The Dew of Flesh

by Gregory Ashe

  Chapter 32

  “Don’t leave,” Abass said, grabbing Naja’s hand as she folded another blouse and tucked it into the small bag. He stood in the middle of her bedroom, helpless as she grabbed another blouse with her free hand and then wriggled free of his grip.

  Her honey eyes met his, and she smirked. “You’ll be far from lonely, Abass.” Her eyes traveled over his shoulder. Abass flushed.

  “I’ll take care of him,” Fadhra said from behind him.

  “Tair help me,” Abass said. “I’m not a child, you know?”

  Naja placed the last blouse into the bag, pausing to line up the edges, and tied it shut. “Not a child? Tair around us, you can barely wash yourself.”

  Fadhra let out a laugh. She did that more in the last week, since that night in the woods. Days spent with Fadhra and Naja; nights spent racing through the pits, the dew lighting the world in purple and white. Abass smiled at her laugh; he liked the way it bubbled up, as though she were unfamiliar with laughter. Naja raised one plucked eyebrow and her smirk grew.

  “See?” she said. “Now walk me to Cu’s. If you’re not going to be my protection every day anymore, you can still make sure I get to my new home safely.”

  “Tair,” Abass said, “the thought of you working in a shrine—what would Segi say?”

  “Segi was far too stubborn,” Naja said. She turned her arm and showed him the small black tattoo above her wrist. Under-priestess of a shrine of life. Temple prostitute. “And she liked to cause trouble, which I was happy to accommodate. I’m alone now, though, and it’s not a safe life alone.” She put up a hand and stopped his words. “I know, you’d protect me—but you can’t always be there.”

  Silence sprang up between them. Abass could not help but think of poor dead Segi, of Scribe.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Naja said.

  “I know,” Abass said. “But it’s true, and you’re right.”

  “It’s not as if you can’t visit her,” Fadhra said. “And you’re welcome here whenever you please, Naja.”

  “Tair fend, I never thought I’d hear a woman encourage me to go to a shrine,” Abass said.

  Fadhra just laughed again. He could feel that laugh against his skin, warming him.

  “Will you come too?” Naja said to Fadhra.

  “No, thank you,” Fadhra said. “I stay off the streets in the day. Too many things I don’t like to see.”

  The harvests. Abass did not blame her; if she had grown up elsewhere, she would have seen street harvests rarely, if at all.

  “Let’s go, then,” Naja said. She squeezed Fadhra’s hand in farewell and left the room.

  Abass turned. Fadhra wore a simple yellow blouse and tight brown leggings; her clothes left little to his imagination, and he leaned in to kiss her.

  As he pulled back, she grabbed him by the hair. “Come right back,” she said, her voice half-joking. Half.

  “You don’t scare me,” Abass said.

  She smiled and stretched, the thin yellow silk stretching tight across her breasts. “I’m the most dangerous one, you know. And the least trusted. You should be scared.”

  “I seem to remember hearing something like that.” He kissed her again. “Right back.”

  She let him go and pinched his bottom as he left Naja’s bedroom. Abass couldn’t wipe the grin from his face by the time he reached Naja at the front door, and he flushed when he saw her smile return. Abass ushered her out the door, afraid she’d start in on him and they’d be stuck in the house for the rest of the day.

  The streets were full of people under the noon sun. In the eternal summer heat of Nakhacevir, this time of day made people grumpy and tired—and all the more easily distracted, therefore, when cutting purses. Merchants with fat purses on strings easily cut—Abass’s favorite—and, more often than not, a private guard or two alongside to counteract the tenuous purse-strings and—more importantly—the chance of a street harvest. Women in brightly colored dresses that clashed with the painted wooden homes, coins in the hidden pockets of their sleeves, easily tumbled loose with an accidental bump. Laborers and servants filled the street too, but Abass’s trained eyes moved past them quickly; if they carried coin, it was their master’s, and Abass did not want that guilt on his conscience.

  Abass led Naja north and east, away from Old Truth and any Truthers who might still be looking for him. With the brachal on his arm and a pouchful of dew at his waist, Abass had little to fear, but a knife across the throat would kill a sarkomancer as surely as it would a normal man, and Abass liked his throat in one piece.

  Soon they reached the Way of Ash, the city’s only cobblestone road—a broad thoroughfare that passed in front of the temple and the Ladies’ Walk and encircled the city like a belt. Abass followed it north and then east, away from the temple and the Walk. It was a longer route, but the Way of Ash was the safest street in the city—no one wanted to risk a stone-wight by spilling blood.

  Soon they reached the Perfumers’ Walk and turned east, back into the heart of the city. The houses here, although still wood, had bright coats of paint, without sign of fading or peeling. Broad windows opened out onto the street, the heavy shutters often painted in place. Houses that did not fear thieves. The kind of houses Abass would have loved, if the streets were not so diligently patrolled at night.

  “I would not have pictured myself living in the Raises,” Naja said. She had been strangely quiet as they walked. “Segi would have liked it, I think—not the shrine, but this street, the people.”

