“But you have done that?” asked Shane, with the faintest lift of one pale eyebrow.
She chuckled. “Stolen something off a desk? Once or twice, I suppose. Never for an actual invasion, though.”
“So you’re just listening to people?” asked Wren. “That’s it?”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Ughhh, fine. Can we still blackmail people?”
Disapproval radiated off Shane so strongly that it was practically visible, like heat haze.
Marguerite stifled sudden annoyance. You used to chop people to pieces for a living. What gives you the right to disapprove?
“If I have to blackmail someone, I certainly will,” she said, hoping perversely that would annoy him. Judging by the lines around his eyes, she succeeded. “The real problem is figuring out who. So we’ll go to court and listen to a lot of people and hopefully someone will casually drop who Magnus’s patron is.”
“And then?” asked Wren. “Do we blackmail them?”
The disapproving silence from Shane’s direction got even louder.
“Well, then it gets trickier. I’ll talk to them and perhaps we’ll get lucky and they’ll casually drop where Magnus is hiding over a cup of tea. Or perhaps they won’t, and then yes, anything’s on the table. But it all starts with just listening.”
“Ugh,” muttered Wren. “I had no idea being a spy would be so boring.”
Marguerite laughed. “Yes, and I have to pretend to be interested, that’s the worst of it. But ninety percent of the job is just learning who to talk to, sifting through gossip, and putting it together in useful ways. For example…oh…we once had a tailor who was bragging that he’d found an incredible new designer and that he was going to be the hottest thing next season. He wouldn’t say a word about what the designs were like, just that they were amazing. And he was smart enough not to leave the designs where a cracksman could get to them. So I went in and talked to the people who lived along the same street as his warehouse, and they all wanted to complain about the traffic coming and going. Watching the street got me the name of the people shipping the materials to the warehouse, and some chatting with a driver at a bar told me that they were delivering lace. There are only so many sources of lace in large quantities, so I simply strolled into a clerk’s office and asked what their current price was.
The third one told me that a buyer had locked up their supply, and when I dropped the tailor’s name, they confirmed it. That was enough for my employer. They cornered the market on lace in advance of the season, and when the designs hit big, they made a fortune.”
Shane’s grunt was definitely disapproving. Marguerite rolled her eyes. “Look, most of the time we’re dealing with merchants, not the fate of the world. I prefer it that way.”
“But people kill for it nonetheless,” said Shane quietly.
“Yes. Often. The amounts of money involved are extraordinary.”
“For lace.”
Marguerite shrugged. “Or salt. Or food. Or iron. Lace may seem frivolous to you, but to the people making or losing a fortune, it’s deadly serious.”
Shane grunted again. After a moment he asked, “Will there be others attempting to stop you?”
“There will be agents of the Red Sail there, yes,” said Marguerite. “And I’ll be listening to them.
And they’ll be listening to me.” She felt her lips twist. “If we’re lucky, they’ll drop something and we’ll figure out what it means before they do. If not…well, we’ll see. And there are likely to be other operatives around as well, pursuing their own lines of inquiry, and if they learn something interesting, they may be willing to share it. That’s the difficulty of keeping an operation completely quiet.
Someone might go to the Sail rather than me because they don’t know that I want the information. So one has to weigh how much that they want to make known.”
“Could the Sail be dangerous?” rumbled Shane.
“Yes, but that’s why I have a bodyguard.”
She expected another grunt, but he nodded instead. After a moment he asked, “When you say
‘anything is on the table,’ what do you mean?”
And here is where you crawl into your armored shell and disapprove at me for the rest of the day, my boy. She lifted one shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. “Bedding, blackmail, breaking and entering…whatever it takes to acquire the information.”
She’d definitely startled him that time. Probably the bedding part. As if it’s somehow less moral to sleep with another adult than to chop them to little bits.
Marguerite was determined not to let any of that show on her face. She turned away from the railing. “It’s probably worth practicing Dailian as much as we can in the meantime. Now I’m going to go see what we’ve got in the way of lunch.”
ELEVEN
THE TRIP UPRIVER WAS UNEVENTFUL. Shane was torn between the knowledge that it was much better to have a boring trip than an exciting one, and the fact that at least an attack by river pirates would have given him something to think about other than Marguerite, his own failings, and possible demonic cultists, in that order.
Mind you, any river pirates on this river would have to get in line. Literally.
All the barges going upriver used animals on the river bank to haul, and that made passing each other an extremely delicate proposition. There were designated crossover spots every few miles, but Shane still wasn’t sure how they did it without getting everything hopelessly tangled. At night, all the barges would tie up in a line along the bank, the animals would be unharnessed and rubbed down, and gossip and supplies would be swapped between the crews. Shane was pleased to see that their captain was as taciturn with other boat crews as she was with her passengers.
Of course, Marguerite must have chosen this barge specifically for that fact. She knows what she’s doing.
Which had him thinking about Marguerite again. Bedding, blackmail, or breaking and entering.
The way her lips had formed the word bedding was going to haunt his dreams. He tried very hard to focus on the other two.
As a former paladin and, somewhere under all that, a knight, he knew he should object to blackmail and burglary on a moral level. But he also knew that Beartongue had undoubtedly blackmailed many people in a good cause, so it wasn’t as if he could claim innocence. And Beartongue had sent him on this mission and told him to use his best judgment.
He blew out a long breath and stared over the river. The sun was hot but the breeze off the river was cold, which meant that his lower half was chilly and his shoulders and the back of his neck were uncomfortably warm.
The difference, of course, was that Beartongue had an entire temple of people to protect her if things backfired. And it’s not as if she’s doing the breaking and entering herself, either. Marguerite had him and Wren. As soon as Marguerite had mentioned blackmail, his mind had filled with visions of dangerous men willing to kill to protect their secrets. Noblemen who can afford guards, troops,