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Kadou shook his head. “Never mind. Anything else you wanted me to clarify?”
“No. I am at your service.”
Before Zeliha left, she kissed Eyne and hugged Kadou and bid him be so, so careful. She shot Evemer a warning look as he helped her mount up on the horse that she’d hired from the best stable in the city, and she rode off with a tiny squad of kahyalar, just enough to get her to the gates. The kahyalar on watch there would announce her, and then it was up to the gods and to fate to determine whether those passionately loyal kahyalar that Eozena had found would flock to her side, and how many, and whether it would be enough, and how many of the others were . . . corrupt. There had been no news from the palace, and no rumors in the city. The kahyalar had, to their credit, managed to keep from gossiping for once in their lives.
Kadou spent the afternoon outlining the plan with his own kahyalar at Madam Hoskadem’s kitchen table. They had to assume that the warehouse on the island would be abandoned by now, Siranos having fled somewhere else to regroup, if he hadn’t already fled the city.
They only had one lead left, so they went back to the Jasmine Tree.
They came up to the back door of the incense lounge an hour or two after sundown. Kadou and Evemer had lengths of linen fabric like scarves wrapped around their heads and faces—the night was not near chilly enough to really warrant bundling up like that, but with any luck they’d be mistaken for a pair of Tashazi, as long as no one looked closely enough to notice that their hems and scarves lacked the distinctive identifying embroidery that any real Tashazi would have displayed.
But the primary effect of the scarves was that it made it very distracting for Kadou to look at Evemer—it focused all the attention on his eyes. Kadou couldn’t afford to be thinking about them now. There was a job to do, a crisis to focus on. No time to get distracted by the memory of Evemer at his feet, the rough stubble-scratch of Evemer’s cheek under his palm.
There in the dark, they knocked on the door and waited.
It was opened a few moments later by a tired-looking girl of perhaps sixteen years old, mostly backlit by the rosy light of the incense lounge. “How many more times do I have to tell you people?” she snapped. “You go to the front now.”
“We’re here to make an exchange,” Evemer said.
“Yes,” she said. “At thefront,like I said, stupid.”
“The . . . front?” Kadou said.
She rolled her eyes massively. “The front of theshop,” she said, loud and slow, and slammed the door in their faces.
“I think we’re supposed to go to the front,” Kadou whispered wryly.
“I don’t like it. This isn’t the plan.”
Evemer had had opinions about the plan—he was the one who had driven most of the discussion, plotting out a dozen different possible gambits, all of which consisted of practical variations on the core mission:Go to the Jasmine Tree. Get information from the people at the back. Test whether they are still exchanging coins for counterfeits. Retreat and regroup. More tomorrow.
Clean. Careful. Conservative.
And none of them had involved going to the front. In fact, they had involved the precise opposite of that:Stay out of sight. Go quietly and sneakily. Shadows, alleys, disguises.
The disguises wouldn’t hold up in the light, other than to make them stick out instead of blending in. No one would identify them as Tashazi in the light, so they would just be two people with their faces suspiciously covered.
They could just ditch the plan. They could wing it. They’d talked enough about strategy, and Kadou had played enough games of chess with Evemer, that he felt like they had a fairly good grasp of each other’s instincts and movements.
But Evemer wasn’t the sort to improvise anything, and it was foolish and reckless to press onward. Evemer was a better strategist than he was, so Evemer’s judgment was the weightier one. “You’ll be dragging me back home now, I suppose.”
“Would you go quietly if I did?”
“I would go, but not quietly. I wouldn’t like it. It’d feel like giving up, and that’s even worse than not trying at all. But . . . this wasn’t the plan,” he said, defeated. He’d exhausted all his rhetorical arguments already—Evemer would insist on taking no unnecessary risks whatsoever.
Evemer said nothing for nearly a full minute, but Kadou could practically hear the whirling calculations. “A wise tactician holds no sentimental attachment to their plans,” Evemer said slowly. He was quoting Beydamur, the ancient military strategist who, a thousand years before, had been general to Asanbughaa, the legendary founder of Arast and the first monarch of the Misba dynasty.
“Bullshit,” Kadou said. “Bullshit. You’re not about to say you’ve changed your mind.”
“Aren’t I,” Evemer said.
“Are you? What are youdoing?”
“Trying to meet you in the middle, sir,” Evemer said woodenly. He sighed and rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Let’s not get killed. That’s my only request.”
What a terrifying declaration to make, and what a wonderful one. Kadou pushed away his nerves and the voice in his head that said he was about to make a horrible mistake. They regrouped briefly with Melek, who was watching from a distance in case Evemer was caught in a fight and Kadou needed to flee. Tadek, not in any shape to run or fight with his injured leg, had been left at Durdona’s house.
Then, shoving aside his nervesagain,Kadou led Evemer to the front of the incense lounge.
