by K A Dowling
Nerani remembers the echo of the gunshot—how it had seemed to reverberate through her bones. Her knees feel weak beneath her gown. At least no one was shot, she reminds herself. Her chest feels unusually tight.
“Did Rob say anything to you?” Emerala demands. “We’ve been waiting all afternoon for him to get back.”
Orianna nods. “I spoke with him, but only briefly. He asked me to stop by and check on the two of you. I came as soon as Mame Minera permitted me to go.”
“Where is he?” Emerala’s face has settled into a deep scowl in the darkness. She hates to be left on the outside—hates to be left behind. Roberts once told Nerani that his sister had an insatiable need to be the center of attention. Nerani does not doubt that this is true.
“He’s gone to Mamere Lenora’s,” Orianna says
Emerala scoffs, her gaze incredulous. “The brothel?”
Nerani feels a small pull at her heart, like the tearing of stitches. The words escape from her before Orianna can continue speaking. “Don’t say it like that, Emerala.”
Emerala’s green eyes glide across her face. Her thick black brows have disappeared beneath her curls. “How did I say it?”
“You know—with such disdain.”
“Disdain?” Emerala spits the word out like poison. “It’s a whorehouse. How would you like me to react to my brother visiting a home for prostitutes?”
“It was our home too, for a time,” Nerani snaps, feeling herself growing tense. “Or don’t you remember?”
Orianna cuts in, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. Nerani knows that her friend has always loved Roberts, ever since they were children. He is blind to her affection, as young men are like to be. Emerala’s suggestion makes Orianna visibly uncomfortable. Her next words fall too quickly from her lips. “Anyway, he obviously hasn’t gone to seek companionship.” She clears her throat. “He’s seeking out Mame Galyria.”
The seer. Nerani thinks again of the older Mame that read her palm all those years ago. She wonders if it is any coincidence that she called upon that memory on such a day as this. The knot in her chest pulls tighter, robbing her of her breath.
“Rob doesn’t buy into that prophetic nonsense,” Emerala rejoins. “Everyone knows Mame Galyria resides there because it is only drunk commoners that are willing to eat up the drivel she feeds them.”
Orianna shrugs. She drops down onto the cot next to Nerani, rubbing at her still flaming cheek with her left palm. “That’s where he went. I didn’t ask him why.”
“You should have.”
Orianna rolls her eyes, shooting a sidelong glance at Nerani. “I won’t make the same mistake again,” she says dryly. Her words are punctuated by a yawn. “Can I sleep here tonight? My place is too crowded, and I’m exhausted.”
“Of course,” Nerani says. She thinks of Orianna’s four younger brothers rolling about their mother’s tight quarters. She is glad for the quiet of the rain against the window. “It’s much too late for you to go anywhere alone, anyway. The streets aren’t safe.”
Nerani can feel her eyes growing heavier even as she speaks. She tries and fails to blink away her fatigue as she lies back upon her cot. The mattress is cold and she shivers. Shifting to the side, she allows room for Orianna to curl up next to her. The flame of the lantern is burning low, growing close to sputtering out completely.
“Emerala?” Nerani’s voice echoes out into the looming darkness of their quarters. She is met with silence. She is being ignored.
“Emerala, are you going to sleep?”
Again, there is nothing.
Orianna is already snoring lightly. Her chest rises and falls heavily. Poor girl, Nerani can only imagine what she felt earlier this afternoon as she watched people—her people—be pulled from the smoldering tavern.
Moments roll into hours. Sleep does not come. Nerani blinks heavily, staring up at the dark beams of the ceiling above her head until her vision blurs. Colorful dots do pirouettes across her vision. Emerala is still quiet. Unusual. Nerani can make out her silhouette pressed against the glass. She has fallen asleep in the windowsill, lulled into unconsciousness by the sound of the rain. Nerani smiles.
She thinks of Roberts, and of Mame Galyria.
