“Watch me.” I headed for the door, expecting Solitude to call out for Iron. Instead, I heard her sigh.
Then she said it. “Hypocrite.”
That stopped me, although I didn’t turn around. “What?”
“I’ve heard a lot of things about you, Drothe,” said Solitude. “A lot of words used to describe you: tough, dangerous, relentless, clever. I’ve heard some less than pleasant ones, too. But there’s one word I keep coming across that I almost never hear in relation to other Kin.”
“You’d better not be getting ready to say ‘honest,’ ” I said. “Even I won’t buy that one.”
“Not honest,” she said. “Honorable.” Solitude chuckled. “People actually call you honorable, Drothe.”
Now I did turn around.
Solitude had her radiant smile on. “Imagine someone using that word to describe one of us, the ‘gutter crawlers.’ I’ve heard nobles, soldiers, priests-even merchants, Angels help me-called honorable, but rarely a Darker, and never a Nose.”
She stood. I watched her as she came across the floor, bits of marble crunching softly beneath her shoes.
“When someone chooses a word like that for a man like you,” she said softly, “I have to wonder whether it’s smoke or whether it’s true. Are you honorable, Drothe? Are you loyal, not just to your boss, not just to your friends, but to the Kin? Because that’s what it’s about now. If you want to survive, if you want to hold on to the chips you have in the journal and make us take you seriously, then you have to admit that it’s about more than what’s in it for you. It’s about all the Kin, be it keeping them alive, taking control of them, or even keeping the empire from wiping them out. The picture is bigger than you now; bigger than a single organization. I don’t think you’d be here if you weren’t interested in that. If it were just about you, the journal would have been sold or bartered a long time ago.”
Solitude took a final step, bringing herself so close, we almost touched. She smelled of vanilla and cedarwood and summer wine. “What do you think?” she said.
I stared down into those green eyes and understood the stories about how she supposedly recruited all of her operatives on her own. She was good-damn good. And she was right.
I’d been-hell, still was-willing to go to the emperor to save the Kin. Even if it meant betraying Kells, being cast out, being hunted. It was what needed to be done.
But that didn’t mean I had to give the journal to her, pretty speeches and green eyes aside.
“Even if you’re right,” I said, “and I’m willing to take one for the Kin, I don’t see how giving you the journal accomplishes anything. If I want to keep the empire from wiping us out, I’m better off going directly to them. If the journal has everything in it you say it has, I ought to be able to cut a nice deal for both me and the Kin with the emperor. Giving it to you doesn’t get either of those things.”
Solitude nodded slowly. “Good,” she said. “You see it.”
“See what?” I said.
“The threat the empire poses.”
“It’s hard to miss when they surround an entire cordon and try to kill every Kin in it.”
Solitude shook her head. “I’m not talking about Ten Ways, Drothe, nor even about what they did to Isidore. I’m talking about the emperor going mad-about the three incarnations going to war and dragging every aspect of the empire down with them. Including the Kin. You don’t think we’ll choose sides? You don’t think that Gray Princes and Upright Men won’t make deals with one emperor or another to benefit themselves? In a war that will be fought not just in the fields and forests, but in the streets of the empire, you don’t think the various incarnations of Stephen Dorminikos will be able to overlook their distaste of us long enough to see the excellent tools we would make? Tools he could use and then discard, because after all, we’re only Kin?
“No. This isn’t about any threat to the Kin right now, Drothe-this is about what will happen to the Kin down the road. Fifty, one hundred, two hundred years from now. It’s about the Kin surviving as an organization, as a way of life. If the empire falls, it will take the Kin with it. You can’t have darkness without light, and you can’t have the Kin without the empire. The great irony is, if we want to keep the empire, and therefore the Kin, alive, we have to kill the emperor to do it.”
I was right; I hadn’t liked where this was going. I swallowed and took another step back. Solitude followed me.
“Why should I care about what happens to the Kin in a hundred years?” I said.
“Why should you care about what happens to them now?” she replied. “You could have walked away anytime if you wanted to. But you didn’t. Because you’re Kin. Because you’re honorable. Because you care enough to see the bigger picture. That’s why.”
I stood there, not saying anything, my mind racing and blank at the same instant. There were so many things going through my head, I couldn’t grasp any single thought on its own-except for one.
Solitude was right. Damn her, but she was right.
Chapter Twenty-six
I looked Solitude in the eye. She was smiling. It made her eyes sparkle. Solitude was right. Maybe about the cause, maybe about the emperor-or maybe not. I needed to weigh that some more.
But she was definitely right about me.
I couldn’t walk away, because there was too much at stake-too much that might, just might, fit together like she had said. History, I knew, was full of unlikely crap like that.
Dammit.
But just because she was right, and just because I knew I was going to help her, didn’t mean I had to like it-or that I was going to make it easy for her.
“Being honorable’s one thing,” I said, “but bright and shiny feelings don’t give me pull on the street or keep Blades off my blinds. If I give you that journal, I’ll end up betraying Kells, snubbing Shadow, and risk pissing off the emperor. I’m going to need something besides a happy ending for the Kin to make it worth my while.”
Solitude’s shoulders drooped. “Money, Drothe? I had hoped for more than that from you. But if you-”
“I never said anything about hawks.”
A small spark in her eyes. “A job, then?”
“I’m done working for other people,” I said. “Too many compromises. And I don’t want to be an Upright Man, either.” After working for Kells and Nicco, I knew I didn’t want those kinds of problems.
“Then what?” said Solitude. “You can’t tell me you want to go back to being a Wide Nose.”
I walked over to the wall of curtains. I pushed them open slightly. As I’d thought, there was a wall of glass panes and doors on the other side.
The sunlight burned my eyes, but I looked out on the garden beyond the glass, anyhow. No one had been in to tend it, leaving it to become a bed of vivid green, cut through with a chaos of yellows, reds, blues, whites, and oranges. I suddenly wanted to punch out one of the windows, to banish the dust and closeness of the room with the smells of earth and growth and moisture.
I let the curtain fall back instead.
“I want you to cover my back,” I said, not turning toward her. “I want the same protection you give your people, but without the strings. I want to know I have an organization behind me if I need it, but I don’t want to be beholden to it. I want people to know that if they cross me, they cross you, but that when I talk, it comes solely from me.”
I heard a gasp. “Do you hear what you’re saying?” said Solitude. “No one has that kind of arrangement with me. Or anyone else, for that matter. No one!”
“If it makes it easier, I’ll still work for you sometimes,” I said. “I just won’t belong to you. Every dodge will be its own thing, a separate arrangement between you and me. Outside that, I’ll be able to work with your people, but only if you agree, and they won’t use me unless I give the nod.”