Mastiff (38 page)

Bloodstone
, Pounce said.
A very powerful one. I do not particularly like a mage who boasts of his power by wearing showy stones, do you? That is Elyot of Aspen Vale, the mage. The one with the gold and yellow-sapphire necklace is his brother, Graeme. He is a baron
.

What do I care if he is a baron?
I asked as a priest in Mithran orange and a mot in pale pink robes walked in to stand before the dais.
Tortall is lousy with barons. Every time a king wants to thank someone for saving his arse somehow, he names him baron and gives him an acre of rocks
.

Did I raise you to be this cynical?
Pounce asked me as we all stood for the Mithran’s prayer.

You told me it was “worldly,”
I replied, looking at the floor so as to seem devout. Pounce and I had entertained each other through prayers at Lord Gershom’s for years, and had begun again when our Hunts took us to noble houses.
You said I
needed
to be worldly
.

The Mithran finished and I was lowering myself to my seat when I caught an elbow in the shoulder from my left-hand neighbor. The one on my left, a mot with the strong arms and flour traces of a baker, had moved closer while I talked with Pounce. Her lips barely moving, she said, “There’s the Gentle Mother blessing yet.”

I straightened up in a hurry as the priestess began to call for peace and bounty, praising the fief’s strong men and calling for love and serenity for its women and children. I stopped listening. There were so many better things I could do with this time.

My belly growled, loud enough that the mot on my right and the mots across the table from me looked up and glared. I glared back. It was hardly my fault that it had been a very long time since our bread and cheese on the road.

Do you want me to claw at the embroidery on their hems until it unravels?
Pounce offered.
I am willing to make that sacrifice for you. The needlework is bad, anyway, and the colors are not well chosen. I would be doing them a favor
.

I had to struggle to keep from laughing. At last the priestess called for the Goddess’s blessings on the royal family and ended. The count gave us the sign to take our seats. Servants began rushing about with more bowls and platters. They went to each of the nobles and placed food in their trenchers or not, as the pairs of diners agreed. For the rest of us, they dumped the serving dishes at central points and left. We lesser folk were to serve ourselves.

The baker turned to me with a basket of fresh rolls. “Take one, for that growlin’ belly. Where are you from, that you don’t know the priestess of the Gentle Mother?”

I took one. “Corus. My thanks, mistress.”

Her trencher mate leaned out around her to look at me. “And it’s true, thirty of you Provost’s Guard came here to arrest the count?”

“Has he done anything worth arresting him for?” I asked as I buttered a piece of the bread. The two women began to laugh.

“Not he,” said the one on my neighbor’s left. “Doin’ aught that ain’t writ down in—Fay, what’s that book them nobles set such store by?”

“The Book o’ Silver,”
my neighbor, Fay, replied.

“Aye, that’n. If my lord ever thought of doin’ aught that wasn’t writ down in that
Book o’ Silver
, he give it up as soon as he thought of it. Like that there roll, do you?” the mot asked.

I looked at the bread in my hands and discovered I was down to the last bite. “Yes, I do,” I replied. “It’s very good.”

“Iris does the rolls,” Fay told me. “I do the bigger loaves, like these.” She tapped the side of their trencher. “And your’n.” A maidservant brought a large pitcher and set it before Fay. She half rose. “Herb and greens soup,” she told me, and poured some into my trencher. I tried to tell her not to give me too much, but I was too late and my trencher was full. It was wonderful soup.

“Listen,” I said when I’d had a few spoons full. “Mayhap you shouldn’t talk with me. The count and countess aren’t so happy to have Dogs in their home, and they’re particular vexed with me.”

Fay took a heavy gulp from her tankard. “So we heard. You’d look prettier in a proper tunic, you know. All that black makes your eyes ghost-colored. Like you’ve been witness to things that twist your tripes.”

I squirmed at that. These countrywomen who see more than their pots and their gardens, they do that to me. They speak their minds, too, just like my gran. Even Tunstall will fidget if such a mot gives him a looking-over.

Fay patted my back. “Ease your belt, young one. The countess can’t see more’n three feet off without it blurrin’, nor more’n six at all. I have the Sight. My lord lets me do as I wish.”