She recalls again the day of her naming, and how later that afternoon she had confided in Roberts what the Mame had whispered to her. Roberts had only laughed and ruffled her hair. It’s a bundle of rot, Ani. It’s meaningless. Think about it, what does that even mean? Gold blood bleeds red?
Nothing. Nerani felt immediately embarrassed for having allowed it to trouble her on such an important day.
Roberts grin had widened as he scooped her up. Exactly. Those seers know nothing about the future. It’s all for entertainment. The present is the only thing that matters. Now. Today. Everything else is out of your control. She thinks of how his olive skin had been burnt from the sun. It was a characteristic of his mother’s. His green eyes, however—his firm belief in everything tangible and logical—those were his father’s. It was the nobility in his blood—the Chancian ancestry that ran deep within him. He was half-blooded, as was his sister. Their Cairan mother had always insisted that their father’s blood was what made them so terribly hot-headed, so consistently willful.
Ghosts, again. Nerani chides herself silently. The night is full of them tonight. She cannot shake them. She rolls over and tucks her palms beneath her cool pillow. Across the room she can just make out Robert’s empty cot.
What are you looking for, Rob?
She hopes he will come home soon.
CHAPTER 5
Roberts the Valiant
Death is no stranger to Roberts the Valiant. He has been surrounded by it— saturated in it—from the moment he entered the world, red and screaming and cringing in the light. What is another death to him but a notch on his belt?
Standing outside the brothel and listening to the lively music that drifts out from the open windows, he thinks of his childhood. Those days—days that should have been filled with the wide-eyed innocence of boyhood—were redolent with the ever-present promise of death.
He thinks back to the day his father had taken his hand and led him to the market square. There was an execution that afternoon—a former kitchen boy accused of being half Cairan. The king did not like tainted blood working within the walls of his palace. He did not like the thought of gypsies putting their hands on his food. Roberts, then too young to understand the darker implications of the boy’s crime, thought that perhaps the boy was being punished for not washing his hands. His own mother had always boxed his ears when he failed to scrub behind them.
The boy was to be hung in the gallows. Roberts can remember how he climbed atop his father’s shoulders to get a better view.
Always watch, his father instructed. Never look away. Never flinch. It will make you less of a man, and you will need to be a man once I am gone.
Staring at the boy’s tiny feet as they hung limp beneath the scaffold, Roberts never thought that day would come so soon. He had not been ready. He would never be ready. But if life has taught him anything, it is that death waits for no man.
The tinny sound of clattering cans echoes out from a nearby alleyway, calling Roberts out of his memories and back into the present. Roberts draws back into the narrow side street at his back, relishing in the cool shadows that drape across his face. He watches as two guardians stroll out from the darkness, the golden regalia of their uniform catching ablaze beneath the slanted light that falls from the brothel windows. They murmur quietly to one another as their eyes scan the street before them. Their faces are masks of barely stifled distaste as they listen to the raucous sounds that spill out from the second floor. Someone laughs too loudly, her cackle cutting through the splintering wooden paneling of the outer wall and dissipating against the crisp night.
One guardian murmurs something to the other, his voice rising in the familiar lilt of a question. The other guardian shakes his head in response.
&nb
sp; “Not tonight. You heard General Byron—we lay low tonight.”
“If you say so, sir.” The first guardian, the taller of the two, has a voice like gravel. Roberts watches as they begin to retreat back into the alleyway, clearly determined to carry on their evening patrol far from the reaches of Mamere Lenora’s brothel.
Good, he thinks. Leave her alone.
He thinks of Mamere Lenora, the brothel’s self-appointed den mother, and of the way she had cradled Emerala the day their mother died.
No. Roberts catches himself, correcting his wording. She didn’t die, she was murdered.
Rumor has always spread like wildfire through the narrow streets of Chancey, and the day of their mother’s murder had been no exception. Mamere Lenora came running the moment she heard—had found Emerala and Nerani playing in the streets and told them not to go home. When she came to the apartment for Roberts, he was lying beneath the couch, his fingers curled in a pool of blood that was not his.
