by Kate Elliott
“Then what? Beat off our pursuers with your cane?”
“I don’t know, but our first goal is to get you free of the contract.”
“What do you think happened to Roderic?” she whispered.
I wiped my eyes, unable to speak.
So at length we settled into the smoky supper room of a tavern, where we shared a bowl of millet and goat’s meat stew at a corner table so out of the way that a stout oak pillar cut off our view of the door into the common room. In this forsaken corner, there was plenty of smoke but little enough heat. Out there, people were eating and drinking and conversing merrily, as folk did who weren’t running for their lives. We had, of necessity, come into the somewhat more expensive supper room, but despite the late hour, it was packed with noisy folk keeping late hours. I demolished our first helping and began working through a second while Bee picked past stringy goat’s meat and yellow turnip seeking what was not there.
“The old man said he was waiting for me,” said Bee.
“Maybe. Or maybe he was an old lecher and thought it a likely story to draw you in for a kiss.”
I had expected her to recoil at the thought of being kissed by a dying man who must have been ninety if he was a day. I had even hoped perhaps to squeeze a chuckle from her. Instead, she pinned my wrist to the table.
“No. He said I was death coming to meet him.” I had forgotten how deep her gaze was. Men stuttered and collapsed at a glance from her eyes. Right now, I thought she looked as if the weight of the world’s misery had fallen on her shoulders. “He said he was giving me his heart’s fire to help me walk my dreams in the war to come. I’m frightened, Cat. What did he mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Eat something.”
She released my wrist and scooped up a spoonful of brown gravy. With a frown, she stared at a shred of wilted green mint floating in the liquid, then drizzled the spoon’s contents back into the bowl. “I’m not hungry.”
“We have to keep up our strength. If not for yourself, then think of Rory, who may have sacrificed his life for us.”
She sighed and, after wiping her eyes, began to eat. “You never told me what happened to you, Cat. The tale would make the stew go down better, I’m sure.”
So I told her. As the story unfolded, she ate with more gusto, and her bowed shoulders began to straighten as if my words nourished her.
“Can that be true? That the male who sired you is a creature of the spirit world?” she demanded, a little too eagerly. “Like an eru or a saber-toothed cat?”
“What else can I think?”
“It does seem likely, but awfully strange. And how would they have managed the… the deed?”
“In the usual way, I would suppose. Not that you know anything about that.”
“No more than you do!” She grinned, then bit a finger, thinking. “Still, if it’s true, do you think we could cross into the spirit world and hide there?”
“If I knew where to find a crossroads. If you could even cross with me.”
“The magister crossed.”
“He was raised among hunters. Didn’t I mention that? It’s a dangerous place, Bee.”
She frowned. “And this world is not? Tell me, Cat, did all that coin you now possess come from him?”
“Yes.”
Through narrowed eyes, she regarded me shrewdly. “Did he like you?”
“Yes, certainly he must have, because that is how young men show young women they like them. By trying to kill them.”
“But you said he said afterward that he was sorry.”
“He never said that!”
“Maybe not in those exact words. But he said—”
“Leave it! I do not ever again want to talk or think of Andevai Diarisso Haranwy.”
“How quickly you snap, for someone who claims to be undisturbed by the flies buzzing all about her.”
“Somehow, that makes me feel like a steaming pile of fresh manure out in a field.”
She smirked.
“Our pardon.” Two men reeled up like gasping fish. They wore the respectable clothing of apprentices and clerks, and the younger had dressed his up with a bright orange and brown dash jacket. Because of their pallor, it was easy to mark the flush of drunkenness in their cheeks. I shifted my sword to my right side so I could if necessary draw it quickly.
The younger one straightened his jacket and then addressed us. “You fine gels look like you have an empty cup, which we would gladly fill.”
Bee skewered them with a glare. “Was that meant to be poetic or merely crude? You may move on.”
