Wench

by Maxine Kaplan

  Tanya started to feel truly comfortable for the first time since she had closed what she had thought was her inn to bury Froud. She sighed and poured another glass of cider.

  People she recognized from the Tomcat’s gang joined the throng at the center table. She leaned back into the shadows, counting on the fact that no one would look for a tavern wench at this table. But she eyed them hungrily, smiling as little Lukas looked about ready to faint and even easygoing Riley—Riley!—was eyeing his neighbors warily, one hand on the knife hilt sticking out of his belt.

  She started to laugh. Even the chaos of the room was under complete control. She saw that now. The tables were arranged the way they were in order to separate the ruffians who would eat anywhere from clientele conducting actual business. The mess was centrally located and centrally limited—like dirt swept into a pile in the center of the room before being collected by the dustpan. There was no way for anyone who felt like causing real trouble to escape consequences: The doors and windows were all a comfortable distance away, and—yes, there it is, thought Tanya—a crossbow propped up next to the office door.

  Tanya knew better than to ever underestimate a woman who had that many keys. Anyone who wanted to cause real trouble would be dealt with indeed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Jana was standing over Tanya, pouring herself a glass of cider. She was her normal insouciant self and clearly not frightened by her surroundings. But Tanya looked closer and saw that the thief’s shoulders were high and immobile.

  “I’m a little homesick, that’s all,” answered Tanya. “I . . .” She looked at Jana, remembering her face near her own. “I loved my tavern.”

  Jana made a motion toward an empty armchair at one of the corner tables, but then hesitated, looked toward the bar, and opted to lean against the hearth instead.

  “Not surprised,” Jana said, wriggling as she struggled to get comfortable against the brick. “This dump will make you wax nostalgic about being trapped in a ditch, let alone a pleasant seaside town.”

  A sharp, wincingly high screech floated through the window from the street, followed by a crunch like bones under a wagon wheel—which Tanya realized it might very well be.

  She shuddered, less out of fear than distaste. “It’s not exactly picturesque out there, no,” she agreed. “But at least there’s a nice tavern.”

  Jana choked midsip. “A nice tavern?” she asked, still coughing, liquid dribbling out the side of her mouth. “You like the Witch?”

  Tanya felt embarrassment creep up on her, almost as if she had betrayed the Queen, betrayed who Tanya was now. “Well, the décor isn’t to my taste,” she said slowly. “But, I . . .” Tanya hesitated as she saw something simmer behind the other girl’s eyes.

  “What?” Jana demanded. “You what?”

  Tanya found she didn’t want to disappoint those eyes, but truth was truth. “This is clearly a well-run inn,” she admitted. “The proprietress knows what she’s doing.”

  Jana sputtered unintelligible syllables for a moment, before forming the accusation, “That’s insane. You’re insane.”

  Tanya folded her arms, piqued at herself for caring. “Jana. I understand you have issues with Bloodstone. But this is a well-organized, comfortable, and apparently thriving inn. Even if the mashed potatoes needed more salt.”

  A voice behind her added, “Did you notice that the new girl didn’t render all the fat out of that chop?”

  Chapter

  25

  Tanya jumped and the key-holding woman she had seen before emerged from the far side of the hearth, kitty-corner to where Jana was standing, clenched fists at her sides.

  “Jana, stop dirtying yourself against that soot and bring over a chair,” the woman said. “You look like an ill-trained valet.”

  Tanya gaped as a muscle twitched in Jana’s cheek and she averted her wide eyes away from the woman.

  “Oh, Lady of Cups,” sighed the woman, stepping forward herself to pull over the vacant chair. She smiled a gracious smile at a solitary occupant of the nearest corner table, an androgynous near-skeleton dressed in red silk, and neatly flipped the chair around with one hand, jamming it toward Jana.

  Jana sat.

  “That’s better,” the woman pronounced, but in a tone that spoke less of approval than of relief that spilled wine had been mopped up before it could stain. “And now you should introduce me to your companion.”

  Jana’s face was pale and stony. Tanya decided to save her. She stood, dipping a shallow curtsy. “Tanya, ma’am,” she said. “From Griffin’s Port.”

