Chapter Text
“Raise a glass to Grand Duke Adrian.”
Rilsa scoffs; Keene feels it rumble through her, where Rilsa’s head rests in her lap. Rilsa sits up and raises her hand to mirror Keene’s own, but when she’s dashed off the dregs of her wine she springs to her feet and slams the glass down.
“Careful,” Keene says mildly.
Rilsa ignores her, pacing across the room, then turning back to mutter, “I never liked the bastard, for all he was the hero of the city a hundred years ago, but now that I’ve seen what’s coming next—”
“I did warn you,” Keene says. “The devil you know and all that.”
“Did you hear what he said?” she demands. “Ravengard?”
“Yes, I was there.”
Rilsa continues as if Keene hadn’t spoken, or as if she didn’t hear, which is always possible, when she gets on a tear like this. “Using a funeral speech to declare war on us! What else do you call it but that? We’ll cleanse the Guild from the Outer City in our friend Adrian’s name—the man never turned his nose up at working with you, has anyone told Ravengard that? He’s a nobody—trotting along in the Grand Duke’s shadow, nobody knows him, they were too blinded by Duke Adrian’s glory to ever notice his little lieutenant dogging his heels—”
“The Fist like him,” says Keene, knowing exactly what response this will prompt.
“Fuck the Fist.”
She sits again, heavily. Keene waits a moment, two, and when it seems like the fit of temper has properly burned itself out, she leans in and begins dropping a line of kisses down the back of Rilsa’s neck. Rilsa squirms, then surrenders, slumping back until she rests once more with her head in Keene’s lap.
“The Lower City’s angry, too, Boss,” she murmurs. “They saw Duke Adrian as their hero, and they couldn’t even go to his funeral. Idiot Upper City bastards… it would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to have a procession, let the people see him… they aren’t even good at this.”
“You have a plan,” Keene says, teasing her fingers through Rilsa’s hair, shaggy black curls.
Rilsa always has a plan. “I think it’s time the rest of the city stood up for itself against the Peers and patriars. I think now’s the moment.”
“No.” Rilsa starts to sit up again in protest, and Keene pushes her back down. “We have to focus on stopping Ravengard’s election. A bit of trouble the Fist can’t handle will help with that, but no farther. If things become too disorderly, everyone will be keen for an iron fist like Ravengard’s. Or should I say a flaming fist?”
“Your wit’s unparalleled, Boss.” She only sounds a little sullen, and she doesn’t protest when Keene bends down to smooth it over with a kiss.
+
“You let Ravengard shut the Oasis down.” There’s no judgement in the comment, though perhaps a touch of surprise.
“That was a den of sin, Boss,” Rilsa says, straight-faced. “Can’t have such places in a respectable neighbourhood. Thank goodness for Blaze Ravengard.”
She leans across the table and reaches idly for Keene’s hand; Keene, not unkindly, pulls away.
This is her office, heart of the Guildhall, and that makes it different. She wonders, sometimes, if it’s an insult to Rilsa, to draw lines here and not at the Emporium—as if Rilsa’s place is less serious, less sacrosanct—but that’s Rilsa’s territory to define, and she has never minded. So Keene doesn’t mind it there, either, in Little Calimshan: already a world apart, a place that has walled itself off from the rest of the city so its inhabitants can imagine they still live at home.
Rilsa’s never met a wall she wouldn’t try to tear down. She flung open those walls to let the Guild inside, and of course there are those who have never forgiven her. She is too clever to worry about that; too sharp to think it’s ever possible to please everyone. She does what she thinks is best, thinks is right.
It’s that second one that’s the biggest difference between them.
She accepts the rebuff with a shrug, sits back in her chair on the opposite side of the desk. “Ibiz insulted you. He knew what he had to do to get his protection back. If a man’s too proud to apologise, what am I to do?”
“He’s still one of your people. I’d’ve understood if you’d wanted to step in—especially against the Fist.”
“And undermine your word? I would never, Boss. Ravengard is getting bold, though,” she adds. “Do we have a next step?”
“Do you?”
Rilsa shrugs again, this time with a not-so-sheepish grin. “I’m being good, Boss. Vandalism, a couple robberies. I had my boys rough up a tollkeeper who was having a little too much fun shaking down Lower City folks just trying to make their way home every night. Just enough to make Ravengard look a step too slow. Nothing too—what was the word? Disorderly.”
