The Skylighter (The Keepers' Chronicles Book 2) (20 page)

Elma stood outside the Council House and waved for Rafi and Johanna to enter ahead of her. “Just a moment, Jacaré, I’d like a word with you.”

Johanna shot a dark look at the pair of them before allowing the doors to swing closed behind her.

Jacaré tilted back his head and blew out a long breath, waiting for the hedgewitch to speak.

“You aren’t going to be strong enough to reestablish the bond between Johanna and the barrier by yourself. You simply don’t have the
essência
to do it.”

“I can—”

“Be honest with me and with yourself. You need Leão’s power to make it possible, but now the boy’s gone. That was the real reason you brought him with you, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t answer.

“Do you have a new plan?”

“I do.” One he didn’t intend to share. With anyone.

She snorted. “Do you think I can’t feel it? That I didn’t notice the change? I’ve spent the last five hundred years surrounded by people with a trickle of
essência
. I notice when power grows and wanes, Jacaré. It’s been part of my survival.”

His fingers curled into tight fists, trying to hide a slight tremble. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Oh, but he did.

“As the barrier grows weaker, you grow stronger.” She thumped her staff on the wooden deck under their feet. “It’s an itch now, a hint of what could be, and you’re tempted to pull it all down to take back what was yours.”

“Never.” The word was a growl and a threat. “Every action I’ve taken has been for the good of Olinda.”

Jacaré hadn’t noticed a significant difference in his
essência
until he tried to heal Johanna’s hand. He’d long ago learned his limits and usually stopped himself before he reached them. At first he was confused by the amount of power that was left in his reservoir. Then the reason became clear. As the wall unraveled, his power returned to him.

“Was this the reason the Mage Council didn’t want to send you? Because they knew you were a destroyer disguised as a savior?”

“Oh, come now,” he said, forcing himself to relax his fingers one at a time. “I’m the least of their worries.”

He turned for the doors, afraid that if he didn’t move, she’d see the temptation in his eyes. It was a truth he’d barely admitted to himself. A truth that hinged on one word, one peculiar adjective.

In his last fight with the Mage Council, the one that forced Jacaré to take matters into his own hands, Amelia had called Johanna the
chave
—the key. It wasn’t until the barrier began to unravel that he understood what Amelia had meant, the thing she must have known all along but never revealed.

Johanna’s link to the barrier could allow him to unlock the portion of his
essência
that was tied into the wall. It was risky, but it was possible. If he pulled too much, the entire thing might collapse. The spell had gone awry in the first place, leaving him in his current state, and there was a chance it could happen again.

No. It was better that he carefully avoided thoughts of what could be, of the Mage he’d once been. There was no point in going back. He’d lived three centuries without the power; he’d live the rest of his life, no matter how long, without it.

“Take me with you,” she commanded, and he felt the hum as she gathered her power, making a threat of her own. “I can renew the bond and save you from the temptation.”

“No.” He opened the doors. “You’re old and you move too slowly.” It wasn’t a lie, she would hinder their pace, but he could see that her offer had value. The old woman might be of assistance or a burden.

He’d rather not take the chance.

“It wasn’t a request, Jacaré. I will be joining you,” she said as he walked away. “You have your people to care for and I have mine.”

Inside the Council House, Johanna stood on one side of the room with Didsbury nearby, both perusing the books that filled the two-story bookshelf on one of the rear walls. Whispering, and occasionally reaching out to touch a binding with hesitant fingers.

Rafi stood as far from Johanna as possible, with his back against one of the pillars that supported the building, arms folded across his chest, chin down a little, but his head was turned toward the girl who held his heart.

Jacaré felt something—not quite sympathy, more an understanding—as he watched the young man. He remembered too well watching a girl across a room as she spoke so easily with someone else, wishing for that simple camaraderie, that shared history.

Young lords—
And young upstart Mages,
he thought with a hint of sorrow—shouldn’t always get what they want. There was more to learn from loss than from gain. And Jacaré guessed that before this was all over, Rafi would know that lesson far too well.

