Royal Bastards

by Andrew Shvarts

  I shot Miles a confused look, and he threw back a shrug. When we’d set out from the grove, I’d worried this was a suicide mission, that Jax was wrong about the poster, that we’d be recognized immediately, and we were throwing our lives away. But now I couldn’t help but wonder if we’d been wrong about the risk all along. Were our disguises that good? Or did we not even need them?

  The lights of Bridgetown grew brighter and brighter, and soon we were coming up on the town itself. I could make out the rickety buildings of East Bridgetown, densely clustered wooden houses with cracked roofs and peeling paint. The story went that Bridgetown had once been two completely different villages, one on each side of the Markson, connected by a single long wooden bridge. Then another bridge had been added, and another, and another, and soon an entire mile-long stretch of river had been built over, and the two towns had become one, with a sprawling night market, the biggest in the West, set up on the bridges in the middle. I still remembered it so clearly from when I was a little girl: rows and rows of stands that went on forever, packed tight on the elevated wooden platforms, open all night under the flickering light of hundreds of mounted torches. I remembered the noisy shouts of the vendors, the smells of fruit and spice and roasting meat, the barely audible river rushing underneath. I remembered my father’s firm hand holding mine as he guided me along.

  We wouldn’t be going to the market tonight, of course. It would be too risky to go somewhere that crowded. All we needed to do was ride into the Common Quarter of East Bridgetown (basically a slum), find the first apothecary we could, buy the antidote, and bail before anyone had a chance at identifying us. Still, as we got closer and closer to the entrance, I could hear the sounds of the market’s commotion, distant voices shouting and the faintest notes of music. I felt a sudden, unexpected pang of sadness. I’d always planned on coming back to Bridgetown’s night market as an adult, trying on dresses and sampling wines and dancing with some fancy mask on. No matter how tonight went, I was pretty sure that was never going to happen.

  If we’d gone in through the nicer, richer West Bridgetown, we’d have ridden in through a big fancy gate, and probably had to pass an inspection by the City Watch. But in East Bridgetown, we just rode right in, the trees at our sides replaced with crumbling houses, the dirt underfoot by chipped paving stone. From a distance, it looked like any of the poorer villages near Castle Waverly, but once inside, it was stranger, more cluttered, more foreign. If West Bridgetown was where merchants from all over the Kingdom came to sell their goods, East Bridgetown was where they ended up when they went broke. I passed a tavern with four flags hanging over the door, one for each of the Provinces, and the drunks inside were dancing to some strange warbly instrument I’d never heard before. Nearby, just past a pen of squealing pigs, lay a drunk from the Southlands, his head bald, his skin bronze, one chubby hand resting on a strange animal that looked like a lanky gray dog in a bristly shell. A Westerner, a Heartlander, and a Zitochi huddled together in an alley, smoking griefweed as they rolled nine-sided Devil’s Dice. The air smelled like sweat and beer and the unmistakable tang of piss.

  Next to me, Zell shifted on his horse uncomfortably. Only City Watchmen were allowed to openly wear weapons in Bridgetown, so Zell had left his sword back at the camp and hidden a pair of daggers under his cloak. He looked around with what I think was curiosity, like he was trying to drink it all in with his eyes.

  “It’s not all like this,” I explained to him, weirdly apologetic. “There are nice parts.”

  “It reminds me of the Steps in Zhal Korso,” Zell replied, and he actually seemed kind of wistful. “Drinking…gambling…feasting…”

  “Not to mention whoring,” Miles muttered, his gaze stuck on a nearby brothel. Or, more specifically, on the topless women leaning out its upper windows.

  “Hey! We’re married, remember? There’ll be no whoring on my watch,” I said, and okay, yes, it was kind of funny. “Now, hurry up and find us that apothecary. Husband.”

  It took Miles a minute, but he spotted one, a squat one-story building with a pole out front painted white and green: the colors of a meyberry leaf, the universal symbol for healing. We tied our horses to a hitch outside and walked toward its closed wooden door. I worried no one was there, but then I saw some faint candlelight through the shuttered window, and a hint of movement.

  Which, of course, made me start to panic. We weren’t just riding alongside people anymore. We were going to speak to them.

  “I’ll do the talking,” Miles whispered urgently, obviously feeling the same stress. “We’ll just go in, get the antidote, and get out. Don’t say anything unless you have to.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” Zell replied.

