Smoke did not return that night, but my dreams were uneasy and peopled with things I would rather forget. I awoke bolt upright, clutching a dagger before I realized that someone had nudged the foot of my bed. It was my man, Uo, standing over me, impassive despite the knife in my hand. “One to see you,” he said as soon as he was sure I was awake.
“Who?”
He shrugged. “She is veiled.”
“Weapons?”
His flat peasant face didn’t change expression. “A high-born lady.”
My visitor was standing in the middle of my front room, arms at her sides and rigid, as if to touch anything was to contaminate herself. Her mantle bore a single conservative row of embroidery which proclaimed her status without specifying her clan.
“My Lady.”
She turned to face me, cotton mantle still over her head. Her eyes were large and dark, but not crossed enough to be truly beautiful. Like the eyes of another woman, from a long time ago. The memory grabbed at my gut with chilled talons.
“Are we alone?” she asked when my servant had withdrawn. I nodded and she dropped her mantle, showing her face.
She was handsome without being beautiful. Her skull was not flattened in the Frog fashion. Her hair was lustrous, her lip plug small like the jade spools in her ears. On her chin were the four lines of a high-class married lady. It took me a second to put the picture together and recognize her.
“Well, at least you are not drunk,” she remarked.
“Three flower?”
“LadyThree flower.” Her voice was hard and cold. She would not unbend an inch.
“And how may I serve the gracious lady?”
Her eyes flashed. Once, in another life, she was the elder sister of the one I was supposed to marry.
Now what was she? “Ninedeer told of meeting you.”
“I am not surprised my cousin could not keep the news to himself. But was that enough to bring you running to me?”
She snorted. “Let us say he reminded me of your existence.” She stressed the last word as if I were actually dead. Which, I suppose I was, from her viewpoint.
“Then what brings you to English Town?”
“A relative. Four flower.”
Oh ho. A gambling debt perhaps, and Three flower using our past connection to charm her way out of it?
That didn’t seem right. “I do not know the lady.”
“She was hardly a child when you left.” Again that emphasis.
By now I was sick of her attitude, sick of the things she represented, and sick of the skinless face of Smoke floating in my mind. I softened my voice. “My Lady, you obviously want something. Will insulting me help you to gain your end?”
A pause. “You are correct,” she said, suddenly coldly gracious. “I am trying tofind Four flower. She disappeared three days ago, seemingly kidnapped at the Forest Market.”
“Seemingly?”
“Her maid heard a muffled scream, and when she turned her mistress was gone.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her and she flushed. “The maid was questioned very thoroughly. She held to her story to the end.”
“Then Four flower probably has been kidnapped.”
Lady Three flower glared at me. “I wish her return.”
“Then I would suggest contacting a go-between. I can give you a name…”
“The go-betweens say they know nothing of the matter,” she cut in.
That stopped me. Kidnapping was an old, if not honorable, profession, and one of the reasons the nobles kept their women and children close. But there was an order to these things, a procedure. And that called for the approach to be made through a go-between.
“Three days, you said?”
“Mid-morning on the day of the Ocelot last.” Plenty of time for a go-between to contact the family.
Mentally I ran down the list of possibilities. The most obvious one was that the snatch team had bungled the job and the girl was dead. Or perhaps this was an unusually complicated bit of business. Someone had dropped the ball, or the girl’s other relatives had been contacted and were keeping it quiet. Too many things could have happened.
“Was Four flower important?”
“She was of the line of the Emperor Montezuma Himself.”
Which was a polite way of saying she was very well-born and had nothing else. No position, no title of her own, no fortune, and no prospects. A cousin-companion to Three flower, perhaps chosen for her name, and ranking little higher than a servant. But a young noblewoman could become attached to such a one. Especially if her blood sister was a beautiful, faithless, empty-headed ninny. I broke that train of thought off sharply.
“Then there is more to this than you think. Best you go home and await word.”
“I want her found!”
“Do you think I can snap my fingers and conjure her here for you?”
“I think you can contact your friends who kidnap.”
“They are my associates, not my friends, and they only kidnap for ransom.” A thought came. “Was Four flower pretty?”
“Very,” she snapped, and the color drained from her cheeks as she caught the implication. “I suppose you know brothel keepers as well,” she said with cold fury.
“Many of them,” I said and smiled at her discomfiture. “But none of the ones I know would be foolish enough to kidnap a high-born maid off the streets in broad daylight.”Not unless they were very well paid , I thought,and well enough protected not to fear Uncle Tlaloc and his peers. But word of something that big should have gotten around. This was beginning to sound interesting.
“Did she have lovers?”
“She was untouched,” Three flower said. “The maid confirmed that before she died.”
“A flirtation, then?”
“I would have known even that.”
“So.” I was silent for a long time.
“I will pay well for Four flower’s safe return,” Three flower said.
“Undoubtedly, Lady. But I will be honest with you. I doubt very much the child is still alive.”
“Then I will pay for her killers.”
If the girl had died in a bungled kidnapping, the head of the ring would gladly give the skins of her killers as a peace offering and pay wergild besides.
“I will see what I can discover.”
She nodded, reached beneath her mantle and tossed something at me. I dodged instinctively, and the deerskin pouch hit the floor with the metallic clink.
“That will do for a start, I think.”
I kicked the pouch back to the hem of her skirt. “I am not doing this for money,” I told her.
She smiled for the first time. “You shall have nothing else of me. My husband cannot restore you and I would not ask it of him even if he could.”
“You misread me,” I said coldly.
“I read you well enough to know that in an age when things were done properly you would have been killed instead of merely banished.”
“And in an age when things were done properly you would be whipped naked from one temple plaza to the next for visiting a man not a relative, unescorted, and at night.” I looked at her speculatively. “That could still happen, you know.”
She snorted, threw her mantle over her head and stalked out. Uo must have met her at the door because I did
