Chapter 4

No, not lies, not really--avoiding lies, stopping just short of them, as though it was some kind of morality code--but refusing to wade into truths too, skirting them with deflections, answering questions with questions, oblique accusations, righteous defenses. Calder hadn't actually said he was from Lind, but he'd let the papers speak the lie for him, and each denial of more unseemly implications had the ring of truth to Dallin's ears. Dallin would wager that every word Calder had spoken was a truth of some sort. It was breaking the code of those truths and maneuvering Calder into the things he wasn't saying that would be tricky.

Dallin sat back in his chair, relaxing his pose. "Are you easily frightened?" He made his voice soft, a potential paramour expressing concern.

Calder looked down, demure as he slipped one shoulder up in a small shrug. Dallin didn't miss the sinuous shift of the collarbone beneath smooth skin revealed by the pull of the half-laced shirt--didn't miss the fact that it had the appearance of calculated deliberation.

Calder's hands came up with a tink of metal, long fingers pushing black hair from eyes gone soft and distant. "I'm frightened only by those things over which I have no control." A rosy little flush softened the fine spray of freckles over Calder's cheeks. "Some have begged for the opportunity to bind me. Others have threatened it, even tried it, with no regard for my wants or fears. And now...."

Dallin tilted his head, encouraging. "Now?"

"Well." Calder's smile turned gently ironic. "Now you don't have to beg, do you?"

The insult was clear and not wholly unexpected. Nonetheless, Dallin's jaw tightened. "A slattern's trick. You won't find me so easily gamed."

The soft acquiescence fled beneath a hot spark of anger. "I tell you, I am no--"

"Then stop playing at one!"

"You ask questions, I answer them--isn't that how this game is supposed to go? And now I am maligned--again!--because I play by your rules! If I've misunderstood them, do tell, so I can make sure my next step is well within your strategy."

Edging on anger now, Dallin clenched his teeth. "What did you say to those men?"

Calder loosed a soft groan of weary frustration. "I said 'No,' and 'Leave me alone,' and was given a solid blow to the head for my trouble. Will there be charges for assault as well as murder? Or is the constabulary indifferent to crimes against someone like me?"

"Someone like you." Dallin leaned in. "Tell me first what you are so I can decide the proper course."

"You don't even know what *you* are. Why would you believe anything I would tell you?"

That one gave Dallin pause. "What does that mean?"

Calder sighed. "Nothing. I'm... upset. I don't know what I'm saying."

Dallin didn't believe that one for a second--every word that came out of this man's mouth was calculated. "You've not answered my question."

Calder was silent for a long moment, staring at his hands as his fingers picked at each other. Slowly he looked up, his expression fatigued but bold.

"You would make me a depraved conjurer because you want to think me a depraved conjurer. You think I look the part so you'll fit me into it, no matter what I say." He dropped his gaze and furthered softly, "Only remember that I could make of you a monster by the same logic."

Enough. The man didn't seem to know what a straight answer was.

Dallin snatched up the identification papers and waved them under Calder's nose. "Who are you, really?"

Calder shifted an anxious glance to the papers. "They are legal and in order."

Another not-lie/not-truth. Dallin allowed his voice to rise in volume and deepen in timbre, threatening. "Where did you get them? How much did you pay for them, and who sold them to you?"

"I've done no wrong!" Calder snapped, all pretense of calm regard or soft compliance gone. "I suffered attentions I did not want and find myself accused because of it! I had nothing to do with those two men--"

"Those two men tried to beat each other to death in order to give you those attentions, one succeeded, and now you evade my questions and play at seduction! Who are you and how did you drive sane men to murder?"

"How d'you know they even *were* sane?"

"Did you try to play them against each other?"

"No! I never even--"

"Cast a spell, then?"

"I'm not a witch, I wouldn't even know how to--"

"Did you spurn one in favor of the other?"

"I was trying to spurn both, I didn't--"

"Did you look at them the way you looked at me before?"

"I wasn't--" Calder clenched his teeth, fisted his hands. "You see seduction because you want to see it, because you think you merit it! You assume I caused men to attack one another for the same reason you assume I'd even want you, when all you've done is try to bully and intimidate me, and then you look at me like you just found me on the bottom of your boot and call me things no man would suffer without a call to duel! You do these things because you can, because your size and your authority permit it, but I'd love to hear the questions you'd ask if I were your size and you were mine!"

His anger was contagious--Dallin found his blood rising and his heart tripping up in rhythm. "Where did you get the papers?"

"From the same place all citizens of Lind get theirs!"

Dallin growled and pounded his fist on the table, trying not to feel too much satisfaction when it made Calder jump and some of the color fade from his cheeks. "Why do you keep this up, when you know I've twigged? They're forgeries--you're as much from Lind as I am a third nipple on the Mother's left tit."

Calder's glower was scathing. He sat forward, jaw twitching. "Prove it," he snarled. "You have legal verification of my identity, and I have given my statement as witness and fulfilled my obligation as a citizen of the Commonwealth. Unless you can prove those papers a forgery, you can't keep me here." He pushed his hands at Dallin. "Let me go."

"What did you call me when I walked in?"