Keene ignores that jab and just nods her approval. Keene’s is the only judgment Rilsa trusts besides her own, and that deserves rewarding, as Rilsa’s very delicately reminded her. “Well. It might be time to push things a little. You know I don’t like to play my hand too openly, but… talk to Genamine, will you?”
Rilsa’s grin widens. “Waste collection, is it?”
“Not stopped,” Keene says. “Just slowed. Annoying, not catastrophic. If anyone guesses it’s us, let them see how subtle we can be. Just to raise the temperature in the city a little bit. Get folks on edge, make them a little mistrustful of the people presently in charge—which includes Ravengard. He’s not a man who likes to be tested. A few too many little annoyances, and he’ll let himself be pushed into making a mistake. Tell Genamine that if the Master of Drains and Underways comes to her, though, she should give in—and make it clear exactly who won over the workers.”
“We’re backing Vanthampur?” Rilsa runs her tongue over her teeth, considering. “She’s no patriar, so that’s good. But she isn’t so well-known as Ravengard, or some of the other candidates the patriars are likely to scrape up.”
“We have time,” Keene says. “We’ll change that. She used to be one of us, before my time. We’ll see whether that’s a debt of gratitude, or a noose around her neck. For now: you and Genamine.”
“We’re on it, Boss.”
She leans back in her chair. “What else from the Garden?”
Rilsa needs no notes. She keeps the ten thousand secrets that pass through her Garden of Whispers all in her head, from the local cobbler who wants to leave his wife to a would-be Duke’s gambling debts. “The High Harper’s back in town.”
Keene sits up again at once. “Now that’s interesting. What’s brought her back?”
Rilsa’s dispassionate, just a report: “She knew Duke Adrian, back in the day. Half-elf.”
“Was she at the funeral?”
“Word has it. Haven’t met anyone who saw her themselves, but then again, she’s a Harper.” She grins. “She’s probably nearly as good at disguises as us.”
Keene considers. “Might just be paying her respects. We need to know if she’s planning on hanging around.” Rilsa shifts forward, but Keene raises a quelling, considering hand. “Leave that with me.”
+
The High Harper is named Jaheira, and Keene grew up hearing stories about her. She doesn’t have much time for anything her parents tried to teach her before she ran away—nothing she can remember has ever proved to be of any use, it’s all the things they failed to do that really showed her how to get on—but stories of Jaheira did come back into her mind now and again when she was younger. Jaheira and Minsc and all those heroes of a hundred years ago. She hadn’t quite realised any of them were still alive, save Duke Adrian.
Jaheira was chosen for High Harper of Baldur’s Gate a couple years ago, a designation that has done nothing to lure her back to a city she barely visits. She has a house here, Keene’s been told, and rarely spends more than a tenday at a time in it. It irritates Keene. People should mind their territory. Should know it, in and out.
Keene digs out a pin she stole long ago, dons some dirty armour, and spends the day lounging around the basement of a safehouse in Wyrm’s Crossing. Eventually, the High Harper appears. She's a handsome older woman—much older than she looks, if the stories are true. Keene does remember spotting her at the funeral, a dark-clad figure hovering near the back of the room. Her eyes are brown and sharp, her brows lift in surprise when she sees Keene.
“We haven’t met,” she says. “Are you here to make a report, or just to rest?”
“Reporting, ma’am,” she says. “I’ve had eyes on the Guild.”
“The Guild,” she echoes. Whatever she thinks of an assignment she obviously didn’t give, Keene can’t tell. But this is the problem with the Harpers. Keene knows what her people are doing; Harpers do whatever the hells they want, and that makes them easy to trick. “And what do you have to report? I do not know as much about them and their doings as I should.”
“Well, that’s what I’m for, ma’am,” says Keene brightly. “Happy to tell you what I can about their dealings. But I wanted to report on something specific—about Duke Ravengard.”
“Ravengard,” she echoes. The intent there’s a little clearer, and very intriguing: not so fond of her old friend’s friend, perhaps. “I cannot imagine he has any dealings with the Guild, unless that little speech of his was even more hypocritical than it seemed.”
“What do you mean?” Keene asks, letting her genuine surprise show.
