Troubled Waters

  "All right, I'll try, but I'm not promising anything myself. If this Raj did—does—live in Mondragon's shadow, he's hardly likely to show up in any of the registers. People like him disappear even when they don't want to; it's an upstream swim to find them if they don't want to be found. . . ."

  Both women nodded, but Richard was not deceived. Neither had any idea of life's rigors in Merovingen-below. They thought that because he could talk to the canalers in their own jargon, he could pluck the boy out of his hideout. It was a trust that settled uncomfortably around his shoulders, but it was better than the alternatives.

  "Now, I want you both to promise me that you'll let me handle this. I don't want either of you lifting a finger, whispering to a servant or, Murfy forbid, thinking you'll wander Below yourselves."

  "But Richard, I'm the only one who knows what he looks like, or has any idea where else he might have gone ..." Marina looked up at her brother.

  "Then tell me, and make me a sketch. I'm serious about this, both of you. No promises and I won't lift a finger."

  "We promise not to search for the boy ourselves," Andromeda said quickly. "But what will you do when you find him?"

  "If I find him," Richard corrected, "then I'll tell him Kamat's promises are good—no matter who makes them."

  He glowered at his sister and she thought the better of further comments. They left after Richard said he'd be down to Marina's rooms in an hour to get the sketch he'd asked for. He said he had a few loose ends to tie up before commencing his search, but in reality he slipped down the hall to his sparsely-decorated bedchamber and changed his clothes.

  "You don't look like you're going Below," Marina criticized when he appeared in tailored woolens.

  Richard took the sketch, studied it, and folded it carefully into his waist pocket. "I have a few other things to do first," he insisted.

  "You'll be a marked man if you go Below wearing that signet—" Andromeda emerged from one of the wing chairs. The lapis ring wasn't the House signet, but it was official enough to move Kamat money from one bank to another—a fact which clearly was not lost on the dowager.

  'I won't wear it Below. It's just ... as I said, I have a few other things to do first."

  Andromeda stared into her son's eyes until he turned away. "I'm sure you'll do what you think best."

  The ice in her voice was cold comfort to Richard who muttered his good-byes and beat an ungracious retreat. One of the many things Nikolay had not had time to teach his son was how to control the privileged members of his household. Richard could not lie to them, not artfully or creatively as a Househead must; he could only repeat his clumsy half-truths with rising intensity until one side or the other backed down.

  He would search for the boy, although Angel knew there was little enough hope of success there. He'd make some inquiries among the canalers and jobbers who regularly congregated in Kamat's slip waiting for work. But not now, not today. If there was karma, then it was, like all things, relative, and the karma attached to the Samurai was infinitely greater than the karma of an orphan.

  Richard let the front door slam behind him. A boatman in the Kamat slip shouted up, offering his services to the Househead. Richard waved him aside and scuttled across the St. John bridge like a shamed dog.

  'He won't help," Marina muttered, her voice filled with childish disappointment. "He lied to us."

  "No more than we did to him," her mother corrected.

  The dowager wrapped her thin fingers around a bell cord. She yanked it three times in quick succession before facing her daughter.

  "How did we lie to Richard?"

  "By omission, Marina dear, by omission. I told him what we would not do, but I did not tell him what we would do. Your father and I loved you too mucli— each in our own way. You both have much to learn."

  There was a knock on the door. Andromeda called the servant in.

  "Your service, m'sera?"

  He was a large young man with broad shoulders made larger by the bulky First-bath sweater he wore.

  "M'sera Marina will be needing you to ferry her about the city this afternoon. She will be looking for the gentleman I described to you earlier."

  The retainer's hair was dark and curly, his face was bland and regular, his skin was the sallow gold so common in Merovingen, and yet he was an altogether memorable figure—which struck Marina as very odd, since she could not remember having seen him before around the House. She looked at her mother who replied with an enigmatic smile.

  Perhaps there was indeed more to learn about House life than she had hitherto imagined. "We'll be looking for Raj?"

  "No, Ree, you'll be looking for Thomas Mondragon."

