A Brother's Price

lexicon, he realized, of someone’s personal cant. Keifer’s lovers must have given it to him so they could communicate with him. Under the book, little scraps of folded paper contained Keifer’s secret messages.
    Jerin unfolded one: a ball. Heraday, a cant name, talk. Despite the unknown symbol, the meaning was fairly clear. At the ball on Heraday, talk to cant-named person .
    The second message sickened Jerin: Claireday. a clock showing midnight, a simple drawing of a bed. a key unlocking a door. Unlock the door to your bedroom Claireday at midnight .
    The third message sent Jerin to the lexicon for the first symbol. Picnic. Food was the second word, though he checked the lexicon to be sure. The third symbol couldn’t be found in the lexicon. Jerin’s grandmothers, though, had carefully taught it to him: an X with an oval drawn over it—to stand for skull and crossbones. Poison .
     
    The husband quarters looked like Keifer still lived there, throwing his fits, wreaking his anger on anything at hand. Ren stopped just inside the door, shocked.
    Surely Jerin wasn’t like Keifer! Surely Jerin didn’t turn his anger on everything and anything.
    The rooms were strangely quiet. No howls of anger. No screams of ugly, yet childishly simple names. Was Jerin even here?
    She walked to the bedrooms, noting with some relief that nothing seemed broken. No shards of glass. No splintered, battered furniture. In fact, there seemed to be a strange order to the chaos.
    Jerin wasn’t in the big bedroom, with the bed stripped down to the frame, nor the dressing room, where not a stitch of clothing remained. It was the stark emptiness of the dressing room that turned her annoyance to concern. This was far too orderly and systematic to be compared to Keifer’s random acts of destruction.
    Jerin sat tailor-style on the floor of the little bedroom. He sat silent, statue-still, a box and a book both open on his lap, a scrap of paper dangling in his hand, nearly slipping from his fingers.
    “Jerin?”
    He looked up, pale, his eyes wide with shock. He gazed at her, seemingly too stunned to move or speak.
    “Jerin? What’s wrong?”
    “I—I thought I might find out who Keifer’s lovers were.” He held up the paper and book to her. “I was searching for clues.”
    It was thieves’ cant, written out on a piece of good stationery. Three neat symbols. There was also a lexicon for translating it, the simplified symbols expanded into pictures a child could understand.
    “ Keifer’s stupid, Ren. He’s a cow !” Trini had sneered her contempt of their husband. “ I know you don’t marry men for their brains, but there’s a limit !”
    Keifer’s lover had apparently known his mental limits as well as Trini had. The book left little chance for misunderstanding. Ren looked at the quality of the stationery and the lexicon with its careful renderings of the palace, its occupants, and the daily life of gentle society and realized the truth. ‘This isn’t thieves’ cant. This is the personalized cant of the cannon-stealing gentry that nearly killed Odelia.“
    The color drained out of Jerin’s face. “The ones that killed Egan Wainwright?”
    Ren flinched in memory of the mutilated, raped man. Had Jerin’s sisters told him about that? “Yes. Them.”
    “How could they get into the gardens to get to the bolt-hole door?”
    Ren knew that the gardens weren’t perfectly secure despite the wall and the guards. It was unlikely, however, that such a vast number of women scaling the wall could go unnoticed. The Barneses? They had access to the gardens. No. The Barneses never left the palace in any large number—they couldn’t have been the ten women escorting the cannons on the Onward . Nor had one of the Barneses vanished mysteriously when the red-hooded thief had been killed.
    Only palace guests could have been in the garden unobserved.
    And the only women invited to the palace, prior to the Whistlers, were from noble families. During Keifer’s short time in the palace, the royal family entertained often. He liked parties where he was the focus of powerful women. Keifer flirted with everyone; those who had the decency not to return the attention were never asked back.
    Ren flipped through the lexicon, hoping for a clue to the family’s identity. There was the picture of the executioner’s hood, and a translation for colors, but nothing as damning as a woman’s face with “black hat” transcribed beside it. She cast the