The streets beyond were cobbled, uneven with neglect and scattered with dank-smelling puddles. Houses pressed closely on either side, hung with dripping eaves and canting balconies, and cornices spattered with gull guano. Tarnished tin talismans, purpose unknown, jangled in the shadows of the doorways. Confused as the avenue narrowed to a three-way convergence of alleys, Lysaer dodged a pail of refuse water tossed from a window overhead. ‘Cheerless place,’ he muttered. ‘You can’t want to stop and admire the view here?’
Arithon left off contemplation of their surroundings and said, ‘Does that mean you want the task of asking directions through this maze?’
Lysaer pushed back his hood and listened as a pair of matrons strode by chattering. Their speech was gently slurred, some of the vowels flattened, the harder consonants rolled to a lazy burr. ‘The dialect isn’t impossible. On a good night of drinking I expect we could blend right in.’
The crisper edges to his phrasing caused one of the women to turn. The expression half-glimpsed beneath her shawl was startled and her exclamation openly rude as she caught her companion’s elbow and hastened past into a courtyard. Rebuffed by the clank of a gate bar, Arithon grinned at the prince’s dismay. ‘Try being a touch less flamboyant,’ he suggested.
Lysaer shut his mouth and looked offended. More practised with ladies who fawned on him, he stepped smartly past a puddle and approached a ramshackle stall that sold sausages. Sheltered under a lean-to of sewn hide, and attended by a chubby old man with wispy hair and a strikingly pretty young daughter, the fare that smoked over a dented coal brazier seemed smelly enough to scare off customers. At Lysaer’s approach, the proprietor brightened and began a singsong patter that to foreign ears sounded like nonsense.
Caught at a loss as a laden sausage-fork was waved beneath his nose, the prince tore his glance from the girl and offered an engaging smile. ‘I’m not hungry, but in need of directions. Could your charming young daughter, or yourself, perhaps oblige?’
The man crashed his fist on the counter, upsetting a wooden bowl of broth. Hot liquid cascaded in all directions. The fork jabbed out like a striking snake, and saved only by swordsman’s reflexes, Lysaer sprang back stupefied.
‘By Ath, I’ll skewer ye where ye stand!’ howled the sausageseller. ‘Ha dare ye, sly faced drifter-scum, ha dare ye stalk these streets like ye own ‘em?’
The girl reached out, caught her father’s pumping forearm with chapped hands and flushed in matching rage. ‘Get back to the horse fair, drifter! Hurry on, before ye draw notice from the constable!’
Lysaer stiffened to deliver a civil retort, but Arithon, light as a cutpurse, interjected his person between. He caught the sausageseller’s waving fork and flashed a hard glance at the girl. ‘No offence meant, but we happen to be lost.’
The vendor tugged his utensil and lost grip on the handle. Arithon stabbed the greasy tines upright in the ramshackle counter, and despite penetrating stares from half a dozen passersby, folded arms unnaturally tan for the sunless climate and waited.
The girl softened first. ‘Go right, through the Weaver’s lane, and damn ye both for bad liars.’
Lysaer drew breath for rejoinder, cut off as Arithon jostled him forcibly away in the indicated direction. Whitely angry, the prince exploded in frustration. ‘Ath’s grace, what sort of place is this, where a man can’t compliment a girl without suffering insult out of hand!’
‘Must be your manners,’ the Master said.
‘Manners!’ Lysaer stopped dead and glared. ‘Do I act like a churl?’
‘Not to me.’ Arithon pointedly kept on walking, and reminded by the odd, carven doorways and curious regard of strangers that he was no longer heir to any kingdom, Lysaer swallowed his pride and continued.
‘What did they mean by “drifters”?’ he wondered aloud as they skirted a stinking bait-monger’s cart and turned down a lane marked by a guild stamp painted on a shuttlecock.
Arithon did not answer. He had paused to prod what looked to be a beggar asleep and snoring in the gutter. The fellow sprawled on his back, one elbow crooked over his face. The rest of him was scattered with odd bits of garbage and potato peels, as though the leavings from the scullery had been tossed out with him as an afterthought.
Mollified enough to be observant, Lysaer did an incredulous double-take. ‘Dakar?’
‘None else.’ Arithon glanced back, a wild light in his eyes. ‘Oh, luck of the sinful, we’ve been blessed.’
‘I fail to see why.’ Lysaer edged nervously closer, mostly to hide the fact that his half-brother had crouched among the refuse and was methodically searching the untidy folds of Dakar’s clothing. ‘You’ll have yourself in irons and branded for stealing.’
Arithon ignored him. With recklessness that almost seemed to taunt, he thrust a hand up under the tunic hem and groped at Dakar’s well padded middle. The Mad Prophet remained comatose. After the briefest interval, the Master exclaimed on a clear note of triumph and stood, a weighty sack of coins in his fist.
‘Oh, you thieving pirate.’ Lysaer smiled, enticed at last to collusion. ‘Where do we go to celebrate?’
‘The horse fair, I think.’ Arithon tossed the silver to his companion. ‘Or was that someone else I heard cursing the mud on the road below the gatehouse?’
Lysaer let the comment pass. Thoughtful as he fingered the unfamiliar coinage inside the purse, he said, ‘This must be a well-patrolled town, or else a very honest one, if a man can lie about in a stupor and not be troubled by theft.’
Arithon skirted the sagging boards of a door-stoop.
‘But our prophet didn’t leave anything unguarded.’
Lysaer’s fingers clenched over the coins, which all of a sudden felt cold. ‘Spells?’
‘Just one.’ The Master showed no smugness. ‘From the careless way the bindings were set, Dakar must have a reputation.’
‘For being a mage’s apprentice?’ Lysaer tucked the pouch in his doublet as they passed the front of a weaver’s shop. Samples of woollens and plaids were nailed in streamers to the signpost but the door was tightly closed and