  The woman waved a hand upward. “I appreciate your manners, but Thomas has informed me that you are to be given every deference.” She smiled. “I should be curtsying to you.”

  She didn’t curtsy. After a long, awkward moment, Tanya sat back down, feeling somehow bested.

  The woman in black smiled even wider, a secret, oddly toothy grin, like a wolf about to pick the scraps off a bone.

  She placed her hand on her chest. “I am Madame Moreagan, and I am the proprietress of the Witch.” She paused to throw out an arm to block a black-eyed (literally, he had two black eyes, one of which was older than the other and turning green) man from passing behind her and, without turning her head, reached into his front pocket and removed a crystal ashtray.

  Madame Moreagan snapped her fingers four times—once, then twice, very close together, and then, after a pause, a fourth time. Men at the central tables jostled to be the first to appear at her side, pick up the bruised thief, and drag him out of the tavern.

  She saw Tanya observing this operation and smiled again. “Do not worry, Mistress Tanya,” she said. “That was my signal to simply make him sorry, not to take revenge.”

  Tanya frowned, trying to figure it out. “Those men work for you?” she asked.

  “Not exactly. I am rather picky about who I employ. But I make it a point to return favors. I also make it a point to remember when favors are not offered and who declines to perform an office for me. Jana, are you about to eat with your hands?”

  Tanya turned and saw that Jana had a finger-full of mashed potatoes halfway to her mouth. She was saved, unexpectedly, by the arrival of the Tomcat.

  “Madame Moreagan,” said the Tomcat, bowing elegantly “You never seem to age.”

  “I take great care not to, Thomas,” she said, still looking at Jana. “Is this one with you now?”

  The Tomcat’s face darkened, but his eyes flickered to Tanya and when he spoke his voice was mild. “Jana? Sadly, no, not anymore. It’s a pity. She’s an excellent tracker.”

  “Is she?” Madame Moreagan sniffed. “I’m glad to hear she’s managed to make herself useful somewhere.”

  Jana stood. “I’m getting a drink,” she announced loudly, and stalked off to the bar, muttering to herself.

  “I suppose you have your reasons, Thomas,” the older woman said dryly. “Personally, I never got much use out of her.”

  Tanya watched as the Tomcat followed Jana’s progress with a glare before pressing on. “My dear Madame Moreagan, I am coming from our friends the Others, and was hoping you could lend me a maid to draw my bath. I’d like to freshen up and dine like a civilized gentleman.”

  Madame Moreagan nodded her approval. She moved her right hand and a girl in a white cap stepped forward, dipped a curtsy, and turned toward the staircase in one neat gesture. The Tomcat bowed twice, once to Madame Moreagan and once to Tanya, then followed the maid away.

  To Tanya’s surprise, Madame Moreagan stayed. She stepped around the table and appropriated Jana’s vacated chair.

  “Now. What’s a serving-class girl from the Port Cities doing occupying a position of honor in the Tomcat’s rotating band of crooks?”

  Tanya blinked at the older woman’s bluntness, the quick change from the unctuous tones she’d used in front of “Thomas,” and even in front of Jana.

  “I . . .” Tanya hesitated. After all, what was the real answer? “I w
as on my way to the Capital,” she said slowly. “I was set upon by the Tomcat’s thieves. They wanted the mare—that is, my horse. They wanted my horse.”

  “A horse is a reasonable reason to accost an unprotected young woman. But why bother courting you after already abducting you? Other than the obvious reason, that is.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Tanya said. “I am respectable.”

  Madame Moreagan cocked her head. “As you say. It’s hard to imagine another use for you.”

  That word: use. Tanya knew she was being baited, but couldn’t let the insult stand. Froud hadn’t raised up a useless girl, quill or no quill.

  “As it happens,” she said, holding her head high, “he wanted to keep me because I am the best cook the Port Cities has seen for a generation. Yes, I did notice the mangled cook on the chop. And you’re wasting that wine in the sauce. Not my idea of tavern management.”

  At that, Madame Moreagan blinked and then, grinning, stood.

