All paths led to the beginning.

Every time Ari tried to remember the year carved under the seven-pointed seeing star in the Institute, the numbers shifted to one she couldn’t pinpoint. The speeches that the Chief used to make about their heritage slipped away too, like water between her fingers.

Red, White, Blue: colours of their Agents, colours of the Union Jack. Wasn’t there something like that in his speeches? Didn’t that very line feature in every trainee’s handbook, kept safe under their pillows? Blue, white, red: that wasn’t the only flag it made.

‘Red for the poppies, lest we forget. Blue for the cornflowers, for the innocence lost. White for the lilies we’d lay on their graves, over and over again, until we can rest in peace.’

Another memory without an anchor. Phrases sprouted when Claribel swam through her past, throwing up floating fragments.

Back in their carriage, she extracted the ink and parchment that she’d once hidden under the seat to mark out locations of interest.

Claribel leaned over her shoulder, hovering like an angel. Or was she the devil?

She drew the first dash upon the parchment balanced on her lap, hoping that no ink would splatter onto Claribel’s silks.

~Are you asking if I agree? Sometimes love is between a lady and her people, and that must come before romance, no matter how true the heart is.~

Because she wasn’t sure if she could decode anything other than a threat, but Claribel was different. Claribel had bathed often enough under the smile of a loving father to recognise the meaning in a warm, wayward glance.

~I think so. But do you really think they are lost memories? They might be hallucinations, might they not? We should not make decisions based on my visions.~

Rather, it’d be a chance to see if the visions carried an element of truth. For someone with a past that seemed to shift like water, missing the dots on the i-s and crosses on the t-s, would it be a surprise to uncover a new one? She wrote out the next part of her message, three dots in a row.

~What is that?~

She’d considered writing the message in French, but hers was rusty, and there seemed to be too many traces of it in this world for it to be a complete mystery to the rest of the attendants. This, on the other hand… She was sure that the telegraph hadn’t been invented yet.

‘It’s Morse code,’ said Natty, skimming over the message she’d written. ‘So are we just going to leave the whole thing about Khurammians hanging then? What’s going to happen if the king raids the bathhouse?’

‘We’ll get Madame Lucretia on side tomorrow,’ said Ari. ‘That’s why we need to get Bleuet on her own. Help me, Natty. Please?’

A plea so often unuttered between the two of them, because neither needed to ask.

Natty sighed and crossed her arms. ‘What do you need.’

‘Somewhere for her to meet us. Somewhere that can’t be ambushed, ideally, so not in La Petite Mort, but also not miles away. She’ll have to get there and not set off a search party by the other attendants. Especially not Madame Lucretia.’ Ari didn’t know who the woman was, but if the shift in her business towards extortion and racketeering had started three years ago, then she wasn’t one of the schoolgirls either. If she was lucky, Madame Lucretia was a highly-competent grunt. If she wasn’t… Why don’t we start on a clean slate? That’d been the madame’s offer.

‘I’ve got a perfect suggestion.’ Natty grinned despite the circumstances. ‘The bathhouse. Take a bath together.’

‘Come on.’ Ari threw Natty’s words back at her. ‘Are you seriously asking?’

‘More like if you’re seriously asking whoever Bleuet might be to come and meet you alone, why not offer a place where you’ll both be dressed in the emperor’s new clothes? You’re not going to find a better place to prove you’re unarmed.’

~I must protest. I cannot be seen without my clothing.~

‘If you’re going to say, “Not over my dead body”, then, like,’ she twinkled her jazz hands at Ari, ‘not sure about the technicalities of that. Don’t worry though. No one will think it’s you. Most people haven’t seen you close up. It’s not like you’ve got screens blasting your face in HD, or paparazzi following your every move. Honestly, go just before sundown. The bathhouse will still be open, but the sun will be closing shop. They’ll light the place with some candles, but once you get in one of those tubs, you’ll just be another random woman with a towel on her head. No one will see you, because people don’t see what they don’t want to see.

