Blood Ties (7 page)

“It looks like a layer cake,” Ash said, awestruck, and was thinking, Sweet. Rich. Delicious.

“Like old stale cake,” his mother said. “And full of maggots and weevils.”

A group of women in bright shawls and dresses without trousers underneath had walked past, laughing loudly.

“A few butterflies and ladybirds around, too,” his father said drily.

“Where you get sailors you get butterflies,” his mother retorted, then her face softened and they both laughed.

For years afterward Ash had looked for butterflies near any harbor they went to, but he had discovered they were few and far between.

Ash put the memory away from him and kept running. He rounded the Customshouse near the docks and began to climb the hill, past the swaying ghost of the drunk bosun’s mate loitering on the steps where he’d broken his neck, and past darkened taverns and brothels where only a single torch hung outside. The whores were asleep. Even the Sailor’s Rest, which never closed, had its door shut against the early morning chill.

He wanted to slacken off, to slow down as he breasted the hill, but he forced himself on, muttering the chorus once again. His feet slapped the cobbles a little faster. There was a drunk asleep in front of the Watering Hole. Probably asleep. Perhaps dead.

The girl’s face leaped to his mind: young, she had been, fourteen maybe, with pale hair and quick hands. She’d have had him, if he’d been the sozzled young merchant she’d taken him for. She’d have slit him from balls to throat and smiled while she was doing it.

But after she died —
after he’d killed her
— her face had been washed clean of all the greed and hatred. She had lain like a child fallen asleep, waiting for her parents to come home.

Ash threw up in the road. Bile burned his throat. He stayed for a moment, bent over with his hands on his knees, panting. He forced down the memories of the girl, of the smell of her blood, the heat of her body against his hand as he slammed her against the wall, the soft sigh as her last breath escaped her. He pushed them all back down and his gorge with them. Then he straightened up and began to run again. Doronit was waiting.

His memory flashed back three months to the first time he had seen her. It was early in the morning. The day before had been very long, very dispiriting. No matter where they went, no one had been interested in employing a Traveler boy with no skills and no references. Most tradesmen and merchants had refused to even see him, and those who had were scathing. “Wouldn’t sleep safe in my bed with one of you lot in the house!” said the butcher, who had been their last hope. Ash hadn’t been sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. He had dreaded the charnel house and the dismembering, the constant stench of blood. But at least, he had thought, butchers ate well.

They had gone back to their lodgings and sat slumped at the table. Even his mother had been diminished by a full day of hatred and distrust.

“Perhaps we could find a Traveler to take you on. A tinker or farrier, or someone like that,” his father had said.

“No,” his mother said. “There’s one more person left to try. Tomorrow.”

“Who?” Ash asked.

“Her name is Doronit. She’s settled. She hires out safe-guarders.”

“Swallow!” his father protested.

“I know it can be dangerous. But it’s a trade that will never go short of work. And it is . . . respectable.”

His father fell silent, passing his hand over his head in tiredness or uncertainty.

“I don’t mind,” Ash said. “There’ve been times I would have liked to know how to fight.”

His mother nodded. “That’s true. There’s always times for a Traveler when it would be good to know how to fight.”

His father stared at him. “If you fight, they kill you.”

“Worse things than death,” his mother replied.

His father smiled at that, the wide, wondering smile he kept for her. “They should have named you Hawk instead of Swallow,” he said, and kissed her.

The next morning, early, they’d gone to Doronit’s house, halfway up the thoroughfare leading to the most exclusive street in the city, a brick building painted pale yellow to mimic the golden stones of the rich. They had been impressed. But Ash knew now that she hungered to live at the very top, in one of the solid stone mansions.

She’d come to the door to answer their knock herself, dressed as most women in the city dressed: wide trousers tucked into boots, with a soft three-quarter skirt over the top, a wool shawl around her shoulders over a simple shirt. Her clothes had combined different hues of the same green. It was a modest, sensible, reassuring outfit. It should have made him feel that he was applying to work in a respectable, comforting, solid enterprise.

