dragged her heart down. There were patterns to follow in Aria Magli: dresses of particular colours, each selected for the day of the week; one address of a half dozen to stay at, rotated through. Either her father or one of his men was here to tell her more of Dmitri’s cryptic message, and to give her a new assignment. There would be no long nights trading whoring secrets and stories with the courtesans, not this time. She lifted her hand, gesturing that the boy should take her where he’d been told, and looked, without expression, at the contented chicken. The boy answered her in the affirmative, babbling on with tales of his father’s heavy hand and the eight, or fourteen, or twelve, brothers and sisters who all scrambled and worked to keep him in his drink and happy. Belinda laughed in the right places, gasped dramatically when it was called for, and heard nothing he said.
He had been waiting, then, her father or his man. For days, perhaps, even weeks; the journey from north of Khazar all the way to Aria Magli was easiest in high summer, but still not quick. She’d parted ways with the coachman—a more inventive lover than poor Viktor—in Khazar’s capital city and travelled alone, only arriving in Aria Magli late the night before. They had been waiting for her, watching. The morning’s taste of freedom had been a false one, and the open, sun-lit canals seemed a mockery now, instead of a pleasure.
The chicken finished its snack and bwocked with irritation. Belinda turned a faint smile on it. “You may have found a stay of execution, my little friend. I may not be here for supper.” And if she were not, the bird would go to the boy and his eight or fourteen or twelve siblings, perhaps a finer meal than they’d had in weeks. Then again, a chicken hadn’t the sense to comprehend false hope, and Belinda did. It left a taste of bleakness in her throat, bitter as almonds.
The boy poled the gondola beneath a low bridge. A coin glittered down off the bridge, landing at Belinda’s feet with a flat tap. She leaned past the chicken cage to collect it, gold a heavy weight in her hand, warmth undiminished by its brief sojourn through the air. “Here,” she said. “At the next steps.”
“No,” the boy said with determination. “The man told me—”
“He told you wrong,” Belinda interrupted. “Here, boy, at the next steps, and this is yours.” She lifted the coin between two fingers and all but felt the avaricious leap of the child’s heart. For a few seconds the image caught her, the stamped golden coin brilliant in the afternoon sunshine, giving a warm cast to her fingers. Beyond her hand, in poor focus, was the water, blue with reflected skies in direct light, brown with debris in shadow. Farther still were figures on the streets, mostly in the strong shades favoured by the wealthy. Probably not her father, then; he preferred the less ostentatious parts of Aria Magli for meetings such as this. Belinda had long since learned it was often as easy to hide in plain sight, as plumed as a peacock, but Robert would have no changing of his ways.
“If you like to dawdle,” she continued, “stay a while. It may be that I’ll return.”
“My father,” the boy hazarded. Belinda smiled a little.
“A bargain,” she suggested. “Wait an hour, and if I haven’t returned, you have the guineas, this coin, and this chicken here to take home to your father.”
“And if you have?” he demanded.
“Then you’ve all of those things and my fare for the rest of the day,” Belinda replied. Another chicken could always be purchased, or dinner taken at one of the inns in the traveller’s part of town.
But she’d reminded the boy with her words, and he hopped forward, a palm extended. “Your fare for the morning,” he said. “Four guineas.”
Belinda lifted her eyebrows. “Two.”
The child looked affronted. “Three and a half.”
Belinda laughed. “Three, and it’s done.”
The boy spat in his palm, offering it to her before he thought. Then dismay filled his eyes and he wiped his palm hastily against his grubby shirt, offering his hand a second time. Belinda dropped the guineas and the larger gold coin into his hand, watching as he secreted each coin into a different, heretofore unnoticed, pocket or pouch in his clothing. “An hour,” he said with the air of an aggrieved parent. “Not a minute more,