Kalan cocked her head to one side curiously. “Captain, don’t you think it a little odd to be lecturing me about being nice while you’re teaching my brothers to hit each other with big sticks?”
Damin laughed. He could see the irony, but Raek Harlen wasn’t nearly so impressed. He opened his mouth to say something; but fortunately Damin came to her rescue before the captain could order her from the yard. “Am I finished for the day, Raek?” he asked. “Now I don’t have a sparring partner?”
“I’ll spar with you!” Kalan volunteered.
Damin laughed outright at the suggestion. “Why do you need to know anything about a quarterstaff, Kal?”
“Because the quarterstaff is an extremely useful weapon,” she quoted smugly. Kalan had a good memory for stuff like this. She could overhear something once and repeat it back, even months later, verbatim. “A staff can be used any way a man—or woman—wants to use it. You can strike like a sword, or hit like an axe. Or you can thrust it like a spear and you can do it from either side of the body and you can change quickly from side to side, which makes it very difficult for your opponent to respond to an attack.”
Damin recognised the speech. He shook his head at his sister. “It’s creepy the way you can do that, Kalan.”
Raek relented a little. He smiled at her. “And even if you can quote Captain Almodavar word for precious word, there’s more chance of a Fardohnyan invasion this afternoon, young lady, than me letting you spar with your brother and a couple of quarterstaffs.”
“Are you afraid I’ll hurt him?”
“Yes,” Raek agreed, taking the staff Damin held out to him. “That must be it.”
Kalan glared at the captain, then crossed her arms across her body with a scowl. “I hate being a girl.”
“Some day you might find you like it,” Raek suggested.
The captain turned to Narvell and Adham and told them they could finish up. Overhearing the order, the Raider supervising Starros and Travin signalled them to finish as well. Travin helped the Raider collect their weapons and headed back towards the armoury with Raek Harlen, leaving Kalan with her brothers. Sitting on top of the fence looking down at them all, she felt like a queen overlooking her court. The illusion lasted right up until Narvell poked her in the side jokingly and she almost lost her balance.
“You and Leila have another fight?” Starros asked with a knowing smile as he walked to the fence, tucking in his shirt.
Kalan nodded. “I was really convincing. Lirena probably won’t send anyone to look for me for hours yet. She thinks I’m in a right old sulk.”
“I can’t believe the old girl falls for it every time,” Adham said, wiping his dusty, sweat-stained face on his shirt. With his fair hair and slender build, he looked more like Starros’s brother than Rodja’s.
“She’s getting on a bit,” Kalan shrugged. “You’re not all going back to the palace, are you?”
The boys looked at each other questioningly. Apparently, they had no plans beyond this morning’s training session. Their more formal lessons were temporarily suspended, since their last tutor had left over a month ago claiming he couldn’t bear to work under such trying conditions. As he was the fourth tutor in as many months to quit the palace, another letter had been sent to Princess Marla in Greenharbour about the need for yet another scholar and she had written back to say she would be bringing the new tutor with her when she brought Luciena to Krakandar. That meant they had another few days before their lessons resumed. These precious moments of freedom were not to be wasted on things like history or mathematics.
Kalan looked at Damin expectantly. Although neither the eldest nor the biggest of the Krakandar children, he was their natural leader and the others would usually go along with whatever he suggested.
Except Starros. He was probably the only one among them who didn’t follow blindly wherever Damin led.
“We could go fishing,” the young prince suggested after a moment.
“Only if Uncle Mahkas doesn’t find out,” Starros warned. “He told Rodja we weren’t to go near the fens without an escort.”
“We’ll take Travin,” Kalan declared. “Then Uncle Mahkas can’t say we didn’t have an escort.”
That seemed to satisfy even Starros. The others looked at each other and nodded their agreement. Kalan jumped down off the fence with a satisfied sigh. It’s a perfect day. I’m going fishing in the fens with the boys and Travin is coming along as my escort.
Life didn’t get much better than this.
Chapter 4
In the poorer sections of Talabar, particularly among the hovels belonging to the free labourers of the city, life had plenty of room for improvement. For Rory, son of Drendik, son of Warak, life could take a turn for the better any time it was ready, as far as he was concerned.
Now would be good.
Yesterday would have been better.
Rory’s troubles all started when he began to suffer unbearable headaches, which at first both his father and grandfather had put down to hunger. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. Things had been bleak recently, work harder and harder to come by. It had something to do with the completion of a major undertaking far from Talabar, Rory knew, somewhere in the Sunrise Mountains. According to Grandpa Warak, once the construction of the Widowmaker Pass was finally completed, all the workers formerly employed on the project had suddenly flooded the market. There was a glut of able-bodied slaves available for purchase and they were going cheap. Ship owners across Fardohnya were snapping up bargains, crewing their ships—in some cases almost entirely—with slave labour. That meant free sailors like his father and uncles couldn’t find work unless they were willing to sign on as bondsmen, which was just a polite way of signing yourself into slavery.
Everyone went hungry as Rory’s father and uncles tried to scrape up enough to put food on the table for their large clan, and the headaches got worse by the day. It wasn’t unreasonable, he knew, to think the two events were connected. He even stopped complaining about them after a while. The look of despair his father wore most of the time made his own pain seem insignificant.
