by Dale Lucas
Rem had been so sure that Indilen would be there, working at the Pickled Albatross, to meet him. Why in all the sundry hells of the Panoply hadn’t she deigned to even show up and speak with him that night? Had their brief but memorable afternoon together really meant so much to him and so little to her? Had she lied to him? Forgotten about him?
Or had something terrible befallen her? Something that kept her from her appointed shift, and their intended meeting.
“I could introduce you,” Torval said.
Rem finally found the words that had escaped him moments ago. “I should learn my lesson where barmaids are concerned.”
“Come now, lad,” Torval said, “You can’t stop petting the pups just because one bit you and ran away.”
“If she’d deigned to bite me,” Rem said, “I’d have counted myself lucky. She skipped right to the running-away part. And, honestly, Torval, I really thought there was something between us. Some spark, like tinder and flint—”
“Such is the way of things,” Torval said wistfully. Aarna returned with two tankards and thumped them down in front of the pair. Torval lifted his and Rem followed suit. Before he drank, Torval paused, held out his tankard, and poured a small measure of the ale onto the rush- and sawdust-strewn floor.
“A draught for Freygaf,” he said quietly. “May his ascent of the mountain be smooth and his welcome in the Halls of the Undying a warm one.”
Rem gave Torval an approving nod and poured out some of his own ale. Then he lifted his tankard in toast. “To Freygaf.”
“To Freygaf,” Torval said.
They drank.
The ale in the tankard was some of the finest Rem had ever tasted—fruity and fulsome, big and malty, with some mild hoppy bitters to temper its sweetness and a whorl of mouth-tempting spices. The brewers of the Lycos Vale were renowned throughout the north, but Rem honestly couldn’t remember ever tasting an ale to compare with what he now quaffed.
“Hell’s bells,” he muttered, licking his lips. “Where on earth did they find this stuff?”
Torval smiled. “Aaaah, another satisfied customer! That’d be Joedoc’s hand. He’s the brewmaster. Doesn’t work the mornings, so he’s not around at present—but he’s a genius with barley and malt, isn’t he?”
Rem settled onto his stool. “I think I’ve just found my new favorite watering hole,” he said.
Torval made a mock-serious face. “I saw her first, Longshanks!”
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you to share, you obstreperous little man?” Rem asked, laughing.
For the first time since being thrust upon Torval, Rem felt like the two of them might make good partners after all. When their laughing tapered off, the food arrived—cheese, some dried plums, and salt pork—and the two ate. Rem found the fare simple but satisfying—and the quality of the ale more than made up for the simplicity of the food that accompanied it. When they had finished, Rem felt the weariness of a long night upon him and begged his leave of Torval.
“I’ve got to sleep,” he said, feeling as though he might conk out at any moment, right there at the bar.
“On your way, then,” Torval said, pulling coin from the little purse at his belt.
“Wait a minute,” Rem said, “I’ll not have you paying for my ale just yet—”
“Shut your cake hole,” Torval snarled. “This one’s on me. ’Sides, they only charge us for the ale here. Food’s free for watchwardens. You can buy for me after you get your first pay purse.”
Rem was touched. “Very generous of you. Thanks, Torval.”
“Get out of here,” Torval said. “Go get some sleep. We’ll have another long night ahead of us come sundown.”
Rem stood and swayed on his feet. The combination of the ale and his weariness was working on him. Hard. He steadied himself on the bar.
Aarna emerged from the kitchen again. “Leaving us already, good sir?” she asked.
“For the last time, Aarna,” Torval said, almost growling, “this little snot’s no ‘sir.’ He’s just another dumb watchman walking the beat, like the rest of us.”
Rem felt a bloom of warmth in the center of him. Strange as it might be, he liked the sound of that. Of all the things in the world that he could be—that he might have been—a watchman walking a beat sounded good enough for him.
Rem bent over the bar, took Aarna’s hand again, and gave it another kiss. “Until the next time, milady.”