He remembers the sound of Mamere Lenora’s husky voice as she sang softly into Emerala’s head of curls. Her lullaby had mingled with the ceaseless sobs that expelled from his sister’s chest. Nerani stood silently next to them, her wild eyes a sea of blue against a pinched face as white as snow. He had not been a man, then. He had thrown up in the powder room, trying in vain to purge the memories of the way his mother and aunt had lain, white and lifeless upon the blood-stained sofa. The echo of the gunshots rattled about his brain.
Mamere brought the three of them to the brothel—had let them live among the whores.
Orphans, they were called. Their parents had succumbed to martyrdom. Selfish, really, it was whispered by the concubines, what with children so young.
Roberts had been cowardly. He should have been able to take care of the girls on his own. He should have grown up faster. His father never would have let his daughter and niece be raised in a house of women that sold themselves. But by that time, Eliot Roberts had already been long gone. The man had relinquished his right to make decisions for Emerala and Roberts the moment he had sailed west and left them behind.
Roberts lets out a deep exhale, the sound of his breathing cutting short as a subsequent shattering follows his sigh. He trips and his heart seizes within his chest. Beneath his feet, several abandoned milk cartons have shattered into shivering glass fragments.
He does not need to look up to know that the guardians have turned back around.
“Who’s there?” snaps one of the soldiers. “Show yourself.”
Fantastic. Roberts groans internally. This is the last thing he needs tonight. He moves out of the alleyway, cringing as the moonlight drapes over him in a pale wash of muted white. The two guardians are drawing nearer, their golden cloaks billowing behind them as they approach. Their gloved hands hover just above the barrel of their pistols. As they come to a standstill before him, he can see the caution in their eyes replaced with mirth.
“What have we here?” The gravel voice of the taller guardian reaches Roberts from across the narrow street. His lips curl upward in a smile. His short-cropped hair and cleanly shaven face make him look identical to the smirking man at his right. If it were not for the extra stripe upon his uniform signifying him as an officer of higher rank, Roberts would not be able to tell one man from the other.
The guardian continues speaking, nudging Roberts in the chest with his gloved knuckles. “What a surprise—a gypsy pawing at the doors of the whorehouse. Fitting, don’t you think, Johnson?”
The guardian called Johnson gives a low chuckle. “Do you think he has the money for one of these girls? I hear Mamere asks a hefty price for her ladies of leisure.”
You would know firsthand, I’m sure, Roberts thinks darkly. He bites his tongue, keeping his eyes trained forward. Now is not the time to stir up trouble. He did not come here for that.
The guardians before him are laughing. “If he does have the money, I’m certain it was stolen,” the higher-ranking guardian asserts. “Did you steal money, scum?” He presses his knuckles forcefully into Roberts’s chest, sending him stumbling back a step or two.
“It doesn’t matter whether or not the king himself financed him,” Johnson remarks to his partner, still laughing. He turns his attention to Roberts before continuing. His dark, brown eyes blaze with mirth. “Even a whore wouldn’t condescend to sleep with the likes of you.”
At that, Roberts’s temper snaps. He spits, rejoicing as his shot lands directly into Johnson’s eye. The guardian cries out in rage, wiping at his eyes with the back of his glove. Quick as a shot, the higher-ranking guardian charges him. Roberts bites down hard upon his tongue as his back slams into the wall. The cool weight of a pistol presses against his forehead. He exhales sharply, his breath blowing the wild black curls out of his emerald eyes.
“You wouldn’t shoot me,” Roberts asserts. He fights to put out the temper that still smolders red hot beneath his skin. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Is that so?” The guardian’s voice slips out from behind his crooked sneer in a hiss. “It looks to me like you’ve assaulted a member of King Stoward’s Golden Guard. That’s a misdemeanor in my book.”
“I didn’t know the guardians were in the practice of killing citizens over a little bit of saliva,” Roberts remarks boldly. He immediately regrets his comment as the barrel of the pistol presses more firmly against his skin. The guardian’s dark eyes narrow dangerously.
“State your name, Cairan.”
“They call me the Valiant.”
