Tethered by Meljean Brook Read Free Book Online Page B

that most people suffer under now.”
    “So you are not a
complete
anarchist.”
    She gave him the sharp edge of her smile. The answering curve of his mouth kindled an immediate need to move closer, to slip into his arms and taste the heat of his lips. God, but she couldn’t think properly when he looked at her like that.
    Sipping wine to soothe that familiar burn, she turned to Bilson. Perhaps he hadn’t been radical, but why had Archimedes dismissed those ramblings so quickly? “Now I’m curious as to what you wrote in those handbills.”
    “Only the truth,” he replied solemnly, before the humor returned to his voice. “No, Archimedes had it pegged. We didn’t lack for topics, not with the Liberé war and the native disputes in full force, but we only said what everyone else was thinking—though written in a manner that we thought profound and rebellious.”
    Archimedes looked heavenward. “Show me a boy in first-year university who
doesn’t
think he’s both profound and rebellious.”
    Bilson ignored him, rocking forward slightly, gaze fixed on Yasmeen. “But one was different. The high magistrate had been exposed for keeping a mistress—which was nothing, except that she was bound to him under an indentured contract. There had been a general outcry, but nothing came of it. The magistrate made apologetic speeches and yet managed to justify his behavior, and soon enough, no one was speaking of it…except some of those justifications began to spread, repeated by other officials, all but overturning the protections in the Laws of Indenture.”
    “And somehow, it was all for the indentured’s moral good,” Archimedes said dryly.
    Bilson shook his head. “It was an insult to our people. The principalities of Johannesland had been built on the backs of the indentured, and then united under the laws protecting them. So we—
La Confrérie de la Vérité
—met in the great room, wondering how to expose the hypocrisy, to strip it so bare that no justifications could cling to it. We debated for hours, but had nothing.’”
    “God, the noise.” Archimedes closed his eyes, as if remembering. “I couldn’t have borne another hour of the brotherhood’s bellowing that night.”
    Bilson snorted. “So we discovered. This one pulls his head up out of his book and says, ‘Good God, you imbeciles! Two hundred years ago in Lusitania, Father Jacobus excoriated the Archbishop of Alagoas for the same hypocrisies. Read his journals, and you’ll find that he’s done all of the thinking for you.’ So we did—and our handbill spurred the reforms later that year. And
I
discovered that Wolfram Gunther-Baptiste wasn’t just some dull inknose, so I brought him into our brotherhood.”
    Ah, of course he had. “And you led that brotherhood, I imagine?”
    “We didn’t have a leader, but—”
    “You were,” Archimedes said.
    Bilson conceded with a nod. “If leadership was determining a direction, I suppose I was.”
    So he was. Yasmeen thought she was beginning to see Bilson better now. Archimedes said he always had a game in play, but she’d assumed that his schemes led to some other end: money, excitement, power. Now she suspected that the game itself was his reason. Smuggling would have put him in the thick of power struggles and negotiations…until Archimedes had destroyed Temür Agha’s war machines.
    Perhaps that was why Bilson hadn’t enjoyed salvaging itself, despite the money and excitement—while partnered with Archimedes, he hadn’t been the one making all of the decisions and determining a direction. Archimedes wasn’t the sort to take orders; he did as he damn well pleased, and the salvaging runs they’d made had depended upon his research.
    Yet Bilson had remained in the salvaging business for years—and Yasmeen would have wagered that Bilson stayed because there was one part of salvaging that he did enjoy: the negotiations with dealers afterward.
    And it had all begun with a pamphlet. Knowing