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 coldhearted 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 if 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.