  “The Alders wasn’t too bad,” Abass said. “You did well for yourself there.”

  “Yes,” Naja said. “It was a good place. Only thanks to you, though. After Inka died, I thought for sure it was over. Then you stepped up, confident as an esis and twice as proud, and things kept going somehow. And then you brought Scribe back one night, so sick he could barely keep down broth, and all of us so poor we didn’t have more than broth to give him—why do I think back on those days and smile? Were we happier?”

  Abass tried to swallow the lump in his throat. “Scribe certainly wasn’t; he never said a decent word about that place. You’d think he’d been born in a manor the way he spoke.”

  “When you disappeared,” Naja said, “I thought he would die of grief. He blamed himself. He showed up, weeping so that I couldn’t understand a word, until Segi finally got him to lie down. And he never got back up after that, unless we forced him. Wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t eat or drink less Segi or I put it to his lips. Tair around us, the customers we lost for having that boy there; men thought he was mad or ill or both, and nothing kills romance quicker than reality.”

  “He’s better off now,” Abass said, but he could feel the lie trip on his tongue. “Poor bastard, not much of a life on the streets, and not much better after he took up with us. And Segi too.”

  Naja wrapped one arm around his waist and rested her head on his shoulder. After another dozen paces in quiet, she said, “Watch yourself with Fadhra, Abass.”

  He pulled away slightly to look at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Tair fend, there you go, getting all defensive. If there’s one thing that can be the Father’s own glory of an inconvenience about you, Abass, it’s this blind loyalty to people you love. You overlook things about people, you miss important things. Like with Scribe.”

  “What?”

  “Not my place,” Naja said. “If he wanted you to know, he would have told you. But Fadhra, there’s something I’m not going to keep quiet; Eyl told me about it one night.”

  “One night, huh?” Abass asked with a smile he did not feel.

  “Sh,” she said, giving him a swat on the arm. “Listen. That poor girl was married, had two beautiful babes. Twins. Lived out in a smaller town, the edge of Khi’ilan’s Path.”

  “Doesn’t seem like one for a family,” he said.

  “Not now she doesn’t,” Naja said. “You see a beautiful woman, dangerous, strong, and who likes you. But sh
e was beautiful before she met you, and she was not always dangerous and strong. Last year, she lost her babes and her husband to the High Harvest. Eyl thinks she was out washing clothes, or shopping or something, else they would have taken her too. Me, I wonder if she hid, or ran. She seems like a woman who can’t forgive herself for something. But there’s a darkness there, and so I tell you to be careful, because a person in pain will do awful things sometimes.”

  Abass nodded, recalling his first night with the brachal. The butchered eses. The pain, the bloodlust. “I know,” he said. “I understand her.”

  Naja shook her head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Abass. You’re a gentle soul, somehow, in spite of all you’ve gone through. You wouldn’t have taken in a sick boy, or looked out for two whores in their last good years, if you weren’t. She’s hard, though, and she’ll do whatever the pain makes her do, even if that hurts someone else.”

  He didn’t have an answer for her, so he just pulled her close and let her rest her head on his shoulder again. They reached the shrine in silence. Bright blue trim and yellow paint complemented the thin floral curtains that waved from the windows of the building. Unlike most brothels, shrines never had obscene murals—occasionally religious ones, like a High Harvest, but never anything else. This one had only the blue and yellow paint that reminded Abass of spring. Mingled laughter and moans sounded from inside.

  “Thank you,” Naja said, stepping away from him, her small bag hanging from one hand.

  “You’re welcome,” Abass said. “It’s just a walk.”

  “For everything, Abass,” Naja said. “For watching over two silly old whores. For loving people enough to overlook other things.”

  He let out a light laugh, trying to ease the tension. “Naja, you make this sound like goodbye forever. I’m not far, you know. I’ll come visit, even if Fadhra does get jealous. Perhaps that will be all the better.”

  Naja’s honey eyes lit up with her smile. “Not goodbye forever, no, but you’re with dangerous people now. People you can’t trust, Abass—remember that. And I want to say to you the things I didn’t say to Segi, so I’ll say them now, while I have a chance.”

  She got up on tip-toe and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Wish me luck,” she said with her familiar smirk.

  “If anyone needs luck,” Abass said, “it’s those poor house-wives whose husbands you’re going to ruin.”

  Her smirk widened, she gave a wink, and then without another word she disappeared into the shrine.

  Abass walked back; he did not use the dew—in part because it was day, in part because he needed time to think. Fadhra’s past broke his heart. He knew what that kind of pain could do to a person. What it had almost made him, before Inka took him in. Naja did not know what she was talking about; pain could wound, but it was not forever. And Abass had a good idea of how to take Fadhra’s mind off her past.

  Naja was wrong about something else, too—Abass did love people, but Naja’s fears were unfounded. He had learned from Isola, and again from Scribe, that loving someone too much meant danger, and he did not want that responsibility.