by Sharon Shinn
“Of course,” he answered. “Let me show you upstairs.”
He paused to order bread and cheese from a serving boy, since Josie hadn’t eaten and there was no food in his room, and then he shepherded the two women up the dark and narrow staircase. Corene refused to let him carry her, which would have speeded up the process enormously, and the server arrived with a tray of goods just as they made it to Rafe’s door.
Five minutes later the three of them were more or less comfortably situated around a small table set right before the fire, which Rafe had built up hastily after they stepped into the room. He’d also given the women the only two chairs, while he perched on a battered trunk that held most of his possessions. He was relieved to see that the room was in relatively good order, but then, he was a fairly fastidious man. Even the bed was neatly made, though he couldn’t remember exactly when he had last washed the linens.
“If you’re tired, as I imagine you are, you can sleep while you wait,” he said through a mouthful of cheese. “There’s a room down the hall for washing up.”
“I’m so tired,” Corene said, yawning to prove it. “And my foot hurts.”
“I’m fine,” Josie said. “But you must be tired, too, if you’ve been up all night earning a living.”
She didn’t even say it sarcastically. “I might throw a blanket on the floor and nap for a few hours,” he answered. “I usually don’t have trouble falling asleep no matter where I am.”
“We’re still imposing on you most dreadfully. You’ve been so kind to my sister. I think you must be a very good man.”
Something about that phrase must have triggered a memory in Corene’s mind, because she looked up from her plate. “He doesn’t have any blessings,” she said. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Now Josie’s expression was speculative again. “Yes, of course. A lot of people here in the slums don’t have any,” she said. “Sometimes they let me pull coins for them. Those are always interesting experiences.”
Ah—so that was it. This Josie was some kind of reformer, one of those maniacs and zealots who ministered to the poor. That explained her air of saintliness, though it didn’t explain how she’d managed to stay alive for whatever period of time she’d been carrying out her mission. Even do-gooders tended to fare badly in this part of town. Only the tough survived, only the people who were both smart and ruthless. Right now he wasn’t sure she could claim to have any of those traits.
“Can you take him to a temple?” Corene asked, yawning again.
“I think we have more pressing concerns at the moment,” Josie replied.
“But I want to see. He says he’s been to a temple, but he only pulls ghost coins.”
That caught Josie’s attention; she gave Rafe a quick, sharp inspection. But all she said was, “I suppose that means there’s something mysterious about him.”
He opened his eyes wide. “Me? I’m not concealing anything. Whereas your sister has been hiding a secret all night, beginning with her name, which clearly isn’t Cora.”
Josie looked amused again. “I’m surprised to learn she has such discretion.”
So she wasn’t disposed to share secrets, either. The less they wanted to tell him, the more he wanted to know. “I think I’ll piece the clues together eventually.”
“No doubt you will.”
“But his blessings,” Corene interjected, her voice stubborn. He thought she must be so tired and so overwhelmed that she had picked this one idea to anchor her thoughts to the present. “Can you take him to a temple later? Maybe while I’m sleeping? You pull the best blessings.”
Josie sighed silently, as if capitulating, and then asked Rafe, “Do you have a sheet of paper? And something to write with?”
“Um—sure. Let me poke around a little.”
He finally unearthed paper and ink, and cleared a space on the table for Josie to go to work. He wasn’t surprised to see that she approached this odd, unimportant task with great precision, first marking off twenty-four squares on two separate pieces of paper, and then sketching a blessing sigil in each one.
“Do you know them all by heart?” Corene asked, watching in fascination.
“Of course. Don’t you?”
Corene didn’t bother to answer. “But why do you need forty-eight?”
“Forty elemental blessings. Three extraordinary blessings. Three ghost blessings. And two left over in case I make a mistake.”
She didn’t, of course, as Rafe could have predicted. When she was done, he had to hunt for a pair of scissors so she could cut the squares apart, and then look for a container to hold them. The sisters were busy folding the scraps into smaller shapes while he searched for a bowl or basket. The best he could come up with was a mug that had held ale at a not too distant date, but any leftover liquid had dried into a stain at the bottom of the cup.
He was heading back to the table when a knock on the door sent him that way. “Rafe,” called one of the serving boys through the wood. “Samson sent up a loaf of bread if you want it.”
Whenever Samson had leftover food, he offered it to his boarders at a huge discount, an arrangement Rafe appreciated. “Sounds good,” he called back. Opening the door, he handed over a few quint-coppers in exchange for a slightly lumpy loaf. “Anybody want something else to eat?” he inquired as he turned back to his visitors, shutting the door quickly so the warmth from the fire couldn’t escape.
But the sweep of the door sent an errant draft curling through the room, brushing most of the blessing squares off the table. More than half blew straight into the fire.
“Oh no!” Corene exclaimed, dropping to the floor and trying to rescue the ones that hadn’t swirled into the flames.
Josie was laughing. “Maybe we’re not meant to choose blessings for Rafe Adova after all.”
