The Very Best of Kate Elliott

by Kate Elliott

  Zubaidit was the ruling priestess in charge of the local temple of Ushara, goddess of Love, Death, and Desire. Her even stroke did not slacken as she answered, while her tone remained entirely neutral.“You know I can’t reveal who enters the temple, nor what is said within the Devourer’s garden, but I do know who you mean. What makes you think he might be a traitor and spy, Tesya?”

  “He tells a funny story of where he and his eagle come from. The tale doesn’t hang together, if you take my meaning. Then after he arrived, little things started disappearing from around the hall. A carry bag. An eating knife. A celadon tea cup.”

  “That seems clumsy, and pointless,” said Zubaidit.

  Tesya shook her head stubbornly. “Some of us at Bronze Hall have got to thinking that a spy would start by stealing little things, so we get accustomed to thinking we’ve got a petty thief on our hands. A spy might hope to cast suspicion onto the boatmen who bring supplies. What a newcomer can’t know is the boatmen are never allowed off the dock onto the island.”

  As Salya’s busy piers hove into view, Mai broke into the discussion. “If you know you have a spy in your midst before he knows you know, you can cause the spy’s master more trouble than the spy is worth.”

  “How might one do that?” demanded Tesya.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Mai.

  They approached Gull Pier with its pilings encrusted with barnacles to the high water mark and its banner-posts topped with beautifully carved gulls at rest. Zubaidit released a hand from her oar and scooped up her vest from the sloshing trickles of water running under their feet. She slid an arm through one arm-hole, flipped the paddle to her other hand, shrugged into the vest, and managed to cut right back into the stroking rhythm the others had kept up. Men at work on nearby piers shouted ribald comments at Zubaidit, to which she replied with insults so bald that the words made Mai’s ears burn even as she could not help but laugh. This was not the kind of town she had grown up in! There, a woman would never talk back to a man.

  “You’re not the catch we went out for,” called Fohiono to the men mockingly, for she had no doubt done the same as Zubaidit when she was young.

  “At least we caught something,” said Mai, still laughing.

  The catch amounted to a paltry fourteen muhi-fish, just enough to give the women an excuse for going out on the water on a morning when they might have been expected to be preparing for the Ghost Festival. They slipped past Gull Pier to Gull Beach, being raked clean by a pair of boys. Several young men came running to help them carry the canoe up into the canoe shelter. Fohiono’s clan’s canoes rested under a thatched roof above the wrack of the high water line.

  Mai gave a kiss to Fohiono and a more formal goodbye to Tesya.

  Zubaidit gestured with a quick chop in the hand-talk that meant, “I’ll see you later.”

  Mai fetched the cotton taloos she’d left folded atop a crossbeam. She draped the length of cloth around her body and, after shucking the linen kilt she wore when out on the water, wrapped the taloos with the elaborate tucks and folds that turned it into a dress. The short kilt and tightly laced vest were the only practical thing to wear out on the bay. But unlike many of the women here, she could not bring herself to wear kilt and vest while walking around town. She had grown up in a different world, where women young and old covered their legs and never displayed any glimpse of midriff or breast. It was not so easy to leave that world behind even though it had been almost ten years since she had been carried away from her desert oasis home. Certainly she had been accustomed as a girl to selling produce in the market— nothing exceptional in that!—but to show so much skin, in public! That she could not do, not even now.

  She grabbed her paddle and her leather bottle, draped a silk shawl to cover her shoulders, and set off. The waterside district was lively this morning as last-day shoppers made ready for the Ghost Festival. Folk greeted her as she passed; a few men greeted her with hopeful grins but she knew how to smile to warn them away. She reached the Grand Pier and headed inland up the wide avenue locally known as Drunk’s Lane. The town rose in tiers on the hillside beyond; she could see the sprawl of her porch and the bright yellow walls of her compound against the hillside. Usually walking up an avenue lined with inns and drinking houses posed no problem before midday, but because no ship would be caught out on the water during the Ghost Festival, the establishments were crowded with bored sailors stuck here for three days.

