Page 108 of Tempest

The older woman only shrugged. “Somewhere in the Hook. You know the black flag as well as I do. It’ll be some island on no map, somewhere the crowns have not yet swallowed.”

“That number grows fewer and fewer every day,” Cat sighed.

And the illusion of Sara, a desperate and broken woman, sloughed off her as if she were a snake shedding its skin. She supposed that was not so far from the truth. Her back straightened and her hands went to the top of her dress, pulling it back into a more comfortable place.

“Thank you for your time,” she said.

Behind the desk, the Key Keeper looked perturbed, making to stand.

“I beg your pardon?”

A coin sang through the air, the silver catching the candlelight. It landed with a clink, but the madam didn’t break focus, still staring at Cat’s face. Her black eyes sharpened behind her glasses, her face turning to carved stone. It was not difficult to imagine how such a small woman commanded the entire Paradise Quarter, and everyone in it.

“Worked for the Duchess, you say,” she muttered, whatever motherly kindness she bore disappearing with Cat’s ruse.

“Worked with,” Cat answered neatly. Her mind was already down the stairs, back out into the courtyard to find Fell and return to the Fledge. To continue onto the next step of a swiftly unfolding plan. But she lingered, letting the Key Keeper look her over.

“I see,” the older woman said. “If it’s the Duchess you’re looking for, I can’t help you. There’s been no word since Archenport was reclaimed. And frankly, there better not be. For a madam to abandon her own like that,” she clucked her tongue with derision, shaking her head.

“You would not say that if you saw the gallows of Archenport,” Cat replied, her mind a forest of nooses. “Besides, the Duchess doesn’t need anyone looking after her, least of all me.”

“Then who do you seek, pray tell?” The Key Keeper folded her arms around her middle, the key ring jingling at her waist. “Because you’re certainly looking for someone, Sara.”

She drawled the name, the deceit of it on full display.

Cat weighed another name in her mind. She had not seen Valerian Kane in a brothel in many years, and she doubted he would step foot in one within a crown colony. Besides, it was too precious a card to play.

“I never expected to see a song tower in a crown harbor,” she answered instead, watching the twitch of amusement cross the other woman’s face.

“I am a purveyor of flesh, not stone. What would I know of such things? I am but a simple woman.”

“Aren’t we all, madam?” Cat mused. How often she slipped behind such a mask, using the downfalls of her sex to their rare advantage. “For all the sighs under this roof, there are whispers too.”

With that, she drew another coin from her purse, this one flashing gold, stamped with the image of the Meridian lion. It joined the silver on the desk.

The Key Keeper eyed it, then Cat’s purse. Three more coins slid across the wood, and she smiled.

“You have your answer, I think,” she said, pocketing the money.

Cat hummed low in her throat. “The Arcayans paid to build the tower?”

The older woman leaned back in her seat, hands spread wide. “You are clearly no stranger to the Lyrian Sea, or the crowns that feast upon it. Everything is for sale, be it flesh or rum or sand or stone.”

The truth of it was undeniable, as real as the coins still clinking in Cat’s purse.

“May the sea always sing for you, madam,” Cat said, turning for the door.

“And you,” the woman called after her as she left. “I hope you find what you are looking for.”

I don’t, Cat thought, swallowing down a thousand different things to say.

Her face burned, cheeks suddenly red. Doom loomed over her from Archenport, the noose ever-taunting. But Valerian was doom of a different kind. And she did not intend to escape one predator just to fall to another.

Cat took the most direct route back through the main house, keeping her eyes forwards on the path ahead. Even so, she glimpsed flesh and parted lips around every corner, undulating silhouettes rippling behind silk curtains, their shadows dancing on the walls. Between the many candles strewn throughout the building, and the even more numerous bodies, the air was tight and humid. Cat gasped in relief when she made it back outside, the night breeze a balm on her flushed skin.

She scanned the crowd, looking for the beacon of a silk brocade vest. But the red lantern light turned everyone a similar shade of scarlet, until so many varied faces and bodies seemed the same. Cat was quietly glad she had not sampled any of the drinks circulating through the Quarter, lest she lose her head entirely.

Then she finally spotted him. Not exactly where she left Fell an hour ago, but close enough. He sat beneath the gnarled branches of a flowering tree, fuchsia petals half obscuring him from the people milling around. But it did not hide him from a particularly valiant young woman, her white-blonde hair adorned with red flowers, as she tried to pry some attention out of him.