And in the depths of the city, not too near the wall nor too close to the river, neither at the exalted and uncertain heights nor drowned in the trash and offal that choked the lowest streets, there was a small room with a tin brazier under a thick clay-pipe chimney, filled with two ancient, stained mattresses. On one mattress lay Prince Steppan Homrey, fugitive heir of Lyria. On the other, Asa, who was secretly in love with him.
Despite the lateness of the hour, neither was sleeping.
“I love her,” the prince said, his arm thrown over his brow and manly tears beading in the corners of his eyes. He was ten days past his twenty-third naming day, and the older of the pair by half a year. “I love her, and she is going to be sold to the workhouse.”
A half dozen possible replies wrestled in Asa’s mind—You’ve seen her once, and from a distance and Better the workhouse than here and You may be confusing love for a different kind of longing—until a diplomatic victor came out on top.
“I’m sorry.”
“You should have seen her. She was like dawn on a winter morning.”
“Frosted over, you mean?”
“No,” the prince said. “She was pure and pale, and she shone like the horizon when it is almost too bright to look upon.”
“Ah.”
“I asked her name from a boy there. Zelanie, daughter of Jost. I would swear she has royal blood. If you’d seen her, you’d know what I mean. The way she held herself was like seeing a queen at her coronation. Everything around her was made bright just because she was close to it. I was meant to find her. I see that now. Whatever plan the gods have for me, I was meant to find her. And so I must have been meant to save her. You should have seen her father. He had the face of a butcher.”
Asa shifted. The mattress rustled and settled.
“You think I’m a fool,” the prince said. His eyes were red with weeping, and his face a mask of melancholy. Asa sighed.
“I think you’re being hunted by a stepmother who’d like nothing better than to see you facedown in a river. Your father is the prisoner of a Kyrean wizard, if he’s not dead. Half the people in your home country think you’re a murderer and the other half think you’re a fool. You’ve got a full plate without taking on anything else.”
“This isn’t something I asked for,” he said. “You see that, don’t you?”
Asa’s whole life had been spent in and out of the Sovereign North Bank, working as a petty thief, an acolyte of the gods, a grifter, a broker of information, and—like the city itself—an avatar and embodiment of whatever-needs-doing-gets-done. Becoming the unofficial protector of a political fugitive wasn’t the wise thing either, but it had happened.
Steppan had just arrived when they met the winter before, the fine stitching and well-carded wool of his supposedly unobtrusive cloak making him stand out like blood on a wedding dress. He’d worn a scowl that had been equal parts moral outrage at the misery around him and masculine self-pity, and he’d lost the coins carefully stitched into his sleeve within the first half day of coming down the wall. Even the priests would have thought twice before putting their fates with his, but here he was, months later, his hair longer and shaggy at the nape, his clothes the yellow-brown that everything washed in the Taunis eventually became, and staring across the room with tear-stained eyes like a puppy that had lost its boy. He hadn’t shaved in a month, and his black whiskers shone like they’d been oiled. He was the very image of not-something-I-asked-for, and so Asa had to allow him the point.
“Where was she, again?”
“I saw her on the walk beside the one building that looks like it’s stooping. With the four pillars.”
“I know the one. And this was two days ago?”
Prince Steppan nodded, then he rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows. “Will you find her for me? Will you carry her a message from me?”
“No, I will under no circumstances start announcing you to anyone I’m not utterly certain of. But I’ll look into the situation. See what there is to be seen. Zelanie, daughter of Jost? That, then.”
Asa knew the place. The building was the old tower with roots in the stables of the Hanish Emperor’s palace and a long history of minor collapse. A family living there was likely desperate enough to sell their adult children into the workhouses. Traffic in slaves was prohibited in Nevripal, but Sovereign North Bank wasn’t Nevripal. Asa knew of two places where legitimate businessmen met to make trades like that without technically breaking the law. And in truth, it wasn’t the worst thing a father could do with his daughter.
“Thank you for this, my friend,” the prince said. “I love her.”
You’d mentioned that, Asa thought bitterly but didn’t say.
When the sun first started brightening the eastern skies, Asa was already walking across the rope bridges between the buildings. The air stank of smoke and sewage, but no more so than usual. The sounds of voices came from bare windows and the streets below: shouting and cursing but also singing and laughter. Men and women in dark cloaks squeezed past each other on bridges no wider across than a single handspan, backs and bellies rubbing against each other in a way that would have been intimate if it hadn’t been routine. Every week or two, a bridge would collapse, spilling two or three people down through the filthy air, smashing their bodies through whatever roof lay below them. But then, more died from the flux and no one was doing anything about that either. The bridges would be rebuilt if enough people cared and had the rope to spare, or they wouldn’t. The paths of the city would shift and change like a slow river uneasy in its banks. It was part of what Asa loved about the city. But only part.
The old tower looked sad in the yellow light of morning. It leaned a degree to the east, and windows spotted its sides, knocked through the walls wherever convenience demanded until they looked like an architectural pox. Asa took a ladder and then a stairway made from driftwood logs nailed to the outside of the building, and emerged in the yard Steppan had described. Four massive pillars rose up from the ground, tall and proud as trees, and overshadowed. A few dozen men and women slept in the muck or made a show of waking up. At the far end, three boys played a game of chase with a dog no one had eaten yet.
“Looking for a man named Jost. Daughter’s Zelanie,” Asa said, touching a man’s shoulder. A head shake and a shrug, and then the same question again of the next person, and then on and on, one after another, until movements and words became rote. When, near midday, a woman nodded and pointed, she nodded and pointed toward the river. Asa cursed. That wasn’t a good sign.
The men from the workhouses were set up on the westernmost quay. They had well-fed faces and laughter that was made cruel by its context the way a gem could be made ugly by being set in tin. The pens weren’t finished yet, but a pair of local boys were hammering the walls in place, building the corral for their less fortunate compatriots. The workhouse overseer stood smoking a pipe at the waterside, looking out over the sullen gyre where the river shaved off a bit of its current. His desk was a plank between two piles of bricks with a purple cloth over it to make it seem respectable. A line of men and woman waited for the trades to begin. One of them was a tired-looking man perhaps twice the prince’s age with a pale-skinned girl at his side.
“Jost?” Asa asked, coming near.
The man looked over, and his daughter a moment later.
“Here,” the man said.
Asa smiled. “Then this would be the lovely Zelanie.”