The Child Prince (The Artifactor) (57 page)

Sevana didn’t know whether to laugh or clap the woman on the back. “You’re sure?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve known that boy his whole life. He even gave me a wave as he drove out of the yard.” Holly shook her head, wonderingly. “Did the woman not think at all? We’ve eyes, don’t we? Of course we’d recognize one of our own.”

Yes, the arrogance of the nobility would make such a stupid mistake. She probably hadn’t even thought about her driver being recognized. Sevana rubbed at her chin, thinking hard. “This might not be the right person, but I must admit…the timing of all of this is a little too coincidental.”

“It’s a near perfect match for it to not be tied in, somehow,” Sarsen agreed. To Holly he gave her a smile. “Thank you, Mistress. This might not be what we’re looking for, but it surely speaks of trouble, and the king wants to know about things of this sort. If the woman comes again, can you tell us?”

“Morgan Chansamone would actually be the best person to contact,” Sevana added.

“Oh, I will,” Holly assured them, visibly pleased to be of help.

“This weasel man that you mentioned,” Sarsen started slowly, eyes narrowed. “You said you knew him to be a bad sort.”

“He’s a snitch, that one.” Holly made a sour face. “Always doing shifty deals. He’s like as not wake up one morning with a dagger in the back, the way he goes on.”

“So you know him enough to point him out?”

“More than that,” Holly assured him. “Name is Ticker Sullivan. He comes to our place regularly, as we have private rooms to let. Although why we still cater to the likes of him is a wonder to me. My husband never turns him off, though.”

“Don’t scare him off,” Sevana advised. “We want to know where that man is. We have a lot of questions to ask him, after all.”

Holly gave her a sage nod. “That I won’t.”

“For now, though…” Sarsen looked up and around. “We need to move. We’ve been here too long. Mistress Springer, thank you.”

“Not at all.” With a bobbed curtsey, the woman turned away and went back to the crowd.

“You get His Princeliness,” Sevana motioned Sarsen forward, “and I’ll get the horses.”

Sarsen shrugged agreement. “And when we get back, you get Morgan. I think we need to track down a certain snitch.”

~ ~ ~

“You’re right, the timing is too precise for that to be a coincidence.” Aren sat back in his chair with a thoughtful frown, absently rubbing his chin with one hand.

Sarsen had gone straight to the king once they’d returned to Big. Sevana chose to go to the main room simply so she could take over the couch and put her feet up, so even though she didn’t intend to report anything, she got roped into it regardless. Aren turned immediately to her and asked, “Can we set a trap for this woman? Using the weasel-informant as bait.”

“I don’t see why not,” Sevana agreed. “Obviously negotiations didn’t work as well last time. She’s probably still looking for some underhanded thug to do her dirty work. I’ll set Kip on it.”

“Excellent, please do so.” Aren rubbed a hand over his eyes, looking beyond weary for a moment. “It might not be the one we’re looking for, but I certainly want to know what she’s up to. But for now, it looks like things are going apace. We have several more meetings set up, but I don’t feel it necessary to attend to all of them before we contact the other kings. We have the support we need from the majority of the country now.”

True, that. “So should we contact them tomorrow?”

“That would be best. Err…” Aren gave her a rueful look. “I don’t suppose that you have a way of contacting the other kings that doesn’t require stepping through your clocks? I’d rather not be treated as an intruder when going to ask for a favor.”

And she’d so been looking forward to seeing Aren caught by the guards in a foreign palace…. She gave a resigned sigh and said truthfully, “I do have another method. It’s rather indirect, as I can only contact the magicians serving in the palaces, but I think it’ll do.”

Aren looked relieved. “That should do fine. Thank you.”

“But I’ll let Sarsen help you with that.” Stifling a yawn, she said, “I have a bed calling to me.” With a heave, she got to her feet and trudged out the door, stifling another yawn as she did so.

“Don’t forget to contact Kip about the trap!” Sarsen called after her.

She waved in acknowledgement, but she had no intention of doing any more work until tomorrow. She and her pillow had a rendezvous that she had no intention of missing.

Owwww.
What happened? Sevana managed to crack open an eye through sheer willpower and peer around. Her cheek lay smashed into hard stone, an oddly familiar feeling, and for some reason her legs were highly elevated compared to her torso. A trickle of dust snuck into her nose and she sneezed violently, making her body flop so that all of her slid straight to the floor. Lying on her back, the coldness of the stone seeped quickly through her shirt and sent a shiver dancing over her skin. The coolness helped revive her mind enough for her to force
both
eyes open this time and she looked blearily up. Oh. Her ceiling. So…she was in her bedroom?

Countless previous experiences told her what had happened without her needing to deduce anything. Big had dumped her out of her bed again. Which meant that someone needed for her to wake up and didn’t have the guts to do it themselves. She entertained the notion, briefly, of tracking said varmint down and cursing him. In her not-awake state, a simple frog-morphing spell would suffice.

“Big. Who wants me awake?”

Kip
, the mountain sighed.

That took several moments to process before she managed to think of the next obvious question. “Why?”

Don’t know. Said important.

True, Kip never resorted to this tactic unless something important had happened and he really had no other choice but to wake her up. After her last conversation with Sarsen, she’d had every intention of tracking Kip down today anyway.

Sarsen and Aren had ‘borrowed’ her Caller and research room to contact the kings and bring them into the loop. There’d been a lot of incredulous, “
They’ve done WHAT?!”s
from the kings. In the end, it hadn’t taken much persuasion to get the other monarchs to agree to eavesdrop on the late night Council meeting Goethals had informed Aren about. But this timing meant that Sevana and Kip had roughly a week to catch their assassin.  Heaving a sigh, she rolled and pushed herself up to her feet, shuffling around her bedroom without bothering to properly open her eyes.

