Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (31 page)

“That ain’t helpin’! That’s just stayin’ outta the way!” Reece shot Gideon a pointed look over his shoulder. “Aw, comon’, Cap’n—”

Nivy stepped out of the kitchen and met Reece in the middle of the room with a grim smile. She plucked at her frayed shirt with meaning and then turned around with her hands spread to show him exactly what he had to make presentable and essentially unrecognizable in less than two hours. Skinny, rings under her eyes, lank hair. Not that he was the foremost expert on grooming.

“We need a dress,” he decided, quickly losing confidence in his plan. “Probably a…really poofy one.”

“Leave me to take care of Nivy Girl,” Mordecai announced. “Gideon, get in here and keep your eye on the Vee so I can take Nivy to Madame Maraux’s.”

Hemming and hawing and stomping louder than was necessary, Gideon disappeared into the kitchen; by the sounds of his muffled growls, he was taking out his irritation on their trussed-up prisoner.

“Maraux’s won’t work. The Madame won’t have forgotten what happened last time Nivy came for a visit.” Reece was starting to feel a sort of hot panic boiling in the bottom of his stomach. There wasn’t enough time—they’d already lost twenty minutes just standing here!

“Oh,” Mordecai chucklingly put Nivy’s hand on his arm and led her from the room, “Hettie Maraux is an old acquaintance…you leave her to me.”

After they’d gone, and it was just Hayden and Reece in the sitting room, Reece lowered himself onto the sofa and put his face in his hands. A plan this slapdash
couldn’t
go smoothly—he was sure there was a rule somewhere that said so.

“What are you going to do?” Hayden asked quietly, sitting down beside him.

“Get as close to the duke as I can and stay there all night. At the first sign of trouble, I’ll just…” Reece shut his eyes. “I hope I’m wrong.”

“So do I.”

“But it makes too much sense. A public assassination on this scale would throw Honora into panic…and set up the perfect atmosphere for The Kreft to step in with their monarchy and save the day. The Vees will be the ones to do it. You didn’t hear them, at the dome. Talking about their last task before bringing their new order of justice to the light…this will be it.”

“And the duke? He’s just going to…let it happen?”

That was the question of the hour. The duke was the hardest, shrewdest person Reece had ever known; he wasn’t the type to roll over for anyone, even under (or
especially
under, in this case) threat of death. The duke Reece knew would have fought back hard after learning who Eldritch was and what The Kreft were doing. Not taken a bullet for their plan’s sake.

Maybe Reece
was
wrong.

Please, please let me be wrong
.

The minute hand on Reece’s pocket watch seemed to move forward in leaps and bounds every time he glanced at it. How could jumping in Mordecai’s water closet have taken five whole minutes? Did using a thermal press on the breeches Hayden had fetched from the gentlemen’s clothing emporium really take twenty? That was nearly one half hour down already!

Embarrassingly enough, he had to have Hayden show him how the different pieces of his evening suit worked. Cotton undershirt, white dress shirt, green waistcoat, frock coat, handkerchief, breeches, stockings, boots, spats, funny little neck scarf that he learned was called a cravat…by the time he’d finished attaching Liem’s silver cufflinks to his sleeve, he was sweating. Hayden suggested getting undressed so he wouldn’t sully the suit before the masquerade, but he was kidding. Reece hoped.

At last, feeling like a clown and a half, Reece took his stand in the middle of the room and turned around under Hayden’s studious eye.

“You’ll pass,” Hayden said as if he was a great expert on this sort of thing. He was holding something behind his back—going by his face, something he knew Reece wouldn’t like. “But you’ll need to do something with your hair.” He held out a tonic in a red glass bottle, and Reece took it hesitantly.

“‘
Captain Pleasant’s Hairstuffs for Gents’
,” he read, revolted. “I am
not
putting anything on my head that’s made by a man named Captain Pleasant.”

He heard a muffled snorting from behind the kitchen door and imagined Gideon pressing his ear up against it, laughing.

Hayden refused to take the bottle back, crossing his arms mulishly. “It’s that or a top hat.”

