The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaigns (15 page)

“I’m going to have a talk with you,” he finished. “A
long
talk. Now go to your room and stay there.”

Jane took her leave, and Winter followed her back out into the alley. They said nothing until they’d gone round a bend and out of sight of the little shack. Jane sighed and rubbed her temples.

“Goddamn that kid. Scared the piss out of me.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, took a deep breath, then looked up at Winter. “Are you all right?”

Winter flexed her hand, which still tingled from the transmitted impact of the poker. “Nothing serious. I’ll be fine.”

“Fucking kid. Could have killed someone.”

“I think he wanted to kill
you
, actually.”

Jane chuckled. “I gathered that. Nice swing with the poker, by the way. Have I thanked you yet?”

“Not as such.”

“Thanks.” Jane ran a hand through her hair, mussing it further. “Sorry. It’s not every day a kid a head shorter than me tries to fucking shoot me in the back.”

“You could have fooled me,” Winter said, honestly. “I figured this was all in a day’s work for Mad Jane.”

“Don’t
you
start,” Jane muttered. “It’s bad enough that Sal and the rest started calling me that.” Catching Winter’s smirk, she changed the subject. “What about you, anyway? What happened to the girl who was too afraid to throw a bucket of shit at Mary Ellen Todd? Did you take lessons in swinging a poker?”

“Not . . . exactly,” Winter said.

“You said it was a long story.”

“It is.”

“Well,” Jane said, “we’ve got a ways to go yet.”

—

By the time they made it back to Jane’s building, late in the afternoon, Winter had gone through most of the last three years. It had been a halting narrative, punctuated by Jane’s conversations with various merchants, fishwives, and other Dockside inhabitants along her route. A few times she’d had to stop while Jane was called on to solve some minor issue, such as one house’s tendency to lean onto another’s property and what that should mean for rents, or the matter of
some rancid fish that somehow got packed into a shipment. Each time, the participants seemed to look to Jane for judgment as a matter of course, and accepted her ruling with more grace than Sal had done.

These gaps helped Winter keep her story straight. She told the truth, more or less, but left her personal involvement in events deliberately vague, and omitted any mention of Feor, Bobby’s healing, or that last awful night in the temple under the Great Desol. After a short internal struggle, she also decided to say nothing about what Janus had sent her to do.
I still need to figure that out myself. I can always fill Jane in later.

Jane listened, her eyes going wider and wider, until by the end of the trip she was ignoring the friendly greetings that met her at every corner to concentrate entirely on Winter. When they stopped outside the barred gate of her building, she stopped and glared.

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Jane said. “You ran away from Mrs. Wilmore’s and joined the
army
, like some girl out of a ballad?”

Winter nodded.

“And then you served in fucking Khandar with
Vhalnich
?”

“I didn’t
mean
to,” Winter said. “I went to Khandar because I thought it would be a good place to hide. It’s not my fault they decided to have a revolution right after I got there.”

“You really did it,” Jane said. “I do not
fucking
believe it!”

With a happy shout, she grabbed Winter and hugged her roughly, and after a stunned moment Winter hugged her back.

“God,” Jane said, “and here I was pretending
I
was the tough one, when you’ve been marching around fucking Khandar and eating monkey brains.”

“No monkeys in Khandar,” Winter said, a bit muffled. “Beetles, though. They like to eat beetles. And there’s these sort of snakes that live in the canals. They pack them in mud and bake them—”

“Please stop,” Jane said. “I’ve just worked up a healthy appetite and I’d hate to ruin it. Does your diet still extend to cows and pigs?”

“Not often enough,” Winter said. “Mostly we ate mutton. I never want to see another sheep as long as I live, alive
or
boiled.”

“Come on, then. You can sample the unique Vordanai delicacy I call ‘pork roast pretty rare on one side and fucking black on the other,’ because Nellie in the kitchen is still learning and tries her best.” Jane shook her head. “I can’t wait to tell the girls you were in
Khandar
. They’re going to have fits.”