  A rather young and good-looking stranger stopped stock still and whistled under his breath, nothing crude, more a comment to himself. Judging by his gear and his clean-shaven chin, he was a sailor from out of town. Beneath his unlaced open vest and snugly tied sailor’s kilt he had a stunningly attractive body, all taut planes and wiry muscle. He caught her looking, and recognized immediately the manner of scrutiny she was giving him. A reckless smile flashed on his face. He touched all five fingers together, then opened them with an emphatic flourish, the hand-talk for “startling beauty!” as in a flower blooming.

  His companion was a woman some years older and similarly fit. She grabbed his elbow and steered him toward one of the inns.“Kellas, that kind of beauty is always dangerous to chase. Anyway, you’re not allowed to have sex when you’re working. . . .”

  They ran up the steps of the Inn of Fortune’s Star. The heat in Mai’s cheeks faded, although her pulse was still racing. It wasn’t as if she could risk inviting a man to her bed, even had she time for one. Anji had taken care of that.

  The young man had been wearing a ring, quickly glimpsed when he’d made the gesture. Was its wolf ’s head design familiar, or did it only seem so because she was thinking of Anji?

  On one inn porch busy with men drinking at low tables, voices raised ominously. A fight broke out with a rolling crash worthy of an unexpected thunderclap. A man slammed against a wooden pillar, the shudder quivering through the whole edifice. This provocation was enough for men already half sauced. Sailors, idle laborers, artisans who had closed their workshops until the dawn of the new year, all swarmed up off the thin cushions they had been sitting on. Drunk already! Think of what a mess they would make, which someone else would have to clean up.

  As she tried to hurry past, a pair of tussling men stumbled off the inn’s porch. She raised her paddle to fend them off. One’s fist connected with another’s nose, and blood spattered down his face. The injured man grabbed the other man by the shoulders and began to swing him around; her heart raced as she skipped back, sure they were about to slam into her. A baton swept down from behind her and, with a swift pair of whacks to their shoulders, commanded the attention of the belligerent men.

  “Heya!”

  The combatants separated and backed up, hands in fists. Up on the inn porch the innkeeper was shouting furiously as his help started to knock heads together.

  “My thanks, ver,” said Mai to the unseen person behind her but she did not wait for him to reply. She strode onward, wanting suddenly to enjoy the peaceable quiet of her home where she could expect a measure of blessed solitude.

  The man with the baton hurried up alongside. “You took no hurt, verea?”

  He was a reeve. That reeve. Young and pretty enough to look at twice, and with an intangible quality of melancholy that made you look yet again.

  She feigned a limp.“No, nothing.”

  “You are hurt!”

  She bit her lower lip as if wincing in pain.“No, it’s nothing, truly.”

  “If it pleases you, verea, I will just walk you up to your home, to make sure you do not falter.”

  Roping him in was almost too easy.“Yes, with my thanks.”

  “Can I carry the paddle for you, verea?” he asked as they started walking.

  Shouts, laughter, and the blaring whistles blown by the harbor militia floated up after them.“Neh, I can manage.You’re newly come to Bronze Hall, are you not? I fear I don’t know your name. I’m Mai. People call me Mayit in the local way.”

  “Mayit,” he agre
ed.“I’ve heard of you.” Then he blushed furiously and stammered something too thickly accented for her to understand.

  “You’re not from the south,” she said encouragingly.“Where did you train?”

  “Horn Hall.” Now that she knew what to listen for she heard the way he struggled to form his words so that indescribably thick dialect did not crawl out. “I were born and raised in the far north. It is surely a long way from my home village to all other places in the Hundred. No one has ever been there. I mean, we in the villages live there. But no one ever came there. Then I was jessed, and I was found by—”

  He broke off and pinched his lips closed over the name he’d been about to say.

  “Were you transferred to Bronze Hall?” she asked with her best coaxing smile.

  He frowned, a fleeting expression quickly controlled. “The story of how I came here has many twists and turns.”

  They climbed stairs to the residential terraces where she made her home.“You never told me your name,” she said.