And then Rory’s cousin, Patria, came home one morning, after staying out all night, with enough money to feed the family for a week.
Older than Rory by three years, Patria was fifteen and Uncle Gazil’s only daughter, a pale, fair-haired, waiflike girl with a shy demeanour that hid a will of iron. She claimed the money came from working in one of the taverns along Restinghouse Street, washing tankards and cleaning up after the drunks. Rory didn’t understand why all the grown-ups had seemed so upset. To Rory and his six younger siblings, any food on the table was welcome—they weren’t too concerned where it came from. But his father, his uncles and even Grandpa Warak all wore dark looks for days afterwards and Patria cried a lot.
They were no longer going hungry, so Rory couldn’t understand why everyone was so upset.
Thinking it would blow over after a while, Rory was distressed to discover the situation getting worse as time went on. The whole house grew more and more tense, to the point where even the youngest children could feel something was amiss. Nobody said anything, though. They just stormed around the house and ate the food they could suddenly afford and never mentioned Patria’s unexpected wealth or what she was doing when she left the house each evening in her one good dress and why she didn’t come home until daylight.
Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery—and in the hope of maybe somehow fixing whatever it was that was tearing apart his formerly happy home—Rory decided to find out what was going on for himself. He had followed Patria one night as she made her way through the muddy streets of the slums on the outskirts of Talabar until she came to Restinghouse Street with its countless taverns and music halls and houses of ill repute. He almost lost her when she turned into the street. It was Fifthday evening and tomorrow was Restday, which meant the taverns were full of men who didn’t have to work in the morning. Pushing through the crowd, Rory
hurried in Patria’s wake. As she passed one tavern after another, he began to worry. Perhaps she wasn’t working in a tavern at all. Perhaps she’d found work cleaning one of the brothels, or worse, one of the music halls. That might explain why everyone was so upset. It would certainly explain why Patria was lying about her job.
Just as Rory came to the conclusion that Patria had betrayed what little decency the family could lay claim to by working in a music hall, his cousin stopped on the corner of Restinghouse Street and the inaptly named Victory Parade. There were a number of other girls standing around, who greeted the newcomer with suspicious eyes and then turned away, intent on their own business.
Rory stopped across the street and waited, curious to see what Patria was up to. If she had a job, surely she didn’t have time to hang about on the corner with these girls? None of them seemed to be doing anything useful.
Rory was still puzzling over it when a man walked up to the brunette standing on Patria’s left and said something to her. The girl replied, coins changed hands, and the two of them moved off down Victory Parade, arm in arm.
After she was gone, Patria moved a little to the right, as if laying claim to the space just vacated by the other girl. A moment later, another man stopped and started talking to Patria. He was a big man, his bare arms covered in tattoos, his beard threaded with tiny glass beads. Rory frowned as the man placed several coins in Patria’s outstretched hand and then she walked off with him in the same direction the other girl and her companion had gone.
Rory was streetwise enough to realise what the transaction must mean, but still innocent enough to think his cousin incapable of selling herself for a few measly copper rivets. If she’d wanted a career as a court’esa, she should have said something sooner, he reasoned. It wasn’t unheard of for a girl from the slums to be accepted into one of the court’esa schools, provided she was pretty enough and willing to give up her freedom. Many young men and women signed up gladly, because a court’esa school meant an education and a pampered life if you were lucky enough to get a good master. To willingly become a working court’esa, however—untrained, unsupervised and unprotected—wasn’t so much wrong, to Rory’s way of thinking, as it was stupid.
He followed them, of course. There was no way he could just turn around and go home now, not without knowing for certain. Patria had no idea he was behind them. As she turned into a rubbish-strewn lane beside a tannery just around the corner in Victory Parade, her customer was already unlacing the front of his trousers. Patria turned to face him. The man shoved her against the wall and pushed up her skirts.
As he watched the brute manhandling his gentle cousin, Rory’s anger began to build and with it came a headache of monumental proportions. Patria didn’t complain as the man guided himself into her with a powerful thrust. Abandoning any pretence of stealth, Rory stepped into the lane behind them and stared at his cousin, his head pounding in agony. Patria just stood there, her face turned to the side, her expression one of blank resignation. The man grunted as he pressed himself inside her, pushing her against the rough wooden wall of the tannery, his other hand groping down the front of her dress. She winced as he rhythmically slammed her against the wall, but whether from the rough way he was kneading her breast or the careless way he was using her, Rory couldn’t say. All he could feel was the pain in his head, like a dam swelling to bursting point with spring melt. The look on Patria’s face hurt more than what she was doing. It was the desolation that made Rory’s temples want to explode. The anguish, the hopelessness in her eyes . . .
Rory couldn’t remember what he did next. All he remembered was the feeling that his head was going to explode . . . Then the pain went away as an anvil burst through the tannery wall behind them, striking the man a glancing blow on the side of his head. He dropped like a sack of wheat at Patria’s feet.
She stared at him for a moment in shock, then saw the blood on his head and screamed.