‘Seriously seriously though,’ she turned to Ari, ‘you heard what Master Keating said. There used to be lots of travel between La Petite Mort and the bathhouses. I’m sure there are some concealed passages, if not secret ones, worked into the fabric of this city. La Petite Mort’s been remodelled, but it hasn’t moved from its original location, has it?’

‘But neither of us know the secret passages.’

‘Bleuet will though, if she’s who we think she is.’

And so will Madame Lucretia, if she was who Ari thought she was. What was there to stop her bringing backup through those passages to ambush them?

~As much as I loath to voice my support for your friend’s idea, I must let you know that any crime committed within a bathhouse incurs a greater punishment than one committed in the streets. Even a theft of a farthing from the clothes strewn across the bathhouse shall beget a hanging.~

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

And if this was Natty’s way of getting back at her for delaying the discussion on the fate of those Khurammians, she could only say yes. She couldn’t put into words the sense of doom that’d hang over her at times after making a big decision: one where the font size had exceeded shoulder height, where it was weighty enough to indent the ground. Right now, it was telling her that a misstep would make Sir Edwin arrest her instead, that she’d need to deliver the real culprit soon to quell his suspicions. Soon. SOON.

She wrote in the next set of dashes, then fanned dry the note and rolled it into as tight a scroll as she could get it to be. It wasn’t exactly inconspicuous though. ‘Can you–’

‘Get the message to Bleuet once she comes back? Find a moment when she’s on her own to do it? I can even watch her actions from the shadows and report back to you.’

Before Ari could even piece together a polite protest, Natty stuffed her whole arm into her jester’s hat and pulled out a rolled-up pair of hose, a gown in a faded orange, and a fuchsia cloak that looked every bit like the one that a La Petite Mort guard would have worn. ‘Behold, my hat trick!’

‘When did you grab one of those?’

‘Yesterday. Thought it might come in handy. The attendants all know each other, but there are too many guards for them all to recognise each other with a single glance.’ A few dabs from a tub in her pouch darken her eyebrows. Then, Natty’s face shifted before her eyes: Fabia’s easy smile made way for an intense frown that seemed to age her by ten years, and her usually skinny frame grew an unmistakeable beer belly and a double chin. With a hand braced against the roof of the carriage as it ambled away from the lulling sound of the sea, Natty gave her a little wave, but not before Ari leaned in to ask one final favour: a search and find, even though Natty was no Agent Blue. Grey eyes, she had. Thos’s words from his final evening. Eyes that glowed like an Eye of Una.

A nod later, Natty was gone, melting into the crowds as if she belonged there, in the streets of Eirene, leaving Ari alone with a thought she’d pushed to the back of her mind.

If Bleuet and Madame Lucretia were also from her world, then why did they never so much as look at Claribel? Perhaps they were good enough actors, like Natty. But June and Percy hadn’t interacted with Claribel like Natty had either. If the ability to converse with Claribel’s spirit had nothing to do with whether or not they were from her world, then what was it about Natty that connected them together?

She watched the portside fade into sparse, wintering grass, wishing for the confines of the Institute that’d raised her, just for a moment to rummage through the gear room, for a moment to sit in the comfort of being surrounded by weapons she could trust. And a Chief that she couldn’t.

*

The day passed excruciatingly slowly, yet all too fast.

This time, when she neared the apothecaries, it was without Natty by her side, hoping that her only friend had managed to bide in the shadows well enough to escape La Petite Mort unscathed.

This time, when she passed Master Strond’s shop, he didn’t stop to offer his pleasantries.

It helped that she’d forgone Claribel’s jewel-entwined braids for a simple loose braid from what little hair that Claribel still clung to. Her unlived memory plagued her mind. What if Mildred could still recall that past? What if?

She stopped outside the bathhouse, breathing in the smell of freshly-baked bread from the bakery next door, squinting into the fading light, trying to pick out a shadow that might be Natty. What if she was already inside?

