“I’m not dressed to meet a princess!” Ember said.
Allen laughed. “Princess Amelia doesn’t bother about that sort of thing.”
They went in. Ember had not known a building could hold so much—paintings the size of doors, statues in the alcoves, nobles passing in clothes worth more than the tavern she’d come from. She let it wash over her and tried to keep up.
Then Jet stopped.
She felt it before she understood it. His shoulders had gone tight and his breathing had changed, like a thought had walked up and put a hand on the back of his neck. He turned and took her by both shoulders.
“If you see a man with long black hair, unkempt—don’t look at him. Don’t meet his eyes, don’t do anything quick. Look at the floor and keep walking.”
She nodded fast, not knowing what she was agreeing to. Over Jet’s shoulder, Allen was giving her a small, steadying look. Jet got a smile assembled, more or less, and straightened up.
“Right. Let’s go see a princess.”
They were taken up to a balcony on the second floor. It looked out over the royal gardens and, past them, the open green of the plains running off the castle’s north side. Allen left them there. Jet waved her to a small ornate table set for three, and they sat, and the third chair stood empty between them.
Ember looked at it. Looked at Jet.
“Is that—” She couldn’t keep it off her face. “Is that for the princess?”
Jet smiled at the look of her. “It is.”
The doors opened behind them, and the most beautiful woman Ember had ever seen came through. She crossed the floor like the heels weren’t there, a plain dress somehow making her more striking than all the finery downstairs—auburn hair mostly in a braid, two loose loops framing her face, diamonds at her ears, a pearl at her throat. But it was the smile that did it. Ember became aware that her own mouth was open and could not seem to close it.
Jet rose, and Ember scrambled up after him. He inclined his head.
“Princess Amelia.”
“Jet.” She turned to Ember and tipped her head a fraction. “And who’s this?”
“Ember. Our newest.”
“Ember.” Amelia turned the name over, taking the girl in from head to foot. Then the smile warmed. “A lovely name. For a lovely young lady.”
Ember’s face went hot. “Th—thank you.”
Amelia took the middle chair. She breathed out and turned to the maid who had come in at her heel—a woman who, Ember noticed, had not once taken her eyes off Jet.
“You can take a moment, Marcy. We’ve business to talk.”
“But, Princess.” Marcy’s alarm was plain. She fought for the words, found them, and put them in an urgent whisper, one finger half-lifted toward Jet. “He’s a Ret.”
Ember’s stomach dropped. She looked to Jet—
—and found him with one eyebrow up and the faint amusement of a man who had heard it a thousand times and stopped spending feeling on it.
Amelia shook her head slowly.
“He’s Jet.” Gentle, but it was a correction. “He’s my friend, and he has earned that name a hundred times over. You needn’t worry about me.”
She turned a hand toward the door.
Marcy gave the princess one last look, and Jet a different one, and went. The door shut on the three of them.
Amelia put her head down on the table.
Then her shoes came off beneath it, one and then the other, and Ember watched a princess kick them away across the floor. Jet was grinning—not surprised, more like this was the part he’d come for.
“Amelia,” he said, soft and dry. “I think your maid might not be too fond of my kind.”
Amelia lifted her head. The wild eyes and wilder grin beneath it bore no resemblance to the woman who had glided in two minutes ago.
“You think?”
She matched his tone exactly, and then they were both laughing, the loose, unguarded laughter of two people who had known each other a long time and did not have to perform any of it.
“She means well. But some of what comes out of her mouth, God above.” Amelia pressed the heel of her hand to her temple. “I’ve had a headache for a week.”
Jet took a flask out of his jacket. “Here.”
She had it to her mouth before he had finished offering and pulled a long swallow. Her face seized around it on the way down.
“That’s half alcohol, at least,” Jet said—disapproving, and visibly impressed all the same.
She laughed through the grimace and winked. “That’s what it takes these days.”
She handed it back and dropped against the chair, letting it work.
Ember had no words at all. The distance between this woman and the one who had entered was doing something dizzying to her head. Was this how princesses were, behind closed doors?
Amelia caught the look on her and gave her a smaller, apologetic smile.
“Sorry, kid. The job wants me dainty and gracious for the nobles and the staff all day.” She knocked her knuckles against Jet’s shoulder. “With Jet I get to be the actual person. Turns out the actual person gets more done.”
She looked between them.
“So. How’d you fall in with the Owls?”
“Um.” Ember tried to find the shape of it. “I worked a bar where Jet and Noel stayed. A lot of—a lot happened. And at the end of it Jet asked if I wanted to come.”