“No reason to knife a man just for asking!” They departed, unsteadily, and made their way to a table crowded with young men who greeted them with the hoots men shower upon the unfortunate. A few blew kisses in our direction. I thought about how much we were like the table and the wall, nothing to bother looking at, nothing at all, and they turned back to their conversation and, I hoped, forgot about us.
Bee was carving lines in the smears of gravy left on the bottom of the bowl. “How could he do it? Use the vision of a woman who was walking the dreams of dragons to plot a military campaign?”
“Who? Camjiata? Do you ever see Camjiata in your dreams?”
“How would I know? I’ve never seen him except in caricatures. Some make him squinch-faced, hunchbacked, and spittle-ridden, while others claim him as mighty and black-haired. Rather like you, now that I think on it, so perhaps you are secretly his love child.”
“I am not—” Words caught in my throat. I stuck a spoonful of stew into my mouth and chewed to make them go back down. It was no stranger a notion than the other possibilities. “Anyway, how would an imprisoned man know about you?”
“Couldn’t someone who walked the dreams of dragons dream about someone who walked the dreams of dragons? If he had a wife who dreamed, she might have told him.”
“If she was a diviner. But diviners are notoriously imprecise. And I’m not sure what that has to do with walking the dreams of dragons.”
She looked up, resting the spoon on the bowl’s rim. “You said that when a dragon turns over in its sleep, the world changes.”
I shuddered. “Yes, in the spirit world. I saw it happen.”
“What about in our world? You called it a tide. Wouldn’t that tide run through this world, too, somehow? If things are connected, as you say.”
“I just don’t know, Bee.”
“What do you think dragons dream of, Cat?”
“Plump deer who run exceedingly slowly.”
She pulled out her sketchbook from the knit bag we had purchased to carry a change of drawers and shifts and a few other necessaries. She paged through the sheets: Some were drawn to capture historical events, like the Romans kneeling before the armies of Qart Hadast after they lost the Battle of Zama. Others were pure fancy, like the poor folk falling from balloons. But others, I now realized, represented scenes from her dreams, when it seemed she had truly dreamed things that had not yet come to pass: the ramparts of Cold Fort; the bookshelves and dead fireplace of the library in which we had met the old man; my hand pressing down the latch of the balcony door in the academy lecture hall. A tall man standing framed by the lintel of a door; I did not know him but I was sure I had seen that face recently.
“If they know what Camjiata looks like, and I have sketched him in a recognizable place in my dreams and maybe with some means to identify the day or season, then the cold mages and the princes—who hate each other but hate Camjiata more—might have a chance to find him. Wouldn’t they?”
I whistled softly. “I never thought of that.”
“But why, then, could the agents of the Prince of Tarrant and the mansa of Four Moons House not have come to my parents and asked with a pretty and a please to pay for my services? Maester Amadou was certainly willing to pay for my kisses!” She flushed, glancing toward the table of clerks and apprentices who had begun singing a song likening the city council members to high-priced and cold
hearted whores who lifted their skirts only for the wealthy and never for passion or justice. “ ‘Greetings and peace to you, Maestressa Barahal,’ they might have said, ‘for you have the very means by which we may capture the wicked Camjiata, the Iberian Monster whose armies wrought such devastation across the lands. And for your services we will meanwhile lavish gold upon your family so they can pay their debts and buy new curtains to replace these much-mended and very shabby old ones.’ ”
“They might,” I agreed. “But they had evidence the Hassi Barahals were spies for Camjiata. So that answers that question. Anyhow, having met the mansa, I am certain that once he determined he wanted as well as needed you, he’d not be willing to share you.”
She tucked the book into the bag. “So no matter what happens, we will still be at the mercy of people who can force us to do their bidding just because they have powerful kinfolk, and money, and soldiers.”
“In’t that the truth!” cried the innkeeper as she swept in on the wings of Bee’s final words. She poured mulled wine into the tin cup we were sharing. “Always it is lords and mages who grind us under their well-shod feet. Shoes that were made by the likes of us, weren’t they? Yet we are tossed a pittance and told to be grateful for the work, while they parade in the avenues and rest on finest linen and crow in the city council. Who hears us?”
