Starcrossed (54 page)

“Not unless we both are,” I said. Because I was looking into the haunted eyes of Durrel Decath, a young man who’d once saved my life.

“Celyn?” Durrel sounded tentative, incredulous. He’d known me only by that name, a silly last-minute alias I’d concocted on the spot (and then had to live with) last fall, when he’d whisked me aboard a boatload of his nob friends and gotten me out of the city after I’d run afoul of Greenmen during a robbery that had ended badly. A friend had died on that job — more than a friend — and I was still making up for it, months later.

I hadn’t thought to meet the scion of the House of Decath ever again. Certainly not under such circumstances. Though given the twisted humor of the gods, why was I surprised?

“Milord,” I said, cautious. He’d changed since I’d seen him last, grown thin and ragged and almost unrecognizable. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Durrel said. “This is very odd. You’re injured.” I touched my face, which was streaked with blood from the cut under my eye. “Let’s get you cleaned up, at least.”

“I don’t —”

“Hist.” He helped me untie the ropes on my wrists and ankles, then dabbed at my cheek with a rag dipped in water, wincing as he looked at me. “This should have stitches,” he said.

“Stop. Will you
explain
? Why are you in prison? Why am I in your cell?” The rising weirdness put me on edge. The guard saying, “That’s her,” the money changing hands at the prison gates, getting dumped in a cell with a nobleman I almost knew . . . Fickle Tiboran, god of thieves and liars, might love coincidence, but I was suspicious.

Durrel dropped the rag on the table. He looked older than I remembered; he was twenty-one, but there had been something boyish about him that was gone now. “Unfortunately I’m afraid I can’t answer the last question. I’m just as perplexed to see you.” He held my gaze steady. “But in regard to your other question, they think I murdered my wife.”

I sat back, stunned. When I’d left him last fall, he was heading off to be wed, in an arranged marriage to one Talth Ceid, a woman much older than he was. The Ceid had been ruthless in their conquest of Gerse’s waterfronts a hundred years before, while the Decath were nothing if not respectable. Durrel’s marriage linked one of the city’s most powerful merchant families with one of its oldest noble houses, and it had all seemed like a completely sensible match for rich folk.

Still, I’d known Durrel wasn’t exactly happy about it; he had, in fact, fled the betrothal ceremony in a drunken escapade, sailing out of the city with his cousin and two other nobs. It was that debauched party I had blundered into, those sauced-up young nobles who’d given me refuge. A few months later, I’d heard the marriage had gone through, and though it was clearly never going to be a love match, it hadn’t seemed likely to end in
murder
.

Durrel saw the expression on my face and gave an attempt at a wan smile. “It surprised me too.” He wrung out the rag and wet it again in cleaner water.

“Let me do that,” I said impatiently, tugging it out of his hands. “You just talk.” I held the cloth hard against my throbbing cheekbone.

He stood up and paced into the shadows, disappearing for a moment. “It’s difficult to explain,” he said. “Even now I hardly believe it’s happening. One moment I’m a married man, and the next I’m in here, a murderer.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said gently, because there was something wrong here beyond the obvious.

“She was poisoned. A — a fortnight ago, I think. What day is it?” He pushed his unkempt hair from his forehead. “It seemed like suicide, at first, but I didn’t believe it. I found her, the next morning —” He faltered, taking a swig of his water like he wished it was something else. “It wasn’t pretty. I didn’t know what to do. I sent for my father and the surgeon, but it was too late. The coroner identified the poison as something called Tincture of the Moon.”

“I’ve heard of that,” I said. “It’s rare. Expensive. Hard to distill, harder still to get hold of.” They said you went numb and cold, bit by bit, until the poison reached your heart — unable to speak, unable to move, until you drowned in your own blood. Hours of silent agony. “It wouldn’t be anybody’s first choice for suicide.” That was only half the story, though. “But why
you
? How could anyone think you’d killed somebody?”

