and tells the man without vices the wrong bridge and the wrong time and nothing at all of the man who paid him to wait on Belinda Primrose outside her home.
It slows the tracker by a few hours, and when he realises the urchin lied to him, it brings a rare slash of a smile to his face. He returns to find the child, and because a gypsy man with a kind of calm readiness is watching, the boy’s father still has nine, or fifteen, or thirteen children to his name when the man is done. He has what he needs now: the description of a man, and that of an unusually striking courtesan. His name, the tracker does not learn, but hers he buys off another courtesan, a woman with large breasts and little of the brains her kind are supposedly vaunted for.
A single morning later he sets loose the last pigeon, and with it the trail that Akilina wants finally, finally, finally comes to Gallin.
* * * *
BELINDA PRIMROSE / BEATRICE IRVINE
4 January 1588
Lutetia
Belinda chafed. As Beatrice Irvine, widowed wife to a depraved Lanyarchan lordling, she had become accustomed to a certain amount of freedom. It had been the limited freedom of a woman, unable to cross certain thresholds, reluctantly lent money to, wooed by those who might want a nobleman’s title to add to their names, but it had been freedom.
Beatrice Irvine, fiancée to Javier de Castille, crown prince of Gallin, had no such freedom.
That the watching guards and constant eyes were bothersome came as a surprise to her. She would have imagined Beatrice’s freedoms to be overwhelming—and they were, but in a different manner than she might have expected. Accustomed to a lifetime of hiding and going unnoticed, she had thought that playing an obvious role, one in the public eye, would alarm her; that a habit of circumspection would keep her from enjoying the part. Instead she’d taken to it, a truth that made her wonder, though only briefly, if Beatrice’s easy laugh might have been her own, had circumstances been different. It was a speculation to be let go unpondered; her life was what it was, and imagining it otherwise sent a shudder of confused revulsion down her spine.
Still, those small freedoms that she’d known were now gone, and she found herself resenting the fine life she lived. She picked at embroidery, surrounded by court ladies and under the watchful eyes of guards, until her fingers and her brain both seemed to bleed with weariness of it all. None of her discontent spilled outward; she kept it wrapped inside as thoroughly as she was caught under the guards’ gazes. It was far more difficult, she’d discovered, to call the witchpower stillness and disappear from view when someone was actively watching her. That she’d done it with Javier and Sacha in the room suggested to her that intimacy was key there, as well; whatever connection a joining of flesh offered seemed to provide inroads to the minds of the men around her. The guards, patient, unobtrusive, watching, turned their focus on her more pointedly when she called witchpower and tried to hide herself in the shadows of plain sight. Ultimately more concerned with secrecy than proving, if only to herself, her ability to fade away and escape her polite jailers, she gave up trying and resigned herself to the boredom of stitching.
Weeks. It had been weeks, and for once Belinda shared Asselin’s impatience. Her access to Javier had been whittled away, her ability to write freely to “dearest Jayne” compromised, and the thing that kept a stranglehold on her was that she could see no way to slip free the bonds that held her and escape into a different world for a while without threatening the position she now held.
For the first time in her life, Belinda thought she might understand, truly understand, the constraints that held Lorraine in place.
She, though, had advantages that Lorraine didn’t share. It was possible, not even difficult, to surround herself with shadow and escape the palace, escape the guards and the narrow definition of what a court lady was, at least at night. Daytime belonged to dull interactions with women Belinda had nothing in common with, but nighttime, at least, was her own.
She had not, in weeks of plying Viktor and prowling the palace at night, found where it was that Sandalia and Akilina met, nor learned their subjects of discussion. The handful of times she touched skin against