Dunbrae sat comfortably enough on one of the steps leading out from Rose Hall to the street, nodding curt greeting to those who passed until a young man leading a long-legged red mare stopped to talk. Dunbrae seemed completely at his ease, but the young man shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, now and then casting a quick look up and down the street.
“Aline, if you even send word to Madoc Diviner, you’re making a mistake,” Dezra said, not for the first time.
Usha looked away from the street. Aline, her face calm, used an empty stone vase as an anchor for one corner of the map. She chose a fist sized rock for another and a heavy brass compass for the third. She looked around for something to keep the fourth corner flat. Usha reached behind her and took a brass candlestick from the window.
Aline thumped it onto the table with a decided bang, missing the edge of the map. “Dez, I’ve been picking men and women to work with Qui’thonas for a few years now. I know what I’m doing.”
“Maybe.”
Usha raised a brow but did not intervene. For the moment.
Outside the door, the voices of servants drifted by. Only a few were allowed near this room at the top of Rose Hall. All of Aline’s servants were trusty, or they would not be in her employ, but the fewer who knew that this room would soon be the headquarters of Qui’thonas the better.
“Aline, I’m telling you, the mage is not to be trusted.”
Of course, Usha would have intervened if the subject were not Madoc. She’d have appealed to the two women to reason calmly, to find common ground, to make the most of what their opinions had in common and build from there. On almost all subjects but Madoc Diviner, her appeal would have had a good chance.
Absently, Aline rasped a fingertip along the curling edge of the map. A slight flush crept across her long, unlovely face, her freckled skin looked mottled. “Why is he not to be trusted, Dez? Because the landlord at your inn speaks ill of him?”
“No, though he might as well; he’d be telling no lie. I saw—”
“Yes, you saw Madoc talking to a knight in the garden behind the Grinning Goat one evening when you were out after the curfew.” The flush deepened when Aline spoke Madoc’s name, then cold, dry irony edged her words. “Dumping bodies, wasn’t it, with Dunbrae?”
Dezra snorted. “We couldn’t leave the corpse in the alley, could we?”
Usha slipped from the window seat and straightened the candlestick on the last curling edge of the map. “All in all, Dez, you’ve been doing a fair bit of talking to people well after curfew yourself. Do you really have reason to doubt Madoc’s good will toward Aline because he chooses to do the same?”
“A dark knight, Usha.”
“Yes, who might very well have been talking to him about the weather, the price of ale, or—”
“Or thanking him for a bit of news he passed along.” Dez turned swiftly, making her appeal to Aline. “He’s an information broker. If you don’t believe me, believe someone you trust.”
The skin around Aline’s eyes tightened, as though she winced a little at the implication that she didn’t trust Dezra, yet she made no assurance.
“Dunbrae says Madoc Diviner can be counted on for two things,” Dez continued, “and one of them is that he cares for no one’s good but his own.”
“And the other thing is?”
Silence, then pacing. Usha waited, still and quiet, for she noticed that Aline’s fingers drummed a nearly silent rhythm of unease on the table.
“The other thing,” said Dez, reluctantly, “is that his information can always be counted on as good.”
“Well,” Aline said, “that doesn’t sound ominous.”
“Not so much, unless you remember you can’t always count on Madoc’s reason for giving the information.”
“You just said he cares for no one’s good but his own. Madoc’s good, then, must be the only reason he will sell information. To feed himself, to pay for his lodging... if I thought he were a man to care about such things, I would say to lay up wealth. If you know that, you can reckon your chances and gamble with him or not.”
“You’re too trusting, Aline.”
“Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I trusted him once before—”
“And look what it got you. Your enchanted gift enchanting the wrong man. Him.”
Aline’s face became still as stone, but it couldn’t cover the sudden flash of pain in her eyes. “You could say so. But if you do, you also have to say that Madoc brought me safely to Haven.” Her glanced flicked to Usha. “As he promised you and Lord Palin he would.”
In the silence fallen between the three, tension thickened in the room. Dunbrae’s voice came up to them, muffled by distance but sounding as though he were calling a question to someone. Usha didn’t turn to see, for the invocation of Palin’s name drew her into the heart of the argument.
“Dez,” she said, “Madoc didn’t betray Aline or her husband, though from what I hear, he certainly could have if he’d tried even a little. He is here now, and I see nothing in any of that to distrust.”
Dezra drew breath to say more. Usha stopped her with a gesture.
“Dez, if we were all to be mistrusted for speaking with dark knights, you wouldn’t be able to trust me now. I dined with one only a few weeks ago.”
Dezra shook her head. “You couldn’t help that. You were trapped into having to be in Sir Radulf’s company. And,” she said, “in the company of appeasers.”
“Lorelia is my client,” Usha said, and made no mention of Loren Halgard. But in memory she heard his voice, low and pained when he’d said he would do whatever he could to soften this terrible time of Haven’s occupation for Tamara. She is my child.
What would you do? he’d challenged. Usha still didn’t know how to answer.
“Lorelia’s husband is the chief counselor to the Lord Mayor. The battle they’re fighting isn’t the same as the one ...” Her glance took in both women, one after the other. “As the one you two are getting ready to fight. Same war, Dez. Different battles.”
In a gesture much like one her father would make, Dezra dug at the floor with the toe of her boot, head down and thoughtfully gnawing on her bottom lip. Usha, who knew her well, knew she’d given over the argument. For the moment.
No one said more about Madoc Diviner, and Palin Majere’s name hung like a ghost in the room. The three women returned to the reason they’d assembled in the high room and began a serious discussion about what resources of the first incarnation of Qui’thonas were available, which needed refurbishing, and which would have to be abandoned or created.
“We are going out instead of coming in,” Aline said, crooking a sardonic smile. “But that’s about all that’s changed.”
Dez shook her head. Usha felt a small charge of tension in the room again, but Aline leaned forward.
“What?”
“A lot more has changed, Aline. The old routes have to be abandoned. You almost have to count on them being either compromised or—by the simple passage of time—changed.”
Aline nodded to tell her to go on.
“Routes aren’t the only resource that might be compromised. You have to check your people again, everyone you used before has to get another, very close look. Use Dunbrae. He’s been with you all along. He has a bit of magic to use, he’ll know what to look for, and—” she paused, acknowledging the irony of what she was about to say—“he can be trusted to know if anyone has changed his mind about where his loyalties lie.”
They spoke of those things and more. At last, Usha said, “I won’t be coming back here again, Aline. My work is among the people Dez calls collaborators. Some of them are, some aren’t, and some are my clients. It would be an odd thing if I suddenly abandoned the commissions I’ve tried so hard to get.”