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She drew in a shuddering breath and found her voice.
“I don’t know.”
29
In the confines of Serpens Close, we discovered a stair that led, just as the old man had said, to a path along Duvno Stream, a bricked-in sewer whose stench was leavened only by the steadily dropping night temperature. We hurried for some way along this path and left it to make our way through deserted streets to humbler districts and eventually the festive sprawl of the winter market on the shore of the Solent River. Here we bargained for winter coats, the kind worn by women who must work out of doors through the fierce winter chill, and cloaks to go over them to double as blankets. Bee traded her elegant frock for sturdier garb, and we stood in the cold street and shivered, heads bent together and my hand on the hilt of my ghost sword in case anyone accosted us.
“We need legal help,” I said. “What about those trolls I met?”
She looked askance at me. “You met trolls? Spoke to them?”
“I liked them, Bee. So would you have. But I don’t know where their offices are. We can scarcely go searching this time of night. We have to find somewhere to hide until the sun goes down on solstice eve. Tonight, tomorrow day, the next night, and the next day. That’s all.”
“Then what? Beat off our pursuers with your cane?”
“I don’t know, but our first goal is to get you free of the contract.”
“What do you think happened to Roderic?” she whispered.
I wiped my eyes, unable to speak.
So at length we settled into the smoky supper room of a tavern, where we shared a bowl of millet and goat’s meat stew at a corner table so out of the way that a stout oak pillar cut off our view of the door into the common room. In this forsaken corner, there was plenty of smoke but little enough heat. Out there, people were eating and drinking and conversing merrily, as folk did who weren’t running for their lives. We had, of necessity, come into the somewhat more expensive supper room, but despite the late hour, it was packed with noisy folk keeping late hours. I demolished our first helping and began working through a second while Bee picked past stringy goat’s meat and yellow turnip seeking what was not there.
“The old man said he was waiting for me,” said Bee.
“Maybe. Or maybe he was an old lecher and thought it a likely story to draw you in for a kiss.”
I had expected her to recoil at the thought of being kissed by a dying man who must have been ninety if he was a day. I had even hoped perhaps to squeeze a chuckle from her. Instead, she pinned my wrist to the table.
“No. He said I was death coming to meet him.” I had forgotten how deep her gaze was. Men stuttered and collapsed at a glance from her eyes. Right now, I thought she looked as if the weight of the world’s misery had fallen on her shoulders. “He said he was giving me his heart’s fire to help me walk my dreams in the war to come. I’m frightened, Cat. What did he mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Eat something.”
She released my wrist and scooped up a spoonful of brown gravy. With a frown, she stared at a shred of wilted green mint floating in the liquid, then drizzled the spoon’s contents back into the bowl. “I’m not hungry.”
“We have to keep up our strength. If not for yourself, then think of Rory, who may have sacrificed his life for us.”
She sighed and, after wiping her eyes, began to eat. “You never told me what happened to you, Cat. The tale would make the stew go down better, I’m sure.”
So I told her. As the story unfolded, she ate with more gusto, and her bowed shoulders began to straighten as if my words nourished her.
“Can that be true? That the male who sired you is a creature of the spirit world?” she demanded, a little too eagerly. “Like an eru or a saber-toothed cat?”
“What else can I think?”
“It does seem likely, but awfully strange. And how would they have managed the… the deed?”
“In the usual way, I would suppose. Not that you know anything about that.”
“No more than you do!” She grinned, then bit a finger, thinking. “Still, if it’s true, do you think we could cross into the spirit world and hide there?”
“If I knew where to find a crossroads. If you could even cross with me.”
“The magister crossed.”
“He was raised among hunters. Didn’t I mention that? It’s a dangerous place, Bee.”
She frowned. “And this world is not? Tell me, Cat, did all that coin you now possess come from him?”
