Authors: Sharon Shinn
“Good, now
that’s
settled,” Steff said in a voice of utter boredom. “Can we go look at something else?
Anything
else?”
Corene made shooing motions with her hands. “Leave. We’ll catch up with you. You’re too annoying.”
It took another few minutes for the royal party to sort through the rest of the merchandise, pay for their purchases, and move on. They had hardly taken three steps away when another group of expensively dressed women descended on the booth, and Leah was kept busy until the market shut down at sunset.
“A good day,” she observed to Chandran, when they finally had time to count the money and lock up the cabinets for the evening. “You might want to order more of those shawls.”
“Dhonsho products always sell well. I think because they are so colorful,” he said. “Despite the fact that the Malinquese seem to strictly curtail color in their own fashions. Or maybe for that very reason.”
“I never saw much Dhonshon merchandise in the Plazas in Chialto,” Leah said. “When I open my shop back home, I’m going to import half my items from Dhonsho.”
“Will you be back here again tomorrow?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. I have to keep a couple of appointments. The day after, though.”
“I’ll look for you then.”
• • •
W
hen the next morning dawned sullen and damp, Leah almost changed her mind and headed to the Great Market because it was more pleasant to spend a wet day under a roof than walking the streets of the city. But she’d been lax lately; she needed to check in with her usual contacts just to remind them of her existence.
So she headed to the Little Islands to visit the friends she had carefully cultivated during the last few years. Her first stop was a small, aromatic shop filled with imports from Dhonsho. The windows were always covered with swooping swaths of jewel-toned fabrics so that the air seemed full of colorful shadows. The place was a maze of tables and shelving units holding baskets of merchandise—jewelry, scarves, buttons, children’s toys, figurines, goblets, wrapped baked goods, dried fruit, and bottles of liqueur. Hundreds of items hung from the ceiling on long red ribbons—big glass globes, bunches of dried flowers, complex pieces woven of sticks and yarn in fantastical patterns. It was impossible to wander through the narrow aisles without feeling like you were going to knock something over or hit something with your head, but Leah was fascinated by all the exotic items available and usually managed to visit every display rack before she left.
The owners were a wrinkled old woman, her daughter, and her two granddaughters—and possibly assorted husbands and sons, though Leah had never seen any men working at the place. They were part of a sizable Dhonshon community that resided here in the international district and kept some of their native traditions alive, though many of them had never set foot in their home country. Some time ago, Leah had learned that the old woman had emigrated here more than thirty years ago, when her daughter was fifteen; the two younger women had never left Malinqua.
“You’ll have to take them to visit sometime,” Leah had said when she discovered this, but the old woman had given her head an emphatic shake.
“It is a bad place for women,” she said. “We will not be going back.”
Leah was popular with all four of the shopkeepers, mostly because she’d performed a kind act three years ago. Their landlord was a miserly
Malinquese bachelor who hated all foreigners, despite the fact that most of his tenants fell into that category. He had never bothered to learn Dhonshon or even Coziquela, so most of his attempts to communicate with his renters consisted of shouts and pantomimes. On this particular day, he was yelling at the four women to tell them he was raising their rent because they always turned it in a nineday too late. Naturally they didn’t understand him, but he was so angry that they feared he was about to evict them. Leah had stepped in to act as both translator and mediator—
If they pay their money on time, will you forgo the raise?
—and the women had been grateful ever since.
Today only the youngest girl, Teyta, was on hand, yawning through a slow wet workday. “It is so boring here,” she complained to Leah.
“Do you mean in your shop or in all of Malinqua?”
“Both!” Teyta said with a laugh. “I want to sail to Cozique and open a shop in the famous jewel district. They say you can get rich in one day.”
“What they say and what is true might be two different things.”
Teyta sighed. “Well, even if I didn’t get rich, at least I would be living in Cozique.”
They only chatted a few minutes before another customer came in, this one Dhonshon and looking like she was ready to buy. “I’ll be back some other day,” Leah said with a friendly wave, and slipped out into the rain.
