Everybody who would eventually be somebody was there. Willem Korvan made an effort to talk to each and every one of them, but didn’t bother listening. He watched their mouths move. He nodded and smiled. From time to time he tipped his head a bit to one side as if really concentrating on what they had to say then he would nod again and smile. Nodding and smiling, he might make a meaningless comment on what they were wearing. Then he would smile and nod. Each and every one of them smiled back, and nodded.
What Willem was most concerned with at the time was the smell. Marek Rynuit’s fashionable Second Quarter home had all the right furniture and fixtures, everything predictable and acceptable, but the smell could not be ignored.
Oranges? he thought. No. Nothing so simple. Willem wondered if it could be a combination of things. Oranges after all, maybe, but mixed with… lamp oil? No.
The mortar they’d used on the city wall project combined with a Fourth Quarter beggar’s sick and the porridge his mother used to make when he was a boy?
Closer.
“The current state of things,” another young senator said to Willem’s blank, smiling face, “guarantees naught but that the wealthy grow only wealthier while the poor become increasingly desperate over time. Really, it’s up to us, isn’t it, Korvan, to set things aright once and for all, just as Master Rymiit suggests?”
Willem smiled and nodded, and the young senator appeared pleased. They wandered away from each other and into the same conversations with different people.
“It did seem radical to me at first,” a young woman trolling for a husband said behind too much Shou-inspired makeup. “After all, my family has sold horses for generations and hardly worked as hard as they have in order to see our estates divided among the tradesmen. That idea in particular… but, well, if Master Rymiit thinks it’s best…”
Willem nodded but didn’t smile. He caught the woman’s eye and detected just enough desperation in her gaze that he fled her presence as quickly as he could.
Looking for Rymiit in the crowded sitting room, Willem began to formulate his excuse for leaving so early. Before he could find his host, though, he was stopped by an apparition.
It had been some time since he’d seen her, but there she stood. She’d just stepped into the room, and all at once the smell was gone, as though the air had refreshed itself in her honor.
“Phyrea,” he whispered.
She either heard him or sensed his eyes on her, and she looked right at him. Willem took a step back and smiled. She stared at him, but didn’t smile back. When she stepped into the room the guests parted for her, and it was as if the air itself gave way before her. They weren’t afraid to touch her, just unworthy.
Willem stepped forward to meet her and almost stumbled to a stop when Marek Rymiit slid between them. Focused only on Phyrea’s jaw-dropping beauty, he hadn’t seen the pudgy Thayan.
“Ah, Phyrea,” Marek said. “Did I invite you?”
Phyrea smiled at him, and the sight of it made Willem’s mouth go dry.
“Ah, Marek,” Phyrea replied. “I came anyway.”
They shared a conspiratorial smile that made Willem feel as though he should get out of that house as fast he could, then they both noticed him at the same time.
“You’ve met Willem Korvan,” Marek said.
Phyrea nodded but didn’t smile, and Willem smiled but didn’t nod. The other guests around them seemed to quiver.
“So these are the young masters?” Phyrea asked Marek.
“The heirs apparent, yes,” he answered with a grin.
Phyrea, unimpressed, said, “This canal-builder I’ve heard about…” She turned to Willem. “It’s not you.”
“No,” Willem said. He wanted to elaborate, but the words failed him. Phyrea wasn’t listening anyway.
“Is he here?” she asked Marek.
“No, he isn’t,” said the Thayan, with a hint of fire in his eyes.
“I’m not surprised,” Willem ventured, “that you and he wouldn’t see eye to eye, Master Rymiit.”
Phyrea scanned the room, bored, even exhausted. She wasn’t listening.
“The young fool our unfortunate ransar has trusted with this exercise in endless ditch digging?” Marek replied.
“You don’t know him?” Willem asked Phyrea.
She shrugged the question off. How could she know Ivar Devorast, after all?
“The last time we spoke, you inquired about a certain item,” Marek said to Phyrea. “Tell me you brought it along.”
“Hardly,” she said, looking around the room so she didn’t register Marek’s annoyed look.
Their host’s expression changed back to its placid, friendly mien and he muttered, “Enjoy my little caucus.”
With a bow Phyrea didn’t return but Willem did, he was gone.
“Phyrea,” Willem said when he saw her begin to take a step away from him.
She turned, impatient, and folded her arms in front of her.
“Come with me,” he said, reaching out to take her by the elbow.
She flinched away from him as if his touch would scald her, and Willem’s heart leaped. “Please,” he said.
She wouldn’t look at him, but turned and let him follow her to Marek’s veranda. They had to wave their way through huge clay pots that someone told him Marek had gotten from as far as Maztica. The plants were local, but appeared unhealthy.
“Phyrea,” he said when he hoped they were alone. He tried to touch her again and she flinched. She made no effort to mask her contempt for him.
“Hate me if you want to,” he told her. “It doesn’t make me want you any less.”
“I don’t hate you,” she said.
Relieved, Willem sighed.
“I would have to think about you at all to hate you.”
She isn’t ignoring me, he told himself, then shook his head to try to rid himself of not only the words but the feeling of relief that washed over him.
“I don’t care if you hate me, or think of me at all, or love me, or think of me as a brother,” he said, the words spilling out of him. “I will serve you. I will be your slave, if that’s what you wish. I will do anything to have you. And I may be the only man in this wretched city who understands youthe only one willing to give you everything and ask for nothing in return.”
She allowed him the briefest, unconvinced glare.
“I understand that you’re the kind of woman that the world has got to come to a screeching halt for,” he went on. “You have to be the center not only of attention but of infinity itself.”
“If you tell me you love me, I’ll kill you where you stand,” she said, and he could tell she meant it.
“And if I told you I thought that might be worth dying for?” he asked.
“Then all you’d be telling me is that you’re a fool,” she shot back. “A boy.”
“If-” he started.
“When I was away from the city last summer,” she interrupted, “at my father’s estate in the country, there was a man. He had me in a way you’ll never have me.”
Willem could swear at that moment that his heart turned to glass.
“You’re pretty,” Phyrea said. “You serve well. You make friends easily. You have position and potential, and all of that meaningless stupidity I couldn’t possibly find less interesting.”
Willem closed his eyes against her words, but they kept coming.
“That man, last summer,” she went on, “was a stone mason. He was nothing… no one. He was a brute, but he was more than you’ll ever be, and no matter what happens between us for the rest of our lives, Willem, you will never be a tenth the man he is. I’m not even sure it’s because he’s so great a man or you’re so insignificant, but likely a bit of both. And not only did he fail to offer me his mortal soul, when he left, he didn’t even say good- bye.”