“Indeed!” replied Bee emphatically, with raised eyebrows. “They have curbed our mouths with bridles and bits! Thus are we silenced.”
“The very words of the Northgate Poet!” said the innkeeper. “I took you for radicals. For you clearly aren’t nightwalkers. If you don’t mind my saying so, you ought not be out so very late. Not with your looks, and on such a night with a picketing planned.”
Bee and I glanced at each other.
“I thought it would have started already,” said Bee, batting her eyes in that invitingly innocent way she had.
The innkeeper was a stout, healthy woman old enough to be our aunt. She smiled warmly on us in the way older women do when you remind them of their daughter. “Och, no, lass. Word just came round early today, that tomorrow morning, the Northgate Poet means to go sit on the council steps and refuse to eat until the city council agrees to seat council members elected from the populace.”
“That’s a radical notion,” Bee said, eyes widening with real surprise.
“No different than what happened in ancient days, in old Rome, so the poet has declaimed. Them who can read, can read it on broadsheets being posted. Maybe you saw the one we nailed up by the door. In old Rome, plebeians had their own tribunes and their voices were heard. So you can sure we in the city mean to go picket by the steps in support of the poet’s hunger strike. It’s just that the prince does not like crowds and is threatening to call a curfew. He’ll not touch the poet, of course. But he may strike at us! So folk are building up their courage for tomorrow’s picket by drinking, and drinking men are like to have wandering hands, if you take my meaning.”
“That’s just what happened, maestra,” Bee agreed with the smiling alacrity that made people adore her. I kicked her beneath the table, to warn her that she was overdoing it, and she trod so hard on my foot the pressure brought tears to my eyes. “We sneaked out because we wanted to see the protest. But now we’re frightened, and it’s too late to walk home.”
“Phoenician girls, aren’t you?” asked the innkeeper with a sigh of resignation that made her ample bosom heave beneath the stained apron she wore over her winter jacket and skirts. A man called a name, possibly hers. She glanced toward the door that opened into the common room and flagged the man standing there, husband or brother perhaps, with a wave. “How like your sort to educate their girls in books and neglect common sense. What are your families thinking to let you go walking alone? I suppose it’s just as possible you climbed out the window and never asked permission.”
I choked down a mildly hysterical laugh, thinking of our flight into the garden. But then I thought of Rory and covered my eyes.
“There, there, lass,” she said pettingly. “All will be well. You come back with me into the kitchens. My kitchen girls share a bed in the scullery. They’ll be up all night, for I don’t expect this crowd will leave until dawn, and then for the council square. You can sleep there.”
“That’s very kind of you.” Bee reached into her sleeve for our coin. “How much for your trouble?”
The woman had a frown so deep and unexpected on an otherwise good-natured face that it was like a hard frost falling in the middle of summer. “You paid already for drink and meal. This other I do for my daughters’ sake, so it would fall poorly if I took payment. I only ask you go straight home in the morning and give up this rash adventure. Bad things happen to girls out on the streets on their own. Anyway, it’s no good for my reputation to have you sitting here. I’ve had more than one drunken man ask me about the pair of you in that leering way men have. As if I manage the sort of establishment where I offer up girls as well as ale!”
“We ask forgiveness if our presence here has caused you any sort of trouble,” said Bee in her most unctuous tone. “We never thought we’d run into men who… who put their hands where they aren’t wanted!” Her blushing innocence would have shamed the most persistent suitor. I rolled my eyes, but the woman melted as rivers thaw beneath a glowing spring sun.
“Best come now. The drunker men get, the less likely they are to hear you say no.”
I gathered my ghost sword, and Bee took up the knit bag, and with our coats and cloaks over our arms and the eyes of half the men in the room on us, we meekly followed the woman into the back, past the ale room where a lad was pumping out ale from barrels into pitchers and setting them on a table for the servers, and on into the steaming clatter of a kitchen at full boil.
