The Mask of Mirrors by M. Carrick; (different e readers txt) 📕

a smoking, well-singed sleeve behind. Then he began to crawl, burned arm blindly outstretched, seeking aid. “Help! Someone help me! That witch cursed me!”

Arenza didn’t see what happened next, because she sagged backward into the corner between the tinsmith’s and the apothecary, then slid gently to the ground. From the sound of it, someone was helping Sedge away. But mostly what she heard was Tess doing her pity-rustler best to keep Idusza’s attention off the cursed thug, and on the patterner who’d cursed him.

Against Tess’s hand-wringing and helplessness, Idusza had little choice but to take charge. Arenza stayed limp as Idusza browbeat the apothecary into letting them into his storeroom and even giving them a restorative for the price of the centiras Sedge’s kick had scattered.

“Here, szorsa. You must wake up so you can drink.” The apothecary’s back room smelled of dust and dried herbs and sharp pine resin. They’d set Arenza on a worktable with her patterner’s shawl as a pillow. The table creaked as Idusza jostled her.

Tess’s voice sounded from nearby while Arenza fluttered her eyelids in a daze. “I really should be going now. My nan—”

“Go,” Idusza commanded with a weary sigh. “She is my people, not yours. I will see to her.”

The door snicked open and shut, leaving Ren alone with her hooked mark.

She groaned and tried to sit up, then spoke in Vraszenian. “What happened?”

“Drink this.” A cup pressed into Arenza’s hands, and Idusza helped prop her up. “That man… Caused you those ills, szorsa? Or was it the Faces and the Masks working their will through you?”

She drank, coughing a little. “I—I’m not certain. I was so angry, and then…”

Ren hadn’t quite planned this part. The usual form of the Kindly Hawk only required brief contact with the mark. She needed to win Idusza’s trust in the long term.

Hence building the scam into something more dramatic. Idusza’s mother had complained that her daughter didn’t respect patterners—but that was because she didn’t believe most of them had any gift. A display of the sorts of powers szorsas were reputed to have in legend stood a chance of breaking through her skepticism, turning Arenza into someone Idusza might confide in.

“That man.” Arenza widened her eyes in horror. “I— He caught fire.”

“He did. He—” Idusza’s frown collapsed into something between a hiccup and a cough. She clapped her hands over her lips, but the giggles refused to be contained. “He flapped like the chicken I butchered last week. All that was missing was the clucking. Oh, what I would give to be able to set my enemies on fire.”

Should I look proud, or— Arenza dropped the cup. “No. No, that cannot have been me. Something else—he wandered too close to someone’s pipe—”

“And too close to someone’s worms?” Idusza pointed out ironically. “He coughed those up also. No, my friend; you were the vessel of the Masks in cursing him as he deserved.” She retrieved the cup from the floor. “Who are your people?”

Sooner or later Idusza would talk to her family, and then she might find out Arenza was the same patterner who’d spoken with her mother about Grey Serrado. But Ren would leap that canal when she got to it. “The Dvornik. I am Arenza Lenskaya Tsverin. I know not how I can thank you—”

Idusza quieted her with a pat on her hand. “Ah, Dvornik. Always making complicated what is simple.” She wrinkled her nose, but it was the usual teasing between Ažerais’s children. “Idusza Nadjulskaya Polojny of the Stretsko. And I would never turn my back on someone who keeps to our ways. Arrived you recently to Nadežra?”

When Arenza nodded, Idusza patted her hand again. “Then I will help you find your feet.”

She returned to work not long after that, but not before making Arenza promise to meet her the next day. Her performance ended, Ren went looking for Tess and Sedge.

The latter was rinsing his mouth out with zrel and spitting into the nearest canal, then scraping his tongue with the heavy woolen undersleeve that had protected him from the flames. “Oh, come now,” Ren said, grinning and clapping him on the shoulder. “Like you have never eaten worms before.” They all had, when food got really scarce.

Sedge glared sidelong. “I take money to beat people up so I won’t have to eat worms anymore.” He touched his jaw and hissed at the tenderness. “Too bad she’s Stadnem Anduske. With a hook like that, she could make good money working for Vargo.”

He hissed again when Tess flicked his hands away so she could apply a salve, but his gaze was merry. “Now, Tess, why don’t you tell us about this Pavlin fellow…”

Charterhouse, Dawngate, Old Island: Cyprilun 4

Vargo had been in and out of the Aerie a dozen times, sometimes as a prisoner, sometimes to spring one of his own from lockup. But the Charterhouse, scarcely a mile to the east, was less familiar territory—the domain of legitimate bureaucracy.

Now he had an invitation to walk its halls… from the very man he’d been targeting for months.

It hardly seemed like coincidence.

::Stop stalling, my boy. We won’t learn what Mettore wants from out here,:: Alsius said impatiently.

If what Mettore wanted was to arrest Vargo, he could just send his hawks to Eastbridge. Knowing the man, Vargo doubted he’d bother with anything so legitimate; more likely that they’d ambush him somewhere on the Lower Bank and leave his body in a canal.

Vargo’s fingers tightened on the head of his sword cane. They’d try.

No, this wasn’t an ambush. An invitation to the Charterhouse meant Indestor intended something more civilized.

A clerk was waiting just inside the threshold, catching Vargo before he could do more than eye the line of people waiting at the desk. “Good morning, Master Vargo. If you’ll follow me?”

Keep the commentary to a minimum, he told Alsius as the clerk led him upstairs, along a hallway, and to a set of double doors. I need to be able to think.

Silence was