Ganelon finally pulled on his boots, walked to the rail, and looked out over the ordered chaos below.
The large, dimly lit two-story room served as store, warehouse, meeting hall, and gathering spot for the people who worked the Veidrava salt mine. The miners and their families thought of the store as belonging to Ambrose, though he only ran the place. Like everything else of value in Sithicus, the shop really belonged to Lord Soth. The master of Nedragaard Keep had never seen the store or the mine, but his stunted seneschal visited often enough to keep that fact fresh in their minds.
'With the new stock of cloth from Borca, it should be a busy day,' Ambrose called up to Ganelon. The shout brought on a fit of coughing, a reminder of the weakness in the older man's lungs from years of working in the mines. Still wheezing, the shopkeep unbarred and opened the front door. He expected to find customers queued impatiently.
He found his stoop deserted.
Ambrose stepped outside. As was his habit, he kept close to the door, within the confines of the building's early morning shadow. His years below ground had left him unaccustomed to sunlight Unlike the other men who'd survived their time in the pit, he had never reacquainted himself with it. As eccentricities went, this was unusual, even for a place of back-breaking, soul-deadening toil like Veidrava. But the shopkeep's kindness had long ago eclipsed this quirk in the locals' minds.
Squinting against even the weak light of dawn, Ambrose looked around. A group of miners' wives, dressed in coarse clothes of a uniformly drab style, milled together on the opposite side of the wide gravel road. They met the shopkeep's eyes but did not return his waved greeting. 'What's the matter now?' he wondered aloud.
'Sheep do not traffic with wolves,' answered a soft voice.
Ambrose turned to find himself facing a petite, gray-haired woman dressed in the brightly hued clothing of her tribe. 'Magda Kulchevich,' he said. 'As always, I am pleased to see you.'
Ambrose did not wonder how the woman had got behind him without making a sound, or why the miners' wives kept their distance. Madame Magda was raunie of the Wanderers, the small Vistani tribe that roamed the wilds of Sithicus. They were fortune tellers and traders and thieves. The locals shunned them, until they needed some shady work done. Then they were glad to pay the Vistani's fees, whether the price was reckoned in silver or blood.
Ambrose limited his dealings with the Wanderers to barter of the more mundane sort. 'What have you for me today?' he asked, gesturing for the matriarch to enter his store. 'Blankets? Some jewelry?'
'Would you accept anything more esoteric?' she asked. Before he could reply, she laughed in the way a mother laughs at a child's silliness. 'Of course not! You wouldn't even take a charm to help the mad girl.'
'You can help her?' Ganelon called out. He bolted down the stairs four at a time. 'Ambrose, why haven't you told me about this?'
There are few creatures beyond the help of the Vistani,' Magda said.
The shopkeep grabbed Ganelon by the arm. Their aid comes at the peril of her soul,' he whispered. 'Leave it be.'
Magda shook her head. 'No need to hiss, Ambrose. I know what you think of my people. Who knows, you may be right.'
She turned to Ganelon. Her green eyes called to him as the sea beckons a mariner; they were full of mystery and adventure and even peace-but it was the peace of death. 'You think that love will save her. Sometimes love makes things worse.'
'Or maybe the boy doesn't know what love is,' offered a burly Vistana. The man strode into the store and dumped the huge roll of carpet he'd been carrying. The roll thudded on the wooden floor, raising up a cloud of dust. 'He doesn't look the sort who's had much practice.' He smirked. 'It's all right, boy. I will stand in for you with your ladylove if your saber's not up to the duel.'
Magda spat her disgust. 'We speak of the heart, Bratu. In a duel of hearts you would be unarmed.'
Bratu replied gruffly, in the patchwork language of the Vistani known as Patterna. He was obviously upset at being insulted in front of a giorgio, someone outside the tribe. Magda let him speak, but when his words took on an angry edge, she silenced him with a single, subtle flick of her hand. 'You've had your say,' she declared, then gestured at the carpet. 'Unroll it. We do not offer a friend like Ambrose a pig in a poke.'