Iris leaned around Fay. “And Master Niccols has taken his pleasures in my bed.” She winked. “We’re a wicked pair, Fay and me. Me for doin’ what I please, and Fay for Seein’ what folk don’t like. There’s none that’ll squeak to us about who we talk with. That’s why we sat here, instead of at our regular spot.”

“It’s not my fault if the gods gave me their Gift,” Fay said, and elbowed her friend. “But since I got it, I’ll speak it true. There’s naught my lady can say to halt me, either, not her nor her flower-mouthed priestess.”

They refilled their tankards and emptied them while I decided to take them at their word. Few people will cross any who have the magical Gift of Sight, as Fay claimed, for fear the next time a grim Sight came on the one so touched, she would share it. The notion of plump Iris tumbling the prim and pinched Niccols gave me a squeeze in my imagination. I changed the subject rather than think about that any longer. “Do the count and countess feast like this often?” I asked.

“Until the last year, no,” Iris told me. “Their Young Lordships being off at court and Her Young Ladyship being married, it got quiet here.”

“You can’t say
quiet,
” Fay argued. “Not during slave season, it’s not.”

“During slave season?” I asked between some more spoons of soup. It was the best I’d ever had, even better than Aunt Mya’s. Up at the head table I could see Lady Sabine daintily eating hers as the prince talked her ear off.

“Oh, aye, they come through every three-four weeks in summer, bound for Scanra, the Yamanis, or Galla,” Iris told me. Fay was scraping the last of their soup from the trencher. We didn’t get as much as the nobles did. “Most make no matter, but one a month stops here for my lord to look over.” Fay had moved in some and Iris and me had slid back so she could see me as we talked. She could also see the look of startlement on my face. “Don’t you know—no, you’re not from here.” Iris said it like everyone else was. “They have an investment in a slave tradin’ company. The count likes to see where his investment gets him.”

The skin on the back of my neck prickled. I wished the others could hear, but I couldn’t even see Tunstall or Farmer, hidden behind so many walls of people. I looked about, pretending I was trying to see when the next course would arrive. Casually I said, “So he got lucky, having a clutch of slaves on hand when the prince and the baron came for a visit.”

Fay snorted as a slave came up with a plate of jugged hare and dropped slices in the trenchers. I slipped a piece down to Pounce, who ate it and said,
Too tart for you
. Of late I have learned that my stomach does not care for things which are very tart, as jugged sauces tend to be.

Fay waited for the slave to move from earshot before she told me, “It weren’t no luck, Mistress Dog! My lord count brung them onto castle grounds as soon as they arrived. And that
before
he’d got the message that the baron was coming to visit!”

I started to reach into a pocket for a handkerchief, then remembered I couldn’t show nice ways if I was to convince folk I was an everyday dull Dog. I wiped my mouth on my arm, on that lovely thin silk. “I’ll wager they’ve been plenty of help, with three extra nobles and their folk visiting,” I commented, and took a seemingly deep drink from my tankard. It was filled with strong ale. I sipped and let the rest stay where it was. The last thing I needed tonight was a gut full of spirits. At the dais, Sabine and the prince were toasting each other with goblets of wine, but I had no fear for the lady. Her head is harder than Tunstall’s, and there’s not a Dog in Corus who will drink against Tunstall.

Iris snorted. She had already refilled her tankard and Fay’s. “Not enough help, my eye. They sent some of them away with their keepers before dawn.”

“Snatched ’em at their work,” Fay told me. “One lass who was kneading bread for me. That bossy slave minder, the one they called Viper behind her back, she grabbed that gixie and took her off with no apology to me.”

“Right in the middle of kneading,” I repeated for a comment. I nodded yes to a slice of lamb and another of baked fish. When the server moved on I said, “That’s bad. But surely you can get other workers. The count should have hundreds of slaves, getting them cheap as he must.”

Iris shook her head. “Only the debt ones, as owed his da and grandda. Slaves is expensive. You can’t just take your own when you like, my man told me. You have to sell them and pay investors their money back. I’m not one for slaves, anyway. You need three times as many to do the work of one free mot or cove. My man manages the apple farms for the count. He says the only places slave labor really pays off is the big fields like they have in Maren or Carthak.”

The mot on Iris’s left said something to them, taking their attention from me. I broke the fish up and fed it to Pounce under the table between bites of lamb, wondering if Iris’s man was right. It would explain why there were so few slaves in the city who didn’t belong to the temple, the palace, or the slave traders themselves.

