Page 49 of A Steeping of Blood
She jumped off the crate, doing her utmost not to watch him button his shirt back up and adjust his trousers. Her insides burned. Every part of her wanted to turn back to him, fighting the dread that wished so desperately to leave now that they had arrived.
“You know I excel at all that I do,” she managed to say, and couldn’t decide if she was thankful or not when Jin threw open the hatch and called her name.
14FLICK
It was two days before Flick could return to the grove after spending the entirety of yesterday running back and forth to meet with the inspector and hand him the multiple forged documents he needed: One was a letter from Willard’s own desk signed by the Ram approving an extended hold on the vessel Arthie and Jin had taken. On the second one, Flick simply had to sign a letter from the foreman looking for confirmation that the EJC ship did indeed get berthed in the first place. The third was a letter explaining why the ship might have needed to be moved from the berth should anyone inquire about its whereabouts.
That particular letter took her far too many tries to get right. She might be a forger with an extensive vocabulary, but she was also a girl and not a disdainful official.
And then it was done.
She was free to focus on the ledger, and was so deep within its pages that she jumped when the Old Roaring Tower began to toll. She straightened a crick in her neck and stretched her arms.
“Three bells?” Flick counted in surprise. “It’s been hours!”
Jin and the others should have arrived in Ceylan by now, if their calculations were correct.
And Flick had progress of her own to show for it: She hadn’t yet forged the invitations, but she’d taken pages and pages of notes, from details she was able to decipher and expand upon to various affairshere in Ettenia that her mother was involved in as both the Ram and the head of the EJC. Flick closed her eyes to clear the many lines and slashes of her mother’s code and reopened them to give her notes a proper read.
Every bit of it was horrible.
The Ram extorted and monopolized several exports and imports, successfully—and gleefully—depleting the coffers of long-standing high society names. She had detailed how, too, from securing contracts with the EJC, and thus, herself, or by racking up fees and absurd fines until profit margins weren’t feasible in any way for anyone, even high society folk. Then there were plans for how she might influence the pricing on medical amenities—from medications to doctor visits and facilities—that Ettenians would be too desperate not to drop exorbitant amounts of duvin to attain.
Arthie had told Flick to find anything and everything that would help them bring down the Ram, but Arthie didn’t have to tell her that it needed to be something of substance. Something loud. As heinous as weaponizing vampires, as heinous as stealing humans off the streets.
Like the real reason why.
“Like you,” Flick said to a page in the ledger, smoothing it out. She’d marked it because of how it stood out to her. It featured a building of some sort. An entire segment of the ledger was dedicated to it, including several drawings, a skill to which Flick knew her mother was typically averse.
In the margins, her mother had scribbled something about needing more trials and incubation periods, at the end of which read,to shift at fortnight, whatever that meant. Flick didn’t know how long ago that fortnight had been, but was it a base for the Ram and her men? There were far too many disparate details written, it seemed, as they struck her mother’s mind.
The building’s layout was as detailed as could be, considering the lack of artistic talent. It spread wide and long and was a single story as far as Flick could tell, with an open area at its center and several rooms and halls fanning from it, including a large one with a strange set of… pill-shaped objects spaced out within. Was her mother creating a new ingestible way to subdue vampires?
The longer Flick looked, she found more questions and fewer answers. She set aside her notes and flipped back through the ledger to study the original drawing again.
“Why, hello there,” she murmured to an inset at the corner of the drawing. It nearly blended in with the text. A series of lines were sketched inside a circle, some intersecting, others cutting diagonally. Flick rotated the ledger, studying it every which way, but couldn’t tell what it was. Distracted doodles? The method the Ram had used to come up with her code?
Flick rotated the ledger again, and a number of the scraps tucked inside slipped out. Flick growled and began shoving them back inside, pausing when she found a map of the world. She saw Ettenia and the Eastern Colonies, Jeevant Gar and Ceylan. Qirilan and Arawiya. Some were shaded, others not, and Flick realized the shaded countries had been colonized. Some parts of Qirilan too. Not an inch of Arawiya, the kingdom Laith had come from, with its vast expanse, had been touched.
Yet, a voice warned her.
She couldn’t worry about that.
“That’s it!” Flick exclaimed, studying the inset with fresh eyes. She dug through her satchel for the kit that she carried everywhere, undoing the elastic loop and riffling through her stack of carbon paper, notes, and—aha!a map of White Roaring.
The inset was a bird’s-eye view of a cluster of streets.
Flick unfolded her map and laid the semitransparent sheet overher mother’s drawing, sliding it around while hoping and wishing it was in White Roaring, and not another country again. Like Ceylan, or someplace even more unknown to them.
At last, it matched up. With a relieved laugh, Flick pulled it away and studied the location. Her breath caught. It was certainly in White Roaring, just beyond the river, a side of the capital she rarely visited. Flick studied the corner more closely, trepidation settling over her like a cloak.
Near the palace. Where the tribute was to be hosted.
That, Flick thought, was not a coincidence.
She was suddenly hot and cold at once, knowing she needed to see this place for herself and figure out what her mother had planned. For all their sakes. Arthie had specifically told her not to, but Arthie was also sailing to an island where she didn’t know what to expect. If she and Jin and Matteo could do that, Flick could do this.
Besides, this wasn’t the location of the tribute, which is what Arthie had forbidden, but it was close enough to be concerning.
