Someone behind me loosened the rope about my neck and whipped the guard’s cloak off. The door banged shut immediately thereafter.
I blinked away dust and the confusion of close confinement. There was no sign of the Duke here. Only a wide wooden table with the Factor seated behind it. My heart twisted in a cold stab of anger and regret. Two other dead-eyed men stood to his left. All three watched me blankly as my shoulders slumped and the breath left me.
Our plan was lost. The game was blown.
“Emerald.” The Factor’s voice was calm, quiet, as ordinary as his face except for those eyes.
“Green. You may call me Green.”
A smile flickered across his mouth. “Emerald.” He tapped his fingers against his thumb a moment, as if tallying. I let my eyes rove around the room. Three high, narrow windows on one wall, a ceiling far above me, shelves lined with large and heavy books behind the Factor’s men and on the other walls. A door amid the shelves, a door behind me, and him in the only chair.
Nowhere to go. Nothing to use.
Whatever calculations he was making came to their end. His face was grim. “A valuable servant is dead. I now see that an extremely valuable possession has been mutilated and thus rendered worthless. I give you liberty to make a statement before I have you cast from the rim of the dome atop this building.”
I was wrong. His voice wasn’t ordinary. It was as dead as his eyes.
And I had nothing I could wield against him.
Yet I wasn’t bound. I wasn’t restrained in any way. Whichever guards had walked me through the halls to this place had vanished with the hood.
I was still me. I shifted my weight, testing the balls of my feet. The Duke was not here, but three of his dead-eyed servants were. More important, the Factor had ever been my enemy.
There was something I could do. Strike one of them down, any of them, and the rest might learn a little of the fear they’d beaten into me. I tensed my muscles, ready to spring and gain close purchase to pour my words in his ear. My cloak of belled silk jingled as I moved.
The Factor raised a hand, not toward me but at his two companions. “She may attempt an attack,” he said. “She will not succeed.”
“If you are certain, Your Grace,” one of them answered.
Your Grace! How many undying, dead-eyed dukes could there be in this city? I had found the Duke of Copper Downs after all! That he went abroad on his own streets under the name of the Factor surprised me, but I realized there was no reason it should. The people who ruled this city were like those sliding boxes brought in from the Hanchu ports that folded into themselves without ever reaching an end.
I relaxed. He would not bluff me. Why did he need to? He did not know I understood anything of the words of power. The Dancing Mistress had been uncertain of them. They were my hidden weapon. I did not know if their strength would hold now, but there was no way to find out except to put the question to the hardest of tests.
“You were wrong,” I told him.
“Wrong?” His smile flickered again. “A curious choice of exit lines. And no, I was not wrong. In what? Lifting a foreign guttersnipe from poverty? Raising you in privilege? Teaching you every skill of womanhood? Perhaps you would prefer picking rice in the tropics, bound in marriage to some laboring peasant. You were almost so much more than that.”
I’d had those same thoughts, but that did not make him right. The bells of my cloak jingled again.
Words, I told myself in the language of my birth. He tries to win once more through the power of his words.
What would my grandmother have done? What would Endurance have me do? I could hear the snorting breath of the ox as he sought to warn me back.
The only way was forward.
Flipping the cloak of bells away from me, I flung it at the Factor’s companions. I danced to my left, away from them.
He jumped to his feet and threw the table over, roaring words I did not-or could not-understand.
I leapt forward to balance on the edge of table. I had practiced this exact stance for so long. I spun into a kick from which the Factor ducked. Then I leapt to grab him around the neck.
“The life that is shared,” I whispered in his ear in the language of my birth, “goes on forever. The life that is hoarded is never lived at all.”
That was as close as Federo and I had been able to come to the Dancing Mistress’ words. Surely, though, inasmuch as she’d given them to me in the Petraean tongue of Copper Downs, their sense had come from whatever language her people spoke amongst themselves. I hoped and prayed that sense would carry forward into my own words.
The Factor bore me down under his far greater weight. His two companions grabbed me by the wrists. I feared suddenly the rape that Mistress Cherlise had warned me about. These men would tear my body for their pleasure before they tore my life out for their protection.
“You,” the Factor said. He couldn’t seem to find his next thought.
His hair began to twist. It jumped like snakes disturbed from their sleep. Ripples of gray, then white, shot through it. The other two loosed their grip on me, staggering back in their own sudden, shocked decay.
“You…”This time he looked surprised. Finally there was some gleam of light in those cold, dead eyes.
I pushed him away from me, sitting up as he fell. The Factor struggled with something mighty that was caught in his chest. The words worked. I leaned close, to be sure he could hear me even as he was dying.
“You may call me Green,” I said. “Green,” I repeated in my own language.
He gave me a look of utter despair, which gladdened my heart. Wind and dust erupted violently. The air stank of old bandages and rotten meat, while unvoiced shrieks echoed within my skull.
I held on tight, remembering who I was and what my purpose was here. I bore these noises and the fires in my head as I’d borne the years of beatings and abuses. My patience had been schooled by the very best this man could set against me.
A moment later, I was alone in the room, amid the splintered remains of his table and the shattered wood of his chair.
The motes floating in the sunlight from the high windows engaged my attention for a while. Were these the dust of immortality? Or perhaps just the room’s air stirred so much that every crack and crevice had surrendered its dirt.
Studying their texture awhile longer, I realized I was in the same shock that had possessed me after Mistress Tirelle’s death. Except I did not feel guilt this time. Or pain. I was not sure it even counted as a killing. All I had done was point the weapon of the Duke’s magic against him and those who served him closest. They had brewed their own poison and served it out in cups for generations. How could I regret these child-takers sipping their own bitters?
They were gone. The Duke and the Factor both. How was it no one in Copper Downs had noticed that the two of them had been the same man? Perhaps it had been one of those secrets that everyone understood but no one spoke of.
Everything about this Duke was difficult for me to fathom.
With them gone, I was free. The Factor was no longer in a position to pursue his complaint against me for the killing of Mistress Tirelle. The Duke was no longer in a position to offer a bounty for my head. I was free-free as any girl of twelve who stood out on these streets surely as a fire in the night.
Rarely had I thought to regret the color of my skin, for I found myself pretty enough to look at, but here and now among these maggot men, my fine brown tone made it impossible for me to hide.
What of it? I breathed deeply and searched for the courage that had driven me to face down the most powerful man on the Stone Coast, and indeed, in this quarter of the world. Resolve clutched within my throat, I stepped to the door and pressed my ear against the once-glossy panel. Now it was matted with dust and flecked with tiny pocks.