Centuria Books · A Kiss for the Knife
A Kiss for the Knife — Read the First Chapter
She brought a knife to kill him. Keeping him alive may cost her everything.
Chapter 1
Lis needed permission to enter Caldris, so she meant to steal some.
The customs clerk kept the permits in a brass-edged case beside his elbow. The key rode in his waistcoat pocket.
Whenever a woman leaned across his desk, he planted his elbow on the case. Sound judgment about women. Less sound about his waistcoat.
She had watched him for eleven minutes. The queue had moved twice.
“He’ll still be here tomorrow,” Ossel said.
“So will we, at this rate.”
“You could pay him.”
“I could also eat my boots. Neither would improve the afternoon.”
Ossel hid a grin behind his scarf. Damp had tightened his sandy curls, leaving one impudent loop above his left ear that Lis wanted to flatten. He looked far too pleased with the afternoon for a man whose safe return depended on her stealing from a customs house.
She could pay him if she meant to sleep hungry in the street. The board above his desk demanded an entry fee, a lodging bond, and a return allowance. That last one could only be bought after the other two. Every charge came out of the coins she had saved for food and a room.
Dessa’s work letters promised lower fees. They also named the merchant who had supposedly hired them. Lis had watched the first clerk send a traveler aside while a messenger checked his employer’s address. She preferred not to learn whether Dessa’s lies could survive the same test.
She counted the coins through the cloth of her pocket, keeping her expression bored. Two for an emergency boat. Enough for several cheap meals. The remainder for lodging where the owner would value prompt payment above questions. None had been set aside to improve a customs clerk’s afternoon.
Ossel nudged her boot with his. He had noticed the calculation and stopped suggesting she spend money he knew they needed.
Beyond the queue, soldiers drove iron probes through sacks of barley, spilling grain across the quay. A woman spread her apron to catch it. The nearest soldier moved her aside with his boot without interrupting his conversation.
Lis drew her jacket closed over the knife at her belt.
“Not him,” Ossel murmured.
“I know.”
“Your face didn’t.”
She gave the soldier a last, useful inspection: rust near his buckle, soaked boots, sleep crust at one eye. An ordinary bastard on an ordinary shift. There would be plenty more inside the city, and she had a job for one particular man.
The river rolled brown beneath the landing, knocking the waiting barges against their pilings. Nothing passed the inner gate until its load had been inspected. Beyond the barrier, Caldris climbed in tiers of pale stone beneath blue roof tiles and smoke from a hundred chimneys. Its palace wall rose so high that the windows seemed designed for people who had never dropped anything they needed.
Home lay west, past the gate towers and two days of river. Four days going back against the current. Longer if someone took an interest in her face.
She preferred to give them something else to study.
“The lamp-oil shed,” she said. “Behind the green cart.”
Ossel glanced toward it. A porter had left its door ajar.
“You checked inside?”
“Empty. Broken window at the back.”
“And the dog?”
“No dogs on this landing. One in the guardhouse. Chained.”
He worked a finger beneath the bead pouch at his throat. “Twenty minutes.”
“I need twelve.”
“You needed twelve in Terness. I spent thirty-eight minutes beneath a fish stall.”
“You ate very well.”
“I was a cat. I have opinions about that smell now.”
She let herself smile at him. He squeezed her arm once, then wandered away with the idle patience of a man looking for a place to piss.
Lis moved up the queue.
The clerk had three sorts of pass. Thin white slips permitted a single crossing through the inner gate; red ones admitted carts to the warehouses. The stout gray cards lay beneath both, protected from weather and casual inspection by the cheaper permits. Lis had watched a wool carrier present one at the river barrier and again at the lodging desk before putting it away for his return.
Those cards carried a prepaid bond, stamped in batches for merchants who sent different workers on successive journeys. The carrier’s name was entered only when the card reached the second desk. A blank one would turn her from an unexplained traveler into somebody whose charges had already been settled, the sort of transformation that needed no glass bead and was generally more respected.
A gray card would give them a room without showing the work letters Dessa had supplied. It would also get them back to the river before anyone asked which western gate had first let them in.