“And I’m not wearing a top hat, I told you—”

“You’re the one so concerned with fitting in.”

“I’m going to stop an assassination! I think I can afford to be a little underdressed!”

“If you’re not going to let me help with anything else, you can let me do this much right!”

“Then do it right! Get me something that wasn’t made for
girls
!”

As Hayden fumbled for a comeback, Reece pulled his pocket watch out of his waistcoat, examined it, and swore. They needed to meet Po at the docks outside The Owl in less than an hour, and he couldn’t ride his bim there unless he wanted to show up at the masquerade wearing a film of dust, so that meant catching The Iron Horse’s late afternoon run. In fifteen minutes.

Nothing seemed to be where he had left it as he dashed around Mordecai’s. He wanted to wear his flight wings (still his bleeding “first feathers”) and was sure he’d left them on his morning jacket, but he’d seemed to have misplaced that too. Hayden removed his wrist straightener as an afterthought. Even though it still twinged to flex, Reece couldn’t afford to wear something that would set him apart from the other guests.

“Hey,” Gideon called from the kitchen door during one of Reece’s frantic passes, “here. These oughta help you some.”

He stretched out the most un-Gid-like thing Reece had ever seen him handle: a netted bag filled to its drawstring with colorful marbles. Gideon gently tipped some of the marbles into his hand. They were decorated with swirls like miniscule galaxies.

“Your generosity and resourcefulness is truly humbling,” Reece said dryly.

“They’re full’a burstpowder, genius.” Gideon put the marbles back into their pouch one at a time, his big fingers cautious. “One’a Mordecai’s oldest tricks. The marble masks the metal in the powder, makes it undetectable by magnomiters and the like. Throw one’a them and you’ll get about half the result of a regular burstpowder shell. And there ain’t no reason an upstandin’ citizen like yourself shouldn’t be carryin’ a bag’a marbles on his person.” He handed over the gift with a leer for Reece’s attire. “Just be sure to bring back the spares, Cap’n Unpleasant. Mordecai’ll be put out if I go givin’ away all his tricks.”

Mordecai and Nivy returned with only six minutes to spare. At least, Reece
thought
the girl with Mordecai was Nivy, but there wasn’t much to go off. The only similarity between the girl they had caught on Aurelia and the one in the silver gown on Mordecai’s arm was their black ribbon necklace.

“Go ahead darlin’, give us a spin!” Mordecai said as he backed away from Nivy and stood in line with Hayden, Reece, and Gideon, who had a foot stopping the kitchen door from closing all the way. Mordecai, Reece noticed, smelled suspiciously of lilac perfume.

Looking like she wanted to laugh at herself, Nivy spun with faked enthusiasm. Reece wasn’t going to pretend to understand the dynamics of her dress or what this part or that part was called, but he knew pretty when he saw it. The gown had laces up its back, short sleeves that sat on the edges of her shoulders, and little pearls around the neckline. Her hair, curled and pinned over her shoulder, had not a lank strand to it.

Hayden gasped as Reece offered Nivy an ALP.

“If you can find someplace to keep this, you can carry it.”

Nivy stared at the gun thoughtfully, chewing the inside of her cheek, and then reached for it. Reece pulled back slightly and added, “I want your word. No unpleasant surprises,” before he let her take it for good.

“It’s just like one’a those stories,” Mordecai said dreamily. “Where the urchin gets to go to the ball and act like a princess.” He pulled out a celebratory cigar and struck a match against the wall. “Makes a man tearful.”

Po was waiting at the docks, sitting cross-legged on the rusty roof of her brother’s Nyad. She pushed her goggles out of her eyes and slid down onto the nose of the ship to get a good look at them—at Nivy in particular, Reece thought.

“You two look clever,” she called, swinging down to the ground with a sigh. “A smart match.” Her eyes lingered on Gid and Hayden. Mordecai had stayed behind to guard the Vee. “Are you two not goin’?”

Reece made his way under the Nyad’s wing and opened her creaky sliding door. For being a family of genius mechanics, the Trimbles’ sure had an old lugger for a ship.

