Neb nodded. “When I met Petronus, I was standing under Sethbert’s canopy, studying the position of his guards.” He paused. Had it really been so many months ago? “I’d stolen scout magicks from Lady Tam, and intended to use them in order to kill Sethbert.”
Isaak’s eyes flashed. “You knew what he had done?”
Neb nodded. “I did. But Petronus saw me and stopped me.”
Isaak pondered this. “You were a boy who survived the spell. Now you’re a hero of the Androfrancine
Order. Do you believe your restraint led to these things?”
He chuckled, putting down the book he’d just lifted up from the wagon. “I had no restraint of my own. Petronus restrained me.”
Isaak fixed his eyes on him again. “But are you glad for it?” Neb thought about this. “I think so. Yes,” he said.
Isaak looked to a point beyond Neb now and stood. “Lady Tam,” he said. “An unexpected delight.”
Neb looked up and blushed. Lady Tam still radiated beauty, though now it was clear that she wasn’t half as pretty as Winters. Still she was beautiful, and when she smiled at him he felt his face grow red. “Hello, Isaak,” she said, inclining her head to each of them. “Nebios.” She smiled. “How is the inventory?”
Now Neb stood as well. “We’ve found three mechanicals. Small ones, to be sure, but two of them are still in good repair.”
“I should be able to restore the third,” Isaak said. “It appears to have slipped a gear.”
Jin Li Tam looked to the wagon, and Neb thought for a second that her face registered surprise. He followed her eyes and saw the golden bird in its golden cage, its wings hanging broken and its neck twitching. “Where did this wagon come from?” she asked.
Neb stared at it. Something about the golden bird nagged at him. He suddenly smelled the sulfur and ozone of Windwir’s firestorm, and he flinched.
Isaak looked at the registry. “This one is from the Emerald Coasts,” he said. “A private collection.”
He saw the bird flying low to the ground, its golden fe?€ its golathers steaming. It was at Windwir, he realized. Neb opened his mouth and a stream of unintelligible words tumbled out, fragments of scripture jumbled together with glossolalia. He closed his mouth quickly and looked at Jin Li Tam.
She stared at him. “Neb?”
He waited for the tension to leave his throat. Finally, he spoke. “I saw this bird at Windwir.” Neb watched her eyes narrow and her jawline tighten. “Really?”
He nodded. “I did.”
She nodded, her eyes suddenly far away. “I hope you can fix it,” she said. Then, her eyes returned to the present. “Petronus is calling for you both,” she said. She paused. “Take him that bird. Tell him I said I will speak to him about it later.”
Neb grabbed up his stack of papers. He probably wanted to talk about the council.
The Council of Bishops was just a few weeks away. Many of the gravediggers who had come north with Neb had been put to work building bleachers and crafting the massive tents to contain it. The last birds of invitation were to go out tomorrow.
Neb started toward the manor and the suite of offices they had grown into, then realized he was being rude, and turned to wait for Lady Tam and Isaak.
Isaak held the birdcage in his hands.
Jin Li Tam was staring at it, he realized, and Neb had never seen a more profound look of sadness upon her face.
Petronus
Petronus’s office adjoined the converted guest room that Neb and Isaak worked from. The steward had insisted that he have privacy and wouldn’t hear of him using his living quarters as his work space. Instead, they moved a small desk, some bookshelves and three chairs into a large walk-in closet. The closet even had a small window that opened out on one of the manor’s many gardens. As spring hurried on, Petronus could smell the flowers blooming, though of course he had to stand on his desk to see them.
He looked up the knock on his door. “Come in,” he said.
Neb came in first, and Petronus swore that every time he saw the boy he was taller. His shoulders had broadened and he even had the beginnings of a beard, trimmed.as neatly as a boy could manage. He wore the robes smartly, though he still walked in them as if they weren’t really his, as if he weren’t really a member of the Order. “You called for us, Excellency?”
Petronus nodded. The Gypsy King surprised him, abruptly vanishing after Sethbert’s capture. Rudolfo was a wily one, but like his father, his sense of duty anchored him. When he concluded with whatever private matter he attended to, Rudolfo would be back to finish the work he’d started here, because like Petronus, he would do what he was made for. “I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Petronus said.
“Yes, Father.” Isaak turned to the door. “If that is all, I have a meeting with the bookbinders to discuss logistics.”
Petronus forced a smile. “Thank you, Isaak.”
The metal man left, and Petronus relaxed in his chair. Outside he heard a child laughing, and for the briefest moment his nose filled with the smell of salt water and freshly caught fish as the laughter evoked unexpected memory. His feet could nearly feel the warm wood of the boat docks slapping at them as he raced a young Vlad Li Tam for his father’s waiting boat.
The sudden image of his friend as a boy flooded Petronus with sadness. Beneath that sadness, he knew, lived a terrible wrath toward someone he once loved as a brother.
“I was made for this,” Vlad Li Tam had told him long ago when Petronus had asked him if he ever wondered what his life would’ve been if he weren’t Lord Tam of House Li Tam. Afterward, they’d gone fishing together for the last time, and it had almost touched the magic of earlier days, before destiny had
found and chained them.
I should go fishing, he thought. Surely one of the servants or Gypsy Scouts could point him toward rod and tackle. The river that cut through town was not very wide, but he’d seen deep patches of green beneath the shade of the trees that lined its edge, and he knew that trout rose in it, their brown backs rippling the water as they fed.
But in the end, Petronus stayed at his desk and worked until his eyes blurred and his hand ached, unshackling himself from the desk long after the sound of frogs filled the forest-scented night beyond his window.
“What I was made for,” he said quietly to that dark.
Jin Li Tam
Jin Li Tam awoke in the middle of the night to commotion in the halls, and crept to the spyhole in her suite’s sitting room to look out over the stairwells and landings of the seventh manor. She saw servants and scouts rushing about as quietly as they could up and down the stairs, in and out of the doors.