She had no wish to learn how good Dessa’s false letters were from inside a cell.
The clerk coughed into a cloth and reached for his tea, drawing Lis’s attention to the silver hook at his waistcoat pocket. The key hung there, too far from the desk to reach without leaning across his precious case.
He needed a reason to stand.
A cart creaked toward the scales on her right. Its lower wheel wobbled. The load carried flour sacks beneath a canvas sheet, and dirty water dripped from the rear board.
Lis smelled the flour before the canvas shifted: sour, carrying the damp cellar reek of grain left in a flooded hold.
The porter stopped to shift the canvas. His boot slid in the white paste beneath the cart. He caught a side rail, but a sack rolled off the load and struck his ankle.
He sat down hard.
The cart driver swore at him for dropping it.
Lis stepped out of the queue. “That’s kind. Ask whether the sack’s all right.”
“Keep moving.”
“Gladly. Tell him to lend me his spare foot.”
The porter tried to pull his leg free. He had gone pale around the mouth. Lis squatted beside him and shoved the sack away with both arms, soaking her cuff in cold flour paste.
“Can you move it?” she asked.
He nodded too quickly, already glancing at the driver to judge how much pain he could admit before losing the day’s pay.
“Take your time. He’s got a fine range of stupid things to say. We won’t miss them.”
The driver reached for her shoulder. Lis looked at his fingers until he withdrew them.
Ossel padded out behind the green cart. The brindled dog paused beside a coil of rope, shook himself, and trotted toward the scales. A fleck of blue glass shone against the skin inside his ear. He kept that side turned from the soldiers.
Lis tore open the wet seam of the fallen sack.
“Here,” the driver snapped. “That’s paid flour.”
She scooped up a gray lump and held it out. “Then somebody owes it an apology.”
Two women in the queue laughed. The clerk looked up.
“This cart’s been passed?” Lis called.
“Mind your own load,” said the driver.
“Which one’s the army mark? That red crown?”
The clerk stood. A hurt porter could wait, but flour being charged to the crown had acquired an urgency that brought him around the desk.
He approached with the cloth pressed to his nose. Lis rose to meet him with the ruined grain cupped in her right hand, leaving her left loose beside the soaked cuff.
“Look at that,” she said. “My aunt would call it soup, and she’d still make you apologize to the bowl.”
The clerk bent over her offering. She stepped nearer as a passing barrow crowded her back. Her empty hand caught the silver hook, lifted it clear, and folded the key beneath her thumb.
He never looked down.
“Open the next sack,” he told the driver.
“There’s a fee for unloading.”
“Then you can charge yourself.”
Lis liked him a little for that. She wished he had displayed such charm before she stole his key.
Ossel nosed the scale pan. The driver kicked at him and missed. A soldier came over to see what had made the dog bark, leaving the permit desk clear for four paces in either direction.
Lis returned to the porter. “Sit against the post. Keep the foot up.”
“They’ll dock me for the sack.”
“They’ll need to prove you brought the river in it.”
She put his discarded cap into his hand and stood between him and the desk. The clerk was arguing over a second gray lump. The queue had bent toward the performance.
Lis eased the key into the case lock behind her hip.
The lid rose a finger’s width, enough for her to feel past white paper and the smooth edge of a red slip. She caught a thick card beneath them, eased it through the opening, and lowered the lid before the clerk could turn. The key twisted in the lock as she tucked the stolen card inside her jacket.
“You,” the clerk said.
Lis faced him with flour still in her hand.
“Where did you come from?”
Ossel stopped barking.
“That queue,” she said. “I’ve aged in it.”
“Your trade.”
“Rope.”
He held out a torn length from the cart. “Would this have held that load?”
She took it with her empty hand. The key pressed cold against her fingers. She turned the cord once, hiding the silver in the twist.
“When it was new.”
“And now?”
“Now I’d trust it to hold the driver’s trousers up. On a calm day.”
More laughter, sharp enough to make the driver curse. The clerk reached for the cord. Lis gave it back and guided the key hook into his pocket in the same movement.
