“Yes,” Cerise said.
“Not while it’s dark? It’s pitch-black out there.”
“It will be fine,” Cerise said.
Urow’s youngest son had followed her out. Gaston, William remembered.
“Lagar sent people out to watch the waterways.” Gaston’s voice was a deep guttural snarl. Trying to make himself seem older, like his father. If he were a cat, he would’ve arched his back and puffed out his fur. “Ry said he saw Peva out in the Mire.”
“The court is tomorrow,” Cerise said. “If I wait, I won’t make it to the hearing. I’m late enough as is.” Her gaze flickered to William. He looked into her dark eyes and lost his train of thought.
Want.
His ears heard her speak, but his brain took a couple of seconds to break the words down to meaning.
“If you would rather stay ...”
“No.” He walked down the dock and stepped into the boat. He had to figure out some way to keep her from catching him off-guard like this.
Cerise hesitated. “Clara, at first light, you should come, too.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Clara crossed her arms.
“The Hand has a tracker,” Cerise said. “He may follow us here.”
“The Hand wants you, not us.”
“It’s not safe here.”
Clara raised her chin. “You may be in charge of the family, and if Urow was awake, he might listen to you, but he isn’t awake and I’m not about to take orders from the likes of you in my own house. Be on your way.”
Cerise clenched her teeth and climbed into the boat. Anger rolled off her in waves. She touched the reins, and the rolpie took off, pulling them across the pond.
“Why doesn’t she like you?” William asked.
Cerise sighed. “Because of my grandfather. He came from the Weird. He was a very smart man. He taught me and all of my cousins. We don’t have normal school here in the Mire. Some people can’t even read. But our family had Grandfather. We know some things that most Edgers don’t, and that makes us different.”
“Like what?”
Cerise switched to Gaulish. “Like speaking other languages. Like knowing the basics behind the magic theories.”
“Anyone can learn another language,” William told her in Gaulish. “It’s not difficult.”
She peered at his face. “You’re full of surprises, Lord Bill. I thought you were Adrianglian.”
“I am.”
“Your Gaulish has no accent.”
He overlaid a thick coastal drawl over the Gaulish words. “Is that better, mademoiselle?”
She blinked those huge eyes, and he switched to a harsher Northern dialect. “I can do a fur trapper, too.”
“How do you do that?”
“I have a really good memory,” he told her in refined upper-class Gaulish.
She matched his accent. “I have no doubt of that.”
Her grandfather must’ve been a noble and from the East, too. She stretched her a’s. William filed it away for further consideration.
“That’s really impressive,” she said.
Ha! He’d broken bones, killed an altered human, carried her rhino of a cousin, and she didn’t blink an eye. But the moment he said two words in another language, she decided to be impressed.
Cerise dropped into Adrianglian again. “People like Clara don’t like it. She thinks we ‘put on airs,’ as she says, as if what we can do somehow makes her less. She is right, you know. You’re heading straight into the den of cut-throats. You should’ve taken her up on her offer and gone back to town.”
She’d heard their conversation. William shook his head. He had a mission to complete, and if he walked away now, he would never see her again. “I said I would come with you. If I don’t, who’ll protect you?”
Her lips curved a little. “You saw me fight. Do you think I need protection, Lord Bill?”
“You’re good. But the Hand is dangerous, and they have numbers on their side.” He waited for her to bristle, but she didn’t. “Besides, you’re my ride to a safe, warm house, where it’s dry and I might be given hot food. I have to take care of you, or I might never have a decent meal again.”
Cerise tossed her head back and laughed softly. “I’ll make an Edger of you yet, before this is over.”
He liked the way she laughed, when her hair fell to the side and her eyes lit up. William looked away, before he did something stupid. “You have a plan about the sniper?”
She nodded at the corpse. “I think we should let the dead man do the work.”
William glanced at the hunter and bared his teeth at the corpse.
TEN
THE door opened silently under pressure from Spider’s hand, admitting him into the hothouse. Fifty feet of glass sheltered a narrow strip of soil divided by a path in two. During the day sunlight flooded the hothouse, but now only the weak orange radiance of the magic lamps nourished the greenery. The previous owner of the mansion had used the hothouse to coax cucumbers out of the Mire’s soil; he would’ve been shocked to discover the oddities that filled it now.
Spider surveyed the twin lines of plants and saw Posad’s misshapen form, hunched over by the roots of a vernik midway down the path. A large bucket and a wheelbarrow sat next to him.
Spider strode toward the gardener, the gravel crunching under his feet. Posad dipped his small, almost feminine left hand into a bucket and administered a handful of black oily mud to the soil around the roots of a young tree. Translucent blue, it stood seven feet tall, spreading perfectly formed leafless branches.
The blue branches leaned toward Spider. Tentatively, like a shy child, one touched his shoulder. He offered his hand and the branches nuzzled his palm.
He plucked a bag of feed from the wheelbarrow and offered a handful of grainy gray powder to the tree. A small branch brushed it, scooping the powder up with tiny slits in its bark. Its fellows reached to his palm, and the entire tree bent closer to the food.