Covenant's End - Ari Marmell Page 0,7

you're—”

“Oh, for fig's sake, can we just not? How about you give me clear answers, and you won't have to live with all the mockery you're going to suffer after you've been beaten up by an adolescent girl in public.”

His jaw clenched, causing his mustache to bristle as though it were an angry cat. Shins almost hurt herself swallowing a snicker. “What makes you think you'd be able to beat me?” he demanded.

Widdershins's answering smile was not only welcoming, it bordered on dainty. “Would you care to find out?”

Apparently he wouldn't; the stranger's entire posture slumped. “Would you believe I'm just taken by you?”

“Flattered, but no. You're not subtle enough to do anything less overt than leering, and I've been leered at. I know what it feels like, and you haven't left nearly enough slime on my back.”

Olgun snorted, radiated mischievousness, and sent a crawling sensation of sticky wetness down the young woman's spine.

“Quit it!” Very tricky, getting the weight and emphasis of a shout into a whisper so soft it was barely a breath, but it was a trick she'd mastered a long time ago. Pretty much out of necessity.

Her divine partner's answer was, more or less, a chuckle.

The stranger hesitated a few seconds more. Then, with a resigned sigh, he reached into a pocket of his ragged coat and removed a worn sheet of parchment.

Squished, battered, folded, and refolded so often the creases were almost worn through, and soaked in the aromas of lint and stale sweat, it remained clear enough, once opened. The both of them took some time to contemplate, first the sketch and then one another.

“It's missing something,” Shins said finally. “I don't feel it truly captures the inner me.”

“Certainly didn't tell me what to expect,” the man confirmed.

“Hmm.” Again she turned her attention to the parchment, not the portrait but the text below. Her name, a brief list of the sorts of activities in which she might be involved—“Petty theft?!” she protested to Olgun. “There's nothing petty about them!”—and the promise of a small reward for any sightings or information regarding her, to be delivered to…

“The Finders’ Guild? Oh, figs.” Last she knew, Shins wasn't in any trouble with Davillon's thieves, but she couldn't readily come up with any good reasons they'd want to keep an eye on her.

“Where did you get this?” she demanded.

“Uh, been circulating for a couple months, now. In Davillon and all the surrounding towns. Actually were some going around earlier'n that, even, but those said deliver any information to a particular address in the Ragway District, rather than the Guild in general.”

She was only half listening, now, her attentions fixed on a point hundreds of miles distant and a season gone by. The bustling city of Lourveaux; the strangers loitering about the tomb of Archbishop William de Laurent, as though waiting for someone; the spy she had believed, only learning otherwise much later, to be watching her on behalf of House Carnot.

Again she pitched her voice for divine ears only. “What do you think?”

Worry, suspicion, but tentative agreement. Someone watching for her on both sides of Galice? It seemed far too much to be sheer coincidence.

Snapping back to the present, Shins clunked a couple of coins onto the food-stained table. “It's not as much as they're offering,” she said, tapping a finger on the parchment, “but you don't have to face a road supposedly full of monsters—or me—to collect.”

Grimy hands twitched toward the silver, but the stranger stopped himself. “And, uh, what am I doing for this reward?”

“Finding any more of these that might be floating around this little trading post and burning them.” It wouldn't accomplish much, she knew, but it might render this particular spot a tad safer if she had any need to come back this way.

Not that she planned to.

“Oh. All right.”

“Incidentally,” Shins added, interrupting him in mid-scoop, “it's probably crossed your mind to just take the coins and then not bother looking for any more of these posters. I mean, how would I know, right?”

“Um…”

“I suggest you consider the lengths that someone's gone just to keep track of me. And then wonder why.

“And then…ask if you're really sure I wouldn't know.”

With that, she swept from the chair and the table. It was all nicely melodramatic and threatening, and she almost ruined the whole effect by bursting into laughter when Olgun suddenly filled her head with ominous operatic music. Fortunately, she managed to hold off until she was back outside.

“Was a little overwrought, wasn't it?”