Page 56 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

“Emeralds, darling; let’s not be dour,” Gail said. Nore bit her lip to stifle any commentary and switched the onyx out to match her other ear. She would be deliriously happy when they were free of Gail, when she could run her own assignments as she chose. When she could be free of both of them, she amended, glancing at Caspian’s trunk against the far wall. She had never so deeply missed her terrible apartment, her evil cat, and the familiar dreariness of Nettlepool.

“The solicitor?” she prompted.

Gail waved a hand. “Scaelan,” he said, drifting over to Caspian’s trunk then glancing through the contents. Nore grimaced. “My lord has reason to believe he would know who the chosen Scaelan suitor is. Scaelas, their lord, has played his cards close to his chest, but considering the High Lady of Locke grew up in Scaela, they are the presumed front-runner.”

“Ah.” Nore dabbed perfume—of a distinctly nonmagical variety—onto her wrists. “Anything else?”

“Hmm?” he asked, holding up a jeweled dagger he’d found in Caspian’s trunk. He dropped it when he looked up to find Nore watching him. “Not officially, no. Anything else you find interesting would probably interest me, though.”

“Right,” Nore said. She missed clear, obvious objectives. She missed the duchess’s careful hand. She missed feeling like she was useful and good at her job. Even when she didn’t know the full picture of Celestine’s machinations, she at least knew there was a larger tapestry in the first place. “I’ll do my best.”

Officially, the solicitor was not Nore’s client. Instead, his partner, a Mx. Patran Flindt, took the meeting while the solicitor, Aren Flindt, sat in the corner with a folder of documents, disinterested as Nore introduced her business and began on the first round of wines. Caspian stood at her side, connected to a well provided by the household for his use.

“Come, darling,” Patran said after trying a few that they insisted Aren would particularly enjoy. “Have a taste.”

She, too, wished Aren would join. Though Patran was good company, they weren’t particularly useful as far as Nore knew, and she wasn’t going to get answers from Aren with him sitting morosely in the corner, focusing on his work. Perhaps the onyxes would have been a better choice after all.

Nore glanced over, cycling through possibilities: a loveless marriage of Idistran nobility (it seemed she could not throw a stone in these parts without hitting some sort of Idistran nobility, Caspian included), a quick temper, disinterest fostered by years of companionship—but then Aren smiled, and there was something gentle about it. Kind, even. Nore dismissed all options out of hand.

“Let me finish this, and then I will, as long as you don’t drink it all first.”

Nore allowed a little smile herself. “I always encourage moderation,” she said.

Aren’s gaze skipped to her. “Keep an eye on them, Nore. They will drink you out of your samples if you’re not careful.” His accent was different from Patran’s—Patran sounded like Caspian, and Aren did not; nor did he sound like Gail. She always thought Caspian’s accent arced upward on the vowels, and she’d never heard anyone pronounce her name with quite the care that he did, the softness of the r as gentle as a caress—that was, if he ever said her name again. Aren’s arced further, shifting the end of her name into a rounded burr, a roll that made “Nore Gordon” sound like a character in a storybook instead of the exhausted body she knew she was deep down.

It was almost as if Caspian had read her analysis. His gaze was on a sword, hanging over the fireplace. “You’re Scaelan,” he said, and it took Nore a second to realize he was speaking to Aren, not Patran. “Aren’t you?”

Aren’s smile faltered. “I am,” Aren said, stiffer, and Nore looked between the two men, then to Patran’s tight-lipped expression. She had told Caspian that their role was to fade into the background, to resist the urge to pry—prying was messy and unprofessional. Asking questions, especially when her clients were sober, only put their guard up, which could be detrimental to Nore’s ability to gather information.

Or maybe, she thought darkly, he was actively trying to disrupt her information gathering. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying to derail her mission entirely.

Nore was searching for something to say to dispel the sudden tension when Aren said again, “I am. From the northwest, near the border with Cleoc Strata.”

Caspian nodded. Nore’s fingers found a new bottle, but her thoughts were focused on the conversation. “I spent some time in Cleoc Strata after the war.” There was a beat of silence. “You’re the primary well here, right? You’re keeping the household magic sustained.”

Nore glanced at the wall, at the steady, pale magelights that supplemented the light from the burning fire in the grate and candles around the room. They looked no different from the ones she’d seen elsewhere—maybe a touch paler?

Aren softened. “Yes,” he said. “It’s easier—the staff has been… uneasy, with winter coming on. I’d rather do it myself.”

Nore frowned at Patran. “What does winter have to do with it?” she asked, recognizing she was breaking her own rules and hoping desperately she wasn’t overstepping.

Aren glanced between Nore and Caspian. “You weren’t here last winter, were you?”

“No,” Nore said before Caspian could answer. She didn’t know where Caspian had been last winter, but she remembered the notes from Lucia’s maid. Something about a bad Wintertide, which was the Idistran version of the holiday she knew better as Winterfast in Lindan: the short thirteenth month of the year, fifteen days usually spent in feasting, celebration, and reflection. “What happened?”

Aren set his papers aside. He came over and sat next to Patran, accepting the glass of wine Nore offered as he wound an arm around his spouse’s shoulder. Patran leaned into him, already loose-limbed with the wine. Caspian sat, too, on the armchair across from Patran and Aren; Nore took the cue and perched on the arm of his chair.

“I know there are rumors about power fluctuations—but the rumors I’ve heard are greatly exaggerated at best and fabricated at worst.” Aren shook his head, taking a sip of his wine. “Even here in Eprain, things remain mostly steady—a wobble here and there, but that mostly stopped over the summer.”

Nore and Caspian exchanged a glance. That did differ from what she’d been hearing, where they spoke of power as if it was a tremulous, unpredictable thing.

“I thought it was… unstable.”

Aren shrugged. “Yes and no. Certainly at first, after the war. Some days, it was so strong and clear that… I felt overfull of it, like a wineskin ready to burst. And then, some days, some hours, it was a struggle to come up with anything. Sometimes, there are seconds where it flickers. But most of what you hear is overreaction and petty annoyance.”

“But Wintertide?” Nore asked, running her thumb over the stem of her glass as she did her best to commit Aren’s tale to memory.

“Yes,” Aren sighed. He took a sip, gathering his thoughts. “There was a drought in power in the cold of winter, which lasted nearly a week; then a surge, which damaged infrastructure that was already stalling. As if the power just… woke up, and—”