“Pervert,” he mutters.
A familiar tremor rumbles through me beneath the surface, like a ripple resonating from my heart as it starts to climb. All at once, this feels real, in a way it didn’t before—it’s not playacting, it’s real prison and real constables and very real pain spiraling into panic inside me. I’m suddenly desperate for this man’s hands to be off me, but I’m too afraid to move in case he thinks I’m trying to run and cracks me again. My muscles tremble for wanting it, wanting to pull away, be out of his reach. When I try to take a breath, it sticks in my chest like a knife.
Don’t fall apart, I scold myself desperately, even as I can feel myself caving. Not here, not now, do not fall apart. Don’t you dare.
I raise my head, and across the street I can see Percy, Dante, and Felicity. Dante’s got both hands over his eyes, and Percy’s standing a bit ahead of them, looking like he might sprint to my rescue if Felicity didn’t have a hold of his arm. Our eyes meet, but then the gent drags me around, yanking my arms behind my back and clapping a set of manacles around them. The shop boy gives me a smug smile, his triumph bolstered by the stunned silence I’ve collapsed into. When I’m dragged away, he spits at the back of my head.
Hold yourself together, I tell myself, over and over in time to our footsteps down the street. Hold yourself together and don’t fall apart. And do. Not. Panic.
And do. Not. Think about Father.
The march to the prison blurs. I’m shaking and sick—shakier with every step and every second longer this officer has a hold on me—and crawling with the shame of being bowled over by something as small as a knock across the cheek. My breathing is short and sharp, and I can’t seem to get enough of it. My lungs feel as though they’re popping against my heart.
The next thing I know, I’m standing in the foul-smelling courtyard of the prison, the clerk taking down my name, which it takes me three tries to stammer out, and informing me I’ll be held until the next meeting of the general council, where I’ll stand for sentencing. I’m freed from the manacles, at least, though it’s the thief-taker who cracked me that removes them, and it’s hard to let him touch me. He must sense the way my muscles all coil up when he draws near, because he raises his hand again, prelude to another slap, and I flinch so enormously I stumble backward and slam into the wall. As the jailer leads me away, I hear the thief-taker laugh.
A single room houses all the male prisoners. It’s cramped and crowded and reeking of gents who’ve been unwashed for far too long. There are at least twenty of them, all looking like skeletons dug up from soft clay. Most are curled up on heaps of matted straw. A small knot are cross-legged in the center around a set of dice that look like they were carved by fingernails and teeth. The walls are damp wood, sweating from the heat—it’s so hot it’s hard to breathe. Everything smells of piss and rot—one man is standing in the corner, top-heavy and weaving as he relieves himself against the wall.
A few men turn in my direction when I’m shoved in. Someone wolf-whistles. I stand by the door for what is probably at least a full minute, trying to remember how to breathe, and far more of a wreck than I’d hoped to be at the pinnacle of a plan of my own devising. I am so far from heroic it’s pitiful. I’m not gentlemanly or brave. I feel small and cowardly, frozen near the door and shaking like mad because I got slapped.
Pathetic, says a voice in my head that sounds like my father’s.
Find Mateu Robles. I shove that thought to the forefront of my mind and focus on it. You’re running out of time.
I force myself to raise my head and look around, taking an inventory of the men. Most of them are thickly bearded, but a good number look too young to be father to the Robles siblings, and they’re mostly five-fingered, except for one of the dice players with half a pinky, and another man asleep on his back who has no arms.
Then I notice the man sitting on a ratty blanket in the corner, his thin clothes swallowing him and a gaunt, clemming look about his face. And two missing fingers—he’s got his hands knotted in his lap, like a gentleman, and I can see the gaps.
Courage, I tell myself, and I think of Percy. Then I go sit beside the man. He looks up when I approach, and I’m about to ask him if he’s who I hope he is, but he speaks first. “Your nose is bleeding.”
Which scrambles up the speech I had planned for him. “I . . . Is it?” I swipe at it with the back of my hand and return with a stripe of blood across my knuckles. “Damnation.” I give a rather fantastic snuffle that does me no favors.
“Your jaw as well.” He raises his hand—the one with two empty spaces where his ring and pinkie fingers should be—and I throw my arms up over my face before I can stop myself—such a violent motion it must have looked as though he’d drawn a knife on me. A few of the men nearby glance at us.
His arm drops. “They hurt you.”
“Not much.”
“Someone did, then.” He stays very still, like he’s worried I might spook again, then asks, “What have you been arrested for?”
“Just a theft.”
“Keep your head down—you’ll be fined and freed before the week is out. The guards here are devils, all of them.” He speaks with the same cadence as Helena, words sifting and sliding into each other like cream swirled into coffee. He gives me a slow up-and-down, taking in the odd combination of finery and filth I have become. His eyes linger upon my lapels, and I almost look down to see if I’ve dripped blood upon them. “You know,” he says slowly, “that looks very much like a coat I used to own.”
Which is about as good a lead-in as I’m going to get. “You’re Mateu Robles,” I blurt.
His eyes fly to my face. “Who are you?”
I had planned this moment in my head—rehearsed it all morning, even practiced aloud to Percy, Felicity, and Dante on our walk to the market, my convincing, friendly argument that would win him over into surrendering his cipher. But instead it all tumbles out of me in a glob. “I’m Henry Montague. I mean, I’m a friend of Dante’s. My name’s Henry Montague. Well, not a friend, we just met him last week. I’m touring—myself and a friend—and my sister, because—not important. We’re touring, and I did something daft and stole something—not the thing that got me here, some other stealing—and that something was your box with your Lazarus Key and now we’re wrapped up in the mess that came with it.”
Mateu blinks at me, like he’s a few words behind. “You stole the Lazarus Key . . . from Dante?”
“Oh, no, we returned it to Dante. I stole it from the Duke of Bourbon.”
“Why did he have it?”
“Your children gave it to him.”
His face hardens, then he tips his head backward against the stone wall and lets out a long sigh. “Goddammit, Helena.”