and that delicate mouth, I’m sure they were only too happy to oblige him. Land!” She laughed aloud. “What a pair you must have made! The scarecrow and the ivory god.”
In the mirror, she saw her husband blush. Interesting. He’d been awkward on their wedding night, but not entirely ignorant. She’d made a point never to ask him how he’d learned, nor yet with whom. She covered her sigh with a yawn. Asper Lindley! Fancy that. Well, Lindley had her coloring, after all. No wonder William had been so enthusiastic when he met her. “What changed his mind now, I wonder?”
“His ‘dry old politician’ is not as old as he appeared to us then. And Galing is now the Crescent Chancellor of the Council of Lords. So Asper, having satisfied his taste for pretty girls (while still refusing to wed any, much to his mother’s despair), well, Asper has moved on to men of influence, while he still has power to attract them.”
It all lined up, even her husband’s slightly sarcastic tone: he wouldn’t understand why a pretty boy would play with him and then move on. William loved deep, and William loved true.
“You should see the two of them in Council,” he went on. “Sometimes I think the Crescent isn’t paying attention to anything anyone’s saying, he’s so busy staring across the room at Asper Lindley’s golden hair. I doubt he’d have looked twice at our Honora.”
“Oh, darling. Galing looks twice at everything. I’m sure we could have arranged it.” The languid duchess grew suddenly brisk. “Now, then, let’s get your notes, shall we? If you can convince the Council to lower the tax on barley water, it will be very good for us. Our barley crop has done extremely well this year.”
• • •
In the River Street Marketplace, a girl named Micah kept her eyes firmly on her turnip stall. It was a grey and muddy day, “the arse end of winter dragging its dirty tail behind it,” as Uncle Amos liked to say. Winter’s end was mucky and messy enough at home on the farm; in the city it was worse. Not ten times worse—though that was what Aunt Judith always said. As if the multiple of “bad” was always ten! Micah liked people to be more precise. So, with the part of her that was not watching the stall, she calculated how much worse the city was, exactly.
On the farm, you pretty much knew what you were getting into, or how to avoid it—as long as you wore your clogs in the farmyard. You knew what season to plant things, and when to put the chickens to bed. The way to the pasture didn’t change, and the cows had worn a deep, clear rut over the years between it and the barnyard where they came to be milked.
The city, though, had streets tumbled about in no particular order. If cows had laid out the streets that wandered and crossed each other, Micah hoped never to meet them. And then there were the buildings, with their different shapes and sizes and ornaments: One was a house where people lived and one was a shop where people sold things and another was a place to get beer and another to get grilled meat, but because the shop had once been a tavern it still had those little windows taverns have, and somehow you were supposed to know what was what by the pictures hanging on boards over the doorway, though why a place with a horseman on the sign sold wine, while a sailing ship sold cloth . . .
Micah did make a map of the streets in her head. She added new ones to it every time she went anywhere in the city. But she couldn’t do anything about the houses.
In the city you couldn’t always see the sky, and there were no trees at all. And underfoot lay all kinds of garbage that people tossed, not just dog- or cow-poop, and nobody saved it to put on the fields. Because there weren’t any fields. Just a big open square where Micah and Cousin Reuben came every week to sell what the family grew, alongside lots of other farm folk from miles around, people who lived close enough to the city to make it there and back between sunrise and sunset. Micah’s family was a little farther out, so they brought blankets to sleep in the cart overnight and leave for home the next day.
Weather-wise, Micah put the city at about four times worse than the country. In terms of the number of people, though, shouting and crowding, it was easily one hundred and ten times worse. So Micah kept her eyes on the stall, where all the bunches of sweet little turnips were arranged in the most beautiful patterns. By her. By Micah. Five on the bottom, then three, then two, then one. Eight rows like that.
And every time anyone bought some, she had to rearrange the whole thing. It kept her busy.
• • •
Kaab had convinced the agent to run her a little up the river in a skiff under the bridges, just to get oriented. Maps were all very well, but they didn’t really show the details of a place: the height of a wall, the width of an alley. As it gave him a chance to show off his city and his knowledge to the exotic foreigner, the agent was happy to do it. A boatman did the rowing, of course, moving them northwest against the slow current.
Kaab pointed to the river’s west side, on the opposite bank. “What are those funny—those pretty little roofs? With all the little chimneys?”
“Oh, that?” He looked away. “That’s nothing.”
“Nothing? But people live there . . . ?”
“Pay it no mind. It’s called Riverside. A lawless place.”
“Do you say so?” But Kaab knew all about Riverside. Her friend the sailmaker had many stories of the little island in the middle of the river, old in stone and old in mischief, the haunt of—
“. . . thieves and pickpockets,” the agent was saying, “fences and forgers, card sharps and keen beggars, and, ah, very bad women.”
Kaab shook her head sadly. It amused her no end to play the innocent stranger with him. “And swordsmen?” she asked doucely. “Are these famous fighters of yours there, too?”
“The worst of them are,” he said darkly. “These Riverside swordsmen are desperate men. Some do use their talents to move up to a better life, working as guards or duellists for the nobles. But the worst of them . . . well, they kill each other on the street just to try their blades.”
“I did not know this city was so perilous.”
“Oh, only in Riverside, lady,” he hastened to assure her. “Don’t you think of setting foot there! Why, the City Watch doesn’t even go there. But anywhere else, you’re safe as houses.”
She let the funny phrase pass; his tone and his earnest face made the meaning clear. Like everywhere else she’d ever been, it was a nice city, they said, a good city, run by decent people. You’d only get in trouble if you did something stupid. Or failed to follow the seven hundred and thirty-three unspoken rules of conduct that of course anyone should simply know. Fortunately, Ixkaab Balam was a quick study.
“But must we all cross this terrible Riverside to get to the Middle City on the other bank?” she asked. “The very fine shops are there, no? And then one may climb to the Hill, with its stunning houses of the great nobles of the land.”
He chuckled. “Never you fear, milady! You need never set foot in Riverside. There is a modern bridge upstream, just past the University, that will take you to the new side of the river, where the shops and the people are very fine, indeed. It is a bridge so wide, mark you, that two carriages may pass each other on it!”
“Stunning,” Kaab murmured. It seemed to be the right answer to everything.
She wondered how quickly she could shake this fool and get to Riverside.
•
