A Court of Lies Page 5

  “I know the winnings paid out at the Red Ruby,” she said. “You’ve given me half of what you owe.”

  “I won by playing the orphan,” the thief protested. “It isn’t as lucrative.”

  “You’re trying to win now by playing the thief,” she said lightly. “Pay what you owe your fellow thieves. Pay so we can eat and be safe.”

  “I did,” the man insisted.

  She lifted a single brow. She’d learned that from Jehn, Kael mused, although he knew she’d deny it a thousand times.

  “The orphan strips the pot,” the thief said, his tone belligerent. “Makes the winnings lean. Any fool knows that.” He smirked as if he’d won an argument with her.

  “Any fool,” Briand countered sharply, “knows better than to count his winnings outside the front door of the inn, where beggars and cheats and spies might be watching. Or brag to his fellows that the Guttersnipe won’t get her full cut. Or try to tell the queen of Dubbok how to play the game. And the Red Ruby doesn’t use the orphan card. You’re already lying to me, don’t insult my intelligence too. It makes me much more annoyed.”

  The others watching laughed uproariously at the thief’s dressing down; she had them in the palm of her hand.

  Kael swallowed a chuckle.

  The thief reddened. “Rags and me—well, you might say we had an understanding, girl.”

  “Rags is dead,” she said sharply. “Don’t call me girl. You may address me as Guttersnipe. And all I understand right now is that you aren’t clever enough to cheat me.”

  The crowd tittered. The thief scowled. “You have a sharp tongue, Guttersnipe.”

  “And an even sharper blade,” she replied.

  “Do you really think you have what it takes to be a thief-queen?” the thief said.

  The crowd murmured, some of them jeering at him, others whispering.

  “What is your name?” Briand asked as she leaned forward.

  “Talon,” the thief said with a jut of his chin.

  “Talon,” she repeated. “You are not granted entry tonight.”

  He looked incredulous. “What?”

  Briand’s eyebrows pinched. Her smile sharpened. “Get out.”

  Talon gazed around him at the other thieves and beggars as if seeking support. He found none. “You can’t—”

  “I can,” Briand gritted.

  When the thief tried to draw his knife, hers caught his sleeve and pinned it to the wall. She stood rigidly, risen from her seat on the throne, hand still extended from throwing it. Kael hadn’t even seen her summon the blade to her hand. She must have a knife in a wrist holster.

  “Get out,” she repeated, straightening slowly as the thief wrenched free and retreated amid boos and jeers.

  If Kael hadn’t already been in love, he would be now.

  ~

  When the last thief had paid tribute and the bucket taken away for counting, Briand stepped from the throne and into the shadowy hallway. She was exhausted, but she dared not relax.

  She had not for a moment stopped thinking about Kael since he’d appeared among the supplicants asking for shelter.

  She wanted answers.

  The whisper of air in the darkness alerted her. Briand stepped to the side of the corridor and pressed her back to the wall as she drew her knife in a single, fluid motion, preparing to fight.

  She’d been practicing thanks to all the attempts on her life as of late. She was exceptionally good at engaging with enemies in the dark.

  The shadow detached from the wall and took shape. A cloak. Shoulders. Light from the torches flickered over features that made her heart stutter.

  She didn’t sheath her knife.

  “Why are you here, Kael?” Briand asked, barely trusting her voice. “A mission for the prince? Or perhaps you’ve come to kidnap me and force me to become the dragonsayer on Jehn’s leash again?”

  Something in his eyes glittered. “No.”

  “No?” She took a step closer to him against her better judgment. She could smell his on-the-road scent, like wood smoke, horses, and pine. She had a thousand angry things to say. A thousand broken things. A thousand beautiful, heated, passionate words. She wanted to lose her fingers in his hair and trace the scar on his face with her lips. She wanted to hold her knife to his neck and demand to know why—why?—he could so easily walk away from her, while she could not seem to shake him.

  “I came to give you a message,” Kael said, and stopped. Hesitated.

