"You followed that?" he asked, and didn’t answer for a moment. "I don’t know. It doesn’t translate. Strict. Belligerent."
"And khushti grya? Rinkeni chavo? Tsingan kralis?"
He eyed me sidelong. "Delaunay taught you to listen too well," he sighed. "Grya are horses. Neci says he has good horses to trade, khushti grya. Rinkeni chavo…" Hyacinthe looked wry. "Pretty boy. I didn’t tell him I was half D’Angeline."
I waited, then asked again. "And Tsingan kralis?"
Hyacinthe shifted his gaze toward the central fire, where the tents stood tallest, the wagons were brightest, and the finest horses in the paddocks. "King of the Tsingani," he said finally, his thoughts elsewhere.
"You mean he really is?" I was startled, and the question came out rudely. "I’m sorry."
"Don’t be." He shot me a quick glance. "I wasn’t…I wasn’t sure myself, until Neci said it. I always believed it, but…"
"I understand." I smiled ruefully and stroked his black curls. "Prince of Travellers."
Somewhere behind us, Joscelin’s story continued. He was acting it out now, giving the bear-warrior’s terrible roar. Shrieks of terrified glee answered; the children loved it. The old Prefect would have died of mortification. One of the young Tsingani women, long hair still uncovered, approached Hyacinthe to invite him to dance. He looked apologetically at me, rising. I understood, of course; it would have looked peculiar if he’d declined. Unless we were a betrothed couple-and if I were no longer a vrajna bond-servant, still, as a half-breed’s by-blow, I had no claim to laxta, to being a true Tsingani woman.
Which made me unfit for the grandson of the Tsingan Kralu.
It is a strange thing, how pride may run the strongest among a people despised, as the Tsingani had been in so many lands. I thought about that, as I sat alone near the fire, watching the dancers, watching Joscelin spin his first-ever Mendicant’s tale. It made no difference to our mission.
But it made a difference, I thought, to me.
Chapter Sixty-Three
In the morning, we went to see Manoj.
The horse-fair at the Hippochamp lasts for three days, and this was officially the first. The first day is for looking, the Tsingani say; the second for talking; the third for trading. While this is true, it is also true that by the third day, a handful of canny gadje nobles would have gotten word that the horse-fair was ongoing and come to buy, so the greater part of the trading would be all but concluded by the third day.
Hence, the deceptively casual undertone to the browsing and conversation, which was in fact deadly earnest. To see Manoj, we had to take part in it, for Hyacinthe was not so naive as to present himself and expect a welcome.
Instead, we strolled around the paddock surveying the horses. Joscelin, who had been entrusted with our funds-Mendicant or no, anyone wearing Cassiline daggers was the least likely target among us-had brought out the necklace Hyacinthe had provided. I knew it well, for it had been his mother’s, an elaborate affair of gold coins strung together.
It provoked not a few whispers, that a Didikani woman would dare sport a Tsingano gall-I understood those words quickly enough, for "half-breed" and for coin-wrought jewelry-but it achieved its purpose. One of Manoj’s many nephews spotted us in short order, and came over to lean on the woven saplings of the paddock fencing to talk with Hyacinthe. When he learned of our desire to contract horses and men alike to travel west for a lucrative trade, he brought us to meet with Manoj.
We met with the King of the Tsingani in his tent, which was brightly striped and well appointed. I’d been expecting another ancient, like Ganelon de la Courcel, I suppose, but I had forgotten how young the Tsingani wed. It was hard to gauge his age-they weather quickly, on the Long Road-but I think him not much over sixty. He had fierce, staring dark eyes, iron-grey hair and a resplendent mustache.
"You want to take my people and my horses west?" he demanded. "Who are you to ask such a thing? What is your kumpania?"
Those are not, of course, the words he used; like the rest, Manoj spoke in the Tsingani dialect. Some of it, I could follow. Some I gathered from the general nature of the exchange. Some I did not understand, and Hyacinthe translated later. What I recount now is as I recall it, woven out of whole cloth like a Mendicant’s fable, only closer to the spirit of memory.
"I seek a handful of brave men and good horses to make a great bargain, Kralis" Hyacinthe said smoothly.
Manoj beckoned one of his nephews near and whispered in his ear, then shooed him away. "Tell me of this trade."
Hyacinthe bowed. "The Queen’s Admiral and his fleet are docked at the Pointe d’Oeste. I have knowledge that they will be in need of horses."
It was true, actually; if Quintilius Rousse was going to take a single ship across the Straits, he would need to have a handful of men well armed and mounted to ward the remainder of the fleet and secure their beachhead. Kusheth was neutral territory at best. But none of us would divulge these details.
"I have not heard this," Manoj said dismissively. "Who are you to come by this knowledge? You have not given me your name or your kumpania."
"I come from the City of Elua, and I know many people there and hear many things." Hyacinthe held the patriarch’s gaze. "I am Hyacinthe son of Anasztaizia. I am born to your kumpania, Grandfather."
A middle-aged Tsingano woman dropped an earthenware cup in the corner of the tent. It fell with a dull thud, unbroken. Otherwise there was no sound. Manoj blinked wrinkled eyelids under ferocious brows.
"Anasztaizia’s son?" he said slowly, wondering. "Anasztaizia had a boy? A son?"
"I am her son," Hyacinthe said simply.
After that, pandemonium broke loose. It began with Manoj shouting for one of his nephews, a nervous man of around forty, who ran into the tent and threw himself upon his knees before the Tsingani patriarch. It ended with cries and embraces and Manoj weeping openly as he drew Hyacinthe up to kiss him on both cheeks.
I pieced the story together later, for it was at this point that I lost the ability to follow what was being said. It seemed that the nephew Manoj had summoned-Csavin, his name was-had run afoul of a Bryony House adept the one and only time the kumpania of Manoj had entered the City of Elua.
Bryony is the wealthiest of the Thirteen Houses, for wealth is their specialty, in all its forms, and there are those to whom nothing is more titillating than money. If one stripped the staff of the Royal Treasury, one would find a full half of them bear Bryony’s marque, for her adepts' acumen is legend.
Bryony is also the only House whose adepts are willing to wager for their favors.
And they almost never lose. Not even to Tsingani.
I had believed-as Hyacinthe had-that his mother had fallen enamoured of a D’Angeline, for that was the story she had told him. It was out of love, to protect him from a more sordid truth; she had lost her virtue, her laxta, because her cousin Csavin had laid it as a wager upon the table with a Bryony adept, believing he could not lose. Tsingani know a thousand ways to cheat the gadje.
He had lost.
Not only had he lost, but in the face of the Dowayne’s Guard of Bryony House, he had paid his debt with coin that was not his, deceiving his cousin-Manoj’s daughter, who was young and desiring of adventure-into meeting with a patron who paid good coin to Bryony House for the pleasure of seducing a Tsingani virgin.