now they swung in time to my own movements.
The sounds were too discordant to ever be truly pleasing. It still gladdened my heart to hear them. I felt so close to my grandmother, except that she had not walked alive to her own funeral.
In time, my feet were on carpet. My boots crackled slightly, and slid in a new way. I smelled more now, not just dust and old stone, but also furniture oil and incense and the not-so-distant scent of baking. Doors opened and closed nearby as we walked.
No one said a word. We were among people who would not bother to question why a hoodwinked girl was being led past them. Later, I would come to understand the sadness of a city that had surrendered itself to the terror of a jealous and immortal master. Then, all I knew was that I was alone among strangers.
As always.
Finally I was stopped. A door creaked open. I smelled more incense and something musty. With a muttered “hup-hup,” I was propelled through, as if I were a horse to be driven to market. Hands released me as I stepped within. After another pace, I stopped. I feared barking a shin or tripping over something on the floor.