The hook caught in the lining, tugging against her nail when she tried to withdraw her hand.
The clerk frowned. She leaned nearer, pinching the bad cord as if to show him the rotten fibers. The hook slipped free of the lining and settled where it belonged.
“See that pale bit?” she asked. “That’s the inside going soft.”
He pulled the cord away. “I can see.”
“Then I’d have someone else move the cart.”
She left him looking at the porter.
Ossel followed a man carrying empty baskets toward the lamp-oil shed. Lis returned to her place, shook flour from her hands, and let three people complain about her getting back into the queue. She had earned the complaints. Stealing was easier when she could listen to someone being honestly cross.
At the second desk, she laid down the gray card and entered L. Valinder on its blank name line. The clerk checked the prepaid stamp before glancing at her writing. Apparently a settled charge made a western name easier to tolerate.
“Carrier and one helper,” the second clerk read. “No cart?”
“Buying cordage.”
“Where’s your helper?”
Ossel arrived with his rust coat crooked and his curls flattened under his scarf. He carried their bundle over one shoulder. The collar hid his bead pouch.
“Right here,” Lis said. “Expensive to feed. Easy to replace.”
“She tried,” he told the clerk. “The replacement bit her.”
The clerk stamped their card without smiling. Lis collected it, and they passed beneath the arch into Caldris.
She waited until the river wall stood between them and the desk before she looked back.
The injured porter sat beside a brazier. Someone had given him a folded coat for his foot. The driver was unloading his own cart.
Good. One small part of the world could behave itself.
“Seventeen minutes,” Ossel said.
“You took your time dressing.”
“A man entered the shed.”
She stopped.
“I stayed behind the barrels. He left.”
“You should have given the signal.”
“With which human voice?”
Lis resumed walking. His coat sleeve brushed hers. She let it.
“Did he see the glass?”
“He saw a dog asleep. People are very pleased when you do what they expect.”
“You must find that difficult.”
“Every day with you is a struggle.”
They bought hot onion bread from a woman beneath the gate tower. Lis paid for both pieces. Ossel accepted his without remark, though he knew how hard she kept account of their coins.
His hands were steady. Two changes since midday. He would eat again before sleeping and stay himself through the night.
She made him take the larger piece anyway.
Their room sat above a rope seller in a lane that smelled of hemp, tallow, and boiled cabbage. Lis liked it at once. She could hear the river. The window opened onto a flat shed roof, and the door had a lock she could defeat with a bent nail.
“Cozy,” Ossel said.
“You mean cheap.”
“I mean that bed’s shorter than I am.”
“Curl up.”
He stared at her until she threw him the blanket.
The rope seller had given them the room after a glance at the gray card and three silver coins. A bundle waited on the table. It wore blue twine, tied left over right in the manner Dessa had taught Lis when she still needed reminding which knot slipped under strain.
Lis closed the door.
“It wasn’t due until morning,” she said.
Ossel set down their bag. The pleasure went out of his face.
She examined the window latch, the soot inside the little hearth, and the dust behind the door. No second pair of boots had waited here. Whoever brought the bundle had come, set it down, and gone. The rope seller might have done it himself.
She would ask him later, without appearing to care.
Ossel drew the curtains. “You can still leave it wrapped.”
Lis worked the twine loose.
Inside lay a charcoal likeness, two folded sheets, and half of a familiar seal. Dessa had kept the matching half in Terness. The broken edge fit the shape Lis remembered: three little teeth beneath a deeper notch.
The likeness showed a dark-haired man looking slightly past the artist, his long nose turned enough to reveal a possible scar beneath his right ear. His mouth had the firm, impatient set of someone whose meals arrived while they were hot.
Lis had seen prettier men. She could think of two immediately.
Neither improved the drawing by comparison.
“That’s him?” Ossel asked.
“Perrat Hume. Buys grain through Tervas Marn. Sells it back when people are hungry enough.”
“He looks young for all that money.”
“Perhaps he learned to be a prick early.”