Jaheira scoffs. “The Flaming Fist have forgotten they are still just mercenaries, whatever role they are paid to play in the city. It may be tradition for a Fist to sit on the Council, but some traditions ought to be broken. They have more than enough power already, and Ravengard is far too eager to wield it.”
“That’s what the Guild is saying, too,” Keene says. “But I didn’t expect to hear it from you.”
“We’ve only just met,” Jaheria says with a sharp grin. “You will learn. What was your name?”
“Star.”
“How sweet.” She can tell it’s fake, Keene thinks. But plenty of Harpers don’t use the name they were born with. “And is that the extent of your report, Harper Star? The Guild also dislikes Ravengard?”
“They say…” She pauses, looking hesitant. “Well, they say they had nothing to do with Duke Adrian’s death.”
A look flashes across Jaheira’s face, there then gone, too fast for even Keene’s practised eye to read. Anger, or…? She passes a hand over her face, wiping the moment away. Into the silence, Keene says, still all the tentative Harper, “That was why I went in. I wanted to know… D-Duke Adrian was always a hero of mine, and in his speech at the funeral, Ravengard said…”
“No,” Jaheira says. “I never thought so. And from all I can see, no one but Ravengard believes it. I cannot tell if even he believes it, or just needs some way to understand…” She trails off. “Were you there, Harper? When Abdel was killed?”
She’s heard enough about the scene that she could lie. It’s an easy kind of day to lie about. Nobody remembers the same things, half the people there didn’t see most of what went on. Insert yourself into the landscape, a little shadow, and nobody ever really knows the difference.
“No,” she says. “I usually would, but I just… I don’t know. There were things happening all over the city to celebrate Founders’ Day. I just didn’t end up making it to the Upper City in time. I tried to go after, but they closed the gates, obviously, and—well, I could have gotten in, but… I don’t know. There didn’t seem to be much point.”
Rilsa was there. Rilsa came running, cloak and wig askew, straight to the Guildhall: Keene thinks it possible she was the first person outside of the Upper City to know what had happened. Rilsa was in a state of fevered shock; no stranger to violence, she, and yet unable to put words to what she’d seen: the sudden attack, assassins in the crowd, a man fighting Duke Adrian up on the stage where he’d been giving a speech, and—
“I guess they had a wizard with them,” she said, breathless. “Or maybe one of the Fist wizards panicked. Because somebody summoned some sort of—thing. It was awful, all teeth and blood, and it just started raking through the crowd until some of the City Watch brought it down.” She passed a shaking hand over her mouth. “Never thought I’d be glad to see Vigilar Moore. Don’t know why she was so slow to react—she and Ravengard nearly came to blows after—I wanted to listen but I knew you had to know. I did get—oh.”
She paused, reaching for her pocket, and pulled her hand away from herself with bloodied fingertips. Keene lunged forward, borne on instinct, then stopped and collected herself, barking for one of her Ladies who knows a bit of healing magic. In the interim she hovered closer than she should, watching as Rilsa carefully shrugged off her cloak, her jacket. There was a bright splotch of blood on her shirt.
“Didn’t even notice,” she said, looking down at the stain in wonder, and that, somehow, was how Keene knew that whatever had happened was something very, very strange.
“I should have been,” Jaheira says, blunt, frank, almost a shrug. “But there we are. I have gathered as many reports as I can, but none of them make any sense of it. Somehow, no one saw Abdel die. He was there, he was fighting, he was dead. Little wonder Ravengard must find himself a culprit. He will avenge his friend and make himself a hero—and a Duke—in one blow.”
“I think he believes the things he says. The rot of the Guild, all that.”
Jaheira snorts. “Yes, I think he really might. But if we take the measure of the city, seek to find its point of balance—the Guild is a useful power to set on the scale.”
“You really think the Guild brings balance? They claim the Guildmaster has the power to see whoever they want elected,” she says. “Do you think that’s true?”
“That’s what they say,” Jaheira agrees with a nod, folding her arms across her chest. “Truth be told, I’ve spent little time in the city since the Guild changed hands. But it is good to meet you at last, Guildmaster Nine-Fingers.”
The key to getting caught is not to panic. Panic leads to mistakes.
“So, how much of what you just said was true?” she asks, cocking her head. “Or were you just trying to get my guard down?”
