New Amsterdam

Richard left her before teatime, brushing her emerald necklace aside to plant a final, lingering kiss on her sorcerer's tattoo. Garrett stretched against the velvet coverlet on the canopied bed and closed her eyes just for a moment as the door to the library closed behind him. When she opened them again, the sky blazed crimson through sheer cream lace curtains, and she swore; she had wanted to speak to Henry before Sebastien arrived. She rose and dressed quickly, wincing as she yanked a comb through unfashionably short hair, and turned back just as she was leaving to snatch up her dark velvet sorcerer's carpetbag and the envelope with the scrap of dress in it. She took the servant's stair because it was faster and scandalized a chambermaid in the process, but arrived at Henry's suite before the red sun dipped under the horizon. She knocked, and the Prince in his dressing gown opened the carved door so quickly he must have been waiting.

She had thought that Richard's touch fresh on her skin would make it easier. She looked into Henry's smile and cursed herself for a fool. You're too old for lovesick, Abby Irene. Same refrain. It never helped. "Ready for the spell, your Highness?"

"Of course."

He shut the door behind her and locked it, came to her and laced his fingers through her hair tight enough to hurt when she stepped away. Almost as much as stepping away from the warm smell of musk and lemon peel that surrounded him hurt. She did it anyway. "Henry."

"I adored you," he said.

"It's not beyond Phillip to have you killed if you become an embarrassment, you know."

"Is that treason, Lady Abigail Irene?"

"It's fact," she said coldly. She turned up a gaslamp and lit a candle from her bag: an old one, translucent wax lumpy with bits of shattered quartz and pungent with rosemary needles. She set it on the cherrywood dresser and looked up at him. "Did you get what I asked for, your Highness?"

Wordlessly, he handed her a snippet of thick white linen. She recognized it: a bit of the hem of the shirt he had worn to the ball. She drew a silver spoon and an ordinary nail-scissors from her carpetbag and clipped a corner of the blue dress fabric, rested both in the spoon, and held it over the candleflame.

"Don't you need to cast a circle?"

"The smoke must move freely," she answered. She looked up at him; the rising moon cast a copper light through the eastern window, a little less

full than the night before. It touched Henry's cheek with color as it had

Sebastien's. "Let's watch."

Garrett knew the smoke would rise in two distinct streams, parted by still, unbreakable air, and drift about the room aimlessly as a bored kitten. The inverse principle of similarity would make the two smokes irreconcilable, unless the natures of the two fabrics—manufactured half a world apart—had been fused into a single whole by some act of violence.

The streams rose pure and red-lit by the rising moon, conjoined as if they were one thing.

As they were. Garrett dropped the spoon into the candle, snuffing the flame. She snapped a glance over her shoulder at Henry, but the Prince simply watched her, a frown drawing the corners of his mouth down. "What have you done?" she whispered.

"Nothing," he said, waving a hand to disperse the stream of smoke that coiled around his throat like a noose. "This is some trick. Nothing. Tell me you believe me: have I ever lied to you?"

She shook her head and blew the smoke away. "You never have," she said, and when the pooled wax had hardened, she swept her tools into her bag. "You should dress for dinner, your Highness. We'll have guests."

* * *

The tension at the long table all but soured the meat and wine, glittered off the silver and crystal like the gaslight from the chandeliers. Sebastien had arrived with a wry smile on his face and a fresh rose in his buttonhole fifteen minutes before service. He sat on Garrett's left and flaked his fish aimlessly across his plate with a heavy silver fork. She drew a great and secret amusement from watching the cleverness with which he pretended to dine: he'd very nearly fooled her, when they met.

The wampyr caught her looking and presented her with the thin edge of a smile. He swirled his wine in the glass, and touched it to his lips, inhaling the aroma. Garrett found she didn't have much appetite either, sitting among guarded men with Michel Nezahualcoyotl making polite forays into conversation.

