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“Nocked,” he muttered. “It needs a whetstone.” Then he sheathed it without another glance and strode to the front of her shop, where the downed soldiers lay, booted and bloody. “We’ve got some cleaning up to do.” He crouched behind the burly one. “We had best be quick about it.”
“Indeed,” she agreed, entirely at a loss. How did one clean up soldiers?
Striding through her shop, he grabbed the sturdiest fabric he could find, unsheathed one of what seemed to be an arsenal of blades covering his body, and cut the fabric into strips, then bound the soldiers’ wrists and ankles with it. Then he dragged their bodies to the back door.
“What are we going to do with them?” she asked, hurrying after.
He grunted at he pulled. “You’ve a Shitbrooke, aye?”
“We’re going to dump them in the river?”
“Beside the river,” he clarified as she unlatched the back door. “Unless you prefer to call the Watch about it.”
She hesitated. “Ought I call the Watch?”
Mid-hoist, he looked up. “Do you want to call the Watch?” he asked carefully.
In Saleté de Mer, one did not call the Watch if one could avoid it, in part because, depending upon who was serving duty that month, and further upon one’s marital status, there were occasionally unpleasant payments attached to their assistance. But tonight, she did not need their doubtful assistance, did she?
The Watch meant questions, and eventually, the mayor. The corrupt, stupid mayor of Saleté de Mer, always on the lookout for personal gain.
When these men had burst into her shop, they’d been brigands. When their insentient bodies were strewn across her shop, it became less clear who had done what to whom.
She looked at the stranger who was responsible for two-thirds of the insentient bodies. “No,” she said softly. “I do not want to call the Watch.”
Relief swept across his features but he only gave a clipped nod and kicked the door open with the back of his boot. Night streamed in, carrying wood smoke and the odor of the sea, salty and dirty.
“But the river…?” she said tentatively. “It will be cold.”
He grunted. Apparently this was not a looming concern for him.
“They may be seen.”
He blew out an impatient breath. “Have you another plan?”
“There is a…stew, just ’round the end of my alley. It does quite a lively trade, with men just like these. They will not be noticed.”
He frowned. “You want me to drag three men into a whorehouse, bound and gagged? I think they will be noticed.”
“I know the owner, Master Roger.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Do you now?”
She frowned. “I repair the women’s tunics and ribbons at need, at no cost should they require it. Tell Roger these men are a delivery of mine. He will ensure they are tended to ’til morn.”
“The whores it is,” he said, and dragged the brute over the threshold into the alley.
She stepped out too and pulled the door shut.
Low humps of dirty snow mounded around the edges of buildings all down the street. Pale blurs of warm, orange-yellow light shone though the shuttered windows on the upper floors along both sides of the alley. Everyone was inside now, warm against the cold, joining with friends and companions in the merriment of the Yuletide season. Indeed, from a few windows came the faint strains of song, with an occasional lute to be heard amid the revelry.
No one would notice someone dragging bodies down the street.
“Hurry,” she whispered. “I’ll prepare the others.”
He looked up, his face a blur of dark facial hair and gleaming eyes. “I shall be back.”
Shivers of excitement rolled across her breasts. This worried her, that she would experience chills of excitement because a stranger had promised he’d return after he dragged the bodies of rogue soldiers to a whorehouse and dumped them for her.