  A message. She felt her gaze sharpen. She had no interest in hearing from Jehn the Betrayer of Friends. No doubt they needed someone to call up dragons. Someone to do their bidding like a good little pawn.

  She was not only a player now, she was, laughably and ridiculously, a queen. A queen of thieves and beggars, but a queen nonetheless. Her court might be in rags, but it was her court all the same.

  As such, she would not tolerate such indignity. Briand’s mouth curled, and angry words rose to her lips. She would take great pleasure in telling him her thoughts. In refusing to play the meek dragonsayer this time. She would not bend to the decrees of that pompous prince, not as long as he still held Kael’s heart in chains—

  “Guttersnipe!” someone called, shattering the silence between them and splintering Briand’s ruminations. “Dinner is served in the dining hall. They’re waiting for you!” Light filled the corridor as Weasel stuck his head inside, holding a lantern aloft.

  “Guttersnipe, eh?” Kael said with a look at her that communicated a conversation of unspoken understanding: her love for Nath in the choosing of her name, her owning of her identity with the group even as she fell in with thieves, her vulnerable admission of missing them. Briand felt naked beneath that knowing look.

  Weasel squinted at Kael with suspicion.

  “Are you all right, Guttersnipe?” the thief asked, putting a warning hand on his knife.

  “I’m fine,” she said, not taking her eyes from Kael’s. “I’ll be there in a moment.”

  Kael turned his whole body to look in Weasel’s direction, his muscular frame filling the space and posing a quiet threat with Kael’s at-ease, yet poised stance that could drop into combat at any time. Weasel thief gulped, but he didn’t back down. He was scrawnier and shorter than Kael, but he looked willing to try to fight him anyway.

  He was turning out to be a good ally, Briand thought.

  “Go on,” she said, and Weasel reluctantly retreated after one last curious glance at them.

  The scathing words on her tongue would have to wait. She intended to savor her angry denouncement of Jehn and her refusal to engage with whatever mission he had sent Kael to command her to embark upon. She would wait until after she’d eaten, when there was a proper amount of time.

  “I should go,” she said, stepping toward the warm light of the torches in the hall. “It is customary now for me to open the feast.”

  The warm light of the torches fell over his face, and her heart pounded just looking at him. He looked well. Very well. He had a fresh scar from his time with the pirates that appeared to be mending, and his hair was shorter, as if trimmed for military duty. Stubble covered his jaw. He looked hard, rugged, restless, and every inch a captain of the guard, as Maera had informed Briand via mechbird.

  “Feast?” One of Kael’s eyebrows hitched up in question.

  “We have a lot of feasts,” Briand said. “It’s good for morale. Perhaps your prince should take note.”

  “I will be sure to tell him,” Kael said, and half of his mouth flexed in a smile.

  She was having a hard time focusing on anything but his mouth. She forced herself to look him in the eye instead.

  “I must go,” she said, and started to brush past him.

  “Wait,” he said, laying a hand lightly on her arm. “Briand.”

  Her name on his tongue was like fire on her heart. His fingers were brands. She waited, pulse drumming. The darkness smoldered between them.

  Kael’s eyes held hers, firm, determ
ined. She saw a sliver of something else in that gaze.

  Desire.

  She felt lit on fire, and then she was angry. Angry that he would come here after the answers he’d given her. Come here and torment her. She closed her fingers around her knife.

  He’d already made his choice.

  “Guttersnipe!” someone shouted.

  Briand threw her knife in the direction of the voice without looking. She heard the blade hit the wall with a thump, and the person who’d called her name made a low and startled exclamation. “What in the seven levels of hell, Guttersnipe—”

  It was Nath.

  He abruptly ceased his diatribe of indignity at the sight of Kael.

  “Sir,” Nath said, his voice flooding with delight. “You’re here.”

  Kael strode across the room to clasp Nath’s arms in greeting, leaving Briand seething with rage behind them. She quickly schooled her expression into something more neutral as the two friends embraced.

  “We have much to discuss, old friend,” Kael said to Nath.

