The Adorned (3 page)

It’s because they have moss in their brains
, they used to say in Lun, and then they’d laugh. Not at me—at the Gaelta stoneworkers who came down from the hills for summers in the quarry. Still, my eyes were as green as theirs.

Someone collided with me, hard, and I pulled myself upright, swaying, ready to fight. My eyes were blurred. “What else do you
want?
” My voice cracked on the last word, like a child’s.

“Easy there.” This was a new voice, a man’s voice, low and soft. A gloved hand took mine, pulled me away from the crowd with casual strength.

I blinked away the blur and looked up. The man was large, built tall and broad, with greying dark hair in a braid thick as a sailor’s rope. He was Gaelta, that much I could tell from his green, deep-set eyes, almost the same shade as my own. It was an unsettling familiarity, like looking into a distorted mirror.

Our eyes were all we had in common, though; he seemed inexpertly hewn from heavy stone, muscles bulging and twisting under his clothes. When he spoke it was in Gaelte; I barely understood him. “Boy, what happened to you?’

“They took everything,” I responded in Kered. The words came out in a rush; I felt dizzy and blurred. “Everything.”

A rickshaw had come to a halt beside us on the street, like a rock dropped in the river of the crowd. People moved around it, uncaring. A Keredy man peered down at us from up in the rickshaw, frowning. I realized the Gaelta man had been his driver. “What’s this, Gren?”

The Gaelta man looked over his shoulder. “There’s a boy. He’s been hurt.” He gazed back at me. “He doesn’t look so good.”

The Keredy man rolled his eyes and sighed. “Well, get him up here, by the Sun Queen. I’ve business to attend to, and it won’t do to leave him in the street.”

Gren hefted me up on the rickshaw, beside his employer. Then he took the poles in his great hands and we were moving. I looked back. The stain of my blood on the ground had already been trampled into a brownish smear. Soon nothing of it would remain, scuffed away by a thousand footsteps.

Chapter Three

The man in the rickshaw was called Maxen Udred. He was impeccably dressed in a suit of purple silk, with a dark coat. His high collar only half disguised a short, bullish neck; his hair was slicked back from his forehead in a way that made it look almost carved, like a statue’s.

The rickshaw was old, of Surammer style. War booty, perhaps, though it would have had to have been dragged many miles from the front to the Grey City. The paint was peeling from its left side, but its wheels were sturdy still. Gren pulled it through the streets, muscles straining, not uttering one grunt of complaint at my added weight. The rickshaw was barely large enough to fit us both. I was pressed up chafingly close against Maxen, feeling the heat of him from beneath his thin suit. He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. His smell was sharp, a presence of its own. I didn’t know how he could sweat like that, in the wintry chill of the city.

He looked at me, at my bruises, with a kind of chilly interest. “So. What happened?”

I told him as we rattled through the streets. Where we were going, I could not tell. He nodded at the appropriate points, but said nothing, his mouth thin. Finally, he sighed. “Where do you live, then?”

I half laughed, and pressed the back of my hand to my throbbing mouth to stop it.

“Nowhere near here, if I am right. Well, have you somewhere to stay?”

I shook my head. The ral I would have used to purchase my stay, wherever I might have settled for the night, were gone. The rucksack with my clothes, gone. If the nights turned cold—and they would, despite the mildness of the winter weather—I had barely enough on my back to keep myself from freezing.

Maxen heaved another sigh and tugged at his high collar. “There is a boarding house I have...some small stake in. You may stay there a few days.”

Charity, I thought. My eyes were hot. “Thank you,” I murmured.

“After that, mind, you’ll have to find work.” His eyes narrowed. “I don’t suppose you have something arranged in the city?”

“No.”

“Well, we’ll get you looked at first. Gren? On to the holding house, please.”

We wove down the roads, descending on a slow, gentle slope. There was a sharp smell in the air, coating the back of my throat: the tanneries, I thought, below the bulk of the city, downhill and downwind. Dark smoke rose from their chimneys, smelling of meat and lye.

In between two hulking buildings squatted a low, narrow house. The door was unmarked and the windows were thick and smoke-stained. “Here we are,” Maxen said. He shifted in the seat, and I pressed myself against the edges of the rickshaw.