  “Well. Good, then.” Miles reached the door first, then hesitated and took a deep breath. “No way out. No other choice, is there? No. There isn’t. Let’s do it.”

  He threw open the door, and we stepped in. The only apothecary I’d been to before was the one in Millerton, which was clean and nicely organized, like the pantry at Castle Waverly. This one was the exact opposite of that. Massive shelves sat behind a cluttered counter, and they were messy with loose herbs, vials, and bags of powders. Yellowed books and crumpled papers littered every single surface. The whole room was lit by a single candelabra on the counter, and there was no sign of an owner, save for some shuffling noises coming from a closed door behind the counter.

  “You sure this place will have what we need?” I asked.

  “It wouldn’t be my first choice.” Miles picked a heavy tome off the floor and turned it over in his hands. “But beggars, choosers, all that.”

  “All that indeed,” a dry, accented voice replied. The door behind the counter swung open, and a stocky older man hobbled in, reeking of sweat and cheap booze. He was wearing a rumpled tunic that hung too tight around his heavy gut, and his thinning gray hair had the tips died gold. He wore makeup, but strangely, with thick purple shadows under his eyes and his lips painted bright orange. “My name is Timofei Lorrin Khell-vin-Khorrin, and I hail from Malthusia, the greatest and most wondrous of all the Eastern Baronies,” he said. “Apothecary, scholar, and, right now, a man who’d hoped to shut down his shop for the night. Let’s make this quick, shall we? What can I do for you?”

  Miles cleared his throat and stepped forward. “Well. You see. It’s quite a remarkable story. My name is Anders Tonnin. This is my beautiful wife, Muriel. We were married one month ago, down in Malbrec, where a most curious event occurred. You see—”

  Timofei interrupted Miles with a rumbling, phlegmatic sigh. “Titans’ tits, boy. Can you skip the life story and just tell me what you want to buy?”

  “Oh. Well. Right, then.” Miles blinked. “We’ll need a tonic made. A single vial. Mixed embrium root, Orlesian ash, and skarrling venom, in a solution of—”

  “Distilled alcohol and meyberry juice.” The apothecary let out a weary sigh. “You could have just said you need some skarrling antidote.” There was no sign at all that he recognized us, but given how bleary his eyes looked, I didn’t think he would have recognized himself. “Right. One vial will be twenty-five Eagles.”

  “Twenty-five Eagles,” I repeated. “No problem!” I reached for the coin purse on my hip.

  There was no coin purse on my hip.

  I froze, my empty hand hovering over my side. On a normal ride out to town, that was where I would’ve kept it. But this wasn’t a normal ride out to town. My coin purse was back in my room at Castle Waverly, a million miles away, where I’d left it before sneaking out to Whitesand Beach. I looked back at Miles and Zell, and their faces were just as blank.

  Holy. Shit. We’d been so focused on our disguises and backstories, we’d completely forgotten about money.

  We had to be the dumbest fugitives who’d ever lived.

  Timofei stared at us. “Well? Where’s the money?”

  “It’s…um…it’s a funny story,” I said, with absolutely no idea what sentence came after th
at. How in the frozen hell had Miles managed to come up with a novel-length backstory but hadn’t remembered that buying things costs money?

  “What’s going on here?” Timofei arched a bristly eyebrow. “You do have money, don’t you? How could you not?”

  He was about to recognize us. I could see it now, that moment of realization, when he’d yell for the City Watch, when everything would come crumbling down. Zell must have seen it, too, because he stepped forward, sliding a hand into his coat to grab his dagger. I shot him a hard look, desperately trying to scream NO, because even if it meant our lives, I wasn’t ready to just kill an innocent man. My mind spun with other possibilities. Was there something we could bribe him with? Was there a way to just knock him out? Did we have to run?

  We had to run.

  I sucked in my breath and turned to the door….

  Miles stepped forward, a wild-eyed look on his face. He threw out his arms wide and yelled at the top of his lungs, “I offered my love a purse of coin….”

  He’d lost it. He’d actually lost his mind. After years and years of nervous anxiety, Miles had finally snapped, and at the worst possible moment, too.

  But Timofei didn’t seem alarmed or even confused. He stared at Miles, head cocked to the side, mouth crinkling into a giddy smile. “And prayed she’d offer sight of loin!”

