Apparently I was more thirsty than I was hungry.
Synové was always chatty, but tonight more so, hardly finishing one sentence before she began another. Even Wren, the quiet one with searing eyes who always filled me with some level of trepidation, was more talkative than usual. Aram and Samuel hung on every word as she explained the history of the ziethe, a weapon of the Meurasi clan that she hailed from.
Kazi spoke enthusiastically with my mother about foods the queen preferred, as if we hadn’t just had a screaming conversation in her room. As if she hadn’t just broken down and sobbed in front of me. As if none of it had happened at all.
“Maybe we can meet with the cook in the morning,” Kazi said, “and discuss which dishes she would recommend. I know the queen has a fondness for vagabond food.”
Something about it all was off.
It didn’t feel right.
The cook and her husband had come in several times to replenish dishes or take them away. I stared at the husband each time. He was reserved, aloof, the opposite of his wife. Since they had been here, she had expressed her gratitude to me several times for giving them work. The first day, she had patted her abdomen and said their family would soon be expanding, so she was especially grateful. He had shown no emotion. He just kept going about his work in the kitchen, chopping vegetables with quick smooth movements. She was right about one thing; he was good with a knife.
And Kazi was right about another thing—his appearance. Now every time he walked through the kitchen door his appearance turned my stomach.
What I had told Kazi was true. There was no Previzi driver who looked like him.
But there used to be.
Now he worked for us.
My father had hired him a year ago.
*
She’s racked with guilt, Jase. I’ve tried talking to her. You have to speak to her.
My mother had intercepted me after dinner, pulled me aside. Talk to her.
I watched Kazi walk away to her room—our room. I wanted to go after her, but I saw the worry in my mother’s eyes.
I tapped on Jalaine’s door and called to her.
She didn’t answer.
I knocked a little louder.
“Jalaine, open up. I need to talk to you.”
A Patrei never apologizes for decisions he’s made. And my father never did. This was one of his deathbed instructions—right after he had said I’d be faced with countless decisions. I didn’t regret pulling Jalaine from the arena. I didn’t regret our talk in the study or reprimanding her, but my anger was still loose and hot when we were in the dining room that night. When I had seen Kazi pinned beneath Fertig and soaked in blood, something furious and ugly had ripped through me. I wanted to tear something apart. Or someone. I shamed Jalaine in front of the family.
She was sixteen years old. She made a mistake. A serious one that nearly cost us our lives, but she was still my sister. She was family. And Patreis made mistakes too.
“I shouldn’t have shamed you in front of the family,” I whispered through the door. “I’m sorry.”
There was no answer.
If the job of Patrei were easy, I would have given it to someone else.
Sometimes, I wished he had. I wasn’t just having to live with my bad decisions, but his too, even decisions that seemed right at the time but now were all wrong, ones that had grown rotten over time, like forgotten eggs in the larder.
*
I stepped lightly through the hall, careful not to wake anyone. I had a new understanding of my father. There were decisions he had made that I had vehemently disagreed with. Decisions he put off that I railed against. And decisions he had made that I never blinked at. Like hiring Previzi drivers.
How can you look the other way?
And now I couldn’t. Kazi had described Zane, our man who coordinated deliveries at the arena, and the only one we trusted to make discreet deliveries to Beaufort. We didn’t want it to become common knowledge that he and his men were here. Zane was thirty-three, an older version of the cook’s husband.
“Mason,” I whispered and pushed his shoulder to wake him.
He lunged from his sleep, knocking me to the floor, a knife in his hand.
He blinked, realizing it was me. “Are you crazy?” he asked, his eyes wild, still coming awake. “I could have killed you.”
I should have known better than to push his shoulder to wake him. Mason always slept with a knife under his pillow. He was too young to remember details about his parents’ deaths, but he still had vague haunting memories of the night they died. They were killed in their sleep—an attack by a league that no longer existed. My father had wiped them out. Mason’s father was my father’s closest friend. That was when he became part of our family.
“It’s the middle of the night,” he groaned, still annoyed. “What do you want?” He pushed off me and stood, giving me a hand up.
“I’m hungry.”
“Hungry?”
“Let’s go to the kitchen and find something to eat.”
He hissed but grabbed a shirt from the end of his bed and pulled it over his head.
I lit an oil lamp and brought a pitcher of milk from the larder and two thick slabs of currant cake.
“We haven’t done this in a while,” Mason said, more of a question than a statement. Middle-of-the-night visits to the kitchen were reserved for disasters or planning for them. A few embers still glowed through the grill on the stove. The quiet of a midnight kitchen seemed quieter than anywhere else in the house, maybe because in a large family like ours it was usually filled with so much noise—the constant sounds of dough being punched, dishes clattering, meat being cleaved, the cutting, the stirring, the pouring, the chatter, and someone always coming in for a taste. It was the most comforting room of the house, its sole purpose to nurture. Maybe that’s why I wanted to talk to Mason here.
He looked at me, waiting. “You should have eaten dinner.” He knew this wasn’t about being hungry.
“You know Zane?” I asked.
He grabbed forks from the sideboard drawer. “What kind of question is that? Of course I do.”
I set the plates on the kitchen table, and we both pulled out chairs and sat. “What I mean is, do you know details about him? The routes he drove when he was a Previzi? Maybe most important, do you remember … does he have a mole on his wrist?”
Mason’s brows pulled down. “What’s going on?”
I explained why Kazi reacted the way she had when she saw the Previzi at the arena, and how she had described Zane to me right down to his greasy black hair.
Mason hissed, trying to absorb it. “On her own since she was six?”
I nodded but didn’t tell him how she survived as an orphan.
He cut off a piece of his cake with the side of his fork. “I don’t know about routes, maybe Zane went to Venda, but I do remember his wrist.” He looked up at me and sighed. “There’s a large mole.”
If Kazi had remembered correctly, Mason and I both knew what it meant. Zane had a past with labor hunters. And that meant he probably had a present with them too. He wasn’t just Kazi’s problem. He might be ours too.
We agreed we were going to have to question him, carefully, so he wouldn’t suspect anything. Previzi had the nose of a wolf and could sniff trouble before it arrived—and they were just as good at disappearing. If he thought we suspected him of being involved with the labor hunters who had come into Hell’s Mouth, we’d never see him again. And if he was involved, we needed to know who he worked for—maybe the same person Fertig had taken orders from. We may have crippled their operations by killing twelve of their crew, but I wanted the rest of them too. I wanted them to pay for Samuel’s hand, pay for torching the Vendan settlement, pay for burning homes in Hell’s Mouth and stealing citizens off the street, pay for raiding caravans, pay for choking Kazi and nearly killing her. Their debt ran deep.
“It’s hard to believe Zane’s involved,” Mason said. “He’s a hard worker. Dependable.”
“We’ll find out. I have to make this right.”