Sebastien had scarcely set the glass down when the Aztec ambassador leaned forward. "What brings you to the Americas, Don Sebastien? You are Spanish, of course—" Nezahualcoyotl left the thought unfinished. The British alliance with the Aztec Empire dated from a time when both great powers found themselves with a common enemy: the then even greater power of Spain. "—I would have thought you'd go to the great trade city of San Diego, if you wished to explore the new world."

"San Diego is lovely," Sebastien said, laying his fork aside and letting

his left eye drift closed in a smiling wink. "But I prefer a cooler climate for my exile."

"No-one comes to America for the climate." Garrett watched Richard's face as she said it. He smiled faintly: he'd been born in New Amsterdam, made his fortune by twenty-one in the service of the Iron Queen, and married the old Duke's daughter and heir so he could protect the city and the colony he cherished.

"Some come to New Amsterdam to escape the consequences of previous actions," Henry commented without looking up from his food. "But I think most come out of—well, I won't call it cowardice. Perhaps it would be better to say, a desire to start anew. I suspect most of those merely wind up making the same mistakes over again. A man faces up to his errors, after all, and fixes what he can."

Garrett felt the pressure of Henry's eyes on her, his anger and his desire, and smelled again the smoke of scorching cloth. The anger she thought she should feel paled under white scorn at his cruelty, and her unease at the messages in the smoke. You broke his heart, Abby Irene. And he is angry. But what reason would he have to kill Cecelia? It only hurts the crown. Now, if it were the Lord Mayor. . .Perhaps this was an attempt to frame Sebastien? She saw Sebastien formulating a rejoinder, more incensed on her behalf than his own, and interceded casually. "It's a better exile than some."

"There are many sorts of exile," Nezahualcoyotl said. The Aztec seemed to eat with good appetite. "It's hard, being kept from your home." A self-deprecating smile touched the corners of his strange light eyes, and then he glanced at Henry. "But not too onerous; one finds good friends wherever one travels—"

The sound of footsteps in the hall silenced him. Richard half-stood from his chair, moving to place his body between the Prince and the door. Garrett pushed her chair back, a half-step behind Sebastien—who moved like oil on water when he wanted to—and slipped her silver-tipped ebony wand from her pocket as she came up beside the Duke.

She relaxed only incrementally when she realized that the figures framed in the archway were the blonde, reserved Duchess and the widowed Lord Mayor. Are they having an affair? she wondered—but they stood an unmeasured distance apart, and no awareness flowed between their bodies. No.

Could Eliot be behind the murder? He wouldn't be the first husband to sorcerously do away with his wife. And she knew he'd hired a black mage not twelve months earlier to weaken Richard's political position and to try to kill Garrett herself, although Garrett had been unable to prove it.

"My lord husband," Jacqueline began. She stepped into the dining room, gaslight glittering on her earrings and playing over the fine silk of her dress. "I happened upon the Lord Mayor in the drive as he was arriving. Shall we invite him to dine?" Her eyes measured Garrett for a coffin as she spoke.

"The offer is kind," Eliot interjected before Richard could answer. "But I won't sit at table with a killer. I suppose you've made no progress in your investigations, Detective Crown Investigator?"

His expression shook Garrett's cool assessment of the man as a bastard: there was pleading in it. Richard stepped halfway in front of her, and she bit back a snarl, but Sebastien laid a steadying hand on her elbow and moved aside, drawing her from behind the Duke's fair-haired bulk. "The Crown Investigator," Richard said, "is making every effort to bring the case to a speedy resolution."

"Richard," Jacqueline began. He tried to silence her with a glare: she raised her chin and stepped forward. "It is his wife."

"I'll bet," Eliot said simultaneously, stepping past Jacqueline and striding forward to confront Richard nose to nose. "In loyal service to the Crown."

Garrett heard the scrape of a chair as Henry stood. She didn't look. "That's sedition," Richard said softly.

"It's fact." Eliot turned his head and spat. "Arrest the Prince, Richard. Prove once and for all you care for something other than your Ducal seat. That you care for the colonies, and for New Amsterdam." He turned his head and stared Garrett in the face. "DCI. Do you know who killed my wife?"