Jaheira laughs. It’s a sharp bark of a sound, it shakes her thin shoulders. “I may be a Harper, but I have never been a good liar. So what is your aim, Guildmaster? To convince the Harpers not to blame you for Abdel’s death?”
“The Harpers can cast blame where they like,” Keene says. “I know very well you have spies in my crews. With luck, they’ll even tell you the truth. I didn’t even want Adrian dead. I’m a sentimental sort, you see: I don’t like things to change.”
Hers is a carefully woven web, after all. Of course she’s good enough to manage broken threads and warped weave, or even a rend in the city’s fabric as large as the sudden and strange murder of a Duke. But she’d really rather not.
“Then why are you here, Guildmaster?”
Keene realises, with a sudden uncomfortable jolt, that she has just let a perfectly good excuse pass her by, and doesn’t have a better one to offer.
The key to getting caught is to know when you might as well just tell the truth.
“I thought it’s high time we met,” she says. “And I’m sorry about your friend.”
Some quip or other dies on the High Harper’s lips. Her well-lined face is like a broken-spined book, flashing open then snapping shut. She frowns at Keene, like she’s looking for something. Keene’s not used to scrutiny: by design, people’s eyes skip away from her, out of disinterest or respect or awe or fear. But she knows better than to squirm.
“Thank you,” says the High Harper.
+
Keene makes for the Emporium as the sun goes down. The curfews and closed gates of the city’s rings of walls don’t apply to her, who can navigate wherever she pleases through the streets beneath the streets, the sewers and the caverns of the place once called the Undercity. She emerges, quick and discreet, inside the walls of Little Calimshan and follows the familiar path to the Calim Jewel Emporium, where the district’s Kingpin can be found.
Someone has drawn Rilsa out from behind the silk curtain where she conducts her private business, and she holds court from behind the counter, engaged in a patter of Alzhedo too fast for Keene’s shaky fluency to follow.
Keene runs the Guild, but Rilsa rules Little Calimshan. Keene knew she would: she wouldn’t have made her Kingpin otherwise. Talent like hers couldn’t be wasted as a bodyguard. That was obvious to anyone. But it still brings Keene a sense of warm satisfaction, to watch Rilsa work and remember that she was right. Rilsa cranes over the counter, long and lean, her deft hands flying out to emphasise her words, and every eye the room is on her. Who could ever look away?
“Boss,” someone says. “Your Lower City friend is here.”
Rilsa’s eye snaps to the door, and she breaks into a smile.
“It’s your lucky day,” she says to the person she was speaking to. “My friend is here. You’ve got until tomorrow to come up with a lie I’ll actually believe.”
She waves a hand for Keene to approach, and the crowd begrudgingly makes way for her, for Rilsa’s friend, who nobody knows. The person Rilsa was speaking to looks like they can’t decide if they’re annoyed or grateful, and sends Keene a vague, half-curious look as she edges past.
“Get out of here, go home,” Rilsa commands to the crowd as she leads Keene back behind her curtain. They don’t, of course: they disappear behind the veil of silk, and business continues in their wake. They pause a moment—habit, to ensure no one has innocently followed—and then Rilsa’s fingers twine into Keene’s and she pulls her into the room, into a kiss.
“How’s the High Harper?” she asks.
“You know I don’t like mixing business with pleasure,” Keene murmurs against her lips. She feels Rilsa smile, feels Rilsa’s hands drag through her hair.
“Business first, then,” Rilsa says, not pulling away. “I want to know if I’ve got to arrange an assassination tomorrow.”
“Undecided,” Keene admits. She slides her hands beneath the collar of Rilsa’s soft, loose shirt and slips it down off of her shoulders. “I’ll never trust a Harper. But we just might want the same thing for now.”
“For now,” Rilsa echoes in a sneer. “The Harpers might be worse than the Fist, if only because they think they’re good. At least most Fist know what they do’s not justice. How long ‘til the High Harper decides actually, it’s the Guild that’s putting things out of balance?”
“Hopefully,” Keene says, “long enough to join in stopping Ravengard. After that…”
Rilsa wears no stays, just a loose undershirt in the Calishite style. It’s easy to tug off, soft linen pooling around her ankles.
“Whatever you say, Boss,” she says.