Dessa’s letter gave the meeting place in Caldris’s west quarter. Tomorrow, after the ninth bell. The room would be quiet. Hume would have dismissed the grain agent and would remain to read the books alone. Lis was to strike before the half-hour bell, leave by the river stairs, and carry no letter back across the frontier.
She read the lines about his injury twice. A sword cut suffered months before. The right shoulder still stiff, especially when he reached behind him.
Useful. Real injuries were harder to invent than wicked reputations.
The second sheet promised two hundred crowns, enough to clear the claim on Aunt Belda’s house and settle Orlan’s mill debt. Afterward there would still be money Lis had earned herself, which no clerk could claim because an older relative had once signed the wrong paper.
Below that, Dessa had written the words Lis wanted most.
Your family’s passage is being arranged.
Lis touched the paper there, careful not to smear the words she had waited so long to receive.
Belda had spent Lis’s eighteenth birthday repairing the charcoal jacket at the kitchen table. She had pretended the work was an ordinary nuisance, then produced a new inside pocket sized for the mismatched picks Lis kept losing through old seams. A practical present, made while the household counted flour by the cup.
Lis had worn it that evening to steal a collector’s appointment book. The book bought them eleven days before his next visit. She still remembered Belda sitting at the window on the twelfth morning, fingers resting on the new stitches as though she could feel where Lis had gone in them.
Two hundred crowns would buy more than another postponement. That was the arithmetic that made the charcoal man’s face difficult to regard as anything except a door standing between her family and the road.
Belda could take the good pot instead of hiding it beneath the floor. Orlan could stop sleeping in his boots. They could argue over where to go with a roof behind them and enough food ahead. Lis would even let her aunt complain that she had chosen badly.
She wanted to hear that complaint very much.
“It’s still just her writing,” Ossel said.
Lis moved her hand. “She got us this far.”
“You got us through the gate.”
“With the route she gave me.”
He sat on the short bed, pressing his heels against the floor. “You’ve stolen her papers. You’ve opened her locked doors. This is different.”
The knife rested against Lis’s hip. She had carried it for years. She knew what it did to rope, to thick canvas, to a hand that grabbed her in the dark.
She had never watched a man die because she had put it into him.
“I know what she’s paying for.”
“Does he?”
“He knows what starving people look like.”
Ossel studied her. She hated the patience in his face. It left her too much room to hear herself.
“Do you remember the winter boats?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“The full ones passing Terness. The soldiers on the decks.”
“I remember.”
She folded the payment sheet along its existing crease. Her uncle had visited the landing every morning that winter to ask when the grain would arrive. Near the end, Belda held his coat open for him because he could no longer lift his arms into the sleeves. He still went, as though somebody might release a sack of flour if he asked with enough patience.
Lis set the folded sheet beneath the likeness.
“Then don’t ask me to feel sorry for a grain hoarder.”
Ossel rubbed at a loose stitch in his coat. “I’m asking why nobody at the river has heard of him.”
They had spent the voyage asking quiet questions, but Hume had no wife anyone knew, no grand house anyone envied, no favorite tavern, and no debts. Even rich men usually left rubbish behind: a mistress, a cheated partner, or a servant whose grievance could be purchased for two cups of wine.
“He uses agents,” she said.
“Convenient man.”
“Secretive man. You’d hate him.”
His brief laugh brought the argument to a stop more effectively than another question would have done. Lis had meant to sting him just enough to escape his patience; she had not meant to make his friendship feel like another debt she resented.
“We’ll check,” she said.
“Before or after?”
“Don’t be an ass.”
She spread the meeting sketch on the table. Marn’s office stood two streets from the west rooms. The agent would keep an appointment book. He would also know which servants used the small hatch shown behind Hume’s chair.
She could steal the book in the morning and compare it with Dessa’s letter. A forged meeting would leave them a day to get out.
“If it doesn’t match,” Ossel said, “we leave.”
“Yes.”
He waited.
“I said yes.”
Ossel took the empty bread cloth downstairs. She heard him ask the rope seller where they could buy stew. His own voice carried easily through the boards, warm and a little rough from the river air.