Richard moved to put himself between them again. He walked into Sebastien, who had coolly set himself for the block. Garrett pushed forward and laid her hand on the Lord Mayor's arm. She looked over his shoulder, caught a complex expression on the Duchess' face. "When I have conclusive evidence—" You have conclusive evidence, Abigail Irene. "—Lord Peter, you will know what I know."

He stared her in the eye for a long, sharp-edged second before he turned and strode away.

* * *

Garrett wasn't quite certain how Sebastien spirited her away from the dining room. She remembered his hand on her arm, quick footsteps and the eventual pause, breathless, under a rising moon that painted the gravel garden path under their feet in knifelike shadows. "Don Sebastien, I am in your debt again," Garrett said, leaning into the shadows of a towering forsythia, fighting crawling shivers.

"I think we're past the point of friendship where we need to keep accounts," he replied. "Was Richard always such a pig?"

She laughed, winding her arms around her body. "He's jealous. And a patriot: he sets no loyalty before the Crown. I think he sees that you are not jealous, and to him it seems another bit of evidence that you are heartless and cold."

"I learned that it was foolish to try to possess things." Sebastien shrugged and put his arm around her, for all he had no warmth to share. "Or women. What sort of a life could I offer?" A thoughtful pause. "Is it Prince Henry, Abby Irene? I cannot deduce another answer, and I cannot understand why he would do such a thing."

She leaned back against his shoulder and watched the rising moon dye the facade of the Duke's manor the color of skimmed milk. She shook her head, her hair moving against his jacket, the rose in his lapel brushing her ear. "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"

"You realize, if they had listened to the women, Troy would still be standing? Helen tried to warn them, and Cassandra too."

"After she was cursed for spurning Apollo. And yet she and Helen take the blame." The scent of the forsythia hung over them, raw and sweet, less flower than vegetable. The moon rose another finger's width, waning from full, shaped like a sail bellying in the rising wind. "Don't the years grow long alone, Sebastien?"

"Look." He pointed. "You can see the rabbit in the moon."

"Did you bring me a bit of the shirt you wore last night?"

"I did," he answered, and held her strong hand in his cold one as they walked with measured paces back inside. "I'll ask Duchess Jacqueline if I may have the room beside yours, if that suits you. I somehow don't think she'll mind."

* * *

Smoke rose by smoke, two streams plainly divided in the dappled moonlight that made its way through the branches of those ancient elms. Garrett closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall beside the locked door to the library, breathing a sigh. Exactly as it should be.

The wampyr was innocent. She laid the silver spoon in an ashtray and snuffed the candle out with licked fingertips just a moment before a light tap rattled her door. The hall door: she had been prepared to ignore a furtive tap on the other, having little patience for Richard tonight. If he was fool enough to come to her under the same roof as his wife.

Garrett padded to the door barefoot and slid the bolt back, letting the door drift open on well-oiled hinges. She was unsurprised that Henry stood revealed beyond. "I apologize," he said as he brushed by her, pulling the knob from her hand and swinging it silently closed. She noticed with annoyance that he turned the key in the lock. "I was boorish at dinner. I don't know what possessed me, and I hope—" he paused. "I hope you can forgive me."

Garrett stepped to the side, and began putting the tools of her sorcery away. "No apology is needed. Thank you for the necklace, Henry. It's lovely."

"Necklace?" His voice was tight and heavy as if he wept. The floor creaked behind her.

Garrett whirled, carpet burning the naked ball of her foot, and grabbed for the wand in her open bag. Not fast enough. His hands—those strong,

tapered fingers—reached for her throat, lengthening as she watched,

strange hollow-pointed claws curving from the nailbeds in a welter of puckered flesh.

Garrett shouted at the top of her lungs. Henry's eyes shone blankly glossy, glazed by the moonlight. Talons pricked her skin and she heard—as if through cotton wool—the sound of someone pounding on the heavy, ancient door. She drew a breath to scream but—alien, dagger-tipped, not the hands she remembered so well—his hands closed on her throat and he pressed her back against the bureau still littered with her instruments of sorcery.

Garrett reached out right-handed and tore the emerald out of his ear.