  “If you’re finished with your meal, I’ll take you to your room,” she said. “I believe I know where you’ll be most comfortable.”

  The brisk steps of Tanya’s hostess, to her surprise, led her past the winding staircase and around the corner, stopping at a little wooden door hidden underneath the serpentine railing.

  Madame Moreagan lifted her keys and selected the plainest one, made of thin, silver metal. It had been invisible, nestled between an ornate brass one topped with a carved star and a heavy black iron one with four wide prongs. There was something soothing about its simplicity.

  The tavern keeper turned it in the lock and the door silently swung open on well-oiled hinges. Tanya slipped through the narrow opening and found herself in what seemed an entirely different building from the Witch.

  There was no sign of the ancient stone in the main room. Instead, Tanya found herself in a corridor paneled with slats of fragrant cedar the color of buttered toast. The dim shadows of the dining room clearly had no place in this part of the building. Candles of clean white wax in glass and porcelain sconces were placed at regular intervals, reflecting golden light onto the pearl-colored silk carpeting. Someone had painted dainty roses and violets along the bottom of the wall. As she and Madame Moreagan progressed down the hallway, lemon, lavender and the distinctive smell of fresh laundry filtered into Tanya’s nose. She breathed deeply.

  Madame Moreagan stopped in front of one of many doorways, all of which were curved and freshly painted white. Using the thin key yet again, she unlocked the copper-plated lock.

  Madame Moreagan entered first and crossed the room to a nightstand, lifting a lamp that was the big sister of the sconces in the hallway. She drew a match out of her sleeve and, scratching it to life on a rough-ridged key at her belt, lit the wick. The room bloomed into sight.

  Tanya felt the oxygen flowing into her lungs.

  The room was constructed, floor and walls, out of lacquered wood the same warm shade as the corridor. There was a round woven mat of pink and yellow braiding in the center of the room. The bed was nestled up against the wall, just the way Tanya had her own at the Snake. But rather than a pile of cloth and quilts, this was a real bed, with a low platform and a tall, squishy-looking mattress, piled high with embroidered pillows.

  One spelled out in blue embroidery thread a saying Tanya knew well: Lady of Cups, Preserve Our Preserves.

  There were no windows, but the center of the angled ceiling had been cut out, the wood replaced with glass. Tanya stepped under it, squinting.

  “It’s usually too steamy and cloudy to see much through the skylights,” said Madame Moreagan behind her. “But sometimes you get the stars and you always get the dawn. I hope you’ll be comfortable here, Mistress Tanya.”

  Tanya turned back to her hostess. “Very comfortable, indeed,” she answered, careful to keep her voice no more than polite. She had not expected to find her happy place in Bloodstone. “Thank you.”

  With a nod, Madame Moreagan swiftly padded on silent feet across the room and shut the door behind her.

  Tanya, suddenly exhausted, collapsed on the bed and shut her eyes.

  When she opened them again, the lantern was still burning, but the lights from the hallway were no longer shining under the door.

  The Witch was silent.

  Tanya sat up on the edge of her bed and examined the skylight. It was, as Madame Moreagan had warned, too cloudy to see the placement of the moon in the sky, but it was clearly the middle of the night.

  Tanya sighed. Even in the Glacier, she had never become accustomed to sleeping through the night, and now here she was, alone and wide awake, with nothing useful to do—nothing at all to do, but sit and stare and wait until dawn.

  Something pounded on the floor, stopped, then pounded again, harder.

  Tanya pulled her feet back up to the bed. Something was pounding on the floor of her room from beneath the floorboards. Tanya was not sure exactly how one was supposed to react in this scenario. Should she hide beneath the pillows? Construct a weapon?

  The pounding stopped and there was a loud creak.

  The rug lifted a foot off the floor, making it resemble the toy forts the village boys in Griffin’s Port made out of boxes and canvas.

  And out poured light.

  Chapter

  26

  Without breathing, Tanya stepped carefully toward the rug, rubbing the quill.

  She pinched the edge of the rug and, with a silent prayer to the Lady of Cups, threw it back, revealing the trapdoor that had opened in the floor. Golden light illuminated a wooden ladder.

