She crossed the room and knelt beside the bed. It reminded me of the way she’d looked when I woke up at the hospital. “I’m not some giggly girl, Eddie. I fell in love with you with my eyes open. I’m not asking you to change, just… remember that your actions affect someone else almost as much as they do you.”
I stroked her hair. It was damp with sweat. “I will,” I said softly. But all I could see in my mind was her talking to the old man with gloves, and all I heard was her lying about it.
TEN
The next morning the ruins of the livery stable were still smoking. So was Liz; just before dawn she awoke me by draping her long bare leg over mine, while her hands brought me to life despite a colossal collection of aches and pains. Certain parts of me stirred before my consciousness, so we were actually in the midst of, ahem, battle before I was fully aware. Her skin smelled of sweat, smoke and something deliciously, uniquely her; I let my hands and mouth devour it with all my remaining gusto. She was no tentative, inexperienced girl, and knew how to get what she wanted while making sure I wasn’t shortchanged, either. It was intense, quiet and with the hint of violence along the edges that we both seemed unable to avoid. Neither of us minded.
By the time we finished, sunrise peeked through the window and illuminated air still hazy with diffused smoke. I smiled at the thought that maybe we had generated it. Liz drifted back to sleep, but I was restless. I slipped out of bed and looked outside. The streets were empty; well, unless you counted the half-dozen drunks passed out in the well-trampled earth. It had been a dry couple of weeks, or else these poor bastards would’ve found themselves waking up in six inches of mud. The fire’s smell permeated everything.
My muscles and joints were not happy with me. Every movement reminded me of what I’d gone through yesterday and last night, and I choked down the grunts and groans they inspired. I started the fire in the stove and put water on to heat. There was actually a slight chill in the room; this would be the only cool part of the day, vanishing as soon as the sun rose high enough to reach over the buildings.
I turned and stopped, momentarily transfixed by the sight of Liz. Sprawled on her back, one arm over her eyes and a foot dangling off the edge of the bed, she again looked golden, like a treasure. I watched her breasts rise and fall as she breathed, and unbidden, the memory of the time I’d seen her identical twin sister naked returned vividly to me. It was a lifetime ago, of course; Cathy Dumont was dead over a decade now. But she lived on in my memories, and her shade grew incrementally stronger the longer I kept the secret from Liz.
Would I ever work up the nerve to tell her? Did I need to? I was used to keeping secrets, especially my own, but this was the first time I had to decide if something really qualified as a secret. I’d never been intimate with Cathy, and had not been present at her death, but as far as Liz and her family knew, Cathy had simply vanished years ago. Did I owe it to them to resolve their memories? Or, given the circumstances surrounding her death- decapitated in a bathtub by a mercenary I subsequently killed-was ignorance better for all concerned?
Liz shifted on the bed, dislodging the sheet and showing me a smooth unbroken line of flesh from ankle to shoulder. As my eyes traveled up her skin, I realized her own were open and regarded me with wry amusement.
“Most people pay when they go to a show,” she said sleepily.
“I already paid you this morning.”
She smiled and stretched, revealing even more pale skin. “That you did, my friend.”
I put some tea in two cups and poured hot water into them. She smiled and blew me a kiss when I handed one to her. Patches of sweat still gleamed on her pale skin and lightly freckled shoulders as she sat on the edge of the bed. She took a sip, sighed contentedly; then her expression grew serious. “I should go see if anything’s salvageable at my office. And find somewhere to stable my horses.”
That comment brought back every bit of the previous night’s doubt and worry, which I’d completely put out of my mind. She stood, picked up the heated kettle and went into the next room. I heard water splashing as she washed up.
I stared down into my own tea, my appetite suddenly gone. “Good thing you brought the wagon home.”
“Yeah, if I hadn’t been so beat from that run to Pema, I wouldn’t have.” She leaned out, her wet upper body sparkling in the morning light. “Funny how things happen like that, isn’t it?”
I nodded. She resumed washing.
After she left I also washed up. The soap and water cleaned out all the minor cuts I’d accumulated, and there were a lot of them. With Liz gone I was free to curse and wince as much as I wanted. I applied some of the moon priestess salve to the worst of them, although after a good night’s sleep they’d scabbed over pretty well on their own.
My knuckles, as expected, were swollen and bruised. I could still make a fist, and grab my sword hilt, but I doubted my grip was up to too many parries.
I got dressed and formulated a plan. Well, sort of a plan. Actually more of a next step. As in the next step a blind man locked in a dark room might take as he looked for a key that wasn’t there. The dragon people were connected to Gordon Marantz, which meant he was connected to the death of Laura Lesperitt. That explained why Argoset and the Sevlow big shots might be interested, too. What I didn’t know was why, and it seemed Marantz would be the best one to ask about it. So it was time to find him.
Mrs. Talbot sat on the edge of the porch, her sullen grandson huddled against her. Something about that boy always gave me the creeps, like he’d seen too much for a child his age, and understood way more of it than was natural. “Hear about the murder last night?” she said as I left the building.
“I just got up,” I said, not giving anything away. “Who was murdered?”
“Found some woman dead in the alley. Cut up like a side of meat, they said.”
“Dangerous town.”
Her lips smacked disconcertingly when she spoke. “Heard somebody say they set the fire to distract people from it.”
“Not everything’s connected, Mrs. Talbot.”
She nodded. “That’s a true thing. But lots of things are, and most of us don’t even know about it.”
I’d gotten sucked into this discussion before, so I quickly excused myself. I went down the street to Angelina’s tavern, and my office. The breakfast crowd filled the counter, and rather than force my way in, I waited for an empty stool. When I finally sat, Callie slapped a plate of ham and eggs in front of me without asking. It wasn’t my usual breakfast-I didn’t really have a “usual”-but her harried glare warned me against any rebuke. She had the look of someone who’d worked all night and would snap off the head of the first person who crossed her.
I picked at the runny eggs and listened to the two merchants beside me as they discussed local gossip. I knew them by sight, but we’d never really interacted and they paid me no mind.
“They say the blacksmith burned it down because he was about to be arrested for rum smuggling,” Kopple the tailor said. He had a scar on his cheek that left a gap in his otherwise full beard. “It went up so fast because he soaked the place with his contraband first.”
“Can you blame him?” replied Kopple’s companion, the stonemason Walsh. He ate voraciously, heedless of the egg stuck in his long mustache. “The thought of gentle Muscodian justice scares the hell out of me, too.”
“Man, this is Neceda, not Sevlow,” Kopple said. “Every-body’s into something here, including the king’s men. If the guy wanted to smuggle ale no one would care, not like they would in the capital.”
“Nobody except the Big Mace,” Walsh pointed out, using Gordon Marantz’s nickname among the people who didn’t deal with him.
Kopple nodded. “Yeah, that’s true. He might care. But if the blacksmith had been doing it for a while, he was probably working for him.”
“Maybe, but did you see that officer from Sevlow poking around? I hear King Archibald is going to bring back torture chambers to get confessions and eliminate the whole appeals process he copied from Arentia.”
“Just like the good old days,” Kopple said wryly. “When I was an apprentice, you didn’t come to Neceda alone unless you wanted to leave bloodier and poorer than you arrived.”
“It’s almost that bad now,” Walsh said sadly. “My wife’s knocked up, and we’re thinking about getting out before the baby’s born. Did you hear that, besides the fire, they found some woman stabbed to death in an
