The Four Forges (38 page)

“We hear.” Nutmeg touched Rivergrace’s wrist at that, knowing how her sister was always drawn to water. Neither of them had been out to investigate the old well, sunken and disreputable looking, boarded up and choked over with dried caroweeds whose tiny yellow and wizened fruit attracted wee songbirds every morning and evening.

Rivergrace echoed a soft word in agreement and turned away as the boys buffeted one another, patting themselves down for their own hand-carved pipes.

Grace led the way back to the house which had been set to rights under Lily’s hand, clean and shining as it could be, although Tolby had promised to rebuild walls and rooms as they went. She ducked into the small back room which the two of them shared and quickly washed down in the basin of water they’d left waiting, throwing the used water out in the garden, and drawing a fresh one for Nutmeg. She changed her blouse and bodice, then brushed her hair out on the back porch as she waited for her sister. Far across the yard, at the edge of the house grounds, she watched tiny city birds sit upon the boarded-up well, and chirp and fight with each other for the tiny swarm of gnats hanging about, their feathers flashing with brown and gold and bronze tones.

She rose and walked to the well and tried to peer down through the weeds crowding the boarded cover. She could feel the dampness below. She missed the Silverwing, the sound and feel of running water. Grace toed the tall, gnarled weeds growing about the mouth of the well, just beginning to think about something that she lost when Nutmeg’s whistle pierced the air behind her. She whirled around to see Nutmeg waving her bodice about.

“Come lace me!”

“I had better. You can’t go prancing about the streets any other way!” Laughing, she joined Nutmeg and promptly laced her firmly into her garment. She held a small note in her hands, the way to the shop marked in Lily’s small, neat script.

“Think we look fit enough?”

The two eyed one another. One tall and slender, the other shorter and well-curved, both clean, dressed in sweeping skirts, blouses, and embroidered bodices, ribbons in their shining hair. The corners of Rivergrace’s mouth turned up. “I think we look fit for a Spring fair.”

“Good. Mom doesn’t want us scaring off any customers!” Nutmeg tugged her blouse into a slightly more comfortable position. “Let’s hurry. I’m starving, and I don’t want to miss a lunch if she’s putting one out.” She handed the note to Rivergrace, took up her kerchief handbag, and they set out from the side yard.

A small crowd had gathered by the pressing house, and they paused. Tolby stopped in mid-gesture, and pointed at them to the curious Kernans and Dwellers, men and women, lads and lasses, surrounding him. “My two daughters, Nutmeg and Grace. Inside, you’ll find my brawny sons hard at work. Or you best be finding them.”

Surprised, they dropped in slight curtsies. Nutmeg said, unabashed, “What’s going on, Da?”

“Neighbors,” he responded. “Come to say their greetings.” With that, he gestured back at the pressing house, inviting them in to see the work he’d done. Nutmeg watched them go with a grin.

“Da,” she said.

Grace smiled. “It takes a good neighbor to find good neighbors, right?”

“Or curious ones. Did they look like kittens?”

“They,” said Rivergrace firmly, “looked like city folk. And so do we, tardy ones!” She tugged on Nutmeg’s sleeve to hurry her out to the streets.

By foot, it was much farther than it had seemed on the cart, getting from the corner where their property spread out to the more crowded lane of homes and shops. Their new property, at the northeastern corner of the sprawling city, actually lay beyond the city gates, along with other small estates. Steep cliffs to the north and along the lake to the east protected them as well as the city wall did, it seemed. Rivergrace hoped they would find the bakery which gave off such wonderful smells of hot bread in the middle of the night, borne on the summer air in a tantalizing aroma. The lane began to be peopled, and oh, such people. Anyone she could imagine filled the lanes. Maids walking about with baskets on their head, filled with that bread she smelled baking at night, calling for fresh loaves and buns. Lads running through, carrying messages and packages for delivery, shouting, “Make way! Give way!” They ran by without waiting to see if anybody did, sometimes knocking people off their feet, and curses would rain after them.

Some of the wooden signs hanging out on the street they could easily recognize. Shoes, harnessworkers, metalsmiths, jewelers. They paused before one that showed two hands reaching out for one another, the sign swinging back and forth in a gentle breeze, and they contemplated it. Nutmeg tilted her head one way and then the other before saying tentatively, “A healer.”

