Pagette had stepped in to one side and he spoke formally.
“Miss, may I present his Grace, the Duke Cyril II of Chengdea, city and province.”
Tilda blinked but tried to give no more sign of surprise than that.
“ Bol aloha, Miss…?” the Duke said.
“Matilda Lanai.”
The Duke’s daughter raised an eyebrow as though recognizing that Tilda’s last name simply meant “porch,” in Miilarkian. She probably thought Tilda was giving a fake name, but sadly, no.
The Duke asked Pagette to watch the door, and Dugan let the man squeeze by him back out into the hall. When he shut the door Dugan shot the bolt without asking. The older man was giving the buksu in Tilda’s hand a hard look, and after thinking a moment she slowly held it back to Dugan. He took it, dropped the head in the leather cup of the sheath on Tilda’s back, and snapped the strap across its neck between her shoulders. The old man did not relax appreciably.
The Duke gestured at a chair and retook his own after Tilda sat down, perching on the edge of her seat. There was another chair beside her but Dugan remained standing behind Tilda and crossed his arms, making himself the mirror image of the old knightly-looking fellow behind the two nobles. There was a wine bottle and glasses on a silver tray atop the desk but when Cyril held a hand out towards them Tilda shook her head once. She waited until he began to speak, then interrupted.
“Pagette says you want someone escorted to Camp Town, your Grace. Who would that be?”
Cyril frowned and squinted, concentrating to follow Tilda’s words in the Trade Tongue. His daughter spoke it fluently.
“Are all the women of Miilark so swiftly to business? Not a word of polite small talk?”
Tilda looked at her. “I have had a long day. Forgiveness…your Grace?”
The Duchess nodded. She gave her name as Claudja, and was quickly to business herself.
“It is I who must go to Camp Town, in the company of this knight, his Lordship Sir Gideon Towsan. Commander of my father’s guard.”
Towsan gave no sign he had been mentioned. He and Dugan were busy sizing each other up.
“So go,” Tilda said. “What do you need me for?”
The young Duchess was about Tilda’s own age or perhaps just older. She gave a slight smirk.
“Owing to circumstances with which you need not be concerned, Sir Towsan and I shall not travel openly with guards, but in a clandestine fashion I am sure a woman taught in the Guildhalls of the Islands can appreciate. If we are attached to another group, even to a small one, we will attract still less notice.”
Tilda glanced at the knight. “He might pass for an old soldier if he scuffs himself up a bit. But you, your Grace, do not look like an adventurer bound for Vod’Adia.”
Claudja raised a dark eyebrow. “The same might be said of you, Matilda Lanai, without the cloak and weapons. But some adventurers do take servants with them as far as the Camp Town, and I can pass myself as one of those. Scuffed up a bit.”
Scuffed up a lot, Tilda thought, for the Duchess had the looks of a porcelain doll from the Celestial Empire of Cho Lung in the Farthest West. Tilda looked back to the Duke, still squinting to follow the conversation, but he seemed content to let his daughter speak for herself. Tilda crossed her arms and leaned back a bit, buksu clunking against the back of her chair.
“Just how much trouble are you expecting between here and Camp Town?”
“None,” Claudja said. “Though only fools and drunkards discount trouble altogether. Your simple presence, Miss Lanai, and the reputation of those of your ilk should in all likelihood be of more importance than actual protection. In return, there is a reserved Shugak craft that may be underway as early as the morning. No need to wait for another to return from a run. And, of course, you will be fairly compensated.”
“How fairly?” Tilda asked from force of habit, for gaining a day or more would by itself probably be worth what did not sound to be much of a task.
The Duchess narrowed her gray eyes slightly and the small smirk that had flashed a moment ago crept back to the right corner of her mouth. Tilda did not know who typically conducted the business of buying and selling within a noble Daulic household, but she had the sense that Claudja Perforce did so in hers.
“You have already bought passage with the Shugak, I am sure,” Claudja said. “That will be unnecessary now, and we will of course return to you the difference.”
“Obliged, your Grace. But making good a loss is different than making a fair profit.”
“What would you consider fair, for riding a raft to a place you were going already?”
“Oh, your Grace, these realms and environs are wholly your own. You should be the one to propose a fair price. From which point, we may begin.”
Tilda was aware she was beginning to smile as well, just as she had hawking the horses on the city streets earlier today. The three men in the room were now looking between the two women uncertainly.
“Shall we open the wine?” Claudja offered.
“Let’s do.”
*
It took half an hour but Tilda and the Duchess eventually settled on forty-four gold pieces, which just about put Tilda up for the day even after her payment to Dugan. She took half in advance and as the old knight Sir Towsan produced Miilarkian notes from a bank in Bouree to give payment, Tilda was able to change much of her coinage for more easily managed paper. Pagette and the nobles left the inn from a back door at the end of the hall while Tilda and Dugan returned to the common room where a few customers still lingered.
“What in the world was all that about?” Dugan asked. “I caught no words apart from duke this and duchess that. Jobe, and Vod’Adia.”
Tilda stopped walking. For a moment she had plain forgotten that she and Dugan were not actually traveling together anymore. She bit her lip, stopped biting it, and turned around to face him.
“That girl and the old knight want a traveling companion as far as Camp Town, and to a Jobian temple there. They just hired me.”
Dugan looked unconvinced. “Just you, eh? Could have sworn a thumb was jerked at me a time or two.”
“The Duchess asked what the smell in the room was.”
Dugan cracked a smile, something he had not done much since the far side of the Girdings, before the knight Procost, and Block. His beard had come in now which was a look Tilda had never found particularly attractive growing up in Miilark where all the local men were clean-shaven. Dugan’s did not look so bad however, and he was still handsome when he smiled. Not that one glass of bitter mead and two of wine was enough to allow his looks to influence Tilda. Not quite.
“So when you show up alone to meet them,” Dugan said. “They are not going to wonder where I am?”
Tilda did not answer, so Dugan went on.
“The two of us have worked well enough together, Tilda. We have gotten this far.”
“We did not all get this far.”
Dugan’s mouth lost its trace of mirth. “Believe it or not, I am sorry for that. Truly. But I mean you and me, Tilda. All the way through Daul, and we just handled that meeting well enough.”
“I thought you and Sir Towsan were going to stare each other dead. You really don’t like knights very much, do you?”
Dugan glanced at the floor, no doubt thinking for a moment of Sir Procost of the Roaring Boar Order, as was Tilda.
“I do not much care for nobles,” Dugan admitted. “Call it a hazard of being a foot soldier.”