“Girl! Are you deaf? I said get out of the way!”
It took me a second to realize that the guard was talking to me. He was one of a group of soldiers who’d run up to help the beleaguered sailors. While I was just standing there, dripping, in the rough woolen dress and cloak Augustine had whipped up for me, to approximate female attire of the period.
But not female attire of the wealthy, I guessed, because I got a cuff to my ear when I took too long.
I got out of the way.
And scrambled up the hill to the shade of an oak tree, where a Medusa snarl of eels was lying in the dirt. They were waiting to have their skins stripped off by a curly-haired boy who did not appear enthusiastic about the work. But not because of the bloody eel carcasses, which he handled with the indifference of long experience.
But because he was missing what looked like the greatest medieval faire ever.
And so I stared some more. I’d heard the sound of a crowd from the pier—music playing, hawkers calling, people talking—but had thought it was coming from the city. And maybe some of it was. But the teeming mass in front of me was plenty big enough to account for it all on its own.
The walled city on the one side, and the port town on the other, had a grassy gap in between them. And that, plus the open land along the river, was clogged with people. I’d hoped to catch up with Rosier and help him locate Pritkin before Billy got back, but how was I supposed to find him in this?
How was I supposed to find anyone?
Everywhere I looked there were tents and performers and overly excited dogs. There were drunk adults and laughing kids and gap-toothed old women selling mead. Over by the city walls, an archery contest was going on, with regular roars of approval from the crowd. Closer in, a swarthy type with a hooknose and a wand was painting stories in the air with fire: battling knights and fierce dragons and a princess in a tower. And a little way off, a couple of enterprising guys had rigged up a clay oven on a cart, so they could sell fresh-baked pies to the crowd.
The pies smelled heavenly, to the point that my mouth started watering, but I had no money. So I pulled out a pouch I’d slung around my neck, because I couldn’t afford to be hungry right now. Although cranberry nut bars seriously lost out compared with fresh-baked meat and bread.
Only somebody else didn’t seem to think so.
I looked down to see Eel Boy staring longingly at my snack. For a kid who worked at a food stall, he wasn’t exactly overfed. The arms and legs under the rough tunic were thin, and the cheeks, while not sunken, lacked the expected layer of baby fat. I glanced at the burly guy on the other side of the tree, stirring a pot of stew, who looked like he ate all the leftovers, and who wasn’t paying us any attention.
Then I crouched beside the boy. “Want one?”
He looked from the peeled bar to me and back again. And licked his lips. But he didn’t take it.
“It’s yours,” I said, and took out another, after putting his on the edge of my dress.
I got my wrapper off and started eating, and the next time I looked down, he had a mouth full of PowerBar and was chewing furiously. I grinned. I’d still rather have had a pie.
I ate my bar while scanning the crowd some more, but instead of Rosier I kept finding fey. Maybe because they were everywhere, making up at least a third of the revelers. And while I didn’t know a lot about the Light Fey, I knew enough to find it creepy that members from the three major houses were standing around the same pie wagon, and not trying to kill each other.
Well, the Blue and Green were standing around the wagon, debating the virtues of venison versus lamb. The Svarestri, in their black-and-silver finery, were just nearby, watching everything with flat gray eyes, their expressions making even the drunker members of the crowd give them a wide berth.
The pie guys kept looking at them narrowly, like they were driving off business, and eventually picked up their mobile kitchen and moved a dozen yards away, over by some sausage sellers.
The Svarestri didn’t even seem to notice. They stayed where they were, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the docks. Where people trying to bring up baskets of slippery fish were being dive-bombed by seagulls and blocked by the crowd that had stopped to gawk at the still-smoking ships.
Or at the new one just coming into view.
I hadn’t noticed it before, because it was almost impossible to see at any distance. Or even closer up, because it looked like the whole thing was coated in the cloaks the fey wore, the kind that reflected whatever was around them. The result was a ship that looked like it was made out of the waves themselves, translucent and watery bright, with sails that caught and reflected the rays pouring through a gap in the clouds.
It was beautiful.
And suddenly, that traffic problem got a whole lot worse. A trumpet pealed, a distant, pure note that had heads turning and conversations falling silent. And the next thing I knew, I was being squashed against the tree, me and Eel Boy, who had grabbed his basket protectively when what looked like the whole damn city descended on us.
After the second elbow to the ribs, I climbed up the tree after the boy, who was scaling it like it was horizontal.
Of course, some of it was, the burls and knots on the old trunk making convenient hand-and footholds, allowing us to get above the crowd. We found a perch on a more or less level limb, where he plopped his basket down and continued shucking eels as the throng surged below. And as the ship came closer, gliding silently up the river while more soldiers joined the fray, shouting orders at each other to hold back the crowd.
“Clear a path! Clear a path!”
The locals had obviously dealt with the soldiers’ short tempers before. Because there was a sudden surge away from the docks. Except for a couple of sailors, who were shoved unceremoniously aside, arguing loudly because their boat was still burning.
Nobody cared.
“Clear a path! Clear a path, damn you!” The dock was clear now, but the soldiers weren’t satisfied, forging a wedge into the crowd, cutting a route from the pier to the grassy open area between the two towns. They’d just finished when the ship glided to a stop.
“Who is it?” I asked the boy, whose disbelieving dark eyes rolled up at me.
“Seriously?”
I blinked at him. Had that been sass?
He smirked.
That had definitely been sass.
“Who else would have a ship made out of water?” he asked.
“It’s not actually made out of water,” I said. “It just looks like it is.”
“Oh, right.” He didn’t bother to hide a smile.
I looked back at the dock. And was just in time to see the hull, sails, and even the delicate rigging, which had all been gleaming translucent pale in the sunlight a second ago, suddenly disintegrate. And plunge back into the river, a fantastic mass of water all falling at once, with a splash big enough to drench the crowd almost as far as our tree.