“
No!
”

The word came out of Winter with such force that it surprised both of them. Jane went quiet.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Winter said, only now becoming aware of the risk she was taking.
If word gets
out
that there’s a girl-in-boy’s-clothing in the Colonials, I’ll never be able to go back.
The thought of wearing dresses for the rest of her life brought her close to the edge of panic, and her collar suddenly felt tight and hot. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might not be able to trust Jane. “Please.” The word was all she could manage.

There was another strained silence. Jane coughed.

“Well,” she said. “It’s your story.”

“Thank you.” Winter felt her throat unclench. “I’m sorry. I should have . . . said something. I’ll explain—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jane said. “In here we don’t ask about what happened to anybody if they don’t want to talk about it. Saves a lot of tears.” She smiled. “I guess we’ll have to entertain the girls with the story of how you saved my life from little Jim Bellows.”

Winter’s smile was weak, but grateful. “I don’t know if he could have
hit
you, to be honest. Except maybe by accident.”

“You’re probably right,” Jane said. “But we don’t have to tell
them
that.”

Supper was a drawn-out affair in Jane’s—
Apartments? Barracks? Commune?
Winter wasn’t really sure what to call it. The knocked-together kitchen and dining room weren’t big enough to hold all the girls at once, so they turned up in shifts, while a relay of cooks came and went in the kitchen under the uncertain supervision of Nellie-who-tries-her-best.

The dining room—fashioned from several adjacent offices by knocking down any inconvenient walls—was a churning flock of eating, talking, laughing young women, dressed in a bewildering variety of clothes that had all come from the bottom of someone’s ragbag. They ate off a menagerie of clay and wooden crockery, with flatware gathered from a thousand junk shops and rubbish bins. As far as Winter could tell, small groups turned up whenever they liked and ate their fill, then left to make room for others.

Jane presided over it all like a medieval baron, sitting at an especially tall table with a small group of the older girls. Winter had a seat to one side of her, which got her a few uncomfortable looks from some of the others, but Jane immediately launched into the story of what had happened at Crooked Sal’s, and that broke the ice. Abby, who seemed to serve as a kind of second-in-command, sat on Jane’s other side. Among the others, Winter recognized Becca and Chris
from when she’d been captured, and was introduced to a short, soft-spoken girl named Min and a ramrod-thin woman closer to her own age called Winnie. These four, with Abby, seemed to serve as Jane’s lieutenants, and Winter’s presence at the high table apparently meant that she’d been added to their number.

The food was everything Jane had promised or threatened. It was plain and plentiful, with more meat and fish than Winter had seen in her years at Mrs. Wilmore’s
or
her time in the army. There was plenty of bread, too, great piles of steaming round loaves.

Winter ate her fill, and more. Her army time had taught her that the availability of food was always touch-and-go, so it was always best to stock up when one had the chance. Jane also attacked her plate with gusto, though she carried on a whispered conversation with Abby throughout the meal. Winter restrained her curiosity, though she couldn’t help noticing that Abby left in the middle of dinner, leaving behind a half-full plate.

Once she’d taken the edge off her hunger, certain questions presented themselves irresistibly to Winter. Jane was fully occupied in her role as master of the house, shouting across the room to this girl or that and occasionally roaring with laughter at the responses. Min reported on the day’s activities—her responsibilities seemed to focus on the care and feeding of the younger girls—and Jane listened and gave occasional instructions.

Where does it all come from?
These girls ate better than she ever had in the army, and the food was certainly better than the gray slop produced by Mrs. Wilmore’s kitchen.
How does she pay for all this?
For that matter, where had the girls themselves come from?
Abby said she’d been taking in orphans and strays, but that can’t be
all
of them.

As supper wore on, Winter started to worry.
Janus sent me here for a reason, after all, and he’s Minister of Justice now. Maybe Jane’s running a gang of thieves.
A gang of thieves that included a cadre of chattering, happy twelve-year-olds seemed unlikely, but Winter’s experience was limited. The feral children of Ashe-Katarion had certainly included their share of thieves, but she couldn’t picture them sitting around a table like this.

