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It began with a crime. The theft of a boy.
It was not presented as a crime. Indeed, the man in charge of the whole enterprise was a soldier, the Captain of the Arrow Squadron, charged with protecting the King of Castellane and seeing to it that the Laws he made were carried out.
He had an exceeding dislike of criminals.
His name was Aristide Jolivet, and as he lifted his hand to rap sharply on the door of the orphanage, the large, square-cut amethyst on his left hand gleamed in the light of the moon. Etched into it was a lion, the symbol of the city. It appeared to be roaring.
Silence. Jolivet frowned. He was not a man who liked to wait, or was often made to do it. He glanced behind him, where the narrow path cut into the cliffside fell away to the sea. He’d always thought this an odd place for an orphanage. The cliffs that rose above Castellane’s northern bay were jagged, dotted with scars like the face of a pox survivor, and dusted with a thin layer of loose, gravelly scree. It was easy to lose one’s footing up here, and a dozen or so people did every year, tumbling from the cliffs into the green sea below. None made it to shore afterward—for even if they survived the fall,the crocodiles lurking beneath the surface of the water knew the meaning of a scream and a splash.
Yet, somehow, the Home of the Orphans of Aigon managed to prevent most, if not all, of their charges from being devoured. Considering the usual fate of parentless children on the streets of the city, these were good odds. A place at the Orfelinat was a coveted one.
Jolivet frowned and knocked again. The sound echoed, as if the stones themselves were chiming. The granite façade of the Home flowed out from the cliff’s face, encircled by a single gray-green wall. The Orfelinat did not sit atop the cliffs but rather was part of them. It had once been a fortress of sorts, back in the time of the old Empire. In fact, the door upon which he was knocking was etched with faded words in the old language of Magna Callatis. They meant nothing to him. He’d never seen the point in knowing a language no one spoke anymore.
The door swung wide. The woman on the other side, wearing the blue and white of a Sister of Aigon, looked at Jolivet with wary recognition. “My apologies for the wait, Legate,” she said. “I did not know you’d be returning today.”
Jolivet inclined his head politely. “Sister Bonafilia,” he said. “May I enter?”
She hesitated, though Jolivet did not know why. The question was merely a formality. If he wanted to enter the Orfelinat, there was nothing she or any of the Sisters could do to prevent him.
“I thought,” she said, “that when you came before, and then left, it meant you had not found what you wanted here.”
He looked at her more closely. Sister Bonafilia was a neat-looking, small woman, with bony features and rough hands. Her clothes were plain, many times washed and worn again.
“I came before to see what there was to see,” he said. “I reported my findings to the Palace. I am back on their orders. On theKing’sorders.”
She hesitated a moment more, her hand on the doorpost. Thesun had begun to set already: It was winter, after all, the dry season. The clouds massed on the horizon had begun their transformation into roses and gold. Jolivet frowned again; he had hoped to complete this errand before dark.
Sister Bonafilia inclined her head. “Very well.”
She stepped back to let Jolivet over the doorstep. Inside was a hall of hollowed granite, the ceiling decorated with faded tiles in green and gold, the colors of the old Empire, now gone a thousand years. Holy Sisters in their worn linen dresses hovered by the walls, staring. The stone floor was worn past smoothness by the passage of years; it now dipped and swayed like the surface of the ocean. Stone steps led upward, no doubt to the children’s dormitories.
Several children—girls, no more than eleven or twelve—descended the stairs. They stopped, wide-eyed, catching sight of Jolivet in his gleaming uniform of red and gold, his ceremonial sword at his side.
The girls scampered back up the stairs, silent as mice under the fixed gaze of a cat. For the first time, Sister Bonafilia’s composure began to fray. “Please,” she said. “Coming here like this—it will frighten the children.”
Jolivet smiled thinly. “I need not stay long at all, if you will cooperate with the King’s orders.”
“And what are those orders?”
—
Kel and Cas were playing pirate battles in the dirt. It was a game they had invented, and required few tools save sticks and several prized marbles, which Kel had won from some of the older boys at card games. Kel was cheating, as he usually did, but Cas never seemed to mind. He gave the game his full concentration anyway, locks of his dark-blond hair falling into his freckled face as he scowled and plotted his ship’s next move.
Only a few minutes ago, Sister Jenofa had shooed them, along with most of the other boys in their dormitory, out to the garden.She did not say why, only urged them to amuse themselves. Kel had no questions. Usually at this hour he would be at the washbasin, scrubbing his face and hands with harsh soap in preparation for dinner. “A clean soul in a clean body,” Sister Bonafilia liked to say. “Health is wealth, and I wish you all to be rich.”
Kel pushed his hair back. It was getting long; soon enough, Sister Bonafilia would notice, seize him, and lop it off with kitchen shears, muttering to herself. Kel didn’t mind. He knew she had a special affection for him, as she often went out of her way to sneak him tarts from the kitchen, and only yelled at him a little bit when he was caught climbing the more dangerous rocks, the ones that jutted out over the ocean.
“It’s getting dark,” Cas said, squinting up at the sky, which was deepening to violet. Kel wished he could see the ocean from here. It was the one thing that never bored him, looking at the sea. He’d tried to explain it to Cas—how it always changed, was a different color every day, the light slightly altered—but Cas only shrugged good-naturedly. He didn’t need to understand why Kel did the things he did. Kel was his friend, so it was all right. “What do you think they want us out here for, anyway?”
Before Kel could answer, two figures emerged from beneath the archway that connected the walled garden to the main fortress. (Kel always called it a fortress, not an orphanage. It was much more dashing to live in a fortress than in a place you went because nobody wanted you.)
One of the figures was Sister Bonafilia. The other was familiar to most inhabitants of Castellane. A tall man, wearing a brass-buttoned coat printed over the breast with the sigil of two arrows at odds with each other. His boots and vambraces were studded with nails. He rode at the head of the Arrow Squadron—the King’s most highly trained soldiers—as they paraded through the city on feast days or at celebrations. The city folk called him the Eagle of the Fall, and indeed he resembled a sort of raptor. He was tall and wiry, his bony face marked with multiple scars that stood out white against his olive skin.
He was Legate Aristide Jolivet, and this was the second time Kel had seen him at the Orfelinat. Which was strange. To his knowledge, military leaders did not visit orphanages. But less than a month ago, the boys had been playing in the garden, as they were today, when Kel had glanced over toward the fortress and seen a flash of red and gold.
He had always been fascinated by Jolivet, who often figured as a villain in his games with Cas—a pirate and thief hunter who, once he caught hold of an innocent criminal, would lock them up in the Tully prison and torture them for information. Not that Kel or Cas ever broke, of course; a snitch was the worst thing you could be.
Regardless, Kel had recognized Jolivet immediately and scrambled to his feet. By the time he raced to the fortress, Jolivet was gone, and when he asked Sister Bonafilia if the Legate had been there, she’d told him not to be ridiculous and to stop imagining things.