Dom lay awake staring at the canopy of his bed and worrying about all the things he should be doing. When his bedroom door opened and then closed with a barely audible click, he stayed still, waiting for someone to speak or leave.

The thick carpet on the floor muffled the sound of anyone coming closer, but Dom sensed that someone was there, watching him.

The person’s shape was indistinct. It could be his mother, he supposed, checking to see if her wayward son was in his bed.

He held his breath, hoping that if the intruder saw he was asleep, whoever it was would leave him alone. Peering under his lashes, he watched the shadow move closer. A hand raised, trying to feel its way forward.

Not a servant, then, or his mother. It was someone unfamiliar with his room.

Say something, do something,
he mentally commanded, but the prowler didn’t call out, continuing to ease forward in the darkness.

Dom’s fingers slid across the cool linen of his sheets till they brushed against the dagger that had become his constant bedfellow.

Bursting from the bedcovers, he snatched the extended arm and yanked it forward. The body fell against him, and he used the momentum to roll on top of it. His feet were on the floor; his arm was across the assailant’s chest; his knife plunged down where he thought the throat should be.

Her throat.

The knife bit deep, shearing through hair and sinking into the bed. He gasped and the body beneath him giggled.

She giggled.

“There are easier ways to get me into your bed, Dominic,” Maribelle said, making no effort to shove him away. “You could have
asked
.”

He responded with a string of the vilest curse words he could think of, which only made her laugh harder.

“I almost killed you,” he said, pushing off the bed and pacing a few steps away. His heart pounded and his hands shook. He had to lean against the wall to stop from falling.

How in Mother Lua’s name would he have explained Maribelle dead? In his bed?

“I don’t think you understand how close that was.” He fumbled for the window coverings, sliding them open to let the moonlight into his room.

She didn’t move, lying stretched out on his bed, her legs dangling off the edge. Instead of voluminous skirts and layers of lace, she wore slim-fitting pants and flat-soled boots laced to the knee.

“Maribelle?”

“My hair is stuck. I’m quite literally pinned to your bed.” Her voice turned to a husky whisper. “Was that your plan?”

“Light, Maribelle. You are worse than I am, and I didn’t think that was possible.” Stomping back to the bed, angry now instead of shaken, he yanked the knife out of the bed and pulled a yard of severed hair with it. The piece was about two fingers thick and inky as midnight silk. “Here.”

Her mouth dropped open, and she reached for the side of her neck where the hair had been cut a knuckle’s distance from her skin. “Oh.”

“Exactly.”

“I definitely didn’t anticipate that sort of reaction.”

A growl rose from deep in Dom’s chest.

“Are you always this grouchy when you wake up?” She took the hair from him and divided it into six pieces.

“I wasn’t sleeping, but I’d like to. How did you get in here?” He watched as she carefully knotted the strips, fingers moving in a memorized pattern, braiding the hair. “I have guards posted outside my door and my mother’s.” And at both ends of the hallway that led to her room, but he wasn’t going to say that aloud.

Maribelle looked up from her task, her expression condescending. “What guard turns a beautiful lady away from his lord’s room in the middle of the night? Especially when that lord is you and that lady is me.”

“I’ve never had a lady in my room.”

“Lady, maid, whoever.”

“Maribelle—”

“I don’t really care. It worked. Your guard believed you had asked for me, and let me in.”

“That’s something I’ll have to change.”

She smiled. “Do you really want to?”

He made an inarticulate noise and her grin widened.

“Why are you here? Honestly? I know you wouldn’t come dressed in pants and a . . .” He shook his head, trying to figure out what she was wearing.

“It’s a cape,” she said, swirling the floor-length material. “It makes it easy to blend in with the shadows.”

“I noticed. It’s one of the reasons I
almost killed you
.” He wiped the corners of his mouth with his fingers. “Do I want to know why you’re wearing that?”

“You’ll want to know that three of the five people I identified as potential spies are outside your estate right now.”

