Meek

"What?" Pym asked Cousin Ugenia.

"He tripped," the older woman said, "walking down the stairs to the cell."

"The fall killed him?"

"Yes, but ..." Ugenia shuddered. "He must've broken something in his throat."

"What does this mean for the interrogation?" Ty asked.

"A delay. If we want this done correctly, we need an expert."

"Send for one," Pym said.

"I already have, m'lady," Ugenia said, then mentioned her suspicions one more time.

She worried that the killer had had an ally on the inside. Perhaps in the clinic. Someone who'd pretended he was dead, and healed him. A mage, then. A mage of the Palm. Of course, Ugenia saw traitors everywhere. That was her job. Still, Pym refused to believe that Master Quiricas, the head physician, wasn't loyal. Partly because he and her father had been close forever, but mostly because it would've been such an obvious betrayal.

"If he had an accomplice," Pym said, tapping her teacup thoughtfully. "They must be panicked now he's in custody."

"Yes, I expect they'll try to flee very soon. Before he cracks."

"You're watching the gates?"

"Yes, m'lady. If anyone who ever set a single foot inside the clinic leaves the city, my people will follow"

Pym nodded. "I want to see him. The prisoner."

"What good will that do?" Ty asked.

"I don't know. None. But I want to see him."

"You're the Marchioness," Ty said. "If you want it, it happens."

Which was only partially true. She didn't get to the cells that day, because she was too busy catching up after her trip to Leotide City.

Then the next morning, two of the guards reported that they'd spotted an intruder the previous night. "A possible intruder," the captain of the guard clarified. "Outside the Church, heading for your residence. They gave chase, planning to corner the intruder between the walls and the yew walk, but there was nobody there."

"Which guards?" she asked.

He named two people she only vaguely knew. "Both good soldiers," he said.

"Reinforce the perimeter guard." She considered for a moment. She didn't want to overreact, but that was better than the opposite. So she added, "And coordinate with Mage Fluer. We'll put mages on the roof tonight."

"Yes, m'lady."

The news of a possible intruder led her to review Keep security that morning, and she missed the chance to visit the dungeon before her appointments and audiences began.

Then the following day, she woke to more bad news. Mage Cristonel was recovering in the clinic. An attacker had shattered her shin, leading her to fall from the roof. Master Quiricas had arrived early enough heal her without trouble, but another guard reported seeing a 'shadow' at the edge of the plateau.

"Search the grounds," Pym told the captain. "Every inch. Every room. Including my bedchamber, my mother's. Everywhere. Check every groom and servant and courtier. Then I want a wall of soldiers around the Keep. Search every cart, every servant. Nothing gets in without your permission."

"M'lady!" he said, and trotted off.

"Ask Ugenia when this bloody interrogator is getting here," she snapped at Ty.

"She sent to Leotide. She says that specialists are rare."

Pym considered tasking an amateur with the job, but effective interrogation involved more than cruelty. You needed to extract the truth from the subject, not merely destroy them.

By the time dusk fell that day, the Keep had become an armed camp. After scouring every inch of the grounds, there was no chance that interlopers were inside the walls, so the guard formed perimeter rings, facing outward.

And nothing happened that night.

At least nothing that Pym knew for a certainty had been caused by an intruder. But the next day's report mentioned horses in the stables taking sudden fright, neighing and bucking and kicking the stalls. There'd been a sudden crack as a limb fell from a tree. A guard stumbled on a smooth stretch of path, and insisted that she'd kicked something.

So Pym transferred every last soldier to the perimeter. She didn't allow any of the supply wagons or tradesfolk who'd arrived that day to leave the Keep. Instead she quartered them in tents near the stables and surrounded them with guards.

Then Lady Pym spent an hour in the makeshift encampment, soothing ruffled tempers, explaining that this was merely a precaution against a possible concomitance. She spoke to the millers and the florist, to the old couple who'd entered to visit the priest. She reassured the jeweler and the woman seeking work as a maid alongside her sister, and one with the donkey cart delivering barrels from the cooper, and even the boys who'd snuck in to steal dates from the tree.

By that evening, she was confident that the Keep was as secure as possible.

Two hours later, she heard the news.

"Master Quiricas is missing," one of her courtiers told her.

"Missing?"

"From the clinic, he--"

Pym strode from the audience hall with personal guard, to help with the search. And twenty minutes later, a member of her guard noticed something odd about the woodpile outside the barracks. The guards moved the wood and found--

Mage Cristonel, her silver-streaked black hair filthy with bark. She was alive, though. Barely, with a lump behind her ear.