Two kitchen girls were chopping and grinding at a big wooden table, while the cook was managing the fireplace and its joints and kettles. All were too busy to do more than nod at us with the glancingly curious expressions of people who would find you a seven nights’ wonder if they were not so tired. I was chastened by their industry, and they still had more than half the night ahead of them. A lad hurried in lugging a bucket of coal and set it down by the fireplace.
“Is there anything we can help with?” I asked.
“Och, no,” the innkeeper said, not unkindly. “You’d just get in the way. Go on through into the scullery.”
The scullery had a cheery fire blazing in the fireplace and a fair amount of heat radiating from the copper where water was heated in a huge tub. The stone sink with its big wooden bowl for washing sat unattended. Most of the sideboard was taken up by stacks of dishes, but at the far end rested six painted masks almost ready for the solstice festival. Bee went to look at them as I crossed to the curtained alcove to the right of the fireplace and peeked in to the bed behind. It looked amazingly inviting, with sheets recently laundered and ironed, an unexpected nicety.
“All ready for solstice night except for the blessings,” said Bee.
I went over to examine the masks. One was a fox, and one was a cat with whiskers sticking out from the wood, and the other four were round, humanlike faces with two painted black and two painted gold and decorated with snake-trail patterns in white and red. The shapes were decently done by a craftsman, bought in the market, but the decoration showed more enthusiasm than artisan’s skill.
“We can paint in the charms,” she went on. “It would be a small gesture of thanks, for the offer of a bed on this cold night.”
“Would that be right? Usually people go to a temple scribe to have it done.”
“Why would it not be right? Usually they go because they cannot write. Maester Lewis once told me that anyone who knows the proper act can make the offering.”
She fished out a little pot of ink and the quill pen we had purchased earlier with a blank journal book and other necessities. She had a neat hand, and I watched in fascination as she tucked the blessing symbols in among the cat’s whiskers and almond eyes,
and the fox’s big triangular ears and whitened muzzle, and flowed the charms like ribbons through the more crudely painted patterns on the faces.
“There,” she said. “Now I feel I have not taken without leaving something in return. It binds you, you know, to take without giving.”
“Unless they plan to turn us in to the constabulary for a handsome reward.”
“Have you heard any criers on the street announcing our escape? Now that I see these crowds, I wonder if they can even risk it. The crowds are already agitated at the prospect of the Northgate Poet going on a hunger strike, so how do you think the mob will react to news that the militia and cold mages have allied to hunt down two young women? If I were the prince, I would send out spies and seekers to hunt very quietly.”
“You would hire Barahals, you mean.”
She grimaced as she cleaned the tip of the quill pen. “Yes, exactly. Barahals to hunt Barahals. Then they would close in and take us without anyone being the wiser that we were being hunted.”
“Maybe. But I admit, I’m very tired. I’m willing to take the chance to rest tonight. We’ll take turns on watch.”
But after we took off our boots and crawled into the alcove bed and decided on a turn of watch each, the clangor and bustle from the kitchen lulled us. Or maybe it was the sound of ink drying. We must both have fallen hard asleep, for I woke to silence and no idea how much time had passed. I heard not even the pop and rustle of fire. With the curtain drawn, we lay in darkness except for a line of light where the curtain’s edge did not quite meet the wall. Day had therefore come, but the inn, it seemed, now slept.
No. Someone waited in the scullery, a presence notable for its measured but not precisely calm breathing. A chair scraped softly as it was moved. Bee lay between me and the wall; I hooked a finger at the curtain’s corner and twitched it back just enough to see out.
Andevai Diarisso Haranwy sat in a chair with his back straight, his feet flat on the slate floor, and his hands in loose fists on each thigh. He looked like the kind of academy student who pays close attention in class not necessarily because he is actually interested but because he is determined to do well. There was no fire; I heard no sounds of life, nothing. Just him, sitting there with his greatcoat slung over the chair’s back, and Bee’s steady breathing behind me, and a cat’s questing meow from out of doors.
