voice as graceful as his carriage. Rafe did not like aristocratic men. He did not like men who towered over him. If they had to be fair, he preferred a bit of dirt to darken the blond. Rafe felt somewhat breathless.
“Oh, not at all,” Rafe drawled. “You blend in like a vulture among crows. What are you looking for?”
The man raised his eyebrows. His eyes were blue as the poet’s cornflowers. They crinkled in the corners, as though they were used to smiling. “I was hoping to hire a chair. I don’t suppose it’s possible in this mess.”
“You’d have to walk the few turns to Chambers Street. Hire a chair, you say?” A terrible suspicion clawed its way through Rafe’s consciousness. “Why, you’re not here by chance at all! Are you one of their lackeys, attempting to help those dogs escape without facing the victims of their actions?”
The man did smile at this, with infuriating kindness. “You make it sound very dramatic. I was given to understand they were just reviewing a proposed change to the bylaws. Mundane stuff.”
“The free pursuit of knowledge could never be mundane, and only someone whose livelihood depends on those spoiled wretches on the Hill could say such a thing!”
The lackey blinked. “Spoiled wretches on the Hill, you say?”
“What do they know of the intellectual life? Of dedication to knowledge? Why, hardly any of them even so much as take classes here.”
“That doesn’t preclude their having some knowledge of your activities, does it? They could read monographs and attend lectures. They could carry on correspondence. They could even, in a modest way, of course, contribute their own findings! Knowledge, surely, does not limit itself to one’s physical presence in the pubs and chocolate houses on Chambers Street.” He paused artfully, looked down, and seemed to notice for the first time a—quite small!—stain on Rafe’s cravat. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “Though no doubt you claim an extensive familiarity with those institutions of higher learning. At the very least.”
Rafe felt dizzy. The lackey smelled of a light perfume: apricots and some darker spice—cloves or myrrh. His fingers were long and blunt at the ends, the nails meticulously clipped but not manicured. Blue ink lingered in the soft folds beneath the second and third joint of his index finger.
Rafe took a step forward. They stood only a hand apart, now. “Just whose man are you?” His voice trembled.
Those fingers reached out again. They brushed back a long, dark curl, which had fallen slantwise across Rafe’s face. The man’s expression was unreadable, but the lips smiled. Rafe felt a sigh come through him like a summer storm.
“I am in the service of the Tremontaine family,” he said, quite softly.
Rafe knew. As he had known he would be a scholar from the moment he first listened to de Bertel’s lectures on the ascendance of man. As he had known he would follow evidentiary science when he had first read of the observations that proved the curvature of the earth.
This man, as beautiful as heartbreak, was the Duke Tremontaine himself. One of the most meddlesome members of the Board of Governors.
Rafe wiped his hands on his pants. “Oh, hell’s bells,” he said. “Get the devil away from here before they hang you.”
The cornflower eyes snapped up to scan the crowd behind Rafe again. “But you won’t?”
“My name is Rafe Fenton, and I disagree with you in all the ways that matter. I expect you’ll be hearing my name more often, if you insist on dictating the path of our intellectual pursuits. Because I will oppose you with everything I have in me. But I do not,” Rafe wiped his hands again, “approve of physical violence. So get out before you meet someone who does.” His voice rasped. It was hard to hear over the running beat of his heart.
“Thank you, Rafe,” said the duke. “I honor your passion and commitment. And I hope you’ll see that we share the same goal, in the end.”
Rafe felt bleak, looking up at that earnest face that honestly believed what it was telling him. He was sure the conservative deans and department chairs, so eager to squash the new philosophies, had presented their terms in quite the flattering light.
“Go,” Rafe said. “Redrun Alley will take you straight to Chambers Street. I don’t know if anyone else might recognize you, but keep your head down just in case.”
He turned to walk away, but the duke reached out and caught him by the shoulder. The fissure spreading through his middle split wider. He could have cried.
“Perhaps you might be persuaded to see the other side of the argument? By the time we meet again?” said the Duke Tremontaine.
“The sun is more likely to rise in the north than anyone succeed in persuading me of that. I doubt we shall see each other again, dearest Tremontaine.”
An endearment wielded as an insult cuts sharpest of all. Rafe had made himself an expert in the technique. And yet, with this man, even sarcasm seemed to have turned on him. He felt sick.
The duke winced. “I suppose not. I . . .” He shook his head. “Goodbye, Rafe.”
Rafe stared as the tall man threaded his way carefully through the crowd. He could follow his progress longer than he should have been able to: a head as bright as a new-minted coin—and a mind, and a heart.
• • •
Rafe had been gone for nearly half an hour before Kaab decided to look for him. The girl, Micah (she had asked her directly and Micah had seemed quite sure she was a girl, which made Rafe’s confusion distinctly odd), seemed happy to climb the tall base of the statue of an old man with a broad cape and a fist in the air. He was three times human size, and more than high enough to give them a good view of the main University square.
“I like it up here,” Micah said, when they had settled beside each other on the statue’s shoulder and cape. “I can breathe better. There’s lots of things in the city, but it doesn’t smell good.”
“No,” Kaab agreed, still scanning the people surging below for a young man with a broad forehead and a mane of curling, ink-black hair. The students were still waiting by the closed wood-and-iron doors of the hall, but Kaab doubted they would get any satisfaction. If she were any judge, the guilty parties had long since escaped through one of several back entrances.
“How does it smell where you come from?” Micah asked.
“Like jacaranda flowers and cool springs and wet stone. Like tortillas on a comal.”
“What are those?”
“A kind of pancake and a kind of stove. We eat tortillas at every meal.”
“Does it taste good?”
“It’s the food of the gods,” Kaab said simply.
“And you’re from very far away? I’m also from far away . . . well, a day’s driving in the cart, but Rhubarb isn’t a very fast horse. But you’re from farther away than that.” She sounded very sure.
Kaab thought she glimpsed Rafe, at the far edge of the square, near a retaining wall that backed onto some kind of garden.
“Much