Rory was too shocked to know or care if the man was dead. He ran forward, grabbed Patria’s wrist and dragged her from the lane before her screams brought someone to investigate. Towing his cousin behind him, he ran down Victory Parade, away from Restinghouse Street, not stopping until the noise from the taverns had faded to silence and they were among the silent warehouses of the wharf district.
“Are you all right?” he panted, when he felt it was safe to stop for a moment.
Patria leaned against the wall of the warehouse and stared at him, her face pale in the darkness, her chest heaving. “Rory . . . what happened back there?”
“Nothing . . .”
“Nothing? Someone threw an anvil through a wall at my customer!” She shook her hand free and rubbed her wrist where he’d been holding her. “For all I know, he’s dead. And it’s your fault! You’ve ruined everything, you interfering little fool! I won’t be able to go back to Victory Parade again and it took me weeks to find that corner.”
Rory looked at her in shock. “Go back?”
“Of course I have to go back.”
“But that man—”
“That man was putting food in your belly, Rory,” she informed him coldly. “You might not like how I’m doing it, but at least one person in this family is capable of earning a living.”
Rory shook his head, unable to believe Patria was a willing participant in this awful trade.
“Maybe . . . if you spoke to Grandpa . . .”
She swore softly at him. “Grandpa! What good is he?”
“He knows people—”
“Grandpa knows nothing, Rory,” Patria scoffed. “All his tales about his rich family, and how we’re cousins by marriage to the royal house of Hythria, are just stories he makes up to keep our minds off our empty stomachs. When I was little, he used to tell me my great-great-grandmother was a Harshini, too. Do you really think he’d be down here starving with the rest of us in the Talabar slums if even one of his tall tales was true?”
Rory couldn’t really answer that. When she saw him hesitate, Patria smiled sourly. “See, even you can’t defend him, can you? Well, I’m sick of being hungry, Rory, and if opening my legs to a stranger is all it takes to fill my belly and the bellies of my family, then I don’t care how many drunks have their way with me. Not so long as they’re paying me up front.”
Without waiting for him to answer, Patria pushed her way past him and headed down the lane.
When she reached the end she turned right, heading back towards Restinghouse Street.
It was much later before Rory got home and, as usual, the only one still awake was his grandfather. The old man sat by the window, as he did every night, staring out into the darkness. When he was small, Rory used to wonder if he was waiting for someone to come walking down the street.
“Bit late for a stroll, isn’t it?”
Rory turned to his grandfather, hoping there was nobody else awake. “I had to do something,”
he replied softly in Hythrun as he closed the door. Despite almost a lifetime spent in Fardohnya, Warak Mariner spoke the language like a newly landed tourist. It was always better and easier to speak to him in Hythrun.
“How’s your headache?” Only his grandfather seemed to appreciate the pain Rory had been suffering of late.
“It’s gone.”
“Is it now?” his grandfather asked, suddenly curious. “How?”
“I don’t know.” The small house reverberated with the snores of its sleeping occupants. Rory’s younger brothers slept in this room. His father and uncles slept in the small bedroom at the rear. Patria, when she was home, occupied the small lean-to out back. Rory sat on the edge of his grandfather’s pallet near the window. The significance of his headache disappearing hadn’t really sunk in yet. “I followed Patria tonight.”
Warak shook his head sadly. “That was something you probably didn’t need to see.”
Rory stared at his grandfather in surprise. “You knew?”
The old man’s face was etched with sadness. “No fifteen-ye
ar-old girl brings home that sort of money sweeping tavern floors, lad. Why do you think your uncles and your father are so upset? They know what she’s doing, and it burns them to allow it.”
“They could stop her.”
“And watch the rest of you starve?”
Rory shook his head, wishing life wasn’t so full of unpalatable choices. “There must be some other way, Grandpa.”
“Your father would’ve found it by now if there were, Rory. Or her father. Did you want to tell me what happened?”
Rory nodded, glad of the chance to unburden himself! His headache might be gone, but he was still in pain. “I followed her. She was working the corner of Restinghouse and Victory. A man came up to her, gave her money, and they went into a lane . . . and . . .”
“And what?”
He shrugged, still not sure he believed what he’d seen. “And then an anvil came through the wall and knocked the man down.”
Warak Mariner sat up a little straighter on the pallet and stared at his grandson. “A what came through the wall?”
“An anvil.”
“I see.”
Rory frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Warak didn’t answer his question. Instead, for no apparent reason, he asked about the headaches again. “And now the pain in your head is gone, you say? Did that happen before or after this stray anvil came flying through the wall?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged, wondering what the old man was on about. “I guess it happened around the same time. Why?”
Warak placed a weathered old hand on his grandson’s shoulder and frowned. “Unless there was an anvil-chucking contest going on behind that wall, my guess is that you’ve inherited some of the family talent, Rorin, my lad.”
Rory smiled sceptically as he recalled what Patria had said about their grandfather’s far-fetched stories. “The only talent I have, Grandpa, is finding trouble. You ask my pa.”
“That may be truer than you think, lad. Did anybody besides Patria see you in that lane?”
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