“You can bring him back whenever you like,” Aarna gushed to Torval.
“Bloody hells,” Torval grumbled.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Although he was exhausted, Rem slept fitfully. True surrender to sleep was hampered by a storm of thoughts swirling and racing through his exhaustion-addled brain—thoughts that he could not entirely make sense of or banish. He worried about acquitting himself well in his new position. He wondered what sort of strange encounters he might have in the days and weeks and months to come, walking the ward. He idly built scenarios in which he—with Torval’s help—stepped in to alleviate tense or dangerous situations and did so with a combination of guile, luck, and occasionally physical violence that he was not even sure he was capable of.
You are skillful, his father had said after many a tournament melee or sparring session with blunted swords, but you are not ruthless. In tourney, that will cost you a cup. On the battlefield, that could cost you your life.
Could he survive the perils of Yenara and her close-packed wards by being skillful but not ruthless? He truly wondered …
That led him to entertaining all sorts of unpleasant worst-case scenarios in which minor scuffles and routine calls for order escalated quickly into uncontrollable blood feuds, usually ending with him taking a dagger in the belly or a dirk point in the throat.
So much could happen. In an instant. Over nothing.
Was he equal to that? Could he face that, night after night?
His father would have said no. And somewhere deep inside himself, Rem probably agreed with him—which was why he was here now, in a shabby little rented room, in search of a new life to live, a new Rem to be, and not back in his bedchamber in a castle in his father’s dukedom.
Stop it, his mind snapped. Stop letting your father’s words—anyone’s words—define the person you want to be. If you want to do well here—to thrive here, despite all the danger and uncertainly—you can, and you will. Sleep now, you fool—you’re tired.
And so, he slept. He woke at intervals, wondering if the day had passed, dimly hearing the bells from the Great Temple of Aemon announcing that it was only midmorning, midday, early afternoon.
Just as frustrating, dreams plagued him throughout his fitful sleep, all of them centered on Indilen. There were several variations, but they all amounted to pursuits. He would see her from a distance in the market, then call to her. She would turn toward the sound of his voice, acknowledge him with a smile and wave, then turn and amble away. As Rem tried to follow, the press of the crowd and the flow of foot traffic would, inevitably, keep him from overtaking her. Always, she disappeared into the milling throng, and he was left alone, with the nagging feeling that he was being followed as well, just as he was following her.
He had that same dream—or some variation of it—at least three times during his slumbers. Each time, he found her in a different location—the marketplace, the waterfront, the Pickled Albatross—and each time he lost her in the crowd, finally realizing that he, too, was being followed. The last time this rather unpleasant nightmare awoke him, he would even have sworn that he felt a heavy hand fall on his shoulder just as he awoke.
Somewhere, Aemon’s bells rang. It was the middle of the afternoon. His shift would not start for several more hours, but after that last replay of the familiar dream in which he lost Indilen, over and over, Rem didn’t feel much like rolling over and going back to sleep. It wasn’t simply that the dream troubled him, or reminded him that he had, somehow, lost something (rather, someone) quite special—there was also
the vague sense that he knew something that should suggest a puzzle waiting to be solved, but what that something was and just why it should trouble him he could not say.
He pondered. First, he considered Indilen herself: auburn-haired, dark-eyed, pale and vaguely freckled, her smile both merry and world-weary, idealistic and experienced. Clearly, she was smart, and she had an independent streak—otherwise, what would she be doing here, in a city not her own, trying to make her own way in the world? But she was also cautious—neither naïve nor foolhardy. She had been drawn to Rem, just as Rem was drawn to her—he honestly believed that—but, like any smart girl in a new place, she would have wanted to be cautious about him. He assumed that’s why she had invited him to meet her at her place of work, the Pickled Albatross: it was public, and if he gave her any trouble there, she could have him ejected.
Thus their meeting was low-to no-risk on her part. She had control, and she was on safe ground.