Lis smoothed a crease in the charcoal likeness and discovered a small hollow beneath the man’s lower lip. She disliked the artist for noticing it almost as much as she disliked herself for looking again.
Outside, bells rang above the palace. A street singer began a verse about the ailing prince of Darsenne and his empty marriage bed. Lis had heard a worse version in Terness: a scarred face, a ruined body, women paid to lie about both. Whatever else differed across the border, its singers agreed that a prince’s chief duty was to disappoint women from a bed.
She pulled the curtain across the sound.
The likeness remained on the table. Tomorrow she would learn which parts of the letter were true.
Then she would have to decide whether she could do what it asked.
Chapter 2
Tervas Marn owned a good lock and a better dog.
Lis could have forgiven either on its own.
She stood beneath the grain agent’s office window with a coil of new cord over her arm, considering the eight coppers it had cost. Ossel had objected until she promised to return it to the rope seller, uncut and free of blood. Those were fair conditions. She had agreed to them with the confidence of a woman who had yet to meet the dog.
Now a broad muzzle pressed against the gap beneath the office door. The dog sniffed twice, drawing in whatever tales her boots could tell of cheap sausage and a borrowed room. She moved them out of reach.
She had meant to enter through the rear yard, pick the lock, and leave with the appointment book before Marn returned from the weighing house. Through a crack in the door, she could see why nobody had bothered to fit a second bolt. The dog occupied the entire patch of sunlight inside, and its chain reached both the office door and the foot of the narrow stair. It could defend every sensible route while lying down. Lis respected that sort of economy, even when it inconvenienced her.
A bribe might buy quiet. She had half a sausage in her pocket. It might also buy her the joy of meeting a large dog that liked sausage and eating hands.
She left the sausage where it was.
Across the street, Ossel leaned against a shuttered shop. He lifted his brows.
Lis touched two fingers to her nose and pointed at the office door.
He tipped his chin toward the high window. No borrowed shape would help with that animal; it would smell Ossel whether he wore fur, feathers, or a face that earned better wages. Lis had learned this during a poultry theft that remained a painful subject between them. She considered the window.
The back door opened. A cleaner stepped out with a bucket and threw dirty water into the gutter. Lis rescued her boots before the wave reached them.
“Morning,” she said.
The cleaner looked at the cord, then at Lis’s jacket. “He won’t pay before the work’s done.”
“That’s what I came to discuss.”
“You and everyone else.”
Lis followed her glance to the rear window. A sash hung crooked, held up by a wooden wedge. The cord inside its frame had snapped. Rich men could eat foreign fruit in winter and still expect a piece of string to live forever.
“Window first,” Lis said. “Then he can tell me how poor he is.”
“He’s at the scales.”
“Good. We can skip that part.”
The cleaner rubbed her knuckles against her apron. Her short gray hair stuck to her temples, and a wet patch darkened one knee where she had been scrubbing. Lis could picture Marn finding his appointment book gone and asking why his cleaner had spent so much time outside. She had come prepared to rob a grain agent, not cost this woman her wages. The difference would require care.
“Has he sent you?” the woman asked.
Lis lifted the coil. “He wants this matched. I’d rather do it while the light’s good.”
She let the woman supply the answer. A girl carrying cord beside a broken sash fitted neatly among Marn’s many unpleasant errands. Lis had learned to offer people something they already expected; a useful lie asked less of its listener.
“Dog won’t let you through.”
“I noticed.”
“He only bites people who try.”
“A fair arrangement. Have you got a stool?”
The cleaner studied Lis a little longer. Then she went to fetch one.
While the cleaner fetched the stool, Lis set her coil beneath the window and studied the rooms beyond the panes. A broad desk held a red cloth-bound book, close enough to the edge that its worn spine faced her. Past an open inner door, a short stair climbed to a smaller room whose window stood above the yard roof. Marn had given his dog command of the lower floor. The upper room would depend on its catch.
The dog could keep the stairs. She had climbed worse roofs for smaller rewards.
“You can’t carry that through a locked door,” the cleaner said when she returned.
“I’ll work from here.”
“Suit yourself.”