“Isn’t it always the husband?” A twisted smile tried to form itself on his lips, but died prematurely. “They found a vial of the tincture in my rooms. But it wasn’t mine —” He turned back. “They’re going to execute me, Celyn.”

A chill washed through me. My knowledge of nob murder trials was only sketchy; commoners were liable to be summarily executed as soon as the Watch reviewed the evidence. More than one bar fight had ended when the instigators were strung up on makeshift gibbets outside the tavern door. But for someone of Lord Durrel’s stature, and a victim as important as a member of the House of Ceid, they’d probably be a little more careful. Noblemen accused of crimes were tried before the king, in royal courts — but the king was ill, maybe dying, and all royal courts had been suspended because of the war.

Still, the biggest risk I could see came not from the king’s justice, but the Ceid’s. Everyone in Gerse knew what they were capable of, though nobs and officials turned blind eyes. Foe, friend, family — it didn’t matter, if you crossed the Ceid. A blade in the back, a pistol shot to that downy head; Durrel looked scared, and he had reason to be.

“I didn’t do it,” Durrel said.

I glanced up into his shadowed face. “Of course you didn’t,” I said. “You couldn’t have killed anybody. I don’t believe it.”

Durrel looked hard at me for a moment, then everything in him seemed to slump. “Thank you,” he breathed. “I don’t think I realized how badly I needed to hear that.”

“You can spare your gratitude.” I tried to say it lightly. “Your cell mate’s word probably doesn’t carry a lot of weight.”

“It does with me,” he said, and there was something low and urgent and desperate in his expression. I pulled away and left the table, crossing the cell and peering into corners, tapping at the edges of the door, kicking aside the filthy rushes with my toe.

“Keep talking,” I said, giving the lock on the door my attention. Of all the idiotic times to leave my lock picks at home. “Why did you have the poison?”

“I
didn’t.
I don’t know why they found it in my quarters. I have no idea how it got there. What are you doing?”

“Looking for a way out.” The lock on the door was solid and huge, but that just meant the tumblers inside were bigger and easier to reach. Of course, that left the problem of what to do once the cell door was open.

“We’re locked in a cell at Bryn Tsairn Prison. There’s no way out.”

“Ha,” I said. “You’ve never been locked up with me before.” Although, strictly speaking, I’d never actually
escaped
from a prison cell; the two previous times I’d been arrested, my business associates had bailed me out. I grabbed the bars on the cell door’s little window and hauled myself up to peer into the hallway. One lonely torch burned out of sight, splashing ominous shadows on the walls and ceiling.

“Hey.” Durrel’s voice came gently through the stifling darkness. I dropped back to the ground and gave the locked door one last tug. “Easy, Celyn. We’re not going anywhere, at least until morning. And you need to rest, with those injuries. Come back to the fire and sit down.”

“The fire?” I tried to scowl, but my face hurt too much.

“The candle, then.” He held out his hand, creased with prison dirt though it was, and I let him lead me back to the table. I sat obediently, but my mind was still turning over the problem of the lock and an escape.

“Talk to me,” he said. “Tell me what you’ve been doing since I saw you last. I thought you were going to stay out of trouble.”

That startled a laugh out of me. “I
try
, milord. Can I help it if trouble has other plans? And besides, who sent me into the nest of Sarist rebels?”

“Ouch!” Durrel’s hand flew to his tattered shirt, as if I’d wounded him. “How was I to know my aunt was going to start a war? And from what I hear,
you
were not wholly blameless in that affair. I looked for you,” he added, sobering. “Meri told me you came back to the city, but I didn’t know how to find you.”

“I —” I faltered. I never knew what to say about last winter, about the Nemair, the family who took me in and sheltered me from the Inquisition; about witnessing the start of the civil war that now spread through Llyvraneth like flames through a library; about Prince Wierolf, and Meri, and all the others. About not
wanting
to be found again. “I don’t know what you heard, but —”

“You were a hero,” he said. “You saved Meri’s life. You saved the
prince.
” He leaned closer, and there was a strange, earnest spark in his eyes. “Is that why you’re in here? Something to do with —
the rebellion
?”

