I stopped smiling, completely done with being interrupted and ready to be Twenty-Three again.
“I’m on probation and all the auditioners are out to kill me,” I said. “Sorry if that disrupts your business plans, but I have to get a killer to recant in order to prove my innocence. So I’m going to focus on that.”
She sucked in a breath, walked to the tub, and started going through the chest of drawers next to it. She returned with a tiny jar. “Shirt up—you can’t do anything if you pull your stitches out.”
She washed her hands with a bottle of watered-down witch hazel and opened Isidora’s salve. The spicy scent of hot peppers wafted around us, burning my nose.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“You’ll be breaking the rules.”
“Those rules were made for auditioners not on probation.” Maud sniffed and patted the salve down my side. “They never specified rules for this.”
“I knew I liked you.” I grinned and saluted her. If I died, she didn’t get paid. Helping me, even if it was slightly wrong, helped her. “I need to know what the others are up to, and there’s only one sort of person they won’t attack—a servant.”
She nodded and said, “I’ll have to get you a uniform. What else?”
“It’s about time for another test, isn’t it?” I tested the edges of my wound, wincing with each pinch of pain as I twisted. “You heard about that?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” She sighed. “It’s breakfast.”
“So you’re fine with helping me win but not fine with telling me stuff like that outright?”
She frowned.
“Your face will stick like that one day.” I laid out my mask, knives, and lock picks on the bed. Best take stock of what I had and what I needed. “Ruby’s been teaching us manners, and you need those at the breakfast table. The meal’s poisoned—there’s Emerald’s lessons—and they’re seeing if we paid enough attention to Amethyst and Isidora to know how to counter it. They using servants?”
Maud nodded. “I volunteered to serve drinks.”
“Think the Left Hand will notice if I take your place?”
“Probably not. Their servants recruited us.” She shrugged. “They’ll be too busy with the food to check.”
The door handle twisted. I threw a hand over Maud’s mouth, dragging her to the other side of the room.
“Someone picked it,” I whispered. “Be quiet and still.”
No one had seen me enter. I’d made sure of it. So this was meant for me the next time I opened the door. I let go of Maud and lowered myself to the floor as quiet as I could, cheek pressing into the floorboards. Small feet—too small to be Four, Five, or Fifteen—tapped against the entrance steps. Gloved hands fluttered around the bolt keep.
Eleven.
She had to be trapping my door. I knew a few common ones: packets that blew powder and vials filled with oils that ignited as soon as the air hit them. I could disarm one of those without killing myself. Probably.
I’d done it once, and Rath had only lost some knuckle hair.
Eleven shut the door and hurried away.
I tested the handle, wincing at the pressure. The trap was inside the bolt keep and probably a packet of something nasty. Sliding one of my finer, thinner picks between the keep and the door, I wedged the pick in place. Silver shone in the crack between the door and the jamb. I took a small breath.
A mealy, slightly acidic scent hit my nose.
“It’s Lady’s Palm.” Fresh from the earth and potent enough to kill a grown man. Emerald had shown us the mushroom in a dark, damp corner of her greenhouse. I’d only ever seen it dried before coming here. “I mess this up, don’t touch anything. Just go get Emerald and Isidora.”
This wasn’t clever. Eleven’s trap didn’t discriminate between auditioner and servant. Lady’s Palm was the easiest poison to use and the hardest to counter. The antidote only worked if you knew how much to take.
And Lady knew no one wanted to guess how much nightshade extract to drink.
I eased another three picks into the crack and opened the door. No click, no puff, and no white cloud of death.
A small white ball of Mizuho rice paper—thin enough to fold and thick enough that the powder didn’t seep out—sat in the keep. If I’d opened the door as normal, the ball would’ve rolled out and the needle glued above it would’ve torn a hole in the rice paper. It was crude but effective.
“That’s it?”
I glanced at Maud. “Killing people isn’t hard.”
And wasn’t that how everyone died? Not expecting death from something simple.
“You all need better locks.” I studied the ball, gently turning it over in my hands.
“You really don’t trust anyone, do you?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s impossible to cross the river and get here—”
“I did it.”
“—normally.” She stepped around me and peered out the door, blocking me from view with her skirts. “They changed security for the auditions.”
“Handkerchief.” I held out my hand, and Maud handed hers over. “What do you mean?”
“Most of the guards are new recruits,” Maud said. “They switched them up for auditions.”
I’d not thought of that. I pried the needle off the door, tossing it aside. The ball was trickier, and I wrapped the handkerchief twice around it. If Eleven had used rice paper, the powder was too big to fall through the holes, and she’d surely not put herself in danger with a leaking trap. Maud took a step back from me, eyes on my hands. I nodded to the door.
“Shut it.” I weighed the bundle in my palm. This could work. “Know where I could get nightshade extract?”
“Lady dal Abreu has everything in her laboratory.” She shook her head a breath later when she realized why I’d asked. “You can’t—she has everyone searched before they enter and again when they leave.”
“That’s fine.” I pictured the building for healing training in my mind, trying to remember how many doors and windows it had. “I’ll just go in properly and leave some other way.”
“The window,” she said softly. “Go out the window.”
“What?”
“The orphanage masters searched us when we left and when we returned.” Maud shrugged. “So we used the window.”
Of course—concerned more with if their charges were stealing than why.
“We used to break our falls with this old hay cart. It worked fine as long as you landed properly.” She nodded slowly, spreading her arms out wide, as if to prove all her jumping had left her in one piece and I’d be fine. “I’ll leave a laundry cart there, and you can land in it. That might work.”
She arched her brow and tapped her foot when I didn’t agree immediately, as if jumping out of windows was normal.
“Trust me,” she said. “We’ve got nothing left to lose.”
I snorted. Trust got people like me killed.
But she’d used “we.” Maud was in this too.
“All right.” I clapped her on the shoulder. “Let’s jump out a window.”
Thirty-One