Everything’s all right. You just want to look at the striped cats. Who doesn’t like a good striped cat? No harm in visiting the zoo now and then, seeing the native wildlife.
And a little bit of sunlight would do me a spot of good, too.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting when, at last, the palace opened up into its private gardens. Maybe I was preparing to burst in and rescue Josette from the hands of ten, maybe twenty, expressionless Ke-Han guards, dragging her off to wherever it was Fiacre was being kept. I didn’t realize how I’d steeled myself for combat until I turned a corner past some giant white-blossomed tree to find her watching the tigers. There wasn’t even a single assassin lying in wait for her—though that didn’t mean I was going to give Greylace his dagger back anytime soon.
“Have you come to rescue me?” Josette asked, giving me a look over her shoulder that signified, as always, she wasn’t exactly impressed.
I cleared my throat. “Fiacre’s missing,” I said, coming close enough to her to whisper.
“It would seem so,” Josette said. “But don’t worry. It’s not as though I’d kick up some kind of idiot fuss trying to find him.”
“Greylace says I should drag you back kicking and screaming, if I have to.”
Josette laughed. “I’ll save my kicking and screaming for a few other choice inhabitants of this palace,” she replied.
“Well,” I said. All my nerves were on fire—waiting for a storm that was about to come, with the clouds too far off in the distance to gauge the precise timing the deluge would erupt. “Would you do me the honor of escorting me back to my quarters?”
“Why, General,” Josette said. “I never suspected you of having any manners.” She heaved a deep sigh then, her face tightening as she watched the tigers, too sleepy in the heat to even pace back and forth. I could sense a little of what she was thinking, at least in the barest outline of a metaphor, because bastion damn me if those cats didn’t remind me just a little of myself. There was even a baby one, all white; no use saying which that one was.
Right. No use thinking about it.
We walked back through the quiet hallways together, and as we walked, I felt like we were heading deeper and deeper into the belly of a winding beast—one great big snake made out of formality and sliding doors and cypress wood and mirrors. The deeper we got, the less of a chance there was we’d have any way of slicing our way out again.
I was half-expecting Lord Temur and Caius Greylace to be gone by the time we returned to my chambers, whisked away by the guards like they were just cleaning the place up. Josette and Caius and I had been cockeyed to the point of being blind, so caught up in the problem with the letters that we hadn’t reported our findings higher up along the diplomatic chain. And now, we were separated from the rest of the group, the age-old and generally effective tactic of divide and conquer.
What I wasn’t expecting was to find Caius serving Lord Temur tea from the hearth in the center of the room, the two of them drinking from the delicate cups and savoring the taste.
“I’ve made enough for you and Josette,” Caius said brightly as we entered. “I know that Josette prefers her tea strong, so I’ve let it steep. Alcibiades, would you be a dear and put a wedge in the doorframe? You never know who will stop by, and it’s best always to be prepared.”
I hesitated for long enough to see Lord Temur’s face—he was watching Josette, and, as far as I could tell from Ke-Han expressions, he was even more glad to see her in one piece than I’d been.
And that, no doubt, was because he’d known the kind of shape she might’ve been found in better than I did.
I did as Caius told me, using two extra wedges for good measure, before I took the cup of tea, because it was something to hold on to. Josette made herself comfortable on the floor, then we all must have realized how crazy we all looked, since after that all four of us—Lord Temur included—were laughing.
“Soldiers get like this in the trench,” I said, once we’d sobered some.
“How fascinating,” Caius said. “What of our fellow soldiers?”
Josette drank deeply from her glass before she spoke. “I’ve been sent to this