  “Badinen. My eagle’s Sisit.” He glanced skyward, a habitual motion she had become accustomed to in the reeves she counted as friends. She counted three eagles circling, on patrol or possibly just aloft waiting for their reeves to finish business in town.

  “For your kindness, ver, surely you’ll take tea with us before you go back to your duties?”

  “Oh. Eh.” He was shier than she expected, especially given that he was a young man about the same age as she was. It was an appealing trait, she decided, watching him sidelong as he matched his stride to hers.

  She asked him how he liked Bronze Hall, and piece by piece coaxed out opinions so bland—the food was good but that twice-spicy barsh was an odd thing to eat in the morning; the winds were chancy; the ocean’s roar kept him awake at nights—that the answers made her suspect he was hiding something.

  As she walked down her own street her neighbors greeted her. Mistress Firuliya was out with her girls decorating the porch with wire baskets filled with sweet rice balls and adorning the delicate potted trees with garish festival hats in bright red for the upcoming year. The woman looked the reeve up and down in a way that made him half trip on a step and again stammer into that incomprehensible northern dialect, while Firuliya’s girls giggled.

  “Here we are,” Mai said, too loudly.

  She waved gaily at the red-capped fellow loitering at the corner, one of Anji’s silent watchers. The red cap was Anji’s pointed reminder to her that things could have been different had she made a different choice. The man lifted a hand to acknowledge her, as this one with the broken nose always did. The others weren’t as polite.

  She led Badinen up onto the spacious porch with its spectacular view of the bay sparkling in the sun. From this height you could see the weather coming in as a blustery haze. She had some time before the rain came.

  She rattled the bell and made a fuss about taking off her shoes by the mats.“Please, Reeve Badinen, sit down.”

  She gestured toward the quilted cushions that ringed the tea table, little islands of color around a glossy sea. As he hesitated she pulled out her hair-sticks so the wind- and water-mess of her hair tumbled down, its ends reaching to her lower back. She smiled at him, thinking very hard of sex, imagining naked limbs, bellies brushing, sweat and the musk of love-making.

  He sat, felled like an ox that has just taken a blow to the head. Cheeks darkening, he looked away.

  “I’ll bring tea,” she said.

  The door slid easily, and she left it open behind her so he could see in to the sparsely furnished front room with its low table for doing business and seating pillows stacked neatly to one side on the matted floor. She never entertained visitors there; the porch was her front room, where she spoke to male visitors right out in the public eye. That was the way it had to be.

  She felt Badinen’s gaze follow her as she crossed the front room and passed through the covered walkway that led to the kitchen. She had given her hirelings the festival off to spend with their families. Her sister-by-adoption, Miravia, was at the market doing the last shopping. Miravia’s husband Keshad was at the warehouse doing the final accounting before he sealed the books and the doors for the year. The girls had run around the corner to spend the morning with Mai’s former slave, elderly Priya and her husband O’eki, who treated the young ones like grandchildren.

  In the kitchen, Edi was sweeping in preparation for the last bout of cooking. On the stove a big-bellied pot simmered, cooking down four chickens whose meat and broth would anchor tonight’s feast. He smiled as well as he could with his scarred face. Besides Keshad, Edi was the only male who lived at the house, safe because of his disfigurement and his youth; he was only twelve.

  “Go on,” she said as she ladled water from the barrel into the kettle and set it over the flames.“I’m just making tea.Where is your mother?”

  “Garden.” The word was difficult to understand unless you knew how to listen for the consonants. He’d not spoken at all when he and his mother had come to them four years ago; he’d been too ashamed. “Choosing vegetables for slip-fry.”

  She nodded and walked along the side walkway to the tidy vegetable garden in the back, its obedient rows framed by fruit and nut trees. Derra stood when she saw Mai, her apron sagging under tiny green tomatoes, white radish, pale cabbage, and bold red peppers.

  “I was just worrying about Miravia,” said Mai. “I should have gone with her to the market, her so close to her time.”

