Rook

She banked up the fire, retrieved her vest and knife, breathing hard, and then paused again. For someone who had made it a point not to look at René Hasard’s face, she certainly had stared at it enough today. He was still something wild, dark red hair everywhere, wrapped in a blanket smelling distinctly of homemade bevvy. But the daughter stealer had been replaced by someone different. A bit like Tom when they were little. Almost i

Sophia stepped back. René Hasard was not i

She climbed the steps one at a time, a hand over her bandaged side, and when she reached the bright sunshine beyond the little door, she looked back down the curving stairs. She had almost let him kiss her. She should never, ever think about that again. She turned the key and locked René in the dark.

“Idon’t know, Tom. What should I have done?” Sophia leaned back into the pillows, having just vomited for the second time into the bowl Orla held out for her. She was glad she had at least waited until now for that humiliation.

“Let her alone,” Orla chided. “She’ll rip that cut open if she keeps this up.”

Tom stopped limping about his room and sat down in the armchair, thumping his stick to take out his frustration. His room was on the ground floor, in the oldest part of the house, thick-walled, gloomy, and away from the nicer apartments. Which was the way he liked it. It was as far as Sophia had gotten after she left the sanctuary.

“It is well sewn,” said Orla, peeking beneath the blanket, where Tom could not see. She handed Sophia a wet cloth for her face.

“I’m shocked a man like that would know how to do it,” Tom commented. “And how in the name of the holy saints is he getting out of the north wing?”

Sophia shook her head. She didn’t know. There was much, she now realized, that they did not know about René Hasard. They might not know anything about him at all. “And where is the other one?” Tom continued. “What’s his name?”

“Benoit,” Orla replied.

Tom turned to Sophia. “Did Hasard mention where he was?”

She shook her head. They’d been careless about Benoit—watching René, or trying to, but not his manservant, misjudging Benoit’s potential in the same way they had always depended on others underestimating Orla. A stupid mistake. The kind that could get someone’s head cut off.

“Then the question is,” Tom said, “how soon might there be a hue and cry over his missing master?”

Sophia sighed. “Orla, go to the north wing and see if you can find Benoit. Tell him that René sends word that he’s with his fiancée, and might not return until just before di

He nodded. Orla, grim as ever, patted her head once and hurried out Tom’s door. Tom leaned back in his chair, rubbing a rough chin. “LeBlanc knew the Red Rook would come. It was a trap.”

“But I think,” Sophia ventured, “that he did not expect the window.”

“Perhaps not.”

Sophia closed her eyes, trying not to remember the way it had felt to pull a knife out of a dead man. “Is there news from the Holiday?”

“Oh, yes. It’s all over the countryside. Burglary and murder. They’re tracking the scent west. Spear is with them. He was worried sick when you didn’t come back. I thought he was going to tear the house down.” Tom waited, but Sophia didn’t say anything. “And the dead man was a stranger to you?”

“Yes. Was he LeBlanc’s?”

“Must’ve been. He was a stranger to everyone. And who do you think killed him?”

Sophia’s eyes opened. “Wasn’t it me?”

“Did you clean your knife?”

“No.” Sophia thought back to the fuzzy dark with the foxes barking and the u

“No, only your own. Where is the other knife, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“And more to the point, whose knife was it, who put it into the stranger’s chest, and who else might have seen you climbing out a window of the Holiday?”

They were questions neither of them could answer.

Tom said, “We are in a fix, my lovely sister.”

She nodded.

“But I am very glad you’re not dead.”

She smiled wanly from his pillow. She had considered long ago what might happen on one of the Rook’s missions, what was sure to happen if she was caught. She had thrown her death on the scale, weighed it out against her future, and made a choice. And that choice had been a secret shame to her. It hadn’t been that many generations since the chaotic centuries following the Great Death, when all that could be expected from life was feuding, war, and the struggle to survive it. Personal fulfillment just wasn’t one’s top priority when the children were starving or raiders were cresting the hill. But Sophia Bellamy had not been born into those dark times. She had been born into an enlightenment, an age of privilege, art, education, living in a way that her Bellamy ancestors would not have dared to dream. And she’d been more than willing to risk it, everything her forebears had struggled to achieve, for nothing better than adventure and a challenge to her wits. When it came down to it, Sophia Bellamy simply feared boredom more than she feared death.

But all of that had changed the first time she crawled into the Tombs. Being the Red Rook hadn’t been about adventure then. Suddenly it was about blood and disease and death and the children who watched their parents’ heads being tossed into coffins. It was about injustice and a city possessed. It was about stealing from Allemande and cheating the Razor. And knowing that, in her opinion, only made her actions all the more reprehensible.

What sort of person went to the lengths she did to dam a flood of evil, and then lay awake at night dreading when there would be no more evil behind the dam? Without the Red Rook, she would be nothing but the girl she was before and the girl she would become: a wife, doing just as her mother and grandmother had, doomed to managing a house and di

The truth was that Sophia Bellamy went to the Sunken City because she didn’t know who she’d be anymore if she didn’t. If she was caught, she wouldn’t be sorry. She would only be sorry that the people she loved most would bear the pain of it.

“Tonight,” Tom said, “let’s go on with this di

Sophia nodded. She had to.

“Hasard will be sick, and we’ll send Benoit for Dr. Wi

She nodded again. Wi

“Then, after di

He was not harmless now. Sophia stared at the finely woven fibers of Tom’s linen sheets. Either the motion of her head or Tom’s words were making her ill.