Calder glared, teeth grinding. With a long breath, he swallowed and looked away. "I don't remember."

A blatant lie this time--the first one, Dallin was fairly certain, since he'd come into the room. Dallin noted the change in demeanor--from anger and defense to quiet anxiety--and silently congratulated himself on hitting another mark. He'd throw himself a party when he figured out exactly what it was.

"You called me by a name, like you thought you knew me."

"Nonsense muttering," Calder murmured, subdued. "I was frightened."

"Of my size." Dallin lifted an eyebrow. "It sounded like the North Tongue."

A small twitch. It appeared there were marks all over the place. Perhaps if Dallin kept stumbling blind, he'd hit the right one.

"How would I know the North Tongue?" Calder wanted to know.

"You see my point."

"I see that you've bound me and held me against my will when you have no cause for either. I was very nearly a victim. Would you have been so dedicated in your questioning of those two 'gentlemen' if it were me lying on a slab?" Calder's hands flopped on the table again. "Please." Real entreaty this time, quiet and near desperate. "I've done no harm to anyone, and I want to leave now."

Not quite a break, but at least a crack.

"How long have you been in the province? Why have I never seen you before?"

Calder slumped. "Perhaps you don't get out much," he muttered. "I expect that'll be my fault soon as well."

"How long--"

"Three weeks!"

"And where were you before that?"

"I don't.... Why won't you just...? I've done no wrong. Why are you doing this?"

"Tell me who you are."

"You have my papers. Please." Calder scrubbed at his face, then peered at Dallin with a look of raw appeal. "You said I was not a prisoner. I have answered your questions. I have told you everything I can tell you." Once again, he held his hands out. "Please. Either arrest me or let me go. I don't even care which anymore."

Of all the faces he'd seen this man don this morning, Dallin thought perhaps this was the true one: exhausted and miserable, saw-toothed terror blurring about the periphery. Pity rose, softening the hard edges of suspicion. Dallin didn't believe for a moment that this man was Wilfred Calder from Lind. But he also didn't believe he'd enchanted anyone into murder.

So what was he hiding, what was he hiding from, and why was he so afraid?

Dallin was only slightly moved, his pity tucked back behind duty and then hidden beneath the hard set of his face. Almost everyone brought behind these doors was pitiable in some form, whether hard-bitten villain or truly innocent victim, and long experience had taught him that most people hovered somewhere in between the two. Treating one like the other and alternating his approach--sympathizing, then victimizing--served to unbalance and confuse.

This man was not confused. Unbalanced, certainly, and agitated beyond the point many others had fallen into tearful confession, but no sobbing declarations hovered at his tongue, no indignant justifications. Instead he all but obsessed over those manacles, begging not for his life or forgiveness or anything so trite and unseemly as reprieve--he begged instead for release from the cold metal about his wrists, so fixedly that Dallin began to wonder if the discomfort they achieved had not somehow balanced out against his favor rather than in it.

He peered at the shackles, at the pink, knobby scar on the left wrist. Newish and thick, and reaching halfway about the blue-veined wrist, with the uneven healing marks of botched care and badly treated infection.

He looked like someone who'd spent his life locked up in a dark room, Dallin had thought when he'd first seen Calder. Now Dallin thought perhaps he'd been all too close to the mark. This man had been someone's prisoner before. It was no wonder the restraints unnerved him so.

"Where did you get that scar?"

Calder's hands curled into loose fists, withdrew. A slack shrug was all Dallin got for an answer.

"Who thought you so dangerous as to bind you? Have you been arrested before?"

Calder shook his head slowly. "No."

"Then what did you do to merit shackling?"

A low chuckle, dark and bleak and maybe even a little bit crazed. "An offense almost as heinous as what I did this time." Calder looked up, fixed a defiant stare on Dallin, and gave him the ruins of a desolate smile. "I had the audacity to exist."

Rebellion and despair, obstinate mutiny and raw panic. Too many things clawed for domination in Calder's gaze, and Dallin would swear that every one of them was a cryptic truth in a language he didn't know how to read. This wasn't about what happened at the Kymberly last night. Whatever this was, it made the Kymberly's events small and unremarkable.

"You," Dallin said quietly, "are in very deep trouble."

Calder laughed, pure bitter irony, and rolled his eyes. "Nothing gets by you, does it?"

"No, not from me, not even from the constabulary, and it's no small trouble, I judge. You're hiding from something. No," Dallin said more slowly when Calder twitched, "someone." There--a slight wince and flinch. Dallin lowered his voice, spilled salt into the wound. "And you're terrified."

"If I were," Calder answered, soft and resigned, "that would make you terribly cruel for tormenting a man already tormented." He peered up at Dallin, eyes brimming wet now and once again gone glittering, liquid malachite in the sooty light of the lamps. "Are you a cruel man, Constable Brayden?"

The tears were no ruse, and the question no idle inquiry. Dallin sat back, eyes locked to Calder's, absently pleased that the stare didn't have its former effect. "It is possible," Dallin ventured finally, "that I could help you, if you would but trust me."

"Perhaps you could if I did. But since we find ourselves, quite literally, on opposite sides of the table...." Calder stretched out his arms so his hands splayed on the table, palms up. "Please. Let me go."