She made a few more stops before she ended up at the Welchin café where she liked to spend the most time. The scents and the foods were pleasingly familiar, and the gentle sound of spoken Welchin washed over her like a benediction. She used to get homesick whenever she dropped in on this place, but now she found its familiarity to be comforting instead of distressing.
It was no more crowded here than it had been at the Dhonshon shop, so the owner poured fruited water for both of them, then sat down with Leah for some gossip. They discussed recent news out of Chialto, then shared complaints about the horrible food the people of Malinqua seemed to consider delicacies. “That zeezin, I thought it would burn my tongue clean out of my head,” the woman grumbled. “Who ruins good meat with something like that?”
The owner didn’t have any useful tidbits to relay, though she did mention that one of her promised shipments was late. “Probably time to change my supplier—he’s coru, you know, and has never been reliable—but you’d be surprised at how few torz farmers you can find who want to ship overseas.”
“Maybe he just wants more money.”
The café owner laughed. “That would be true of a sweela man, but coru? He probably just got distracted.”
About an hour later, Leah had reason to think it wasn’t the supplier’s fault at all.
• • •
T
he rain had started to fall steadily enough to be miserable, so she’d wrapped herself in her red shawl and then layered on a hooded cape that was more or less waterproof. Still, she was both wet and irritable as she made her way down to the wharf, keeping her eyes on her feet as she sloshed through puddles and rivulets that made the uneven avenue no better than a streambed. She wasn’t the first patron to track mud and water inside Billini’s bar; the floor was almost as wet as the street outside.
Still, the place was mostly empty since bad weather had kept many regular customers home. Leah sat on a stool up at the front counter, nursed a beer, and commiserated with Billini on the day’s lost profits.
“Maybe tomorrow will be better,” she said. “Sun and a fair wind.”
“It hardly matters,” he groused. “In a nineday, I’ll be almost out of supplies and fighting with all the other taverns for the few shipments that get through. Maybe I’ll just close the place down for a half a quintile and head to the mainland to visit family.”
“Wait, I’m confused. Why will you be out of supplies?”
Billini snorted. “Didn’t you notice the wharf this afternoon?”
Leah had been too preoccupied with watching where she put her feet to lift her gaze and stare out at the water. “What about it?”
“There’s hardly a ship in port. Because of the Berringey blockade.”
FOURTEEN
T
he days following the discovery of Sarona’s body were so somber that Corene sometimes felt the whole enormous palace was sinking into the ground, weighted by grief and uneasiness. Preparations for the big celebration continued, as it was barely three ninedays away, but everyone felt bad about planning a party alongside a funeral. The formal evening dinners were sparsely attended, with Filomara skipping about half of them and various other family members choosing to take their meals elsewhere on random days.
“This is almost as bad as the time Aravani died,” Jiramondi said one afternoon as he tutored Corene in her Malinquese lessons. “I mean, I was only ten, but I remember how oppressive it was. No one wanted to evince the slightest joy in anything, no matter how trivial, for fear of offending Filomara. It felt like no one spoke above a whisper for a whole quintile.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out who’s genuinely sad and who’s horrified because it’s such a dreadful thing to happen and who’s just pretending,” Corene said.
One corner of Jiramondi’s mouth curled up sardonically. “That’s my very practical Welchin girl speaking,” he said.
Corene shrugged. “I didn’t know her, so I can hardly be in mourning. But I find it interesting to watch everyone else.”
“And what have you determined?”
“Greggorio is really sorry she’s dead. He genuinely liked her.”
“Probably too much for my aunt’s comfort, but I agree.”
“Filomara—found her problematic when she was alive, but even more problematic now that she’s dead.”
Jiramondi looked slightly amused. “Again, I’d say you’re right. Who else?”
She looked him straight in the eye. “You didn’t care for her much. And Garameno despised her.”