  It was only with the greatest of efforts that Marina kept a flush from burning across her cheeks as her mother—her oh-so-proper, discreet and timid mother— explained an itinerary to an obviously loyal Kamat servant neither she nor—and Marina was certain of this—Richard had ever laid eyes upon before.

  "You understand, Kidd, that I'm holding you personally responsible for my daughter's well-being?"

  "Yes, m'sera."

  "Very well, now get the boat ready." Andromeda was silent while Kidd left, then she turned to her gaping daughter and appraised her appearance from boots to hair. "That will never do, Ree."

  "What will never do, Mother? What in Murfy's name is going on? How am I supposed to go looking for Tom?"

  "It's what you want to do, isn't it? It's your heart's desire; it's written clearly on your face. I think I saw Thomas Mondragon before I married your father—-he was only a toddler then—but I knew the Mondragons, or of them. Sword of God he may be, but he's Mondragon first. If the boy's missing, he's missing because of Tom as much as he's missing because of you. We might not have karma in Nev Hettek, but we've honor—and that's enough for a Mondragon."

  The color rose in Marina's cheeks at last. She did love Thomas Mondragon—in a blind, romantic way. Her imagination could conjure all manner of consequences to locating Tom and searching with him to find the boy.

  "What should I wear?" she asked as Andromeda led the way toward the wardrobe.

  An hour later, more carefully turned out than for a Kalugin's ball, Marina descended the inner stairway to Kamat slip where Kidd was waiting.

  "Petrescu," she said, scarcely recognizing her own voice. Her heart was pounding against her ribs; she felt deliciously alive and eager for adventure. "Yes, m'sera."

  Petrescu! Petrescu's spires were visible from her own bedroom. Marina had watched the boy, Raj, run across Foundry Bridge toward it. Had she known she might have kept watch beside her window and caught a glimpse of her hero on the seat of some poleboat going about his business. She did not ponder how her mother had, in a few short hours, flushed out the elusive Mondragon's home; she only marveled that Andromeda had given the venture a romantic's blessing.

  Yet, like most dreams, meeting Thomas Mondragon was better imagined than lived. Marina's face was pale and her hands both cold and damp by the time Kidd expertly cut the current and sluiced around into Petrescu slip.

  "Will you wait here?" Marina asked as he tightened the bow line. "Yes, m'sera."

  Marina nodded and waited for him to assist her from the boat to the walk and the stairs. It was not the sort of hightown gesture she usually affected, but her legs had gone rubbery and she needed his rock-solid arm.

  Andromeda Kamat's information was both precise and accurate. Marina found herself on the second-tier walkway before a nondescript, unmarked door. She purged the air from her lungs and inhaled deeply. Her hands steadied and the knots in her throat loosened, then she tapped on the door.

  Nothing. But then Marina Kamat wasn't used to knocking on doors. People knocked on her door, servants knocked for her, but mostly she had never gone where she was neither expected nor invited. Below her the water splashed noisily between boat and isle-rim. Kidd was watching her; she could feel his eyes. He was laughing at her—laughing silently and without expression the way all serva
nts did. Marina steeled herself and fairly threw her fist at the door.

  This time there was sound beyond the door: feet scuffing along floorboards, a throat being cleared, a spy-hole clicking open and shut. Marina smiled automatically when she heard that, but her lips were thin and she could smell her mother's ashes-of-roses perfume rise around her.

  The door swung open. It was Tom Mondragon— and she was left speechless. Her hero looked as if he'd been sleeping in his clothes—possibly sleeping off a binge in them. His pale gold hair tousled disarmingly across his forehead. The arm he held against the door-jamb seemed to keep him upright while the other hung limply at his side. He did not stare, but blinked as if he did not believe his own eyes. Fortunately, Marina found her tongue before he found his and she introduced herself as Andromeda had suggested.

  "I am Marina Cassirer Kamat; I've come about the boy, Raj . . ."

  He pondered that for a heartbeat or two, and Kidd on the landing a heartbeat longer. A cat might have smiled as Mondragon did as he invited the Kamat heiress into his home and closed the door behind her.