We got stewed beef, new peas, and stewed greens while the nobles applauded the arrival of venison and the roasted, stuffed pig. Pounce had left me, so I worked on my food alone, watching the crowd. And then a thread of air wrapped around me, carrying voices.

“—six blades with rust. Six! I don’t call that satisfact’ry, nor will—” That was a cove, all military-sounding.

“—you’d think I was speakin’ Yamani, the way she gawped at me!” A mot, mayhap a bit older than I am.

There was a dust spinner nearby. It had sensed me, and the feel of it raced through the breeze that touched me in that huge chamber.

“—one kiss of your hand, no more. Only let me know I may hope!” A cove, educated and noble, and what a cracknob!

“—I’d say you jest, Niccols, save you have no humor that I know of.” I did not recognize this tight-arsed mot’s voice, but she was noble, no doubt of it. “Count Dewin would never place slaves in the guest wing. He’d cut off an arm before he’d soil rooms meant for the nobility.”

“Far be it from me to argue with my lady’s own cousin, but it’s true.” From his careful way of pronouncing things, Master Niccols sounded as if he might have had a bit more to drink than was wise. “He took them up himself—”

The rest was lost. I wondered if the spinner itself might have more. Where was it? Not inside. They were never inside. What kind of power did a spinner have that would cause it to sense me, and reach me, all the way in here?

The mots around me were well taken up in chatter. The ale pitchers had been replaced twice up and down the table. I tapped Fay on the shoulder and asked her, talking direct into her ear, where I might find a privy I was permitted to use. With her instructions, stooping as I slid between two servants bound for the door, I left the great hall.

Rather than follow the servants, I parted from them and raced up to the room, where I hoped to find doors unlocked and my packs with Sabine’s. I was right twice. The ladies’ solar and the countess’s office were open, and my packs were there, showing signs of the maids’ hunt for my uniform. Achoo greeted me with enthusiasm. She was hungry
and
ready to go outside. I saw a cot had been set up for my lady, and a pallet for me. I hoped that Farmer’s bug charm still held as I groped in my things.

With a packet of dust from the Day Market in Corus and another from Serenity’s garden in Port Caynn, I went outdoors, Achoo at my side. We walked along the skin of the great hall until we halted between two doors that opened from it to a broad terrace. Here breezes from the spinner found me, passing me strands of talk that flowed from the heated chamber across the terrace and down its steps into a good-sized garden. Torches lit my way and voices reached in my ears. I tucked myself in the shadows by the hedges and went in search of voices and spinner alike. Achoo ran silently at my heels.

“—going over the books and I cannot reconcile these amounts. We should have far more coin in the treasury.” That was the mot Niccols had called “my lady’s own cousin,” the stiff arse.

“Ignore it, Lady Rosewyn.” That was the count. “I had use for that coin.”

The second thread of conversation drowned out the first. “—well, I can do better than a plate-faced virgin nobody who talks of little but religion.” This cove’s voice I did not know. “If you like her so much, Graeme,
you
marry her.”

I did not hear the answer. Graeme, who was likely the baron of Aspen Vale, must have said something. There was a long pause before my speaker, Elyot, that would be, said, “I’ve never heard of him, but I’m not concerned. Did you see the way he bolted back the ale? No mage with any great power drinks like that. The risk is too great that our magical Gift will start to leak. Besides—”

His voice was gone. I was forced to listen to an eager cove trying to get his fambles into his giggling sweetheart’s clothes until the currents in the air led me to the far side of a stone-lined pond. There, on the middle of the broad path, turned my dust spinner. It was thin, like a narrow tornado, nearly twenty feet tall, and, I sensed, very old. No wonder it had so much power.

“Achoo, either sit or wander, but behave,” I told her. The clever thing had learned years ago to recognize when I listened to the air, and never bothered me when I did so. Now she trotted off to investigate an interesting rustle in the bushes.

I bowed to the spinner. She had bent herself almost in two, as if she were looking at me. Certainly she wasn’t about to bow to any of the many scuttling mortals that had come her way. “I give you greetings, ancient one,” I said and showed her my two packets. “I brought gifts for you, if I may.”