Durrel mouthed those last words, and I scowled, considering. Was it possible? I’d been on the wrong side at the Siege of Bryn Shaer; perhaps the king was rounding up everyone with any tenuous Sarist connections, as he’d done before. And mine were rather more than tenuous, or at least they had been.

“I thought so, but it doesn’t feel right,” I said. “They grabbed me off the street in the middle of the night. Traitors to the Crown are usually arrested with a little more ceremony, so everyone can quake in fear of the king’s wrath. This feels more like Greenmen — but these guys weren’t Greenmen.”

“And even if you were arrested for your ties to the rebels, it’s highly improbable for you to end up in here with me. We’re not so overcrowded at Bryn Tsairn that we need to double up on accommodations.”

He was right. There was something else here, something lower and stranger than royal politics. “Somebody apparently paid a fair coin for the privilege of sending you a thief,” I said. “The question is who, and why? That guard said somebody sent you a present. What did he mean?”

“I just assumed he was playing with me; ‘Bait the Nob’ is a grand sport here at the Keep.” Durrel spoke slowly, as if turning a thought over to examine it. “You think he might have been serious; someone —
sent
you to me? To what end? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Oh, milord,” I said. “I’ve learned it’s easier if you stop expecting things to make sense.” I rose slowly and leaned back against the wood. “It would appear we have a common enemy. Who have you pissed off?”

He eyed me evenly. “You mean besides Talth’s family?”

“Well, that’s no good. I’ve had no dealings with them at all. Is that it? No dark secrets in Durrel Decath’s past or present?” My voice was as light as I could make it, and Durrel shook his head. I frowned. My own list was definitely longer — dissatisfied clients and frustrated assassins, disgruntled former rebels, jealous nobs. Inquisitors. The standard assortment. “There must be someone else. Could it have anything to do with the war?” Even now, magic-tolerant Sarists commanded by Prince Wierolf were advancing on the city, pressing with surprising success against Prince Astilan’s royal troops. “Where do the Decath stand?”

“Where they’ve always stood, off to the side where they can’t get into trouble. Waiting for the pieces to fall so they can still be everyone’s friends when it’s over.” I thought I heard an edge of bitterness in his voice. “But what about you? I seem to recall there was rather more about you than you originally let on.”

That was no surprise; my relation to the High Inquisitor had become a more or less public secret in the last few months. “But no one knows I’m back in the city,” I said — which wasn’t
strictly
true — “and even if they did, they’d be looking for a waiting gentlewoman, not —”

“A ragtag, street-brawling urchin?”

I had to grin. “Something like that.”

Durrel gave my stained and rumpled men’s clothes a critical eye. “I think I preferred your last disguise.”

“Runaway nun?”

“More romantic, definitely.”

“Well, that’s what I was going for.” This conversation was ridiculous, but I couldn’t help it. Lord Durrel was too easy to talk to.

“This is probably not the time to mention that you should maybe have stayed out of the city,” he said, a quirk to his lip.

I shook my head. “I had to come back. I had friends here, and —”

“No, I get it,” he said. “It’s home.”

Home. I wasn’t even sure what that meant anymore. I leaned my head against the curving stone wall of the cell. It was late and surreal, and the bumps on my head were taking their toll.

After a silent moment, Durrel straddled the bench and poured out another cup of the stale water. “Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way,” he said. “Maybe we’re not looking for a mutual enemy, but a friend.”

I choked on my water. “I thought I’d gotten past the sorts of friends who have you arrested.”

Though we ran through our tiny circle of shared acquaintances once more — many of them his cousin’s family, who’d taken me in for the winter, and all their friends and allies — we had no better luck. I couldn’t fathom any of the Nemair or their fellow Sarists having me arrested.

“We’re left with a puzzle,” Durrel said, and there was a lively spark to his voice that seemed all out of place.

“Pox,” I said. “I hate puzzles.”