The Mask of Mirrors by M. Carrick; (lightest ebook reader txt) 📗

More beer sloshed onto the table, its sour-spiced scent perfuming the alcove. The steel of Sedge’s gaze turned brittle, the muscles of his jaw, his neck, his forearms corded with the effort not to shatter.

“You’ve been together. All this time. Safe. And together.” No matter how he tried to disguise it, Ren could hear the hollowness at the core of his words. She’d had Tess. Sedge had been left to carry on alone.

Now it was her turn to grip his hands, sticky with spills. If I’d realized—

Before she could apologize again, Sedge shook himself. “Where? I looked everywhere. You weren’t in Nadežra. Where did you go?”

“Ganllech. Though not on purpose.” If he wanted to change the subject, she knew better than to push. Ren let go and took a healthy slug from her own cup. “After you… died… I fed Ondrakja meadow saffron, then conned a captain into believing Tess and I were experienced ship’s monkeys. Got us out of the city, but he soon realized I lied, and at the next port of call put us off.”

“Fed her…” A grin split Sedge’s face, pulling at the scars crossing it. “So Simlin didn’t lie. Heard Ondrakja got sick, but he said you’d poisoned her. And everybody believed him.”

Then his grin faded, as the weight of it hit him. “Shit. You poisoned her.”

“And I would again,” Ren said violently. “I care not that it makes me a traitor. Ask me to choose my brother or my knot, and my brother I will choose, every time.”

It was almost true. Ren wouldn’t take her choice back… but killing the leader of her own knot was blasphemy. If she’d untied herself from the knot first, Ondrakja would have known, and then she never would have drunk the poisoned tea. So Ren had fallen back on the best weapon in her arsenal—her ability to lie.

But it meant no knot would ever take her again. Not unless she reinvented herself as another person. And if she was going to go to all that work, she might as well join the gang that held all the real power in Nadežra: the city’s nobility.

Sedge saw through the bravado. His throat jumped as he swallowed. “Fuck. You did that for me. I… shit.”

If she didn’t say something, one or the other of them was going to wind up crying. “How could you survive that?”

He coughed, clearing his throat. “Somebody found me and dragged me to a leech—after they looted my boots.” He’d loved those boots. So big they chafed and left blisters; he’d had to stuff them with rags. But they’d made wonderful clompy sounds that had all the Fingers feeling safer when Sedge was around. “Took about a month before I stopped sleeping and drooling on myself. A year before everything stopped hurting. I still get dizzy sometimes. But nobody raises a fist to me these days unless they’re seriously stupid. And I got new boots.” He propped a muddy heel on the empty stool at his side.

New boots. Ren choked on a half laugh. He’d never been as good with words as she was, but he was doing his best to distract her. The sight of him had torn the scab off a wound not nearly as healed as she thought, and she couldn’t look at him without drowning in a flood of both guilt and joy. “Now you work for Vargo?”

His boot thunked to the floor. “Yeah. Guess we need to talk about that.” Bracing himself with another gulp of beer, Sedge tugged his sleeve up, revealing a charm of knotted blue silk tied around his wrist. “I’m with the Fog Spiders now. They’re kind of his main crew. So, uh, don’t go asking me nothing you shouldn’t.”

The oaths for knots varied from gang to gang, but there were some things in common. Like sharing secrets with each other, but keeping them from outsiders. “I understand.”

Nothing stopped him from asking her questions, though. “What the fuck were you doing, anyway, snooping near Vargo’s warehouse? Please tell me you en’t involved in whatever went down there last night.”

Her knee-jerk impulse was to ask what went down last night. Ren swallowed it and said, “I look into his business only. Not in a way you should worry about; just figuring out if, like he claims, he’s gone legitimate. My impression is, not so much.”

“Why do you care about his busi— Oh, fuck. Oh, Ren. Oh no.” Sedge’s head sank to the table. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The pitcher and mugs rattled each time his brow hit the wood. “Please tell me you en’t Vargo’s Alta Renata who’s gonna get him his fucking charter.”

“Please tell me you won’t give yourself a concussion if I say yes.” She reached across the table and pushed him upright.

“I’ll end up with a lot worse than that if Vargo finds out,” he muttered darkly.

“Then he will not find out,” Ren said, offering him a cocky grin. Some of her confidence was coming back, and bringing with it the things she used to say, when all three of them ran with the Fingers.

Sedge’s mouth worked past several unspoken responses. Defeated, he sank back into his chair, face planted into one hand. “Just tell me what you need to get the job done.”

Him ambushing her had been seven strokes of luck at once. “I need somebody who knows Vargo. I seek not to pry into his secrets—only that I never heard of him when we were with the Fingers.”

“No, we wouldn’t have. He took over the Spiders—used to be a Varadi gang—right around the time you left. There was a bunch of turf wars all along the Lower Bank then, but he mostly stayed out of them.” Sedge grimaced. “Well. That’s what it looked like. Turns out he was the one starting them. He’d let his rivals tire themselves out fighting each other, then wrap up the remnants, replace the leaders, and welcome them in like he was doing them a favor. That’s how