Gren cleared his throat. “Shall I wait outside, sir?”

“Yes, Gren. I’ll take the boy.” He took my shoulder and turned me bodily, getting a long good look at me. His eyes narrowed a little. “There’s a woman here with some skill in medicine. She’ll have a look at your wounds.”

“Thank you,” I said, in a small voice.

“Come on, then.”

He knocked on the door with a heavy hand. A thin-faced woman answered, and her sour look shifted into an obsequious smile when she saw who was knocking. “Mister Udred! Come to see your clients?”

Clients?
I looked up at him, wondering, but he simply smiled.

“Yes, Alix. If we may?”

She looked at me, cocking her head. “Who’s this? A new one?”

He shook his head. “He was robbed and beaten on the street. I thought you might put him up for a day or so, on my account.”

“You’re so generous, Mister Udred,” she twittered, and she let us in.

Inside, at a long table, a card game was in progress. There were three men around the table, all Northerners older than myself by at least ten years, and two women.

One of the women seemed in her forties, with a weary air. She had the hook-shaped brand of a false-witch on her cheek—it was an angry, puckered scar. That same ragged crescent, tattooed on a nobleman’s skin, would be a mark of a priest’s special blessing. The other was a year or two my elder at the oldest, and her hair had the same nut-brown hue as my own.

“Good afternoon, all,” Maxen called out with a kind of false cheer; the card players looked up at him and stood at once, echoing his greeting.

Maxen took a small notebook out of his coat and flipped through its thin pages. “Lana Smethan?”

The false-witch stepped forward. “Yes, sir.”

“You have done nurse-work, have you not?”

She bobbed a curtsy. “I have, sir.”

“Then have a look at this boy. He’s been hurt.” He half shoved me forward, into her hands.

She took me by the chin and turned me this way and that. Finally, she clucked her tongue. “Come sit with me, young man, and I’ll get you fixed up.”

While we sat, Maxen circled the other three. He checked his notebook again. “Vanesse Grimsel?”

The younger woman curtsied to him. “Yes, sir?” Her voice was shaky, nervous.

“A family in Lower Wing, the Kinsheres, have need for a childminder for their twins. They will send their coachman to fetch you later in the week, so be ready for it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I winced then, as Lana passed a clean rag over my mouth. She fussed at my wounds with long, narrow fingers. “You won’t scar, I think,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Wounds to the face always look worse than they are.”

“They feel bad enough,” I said.

She chuckled. “That they will, but give it a few days and you will be back to your old self again.” She looked me over, top to bottom. “Have you come to work for Maxen, then?”

“Work for—?”

“He’s a bond broker,” she said. “He can arrange work for you, if you sign his contract. You won’t make money, but at least you’ll have a place to sleep and food to eat.” She shrugged. “When you’ve few other options, it’s better than begging.”

They were indentured, then, Lana and the others. They would sell their time, in parcels of long years. There were few indentured servants in Lun; it was too small for it. A farmer needing more hands would hire their neighbor’s children; a quarrymaster might lower his apprentice fee. When I was a child, there was an indentured woman at the inn, brought in when the whistling-plague killed the landlord’s sons. After her term, she had married a quarryman, then died of an ulcer a year later.

Maxen turned to Lana, then. “How is the boy?”

“He’ll live,” she said shortly. “Sir.”

“Good.” He nodded. “That is all I have for today,” he said, louder. He tucked his notebook away. “I will come back when I have assignments for the rest of you. As for you...” He looked down at me. “We can talk when you are feeling better, yes?”

I nodded to him, then. “Thank you, sir.”

One corner of his mouth lifted. “Don’t thank me yet. What’s your name, boy?”

“Etan. Etan Dairan.”

“Very well, Etan.” He nodded. “I will see you again soon.”

Chapter Four

I was cold when I woke. I had been cold since leaving Lun, but I thought that had been the nights curled up in hay carts, shivering in the cold air. Now, here, under a blanket with a low fire burning in the hearth, I was still cold.

I’d been nearly a week in the boarding house. The
holding house
, Maxen had called it, holding his indentured until he found work for them. Like fish in a bowl, I thought, and me floating aimless among them. At least they had not thrown me out on the street yet; Maxen had not been back since dropping me, and the housekeeper, I thought, would be loath to remove me without his say-so. Still, I knew I couldn’t count on staying here much longer. It wasn’t hospitality that had kept me here, I thought, but Maxen’s absent-mindedness.

