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“I suppose he could be dead…”
“He is not dead.” Grim and icy, his words were filled with dreadful certainty.
“I see,” she said softly.
His eyes reflected gleams of low firelight as he turned to her. “No, lass. You do not.”
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bsp; She broke gaze, turned away from the stern, terrible truth in his eyes. She made an impatient gesture. “Oh, why do such things matter anyhow? The whole thing reeks: your business, that man hunting you, the things people will do to one another, given half a chance. The whole world.” Having gone so wide, she focused her disgust down more narrowly. “This city.”
He absorbed her little tirade in silence. “Do not judge Saleté de Mer too harshly, lass. I’ve smelled far worse cities than yours.”
She closed her eyes and laughed softly at the subtle, certain change in conversation. He was right. Why argue under the counter about how rotten the world could be?
“Have you?” she asked, settling back against the wall beside him, a surprisingly comfortable position. She’d never sat on one of her crates before.
He nodded. “Venezia. Now there is a stinking city, when the tide is low. The canals,” he said, and shook his head.
“Venice,” she whispered, entranced. “You have been to Venice.”
“Sicily smelled of basil and oranges. Until we arrived. Then it smelled of blood and screams.”
She swallowed.
“Acre was the worst.”
“You were at Acre?” Acre, the city that had fallen to the brave crusaders, the triumph of the West.
His face seemed to shut down. A ripple went across his jaw, and all the energetic…joie of him, seemed to vacate his body. He became again the granite he’d been when attacking the soldiers. “Jesus God, what an awful stench we made.” Her jaw dropped at the blasphemy but he paid it no mind. “A hundred thousand warring men and about six laundresses for every thousand.”
“Why so few?”
“The Pope, being so wise, discouraged women on crusade, even laundresses.” He looked woeful. “’Twas an awful thing he did.”
She smiled faintly. “Perhaps that was because they did not do much laundry?”
“They surely did mine,” he replied with feeling.
She tipped her head back and laughed. Criminal or no, he was the devil. And she liked it. Liked him.
And if it came to it—which it had—she realized she trusted him more than that malevolent nobleman, or her own mayor, or any of the other men who had moved through her life with such disregard, leaving despair and occasionally destruction in their wake.
“I tell you, sir, I weary of the stench sometimes,” she confessed in a low tone. “When you live in a town, of course, one grows accustomed; it becomes your every breath. It means nothing, for there is nothing else. But when you leave it behind, go past the walls to fetch supplies or go to fair or gather flowers, then you realize.”
He shifted on his crate. “What do you realize?”
“What you have left behind.”
“Safety? Food? Shelter?”
She smiled. “Noise. The clatter, the stench, the endless, ceaseless racket…” Her voice drifted off.
“Ah. You would rather live with the quiet, wild beasts of dell and dale?”
She laughed. “I would rather eat regularly, so no. In any event, I am a peasant no more. I am a merchant now, tied to town. And I do not suffer for it,” she added quickly. “I have an income of my own making, food, this strong house,” she patted the wall, “and, for the most part, am my own master.”
“But for Bayard,” he said.