The words had scarcely left her mouth before a delivery lad burst out of the door, slinging his leather satchel over his shoulder. “Make way,” he said importantly. “I’ve documents to deliver! Contracts! Give way!” and he dashed off between the two of them before they could take a step to the side, his satchel banging Rivergrace in the side. Startled, she laughed at herself, and Nutmeg, too, for standing about with their mouths open, wondering.

They decided it might be dangerous to stand about that shop any longer and moved on quickly. There were candlemakers and soap shops and perfumeries, all richly scenting the air with their various aromas. There were paper sellers and ink sellers. They did not gawk at the Dwellers, Kernans, and Bolgers walking the streets, going about their business or hawking their wares, but they did watch the few Vaelinars who strode among them, far more visible than the two had ever seen them before, and . . . this intrigued Rivergrace, veiled. They wore hats or thin gauze masks that covered their faces and their eyes like a galaxy of jeweled colors from view, and they moved through the crowd with unknowable purpose.

They needed no delivery boy to shoulder people away. The citizenry simply stood aside, with narrowed expressions, giving them all the room they needed to pass in the crowded lanes. Words followed in their wake, gone seemingly unheard, a phrase of honor now and then, but more often a low, muttered curse.

A cobbler sitting outside upon his stool, brushes quickly buffeting and polishing a pair of boots, spat, “Bloody slavers,” as a well-dressed gentleman passed him by without acknowledgment, but the words dashed upon Rivergrace like a spray of icy water caught in the scorn. He looked up, meeting her shock. “Beg pardon, m’lady, but truth is truth.” His calloused hands went back to polishing the boots vigorously.

Nutmeg hooked Grace’s elbow, marching firmly on, keeping her in step. Grace looked down at her sister’s face, unable to read much past the slight heated color blushing her rounded cheeks.

At the corner, she gave Nutmeg the small map and notes from Lily for her to peruse. When Nutmeg looked up and pointed out the direction, she ventured, “Perhaps I should wear a veil . . .”

“Don’t be silly. Hiding a thing often makes it seem more than it is. I think they wear those veils as a quiet way of shouting, ‘Make way! It’s a Vaelinar here, so give way!’ ”

Rivergrace laughed in spite of herself. “Do you think?”

“Do they clear themselves a path? Of course I think so! It gives me an idea, though,” Nutmeg went on, as she steered them down the right path. “Decorated veils might become very fashionable. I wonder if Mom has paid them any attention?”

“Nothing escapes her eye. Nothing.” Rivergrace mulled her words a bit. “Decorating them, though, might be something she’s not thought about.”

Nutmeg nodded vigorously as she led the two of them down the eastbound lane, twisting slightly toward the south as if the hills to the north set all of Calcort sliding downward a bit. The street here sang with vendors no less colorful than the other, and many of them sold wares Grace had never even known existed in the world, let alone wanted, and the two of them moved in slow wonder, taking it all in.

And then someone took Nutmeg’s purse.

 
 
Tiiva came into Lariel’s chamber quietly, ledger in her hands, and sat down without preamble, saying, “You’ve got to do something. He’s skulking in the woods, hunting, and he’s scaring the clothes off everyone.”

“Everyone?”

“The game at least. They’ve practically fled the immediate area, as if knowing a predator was among them.”

Lariel did not take her eyes off the arrow she was fletching, her nimble hands moving quickly and surely as she created the weapon. “He is not skulking, he’s camping. And he’ll come in when he pleases, as usual.”

“At least send Jeredon out to him and make certain he is all right. The ild Fallyn will do what they can to pique you after your denial. Tressandre took him in and nearly as quickly threw him out.”

She looked up at Tiiva then, whose neutral expression seemed as carefully wrought as the hunting arrow Lariel held in her hands and whose copper skin was as unlikely to show a blush as any Vaelinar’s skin. “What others would call hurt, the ild Fallyn call foreplay.” She set down the half-done shaft and capped the skin of glue.

“Don’t you feel a bit of remorse? You sent him back to her.”

“I,” corrected Lariel firmly, “sent him as my envoy. If he’s injured, then it’s an injury to me, and he must come report it. If he does not, then there is no injury and I have no quarrel with the ild Fallyn. I cannot act without evidence that anything is otherwise. I won’t be provoked, and he knows it.”

“Still...”

Lariel sighed heavily. “All right, then. Take Jeredon and go out and tell him his queen commands him to return to the court so we can prepare for the Conference. Is that acceptable?”

