The Skylighter (The Keepers' Chronicles Book 2) (21 page)

“Let’s get close enough to hear what they’re saying.” Maribelle slid off the roof.

“I don’t think they’re doing anything that will interest us,” he said, but Maribelle was already gone.

He slid off the roof, feeling clumsy in comparison with this privileged duke’s daughter. Ridiculous.

Maribelle hopped over the adjoining fence, crossed through the next yard, and slipped into the alley directly across from the couple. Dom followed. Crouching low, they crept forward till they were in earshot.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right? I’ll walk you back,” the man said, his hands continuing to chafe her arms. “I don’t like the idea of you being out here alone.”

“It’s one block over,” the woman said, sweet impatience in her voice.

Dom knew that voice too well.

“I can make it on my own,” Brynn said. “I’m staying at my aunt’s place for the night.”

“I should have walked you to the estate before the gates closed. It wasn’t very polite of me.”

Dom nudged Maribelle with his boot, but she didn’t budge. He didn’t want to hear any more.

“You don’t need to worry about being polite,” Brynn continued. “Polite goes out the window once people are married, right?”

“Married? Does that mean . . .”

Brynn must have nodded or made some sound too soft to be heard across the street, because the butcher’s son whooped.

A stone plunged into Dom’s stomach. “Let’s go,” he said, pressing his face close to Maribelle’s ear.

“We should follow her.”

“Brynn is not the spy.”

“You don’t know that.”

Dom ignored Maribelle, walking away from the sound of amorous kissing.
Sloppy, wet, loud kissing. No one can enjoy a kiss that’s so messy.

Unbidden, the sweet kiss he’d shared with Brynn in the meadow came to mind. It had been so innocent, simple and true.

It had meant something to him.

He wasn’t sure at what point Maribelle had caught up with him; she said nothing as he paced away in furious silence.

Finally, after they’d passed three blocks of homes, she said, “If we’re going to try to catch the third person—”

“Stop.”

“We passed the turnoff—”

“You did that on purpose.” Dom swung them into the nearest alley. “You knew she’d be there. That she’d be with
him
tonight.”

“She was on my list. She was at the Duke’s Dagger the night the information was leaked. She has access to everything—”

“Stop!” he yelled, this time loud enough to make Maribelle cower. Guilt fluttered across his mind on hesitant wings. At some point she’d come to trust him enough not to cringe when he was angry. “Why? What’s your plan in all of this? Are you like your father and choose to hurt people for the fun of it?”

“Dom,” she said, using his nickname for the first time. “Dominic, no. You need to open your eyes. Someone in your house is giving away your defense plans, and it’s likely someone you know. Someone you care about. You can’t afford to rule anyone out.”

“It’s not Brynn. You and I both know it’s not her.”

“I don’t know that, and I’m not too close to pretend it couldn’t be.”

“Did it look like she was selling secrets?” His voice dropped to a low snarl. “Did that look like anything dangerous to you?”

She didn’t answer, wrapping her arms around her middle.

“I’m going home. Find your own way into the estate,” Dom said as he walked away.

“Wait, don’t go.”

He ignored her, his steps heavy with anger and heartache.

“It’s Raul,” she yelled as he reached the end of the alley.

Two more steps while the words sank in. He stopped, back still turned.

“The last person on my list is Raul,” she said again, her quiet tread drawing closer. “He’s at the Duke’s Dagger again tonight. I saved him for last, hoping that we’d catch our spy before we got to his name. I want him to be trustworthy, but . . .”

“Fine,” Dom said when her silence dragged on. “Let’s go.”

•  •  •

“Do you have a plan for getting into the pub unnoticed?” Dom’s tone was angry. The slurping sounds of Brynn kissing the butcher’s son played over and over in his head like the chorus of a drinking song, too loud and irritating to ignore.

“I do, actually.”

They’d stopped a street short of the Duke’s Dagger, near the edge of the day market. It was empty of life; nothing moved except the moonlit awnings flapping in the breeze.

Maribelle was searching through her cloak, and Dom realized that there were pockets sewn into the lining, similar to the cloak Johanna wore when she was Storyspinning. Maribelle expertly dusted her hair with some white powder and wrapped the material around her waist so that it resembled a long, ragged-edged skirt.