It was easy enough to hear the throng of people inside through the glassless windows, thrumming low beneath a melody plucked on a lute: not one she recognised this time.

What if Natty couldn’t make it? What if she was lying dead in La Petite Mort’s weapon storage room? Not the first body to cool on those floors.

‘Don’t kill me, it’s me,’ came Natty’s voice, just before a man in a bright green doublet and blue hose threw his arms around her and handed her a linen towel. An identical one was draped over his shoulders, which looked too wide to be Natty’s.

‘Amazing things posture can do,’ Natty whispered. ‘By the way, yours is screaming “I’m here to check out who’s going to shoot me through the head” instead of “I’m hear to have a nice, relaxing soak in the hot spring water”.’

Letting down her guard was an impossible feat, though she tried to relax her own shoulders and banish the scowl from her face.

she asked, looking towards the attendant who perched on a stool right outside the entrance counting coins. A pair of visitors dropped a few coins into her bowl without asking for the price, and she grunted in return.

~I… would take your friend’s lead on this. Also, this may be a bad time to let you know that my purse only contains a few crowns and ravens. If this costs a few farthings, the entire content of that bowl will not be enough to supply us change.~

‘Good thing I haven’t a single raven in my purse then.’ Natty sauntered up to the attendant and said, ‘Two for private tubs please.’

‘Meal?’ The attendant stared back with eyes as dead as Ari’s victims.

‘No.’ Natty tossed a few coins into the bowl, earning a stone token and another grunt from the attendant. ‘We have cupping today. Pay the Master Barber inside if you want it.’

Natty dipped her head in thanks and dragged Ari up the stairs, shoeless, up into a crowd of unarmoured skin. Only the musicians and the attendants beating a few bathers’ backs with bundles of birch branches remained dressed, like them. Away from the pool in the middle, where steam rose around half-immersed bodies, stood several wooden tubs. Groups of two to four chatted within, separated by a large wooden tray between them, bearing breads and beers.

They walked past a man in a checkered apron, heating up ceramic cups over a small fire and placing them in a row down another man’s back, as if they’d time-travelled straight out of an acupuncture shop.

~That’s the Master Barber.~

Of course cupping had nothing to do with perming hair by wrapping it around a cup, or cutting a beard using shards from a cup, or whatever she thought it was.

Natty handed an attendant their token, earning them a spot in an empty tub. It even had its own wooden, cross-shaped hanger for their clothes.

Ari tried to focus on covering the quality of Claribel’s linen underdress on the hanger with the borrowed, orange gown; it helped calm her more than thinking about how she’d need to resort to strangulation, drowning or fire to defend herself here. The first two relied too much on a strength that Claribel didn’t have in her arms; as for the last, there was simply too much water around.

She let the warmth of the water embrace her, lowering herself until only her head peeked from the surface.

Don’t you mean to give yourself back to the water?

Ari startled. It’d been years since she’d heard that distorted voice in the bath. Now, only the seas still whispered to her. She shook the droplets from her hair and zoned in on something, anything that wasn’t the feeling of her edges disappearing like a mermaid into sea foam.

‘I found it, by the way,’ said Natty, grounding Ari back in reality. She removed her disguise, but no one seemed to stare at the reveal. She opened her palm, letting the light twinkle through the gem.

For gem it was: it looked more like a glittering ball of crystal than glass. She could see how Thos might mistake it for the Eye of Una like the one that Claribel had worn for that first morning’s greeting with Sir Beren and Sir Dagon.

‘Is that supposed to serve as a piece of evidence that I have good taste in eyes?’ Bleuet smiled at them, footsteps quiet under the chattering voices and splashing water, draping her gown over Natty’s tunic and lowering herself across from them in the same tub. Instead of the black and gold flower she’d worn before, the glass eye she wore now was a close imitation of her real, grey one. ‘It’s very well-made. I can recommend you the glassmaker should someone ever maim you. That someone might even be me, so please don’t disappoint me, Ari Lee. I’ve heard so much about you. Tell me, where’s Miri?’