A faint smile played about Tiiva’s mouth. “Yes, my queen. It will have to do.” She rose, and left with a quiet rustle of her elegant skirts, the ledger book balanced on the edge of Lariel’s desk and quite forgotten.

Lariel glanced at it. She picked up her arrow and began fletching again, her mind on other thoughts as her fingers worked nimbly. She did not even notice that the edge of the arrowhead, not finally sharpened, was still keen enough to bring her blood out and stain its surface. His pride would never let him tell her if things had gone badly. They both knew she dared not take offense from the treatment he’d met. He wouldn’t tell her. Never.

 
 
Nutmeg sprinted after the thief without thought, just as she would have gone after one of her brothers who’d dumped a pail over her, Rivergrace half a stride behind her. Neither bothered yelling for aid, as it would only take breath, and they needed that to chase the urchin down. He dashed through the throng of folk as if they were not even there, and the two of them plunged headlong after him, getting a few elbows and protests as they did, but the chase didn’t seem to draw undue attention or surprise. Grace supposed those in the city must be used to thieves of all sizes.

Nutmeg kept on the young fellow’s heels, with the help of Grace who could see head and shoulders above most, and called out twists and turns as the urchin dodged into alleys and down back lanes, twisting tightly into a shadowy quarter of the city. The uneven paving below their flying boots turned into hard-packed ground, and then the urchin doubled back suddenly, past Grace’s reach and would have been gone but that Nutmeg threw herself in a diving tackle that brought both of them to earth with a gasping thud.

The boy rolled onto his back, laughing and choking for breath, and raised his hands in the air. “I give, I give. Dun be settin’ the guard on me.”

“Who needs the guard!” Nutmeg demanded as she promptly sat on the young man’s chest and pegged him down by his ragged collar. “Now give me my purse back, and don’t you be telling me you tossed it somewhere.”

“Mercy, mercy, ye wouldna hurt a poor motherless boy, would you?”

“Your mother is probably waiting around the corner with a stick. My purse!”

He laughed again at that, dark brown eyes twinkling, even as he squinted his face up at her, expecting a blow or two. “Can’t be city-born, you run too well. I’d say you were country bumpkins, but you know too much. So you caught me. Just finish me, and don’t let anyone know, ’cause I got me rep, you know?”

“I don’t want your rep, I just want my purse,” Nutmeg told him emphatically.

Rivergrace leaned against a building, in the shadow, watching for anyone else coming in or out of the alley, although she heard no one, she thought there might be a pair or two of eyes spying. The urchin rolled an eye at her, not unlike Bumblebee when he thought he might be carrying too much weight for his own good, and looked back up at Nutmeg from under a fringe of curly brown hair.

“Must be a mighty full purse to be important enough to chase me into a back alley where anything could be waiting.”

Nutmeg took a deep breath and shook the boy by his collar. “I have three brothers,” she told him. “And I’m not past stripping you down like it was bathing day to get it off you.”

“Now that’s an offer I canna turn down.” The boy grinned. He was still grinning when Rivergrace bent over him, letting the sun strike her face and her eyes. He paled then and tried to wiggle out from under Nutmeg.

“It would be wise,” she remarked, “to give it back.”

“Let me up, then.”

Nutmeg let him sit up, but stayed sitting on his ankles. He reached inside his patched pants and pulled out the purse, hefting it as he did so. “Pretty light for all this fuss.”

She grabbed it from his hand as Rivergrace straightened up, keeping her gaze steady on the urchin. “It’s not what’s in the purse, it’s the bag itself. My grandma made it for my mom and she gave it to me.”

He shrugged. “What if I needed it more than you?”

Nutmeg opened the purse and shelled out the three bright coins inside and dropped them in his lap before standing up. “Then take them.”

He whisked them away with a sweep of his hand over them. Rivergrace blinked. She hadn’t even seen him pocket them, but they were gone. “Ye’re a real lady,” the lad said. “But ye’ll be losin’ that purse again, sooner than soon.” He rose, and dusted himself off. “Not city folk, and ye’ll be marked in any crowd. So iffen ya dun want to be losin’ that again quick, ye hold it like this.” He took the purse from her and showed her how to carry it, tucked under her elbow and with her arm through the strap in a certain way. He corrected her a few times as she tried to wear it the same way. Finally, he patted her arm. “There. N’ one’ll be grabbin’ it now, or light-fingerin’ it open. It’s not only secure, but, well, ye’re holding it like one of us.” He lowered his voice and looked about. “We dun be stealin’ from ourselves, ye know.”