“Tie this for me. There are places to cinch it all the way down.”

He obliged, while she completed the outfit with a pair of oversize false teeth.

“How do I look?” she asked, the teeth giving her an exaggerated overbite.

If he hadn’t been so angry, he would have laughed. “Too pretty not to draw attention.”

She frowned at him, and one of the buckteeth stuck out over her bottom lip. “It works in Maringa. No one ever notices me.”

“So you do this a lot, then?”

“What I do in Maringa is none of your business.”

He eyed her, then took a handful of dirt and rubbed it on her cheeks. “Perfect,” he said with a gloating smirk. “Lady Maribelle, daughter of Santarem’s richest duke, would never walk around town covered in mud. No one would guess your identity now.”

“Go find some place to wait,” she said, waving in the general vicinity of a barn. “Spying is as much watching as it is doing.”

And sometimes it was just doing.

As he walked away, he fingered the slip of paper he’d lifted from Maribelle’s pocket. He knew it must have directions to each of the potential spies’ locations, but he hoped the note would give him some other clues.

Stopping midstride in the shadows of the barn, Dom realized he’d gotten that and much, much more.

•  •  •

Maribelle spat her false teeth into her palm and wiped them on the edge of her cloak. “Raul has a gambling problem.”

She twisted her skirt around and untied the knots that held it in place. “I thought maybe it was some complicated code—intentionally throwing hands or making poor choices to alert a relay—and I’m fairly good at spotting those types of things, but no. Raul is simply the worst card player I’ve ever seen.”

Dom had followed her instructions choosing the stable as a safe, quiet place to wait. He’d created a little nook for himself in one of the empty stalls, pulling a lantern and a blanket down, and angling himself against the back wall of the building.

Instead of responding to her statement, he spread out the torn paper he’d been carrying in his pocket for weeks and the strip he’d lifted from Maribelle. “You
are
good at codes,” he agreed, pulling back the edge of the blanket, revealing his scribbles on the barn’s wood floor. “But they aren’t that difficult when you can relate them to something you already know.”

The directions, the name of the pub—he’d been able to identify those on the coded list, and from there he’d worked backward, figuring out the cipher and applying it to what had been the love letter.

Her lips moved as she read the words he’d written. She paled, but said, “It’s not what you think.”

“That you’ve betrayed me?” The charcoal he’d used to decipher her notes crumbled in his clenched fist. “That you’ve betrayed us all?”

“No, Dominic. You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand? Twenty-six cannons, four ballistae, one hundred and twenty-four longbows, a series of directions that make no sense.” He advanced on Maribelle with every word, backing her into the corner. “Did another copy of this message get sent?”

“Yes,” she whispered, raising her hands defensively between them. “Yes, I sent another copy, but it’s not what . . .”

Anger was an acquaintance, something that visited Dom from time to time and left no lasting mark, but this feeling . . . this was rage. It was as black and gritty as the charcoal on his palms. It was murder in the making.

Dom had fought with Rafi a time or two, and gone a few rounds with an underlord’s son, but he’d never wanted to
kill
someone before. Leaving Maribelle crumpled in the corner of this horse stall was an apt punishment for her treachery.

Her eyes flicked to the stall door, but Dom wasn’t going to let her go. He gripped her arms above the elbows, holding her in place, forcing her to face him.

“Was tonight part of your game? Running around the township. Climbing buildings. Were you trying to make me distrust the people I care about most?”

She grasped his forearms, but she didn’t try to pull away. “I am
trying
to help you, but there are more elements at play. More people I’m responsible to.”

“Like your father?”

“No.” She closed her eyes, her lashes trembling in perfect crescents against her cheeks. “Think. What information did I give away?”

“The exact details of our armory.”

“Nothing Belem’s army wouldn’t have seen when they approached the walls.”

“Now they know how to defend against what we’ve prepared.”

“I gave them inconsequential information and got crucial information in return. I found a real spy in your household. One who is sharing much more significant details.”

Now he gave her a little shake. Her eyes opened and a tear ran down her cheek.