Therefore, could Rem really assume that she had simply quit her job and stood him up, without something important having waylaid or drawn her away? True, she might have simply decided both that she hated serving ale to drunken louts and that she had nothing to gain by getting to know Rem, but somehow—foolishly or not—he did not think that would be the case with such a girl. She seemed the sort to keep her promises, and so he regarded her failure to keep those promises—both to him and her employer—as more than a little suspect.
All right, then. Perhaps something had happened to her, he thought, staring up at the knotty wooden ceiling beams above his bed. What? What could have become of her between the time Rem saw her at the morning market and the time he arrived at the Pickled Albatross and Indilen failed to report for her shift?
Answer: quite a bit. Yenara was a bustling city full of very shady characters with all sorts of bad ideas about how to entertain themselves or make a living. Indilen could have been snatched by cutpurses, who saw her regal bearing and the fine scrivener’s set she carried and instantly marked her as easy prey. They might have stolen everything of value in her possession and left her strangled or bleeding out in a back alley.
He shuddered. What a horrible thought.
And how doubly horrible that he could easily imagine it, in all its vile detail.
Perhaps, he thought, I should seek her out.
The sensible part of him balked at that thought. What if she simply didn’t want to see him again? What if she had purposely avoided him? What if his assumptions that she liked him, that she wanted to know him as desperately as he wanted to know her, were all wrong? Would it be fair of him to hunt her down and confront her and make her tell him that, face-to-face? Shouldn’t he simply leave her be, wherever she was and whatever had become of her?
No, he thought. No, I shouldn’t. Something terrible may have befallen the poor girl, and wouldn’t your heart be broken, your honor impugned, if you had suspected as much and not tried to learn the truth? You need not put any pressure on her if you find her—simply make it clear that you were worried, and you wanted to make sure she was safe. That is all that you need to know, and no more.
That thought—that determination—got him out of bed. In moments, he was dressed. He bounded down the stairs of his boardinghouse, splashed water from a nearby public fountain on his face to refresh himself, then headed off in the direction of the Fifth Ward and the Pickled Albatross.
He had a couple hours before his shift began. He could squeeze in a little investigative work of his own before he reported for duty …
Rem arrived at the Pickled Albatross in the early evening. Outside, the sun was falling and the shadows in the street grew long, but inside, the night had not yet begun. It was still too early for the longshoremen and laborers who toiled on the waterfront to be released from their daily labors so that they could get about the important business of a night’s drinking, thus the tavern was largely empty, the normal midnight roar declined to a dull hum of muttering voices, occasional coarse laughter, and the scrape of chair legs on the rush-strewn floorboards.
Rem stood near the doorway, searching the great room for his quarry: that brusque, unflappable blond barmaid that he and Torval had been served by the night before. Something she had said to them lodged in Rem’s mind and kept repeating itself like the only phrase known to a Maswari parrot. Her words echoed, again and again, while Cupp’s own, in sharp contrast, were interjected between them. It might mean nothing at all, but their two explanations seemed to vaguely contradict each other, so Rem thought a polite follow-up couldn’t hurt.
When she hustled past him, emerging from the kitchens and on her way to a table with a tray loaded down with bread, beer, and wedges of very smelly cheese, Rem nearly missed her. He raised his hand and tried to flag her down, but she was on a mission. Thus, he followed, scurrying across the room in her wake, deciding that calling out for her and making a spectacle of himself probably wasn’t the best approach.
She delivered her goods, took coin from the men at the table who received it, then turned to careen toward another waiting table of cardplayers who had flagged her down. That’s when Rem struck, inserting himself into her table-to-table path and offering a winning smile to try to reassure her.
“Hello there,” he said. She nearly fell on her bottom, having to work entirely too hard to stop her forward trajectory when Rem blocked it. Rem caught her before she could fall. “I’m very sorry. Do you remember me, by any chance?”
“No, sir, I don’t,” the girl said. “But don’t take it personally, I serve a great many fellows on a daily basis, so if we’ve just met once, you were unlikely to make an impression.”
