“It told him to post his reply on the message board outside the Pregnant Pig,” Makenna said. “As for the rest of it . . . we’ll see.”
She waited till early evening to visit the message board. Etta said that messengers visited the public boards all the time, but there was a fair chance that the servant who had received the letter might be sent to post the reply. Makenna didn’t want him to see her again. He might wonder, and having anyone even begin to suspect her disguise could be fatal in an all too literal sense.
As it turned out, waiting did her no good. Half a dozen men in the blue-and-black Brallorscourt tunic hovered in different places around the street. They were trying to be inconspicuous, but there were too many of them, and the street was too small. Makenna wasn’t the only one who stared.
Etta took one look, ducked down into the satchel, and held still. “Go up to the board,” she whispered. “Look for messages someone might pay to get a bit sooner; goods for pickup, a job offered, that kind of thing. Copy down anything that sounds promising, and who the message is for. We might as well get a bit of coin out of this.”
Makenna did as the girl suggested, simply reading Brallorscourt’s message along with the rest.
When she left the board, none of Brallorscourt’s men paid her any attention at all.
“They’re looking for you around the town as well,” Master Noggat told Makenna later. “Asking in the taverns if anyone has seen you and promising ‘a significant reward’ for information. It’s a good thing you’re no longer a girl with dark-red hair and a button-covered vest, lass . . . ah, mistress.”
“Lass is fine,” Makenna told him. “I just wish Brallorscourt didn’t take me for a fool.”
“That note is practically an insult,” Daroo agreed. “Asking you to meet with him so you can ‘discuss the matter in private.’ He might as well have told you to meet him alone, in a deserted alley, at midnight!”
“He thinks of traps before he thinks about negotiating,” said Makenna. “That’s something worth knowing about an enemy.”
“Well, the hunt’s up in the city now,” Noggat said. “At least, Brallorscourt’s men are hunting in the city. The suns-guards who’re after you have mostly moved out into the countryside. But between the two of them, I’d advise you to stay a boy a bit longer.”
“It seems I must,” Makenna said. “At least till the hunt dies down. After that, I’ll have some thinking to do.”
Without Etta’s help, working as a city messenger would have been impossible. But the goblin girl’s guidance made it easy, and to her own astonishment, Makenna began to enjoy it. She grew accustomed to the smells, and the people weren’t unkind, busy and noisy as they might be.
Etta was also right about there being little danger to herself. If Makenna’s satchel was too full for her to ride there, she tucked her legs through the back of Makenna’s belt and rode beneath the loose woolen vest that had replaced the one Makenna had covered with buttons.
Neither of these hiding places was secure, and people sometimes caught a glimpse of the goblin girl—but they didn’t care.
“Why should I object to your small friend?” said the plump woman who owned the crockery shop. Makenna had delivered a teapot, to match a set that had already been sold when the customer’s son had bumped into the stand at just the wrong moment. The mother was willing to pay for the breakage, but she wanted to purchase a complete set and refused to buy till she could see for herself that the new pot was a good match.
It wasn’t terribly fragile, but Makenna had carried the well-wrapped bundle through the bustling streets in her hands instead of the satchel. She’d reached the shop without incident, handed it over to the shopkeeper . . . and watched the lid slither out of the straw as the shopkeeper unpacked it. It would have fallen and broken if Etta hadn’t leaned precariously out of the satchel and snatched it up before it had a chance to hit the floor.
“Aye?” Makenna watched the woman warily, though she seemed more interested in whether the new pot matched the set than in hauling Etta off to the nearest priest. “But I thought city folks didn’t hold with goblins. It was in the city that the Decree of Bright Magic was first enforced.”
“Of course it was,” said the woman. “With the church sitting right on top of us. But that’s not to say the townsfolk favored it. Oh, there were some who didn’t care—which was very short-sighted of them, for my herb-healer did better by my sick headaches than the priests, and she charged less. Which was likely why they passed it in the first place, curse them. My friend Margy, who grows flowers for the street sellers, she started having all kinds of problems in her flower beds after the goblin family that lived there left. Moles! I had no idea how much damage one mole could do, and neither did she till her Greeners were forced to flee. Her profits are down almost twenty percent! And I think she misses seeing them about. Your friend just saved me having to pay for another lid—and if it didn’t match, we’d be back to square one again! Why should I object to her?”