  Tanya knelt. The ladder went down about fifteen feet through a tunnel of tightly packed sand and stone. Flickering sconces lit the way, but the tunnel was too long for Tanya to see what was on the other side.

  Tanya twiddled the quill between her thumb and forefinger.

  She grasped the top rung of the ladder, easing first her left foot and then her right into the hole. The ladder was solid and heavy; it didn’t shake.

  Tanya climbed faster the lower she went and landed squarely on both feet, feeling the warm sand wriggle between her toes.

  The tunnel was narrow, but more than tall enough to walk without crouching; a light breeze found its way into Tanya’s hair and tickled her nose with the faint smell of burning rosewood chips.

  Tanya kept walking. She didn’t know for how long, but she wasn’t tired—in fact, she was suddenly hungry, and ready to start her day. She thought she could smell fresh bread and wondered whether she was under the kitchens, but she heard nothing at all, not even her own footsteps.

  That is until she turned a sharp corner and the sand path dropped away, depositing her, stumbling, at the mouth of an enormous, noise-filled cavern.

  The stone walls jutted out unevenly in places, with one side interrupted by a waterfall tripping merrily into a smoking, bubbling brook. It was warm here. Tanya undid the buttons on her blouse.

  Modesty didn’t seem a concern. Of the perhaps 150 people milling around the cavern, probably 147 were women.

  Tanya had never seen so many women in one place in her life: fat women, thin women, pale women, dark women, tall women, and teeny tiny ones, all of them wide awake and extremely busy.

  An array of booths ringed the perimeter: enormous barrels filled with soap that had been rigged to churn laundry; a rosy-cheeked girl with her curls tied up in a knot on the top of her head merrily hacking precise cuts of pork to order off a carcass lying across a clean, steel table; a short woman with formidable breasts holding her hand to a little green-looking waif’s forehead, then uncorking a brown glass bottle and measuring a portion into a smaller vial; a middle-aged woman with one white streak swirling across dark hair elbow deep in a clock; and, yes, a bored-looking girl, small and round, minding a bar stocked with cider, sherry, port, and freshly baked, buttered biscuits.

  Tanya had stepped into an underground marketplace.

  She started to make her way to the food, but Madame Moreagan stepped in front of
her, blocking her path.

  “Oh no,” said the tavern keeper, in a voice that evinced no surprise. “Did the noise from the Night Swap wake you?”

  “A trapdoor opened in my room.”

  Madame Moreagan theatrically put her hands to her cheeks. “Our apologies,” she said. “But, actually, you’re in luck. It’s not every visitor to Bloodstone that finds their way to the Swap.”

  “This is a swap meet?”

  Madame Moreagan began walking, motioning with an imperious hand for Tanya to follow her.

  “The Night Swap,” said Madame Moreagan, “is the reason why Bloodstone is still standing.”

  The older woman was no longer dressed in the austere black that fit the main room of the Witch like a broken-in boot. Instead, her form—softer and shorter than it had seemed that evening—was wrapped in a dressing gown of lavender velvet, tied in the front with a gold silk sash and topped with a ruffled collar of the same material. Gone were the heavy pointed boots, replaced with soft blue slippers. The strained black bun was loosened, white streaks falling in waves to her collarbone.

  The keys were still hanging around her waist.

  Madame Moreagan led her to an alcove where some faded and squashy brown leather chairs had been set up around a tea table. She ordered them hot cocoa and muffins.

  Sitting, she said, “As you might imagine, Bloodstone is a rather transient community.”

  Tanya nodded. “I know all about that,” she said. “I grew up in the Port Cities.”

  Madame Moreagan shook her head. “Forgive me, my dear, but you know nothing about it,” she told her. “Sailors and pirates come and go, yes, and innumerable travelers pass through your sweet little dead mermaid gate. But the soldiers and pirates have roots there, responsibilities. And you have the shipbuilders, the merchant docks, the tax collectors, the fisherman.” She smiled. “The tavern maids. There is no shortage of people in Griffin’s Port who make sure the rips get sewn back together and the mussels are picked through before steaming.”