They weren’t permitted to sleep under the stars anymore. Instead, they had a room in the back of the café and bedded down on a thin cotton mattress that had seen cleaner days.
“Friends, I take it?”
“When I first came into the world, I spent the better part of a year in Suddapal,” Master Kit said, laying his bedroll out over the mattress. Probably wise. At least all the insects living in their bedrolls were familiar. “I stayed here. Epetchi was just a boy then. Thin as a stick and couldn’t think about anything but girls.”
“Do you think they can help us, then?”
“I think that if they can, they will. That may not be quite the same thing. But I have more faith in goodwill built with meals and shared stories than goodwill bought from strangers with coin.”
“You know,” Marcus said, “I didn’t force you to pay the finder’s fee.”
“The world’s an odd place,” Kit said, and sat down with a grunt. “The last time I was here, everything was different. I was different, they were. Even the building’s changed. There wasn’t a wall there, at least not that I recall. And yet it was all related. It’s as if the world was a stone, hard and unchanging as we lay paint over it, one layer and then another and then another. We change it by the weight of the stories we bring to it, but we only change what’s there. Not the stone nature of the world.”
“That sounds very deep,” Marcus said. “Don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to mean, though. Do you think they know someone with a good boat?”
The captain of the little sailing boat was a Timzinae woman with a broad face and a wicked smile. At Epetchi’s instructions, they met her near the end of one of the long piers. So far from the shore, Marcus felt he’d already left the city. She sat in the back of her boat, wrapping long, braided ropes in patterns that Marcus, in another context, would have mistaken for art. Her name, they’d been told, was Adasa Orsun.
The boat itself was small enough for one person to manage, large enough to carry five if they didn’t need to lay in provisions for a long trek across open water. The deck was white as snow and its sails were square sheets of thick canvas dyed the blue of the sea. It bobbed with the waves, a little up, a little down. As close as it rode to the waterline, Marcus couldn’t imagine how it would keep from being swamped in a storm. But there were at least a dozen other boats similar to it tied to the pier, so there was something to the design or the handling that made it possible.
That or they just didn’t put out to sea if there was weather.
Master Kit made the introductions.
“We were led to understand you might be willing to take passengers south to Lyoneia,” he said.
“Might be,” the woman said. “For the right price. When are you wanting to leave?”
“Sooner would be better,” Master Kit said with a smile. “Can’t go for a month,” she said with a shrug. “Other work already agreed to.”
Marcus didn’t need little black things living in his veins to know it was a lie. The woman smiled up at them. The next move was theirs.
“I am a friend of Epetchi’s,” Master Kit said.
“And so I’m talking to you,” she answered. The rope flowed in loops over her arm and cascaded down.
“I can pay,” Kit said, tossing her a small leather purse. She didn’t open it, just tested the weight in the palm of her hand.
“This gold?”
“Silver. Some copper.”
“And a pretty stone I put in,” Marcus said. “If we can stop dancing, what’s it going to take to get this”—he pointed at the deck—“there?” He pointed at the sea stretching away to the south.
The woman looked at him, then turned back to Kit.
“Who’s he?”
“My name’s Marcus Wester.”
“Sure it is,” she said, not looking at him.
“His name is Marcus Wester,” Kit said. “And yes, he’s that Marcus Wester.”
“Is not.”
“Listen to me,” Kit said with a sigh. “Listen to my voice. This man is Marcus Wester. He is.”
“Have been since before people thought much of it,” Marcus said.
Adasa Orsun tucked the purse into her jacket.
“All right, then,” she said. “Bring your things. The tide’s in six hours, and we’ll be out on it.”
“Because everyone wants to travel with me?” Marcus said.
“Makes a good story,” she said, turning back to her ropes. “You best hurry. Get some good food while you’re at it. I’ve got enough to keep everyone alive, but I run a ship, not a kitchen.”
As they walked back down the long stretch of tar-soaked logs that made the pier, Marcus shook his head.
“I don’t like that,” he said. “She doesn’t know us. Not really. What if I was a terrible, violent, mean-spirited person? I mean, I’m mostly known for killing my employer. You wouldn’t think that would make traveling with me more attractive.”
“I think we are the stories people tell about us,” Kit said.
“No,” Marcus said. “We aren’t. We’re more than that. And our friend on the boat there is taking a stupid risk by going with us.”
“I suppose so,” Kit said. “But I’m still glad she is.”
Clara
Clara could not tell whether the darkness had taken the city, the kingdom, the world as a whole, or only her. When she rose in the morning, the sky seemed dimmer than it had before. When she ate, the salt seemed both weaker and less palatable at the same time. She slept little, waking in the middle of the night and staring up at the ceiling that wasn’t hers. Sometimes she forgot why Dawson wasn’t beside her, and then recalled, and felt the despair roll over her afresh. As if it were all happening again.
But she didn’t allow herself to stop. If she stopped, she was certain she would never start again. It wasn’t even that she would die. She would simply be, still and grey and unmoving. A statue of herself in stone.
“Good morning, Mother,” Barriath said as he stepped into the little dining room. “There’s eggs ready.”
“Thank you, dear,” she said. “You rested well, I hope?”
“Well enough.”
In a better world, he would have been gone again by now. Back to the north and the ships. His place with the navy. Instead, he would spend the day brooding, going to tap-houses. And she would go instead along the streets and into the courtyards where she was barely welcome and see to it that her family survived this all as best they could. Or at least that part that hadn’t died.
The rain, when it came, hadn’t been a massive cloudburst, but a slow, low drizzle that made everything damp without cleaning anything. It did, however, bring the colors of everything out: the red stone arches of the Lias Gate looked like the coals from a fire that had almost burned out. The carving of the bear outside the Fraternity of the Great Bear looked less like a dust-colored dog on its back legs and more like a predator. Even Issandrian’s overly carved and decorated mansion was lent a kind of beauty by the rain. She would have to tell Dawson about that, only she wouldn’t.
Issandrian received her in his withdrawing room, offering her coffee and baked cheese and even a pipe’s bowl of tobacco. Clara forced herself to accept less than she wanted. When she sat on the little white-upholstered divan, she could already see from his expression that the news was bad.
“My lady,” he said. “I am doing everything in my power, but I warned you at the start how little influence I have. And forgive my saying so, but the Kalliam name is tainted. It’s being used among the court members as another way to say traitor.”
“Still, there must be something, mustn’t there?” she asked, sipping at her coffee. “There were houses who fought at my husband’s side. He had those sympathetic to him.”