“Have you ever seen its like before?” Violetta asked, pitching her voice to be heard above the rain pounding on the carriage roof. Their driver took them slowly up into the towering hills that surrounded the bowl of Delphinium. Combined with the drainage of the River Larkspur and the sea itself, those hills damned the poorer citizens below to a life on the verge of submersion, but scaling them held other dangers. The cobbling had only recently been extended to all the great houses, and the sides of the roads still gave way occasionally, loosing stones or slicking them with silt and mud. Their driver took his time, especially with the clouded, starless sky above.
“No,” Evelyn said. “I know of nothing that could provoke that response, in animal or man.”
Violetta grimaced. She had no doubt been hoping that Evelyn would know an antidote. The girl, barely twenty-five, sometimes had a faith in Evelyn that bordered on the ridiculous.
When Violetta looked at her, she saw...what? A lonely woman, doing her best with the hand that had been dealt to her? Or did she somehow see the tremor in Evelyn’s scarred hands, the pinched thinness of her face, the rot staring out from behind her eyes, and still not care?
She couldn’t. The carriage rattled to a stop. Above the din of the rain, Evelyn thought she heard a shout. Then the carriage bobbed; the driver had dismounted.
Violetta leaned forward and peered through the window in the door. “I can’t see him, my lady. Should I—?” She hesitated, no doubt because the heavy layers of fabric she wore were still soaked through where Evelyn’s umbrella had not protected her. The hair on the drenched side of her head was threatening to come down from its pins, drying slowly against her cheek.
Evelyn arched a brow. Violetta huffed a resigned laugh, then opened the door out into the squall. She stepped out, then looked back. Evelyn held up a hand: leave the door open.
Violetta nodded, then struck out along the road, disappearing into the darkness. She had left the lantern with Evelyn, who moved it to the far side of the carriage and lowered its shade, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness outside. She could see Violetta moving, pale and reflective against the black. She watched her pick her way along the road, and then off of it, steps turning sucking and heavy. And then she knelt. Something was there, at the side of the road. The rain refused to gentle as Violetta stood back up, turning towards the carriage. Whatever it was, if it had once lived, it was surely drowned now. Evelyn eased herself back into her seat and turned the lantern back to full glare as Violetta regained the road and came to the door.
“It’s a man,” Violetta said. “He’s still breathing.” Not drowned at all. “A drunk?”
“No, my lady. We think he’s injured.”
“And what does he think?”
“He’s unconscious. Breathing, but not well.” Of course. The options that lay before her were all unappetizing. To leave him would invite the disgust of her servants, and it had taken her years to find Violetta and even a driver who did not mind going into and out of the city in such rains, in such darkness. To take him back down to the closest hospital would add another hour to their journey, and the weather would only worsen.
And she did not want a convalescing house guest. But the last option was the simplest. “Bring him here, then. He can sleep off whatever ails him at the manor.”
Violetta looked relieved as she ducked back out of the carriage.
It took them another ten minutes to get the man over to the road and hoisted into the seat across from Evelyn. Violetta settled in beside her, hair fallen down from her pins and clothing turned grey and muddy. The carriage lurched back into motion, and Evelyn lifted the lantern to get a better look at her new guest.
He was just on the cusp of middle age, at most only a few years older than herself, with high cheekbones and a broad jaw that unbalanced his visage. Or, perhaps, the blame could be laid at the contusions that puttied his face, the blood dried on his cracked lips. He had been severely beaten, and Evelyn suspected that beneath his clothing he had broken ribs, or worse.
Somebody had wanted him dead. Somebody... Somebody had seen the tattoo that peeked out beneath his workman’s shirt collar. Evelyn reached forward and pulled the fabric back just a few inches, exposing black ink mapping out the pattern of an Imperial soldier. An officer, given that it encroached on his neck.
Her heart sped up.
“My lady,” Violetta said, voice low. “He’s...”
A traitor. Did that still scan? How could he have betrayed the country, if his fellows ruled that country? But the Judiciary served the empire, and in the eyes of Delphinium, this was still a war. This was still a rebellion.
“We need to report him,” Violetta said. Report him, and draw the Judiciary’s attention. Even if the situation with The Verity blew over quickly, the increased scrutiny would be unwelcome. Kill him, whispered the part of her that had been so quick to the slaughter in the harbor. Easier, surely, and easily done with him already unconscious, and the rain so fierce.
They could leave the body by the side of the road. Farther out, into the fields. Violetta would do it, given the fear now on her face.But no; there were other uses for a soldier, a traitor, a man so covered with ink that it spoke to high rank. She had known it from the moment she saw those tattoos. Her heart was a pounding drum inside her chest.
Evelyn considered her assistant for a moment, then said, “He stays in the house.”
Violetta flinched, shocked. “He—he will be a problem.”
“Have you ever known me to not act in the defense of my home?” That cowed her quickly, and Evelyn’s features softened. She looked back at the soldier, imagining the wealth of information he must possess. “He stays in the house, and we keep him cloistered. He will know much that can be of use. Movements at the borders, perhaps the structure of the blockades. He may even know what manner of plague has struck our sailors.”
Violetta shifted, uneasy and afraid. “The Judiciary can learn as much from him. It is not our responsibility. My lady, to even have him in this carriage puts us in danger if we don’t report him. Puts you in danger.”
It did. If the Judiciary found them out, they could have her hanged for treason. A good citizen did not obscure contact with the enemy. It was not a risk she would have taken a year ago. But now, with Delphinium rotting beneath her, Evelyn looked on the bloodied body across from her and saw only opportunity. “If we find him out, we gain the upper hand. We help the city, and strengthen our own position.”
“And if he is no defector? If he will not tell us what he knows, if he tries to harm us?”
“Then we will break him.”
Evelyn hid the soldier in one of the unused bedrooms in the manor’s inner sanctum, a set of rooms that she kept to almost exclusively and that let out upon the greenhouse. Only Violetta and two maids Violetta had personally selected were allowed in those halls, a modicum of privacy that Evelyn clung to even as she needed people to change her sheets, to cook her food. It was useful now apart from her more personal paranoid fancies; it meant that they could ensure only she and Violetta tended to the sickroom and saw their patient’s tattoos.
She left Violetta to clean him up and moved deeper into the house, lantern swaying in her hand. Close to the door to her gardens, she kept a small workroom, locked by a single key she kept on her person at all times. She opened the door and slipped inside, setting the lantern on a hook.