color of ant eggs, their thousand and one fascinating shades of hair—then, then she would have understood. Especially in Riverside, where Kaab stood now under the decaying houses bedecked with peeling paint and crumbling gaud. These women, unbound by the rules even of this city, behaved in ways that would shock her modest friends walking the white paved sacbeob ways of her homeland.
A clatter to the southeast. Kaab’s hand flew to the hilt of her dagger, dark, reassuring obsidian in the hidden pouch she had sewn into the insufferable Local gown without which Auntie Saabim refused to allow her to leave the house. When she looked around for the source of the sound, she saw only a pair of young men, remarkably similar in face and dress, arms entwined, sauntering through the narrow streets of cracked and broken cobblestone, stepping lightly over murky brown puddles, paying no heed to anyone but each other.
She kept her hand on her dagger as they passed. A third man was coming down the street; when he was closer, she recognized him, a gold-headed wonder of lace and red velvet, as the man who had pinked her in her first duel last week, the day she arrived. What was his bizarre name again? Pem . . . no, Ben.
Kaab stepped quickly into the shadow of a narrow, twisted alley, lest he spot her. She needn’t have worried; his mind was obviously on other matters as he ambled by, whistling something that he apparently thought of as a tune.
Curious, she followed him, watched him enter a tavern and leave again soon after, a black cloth tied around his arm. There was no harm in going in, was there?
Kaab opened the tavern door and breathed in the lingering perfume of stale alcohol. Other than the few scattered, ancient derelicts seated among the mismatched jumble of chairs and the two comely barmaids bound up far too tightly in faded cotton wiping the battered tables, the place was empty. The girls, one a tall thing with hair the color of maize, the other short, stout, pale as peeled cassava, stopped their work when Kaab entered, but she had grown used to the staring by now. She waved the maize-haired girl over, ordered a beer she had no intention of drinking—not after her first taste a few days ago of the watery piss these people called beer—and touched the girl’s hand when she brought it in a chipped red clay mug. The sight of her cheekbones filled Kaab with thoughts of Citlali, the girl with the divine . . . ah, but the disaster of Tultenco, the forged treaty, the treachery of the Nopalco Court, the desperate flight before dawn—it was all too recent to bear thinking about.
“Haven’t seen you around before,” said the barmaid. She smelled faintly of sweat.
“That,” said Kaab with a small, aloof smile, “is because I have not been around before.”
“No, Cassie,” one of the old men farther back in the tavern said, his voice heavy with drink despite—or perhaps because of—the early hour. “Don’t you remember? Not a week ago this filly lost a duel to Ben over Tess the Hand right outside here.” Kaab whipped her head around to look at him, her eyes narrow, ready to take umbrage. But he tipped in her direction, respectfully, an impossibly rumpled felt hat of an indeterminate shade, and she relaxed. “You made him work for it before he won, though,” he said. “Never seen a girl with a sword do that.”
“Tess the Hand?” said the girl, her eyes not leaving Kaab. “Then she’s got good taste.”
If the beautiful prostitute went by the name Tess the Hand, she was a beautiful prostitute worth discovering more about. “Tell me about her.”
“Why, have you got custom for her?”
The Balam were the first family of Traders among the Kinwiinik. Kaab knew better than to appear too eager. “Perhaps.”
“Well,” said the girl, twirling a lock of her thick hair around her finger and giving Kaab a wink, “she’s the best there is.”
Kaab felt unaccountably warm, a thousand thanks be to Ahkin in this miserable cold. “I am not surprised,” she said. “She had the air of a talented woman.”
“What do you want from her?”
Kaab thought for a moment. “Does she have particular specialties?”
“Oh, she does it all. Like I say, she’s the best there is.”
“And how much money does she ask for?”
“Depends on the job, really. You’d have to ask her.”
This was growing more tedious than a game of Nine Bean with only three players. Really, a girl dressed like that in an establishment like this had no business being coy. “Oh? One deals with her directly, not with her—with the—” The idea the crippled sailmaker had explained on the voyage over still made no sense to her; no wonder she couldn’t remember the word, either. “The man who manages her? Ben?”
The girl obviously had no idea what she meant. “What would you want to talk to Ben for? She can conduct her own business, thank you very much.”
Well, that was a relief. “I am glad that at least some here do their prostitute work without the assistance of managers.”
At this the girl threw back her head and gave herself over to full-throated laughter like a gibbon. “Is that what you think Tess—oh, that’s so—” But here she lost herself in hilarity again, while Kaab forced her fingers not to drum on the table. The girl gave a last chuckle and wiped her eyes. “Tess isn’t a whore. She’s a counterfeiter. And Ben’s not her pimp; he’s her protector. She’s a talented woman, like you said. A lot of people would take advantage of her skill if they could. Ben’s sword makes sure nobody does.”
Far too basic an error to make, little bee. Kaab clenched her fists and restrained herself from banging one on the dented chestnut-brown surface of the table. “I see. That is an amusing misunderstanding. So Tess and Ben are lovers?”
“Hardly. He’s not her flavor, nor she his, if you catch my drift.”
Kaab’s heart began to beat against the tight cage of her bodice like the wings of a hummingbird in flight.
“Though,” said the barmaid uncertainly, “he’ll indulge in any flavor he’s asked so long as there’s enough money in it.”
“His preferences are not of interest to me,” said Kaab. “But her—do you know where I might find her?” After all, if Tess—Tess the Hand—was a skilled counterfeiter, a closer acquaintance with her could be of use to Kaab’s family.
“Not here, that’s for sure, at least not till later tonight. She’s out on a job. So’s Ben, for that matter. He just ducked in here so I could tie on his mourning band—lost his father, you know—and he was dressed so fancy I couldn’t help staring. ‘Heading to the Hill, are you?’ I said, and the Green God take me if he didn’t say, ‘Why, yes I am,’ pretty as you please, and waltz out the door.”
Kaab would have been happy to tarry longer, but she had promised Juub that she would demonstrate the swordplay she’d learned on the ship, and if she was any judge of adolescent boys, then the longer she kept her cousin waiting the more irksome he would be when she got back. “Thank you for your time, which I appreciate greatly,” she said, standing and dropping a handful of minnows onto the table.
“What are the chances you’d take fifteen minutes and show me how much you appreciate it?”
Kaab looked her up and down, taking in the orange dress, the crimson petticoat underneath it, the blue eyes sparkling above it all. “Alas, lovely woman. In another place,
