became nobility, shoulders confidently back, chin proudly raised. She was Victarine, with the big “dan” in her name and disinterested scorn for anyone without it. She’d pinned her hair up. A plain dealer, hiding nothing. On reflection, she pulled a few strands free for a softening touch. Simple clothes, but not cheap. She’d decided a skirt was pushing it, but she’d opened one more button of her shirt than usual, rolled the sleeves once to show her wrists. Unguarded. Even a little vulnerable. Finally, she’d made Tallow flick her with road muck. She had been riding hard on a vital mission, after all.
“Who goes there?” snapped a sergeant, pointing a polearm and a belligerent expression.
He was guarding the gates of a fine old manor house which, judging by the lion-and-hammers standard planted in the churned-up ornamental gardens, Brock had commandeered for his headquarters. She sized the man up at a glance. Moustache waxed and breastplate polished even in the midst of this mess. A self-important stickler who took himself far too seriously.
“My name is Victarine dan Teufel.” In the smooth, clear noblewoman’s accent her mother used to have. “I need to speak to Lord Governor Brock.”
He frowned up, looking for something to distrust, but she gave him nothing.
“You could be a spy,” he said, grudgingly.
“I am a spy.”
He stared at her, caught off guard.
“On your side.” She leaned down, glancing left and right, using an urgent whisper, as if she’d picked him and only him to trust with a secret. “And I have a message from Lord Marshal Brint that could change everything.”
Important news, for the important man. He puffed himself up, turned frowning to the busy yard. “Clear a path there! This woman needs to see the Lord Governor!”
She’d always been the best liar she knew. Then the Practicals dragged her from her bed in the night, and her family was sent to the camps in Angland. Young Victarine dan Teufel had buried her fancy name in a shallow grave and become just Vick, and lying had gone from a game to a means of survival. In the years she’d spent in that freezing hell, as her family died one by one, she’d only told the whole truth once, and that was the day she got out. She’d hammered her face into a vizor of blank indifference that no shock, no pain, no terror could dent.
Which proved to be a very good thing as she was shown into Leo dan Brock’s borrowed dining room. From what she’d heard, he was one of those vain men of action who can’t wait to believe what they want to. But he wasn’t eating breakfast alone. Standing nearby, big hands clasped, looking mightily surprised to see her wander in out of the muddy morning, was her old comrade from the Breakers, Gunnar Broad. Worse yet, sitting on the other side of the table was the heavily pregnant daughter of Vick’s previous employer, Savine dan Brock.
What Vick thought was, Shit. What her expression said was, Good, you’re all here.
“Victarine dan Teufel.” Savine’s face might have been softened by her condition but her smile had a harder, hungrier edge than ever. “Unless I’m much mistaken.”
Broad’s heavy brows knitted with suspicion. “The two o’ you know each other?”
While Vick tried to plot a safe path through the swamp of truths and falsehoods these three knew about her, she met one question with another. “The two of you know each other?”
“Master Broad saved my life during the uprising in Valbeck,” said Savine. “And I shared the carriage there with Inquisitor Teufel.”
“Inquisitor?” Broad’s wide eyes looked strangely small through his lenses. “Thought you grew up in the camps?”
“I did. But Arch Lector Glokta offered me a way out.” Vick met Broad’s eye and told all the truth she could. “Bringing the Breakers to justice.”
“You were working for Old Sticks all that time?”
“My father once described Inquisitor Teufel as his most loyal servant.” Savine sipped delicately from a teacup, but the stare she gave Vick over the rim was flinty. “So I must say I’m surprised to see you swagger into my parlour with a message from one rebel to another.”
There was a weighty silence, then, while everyone frowned at Vick, and Broad slowly unclasped his big hands, that Ladderman’s tattoo squirming as he made fists of them. She knew it was one of those moments when her life hung by a thread. But it was hardly her first.
“Everyone’s loyalties are a touch tangled these days.” She hooked out