  “Yes,” Nath said, clapping Kael on the back. “How are Tibus and Maera? Languishing from boredom in that stinking encampment, I’ll bet. I pity them. Not everyone has the privilege of serving a thief-queen.” He flashed a crooked grin over his shoulder at Briand, who had finally managed to get her furious expression stuffed away behind a cool, if somewhat stiff, smile.

  “Tibus and Maera send their love,” Kael said. “And you. You look like a proper gutter dweller yourself,” Kael said with a low laugh, taking in Nath’s grizzled beard and ragged trousers. “What has she done to you, Nath?”

  Nath beamed. “Our girl is a queen now. Queen of thieves and rats and leaking sewers, mind you, but it is a role she is uniquely suited for.” He turned to look at the knife embedded in the wall, and his eyebrows drew together sharply as his smile dropped into a scowl. “And, as you can see, she’s still slinging knives everywhere. You could have lopped my earlobe off, Guttersnipe.”

  “I knew where I was aiming,” she replied coolly. She was annoyed and jealous of Nath’s open and easy affection for Kael, and Kael’s for him, when she was reduced to heavy silences and words that cut deep. Her chest throbbed with pain at the loss of her place at the proverbial table.

  “Hasn’t she grown?” Nath said like a proud father.

  Briand felt small, and hot, and furious, and sad. She felt as if her skin wasn’t going to contain all of her feelings. But she was thief-queen now, and dragonsayer, and a player in the game of kings and nobles. She lifted her chin. “I am the same size I was the last time I saw him. Or do you mean that our cook is fattening me up?”

  Nath guffawed. He was in an excellent mood. “Our cook ought to be laying bricks beside the river. His food has the taste and consistency of mortar anyway.”

  Kael studied Briand as if he hadn’t just been scouring her face with his gaze. As if he hadn’t just delivered a shock of news without explanation. His lips tipped in that bemused smile again. What was he thinking when he smiled at her like that?

  Oh, how dare he come and smirk at her? In her own thief quarters?

  She ought to throw him out. Rescind his sanctuary. Scrape the scent and taste of him from her memories.

  She reached for the second knife at her belt, fingers curling around the hilt.

  Kael’s sharp eyes noticed her movement. Still, he smiled.

  She wanted to pin the collar of his shirt against the wall.

  “Come,” Nath said to Kael, foiling her plans. “Let’s eat. Everyone is waiting for the dragonsay—er, I mean Guttersnipe—to make her formal toast. It’s a new tradition we’ve started.”

  Not waiting for them, Briand spun on her heel and headed for the dining hall.

  She could feel Kael’s gaze burning a hole in her back the whole length of the corridor.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE THIEVES’ DINING hall hummed with voices. The clatter of knives and forks against wooden tables filled the air, mingling with the scent of roasted meat.

  In the center of the longest table stood a roasted pig, won from a Dubbok game by one of the players under Briand. She hadn’t asked how a roasted pig came to be gambled away. She’d merely pointed the young lady in the direction of the kitchens. The current cook, who Briand frankly wasn’t sure truly deserved the title, had poured some sort of savory sauce atop the meat and surrounded it with roasted apples.

  The thieves spotted her at the door and began to drum on the tables as they chanted, “Guttersnipe, Guttersnipe!” Amid their shouts, she jumped onto the nearest chair and drew her knife. She wiped it with a clean cloth someone handed her, and then she took aim at the roasted pig.

  She felt rather than heard Nath and Kael step into the room behind her. Kael’s presence was like fire at her back.

  She let the knife fly.

  The blade flew across the room and embedded in the middle of the pig. Her second knife was right behind it, landing a little to the left. A neat cut.

  The closest thief to the pig, Crag, grabbed the blades and hoisted up the slice with a cheer. He laid it on a plate and began to carve up the pig.

  Nath and Kael reached Briand as she was climbing down from the chair.

  “That was quite a spectacle,” Kael said.

  “Well, we like to remind the thieves where some of her talents lie,” Nath said in a low voice. “As some of them have been trying to kill her in a bid to take the crown.”

  Kael’s eyebrows drew together in an indiscernible expression at that. “And are these fools still alive?”

  “It’s a complicated situation,” Briand said.