  "We've got him back, a bit worse for the wear but nothing permanently damaged. Your concern is appreciated."

  All the lines Marina had rehearsed flew out of her head. If Raj was safe, there was nothing she could say. Or so it seemed.

  "Cassirer—that's an unusual name for Merovingen, isn't it?" Tom asked softly.

  Marina fancied herself a kindred spirit of the lower classes—or at least the middle classes. She affected cut-off breeches and baggy sweaters when Andromeda did not intervene. But she knew next to nothing about life beyond the security of the Houses. She thought Mondragon was still fuddled by alcohol and sleep. She thought he was making polite conversation.

  "It's a Nev Hettek name. My mother's from Nev Hettek."

  "Come in, then. Sit down."

  He led her to the sitting room. Marina's heart was pounding again, but the notion that she was further and further from the boat where Kidd stood guard never wandered across her mind. Still, some warning must have turned in her subconscious.

  "We had a devil of a time finding you, Thomas Mondragon. You're quite the shadow. I guess that's why ..." She blushed, and a scent of musk and roses grew around her. "Well, you do know what happened?" She pulled Raj's poems and his final note from her pocket and held them out.

  Mondragon took the tattered sheets. His expression remained sleepy-wary as he read the melodramatic letter, but it changed when he encountered the poetry.

  " 'But if, despite of all my lies/ There is forgiveness in your eyes/ Then as my sorrowing soul dies/I shall most welcome Death.' " The corners of Tom's mouth crinkled upward and he shook his head slightly. "I could never write like this, Marina Cassirer Kamat." He handed the packet back to her.

  Marina looked down as she took them, but it did no good. She blushed violently. The edges of her ears were warm and, she was certain, brilliant carmine. "I feel so utterly foolish. I—I should go back home. I'm as hopeless as the boy."

  She retreated a step, but Mondragon's fingers clamped around her arm and she stopped.

  "Raj gave me a pretty scare, disappearing like that. I had no idea what he was up to, not even an idea how much he dreamed of medicine and the College. I'm not sure I'd have seen things his way. I might have been inclined to take Kamat's stipend and continued the lie, if I'd felt as he did—about medicine, that is."

  Her heart could pound no harder, and, as no one could actually die of embarrassment, Marina found her composure slowly returning. "That wasn't a lie— not if he's as talented as he claims he is. Kamat stands by its promises."

  "Karma?"

  "Honor."

  The unreadable veil of expression across Tom's face changed its texture. Marina believed she'd risen a bit in his estimation, and for once she was not completely mistaken.

  "We'll sponsor Raj to the College." A bit of fire and sincerity had returned to her voice. "We'll give him whatever he needs: his books, his board, and enough silver in his pocket so he needn't apologize to anyone."

  "Raj wouldn't like charity."

  For a moment Marina forgot the Angel-faced man who touched her arm. It was her House they were talking about—her honor—and there was nothing romantic or embarrassing about it. "It wouldn't be like charity. Kamat takes care of its own; even the Below knows that. There'd be a place for Raj when he was finished." She stared straight into Mondragon's eyes. "We pay for a man's labor, not his soul, and we don't use him up."

  The pressure on Marina's arm increased for a moment, and changed, as did his expression. "Kamat? Kamat . . . woolworkers and dyers, aren't you?"

  "First-bath."

  He nodded, taking note of the midnight silk she wore so casually, and the subtle weaving of silver which traced her collar.

  "A man is lucky, then, if House Kamat is his patron or employer."

  "We think so. My great-grandfather herded sheep above the Det Valley."

  Tom released her and she took a moment to brush the wrinkles from her sleeve. Kamat was not the wealthiest House in Merovingen, though it issued no public debentures and registered no unsecured liabilities with the Signeury. Only the wiliest of Houses guessed, or remembered, that Kamat's greatest assets were not within the city at all. They had never divested themselves of the vast flocks or tracts of land that had first given them the price of an island home in Merovingen.

  "We remember our origins and our word. I'll tell Raj that myself, if he's here. He can apply at the College whenever he's ready."