“Please,” she whispered. “I want you to succeed. I need you to succeed and Belem to fail grandly. My father can have no allies.”

“Why?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“Because . . . because my rebellion is growing, but it won’t survive if Belem can come to my father’s aid.”

As a child Leão had had horrific nightmares—as many children with a strong Spirit affinity often did. To help him sleep, his grandmother had once given him a handful of acorns. Her voice was soft, her hands tender as she pressed them into his palm.

“Can you keep a secret, Leão?”

Still shaking from his most recent dream, he blinked away his tears and frowned at the fistful of nuts.

“Do you know how we light the streets of Olinda?”

“No.”

She harrumphed and pressed her finger to one of the acorns. “Certain items—naturally occurring things like pebbles and pinecones, things that haven’t been changed by our hands—can hold a small amount of
essência
.”

With a tap of her finger, an acorn began to glow a dull red.

“H-how did you do that?”

Her face creased with a smile—one of the warm ones she reserved for moments when they were alone. Then she taught him the complicated and secret process of imbuing the acorn with the proper amounts of Fire, for light, and Air, to keep the magic from expanding beyond the shell.

Johanna’s necklace must have been created through a much more difficult sort of spell to be able to transmit images to the glass. And the collars . . . the metal was heated and shaped, taken from its natural form and turned into something else. According to his grandmother, that should have made it impossible for the beryllium to hold
essência
, let alone drain and transfer it. He guessed it was some property peculiar to the metal.

For two days he stayed far away from the pulsing sense of power, and anyone else whose
essência
he could feel, by sticking to the poorest parts of town and the very edges of the city. Many homes on the farthest northern border of Cruzamento, the ones closest to Roraima, were abandoned. It was considered bad luck to live so close to what had once been the kingdom’s seat, and many people complained about the snakes that seemed to find a way into the homes and businesses, closets and beds.

During those days he poured every ounce of his
essência
into small, unnoticeable items and let his energy recover overnight.

On the third day he snuck into the city—creeping past the dozens of soldiers who tried to mix with the merchants and salespeople—drawing closer to the center of the power. He blended in, another fighting man visiting one of the pubs during his off-duty hours. And he hoped that with all the flitting notes of
essência
from the Keepers and slaves, the addition of his would go unnoticed.

It was part luck and part miracle that he saw Pira, stumbling and dirty, leave the blacksmith’s shop at dawn. His first impulse was to rush to her side, but he kept his distance, watching from an upper room of an inn as she staggered to the well and dumped a bucket of water over her head. She dropped to the well’s edge, head down in an unfamiliar posture of exhaustion and despair. Even at a distance he could see the soot that stained her apron and blackened her hands, and he almost abandoned his plan.

She’s right there!
His heart railed against his rib cage, demanding he take action.
Go! Get her now and run.

Instead he forced himself to rely on his training. He could hear Jacaré saying the words to the youngest cadets:
Slow down, study your surroundings, don’t deviate from the strategy.
Rushing to Pira’s aid without considering the consequences would end in disaster.

He gripped the windowsill till it cracked, and even though a sliver sank into his thumb, he didn’t let go. It was the only thing stopping him from breaking the window and racing into the blacksmith’s shop after her.

A few moments later, black smoke rose from the chimney, and he could hear the distinct thump of a hammer against metal.

He watched the street for a while longer, trying to gauge the number of people who possessed the least bit of
essência
. There were a dozen or so with Keeper levels of power, and perhaps two dozen more who had significantly less.

Once he was sure he had a good estimate of what he was facing, Leão crept down to the street and laid his traps.

•  •  •

It was, perhaps, twenty minutes till full dark. The sky to the east purpled like a bruise, the color fading as it spread to the west.

Leão had returned to his room at the inn, waiting for Pira to step outside the shop. The stream of smoke never stopped pouring out of the chimney, and he’d listened to her hammer fall most of the day. Two different women entered the barn, one collared and carrying a basket, and the other moving like she was in charge. For a moment he considered blasting the second woman, but her
essência
was weaker than his. Killing her would draw the attention of the person with the real power that much faster.