off, then waved in the direction of the letter with a pained expression—the sort of face he pulled when he saw some kind of outfit that, he said, was indicative of poor workmanship. “Well, like that,” he concluded at last, and chose that moment to take my favorite chair all for himself.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. I didn’t know. It could always have been the madness talking—except I knew that it wasn’t. Caius Greylace was absolutely, without a doubt, at least three cards short of a deck, but he was smart as a whipcrack and he wasn’t about to create a conspiracy where none existed.
“Exactly,” Caius said. “Neither did I, really, so I don’t blame you for being at a loss.”
“Well,” I muttered. “If you’ve got the solution, we don’t need a dialogue about it.”
“Humor me,” Caius Greylace said.
“Don’t I always?”
“Not really,” Caius said, and clapped his hands together. “All right then, I will tell you, but only if you promise to have breakfast with me. I’ve already ordered it, and some nice soap that you can use when you bathe and shave today. How does that sound?”
“You’re bribing me,” I replied.
“Only a little bit,” he admitted.
I sat back in my uncomfortable Ke-Han chair, eyeing the letter in question. The handwriting was exactly right, loop for loop; the paper was the same as always, coarse and from the countryside, heavy and stiff and nearly impossible to tear. But everything else was wrong. It just didn’t sound like her—and Caius, of all people, knew why. How long had he been snooping through my things? And when had he found the time to do so? I wondered if he spent most of his time sneaking around my room while I was sleeping—last night, for example, when I was practically dead to the world—and the very idea made me shudder. At least I knew that he was on my side. It was clear now that he could have killed me, with one of those fan-knives, for example, at any time he wanted.
So he considered me quaint, like a pet. Worth keeping around for whatever happened next. Almost the same as I considered him, except I was sane and he was loopy as Yana’s letters.
“Breakfast, huh?” I said.
“I think I have managed to procure us some fried eggs,” Caius added. “I left extremely specific directions with the servants. And everyone is all too ready to give the great hero what he wants. You are a hero now, you know. I am sure the Emperor will wish to speak with you at some point today—I’ll go with you, of course; I don’t trust you alone with people.”
“Neither do I,” I agreed, almost overwhelmed. The headache was coming back.
Without speaking, Caius was suddenly standing and gliding across the room, quick as you like, to stand by me. He ruffled his fingers through my hair—he was actually touching me, but now that I’d finally started to get used to him, I was going to have to kill him—and pressed his thumbs against my temples, where the blood pounded all too hot.
Everything stilled and cooled; the world slowed around me. It was like the night before, with the incense and the wine and the music. It was like being in another place, on the bastion-damned moon, floating out into the night among the stars. For all I felt imaginary at that one moment, I might as well have been a painting on a standing screen: some bowlegged crane or a flower-dusted pine tree, bent and knotty with age.
He was pulling his mind magic on me.
“What’re you…” I muttered, trying to struggle against it as he pulled a blanket up over my slumbering brain. “Stop that… Tickles…”
“I’ll be more careful,” he murmured. “It is only that I thought I might cure your headache. I’ve had my share of them myself, you know.”
“Stop it,” I said, but even I could hear my voice held no conviction.
“Besides,” Caius went on, his voice hushed, “this way, we are closer, and I may speak to you in private. It is my suspicion that Yana Berger wrote to you as she always does, with the peculiar patterns she always did, but that someone has intercepted her letter to you and rewritten it.”
I struggled against the sleepy heaviness in my head. At least it didn’t hurt anymore, but that didn’t make it any less impossible to think. “Why would anyone do that,” I said. “It’s just Yana.”
“Someone paranoid enough to screen all our letters,”