  “‘A Stanza to a Summer Love,’” Miles proudly replied. “Mercanto Oriole. One of his ten best, I’d say.”

  “One of his top five!” Timofei hustled around the counter, the stack of papers totally forgotten. “Titans’ tits! You know the works of Mercanto Oriole?”

  “Of course,” Miles replied. What the hell was happening here? “He’s my favorite classical poet. Maybe my favorite poet of all.” He leaned over and picked up a heavy leather-bound tome, the one he’d been looking at earlier. “It is so rare to meet another Mercanto fan….”

  “In this dump of a city? You’re lucky to find a man who can read!” Timofei rushed across the room and grabbed Miles by the shoulders, clasping him in his broad, sweaty arms, embracing him like a long-lost son. “My boy! Tell me you’ve also read Mercanto’s plays….”

  “Of course! I read The Tragedy of Ostrapos once a year!”

  Timofei let out a delighted laugh, and I’m pretty sure this was the happiest he’d been in a decade. “Just when you think your life has hit its absolute bottom, you meet a Mercanto fan!” He slapped his forehead, and his sweaty hand made a smacking sound. “But what am I saying? Here I am, going on and on about Mercanto, when you came in here on business! Let me get you that antidote right away!” He spun toward the shelf of ingredients and sprang to work, grabbing one thing after another. “And don’t even dream of money! No fans of the great Mercanto Oriole will ever pay a single brass Eagle in my shop!”

  I turned to Miles, mouth agape, and he just shrugged. It was amazing. It was like his whole life, all those years spent with his nose wedged deep in a book, all those times he’d been mocked or ignored or shunned, had built up for this one moment. He was validated. We’d never hear the end of it.

  I turned the other way to check on Zell. Given how confused he looked, we might as well have all grown wings.

  A few minutes later, Timofei bumbled out of his backroom, a clear glass vial in his hands. A wooden stopper sealed it, and a pale blue liquid sloshed around inside. We were getting the antidote, and getting it for free. At this rate, I’d bake Miles a cake, and I didn’t even know how to bake. I reached for the vial, but just as my fingers touched it, Timofei jerked it back. “I said you wouldn’t have to spend an Eagle, and I meant it. I would, however, ask you pay a different price.”

  “A different price?”

  He grinned ear to ear, and half his teeth sparkled gold. “Have a drink with me! The three of you! I’ll buy a round, and we can all talk of Mercanto and Varleson and the other greats!”

  I looked to Miles and Zell for help, but none of us had anything. This was very much not a situation we’d planned for. “Well, we’d love to,” Miles tried, “but we, well, you know, were hoping to go to sleep soon. My wife and I, we need to get up very early, you see….”

  “Oh, I understand. Say no more,” Timofei said with an all-too-knowing wink. “As Mercanto wrote…‘A woman wants so far to be / from men who talk of poetry.’” I was starting to get the feeling I wouldn’t like this Mercanto guy, but that wasn’t really relevant. “One drink. Just one drink. Give a broken old man that much.”

  I stared at the vial dancing between Timofei’s fingers, so close but so far away. I wanted to just grab it and run, to get back to Lyriana and Jax, but that would probably end in Timofei calling the City Watch after us. I couldn’t see a way out. We had to play along. “One drink is fine, my love.” I patted Miles’s shoulder, trying to put on my best loving-wife voice. “But just one. And then we must return to the inn.”

  “Splendid!” Timofei slapped a hand on the table, almost dropping the vial and giving me a heart attack. I hoped he’d give it to us and we could sneak away, but he opened his coat, revealing a dozen little pockets sewn into the inside, and tucked the vial into one of them. “Follow me! I know of the most charming tavern. Well, it’s acceptable. Well, it’s a bit of a dump. But the beer is cheap, and the first bowl of nuts is free!”

  He led us outside and back the way we’d come before ducking onto a side street. The tavern he brought us to was called the Stumbling Sally, and it was just what you’d expect Timofei’s favorite tavern to be: a run-down two-story shanty with smelly drunks sleeping against the walls and an off-key ballad warbling out the windows. Timofei threw open the swinging front doors and led us into a messy hall packed tight with people drinking and dancing, playing cards, and, in the case of a couple against the far wall, going at it. Three girls, musicians, stood on a small stage in the middle; one strummed a lyre, one played some weird three-pronged flute, and the third sang a song about a drunk who mistook a bear for his wife (guess where it went). Timofei cheerfully led the way in, but next to me, Miles was sweating and Zell’s hand stayed inside his coat. Every step we took, I got more and more scared. We might have fooled Timofei, but what were the odds that we’d fool every single person here, too?

