stepped up to the door. It was thin wood held by a leather hinge well on its way to rot. She rapped on it smartly with her knuckles and set her shoulders. Inside, someone stirred, grunted. A bar was pulled away and the door swung open. The man standing in the shadows blinked at her, as astounded by her presence as he would have been at a gryphon or a dragon. Baronesses were clearly well outside his experience. Even fallen ones.
“Good afternoon. I’m Clara. You must be Mihal,” Clara said.
“Yes,” he said, then bowed as if only then remembering to do so.
“I’m a friend of your mother’s,” Clara said. “I don’t think we’ve met formally.”
“She … ah … talks of you. On occasion. Ma’am.”
Clara smiled, nodding. It was always so difficult to put young men at ease. They all seemed to look at her as something out of a myth. All except Vincen.
“Your sister’s wedding. It went well, I hope?”
“Quite, ma’am,” Mihal said, scratching himself sincerely and indelicately. “It was a nice dress you gave her.”
“I’m glad it suited. May I come in?”
Mihal’s expression went uncomfortable and he glanced back over his shoulder in concern.
“I have three boys of my own,” Clara said. “I’ve seen worse.”
“Well, then. Certainly?”
The rooms were tiny, squalid, close, and repellent. Clara sat on a stool and crossed her ankles as if this were the finest drawing room in the Kingspire.
“I was wondering, Mihal, if I might put upon you for a favor.”
“Ah. Sure, I suppose,” he said as she drew out her pipe and packed it with tobacco. She lifted her eyebrows, and he brought her a burning candle to light it from. The smoke tasted wonderful and smelled much better than the room. Clara took the bowl in one hand, tapping her teeth with the stem.
“I am looking for a young man. A Firstblood. He probably thinks of himself as a tough, and he associates with a Kurtadam man of middle years,” she said, “and his friends call him Ossit.”
Marcus
After his season in Lyoneia, the plains of the Keshet in summer felt as strange and exotic to Marcus as walking into a dream. The wide horizons under the uncompromising bowl of sky felt too large, and the desert air strangely cool now that it wasn’t too humid for his sweat to dry. A few distant clouds scudded overhead with the dim quarter moon showing pale in the blue among them. The caravanserai, as near a thing to a permanent city in this part of the Keshet, centered on a stand of massive obelisks that rose in a circle toward the sky. The stones curved like the claws of some massive beast that could hold a hundred wagons and their teams in its palm, and in the center a spring of clear water trickled from a broken stone into a wide and shallow pool. Half of the travelers in the little oasis were Tralgu, the other half Yemmu, and so two Firstblood men on foot and without so much as their own tent stood out like blood on a wedding dress. Everything smelled of dust and horse shit, and the suspicious looks from the caravan guards promised violence if Marcus or Kit spoke the wrong words or laughed at the wrong jokes. Marcus suspected that it said something unpleasant about his choices in life that he felt so comfortable there.
He sat beside the water, his little pack at his side. He’d wrapped the sword in cloth and bound it with leather straps. No particular use if he wanted to draw the thing, but there was less chance he’d need its use if it wasn’t obvious he was hauling magical treasures from the Dragon Empire about with him. His own blade still hung from his hip, though in a new scabbard. The old one had rotted through with his clothes. The sand-colored cotton robes they’d bought on the Lyoneian coast weren’t so different a cut from the local. Kit made his way through the camps, listening and talking, being charming and using the power of the spider goddess to ingratiate himself to the carters and guards and nomadic hunters. Marcus only saw him when he came back with money or a bowl of boiled millet and roasted goat.
“What’re we looking at?” Marcus asked, biting into the meat.
“I think it could be worse,” Kit said softly enough that his words didn’t carry. “I haven’t found anyone heading in our direction, but I have been promised a mule