success of our feast to reach her ears.”
Saabim gave Kaab a funny, knowing smile and kissed her husband on the cheek. “Then the expense must be borne, of course, my little thrush.”
Chuleb reciprocated with nicknames that threatened to send the dogs scurrying for cover again, so Kaab intervened quickly. “Do we have the saffron? Would you like me to get it?”
He waved an impatient hand. “Oh, for the sake of the nine heavens, child, if it interests you so much! Try the Fenton compound first. They’re in the spice trade and should have some on hand. We’ll need—well, enough to braise forty hares. You might as well get the hares, as well. I leave it in your care, Niece. I trust you will do the family honor.”
This last was a formal phrase, meant to mark a charge given from an elder to an active family Trader. It had been seven months since someone had last said these words to Kaab, and her eyes pricked unexpectedly to hear them again, so far from home.
She touched her heart with her hand and bent her head. “As Ekchuah dives and Xamanek lights the way, this unworthy servant will give her precious water, her blood that our honor may grow its roots into the earth.”
Her reply was the ceremonial one, not generally given for common tasks. Her uncle blinked in surprise and then bowed his head briefly in reply. Aunt Saabim, who looked very much like Kaab’s mother in this strong light, bowed her head as well.
“I’ll be back soon!” Kaab said, before the tears that clogged the back of her throat came up any further. “Can I use the good Caana chocolate for the trade?”
Chuleb sighed. “If you promise to be prudent. It’s in the brown chest in—”
But Kaab was already heading to his offices, her bare feet sliding along the tiles of the peristyle. “I know,” she called over her shoulder.
“Remember to wear Local clothes!” her aunt called after her. “And some shoes!”
• • •
Kaab allowed the maid to help her into the simplest bodice and skirts that her aunt had left in her closet. She nearly ignored Aunt Saabim’s dictate about the shoes, but the maid reminded her about the appalling state of the streets in springtime (shit and mud was the least of it, apparently) and she reluctantly consented to the boots. Adopting Local customs was the Trader way, but her feet felt decidedly shackled in all but the simplest rubber-and-hide sandals. At home, women rarely went shod. But of course, at home the streets were swept meticulously clean every morning and night by phalanxes of war-captive slaves, and no one would dream of pissing in public. While living among the barbarians, Kaab reasoned, one had to make accommodations.
Once out on the street—a bag full of good chocolate on her arm and a modest amount of Local coin for any unforeseen circumstance—Kaab turned west, and walked for several streets beneath tall, bare trees that had just begun to put out closed green buds. Kaab recalled the redolent purple jacarandas and the sunset spray of brush-tree flowers, and felt her heart crack that much further. The walls were high in the merchants’ neighborhood, and traffic minimal. Men and women whose clothing and demeanor marked them as servants brushed past her with hardly a glance sideways. Interesting. In Riverside and the neighborhoods in between she had been a curiosity as a foreigner. But clearly the merchants had long since grown accustomed to the presence of the Traders. And tomorrow evening, many of the most prominent Local merchant families would be arriving at the Balam compound to feast on a hundred delicacies that she and the other women had spent the last three days preparing. Fetching saffron might seem like a trivial task, but Kaab was prideful, not ignorant. A brilliant feast had the ability to help a family rise very far—just as an inferior one could bring down the curse of the gods, under whose purview such things rested.
Her uncle’s directions to the Fenton compound had been mercifully clear—Kaab spoke two other languages which relied on the nonsensical left and right, but she had never been forced to live in the lands where they were common. She arrived a quarter hour after she had set out. The walls were an even-mortared limestone, solid, imposing and unpainted. They rose three times her height, and above them tall spikes of greening iron deterred acrobatic thieves. The trees had been removed for ten yards on either side of the enormous, iron-braced doors. A cord hung on the west side, and seeing no other option for gaining entry (aside from methods of which her uncle would surely not approve), she pulled it.
A small window in the door slid back and an older man’s face appeared. She explained that she was here on business of the Balam family. The man seemed dubious, but after a moment she heard several bolts sliding open. A small door eased back on deep hinges and a large, rough hand emerged from the shadows as though from the underworld to help her through. She had to duck and step quite high—the weight and length of the unfamiliar skirts nearly sent her sprawling.
She emerged blinking and stumbling into an open courtyard, dominated by an unadorned building which she assumed was a storehouse and a stately, ornamented house of new construction.
“You can await Master Fenton’s man of business inside the house, mistress,” said the guard. He motioned for her to follow the path through the open garden. She hesitated, wondering if she should surrender her obsidian dagger, heavy and reassuring in the other skirt pocket, as a gesture of goodwill. But the guard had turned back to a game of cards with his companion, and seemed entirely uninterested in her. The Xanamwiinik were worse than the Tullan, Kaab thought with hard amusement as she climbed the marble steps. They did not imagine women capable of killing a turkey, let alone a guard.
She repeated her request to the maid who answered the front door, and was led to a small antechamber decorated with dark woods and tanned leathers and art from the remotest parts of the Traded world. She spotted a cotton mantle embroidered and printed in the Bakhim style beside a small headdress of quetzal feathers, a kind only certain decorated warriors were allowed to wear at home. She wondered if her Uncle Chuleb had traded these to Master Fenton, and if so, if he had explained their true use and origins. Kaab felt distinctly odd, standing here in her meticulous Local clothes, as if she herself could have been displayed on the walls if she hadn’t bothered to change before she arrived.
She tensed at a sudden clamor of voices in the hallway outside, rapidly approaching.
“By God, he will see me now! If he had the nerve to summon me like some common accounting boy, he damned well can’t expect me to wait when I get here.”
“Master Rafe, I believe your father’s letter instructed you to arrive in the morning—”
“Well, that bit of high-handed authoritarianism would have been impossible for me to comply with, even if I were the dutiful sheep of a son he wishes me to be!”
The owner of that deep voice—attempting to be imperious, but a little too piqued to manage—burst into the antechamber at that moment, swept his gaze across, noted the closed doors to what Kaab had presumed were the offices of Master Fenton and his man of business, and uttered several words that Kaab did not understand. She assumed they were not fit for polite company, judging by the deep blush of the trailing maid and pained wince of an older man with a pen in his hand.
“Master Rafe, there are ladies present.”
The young man—Rafe—gave Kaab a cursory bow. “Apologies, madam. I did not see you standing there. Are you—goodness, you’re one of the Balam!”
He seemed so disconcerted that she had to smile. “I just arrived,” she replied. “I think that is why we never had the pleasure of meeting.”
She put particular emphasis