  Kael gazed at her with a glimmer of astonishment in his eyes. She wondered what he could be thinking.

  “Look,” Nath said to Kael. “There’s Cait and Crispin. They’ll want to speak with you, I’m sure.”

  Thieves swarmed around Briand before she could speak to Kael. He and Nath crossed to the other side of the room as the crowd trapped her.

  “Guttersnipe,” a thief with an eyepatch said. “I have questions about Dubbok. When one is playing the orphan card—”

  “Guttersnipe,” another cried above the first. He had a scar across his left cheek that was shaped like a hook “Nobbins stole my blanket roll while I was sleeping! Make him give it back!”

  “Do you see a throne of crates and barrels?” she demanded. “I am here to dine, not be besieged by your questions. Come see me in the morning during the allotted time, for lords’ sake.”

  “But my blanket,” the thief with the scar on his face protested. “What will I sleep on tonight?”

  Briand pushed her way through the crowd toward the table where the food lay as the thief followed her. “Did you not tell me last week that you spent the last several years sleeping in gutters?”

  “Yes,” the thief said. He was called River, she remembered.

  “Well, can’t you find a nice nest of straw to sleep in? Wouldn’t that be nicer than gutters? Or are you incapable of that?”

  “Yes,” River said sulkily. “I’ve lost my talent for it.”

  Briand surveyed the food. Half of the roasted pig was gone. The rest of the spread consisted mainly of the current cook’s specialties—various stewed bowls of meat and mush.

  She frowned at the fare.

  “We need a new cook,” she muttered. “How did the current one get the job, again?”

  River scratched the back of his head. “I believe he put on an apron and declared it his job. Said he was in the net-mending business before Cahan’s soldiers took his land, and he didn’t have it in him to beg or steal for his stays. Rags let him stay because he knew how to make her favorite dish, potter’s stew. These are all his mum’s recipes, I think.”

  Briand dipped a wooden serving spoon in a platter of mush and watched the goopy brown gruel fall back into the dish. “I see.”

  She served herself a plate while River stayed at her shoulder, chattering on about his stolen blanket.

  “I sha
ll give you a blanket to shut you up,” Briand said finally.

  “My grandmum made it,” he said mournfully with a shake of his head. “It’s special to me. I need it back, Guttersnipe.”

  “Fine,” she said. “You and Nobbins see me after dinner. Bring the blanket.”

  She took her seat beside Nath. Kael didn’t look at her as she approached, but she felt the heat of his attention. Her stomach tied itself into a knot.

  Cait was busy asking Kael questions about Nyr and the court’s adaptation to their new surroundings.

  “Are my parents well?” she asked anxiously. “We send letters, but my mother has such a difficult time with the encryption process. Her reports come out a little comical. I can’t quite understand her meanings sometimes. The other day she sent me a mechbird that said my father ate flowers for breakfast and played a game with dolphins after lunch.”

  Kael smiled. “Your parents are doing well, flower-eating notwithstanding. I think your mother meant to say that the Nyrian word for breakfast is the meal of flowers, because it is generally eaten in the gardens. I’m afraid I don’t know what he meant about dolphins, though.”

  “I wish we could eat in a garden,” Crispin muttered with a glance at the stained walls of stone around them.

  “You’d just wipe yourself with feverbeet leaves again,” Nath said, and guffawed.

  Crispin threw a roll at his head.

  Tears shimmered in Cait’s eyes before she blinked them away. “Do they miss me?”

  “They miss you,” he said softly. “But they are proud of you. Your mother told me you are doing important things for Austrisia. I agree with her,” he added.

  “Well, I do what I can to help.” Cait cleared her throat, flushing pink. “Have you heard the story of the feverbeet leaves, by the way?”

  Kael’s mouth tugged sideways. “I have not.”

  “You’re in for a treat,” Nath said. “See, the lad here—”

  “I get to tell it,” Crispin interjected. “It happened to me.” He straightened in his chair. “I was down by the creek—”

  “You tell it all wrong,” Cait protested. “You give away the punchline immediately.”