Rem motioned to his watchwarden’s cuirass and signet. “I was in here last night, with my partner, a dwarf.”
“Ah,” she said, smiling a little. “The Double Drakes, followed by the brawl.”
“Precisely,” Rem said.
The girl bent close, speaking in a conspiratorial whisper. “You’d best not let Cupp catch you here all by yourself. He’s likely to give you a pass if Torval’s with you, but alone? He’ll chew you up and spit you out.”
“That bad, is he?” Rem asked.
The girl shook her head. Her manner was resigned, almost disinterested. “You have no idea.”
“Well,” Rem said, “I’ll be brief, then. Do you remember us asking you about another barmaid? Indilen?”
“Oi, girl!” the cardplayers at the neighboring table called.
“I’ve got to go,” she said to Rem.
“Just a quick question or two,” Rem said. “Do you remember what you told us?”
“She’s not around.”
“Right,” Rem nodded, “you said—”
“She arrived for her shift on Saturday,” the barmaid said impatiently. “Cupp sent her on some errand, and she hasn’t been back since.”
“So she was here on Saturday, but—”
“Wax in your ears, love?” the barmaid asked, looking at Rem like he was a stray, underfed puppy. “She was here, Cupp sent her off, she never came back.”
Rem nodded. That’s what he feared she’d said. “All right, then. Thank you, er … what’s your name?”
The girl cocked her head a little. Her eyes narrowed. A crooked smile livened her soft face. “Planning to ask after me when I flee this roach hovel?”
Rem reached into his pocket, pulled out his last few coppers, and handed them over—an offering. “No, ma’am—I just want to thank you by name for helping me.”
“Jhonna,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me …”
Away she went to take the cardplayers’ orders. Rem slowly extricated himself from the seating area, moving in a slow, driftwood fashion back toward the main entrance.
She came in on Saturday. Cupp sent her on an errand. She never returned.
That wasn’t what Cupp had said.
Should he ask the tavernkeep again? Should he challenge his story in light of the one Jhonna told? No. That was foolish. Accused of lying, Cupp woul
d only take it out on the barmaid.
It could all be a simple mistake, of course. Maybe Cupp spoke out of turn? Chose his words lazily? Maybe he didn’t really mean that he hadn’t seen her in two days, but that she simply failed to return from the errand and work her Saturday-night shift?
“What in the sundry hells do I have to do to be rid of you?”
Rem was snapped out of his reverie. Cupp had found him. The big, thick-bellied tavernkeep had just emerged from the kitchens, and he didn’t look pleased to find Rem in his foyer. Rem decided to play it like a professional: cool, collected, indifferent.
“Evening, sir,” Rem said, as cordially as he could manage. “Seems a quiet afternoon hereabouts?”
“You may be a watchwarden,” Cupp said, “so when you’re on your shift, I may be forced to be polite to you and give you your free bloody beer, but if you’re not in here on official business, then I don’t want your troublemaking arse in the place, do you understand—”
“I do,” Rem interrupted. “And I apologize, profusely, for any trouble I’ve caused you, either before or after acquiring this signet.”
Cupp sneered. He seemed to sense sincere regret in Rem’s voice—indeed, Rem was trying to offer some—but the tavernkeeper was belligerent nonetheless. “Fine, maybe in the future I won’t consider you a bloody pox on this place. For now, get out.”
“A quick question,” Rem said, “and I’ll be on my way. About Indilen.”
Cupp’s eyes rolled. “Bloody hells, lad—are you still on about that little twist?”
Rem tried to look lovestruck and ridiculous. He probably didn’t have to try very hard, but he needed Cupp to believe he was a fool after a piece of tail, and not a watchwarden questioning him to test the veracity of his story.
“Sad to say,” Rem answered.
“I told you, she missed two bloody shifts. She’s fired. If I see her, I just might chain her back in the scullery and make her wash mugs for a few nights, just to teach her what it means to run out on a contract with me.”
“So she never showed up for her shift on Saturday at all? Ever?”