“Did they get locked out after curfew?” Since his last discussion with Maribelle, Dom had encouraged his mother and Raul—who would soon be named captain—to set a strict time for all guards and members of the household staff to be back on the estate. They’d agreed, saying that it was a good idea, but hadn’t extended the curfew to the rest of the township because many of the pubs and inns relied on their after-dark customers for the majority of their profits.

Later, in private, Lady DeSilva had cautioned Dom not to put too much faith in the curfew’s ability to stop the spies. “As much evil is done in the light as in the darkness,” she had reminded him. “If someone needs to get a message out, they’ll find a way.”

He’d felt naive. Maribelle had obviously been passing and receiving messages despite the people Lady DeSilva had assigned to watch their guest. It made sense that others were sneaking around without garnering much notice.

“It doesn’t matter
why
they’re out. These three are the only remaining suspects. And they are all outside your estate now. At the same time. Doesn’t that seem an unlikely coincidence?”

It did. And he hoped that it meant they were closer to finding the traitor. “I’m coming with you.”

“I hoped you would.” She pulled a string from the torn sheets and expertly wrapped it around the woven hair, turning it into a bracelet of sorts, and dropped it on his bedside table. “You’ll draw too much attention like that. You have to change.”

He’d gone to bed in a pair of loose cotton pants. They hung low on his hips, baring every square inch of skin from shoulder to hip bone. He almost felt embarrassed, until he realized she’d already seen him half-dressed.

“Do you really want me to?” He echoed what she’d said earlier. It was a joke . . . for the most part. There was something developing between them, though he wasn’t sure if he’d call it friendship as much as sociable antagonism.

Leaning back on her elbows, her cape a dark smear against his white bed linens, she studied him. “No, but then we certainly wouldn’t get anything
productive
done tonight.”

•  •  •

Their first stop—tracking down the stable boy Maribelle had identified—was a bust. The poor boy had been called home to help with his three younger siblings while his mother was ill.

“That makes it simple,” Maribelle said, checking a slim slip of paper in her pocket.

It was dark, but Dom could make out the scratch of letters across the page. “Where are we going?” He hugged close behind her, trying to read the square script, but she tucked it into a pocket of her cloak and moved on without a question of direction.

They slipped between houses on a street that featured moderately prosperous businesses with living quarters above. Everything was closed for the evening, but lights burned in many of the upstairs windows. Laborers toiling late into the night, or families gathered before bed. Either way, Dom doubted anyone would notice them.

Which was saying something, considering that normally Maribelle drew attention with her bright, scandalously cut dresses.

This other Maribelle—dressed in black, moving like a huntress, quiet and unseen—made him wonder which side was closer to her true self. When she stepped onto a garden fence that abutted the back side of a house and used it to propel herself onto a second-floor windowsill, he had a fairly good guess.

“I know you have your own spies moving around Santiago. I want to know how many are on my own staff,” he said as he followed her onto the slate roof.

“Shh,” she hissed, dropping to her belly and shimmying up the sharp pitch. “I’m not telling you my secrets.”

He lay beside her and looked at the home directly across the street. A baker was preparing dough for his morning wares, his work area lit by a few lamps and a fire glowing in the oven.

“That baker doesn’t work for me. We only have Cook and a few assistants. Is he one of your relays?”

“Next house up.”

Dom squinted but couldn’t make out the sign above the door. Light seeped from between a gap in the curtains, but he had no sense of what was going on beyond.

“Who’s in there?”

“If there’s no movement in five minutes, we’ll move closer.”

She was excellent at deflecting his questions, and had he not been on a roof, on a quiet street, late at night, he would have pushed for better answers. Instead he lay silently waiting for something to happen.

The side door of the house opened onto the alley, and Dom went rigid. Two people, male and female by their shapes, stepped outside.

They stood close, talking. The man rubbed his hands up and down the woman’s arms as if trying to keep her warm. She leaned in, their chests pressed together.