“A lot happened,” Amelia repeated.
Her eyes stayed on Ember a beat too long.
In that beat, Ember understood that the woman across from her was a good deal sharper than she let the room believe—that she was reading the set of Ember’s shoulders, the things beneath the words. Her pulse picked up. Being looked at and weighed was an old feeling, and not a good one, and old habit answered it before she could think: she sat up, smoothed her face, and gave Amelia a pleasant smile.
Amelia frowned at exactly that.
“You felt it, didn’t you?”
Ember’s smile faltered. “Felt what?”
“The moment I stopped believing you.”
Ember went still.
Amelia studied her, but the look had softened now.
“When I pressed, you knew. Before I said anything.”
“I just—” Ember looked toward Jet, then back. “I could tell.”
“Could you tell what I felt?”
Ember hesitated. “Curious. But not only curious.”
Amelia’s brows rose.
“What else?”
“Worried.” Ember swallowed. “And sad, a little. But not because of me.”
For the first time since she had entered, Amelia had no answer ready.
She leaned back slowly.
“You might be a sensor.”
Ember’s brows drew in. “A—what?”
“A sensor. Some people are tuned to what others feel. Not mind-reading, nothing so clean as that. But when a room changes, they change with it. When the person across from them feels something strongly enough, they catch the edge of it.”
She glanced at Jet. He looked as lost as Ember.
“The knack usually grows in someone who had to read rooms young,” Amelia went on. “Someone who learned that noticing first was safer than noticing late.”
Her eyes held Ember’s.
“Which is what you were doing just now, I’d guess.”
Ember thought of the tavern. Of the rooms before the tavern.
She nodded slowly.
Amelia reached for one of the cups on the table and slid it toward her.
“That’s a difficult thing to carry without knowing what it is.”
Ember wrapped both hands around the cup, though she had not noticed herself wanting anything to hold.
“You’ve landed somewhere good now,” Amelia said. “Jet’s people are kind, the lot of them. You’ll be all right with them.”
Then she leaned in and dropped her voice to a conspirator’s whisper.
“And I’m technically his employer, so if he ever gives you grief, you come to me. I’ll set him straight.”
Ember laughed. Amelia laughed with her, and Jet watched the two of them with something content in his face.
It took a moment to settle and left smiles behind when it did.
Then Amelia looked at Ember a little too long again, and Ember felt the shift come into her before it showed—the brightness thinning, the smile going small. Amelia rubbed her wrist and looked off the balcony at nothing.
“Reid’s brother was a sensor too,” she said quietly.
Ember did not understand a word of it. She looked to Jet. He gave the smallest shake of his head—leave it—and she did. She held still, and the three of them sat in it for a while.
It was Jet who came back up out of it.
“I’ve got that report, boss. Whenever you want it.”
Amelia drew a breath and put the working smile back on, though kinder this time.
“Go on, then.”
“So some of these small-town garrisons aren’t being watched closely enough,” Amelia said when he had finished.
“That’s how it reads.”
She turned it over.
“I’ll send people out to the smaller towns. Quietly. No warning to the soldiers, kept well out of sight, so they hear how the garrisons actually treat the people they’re meant to protect. Then I’ll act on it.”
“Your people aren’t as quiet as they think.”
Amelia gave him a flat look. “My people are perfectly capable of being quiet.”
“Your people wear polished boots and ask where the cleanest inn is.”
“Then recommend someone better.”
Jet considered it. “There are a few. Not yours.”
“Anyone I can trust?”
“Anyone you can trust wouldn’t be much use.”
Her mouth twitched.
“Anyone you trust, then.”
“That’s a shorter list.”
“Give me the names.”
Jet nodded. “I’ll have them for you.”
“Good. What else?”
“You wanted the state of the rebel army.” He chose the words carefully. “What’s left of them is starting to pull back together. How far along, I couldn’t say yet. And I did the rounds in the towns you asked about. You were right—the mood’s turning against the Crown again. Nobody’s said the word rebellion to me. But it’s behind some of their eyes.”
Amelia let out a long breath.
“Nobody’ll say the word. Not after three years ago.”
She drew a pouch of silver from her purse and set it in his hand.
“Keep your ear to it for me. And see if you can put names to whoever’s rebuilding that army.”
“Sure thing.”
The pouch went into his pocket.
She stood, and they stood with her.
“I’ve a dozen meetings left today, all of them with worse company than you two.”
