Not to mention friends.
Ripka unrolled the bundle of clothes onto the bed. “Help pick an outfit for tonight. We’d better hurry or we’re going to be late to meet Latia and Dranik.”
Her eyes brightened. “We’re going?”
“Said we would, didn’t we? And anyway, I think Dranik is into something. I’d bet my blues – ah, I mean pride – that Thratia is using the cafes to smuggle weapons to her supporters, same as she did with the honey liqueur in Aransa. If we can catch her at it, feel out the extent of her network, we might be able to stop an uprising happening the moment Thratia arrives at the city’s gates.”
“Is she really that bad?”
Of course. Honey must have been imprisoned long before Thratia’s rise to power. Ripka nodded, sorting through the clothes with Honey at her side. “She’s an efficient ruler, I’ll give her that, but she takes choices away from people, uses them like commodities, and that’s something I just can’t stomach.”
Honey nodded, firmly. “We’ll stop her.”
In that moment, with the sun gleaming down upon a selection of new clothes gifted to her by a friend – quite possibly the first real friend Ripka’d had since the watch, since Detan and Tibal – she found herself smiling as a warm curl of hope unfolded within her. “Yeah. I think we might just pull it off.”
Chapter Sixteen
Detan was disappointed to discover that the Saldivians looked rather a lot like the rest of the peoples of Valathea and the Scorched. He’d been hoping for something a little more extreme: perhaps a squat people, or maybe a wild skin color like red or blue. But the people sitting before him now looked positively normal by Valathean body standards, if a little strange in the clothing department.
Thratia’s guests enjoyed a suite of rooms on the top level of her compound, large arched doorways leading out to thin patios so that they could survey the city. The curtains on those doors were drawn now, fluttering in the night breeze. The pale linen looked as if clouds had blown into the room. The Saldivians sat cross-legged on cushions on the floor, a mat containing a bright berry tea set and plates of baked goods between them.
They were, he supposed, a little shorter than Valathean standard, but they still had the thin limbs and narrow features common to the region. Two men and a woman looked up at him, blinking with curiosity, teacups cradled with ease in the palms of their hands. The woman put her cup down and stuffed a pastry into her mouth, chewing noisily.
Their clothes were not in the slim-cut style Valathea and the Scorched favored – a style evolved for easy work, and safety around the many whirling gears and machinery of airships and their correspondent technologies. The Saldivians had gone wild with bolts of fabric, swathing themselves in great voluminous wraps. Detan rather thought they looked as if they’d tangled themselves in the curtains and just decided to live with it.
“Hullo,” he chirruped at them, and gave them a wiggle of his fingers. He’d be damned if Thratia made him go through the dance of politic introductions. He only bowed his head over his hands for those he felt deserved the respect that gesture signified, no matter their station in life. Or those he wanted to believe he respected, at any rate.
“This,” Thratia interjected smoothly, “is Lord Detan Honding.”
There she went, calling him a lord again. She’d been trotting out that title at every opportunity, as if it really meant something any more, and the realization was beginning to make his skin crawl. What leverage did she think she could wrangle from having a disgraced lord press-ganged into her entourage?
“Seas bless our meeting,” the youngest of the men said. His accent startled Detan, who was used to hearing only the rolling syllables of Valathea and the clipped speech of the Scorched. The Saldivian had a muddied way of speaking, as if each syllable was a heavy thing and left a coating in his mouth. He was maybe in his thirties, though Detan’d be hard pressed to bet on the fact, with the other man old enough to have some deep wrinkles and his hair all wave-crest white. The woman was about the young man’s age, maybe younger, though it was hard for Detan to pin anything down on them for sure.
Thratia inclined her head to the older man. “This is Ossar, once a chieftain of the Saldive Isles and now functioning as a diplomat here in Aransa. Iessa,” she nodded to the girl, “is his daughter, and Rensair her husband. Rensair’s Valathean is the best of the bunch, though Iessa’s is much improved since their arrival.”
The young woman smiled, recognizing both her name and at the very least the tone of a compliment. Their names sounded strange to Detan – soft and hissy, like a wave breaking against a stone.
Before Thratia could make her presence more keenly felt, Detan plopped to the ground cross-legged at the empty edge of their tea mat and rested his hands on his knees, offering big smiles all around. Whatever reason Thratia had for dragging him here to meet these strange people, he was not about to let her take the reins. Purely on principle. He might be under Aella’s thumb, but he had his pride to think about.
“What brings your lovely family to sunny Aransa?” he asked, high-toned, as if this were just a friendly chat between tourists passing one another in a tavern.
Rensair leaned toward him, foam-grey eyes brightening with interest. Detan chose to focus on the young man and ignore the scowl Ossar threw him. “We come on Thratia’s invitation.” Rensair spoke slowly, constructing his sentence with care.
“Matters in the Saldive Isles–” Thratia began, but Detan held up a hand to cut her off.
“You want me to hear what they have to say, then let them say it.” He spoke quickly and without taking his gaze from Rensair, Detan’s cheery smile plastered firmly in place. But there was no hiding the fine tension in the lines around his eyes, forced to crinkle to make a casual observer think his smile spread naturally to them. And no matter how quickly Detan spoke, Rensair’s soft frown told him he’d picked up the gist of what Detan had said. Thratia gestured grandly, sarcastically handing control of the room over to him.
“And how did you get to be so chummy with ole Thratia?” he asked, but Rensair just frowned in response. “I mean – how did you make friends with Thratia?”
“Ah, friends, yes.” He smiled, back on familiar footing. “She has worked very hard to keep the Valathean menace from the Saldives.”
Detan coughed politely into his sleeve to cover a choked-off laugh. “I would have called her the Valathean menace, before she grew so boorish that Valathea couldn’t even stomach her.”
Ossar said something, fast and liquid, and though Detan couldn’t understand the words the tone was clear enough – and the blush of embarrassment on his daughter’s cheeks.
“What’s the old man have to say, then?”
Rensair grimaced. “He says you are impotent.”
Thratia roared with laughter while some colorful heat painted Detan’s own cheeks.
“You mean… impudent?”
“Yes, yes, that. What did I say?”
Detan grimaced. “Never mind that. Your dear ole father-in-law isn’t exactly wrong. On the impudent front, that is.” He shot Thratia a glare and she wiped tears from her cheeks, snickering softly.
“And for that, I apologize.” Detan shifted internal personas, moved from the glib con man that had shielded him for so long back into the skin of the lord, the child of privilege and politics. The man his aunt had always wanted him to be. He’d buried that old skin deeper than he’d thought, and it felt tight on him now. Constrictive in a way it never had before.