Ganelon stared at the burly Vistana with undisguised hatred on his face. Bratu returned the angry look in kind, a sneer curling his lips. The gypsy was twice the size of the younger man. His arms were nearly as muscled as Ganelon's legs. However, Ganelon had never walked away from a fight in his life, particularly over an insult even remotely connected to Helain.
Ambrose had tended Ganelon's bruises and cuts enough times to know that a scuffle was imminent. Moreover, he'd seen the younger man pounded unconscious enough times to know that he stood little chance against Bratu. So he redirected Ganelon's attention to the carpet with a simple comment: 'None of the miners' families would pay for this, but I think Helain would like it in her room.'
The carpet was looted from Duke Gundar's castle on the night he was murdered,' Magda noted. She lifted a corner and ran her slender fingers over the abstract pattern. 'Or so claimed the man who traded it to me. I don't believe that, though. Gundar would not have owned anything so beautiful, even if only to tread upon.'
She mouthed a silent word and chased it from her lips with her fingers, an old Vistani curse upon the memory of the slain nobleman. Magda had traveled for more than a decade in that tyrant's domain before assassins cut him down and his territory was divided up between his equally monstrous neighbors. Long ago she had vowed to curse his name once for every hour of sorrow he had inflicted upon her and her small tribe, which she had cobbled together from the few Vistani left alive in his domain. Gundar had been dead for sixteen years and would be dead a dozen more before Magda fulfilled that vow.
Ambrose began haggling over the carpet's fair price, which would be paid to the Wanderers in salt. Hard currency was difficult to come by at the mine, even for Ambrose, but that was no problem to the Vistani. Few sources for salt existed in the lands hereabouts, and they could trade the stuff again at the border for an additional profit.
Bratu did the bargaining for the tribe, as such activity was below Magda's station. Instead, the older woman saw to it that the other items the Vistani wished to trade were brought in and laid out for Ambrose's consideration. Ganelon watched as a girl carried in an array of more mundane wares: pots and pans, clothing, a large wooden chest. She carted even the heaviest items with ease, a bored look on her pretty face.
'Careful with that, Inza,' Magda said, as the girl let the wooden chest drop to the floor.
'Of course,' she replied sweetly. Though I would surely care for it better if it were my own.'
Magda sighed her disapproval. 'Have you not given up on it yet?' She went to the girl's side and laid a hand on her shoulder. 'What do you own that deserves such a thing to hold it?'
'Nothing yet.' Inza ran her delicate fingers across the top of the chest, upon which was carved a lone wayfarer encircled by a riot of greenery. 'But some day I will.'
Seeing the two side by side, Ganelon realized that Inza must be the raunie's daughter. The resemblance was so strong that they might have been the same person distorted through a lens of thirty-five years, one that restored the mother's gray hair to raven black, her care-worn face to its youthful beauty. Only their eyes shattered the illusion. Inza's green eyes did not bring to mind the sea's fathomless depths. In them Ganelon glimpsed the verdure of the deepest forest, a sunless labyrinth of creeper and vine. The effect was mesmerizing.
Ganelon didn't realize he'd been staring until he found both mother and daughter looking at him with something close to revulsion on their faces.
'Sorry,' he murmured, abruptly turning his attention to the tops of his boots.
But the women didn't react. Ganelon had only just begun to wonder why when he heard the scrape of iron-shod boots behind him. He spun about and saw the real object of their loathing.
Azrael, Lord Soth's seneschal, emerged from the darkness of a shadow-draped corner. How he'd got there Ganelon couldn't imagine, though he accepted the dwarfs presence without hesitation. Such weirdness was becoming all too common around Veidrava, from sightings of dead riders to rumors of what lay hidden within the mine's gigantic Engine House.
The dwarf was grinning, an expression so exaggerated that it made his bone-white mustache and mutton chop sideburns bristle like an animal's whiskers. Cheerful malice glinted in his brown eyes. 'I've had dreams about this day,' he said in a throaty whisper. 'How long's it been, eh, Magda? Twenty years? Twenty-five?'
'Thirty-two,' the raunie replied. 'Still not enough for my taste.' She held her right hand before her, fingers