Jiramondi hesitated a moment, and then nodded ruefully. “She was a difficult and unlikable girl. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across someone who’s been blessed with every gift, and who doesn’t show a scrap of gratitude about it. Sarona just assumed that she deserved to be beautiful, to be wealthy, to be well-connected. She didn’t care that other people have struggles—if she noticed them at all, it was to look at them with scorn. She didn’t have an ounce of compassion or empathy.”
“Of course I’ve known people like that,” Corene said. “
I
was like that, at least when I was younger—and until I faced a few disasters of my own.” She thought about it a moment. “I might still be more like that than I’d want to admit.”
Jiramondi sat back in his chair and regarded her with a half-smile. “Now that surprises me,” he said.
She smiled back. “That I’d realize it about myself? Or admit it?”
“That you’d think it’s true. You’re much more aware of other people than Sarona ever was.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But I never liked people that much. And they never liked me.”
Jiramondi rested his chin on his fist and continued to regard her. “But they don’t repulse you because they’re different. Sarona was often repulsed.”
“Who’s different? Different in what way?”
He smiled. “And that’s what I mean.”
“Because Garameno is in a wheelchair, for instance?”
“Exactly. He’s not—” Jiramondi searched for a word. “A whole
man. Which, to someone like Sarona, made him abhorrent. But you don’t notice the wheelchair.”
“Of course I notice it,” Corene said. “I just don’t care. What interests me about Garameno is how clever he is. And how close he is to Filomara. And how very well-informed he is about everything that happens in Malinqua.
Those
are the things that define Garameno, as far as I’m concerned.”
“And you aren’t repulsed by
me
,” he said.
“By—?”
He spoke a Malinquese phrase that she didn’t recognize. When she looked puzzled, he offered the definition in a slow, deliberate voice. “A man who has sex with other men.”
“Oh, that.
That’s
not what I find interesting about you,” she said. “What intrigues me is how smoothly you maintain good relations with everyone in the palace. Few people actually dislike you. Most people trust you. But they don’t notice how skillfully you’re managing these relationships. Your brand of charm is so subtle they don’t realize how you’re actually using it.”
Jiramondi blinked at her. “What a very different way of looking at my existence, to be sure. Mostly I imagine that I’m frantically waving banners and organizing conversations to distract people from thinking about the things in my life they consider repulsive.”
Now she was the one to lean forward and study him. “Here’s what I don’t understand,” she said. “How does anyone
know
these ‘repulsive things’ about you? It’s not like you go around the palace kissing footmen or staring longingly at handsome young boys. At least not that I’ve ever noticed.”
He nodded. “I try to be circumspect. But I was discovered once—in a most unambiguous situation—and the circumstances were widely reported. I was too proud to lie and claim I’d been taken advantage of.”
“Who discovered you?”
“Lorian. Who, as you know, cannot keep a secret from my aunt, though I begged him.” He shrugged. “He’s never liked me much, so I think he was glad for the chance to try and ruin my life.”
“Why doesn’t he like you?”
“He’s always
hated
my father. Hated all of Filomara’s brothers,
actually, except Morli. So he’s never liked Garameno, either, which has always been a comfort to me.”
She grinned, but said, “So Lorian found you and told Filomara. What did she say? The empress has a lot of faults, but this doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would bother her.”
“No, it didn’t seem to change her opinion of me one way or the other—but others were in the room when he made his report. The prefect, for instance. You might notice that Harlo is not one of the people I’ve managed to charm. He considers my—weakness—to be so monstrous that he can barely stand to look at me when we’re in the same room.”
She’d witnessed that prejudice for herself. “Well, I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with such reactions from some of the royal court,” she said. “But for people like Melissande and me, it doesn’t matter.”
“Melissande told me that in Coziquela, the word they use to describe men like me is
sublime
. I don’t know the word in Welchin.”
“There isn’t one.”
“Because such a thing is unmentionable?”
“Because nobody cares. You think I’m being very tolerant and good-hearted, but I never knew anyone who thought twice about such a thing. Maybe if I’d been raised differently I’d be shocked, but it’s kind of hard to get worked up about it now.”