Page 2 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

“Amalgamate made or carried,” Nore said, holding her ground. Nore, who was terrible even within her native system of magic, always found herself a little jealous of (and awed by) amalgamates, who had control over more than one system of magic. “Safely transported to a new system.”

Hands regarded her. She needed to prove her knowledge so she wouldn’t get scammed—even though Hands was someone she worked with regularly, she was well aware of how easily that relationship could sour. If he thought she would be an easy mark to pull a game on, to con her out of her money… Well. Could she blame him for taking that opportunity?

“You want something that dispels all magic,” Hands said again, as if waiting for her to tell him it was a joke. “So if someone walks in with spellstones—”

“They would crack,” Nore said.

“Or potions?”

“Wear off, or be rendered unusable.”

“I won’t find one,” Hands said, but Nore already knew he was cataloging in his brain, thinking of every possibility. She had not yet posed Hands a challenge he couldn’t best. “If it exists, it would have to be old. Old enough to predate most of the systems we have now, and to somehow still be intact and functional…”

Nore shrugged. Magical artifacts were not her trade, just like magic was not her calling, but she had made the study of them a pet project over the years—possibly out of spite. “It’s possible,” she said.

Hands looked out to sea, grumbling under his breath. “If such an artifact existed, everyone would have one.”

Nore doubted that. Most people didn’t care enough about systems outside their own to protect against them, or engage with magic they hadn’t grown up with—and amalgamates were rare enough that it barely mattered.

She knocked twice on the table. “I have faith in you,” she said. She slipped the man a purse of coins. “A deposit for your time. Leave word with Joana at the bar when you find it.”

“Go home,” the man said gruffly. “And get yourself a better job, for gods’ sake.”

Nore smiled and inclined her head. Once, on one of her earlier meetings with Hands, he had told her that this wasn’t a place for nice girls like her. She hadn’t corrected him—but after the third or fourth time doing her bidding, he had mostly stopped with such platitudes.

Nettlepool was back to its filthy worst by the time Nore was at her front door. It was always worse in the first glimmer of dawn, she thought, when the lavender glow of a new day illuminated the filth on the streets and the cloudy skies churned gray and malicious above. It could rain at any moment on any day from any direction, turning the filth into sludge, making the streets iridescent with oil and grime. She checked over her shoulder twice before opening the door and immediately secured the trio of locks behind her the second she was inside. There had been too many close calls over the years to forgo this process.

It was only when she reached her rooms on the fifth floor (three more locks, opened and re-bolted) that she allowed herself to relax. Her cat, Grimsby, wound through her legs, meowing with familiar annoyance. She gathered him up in her arms as she crossed the room—he didn’t mind her filth if it meant he received scritches behind his ears, and she ignored the way he bit her hand—and kicked off her boots. It was long past time for sleeping, long past time when her work should’ve been done, but a consistent schedule was not something Nore’s work allowed for. She made her way through the room in the dark, finding a book of matches where she’d left it on the sideboard. She struck one, careful not to ignite Grimsby’s fur, and lit a candle.

The candle flared to life, revealing a person sitting in her armchair next to the bookcase, waiting.

It was only due to her careful training that Nore didn’t even startle, didn’t suck in a quick breath, didn’t change expression. In less than a second, her knife was in her hand, a reflex she always practiced but never had to use—but she aborted the motion halfway through, recognizing the figure in the chair. Their broad, expressive features were now schooled into placid disinterest.

“Well met, Finch.”

“Sparrow,” she said, setting Grimsby down and sheathing her knife, trying to urge her heart to stop racing. She looked over the crown’s messenger—they looked as tired as she felt. It was likely Sparrow had been waiting here awhile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Dove requests you,” Sparrow said. “Leave your office at seventeen past eleven. There will be a coach waiting.”

Nore did not look at the clock; she knew it was only just past five in the morning, and she’d need to be clean and appropriately attired at ten to get in and go through her papers without looking suspicious before taking a meeting.

“Thank you for the update,” Nore said.

Sparrow nodded, stood, and slipped past Nore, out the door, and into the hallway. Nore locked the door behind them.

Alone in earnest, Nore let herself sag against the sideboard. She pressed a hand to her eyes. She was so tired—she couldn’t remember a time in which she hadn’t been tired. At thirty-one, no longer a girl, barely even a young woman, she felt every hour of her sleeplessness settling into her bones. Her adoptive aunt had always warned her that it would get worse as she grew older, but Nore, fool that she was at twenty, thought exhaustion was something that happened to other people.

She pushed away from the sideboard and shuffled into her bathing room. She would have to wash before going to her office, and her hair could dry while she slept.

Too few hours later, Nore was applying rouge to her cheeks and kohl to her eyes and pinning her two red braids up around her head. Usually she put more effort in when her employer requested a meeting, but the duchess had to know how late Nore had come home that morning, and she was far more valuable for her talent than for her beauty. She dressed quickly in a black day gown, cut low, with long flowing sleeves and buttoned embroidered cuffs at the wrist. Once she was appropriate, she fed Grimsby and scratched him under the chin, secured her heavy black cloak, triple-locked her door, and went on a long and roundabout walk to the harbor’s front.

Nettlepool had never grown on her. She crossed one of the markets, lifting her skirts to avoid the worst of the puddles, keeping her eyes straight to avoid the calls of the wares. The whole city smelled of rancid fish and waste, the docks were dirty, and the nearby smithing quarter spit black, greasy smoke that seemed to cling to everything. The only place she truly liked in Nettlepool was her own tiny apartment. It was safe. It made her feel safe.

And it felt better when she didn’t examine all the possible reasons that was the case.

Safety was a rarity that Nore valued as much as she feared it: to feel safe was to get complacent, and she could not allow that to happen. But she also needed to sleep, and at least in her apartment, she could. She kept a second set of rooms in a far nicer area of town, and had once even tried to stay there… but sleep had been impossible, and Grimsby spent the entire two-week period hissing at her from under the bed. Now, Nore used that apartment for hosting guests, a decoy from her true safe place, and little else.

She only diverted twice from her path: once to drop a rolled piece of parchment inside a small gap in the mortar of a wall near the flower district, and a second time to change the flag color on one of the postboxes in the garment district from black to red. She did not check to see if these communications were seen and interpreted; that was what made a good spy into a caught spy.