“I don’t care for your quirky little customs, scum,” snarls the soldier. “I want your name. Your real name.”
Roberts swallows hard, considering his options. Anything but honesty at this point will get him badly beaten, if not killed. Acts of blatant hate are no longer rare occurrences. These days, it’s normal to hear stories of Cairan men beaten close to death for the simple crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He thinks again of those tiny feet hanging in the gallows—blowing softly in the quiet seaside wind. The boy had not been killed because he forgot to clean his hands before touching Rowland Stoward’s food. He was killed for being a gypsy—for having Cairan blood running through his veins. It is hatred that fuels the king, and it is hatred that sits in the barrel of the pistol against his head—cold, unmerited hatred.
“My name is Roberts the Valiant,” he says quietly.
He watches as the guardian before him contemplates this new information. His brown eyes widen and he allows the pistol to fall away from Roberts’s head. Behind him, Johnson swallows a laugh. Roberts can already feel his blood beginning to boil. The feelings are old and the roots of his anger grow deep into his spirit. He thinks of his father’s winking green eyes, of the sorry sight of him the day he left his family behind.
It is the legacy he bears, as Eliot Roberts’s only son.
“Roberts?” The guardian repeats him in a voice dripping with mockery. Humor glistens in his eyes—dances upon the corners of his lips. “Roberts, did you say?”
“Yes,” whispers Roberts, scowling. He is suddenly all too conscious of his own deep green eyes, so very different from the vivid blue eyes that mark the Cairan people—his people.
Johnson hoots loudly, his eyes creasing shut as he laughs. “A bastard boy,” he exclaims. “I didn’t realize we’d stumbled on a half-blood.”
The higher-ranking guardian frowns down at him. “That takes the fun out of this, then.” He holsters his pistol at his waist. “I’m not in the market for half-bloods tonight.”
“Lucky you, bastard.” Johnson sneers at him from behind his superior officer.
Roberts scowls back at him, feeling the tension seeping out of his shoulders all the same. He watches as the guardians draw away from him, their eyes still gleaming with mirth.
I’m glad someone finds the humor in this, he thinks darkly.
“Until next time, Roberts the Valiant,” comes the stony voice of the superior guardian. His figure
is already swallowed by the dark of the street. The sound of their boots grows quieter against the cobblestone. Roberts listens to the pattering footfalls until they fade to silence, knowing that there will not be a next time. They will forget his name, the guardians, as they always do. They cannot be bothered with remembering. He is nothing to them, and he is content to remain that way if it is what keeps him alive.
Glancing up at the low moon overhead, he groans. The night is getting old. The interaction with the guardians has cost him a great deal of time. He thinks of his sister. He is sure Emerala is livid that he has not yet returned to their quarters.
He draws closer to the brothel, his nerves singing beneath his skin. He is here for the seer, and nothing more. There are questions to be asked tonight—questions that only she can answer. He will make his visit as quick as he can.
Drawing to the open door, he steps inside. The foyer to Mamere’s is crowded. He thinks it is the lingering adrenaline from the spectacle at Toyler’s that draws solicitors to the whorehouse. All of the common men of Chancey seem to have found their way to the outskirts of the city that evening. He supposes everyone wants to share a piece of the excitement.
He shoulders his way through the crowd, frowning at the shaded and stinking figures that linger in the smoky common room. His hands are shoved deep into his pockets. His eyes scan the faces of those before him.
“Roberts!” An all too familiar voice in his ear causes him to cringe. He thinks that perhaps if he keeps walking he will manage to lose the prostitute in the dimly lit room.
“Rob!” The grating voice is louder this time—closer. A hand rests upon his shoulder, pulling him backwards through the throng of people. He pauses, agitated. The powdered woman that appears before him is wearing a tattered top hat. Golden curls peek out from beneath the rim. She smiles coyly, tilting her exposed shoulders in his direction as she does a dramatic curtsy. The soiled fabric of her dress is too large for her frame. It is held in place upon her body by a ripped black corset.