cheery scarlet livery waited on the tables, and more somberly uniformed hired muscle stood around near the bar, riot batons looped casually on their belts. The floor was freshened with sawdust, not straw, and stringed music, for Hoiran s sake, lilted from a screened dais at the far end of the room.
Ringil saw faces glance up unhurriedly from their platters as he came in, register his arrival, and then go back to dining with as little concern. Small smiles and shrugs, a disinterested comment back and forth. If the sword on his back was noticed, it excited none of the anxiety Ringil had seen in the other tavern when Klithren and his men came calling. In fact, at one table a satin-clad young woman turned and eyed him with open and rather predatory interest, before her friends chorus of shocked mirth and expostulation brought her back around to face her food.
Ringil let a thin smile flicker across his face in response. He crossed to the bar.
I m looking for the Lady Quilien of Gris? I understand she s lodged here.
The bartender wiped a cloth across the bar-top. He surveyed Ringil and his companions, shot a sidelong glance at the closest of the hired muscle. He sucked at his teeth. Is she expecting you?
No. But if she still plans to take passage on the Marsh Queen s Favor tomorrow morning, she ll need to see me. Ringil nodded upward to the stairs and landing over the bar. Room Eleven, isn t it?
The bartender put down his cloth.
Wait here, he said. He moved down the bar and leaned over to mutter in the ear of one of the uniformed men. The man looked at Ringil, clearly wasn t much impressed by what he saw, but shrugged and pushed off the bar, then made his way to the stairs and up. His footfalls clomped overhead on the landing gallery, then faded. Ringil waited and watched the diners. The bold woman in satin sent him a couple more arch glances and whispered to her friends. He looked about idly for some male attention in the same vein, but could not find it.
Get you something while you re waiting?
Ringil was about to say no, then recalled his abandoned glass aboard the Marsh Queen s Favor and the ensuing regret through the climbing streets, the tilting gray vagueness that would not leave him alone. The sense that he was not anchored enough in things outside his own feverish head.
Yeah, like getting drunk is going to help that.
Fuck it. Battlefield tonic, right? He remembered Flaradnam after the battle at Rajal Beach. Iron hip flask raised, seamed black face grim and gashed with something you couldn t really call a smile. Kill or cure, Gil.
Rum, he said, and indicated his porters. For them, too.
The bartender raised an eyebrow at that, but he set up the glasses and poured accordingly. Ringil tossed a couple of coins onto the bar-top, glanced up at the sound of clomping footfalls on the landing overhead. The uniformed muscle, coming back downstairs with a bemused expression on his beefy face.
You can go right up. He apparently couldn t believe it.
Ringil grunted as if he expected no less. He knocked back his rum this one wasn t bad and upended the empty glass on the bar.
Stay here, he told his escort.
Upstairs, the landing gallery cornered right, into a narrow passageway with doors on either side and small candelabras in the ceiling every ten feet or so. The receding dimensions of the passage seemed to sway very slightly in the guttering light the candles gave, as if the inn were a ship that had already put to sea. Ringil resisted the temptation to put bracing hands against the walls as he walked.
The door to Room Eleven was ajar.
He stopped dead when he saw it. Something black and whisper-edged ghosting up through the layers of flu and alcohol, right hand flexing at his side, left reaching across to loosen the sleeve he kept the dragon knife in. The corridor was far too narrow for the Ravensfriend to be useful any fighting done here would be close and sweat-palm desperate.
Just what you need right now.
Ringil eased closer to the far wall to get an angle of vision on the cracked door. Silence battened down in the corridor, stuffed itself into his ears like black water. He watched with fatalistic calm as the gap between door and jamb thickened, as the door hinged slowly and soundlessly back on itself and opened the room beyond to view.
A dog stood in the gap, looking steadily up at him. Pricked ears and slanted amber eyes in the gloom. Long gray muzzle, and a ruff at its throat as thick and glossy as one of his mother s winter mufflers.
Dog? That s a fucking wolf, Gil.
Ringil stared back into the amber eyes. Had he been less fuddled with fever, he might have reached for the ikinri ska, the words and gestures he d used against the dogs at the river, the marsh dweller lore learned from
Hjel, leapt into his head, tight-limbed, hot-eyed young scavenger prince in rags, who seems, despite evasive conversational maneuvers to the contrary, to somehow already know you as he tilts wine from a leather skin, catches your eye in that way you recognize, invites you to stay and admits yes, he s heard of Trel-a-lahayne all right, his forebears were its rulers, but it s a dead legend now, man, fallen to an unknown evil out of the south a thousand years ago and then he leads you to tumbled white ruins on the marsh to prove his point
The Gray Places were full of that shit, full of the wreckage of what you thought you knew about the world, full of people and places that could or should not be, and aching absences where what you expected was suddenly not. But with time you learned, you handled the ache, you let the current carry you, and you took what it offered you along the way; you lay down, for example, beneath damp marsh dweller canvas like some childhood fantasy of escape, lay down with hot-eyed scavenger princes who smelled faintly of wet earth and wood smoke, and owned all manner of useful tricks of sorcery with plants and animals.
And when you woke, some uncounted series of days and nights later, and your companion was gone with his tent and wagon and the rest of his grubby clan, and the Gray Places as often had faded with them, burned back to the hard-varnished texture of whatever portion of the real world you d washed up in with your dreams then, still, the scents of your fucking lingered on your flesh, and the ikinri ska, in your own reality no more than myth and marsh dweller superstition, was harsh in your head, and real as a blade
The wolf, or dog, perhaps bored with all this, twitched an ear at him and turned its long gray head away. It yawned, exposing slick white fangs as if for inspection, closed up its muzzle again with a hollow snap, and walked away from him, back into the room. Ringil, beginning to suspect that the rum had been a bad idea after all, went after the animal, one wary step at a time.
At the back of the room was a section for washing and dressing, screened off by an opened iron concertina frame hung with thick muslin curtains. The dog crossed to the leading edge of the screen, peered in, and then seemed to leap up onto some high platform behind the drapes. A poorly defined shadow moved across the muslin, and a woman s voice drifted languidly out to him.
You wished to see me?
Ringil cleared his throat. I ve come from the Marsh Queen s Favor. Our departure has been brought forward.
Really? A sudden edge on the urbane tones now.
And there I was, given to understand we need not depart until I chose to present myself aboard tomorrow morning. Your captain is a fickle man when his purse is filled.
He is not my captain.
But fickle nonetheless.
Possibly so, my lady. I really wouldn t know. Some ghost of court-bred manners past struggling to assert itself as he spoke. It was a part of himself he took out from time to time, like some age-worn keepsake of youth, and was always surprised to find how much he missed it. But though it grieve me to carry the message, I am very much afraid that your ladyship will need to present herself aboard before dawn, or the ship will sail without you. I have brought men to ease the transport of your effects.
A slight pause.
Well. They send me a knight errant. And I have, I suppose, been less than courtly with you.
Motion across the muslin again. The Lady Quilien of Gris stepped out from behind the screen and paced toward him, toweling riotous dark hair dry with one hand as she came. Apart from the scarlet flannel towel she was using, she was completely naked. She offered her free hand in a
Naked?
