I reluctantly followed after him. I sat on one of the too-small chairs, clutching Yana’s strange letter in one hand.
All right. An ordinary fan. Whatever that had to do with anything.
I supposed I could agree with him on it, though. The deep reds of the silk and the pale wood of its binding were all I did see, and it seemed ordinary enough. Quite plain, even, for Caius Greylace’s tastes.
“Watch carefully now,” he counseled, while I privately resolved that he was going to regret it if he chose to hit me on the nose again. It was still sore. That crafty little bastard.
Instead, he pushed the fan shut with both hands this time. When next he opened it, there were small knives, thin-bladed and cruel, hidden in the fan like the spaces between fingers.
I lifted my eyebrows. Caius giggled a high-pitched giggle, and covered his mouth with one hand, quite carried away with his own success at managing the trick. He’d probably been practicing it, waiting for the right moment to reveal all to me, like the magician that he was, through and through.
My patience was wearing thin. There was indulging a man his peculiarities just so you could get to the point, and there was wasting precious time. I wasn’t even sure why I’d been in the mood for the former, but I certainly wasn’t going to allow the latter. Not where Yana was concerned. Definitely not with this bastion-cursed headache.
“I don’t see what this has to do with the letter,” I said, calm as I could.
“Oh, don’t you see?” Caius cast the fan down in frustration, and I moved my feet to make sure neither of them caught a knife by “accident.” “It is one thing made to look like another! The danger concealed in something quite ordinary. I did think I’d made it clear as possible.”
He’d made it clear as mud, I thought, but I kept that to myself.
Caius paused, and I could almost see the change coming over him, like some kind of invisible comb made to sort out and straighten anything that had gone astray in his momentary fit of temper. I made a joke of it often enough, but there was madness in the Greylace blood. It was common enough knowledge, and it was little things like this that reminded me of it. Something just wasn’t right—like a dragon with a bolt gone missing. Couldn’t trust him, even if you wanted to.
Which I didn’t.
“My apologies,” he said, in a low, calm voice. “What I mean to say is that someone has clearly written this letter in place of your dear Yana.”
His robes pooled elegantly around him when he ducked to pick up the fan, and his knives. I defnitely wasn’t anywhere near calm anymore.
“What are you saying?” I demanded. Not the most eloquent, but he made it damn hard. “She’s not in trouble, is she?”
“I should think not,” Caius replied. “At first I thought that she might have taken ill; that the unusual tone was the product of dictation, perhaps. I worried for her health, and wondered if I ought to write to someone—have a doctor sent out to visit her in the country. You absolutely cannot trust country doctors, my dear; we both know that much. And since she’s so very important to you—you’ve had so much weighing upon you of late, I didn’t want to worry you—I thought to keep it to myself. Perhaps rewrite the letter so that you wouldn’t notice anything was off, either, while I took care of things.”
“Wait,” I said. “Greylace. Just how often are you reading my private things?”
“You’re welcome,” Caius went on, smooth as buttermilk. “It was very kind of me; but I do it because I’ve grown so fond of you, and since you refuse to take care of yourself, the burden falls on those long-suffering souls like myself and Dear Yana. However, Alcibiades, I do not think that Yana is ill.”
“Course not,” I muttered, though I was relieved nonetheless. The letter was crumpled and small in my hands, themselves stiff from so much practice with a foreign blade. “She’s got a constitution like a bull.”
“Naturally, as all fine women do,” Caius acquiesced. “So it was with a mixture of relief and dread that I continued to theorize. What sort of change might come over a woman, a woman like Dear Yana, strong as a bull and set in her particular grammatical ways, to alter her tone so drastically as to sound like…” Caius trailed