Henry jerked away with a cry, blood racing over suddenly human hands as he clapped them to ripped flesh.

One more resonant thump: the lockplate shattered with a splintering crash. Sebastien and Richard burst through the door. They halted at the spectre of blood and moonlight, at Garrett tearing her gown open and wrenching the emerald necklace from her throat as Henry swayed and went to his knees.

"Richard, your stickpin!" She pointed at his collar, and he flung the jewelry away like a serpent discovered in a pocket.

"Abby Irene—" Sebastien started.

"It's the ambassador," she said. Henry looked up at her, the sanguinary flow still staining his hands and his shoulder. Sebastien turned, Richard half a step behind him.

"No."

A voice accustomed to obedience, and both men froze in the doorway as Henry forced himself to his feet. A slow red drip trickled down his jacket. He didn't seem to notice. "I'll handle this."

Garrett supported herself against the dresser. Sebastien and the Duke stepped aside, but turned to follow as the Prince pushed through the shattered door and stomped out of sight.

Silence ensued for some minutes, and Garrett found the strength to go and seat herself on the bed. She wondered when a servant would be along or worse, Duchess Jacqueline. But some time later, Sebastien stepped in from the hallway and reported: "He kicked the door in."

"Oh."

Henry followed no more than ninety seconds later, Richard at his side. He held something clenched in his fist like a shed snakeskin, and he held it out to Garrett like a man offering his best hound the fox's tail. "Your glove, my lady?"

Garrett took the limp, bloodstained thing and dropped it on the floor between them. "He needed a binding. The emeralds to limit it, to bind you and identify the target. Some personal item to trigger. He must have done the same in London."

"I left before the killing—"

"Did you?"

"I. . .." Henry pushed bloodstained fingers through his hair. "Yes. I don't remember. But how could I not remember?" His arm dropped to his side as if his own touch disgusted him.

Garrett moved away from the dresser, into the center of the room. "He said his mother was white."

"French," Prince Henry answered. "A concubine to the Aztec Emperor. She died of the same pox that scarred him as a boy. When the Aztec court came to England, when we were both boys." The Prince had too much courage to turn away. "I taught him English. We were—friends."

"The Emperor found uses for him, I take it. But they didn't suit his

ambitions?"

"Or maybe his taste for revenge." Richard shrugged.

"Bastards and second sons—" irony dripped from Henry's tongue "—make good ambassadors."

"We can't let anyone know he used you for his scheme, Highness. You've no guilt in this thing." The Duke coughed into his hand. Garrett studied Richard's face, and Henry's. And the wampyr's, though Sebastien stood silent by the door.

Henry swallowed and looked down at his hands. "I can't. . .lie about this, Richard."

"You're asking him to conceal evidence of a murder." Garrett was surprised at her own voice, level and disbelieving.

"It could mean the revolt of the colonies if you don't. The end of our alliance with the Aztecs: this is the Emperor's bastard son. Everything the French could have wanted."

Henry looked at Garrett, his deep-set eyes glistening, stricken in the bluing moonlight. Garrett looked away. She knew what he wanted her to say. She touched her throat, felt the torn edges of her dress. "I serve the Crown," she whispered.

She pushed away from the dresser, stepped past Henry, past Richard, toward the door. She stopped. Glanced over her shoulder.

"I have to confess this," Henry said, drawing himself up.

A harsh scent of burned cloth and blood tainted the air, overwhelming the scent of oranges.

"It will mean lives if you do, your Highness." She didn't need to look at Henry to know how his lips pursed in struggle, didn't need to look at Richard to see him drop his eyes to the floor. "Mine, perhaps. The Duke's. Maybe even your own. It will mean war. And it will mean only your honor if you don't."

"I know." His hands flexed helplessly, stretched and clenched. "What would you have me do, Abby Irene? What will you say of all this?"

"I will do as my King bids me do," she said. And then she stood and watched the moonlight move upon the wall, and waited for them to argue. Don Sebastien never moved from his place beside the door.

"Sebastien," she said, some time later. "Sebastien, take me home."