But he had been nineteen so he’d looked straight through the clothes to the body beneath, which was curved and full and promising; he’d looked at the face, with red mouth, even teeth, long, dark lashes and something about the sapphire eyes that was neither respectable nor comforting. Their eyes met and he saw hers widen, but he’d been overtaken by breathlessness and he still wasn’t sure if it had been simple desire or something else, something like the pressure he felt when he knelt at the gods’ altars. He had coughed with embarrassment and turned aside a little, shuffling his feet, and he’d seen out of the corner of his eye that she was smiling at him in amusement. That he had made a fool of himself. He’d flushed. Had thought that she’d never take him on. He’d suddenly burned to work for her, to prove himself to her, to wipe out this first impression of gaucheness and adolescent stupidity. He had been following his parents around for days trying to find a job because he needed to eat; because he had to leave them; because there was no place for him on the Road. He hadn’t cared where he ended up if he couldn’t make music. But he’d desperately wanted a place with Doronit.

His father had explained that they’d been looking to apprentice Ash. Ash had again been aware of her assessing stare and then a smile. But this time the smile had been fixed with pleasure, not amusement.

“Come in,” Doronit had said, her voice as beguiling as a tenor flute. “I would be happy to take this young man.”

From that moment he had dedicated himself to pleasing her.

Doronit owned a complicated business, the simplest part of which was the hire of safeguarders to other merchants. From protecting people who had been threatened, to guarding valuable shipments going from one town to another, to just standing around menacingly when large sums of money were being exchanged, safeguarders were as central to the merchants’ business as their own staff. But unlike their own staff, merchants didn’t need them every day, yet didn’t like hiring them off the streets or out of the taverns. So Doronit had seen an opportunity, a service that supplied safeguarders only when they were needed. She had a core staff of six and could call on another twenty or so at need. Of them all, only Ash was boarded in her house. That was part of the articles of apprenticeship, of course, and nothing to be proud of, but it still gave him a small satisfaction every time the others went home and he turned indoors with her.

By the time Ash reached the yard again, panting and sweating, the other six had arrived. Aylmer was sandy-haired and blue-eyed with broad shoulders and slightly long arms. He had taught Ash to stand absolutely still: he was the stillest person Ash had ever met. He was quick when he needed to move, but when he came to a stop — he just stopped. There was Hildie, tiny and fast, who was teaching him to spot pickpockets — mostly by teaching him how to pick pockets himself. Elfrida, who usually posed as a waitress, with long blond braids and rosy cheeks, had once knocked him backward clear through a window with one swipe of her singlestick.

And then there were the three others: large, alike, fair-haired, and with faces scarred and scowling. Their last job had been as night-soil carters and they were known, collectively, as the Dung Brothers. Ash could never tell them apart and no one ever used their real names. They didn’t seem to mind and, since they preferred to work together, an order to one was an order to all three. They were slower than the others at singlestave, but were so strong that one blow was all they needed to knock an opponent unconscious.

They practiced singlestave all morning, until Ash’s head was swimming with hunger and fatigue and the Dung Brothers hit him across the room once each, three in a row. They grinned, identical grins, and turned their backs on him dismissively. He was too tired even to feel angry. Then Doronit let him eat.

She led the way to the front room. Her room. The pale cream walls, unlike the bright colors most Turviters painted their houses, were just a backdrop for the other colors in the room. Margolin rugs on the floor, traded across the desert and then over the mountains, sang indigo and russet in the cool darkness. Blue silk curtains embroidered with dark green butterflies dressed the window. A line of matching glasses sat on the high shelf to the left — clear glass, worth a warlord’s ransom — with a bronze lamp kept alight underneath them to call up their multicolored fire.

The table, with a centerpiece of indigo linen, had been laid for a formal dinner: two knives, two spoons, a long spoonlike thing with a narrow cup on the end, like a tiny ladle. There were glazed ceramic plates instead of wooden trenchers and a piece of sea sponge floating in a pottery bowl.

“So. We begin the next phase,” Doronit said. “In order to be most useful, you will need to blend in with your customers. Sit down.” She picked up the tiny ladle. “This is for eating marrow bone.”

