The Blinding Knife(58)

But three rounds in, he lost it. Got befuddled, didn’t move before his timer ran out. He didn’t know how to use even a great hand correctly. Andross Guile had obviously drawn a terrible hand—but he survived the damage Kip was able to do in the early rounds, and then demolished him.

Kip turned over his last counter as he lost, and said, “So what am I supposed to do while everyone else goes to practicum?”

“What do I care?” Andross Guile said. “Figure out other ways to be a failure and a disappointment. By the time my son gets back, he’ll be ready to relinquish this.” He gestured toward Kip, as if he were a cockroach to be swept away.

“You’re old,” Kip said. “How long before you die?”

The Red grinned a feral grin. “So, there’s a little bastard in the little bastard. Good. Now get out.”





Chapter 32




Adrasteia was a slave, not a victim. She had crossed the Lily’s Stem, the bridge between the Chromeria and Big Jasper, before the sun had come up. Today was Sponsor Day. That meant no lectures, though the Blackguard would still practice. The Blackguard was too important to take days off. Every student was supposed to meet with her sponsor today, and slaves were no different from anyone else in this.

The difference was that Adrasteia’s sponsor never met with her. Instead, she gave Teia secret little jobs to do on Sponsor Day. Lady Lucretia Verangheti was not an easy mistress.

The vendors in the market were setting up their tents and stalls, laying out carpets, prodding their burros to try to get loads of produce or fish into position. There was a constant stream of people, but with the dawn it would become a flood as house slaves and wives attended to the daily shopping to feed their households. Adrasteia slipped through the mass of people as if she had somewhere to be. She kicked loose one of the laces of her boots and stopped by a wall, knelt on one knee, and pulled her skirt up enough to tie the lace.

She pulled the package out from its space between two bricks, slipped it into her boot, and went on her way. She took a few twisting alleys to make sure she hadn’t been followed—not that she’d ever been followed, but it was part of her orders—and finally found a place between two taller buildings. She pulled the package from her boot, then unrolled the letter.

Lady Verangheti rarely wrote words. She didn’t want to leave her own handwriting to tie her to the crimes she made Adrasteia commit, and she didn’t like trusting slaves or scribes with any more than she had to.

It didn’t matter. Adrasteia knew what was expected.

There was an uncannily accurate drawing of a man—Lady Verangheti could have been quite an artist if she hadn’t thought it beneath her. The next page of impossibly thin rice paper had a drawing of a snuff box, inlaid with a family crest: Herons Rising over a Crescent Moon.

From doing this before, Teia knew she was supposed to steal the snuff box, before tomorrow morning.

Adrasteia was a slave, not a fool: she knew that half the time, the victims were men or women working for Lucretia Verangheti. She’d been caught before, back home.

But she never knew which marks were real and which were decoys. It made sense, she supposed. Training worked best if failure was possible, but not catastrophic. If your trainee failed once and then was useless, you’d lose all the time you’d put into training her. If you weren’t willing for your trainee to ever fail, then you wouldn’t stretch her skills, you wouldn’t teach her where the line was.

But Teia didn’t know which was which. It didn’t matter that much, honestly. She couldn’t treat any of them like they were decoys. The difference being that if she were caught thieving from one of Lucretia’s men, she’d be thrashed, and if she were caught stealing from anyone else, she’d be thrown out of the Blackguard and the Chromeria and put in jail.

And of course, her father was counting on her. Things went well for the father of a slave doing excellent work. The other half of the statement didn’t even have to be breathed. A slave knew. Her father was a free man; she hadn’t lied to Kip about that part. But that didn’t mean that Lady Verangheti didn’t have power over what happened to him and his debts.

So Teia studied the portrait, memorizing the man’s features. Landed noble, most likely, from the clothes. Balding, short-cropped hair, wide nose, fat necklaces, wide cloak, sword belt, wide sleeves, leather gloves.

Dressed like that, Teia wouldn’t be surprised if he traveled with a bodyguard. She glanced down the alley both ways. Saw no one. She folded up the rice paper. The corners had red and yellow luxin under a thin layer of wax. She rubbed them together, scraping away the wax, and the paper ignited and burned up in a flash. Teia blew away the dust and headed back toward the market.