I opened my eyes slowly. Rows of narrow beds spanned an oblong room so large it was almost a hall. There were windows, but most had been covered with plywood or sacking. I heard voices and low laughter. I sat up, woolen blanket wrapped around me, then climbed out of the bed. I was still wearing my shoes.

Lana was with me in the room, and the other man—I’d not learned his name. She smiled at me. “Look who’s awake.”

“Well, well,” the man said. “The little Gaelta prince graces us with his presence.”

I blinked, still half-awake. “I’m sorry?”

They laughed. “Where are you from?” Lana asked me. “You’re not city-born, are you?”

“No,” I admitted. “I’m from Lun, in the Lowlands.”

“A village boy, really?”

“I was born there,” I said, frowning at the disbelief in her tone.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose we all fall on hard times. But when your lip deflated, boy, we thought you’d be a little merchant prince, pretty as you are.” She grinned. “If you wait until your bruises fade a little you’ll make heavy coin doing night work.”

I looked at the floor, cheeks burning.

“Now look what you’ve done,” the man said. “Shame on you.”

“Yes, yes, shame on me,” Lana said, chuckling. “Don’t deny a withered old crone her fun, even if it’s at a poor youngster’s expense.”

The man sat down beside me and put an arm around my shoulder. His grin was not comforting. “If I were Maxen, I’d sell this one to the Blooded. Think how many years they could suck from his veins!”

“Trelan, really.” Lana clucked and shook her head. “Don’t tease. He’s a Lowlander. He might actually believe you.”

Trelan shook me, only half-playful. “You don’t think they suck the vigor from tender youths, do you?”

I shrugged off his hand, still staring at the floor. “No.”

“No, indeed.” He stood up. “They just suck the life and work from every man, that’s all.”

“
Trelan
,” Lana said sharply; he made a soft, disgusted sound in the back of his throat, but said nothing more.

There was a sudden bustle of noise from the staircase, and the door to the bedroom opened. The housekeeper stood in the jamb, red-faced with her quick climb. “You all,” she said, flapping her hand at us. “Udred’s people. Go on downstairs, he’s waiting for you.”

I followed them down into the common room, staying behind a little. Watching them.

They had done this before, more than once. They stood side by side, their easy laughter silenced, faces gone grim and composed. They looked like soldiers, lined up to meet with the commander.

And there stood Maxen Udred, in the same purple suit I’d last seen him in, or its very twin. Gren stood beside him, quiet and impassive. His green eyes flickered to me for a moment—only a moment.

Maxen had his notebook out, flipping through the pages, flicking his eyes back and forth. When his eyes settled on me, he frowned. “Wait, who are you?”

Gren leaned in to whisper in his ear, and recognition dawned in him. He smiled shortly. “Etan, was it?”

“Yes,” I said, and I cleared my throat. It would do to be polite. “Yes, sir.”

He tapped at his notebook. “Leave now—no, not you, Etan. I’d like to have a word. Sit down.”

I did; he slid in beside me. Gren stood behind us, impassive, arms folded. Now and then, he glanced at me from under his heavy brow.

“You must be looking for work,” Maxen said.

I nodded, not quite trusting my voice.

“What kind of work?”

“I can read and write, and I cipher tolerably well.”

He raised his round shoulders in an unimpressed shrug. “A clerkship requires apprenticing with a guild. That, I cannot help you with. What else have you done?”

“I know a little music. The harp?” I swallowed. “I can read music.”

“You’re a bit gently reared to be looking for work without an apprentice fee.” He made a sour face. “Have you done any real work?”

I looked at my pale, narrow hands, gripping the arms of the chair; at the faded patterns on the carpet. I looked anywhere save his cold, clever eyes. “There was a whistling-plague in Lun, when I was young. I lived, but...”

“But you’re frail,” he finished. “Well, that complicates things, doesn’t it? No mason or merchant is going to want a lad who can’t lift a stone, or who’ll faint in hot weather.”

“Come now, Maxen.” It was Gren who had spoken, in his thick Gaelte accent. “You can find him
something
, can’t you?”