Rafe set the bread on the table, along with the mug that was no longer needed. “There’s still a few left,” he pointed out, because three folded squares remained on the table. “Maybe those are mine.”
“Maybe they are,” Josie agreed. “And they’ve been chosen for you by the element of air.”
“Maybe he’s elay,” Corene said, returning to her chair and reaching for one of the scraps of paper. She unfolded it eagerly, then stared at it wide-eyed. “Ghost,” she said, showing them the empty square.
Despite himself, Rafe felt a prickle of superstition spiderwalk down his spine. Josie opened the second square. Not a mark upon it. Silently, she handed the third one to Rafe, and he smoothed it open.
Another ghost. If the element of air had chosen his blessings, it had gifted him with absolutely nothing.
THREE
Corene protested for about five minutes, but Rafe wasn’t surprised that Josie convinced her to lie on the bed, where she almost instantly fell asleep. Rafe should have been just as tired, since he’d been awake since noon of the day before, but he found himself oddly energized. As if he’d just had the first glass from an excellent bottle of wine, and it was glittering through his veins. He was pretty sure the intoxicant in this case was the young woman sitting so primly at his table, looking utterly incongruous yet perfectly at ease.
He had been gone for a few minutes, cleaning himself up in the room down the hall, and now he dropped into the other chair across the table from her. He noticed that the fire was burning merrily; she must have added more fuel while he was out of the room. For someone who looked as dainty as an heiress, she possessed an impressive streak of practicality and a hard core of strength. Or so it seemed.
“Anything else I can do to make you more comfortable?” he asked.
“No, actually, I’ve been trying to think what we can do to make up for intruding on you. I’m sure you’re exhausted, too, and would like to sleep in your own bed.”
“I’m good for another few hours,” he said. “But I suppose we’re all trapped he
re until her father arrives.”
“I know. I apologize again for the disruption to your life.”
Out of habit, he pulled the ever-present deck of cards from a hip pocket and began shuffling them. “I find I’m not minding it much,” he said. “It’s made for a more than ordinarily exciting evening.”
“You’ve been very kind.”
He risked the question. “Even though I didn’t sell your sister any red gemstones?”
She laughed. “So you caught that, did you? Some friends of ours taught us that phrase years ago. They were itinerant traders and sometimes dealt with unsavory characters. It’s a way of asking if your friend or partner is in danger without letting anyone else understand the question.”
He nodded. “I guessed.” In the small silence that followed, the ruffling of the cards sounded very loud. “So how would you like to pass the time while we wait?” Rafe finally asked. “Do you play penta?”
She looked intrigued. “I never have. My mother always thought card games were vulgar.”
He laughed softly. “Well, they’re often played by vulgar people.” Just to occupy his hands, he started laying the cards out in suits, face up on the table. Josie watched with seeming fascination.
“The artwork is very intricate,” she said. “Do all decks look like this?”
“Some are more ornate than others. I tend to buy the beautiful, expensive ones.” He shrugged. “I spend so much time handling them, I figure I might as well enjoy looking at them.”
“So are there—five different kinds? No. Six. Seven?”
He neatened the piles and turned them to face her. “Five suits. One to match each elemental trait. Fish for coru, skulls for hunti, roses for torz. Horseshoes for sweela, though that’s always seemed the weakest connection to me. I suppose because horseshoes are shaped in the fire.” With a little flourish, he pushed the last pile closer to her hand. “And for your own element, flutes.”
“What about all those other cards?”
“Three wildcards. Think of them as random blessings. Depending on the game, they can be more or less valuable to hold in your hand.”
“And those?”
“Trumps. Nine of them. I don’t know how they relate to the general blessings, but three times three is a lucky number.”
“And you can play more than one kind of game with these same cards?”
“Dozens. Hundreds.”
“Teach me one,” she said. “Something simple.”
He laughed. It was so unexpected that he should have expected it. This girl might be all elay, but she had a little of the coru element of surprise running through her veins. “All right. This is a game that even children can play. Trumps become their own suit, and the nine of trumps becomes the fourth wildcard. So all you have to do is match six of a kind . . .”
She was a quick study, mastering two easy games so rapidly that he taught her penta, since it had a subtlety that made it enjoyable whether the player was a novice or a professional. She even agreed to play for money—“as long as we keep it to quint-coppers and you don’t cheat”—and laughed in delight the first time she won a hand. By that time, of course, she’d already lost a whole pile of quint-coppers, though he doubted they amounted to much more than a quint-silver. Hardly enough to cover the price of the extra loaf of bread Samson had sent to his room.
“I see how this could become addictive,” she observed. “I keep thinking if I play just one more hand, I’ll finally get the right cards.”
“And that kind of attitude is exactly what keeps me employed,” he answered.
She folded her hands and studied him. “So how does one become a professional card player?” she asked. “What road do you start down that winds up here?”