“You don’t think that goblins and hedgewitches serve the Dark One?”
The woman laughed. “Boy, that’s a country superstition. We in the city . . . Well, by your accent you come from the country, so I shouldn’t talk. But have you ever seen the Dark One appear in his cloud of flame and shadow, to reap men’s souls with his great scythe? Or met anyone who cast dark magics in his name? Or known anyone who knew anyone who did?”
Makenna, who’d long since figured out that the Dark One was nothing but some priest’s tale, was a bit indignant on behalf of the countryside. “The priests all say it’s so, and it’s hard for folk not to believe ’em. Or don’t you believe in the Bright Gods and the saints, either?”
“Me? I believe there are good people.” The woman unlocked her cash box for Makenna’s fee. “Whatever inspires them to do good is all right by me. I also believe there are people who do bad things—even a few who just are bad—and some of them use magic to work their will. Maybe it is because some dark god corrupts their souls, but more likely they simply allowed their own selfishness, greed, or fear to get the better of them. So your goblin friend has nothing to fear from me. That’s three copper bits for the delivery?”
She threw in an extra copper for Etta, for saving the lid, and the goblin girl refused to count it as part of their wages when they divided their take at the end of the day.
After that conversation, Makenna became curious about the city dwellers’ attitude toward goblins, magic, and the church. She stopped eating lunch alone, purchasing a hot pastry or a sandwich from a stall and sitting near enough to some group that she could eavesdrop. For the most part they discussed their own business or gossiped about friends and family, just as the country folk did. But this was a city built around the church of the Seven Bright Gods, and gossip about the Hierarch, his court, and his council was as common as country folk gossiping about the local landholder.
“How can he be all that divine, if a traitor can use a drug to fuddle his wits?” a burly stonemason demanded. “Shouldn’t the Bright Gods have protected their Chosen? If he can be poisoned like a man, he can be wrong like a man.”
“You could argue that his guards discovering so swiftly that his illness wasn’t natural was a matter of divine intervention,” a carter pointed out. “Who’s to say the Bright Gods don’t work through us? That’s what my district priest said.”
“Assuming they did discover it early,” a clerk put in. “Anyone who supported that ridiculous relocation for seven years wasn’t all there to begin with, if you ask me!”
The murmur of agreement was subdued, but no one disagreed. The only reason the relocation had been accepted at all was because, as an apothecary drily put it, “An idea as crazy as that almost had to be divinely inspired.”
The relocation’s abandonment, coming on the heels of the news that a treacherous priest had poisoned the Hierarch with a drug that induced symptoms akin to a brain seizure for “several days,” had shaken whatever faith these cynical town dwellers had.
Makenna remembered Jeriah’s tales of barbarian warriors who were not only stronger than their adversaries but healed a deep gash in a handful of minutes. She hoped the young knight had exaggerated, because having gone back on the relocation once, there was no way the Hierarch could convince the city people that divine will was guiding him in that direction again.
And remembering Jeriah’s steady, haunted eyes as he talked about the barbarian threat, she didn’t think he’d been exaggerating.
But fighting off the barbarian army—Dahlia, saint of lost causes be thanked—wasn’t her job. Makenna was becoming ever more certain that her chosen task was the right one.
If she could only reach the Hierarch, Brallorscourt wouldn’t dare act against her. But to do that, she had to not only get past Brallorscourt’s men, which her disguise might have allowed—she had to get an appointment to see the Hierarch himself. And her disguise would make that impossible! Makenna had once thought she might use the evidence Master Hispontic had uncovered to make Brallorscourt himself let her in, but Brallorscourt had proved even less trustworthy than most humans. She needed some other human’s help. Someone who had access to the Hierarch, who could influence people in the palace who had the power to protect her from Brallorscourt, and who might listen to her. And she knew only one person who fit that description.
“Daroo,” she asked as they sat at dinner outside Noggat’s well-disguised home. “Can you get me into the palace to see Jeriah?”
