black coat with a black rag tied over the lower section of his face. The outfit had two advantages. It concealed anything about his identity that might have stood out. And it made most decent folk look the other way.
Gravedigging was necessary work, but necessity didn’t stop people from wanting to avoid grave curses and grave sickness.
They shared a moment of staring at each other. Cab felt himself being measured and did the same in turn. The contact was big, heavyset. For a second, Cab allowed himself to think there might be something familiar about his green eyes. Then he shut down the wondering before it took root.
“You’re not my usual,” the young man said.
“She got held up at the theater,” Cab replied.
Einan hadn’t told him how to manage the contact, how to allay the man’s mistrust of an unknown entity. Maybe that was a test, too, of his meager instincts.
But One hadn’t warned him yet. He had to assume he was doing well.
“Shit.” His contact looked down the street toward the crowded theater. He seemed to be weighing a decision. “All right. You’d better come with me.”
Don’t lose him, One cautioned.
Although the contact was built like a brick storehouse, he moved like one of the Queen’s trained horses: fleet as the wind and with little regard for whoever he left in the dust. He melted into the dark mouth of a narrow alleyway and Cab stepped quickly to follow him, trusting One to keep up.
So far, she’d never let him down.
Cab was twitchy without a decent blade for protection, but no one jumped them from the shadows. He followed the contact down the next open street, past a vendor selling grilled chestnuts, through a crowd of glittering young ladies moving from one coffeehouse to the next on their way back to the university. Cab realized they were making for the cemetery as they cut a jagged path through the city’s backways, edging onto the main streets only when they needed to.
It was a good route to take if you needed a giant silver lizard with three eyes to keep pace unseen, although the gravedigger couldn’t have known about that.
But there were no screams of awe and terror yet. One hadn’t been noticed.
Finally, the iron gates of the cemetery rose into view. Cab was shrugging out of his coat to throw it over the spikes—so they could hop the fence—when his contact dug a key out of his pocket and opened the gate. It groaned shut behind them.
Inside, Cab tried not to look at the neat array of stones, old and new. He didn’t wonder if he was responsible for any of the graves. Despite their Ever-Noble status, the Ever-Loyals had been named traitors to the crown. They would’ve been buried as traitors.
They walked past countless silent, mossy markers, stopped at a rickety shack on the edge of the grounds. No light shone through the windows and no key was needed to enter. Cab listened, but One was silent, wherever she was.
Anxiety hummed in his bones, but it hadn’t transformed into fear.
“Shut the door behind you,” the contact said.
Cab did as ordered. Kept his hand on the knob.
The gravedigger outfit gave nothing away. Hid everything save for the contact’s eyes, except where a torn sleeve revealed a brown wrist wrapped with leather straps. “You’re new?” The only light in the shack was moonlight, which the contact had angled Cab into, so he saw Cab’s nod in response. “Nothing personal, but it isn’t easy to trust the new ones.”
Cab licked his lips. Knew he couldn’t speak straightforwardly, but knew he’d sound a fool trying to code his responses. “Our . . . mutual connections saved my life. I owe everything to them.”
“Loyal, are you? Hah.” A muffled sigh beneath the bandana. “But it makes sense that a new face would be sent. There’s barely anyone left. Excavation groups have tripled in the past few days. They’re digging deeper, harder, like they’re looking for something specific, not whatever they can find, as they have in the past.”
The Great Paragon. Cab nodded again. He wasn’t supposed to share the information he had until he got everything the contact knew.
“Another point of interest for our ‘mutual connections’”—the contact’s voice was tinged with a flash of gallows humor—“is that one of the princes has returned to the castle with friends. Reason it’s worth pointing out is that this prince doesn’t have friends. Not since the Ever-Loyals were killed and their eldest daughter exiled a little