“We weren’t invited.”

“You weren’t?” Po sounded delighted. “Oh, phew, I was scared I was the only one!”

“In you get, Nivy,” Reece said, waving Nivy into the leather co-pilot’s seat. “We’ve got a tight schedule to keep.”

Struggling with her dress, Nivy hopped up into the Nyad and sat down with an explosion of air from her poofy skirts.

Reece turned to face his friends. “Well, if all goes well, I’ll be back by morning. If it doesn’t—”

“Just be careful, Reece,” Hayden interrupted with a frown, unamused. “I mean, I know you will be, but I guess I mean—don’t be reckless. We don’t know for sure what Eldritch is planning.”

“We know enough.” Pasting on a smile, Reece added, thinking it would be good to give Hayden something to distract him tonight, “You should send your father a log. He’s been pretty worried, I can tell.” He started to say something equally heartening to Gideon, but it turned out Gid didn’t need it.

“Remember what I said about the marbles,” he whispered. “I mean, about bringin’ them back. Mordecai’s gonna spit like a cat when he sees they’re gone.”

“Yes, I promise to bring
the marbles
back safe and sound.”

As Nivy and Reece started buckling in, Po came to the door and began relaying instructions and ticking points off on her fingers.

“Now, she shakes real hard when she’s breakin’ atmosphere, but that’s totally normal, and if you hear a clickin’ sound, that’s just one of the propellers that’s got a nick in it. You’ll want to ease up on the levelers when you take off, because if you overdo it, you’ll burn the system out and then you’ll have to fly without your artificial gravity, and, well, you saw all the junk we’ve got in the back, that wouldn’t be good—”

When she had run out of fingers, she wriggled them and backed away from the Nyad, which made less of a purr and more of a whine when Reece rather nervously started it up.

“You’ll do fine!” Po shouted, waving happily as the Nyad rattled and drifted upward.

Looking out his window, Reece watched her put a hand on Hayden and Gideon’s shoulders as if she had known them for years, saw her moving her mouth as if she was saying one last thing. The Nyad was too bleeding loud to make out what she was shouting; hopefully it wasn’t important.

As the Nyad gradually became a speck in the very distant sky, Po shook her head. “Well,” she said to Gideon and Hayden, “if he doesn’t figure out that the clamp’s been modified to roll right instead of left, I expect we’ll be seein’ them again
real
soon.”

XIX

Brainstormin’

Reece and Nivy stood at the foot of Emathia’s long drive, staring down a tunnel of oaks draped in innumerable strands of tiny photon globes. The sun had gone, but it wasn’t quite dark yet; there was a blue sort of tinge to everything that made the orange in the oaks and the red streamers braided up the estate’s closed iron gate burn brightly. Reece could hear, beneath the crickets and the chatter of other guests lining up for admittance, a stringed orchestra playing Abigail’s favorite movement of Vorherr’s “The Chrononaut’s Last Voyage”. The hulking dark mass on the far reaches of the grounds was the Kraken-class heliocraft the masquerade would relocate to after the guests had all been fed, for the skywaltz.

Nivy looked ready to scale the gate, she was so eager to get in. Reece caught her elbow and steered her around the gatehouse where servants were matching invitations to names on a long scroll of parchment. There were two well-dressed sentries on either side of the gate with metal-detecting wands, checking guests and occasionally confiscating a sidearm, tagging it, and placing it into a brass box already filled with delicate-looking ALPS that Gideon doubtlessly would have melted down into something more useful.

“Bag,” Reece whispered as he and Nivy slipped furtively between two large shrubberies.

Nivy handed him the beaded silver pouch concealing their guns. He placed it on the ground and used his foot to nudge it under the gate.

“Ready?” he asked, looking over her head at the long line of carriages and guests afoot.

Chin held high, Nivy nodded. It was lucky Mordecai had thrown a white fur stole at her at the last second; the night was crisp and sharp and smelled of coming winter, and her teeth were chattering as it was.