As the guards carried her toward the clinic, a shout sounded from within. One of the other physicians finally found Master Quiricas, bound and gagged inside the clinic cistern. Unfortunately, Quiricas hadn't seen who'd attacked him before he'd awoken half-drowned in the cistern.

After that, fear settled over the Keep. What kind of person could sneak through that much security, and beat a two-fold mage?

Lady Pym wasn't afraid of battle but this fight, against a formless, nameless enemy, made her uneasy. She knew that her adversary, whoever that was, had planned all of this, from her father's death onward. This was all part of a single attack.

She couldn't keep fighting blind, so late that afternoon she finally headed off to speak with the prisoner.

She took Mage Fluer and two guards and descended into the old dungeons. They were rarely used, having only three cells and being in the heart of the Keep. Most prisoners were jailed farther out, in the larger gaol beneath the guards' barracks.

Despite being rarely used, the smell was acutely unpleasant as she walked down the final set of stairs. She didn't allow herself to react, though Fluer pressed a perfumed handkerchief to her nose. She did pause, though, to make the sign of the Angel at the makeshift shrine where Treli Trestan had died.

Then she crossed to the barred window in the door of the man's cell.

She saw him only dimly, in the torchlight. Sitting on the straw-strewn stone floor, a manacle around one ankle. Shirtless, with his shoulders hunched, his head bowed ... yet she still had the sense that he was watching her.

"What's your name?" she asked.

He didn't answer.

"My name is Pym," she told him. "But you know that. You knew that the first time we met, in the mountains."

"Arcuro," he said.

"You don't deny that we met before?"

He lifted his head and she saw the green gleam of his eyes. "Would denial help me?"

"No. I'm afraid not. What will help you is telling me who hired you, and why. And who else they hired."

"Would you believe, my lady, that I wasn't paid a copper?" he asked, and his voice sounded too strong and too unafraid.

"You admit that you killed him?"

"From while I heard," the prisoner said. "I stabbed him, but he survived."

"Why? Why attack him at all? He was a--a good man. He cared for his people, his city. He was a good man and you ..." She couldn't continue for a moment. "You stole him from us. He was going to do so much good."

"M'lady," Mage Fluer murmured, behind her. "This is not productive."

"Go," she told the mage, as she gestured to the guards. "Give me some room!"

Fluer objected, but Pym insisted, and the others retreated to the stairs.

"You won't easily tell me who you're working for," Pym told the man. "I know that. You won't name your accomplices. I know that too. I have a ... a specialist coming to speak to you."

"To speak," he said.

She swallowed. "I will find out who is behind you, and I will destroy them. But what I want to know, what I need to know is, why? If not for coin, why?"

"We're targeting you. You and Savradar."

"Savradar? Brazinka Savradar?"

"We'll take you both down."

"Why ..." She frowned. "Why would you tell me this?"

"Why wouldn't I, Lady Pym?"

"What kind of game are you playing? Because I'll tell my people, and they'll stop any plans you--"

"You won't tell a soul."

"And why is that?"

"Because I'm going to kill you right now," he said, standing in the cell.

The chain jingled against the floor when he stepped closer. Then he took another step and the manacle parted around his ankle. It wasn't locked. The manacle wasn't locked and he took another step and opened the cell door--also, impossibly, unlocked--between them.

"Guards!" she called.

She heard them rush forward even as the whoosh of a mage-Arrow sped past her ear. That was Fluer, firing one of her disk-blades at the prisoner.

At that range, she couldn't miss ... yet the disk veered sideways and scraped the stone wall three feet from the man.

He kept walking forward, unhurried, unafraid, and another disk hit what must've been his mage-shield, then the guards burst past Pym--and sprawled to the ground as if someone had shoved them from behind.

The prisoner spun to avoid another disk. There was a crack and a guard gasped in pain and the prisoner plucked the guard's sword from his shattered wrist.

Pym wasn't armed. She hadn't come armed, she didn't have her crossbow or her sword, so she backpedaled fast and the other guard, the one who was still armed on the ground, managed to twist and throw her sword at the man's back.

The sword clanged into an obstruction in the air, then one of Fluer's disks chopped into the man's upper arm.

Blood washed down his skin, and there was a thunk behind Pym.

From the corner of her eye, Pym saw Fluer's head slam against the wall. Oh, no. No, no--

She turned and leaped over the mage's still form and raced upstairs.

Chips of stone spat from the walls beside her. They cut her arm, her cheek, but she kept running and shouting until she slammed through the doors into the fading daylight.

She veered to the left, clearing the field for the guards who were already trotting toward her.