She turned to Ember and dropped a small curtsy.
“It was a real pleasure, Ember.”
Ember curtsied back, clumsy and glad. “Likewise!”
Allen met them again and walked them back down through the castle.
“I can’t believe I just met a princess,” Ember said, shaking her head, unable to hold it in.
Jet started to laugh—and cut it dead.
She turned.
His face had closed, and his back had gone straight. Ahead of them, a tall man came down the corridor at an unhurried slouch, long black hair hanging unbrushed around his face.
Ember remembered the warning at the doors.
She put her eyes on the floor.
She tracked him at the edge of her sight. Allen’s walk had gone stiff and careful. Jet looked at nothing but the middle distance.
The man drew level—and stopped, and turned.
“Hello, Jet.”
Jet stopped too. “Morning, Reid. How’ve you been?”
“Fine.”
Reid’s eyes moved over them. Ember kept hers down. This was the man Amelia had spoken of, the one whose brother had been a sensor, and she wanted very much to look and did not.
“You’ve just come from Amelia?”
“She wanted the countryside towns. Where they sit, politically.”
“The rebel army’s recruiting again.”
“Couldn’t tell you. Only that the people aren’t pleased with the Crown right now.”
“No.” Reid almost laughed.
He looked at Allen.
“I trust these two haven’t been any trouble to walk about?”
“No, sir,” Allen said.
“You don’t have to call me sir.”
Then Reid’s attention came back and settled on Ember, head down at his side. An eyebrow went up. He looked to Jet and Allen.
“Did you tell her about me?”
“No,” Jet said quickly. “She’s shy.”
He gave Ember’s shoulder the lightest nudge, and she made herself raise her head.
Reid was taller than Jet, taller than Allen—an oversized shirt buttoned wrong, trousers slept in, hair and beard left to themselves. Her first thought was that the height was the only frightening thing about him.
Her second, taken from the way Jet and Allen were standing, was that she was badly wrong about that.
His eyes, when she found them, looked like they had once been able to cut and had since gone tired.
He stepped closer. His brow drew down, and it looked almost like worry.
Then he went down on one knee in front of her, putting his face level with hers.
Ember went rigid.
At the edge of her sight, Allen had stopped breathing properly. And she saw Jet’s hand settle, quiet, on the hilt of the gold sword—the one she had never once seen him draw.
The air had gone tight as a held note.
She could not look away from Reid’s face.
“You remind me of someone,” he said.
Curious. A thread of caution in it.
“Are you from Varquez?”
“N—no.”
“Hm.”
He looked a moment more. Then he stood, and it was gone, whatever it had been.
He turned back to Jet.
“She’s still in there?”
Jet nodded.
Reid dipped his head at Allen and went on past them, down the corridor.
When he was well gone, Allen let his breath out all at once. Jet’s hand came off the sword. He put it on Ember’s shoulder instead.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
No one spoke as they went back through the castle. The thing Ember had been so full of a few minutes ago was gone, and something colder and more curious sat where it had been. At the gates, Allen took a quick leave of them and was gone.
When the castle had dropped out of sight behind them, Ember asked.
“That man. Reid. Who is he? Amelia named him, and you and Allen—you were both afraid of him. Why?”
Jet thought about it and picked his way through the answer.
“Reid used to command the whole Royal Army. He stepped down three years ago, after something I’m not going to explain on a public road.”
“What happened?”
“Something big.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one you’re getting.”
Ember frowned at him.
Jet looked back toward the castle.
“Common folk call him Reid the Red. The soldiers who served under him called him Reid the Plague.”
“Why?”
“You’ll hear enough stories without me adding mine.”
She walked a few more steps with that.
“And Amelia?”
Jet glanced at her.
“What about her?”
“She said his name like she knew him.”
Jet was quiet for a moment.
“He’s the man Amelia is promised to.”
Ember stopped walking.
“She’s going to marry him?”
“If nothing changes.”
She looked back, though the castle was hidden now behind the city.
Jet let her think about it. Then he stopped too, and when he turned, the lightness was all the way gone.
“But here’s the thing you keep. Reid is, without any doubt, the strongest person alive.”
Ember said nothing.
“He is genuinely dangerous. You saw how Allen and I went around him—that wasn’t for nothing. When he’s near, you take care. Every time.”
He held her eye.
“All right?”
Ember swallowed. “All right.”
Jet got a smile up from somewhere and patted her shoulder.
“Good. Let’s go find the others.”
The Silent Beggar's Anthology 