Daroo put down his small bowl, his eyes thoughtful.
Simmi had to prepare a whole extra kettle of stew to feed Makenna along with her family and Cogswhallop’s. Natter, Daroo, and Nuffet were living in a lumber merchant’s loft a few doors down, but they ate with Noggat’s family. Cogswhallop himself—having negotiated a hot dinner and a breakfast into the price of Makenna’s lodging—had gone to supervise the hunt for Tobin.
Makenna had expected him back over a week ago, and Natter was beginning to worry.
“Aye,” Cogswhallop’s son told her now. “Wearing that face, you could stroll through the fourth gate in broad daylight. Messengers go to the record halls all the time, and they’ll never think to look for their escaped prisoner going back in. Into the woods, then into the tunnel. You’d have to wait there till everyone’s asleep before we could take you to Jeriah’s room. He’s on the third level, so you can go up the ladder and not risk getting caught on the stairs. But why?”
Why,
Makenna noted, not
What do I get for it?
It seemed the civilizing process went both ways.
“I need to talk to him,” Makenna said. Daroo considered the human a friend. He might not approve of what she intended—but Jeriah had turned her over to the authorities once, and Makenna wasn’t going to let that happen again.
Breaking into the palace was much easier than getting out. It helped that the goblins had access to the Hierarch’s “secret” escape tunnel, but still! Her goblin camps had had better security.
Of course Makenna was only trying to reach a lowly squire, not the Hierarch himself. That was what she needed the squire for.
Back in the room with the pool, she washed off the dirt and her magical disguise. Simmi had trimmed up her ragged hair, muttering about “nightmare,” though Makenna didn’t know if that referred to the task or her appearance. But the squire would likely be startled enough, even if his unexpected visitor wasn’t disguised. She didn’t want to create more confusion than she had to.
The long, iron-runged ladder ended in a small room with a narrow door. It was only an access to the shaft that held the bucket chain, but it gave her a place to hide while Daroo and his Bookerie friends made sure the corridors between her and Jeriah’s room were clear.
It felt strange and dangerous to walk through the sleeping palace wearing her own face. Makenna’s palms were sweating when Daroo hustled her through the door to Jeriah’s room and closed it silently behind her.
She’d heard so much about the richness of the Sunlord’s palace that this spartan room surprised her. It held two beds, for Jeriah supposedly shared it with a tax clerk, though he was almost always gone. Daroo had established that he was gone tonight before he’d led Makenna onto the palace grounds.
There was no window in this inner room; the only light source was the glow beneath the door from the corridor’s night lamps. Even Makenna’s dark-adapted eyes could barely make out the shape of the young knight sprawled across one of the beds. She needed to see his face.
She went out into the corridor, ignoring Daroo’s warning hiss, and kindled a candle stub she’d had the sense to bring with her. Back in Jeriah’s room, she lit the lamp on his nightstand. The light didn’t even make him stir. A sound sleeper, was he?
Makenna grinned, sat down on the bed beside him, and laid her knife against his throat. “Wake up, traitor. It’s time to pay for what you did.”
Even then, he took some time yawning his way to wakefulness—though he stiffened when he finally noticed the knife.
“Excuse me, would you mind repeating that?” he asked.
Makenna blinked. “I said it’s time for you to pay for turning me over to the noose.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Jeriah resignedly. “You don’t look hanged to me. And I should warn you, Daroo is about to hit you with the fire poker.”
He did it so well that Makenna had started to turn, and his hand had started to shoot for her wrist, before Daroo gasped, “I’m not!”
She spun back to Jeriah, pressing down on the blade, and his hand fell away.
“Though if I’d known you were going to be so unfriendly,” the young goblin went on, “I’d have warned him we were coming. He helped you escape! What are you doing, mistress?”
“He helped me escape, after he got me jailed in the first place,” Makenna said. “So I’m making sure he doesn’t call for the guards, not till I’ve had a chance to warn him that if he ever again turns me over to anyone, for any reason, your fa’ll never tell him what happened to Tobin.”
Jeriah jerked, and a red line appeared on the skin of his throat. “What’s happened to Tobin? Do you know where he is?”