  Mondragon shook his head, and caught her again, this time more intimately above the waist. "He is at the age where a man's pride is his most cherished possession. He wouldn't know how to thank you, and it might keep him from accepting your offer. But he'll accept it; I can no longer give him my shadow."

  Marina's eyes asked the question.

  "One of your Det Water fevers, I'm afraid; plus looking for Raj, and . . ." his voice trailed off, leaving Marina to guess what was left unsaid.

  The Kamat heiress guessed quickly, and wrong, since there was nothing that she could recognize to say another woman made her home here. "And you have no relief from your patron, yourself—"

  Tom's eyes shot to the right: a small gesture, and one Marina might have missed altogether if it had not been cousin to the one Richard had used before leaving her room. In neither case could she see behind the hiding, but she knew to move carefully.

  "I wouldn't presume to offer you anything. If you'd been seeking company in the Houses, it wouldn't have been half so difficult to find you. You probably think I'm a schoolgirl goose anyway."

  "A schoolgirl wouldn't have found me. I have to admire you some for that."

  Marina cringed inwardly. This was Andromeda's arena, and Marina couldn't dredge up from her imagination how her mother would turn all this to advantage. "And I admire you," she murmured awkwardly.

  He smiled at her, radiantly and expertly. "I know. You shouldn't. I'm a marked man, and a very poor one. I've nothing to offer the noble House of Kamat."

  That was a lie, and quite possibly he knew it. There was no mistaking the tension in his fingertips, pulling Marina closer. Close enough that she could feel his warm breath on her face and lose herself in his eyes.

  "You hardly know us. A wise man doesn't make presumpt ..." Her words froze as he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

  "Who said I was wise?" Thomas Mondragon was everything she'd dreamed a man should be. His arms were perfect; his kisses were perfect; upstairs, in his bedroom, even the tingle of the coarse linen sheets as they rasped across her spine was perfect. His lovemaking proved that she was right to have waited until the perfect man came along— and she did not consider it at all strange or improper that she could not possibly have been the first for him.

  In point of fact, Mondragon took it rather poorly that Marina had surrendered her virginity to him. House women usually shed that sort of nonsense before leaving school. How else was a woman to know if she wa
nted to get married or not? How else would she perform her ancient duty to create the next generation? In Merovingen, romance had little to do with sex, Andromeda said it was somewhat different in Nev Hettek, where schoolgirls spent more time reading novels than learning religion.

  Marina lay in the arms of a Nev Hetteker. She could have asked and gotten the truth of it for once and for all, but she didn't. There was no need to clutter up such a singular afternoon with philosophy. He was content to let her slowly explore the realms she had avoided. Occasionally, between kisses and caresses, he would remind her that he was House-less here, a Boregy adherent poorly maintained, with nothing to offer in return, and she was at pains to insist that she already owed him a debt larger than she could repay in a lifetime.

  "We'll see," Mondragon replied, tracing the blood-flushed aureole of an upright breast. "A lifetime can be very long."

  Shadows filled the windows and hid their faces before Tom saw fit to remind Marina about the man she'd left guarding the landing.

  "Someone will be wondering after him, if not you," he chided as he trailed her shirt across her skin.

  Marina grabbed the silk and broke the moment's magic. "I'd like to wash."

  "There's a basin on the shelf. I told you I'm poor. Go back to Kamat for your porcelain tubs and hot-water pipes." Her face dropped. Mondragon was moved to sit again on the bed beside her. "I'm shamed to live like this—and know that this is better than it will be. The rent is due, Boregy is put out with me, and Petrescu wants lunes, not soggy, twice-steeped tea—"

  She had come expecting to endow the search for Raj. Her mother had supplemented her allowance with a half-dozen fingertip-sized gold gram coins. No promises; no accounting—as if Andromeda had guessed that her largesse might not flow toward its original purpose. Marina folded her collar and cuffs, then reached for her breeches.

  "I suppose," she began, thinking herself very clever, and artful, "that if Raj can't come to us for his pride, then someone else shall have to watch over him." She fished the pieces out, but had to pull his hand toward her and pry his fingers apart before she could place the coins on his palm.