our jobs, our reputation, our everything. Our lives if they catch us. Let me get it all back. For both of us. Please?”
She was weakening, he could see it, so he pressed his advantage. He’d always been able to wheedle his way around her if he tried.
“Look, Kass, with enough money we can pay the right people, get our names restored or at least cleared. You won’t have to wear that fucking rag of a dress any more, just because you’re a ‘farmer’s sister’ and that’s what they wear. I’ll even get you your blades back.”
She raised an eyebrow, and he made a note to lay it on less thick.
“You know who has my blades?”
“I do. And I’ll buy them back just as soon as I have the money. And of course there’s Egimont—”
“You just shut up about him.” The ice in her voice made him shiver.
She wouldn’t look at him but played with her hair, hiding her eyes behind a loose lock, considering. Vocho wondered what had happened between her and Eggy. One minute the two of them were a mismatched pair, and he’d never seen her happier. Even if he thought Eggy was too smooth for words, a stuck-up pompous mountebank, too damned quiet, sneaky and devious with it, he’d never have said so to Kacha. He’d had words with Eggy, but he wouldn’t say so to Kacha, because she was happy and under it all he did love her, when he remembered to. The next minute, well it seemed like the next minute Kacha was cursing Eggy like a sailor and then wouldn’t have his name spoken. Vocho had revelled in that for a while, glad that he’d been right about sneaky old Eggy, but Kass was constantly in a bad mood lately, and he was the one getting it in the neck.
“OK, I’ll shut up about him. But your blades, our lives, we can get them back. Or go somewhere else and live like kings and queens. If we get this chest open and find out what it is someone wants so much. Aren’t you even a little bit curious? And with a pardon maybe you could—”
“Don’t even suggest it.”
He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Just a thought. I mean, with you restored to the guild, maybe he’d—”
“I said, don’t even suggest it. I’m well rid of him, if that’s where his priorities lie.”
What the hells had happened there? He didn’t dare ask. “Fine, fine, don’t say I didn’t offer. But your blades. With money, we could get them back, get our guild places back, everything we had. Everything. If we open this chest.”
She cocked an eyebrow his way, but he could see the distaste no matter how she tried to hide it. “Still. How can we find out if he’s done something to it?”
Vocho shrugged – he didn’t know much more than she did. “Blood on it, probably. They use blood for their spells.”
“That is creepy as hell.”
“Isn’t it?” A voice from the doorway startled Vocho so much he tried to pull a sword that wasn’t there. Kacha groaned quietly.
The man that Kacha referred to as the “gibbering ninny” stood in the doorway. Vocho couldn’t agree with her – simpering was a much better word for him. A vain, twittering fool in the best fashion of high-society Reyes. Only they weren’t in Reyes, and he stood out like a chorus girl in a hen house among the local farmers, wheelwrights and blacksmiths. Still, he had his uses.
His full name, often repeated by him, probably because it was the only way he could remember it, was Narcis Donat Chimo Ne Farina es Domenech, though in an effort to appear friendly to the locals he had asked them to call him Dom. Mostly they called him Ninny, only not to his face – his father, a prominent clocker, had bought the local manse after the revolt and was a lot of people’s landlord. He was also a controlling tyrant and no better or worse than the previous noble landlord. He’d lately developed a penchant for having his employees, of whom there were many, flogged for minor transgressions. So no one was willing to say openly the slightest thing against him or his son. Sadly for Kacha and Vocho, Dom had taken a liking to Kacha despite the fact she was supposedly just a farmer’s sister and as such not good marriage material for someone like him. The revolt may have demoted a hells-ton of nobles,