  I tried to whisper something to Miles about getting out of here, but he couldn’t hear me over the room’s din, and when I turned around, I bumped right into a firm, broad chest. I stumbled back. The man in front of me was tall and bulky, built like a bull, but more important, was wearing a blue-and-green uniform. The colors of House Collinwood, the ruling House of Bridgetown; a man of the City Watch. A droopy black mustache framed his scowl, and a sheathed sword hung at his hip. He glared down at me with two beady eyes.

  This was it. We’d been made. Time to run.

  But he just grumbled, “Watch where you’re going, girl,” and turned back to the bar, leaving me standing there having a panic attack.

  “There! A table!” Timofei exclaimed like a giddy little kid. He guided us up the tavern’s rickety stairs toward a small table against the second floor’s balcony, overlooking the noisy scene below. He plopped himself down in a chair, waved at a passing barmaid, and ordered four tall goblets of “the cheap stuff.” I got the feeling he did this a lot.

  The table only had three chairs, so Miles and I sat down opposite Timofei, while Zell stood watch. The barmaid set down four dented goblets full of piss-looking beer, and I made a polite gesture of sipping mine. It actually didn’t taste half bad. Maybe I just really needed a drink.

  Timofei clearly did, too, because he downed half his goblet in one swig and slammed it on the table, a mustache of foam on his upper lip. “Now, then! I must ask…what’s your favorite Mercanto comedy? And please don’t say The Lady-Mage of Mellinmor….”

  “Of course not!” Miles beamed, and I couldn’t tell for the life of me if he was just acting well or if he was really into this shit. “Lady-Mage might have its moments, but it’s nothing compared to Comforting a Widow or A Woman’s Warmest Place!”
>
  “Just one drink, remember,” I scolded Miles. Every second we spent here was a second we risked getting caught. But also I really didn’t think I could take much more talk about this Mercanto asshole.

  There was a bit of commotion from the tavern’s entrance, so I leaned over the balcony to see what was happening. The wooden doors swung open.

  Razz walked in.

  I SUCKED IN MY BREATH and spun back to the table, straining every muscle in my face to communicate utter terror. Zell understood it immediately, his hand dropping into his jacket, while Miles looked mostly confused. Razz hadn’t seen us, though, not yet. That meant we still had time to get out of here before—

  “Titans’ tits!” Timofei exclaimed, stepping right up to the edge of the balcony. “Look at this rabble! They’ll let any-one into Bridgetown these days!”

  And of course, Razz heard him. His eyes flicked up to the balcony, past Timofei, and even across the crowded room, his gaze met mine. He saw right through my disguise. His eyes lit up with excitement, and his mouth curled into a grin. His nightglass fangs sparkled darkly in the torchlight.

  What was he doing here? How had he found us? And what the hell were we going to do now?

  Razz turned around and barked something in Zitochi, and I could see more men behind him, his mercenaries, hulking figures in black leather armor, swords and axes strapped to their sides. They strode into the tavern like they owned it, shoving their way toward the stairs leading up to us. Razz’s hungry eyes never left mine. The tavern went quiet and the music stopped as everyone pushed back to get out of the way of these obvious madmen.

  I sprang up, searching for another way out. But there was nothing; only the rickety stairs led down to the first floor, and the mercenaries were already halfway to them. Miles clasped a hand over his mouth. Zell already had a dagger out, somehow.

  “What’s happening?” Timofei demanded. “What is this?”

  Razz and his men had cleared most of the room now and were almost to the stairs when another man stepped in front of them: the City Watchman from earlier, with the droopy mustache. He looked weary and agitated, like this was the last thing he wanted to deal with, but he still blocked Razz’s path. “Look here,” he grumbled. “Weapons are forbidden to citizens within Bridgetown limits. And it looks to me like you and your boys are packing more than your fair share. Now, I don’t want any trouble here. I just want to finish my beer in peace. So why don’t you turn around and walk back out of here, and we’ll pretend this never happened?”