The Mask of Mirrors, M. Carrick; [best books to read in your 20s .txt] 📗

safe distance—safe for her, to run if she felt the need. To know he wasn’t a threat. A shadow out of place in the sunlit marble halls of the Charterhouse.

He put his hands up in a gesture of truce. “So much for my assumption that it would be quiet up here, with everyone occupied downstairs. You do have pattern’s own knack for stumbling into my business.”

Of course. What better time to break into the Charterhouse than while everyone was distracted?

She had an impulse to lash out with some kind of vicious response. But it wasn’t the Rook’s fault that she’d let Vargo turn her into his puppet.

Still, her attempt at courtesy came out brittle. “Thank you. For the other night.”

“I should be thanking you. You rushed in to save everyone.” The hood tilted. He stepped closer, his soft tone laced with concern. “Even I am pleasantly surprised by the thoroughness of the Cinquerat’s verdicts. You’re not?”

A hundred different words all stuck in her throat. She couldn’t admit the truth to him, not yet. Because she had no idea who was under that hood—who was walking around with full knowledge of her lies. And that was bad enough, without confessing her mistakes to him as well.

“Well, I hope you’ll be pleased by this.” Digging into his coat, he pulled out a tightly wrapped roll of black, threaded with colorful embroidery. “I was going to have your corner boy deliver this. I managed to retrieve it before any of Indestor’s staff found it.”

For half an instant, she thought it was her mother’s lost koszenie. But no—that was gone beyond retrieval. What the Rook held was the shawl he’d given her, in apology for that night in the kitchen. As Ren accepted it, he added with a slight laugh, “I’m afraid you’re on your own for replacing the knives, though.”

The kindness made her vision swim. Ren blinked it away, trying to think of something she could do for him in return. Without knowing who he was, how could she know what he wanted?

The Fiangiolli fire.

She clutched the shawl convulsively to her chest. The Rook stiffened. “What’s wrong?”

“Vargo,” she whispered.

Leather creaked as his hand curled into a fist. “What about Vargo?”

The warmth of his tone was gone as if it had never been. Whatever the Rook might have felt about Vargo before, today’s events had put him into the ranks of the nobility. The Rook’s enemies.

Take someone’s money in exchange for planting contraband on a rival’s property, and then someone else’s money to blow that contraband up. That was what Novrus had said. And Vargo had twice reacted oddly when Ren brought up the fire.

She looked up, into the shadows of the hood, trying to meet the place his eyes would be if she could see them. “I think the note you found was from him. Or about him. He’s the one who put the black powder in the Fiangiolli warehouse, then set it off. He’s the reason Kolya Serrado died.”

The Rook didn’t move, not even a breath—yet she felt the shift, the cold radiating from him like a moonless winter night. We don’t kill, he’d said to her.

For the first time, she questioned it.

“I see,” he said, softly enough that she only heard it because the hallway was utterly silent. “It seems I have even more reason to take an interest in Eret Vargo.”

Ren straightened her shoulders. “We both do. Perhaps we might assist each other going forward.”

“No.” The Rook stepped back. “Enough people have been hurt already. I’ll take care of this one myself.”

The retreat—the rejection—felt like a slap. But before Ren could say anything, laughter came echoing up the stairwell. Without a word of farewell, the Rook moved rapidly across the marble hall, through a door that Ren expected to be locked, and was gone before the trio of clerks crested the landing.

The Charterhouse, Old Island: Fellun 7

The Rook knew the Charterhouse: not only as it was now, but as it had been since the seven clan statues were knocked down and the five faces of the Cinquerat erected. Memories like layers of river silt guided him through forgotten hallways, hidden doors, unused offices covered in dust save for the paths he’d left through them.

Vargo. Eret Vargo, now. He’d harbored some dislike for the man, but little interest; the Cinquerat was the Rook’s reason for existing. Them, and the corrupted nobility of Nadežra, and the shattered remnants of the Tyrant’s power, which poisoned everything it touched.

Up to the attic archives, full of moths and contracts and papers nobody cared about anymore. The window there scraped in its tracks, paint as thick as the Rook’s memories making it stick until two quick jerks forced it open. Then he was out, free of the oppressive weight of the building, the proximity to the rot at its core.

With Renata… Arenza… Ren’s revelation, he had in his grasp a new thread that might let him drag that rot into the light and eradicate it for good.

The established houses were old, and the source of their power deeply buried. But Vargo’s rise had been unnaturally swift. If he owed that to a similar source, it would not be so well-concealed.

Vargo had conspired with Acrenix to gain an ennoblement charter.

Vargo was the enemy.

Levering himself up to the roof of the Charterhouse, the Rook leaned against the curve of the dome, hidden from everyone but the startled pigeons, and tore off his hood.

Grey Serrado fell to his knees, gulping in the cool spring air and biting down on the urge to scream. The murder he’d been blamed for, the murder he blamed himself for—Vargo was the one behind it. Vargo planted the black powder that lured Kolya to investigate. Vargo set it off. While Kolya was inside.

We don’t kill. It was a cornerstone of the entity that was the Rook. Something Grey had agreed to when he accepted the mantle.

His fingers curled, crumpling the hood under his hand. Slowly, he rose to