She didn’t say it as if she pitied him or wanted to convince him of the error of his ways. Merely, she sounded curious. Elay women were creatures not only of air, but also of spirit. He had the sense she was trying to fix in her mind the precise pattern of his soul.
He gathered up the cards, since his hands felt empty without them, and began to idly shuffle and cut them, shuffle and cut. “My mother met an attractive man and found herself with a baby on her hands,” he said.
“A common enough occurrence,” Josie observed.
He nodded. “I get the feeling life wasn’t very easy for her until she met my stepfather when I was a few years old. He’d come to Chialto for the work, but he was a country man at heart. All torz. He missed the land. When his sister asked him back to help run the family farm, he was glad to go, and my mother was glad to go with him. A couple years later they had a son, my brother, Steff. A couple years after that, my mother died.”
He shrugged, a silent way of conveying what a time of pain and confusion that had been. All these years later, and he felt like he could still remember every day of that first awful year after his mother’s death. “I hadn’t liked farm life much to begin with, and pretty soon I couldn’t wait to get away,” he went on. “I wanted to get someplace where there was life and chaos and music. I wanted to go to the city. I left the first chance I could.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen. Came to Chialto, drifted around, took odd jobs. Headed down to the harbor to work on the docks. Didn’t like that, either. Came back to the city. Started playing cards to pass the time and ended up playing for money, when it turned out I was good at it. And here I am.”
“Do you ever go back to see your family?”
“Sure. Steff’s a good kid and I visit when I can. I think he’s pretty lonely. The farm life doesn’t suit him.”
“I take it he’s not torz.”
“No, he seems to be coru, though as far as I can tell, no one in his father’s family ever came from blood and water. So I guess it’s no wonder that he doesn’t fit in.”
“To some extent, it doesn’t matter who we are or where we came from—what kind of family brought us into this world,” Josie said softly. “We become who we were meant to be, and all those other influences fall away.”
He gave her a speculative look. “I suppose you’re talking from experience?”
“Certainly I have turned out to be a much different kind of person than I was raised to be.”
“I take it you spend time here in the slums doing some kind of reform work.”
“Something like that,” she said a little dryly. “A couple years ago, I bought an abandoned building and refurbished it. Turned it into a shelter with an infirmary, a kitchen, and a whole lot of beds. I provide a safe place for people to sleep if they’re desperate and have nowhere else to go.”
“Well, unless you have beds for a thousand people, I can’t imagine you can take care of every desperate soul who ends up southside on an average night.”
“Ah. Well. Some of the people I might consider desperate are perfectly happy with their lives. The ones who come to me are the ones who truly have no other options.”
He gestured to indicate her plain, inexpensive tunic. “You’re not dressed like it at the moment, but you look to me like someone who comes from money. I’m wondering how your family feels about this little project.”
She smiled. “My mother is horrified. My brother-in-law brings fairly constant pressure on me to give up the work. My sister—she’s proud of me, actually. She comes sometimes to help out.”
He glanced toward the sleeping Corene. “A different sister, I take it.”
“I have quite a few.”
“That’s what Corene said. She also said that the two of you aren’t actually related by blood.”
“We were raised as sisters until five years ago. The man we thought was our father turned out not to be. It’s complicated.”
“That’s also what Corene said.” He waited a beat, then added, “That’s what you called her. She told me her name was Cora.”
Now she was
laughing openly. “She’s being very mysterious. The sweela folk love excitement and intrigue.”
“And I suppose your name isn’t really Josie.”
“Close enough. Josetta.”
That’s when it clicked in his head. Corene. Zoe. Josetta. “Slap me stupid,” he breathed. “You’re the princesses. The ones that weren’t really the king’s daughters.”
“That’s us,” she said cheerfully.
He had been watching her covertly ever since she arrived, but now he stared outright. Oh, it had been such a scandal, though overshadowed by a surfeit of scandals that had all piled up at once four or five years ago. First the people of Welce learned that King Vernon was dying. Then they learned that he had been impotent all these years, and his three daughters—by three different wives—had been fathered by loyal courtiers doing their part to give the king his heirs. Then they learned that Vernon’s fourth and youngest wife was carrying her second child and that that baby, miraculously, had been sired by the king.
A couple of quintiles later, the king had passed away, living barely long enough to hold his infant daughter in his arms. The five primes—the heads of the Five Families—had appointed a regent and an interim governing body that would rule Welce until the girl inherited her crown at the favorable age of twenty-four.
And while all of Welce waited for that child to grow up, what happened to the girls who had once been princesses? It had never occurred to Rafe to wonder before. He was at an uncharacteristic loss for words.
“I didn’t think you’d be so shocked,” Josetta said at last. “You don’t seem like the type to fawn over royalty.”
He pulled himself together. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had the chance to converse before with someone in line for the throne.”
“Anyway, I’m not really royalty. Surely you know the story? The bloodlines?”
He nodded. “But aren’t you—I don’t pay that much attention, but—aren’t you and Corene both still part of the succession?”