A month later, Ash carefully wiped his fingers and mouth with a sponge, and dropped it back into the bowl.

The town clerk was about to speak. Ash angled on his bench so that he could see down the room, as well as to the center table. He gave half an ear to the speech, and all of his sight to scanning the room for trouble. It was the main chamber of the Moot Hall, with a gilded ceiling and huge wrought-iron candle-rings on the walls. The tables were set with Caranese pottery and glass goblets. He’d seen rooms like these many times before, when his parents performed at feasts, but he’d never imagined himself being a guest in one of them. Well, perhaps not a guest. He was here to work. But he sat at the same table as the guests, and ate the same food; the serving staff spoke to him with the same respect. He felt warmth spread in his chest. His parents, for all their skill, had never sat at a waxed wood table and been offered food and drink by servants in livery. And thanks to Doronit, his table manners were as good as any merchant’s.

He brought his attention back to the present with a frown for his woolgathering, although he didn’t expect any trouble. The Annual Gifting Dinners were hardly dangerous. Everyone already knew what they were getting from the city profits for the year. The infighting was over. The grudges were being nursed. But there wasn’t likely to be any . . .

At the back of the room a door curtain waved in a draft. The councillor’s ghost standing beside it turned her head to look through the gap. Ash stood up and made his way quietly toward the door. That door led deeper into the Moot Hall, not out. There should be no draft. The Dung Brothers, on the other side of the room, watched him impassively.

He flicked the curtain aside, his hand on his dagger. Doronit was behind it, smiling.

“Good,” she said. “Very good.”

She patted his cheek, then looked through the doorway to where the merchants sat. Doronit was dressed in blond lace and dark rose silk, cut low across her breasts. Her dark hair with its touch of red was dressed high with sapphire pins. More beautiful than any woman there. More desirable. But not exactly an honored guest; only the most important merchant families were given grants at the Gifting Dinners. She was there to work, like him. He could read in the tension in her arms and the set of her cheek her desire to be in the select company at the high table.

“You deserve to be at the high table more than any of them,” he said. “Whatever I can do . . . You should have everything. You know I want to help . . . I could . . . I mean . . .”

What did he mean? That he was a prattling fool was what he meant. She would despise him, turn away from him. But although she had stiffened, displeased by his perceptiveness when he first spoke, by the end of the muddled speech she was smiling.

“I know I can trust you. It is good to know I have someone who cares for my interests,” she said warmly. But she gave him a little push, like one you would give a child. “Go back to your place, sweetheart.”

He went, the feeling of Doronit’s hand on his back, on his cheek, still warm, not knowing if she laughed at him or valued him, turning her words from this way to that in his mind. But because he wanted her to value him more than he wanted anything else, on the way back to his seat, he watched for signs of trouble. The councillor’s ghost watched Doronit out of the corner of her eye.

Ash knew Doronit was training others. She disappeared, sometimes for days. She had other houses in the city, other businesses apart from hiring out safeguarders. He didn’t even know how many. It disturbed him, if he let himself think about it.

Were her other employees better than he was? Quicker, smarter? Better at killing? He needed to be indispensable to her.

And when she was gone, maybe she was meeting a lover . . . someone more her own age, more sophisticated, more intelligent, more charming . . . She was twice his age, he knew; he couldn’t think of any reason why she would be interested in him. Yet she had taken him to live in her house; she was kind to him, buying him clothes, teaching him herself rather than leaving it to one of the others. She touched him . . . He remembered every touch, every glance, every smile. Surely she wouldn’t act like that if she didn’t like him? If he worked hard, learned quickly, became polished and strong, maybe then . . . ?

At the town clerk’s dinners and the Merchant House settling days, when merchants and creditors came together in the house’s settling room, to pay their debts and strike new bargains, he kept a lookout for others she favored. But he couldn’t, even using her training on how to read people’s eyes and faces, find anyone she smiled at with more warmth than him. She employed many other safeguarders, but no young ones, like him. No one who lived in her house, ate at her table. He let that comfort him. And finally her lessons turned to areas where he was not entirely ignorant.