Sevana had been here for years, and had never once changed the layout of her bedroom in all that time. Her four-poster bed sat squarely in the center of the room, with a dresser on either side of it that sat low enough for her to set books and lamps on it. A large chest rested at the end of her footboard, which she normally tossed clothes on, completely burying it from view most of the time. A wingback chair in the corner suffered from the same fate, although she tended to throw her coats and cloaks there. The only decoration that she’d ever bothered to do in this room sat on the mantel of the fireplace—a beautifully rendered sculpture of a dragon in mid-flight that the people of Vash Village had given her. It sat prominently displayed on the wide, marble mantel, with nothing else around it.

Making inarticulate groaning noises, she maneuvered around her room with dragging feet, dressing in the first clothes that came to hand. Only luck would determine if they coordinated or not. But with her favorite trousers, plain blouse, and vest on, she felt slightly more revived. Enough, at least, that she ran a brush through her hair and bothered to put on her boots before actually leaving the room.

“So, where’s Kip?” she inquired as she closed her bedroom door behind her. Not a peep from either end of the hallway could be heard. In fact, the mountain felt oddly still, as it usually did in the very early hours of the morning. What time was it, anyway?

Main room,
Big responded.

Not the kitchen? That’s typically where he headed first, in the hopes that Sevana would have pity and feed him. So, too important to be distracted by food? Or was she jumping to conclusions? Forehead drawn together in a half-frown, she lengthened her stride and quickly walked into the main room, leaving echoing footsteps behind her.

Kip must have thrown some logs onto the dying fire, but he hadn’t been here long, as the warmth from the fireplace hadn’t spread throughout the room yet. He didn’t pace, but stood in front of the flickering fire, shifting from foot to foot in a rare show of impatience. When he did hear her enter, he immediately spun about, jaw set in a tight expression.

“Sev. I got the message yesterday from King Aren that we’re to entrap the Council in a week. Is he serious?”

She covered a yawn with her hand as she walked inside and dropped into her favorite chair. “Serious.”

He ran a hand through his hair in an agitated motion, making his unruly black hair stand up in some interesting spikes. “That’s an insanely short amount of time! We’ve got to capture that noblewoman first.”

Sevana gave a sour grunt. “I’ll let you argue that point with him. I didn’t make much headway when I tried.”

Kip finally fell to pacing, nothing more than three long strides in either direction before spinning on his heel and going back the opposite way. “I know he thinks it’ll be a simple matter, because I’ve already tracked down the informant that brokered the deal, but that doesn’t mean I can arrange a meeting with her this quickly!”

“Will you stop that?” she complained to him. “You’re making me dizzy.”

He did stop, but abruptly so, standing right in front of her and blocking the light and heat from the fire. “Sev, it’s not going to be that simple. The informant refuses to cooperate for fear of earning that woman’s wrath. He’s not scared enough of me to cooperate.”

Seriously
? Sevana growled in vexation. “We don’t need that kind of wrinkle right now.”

“Tell me about it.”

She sank back into the chair, making the leather creak a bit, and thought for a second. “Bel is also delegated to deal with this. I bet he can scare him into line.”

“Bel?” Kip repeated blankly. “Scary?”

“He has his moments.” Not that he usually meant to be scary, as far as Sevana could see. It was that indomitable determination and fire in him that made most people flinch, as they instinctively realized that Bel would stop at nothing to achieve his ends. “More importantly, he would have the authority to make promises that would persuade the weasel to cooperate.”

“There’s that,” Kip granted, with a judicious shrug. “Alright. I have a good idea where he is now, but he tends to move about in the afternoons and evenings, so if we don’t catch him this morning, we’ll never find him later.”

“We can’t afford to waste another day.” With a sigh, Sevana looked up at the ceiling and requested, “Big, wake up our freeloading prince, would you?”

Something that might have been an evil chuckle rumbled down the hallways before Big said,
He’s awake.

“He enjoys doing that far too much,” Sevana observed.

In mere minutes, Bel showed up, hair still mussed from sleep and standing on end. He hadn’t bothered to dress, just shoved his feet into slippers, and only had one sword in hand. When he entered the room, he fixed both of them with a glare—or at least, it would be a glare, if he could get his eyes to focus properly.

“What?” he snarled.

“It’s important,” Kip assured him, half-sympathetic. “We’re having trouble with the informant. He won’t cooperate with me and help me trap the noblewoman.”

“We need you to come along with us and threaten him into line,” Sevana finished. “And we need to leave this morning, as he’ll be impossible to find this afternoon.”

Bel passed a hand over his eyes, took in a deep breath, and regained his temper. When his hand dropped back to his side, he looked for more like his normal self. “Do I have time to eat breakfast and get dressed, or do we really need to leave right now?”

“I’d say we could spare an hour, assuming Sevana has a clock portal handy somewhere outside of Lockbright Palace.”

Sevana looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Hmm. Seven o’clock here, would make it eight o’clock there, and most places opened for business around eight or nine…but she did have one clock in a hotel’s business office that they could safely use until nine. “I have one. But you’d best make it half an hour before we leave.”

Kip inclined his head toward her. “Then half an hour, as she said.”

“And we’ll need to do a quick make-up on you,” she warned Bel. “We can’t afford to have anyone see you today, not until we speak to that informant.”

Bel waved a hand in acknowledgement, not worried about this. “Then I’ll get dressed.”

“Sorry to wake you like that,” Kip apologized with a half-smile.

“Oh, it’s not me that you need to be worried about.” A strangely evil glint shone in his eye as he responded, already half-turned for the door. “I can forgive you, under the circumstances. It’s a certain cat that was sleeping with me that you should be concerned about. He’s not as forgiving.” With a casual wave of the hand, he retreated back outside.