  “You said you had business down harborside, Mistress,” said Derra in her soft voice.“Afterward, I told Miravia I would go with her. But she said neh.”

  “As if anything I, or you, would have said could have made the slightest difference once she decided to go. Aui! But now I’ve got to serve tea to a reeve, so I’m wondering if you would go after her. Help her carry things up? She’ll not refuse if you’re down there. You can say you need—oh, anything—something we’re lacking for our feast. I had a sudden craving for durian, maybe.”

  Derra snickered, knowing perfectly well that Mai had never managed to develop a liking for the fruit because of its appalling smell.

  “I’ll take this into the kitchen.” Mai took the apron from Derra and carried it back to the kitchen, where she set it down on the big table. Then she followed Derra out onto the front porch. The woman gave Badinen a startled look, followed by a polite nod and a skittish smile, and descended the stairs to the street. The red-capped man watched Derra walk away down into town.

  Mai settled on a cushion at arm’s length from the reeve.“Last minute festival shopping. You know how that is.”

  “I suppose so.” He wiped a hand with charming awkwardness over his short black hair.“Where I grew up, we have no market.We grew and raised everything our own selves. I never saw a market until I came south.”

  “Is that so?” Mai said, and though she had deliberately set herself to charm him, she did not need to feign astonishment. “You must have grown up in a very out-of-the-way sort of place, truly.”

  “We had no hirelings, that’s for sure,” he said as Derra vanished around a corner with a final glance back over her shoulder and an expression that too closely resembled a smirk.“I don’t miss home much, I guess. But the weather was a cursed sight better there. Not so hot as it always is here.”

  Derra’s look back had made Mai self-conscious. She grabbed for whatever words came to hand.“You think it’s hot here?”

  “Here in the south? I should think so! It’s all muggy like the breath of a sea monster in your face all the time.”

  She laughed. “That’s a fine way to phrase it. Is that from one of the tales?”

  His blush crept up his cheeks as if her laughter was suggestive.“No. Just a way of speaking.”

  “Tell me more about where you grew up.” A limpid gaze turned on him, the slight cant of her body toward him, brought him alive as water kisses seedlings in a desert garden and brings their passion into bloom.

  He t
old her about where he grew up. She listened as she had learned to do in her childhood home which lay so far from the Hundred that its dusty confines and rigid customs seemed like a bad dream. But that life had made her what she was; she saw no reason to scorn it. Nor did Badinen complain of his own humble upbringing. He spoke easily and affectionately of those childhood years even though it was clear he had been a superfluous son treated with mild affection and casual disregard. Becoming a reeve had been a more magnificent destiny than any other end he might have hoped for. He had seen terrible things, the massacre of an entire reeve hall, but he had weathered it and kept on.

  Really, what else could you do but keep on?

  It’s what she had done.

  A door snapped open inside the house. Dragging footsteps announced Edi’s approach with the tea. He came out onto the porch and set the tray on the tea table. At the sight of Edi’s grotesquely scarred face, Badinen’s eyes widened and his lips tightened.

  “Edi, where are the girls?”

  He gestured up the street in the direction of Priya’s home, unwilling to speak in front of a stranger.

  “Can you go fetch them? They need to help prepare dinner.” At his look of horror, she laughed.“I know. I know. But they’re not really that bad, are they?”

  “Are,” Edi mumbled.

  “Maybe Arasit is,” she acknowledged with a sigh. “But your mother is already gone down to the market to help Miravia carry up the shopping. So there’s no one else to fetch them. You can wait until they finish whatever Priya has them doing. No hurry.”

  His glance flickered toward the reeve, who rose.

  “I’m called Badinen,” said the reeve, straight to his face.“And you?”

  “Edi,” he said with a sudden lopsided smile that stretched his scars. He paused, as if wondering what else he could say to an admired reeve who deigned to speak to him, but then grabbed his cane from beside the door and clumped down the steps.

  Badinen watched him go.

  So did the red-capped man, who knew perfectly well how many people lived in the house and that Mai was now alone in the compound. It was his duty to know such things.