Another thought occurred to her, and Winter bit her lip. There was always
one
way for a group of young women to earn a living, after all.
Surely not. Jane would never be involved in something like
that
.
Her friend’s morality had always been a bit selective, but surely there were some lines she would never cross.
Never.

By the end of the meal, she was feeling decidedly uncomfortable. The
conversation flowed all around her, but she was no part of it, like a rock sticking out of a smoothly flowing stream. It felt all too much like being back in Davis’ company, as the “Saint,” collecting her meager ration and wolfing it down in silence while the men around her joked and boasted about their drinking and whoring. The jokes were different, of course, but the feeling of camaraderie—from which she was excluded—was the same. She poked morosely at the congealing bits of fat and vegetable left on her plate.

A hand descended on her shoulder, and she looked up to find Jane smiling down at her.

“I’m about done,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

“I’ve got—” Winter began.

“Some questions.” Jane gave a little sigh, and her smile faded. “I know.”

—

Jane’s room was on the top floor, in one corner of the building, where windows caught the sun from two sides. They arrived to find Abby tugging the door closed with one finger, awkward because she was carrying a thick wad of clothing in her arms.

“Sorry,” she said, edging to the side of the passage to let them pass.

Winter got the feeling that Jane’s room had been enlarged from its original state in the same way the dining room had, by pulling out interior walls, but here some effort had been made to disguise the fact. A half dozen rugs of different fabrics and vintages overlapped on the floor, and a heavy oak table in one corner was strewn with papers. The walls were hung with colorful fabric to disguise the crumbling plaster. A couple of heavy trunks, lids open, comprised Jane’s wardrobe, and an enormous mattress meant for a four-poster bed simply lay on the floor, covered by a clean but threadbare sheet.

“My palace,” Jane said, spreading her hands. “Do you like it?”

“I spent two years living in a tent,” Winter said, closing the door behind her. “Just sleeping indoors feels like a luxury to me.” She hesitated. “Nobody’s going to—”

“Sit with a glass pressed against the door? Don’t worry.”

Winter relaxed a little. “How long have you been here?”

“Just over a year,” Jane said. “It seems like longer.”

“You’ve certainly made yourself comfortable.”

“I’m good at that.” Jane winked, and went to a small cupboard standing on its own beside the big table. She withdrew a corked bottle and two slightly dusty glasses and waggled them suggestively at Winter. “Drink?”

Winter nodded. While Jane poured, she went to the window and twitched the curtain aside. Summer’s late evening sun was just setting, staining the muddy, sooty streets of the Docks with a pattern of red and black. Candles and torches burned here and there, but not many. The view was to the north, and Jane’s building was taller than those around it, and so Winter could see all the way to the river and beyond. The Island was a blaze of light in the distance, like an enormous ship.

Jane stepped up behind her, quietly, and pressed a glass into her hand. Winter sipped without looking, and was pleasantly surprised.
Of course, any Vordanai wine would taste good next to that Khandarai stuff.
She made a face at the memory.

“No good?” Jane sipped from her own glass. “Not the
best
vintage, I’ll grant you, but—”

“It’s fine.” Winter turned. “I have to ask. What are you
doing
here? Where did all these people come from? How do you manage to feed them all?”

“It is a bit odd, when I come to think about it.” Jane turned her glass back and forth, staring at it. Winter noted, absently, that much of the swearing had dropped out of her vocabulary now that they were alone. “It’s . . . like yours. A long story.”

“I think we have time,” Winter said.

“I suppose so.” Jane took a deep breath. “Most of the girls are from Mrs. Wilmore’s, like us.”

“What?”

“I went back, after I ran away from Ganhide,” Jane said. “I had to hide for a while, until they gave up looking for me, and I sort of got to thinking. I’d got away, all right, but there were all those girls still there, and the same thing was just going to happen to them—they’d be married off to the first brute of a farmer who came asking.”

“So you went back.”

“I went back.”

“And staged an . . . escape?” There had to be three hundred people in the building. Winter tried to imagine them all sneaking out of Mrs. Wilmore’s, one at a time, hiding from the proctors and the mistresses . . .