Ela would take that for a good sign, I thought, studying his face from beneath the hand I’d raised to shade my own eyes.
It looked as though his nose had been broken again, and a new scar puckered the corner of his chin. Not that it mattered. The scar and slightly flattened nose did nothing to diminish the high cheekbones, the smooth, bronze-brown skin, that serious brow. If anything, he would have been too pretty without the remnants of violence stitched into his face. While the rest of the Greenshirts seemed close to open panic, he scanned the crowd as though noticing it for the first time.
“Restive,” he said, shaking his head. “I hate that word.”
“Sir?” the Greenshirt asked, glancing warily over his shoulder.
“It sounds like rest,” Ruc went on, ignoring the turmoil beyond. “Makes me think resting.” He paused, frowned at the mob. “Which they are obviously not.”
“Sir…” the Greenshirt began again. Restive aside, his lexical range seemed somewhat limited.
Ruc nodded, stepped past the man, raised his voice—a warm, deep baritone—to be heard over the clamor.
“Who likes rum?”
Most people don’t expect rum at a riot, and the question seemed to confuse the portion of the crowd that heard it. Eyes narrowed, lips tightened, people shushed their companions, leaned forward, wondering if they’d heard right. Ruc had always known how to play a crowd.
“I know this seems very exciting,” he said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Dead people. A handprint. I can promise you, however, that it’s quite boring. I, for one, am the opposite of excited. We’re going to spend the morning hauling these bodies to the crematorium, then we’re going to spend some more time scrubbing blood off the flagstones, cleaning up the statue, and then I’m going to go back to the Shipwreck to spend the afternoon writing an extremely tedious report. You all can watch, or you can have free rum.”
He raised an eyebrow, waited.
“Ya can’t buy us off with your fucking rum,” someone bellowed from the crowd.
“How noble,” Ruc replied. “I’m glad someone with principles will be here to oversee the scrubbing. As for the rest of you, a ship from Sellas—Roshin’s Rage—docked in New Harbor this morning. It’s loaded with barrels of red rum and olives. Bring a basket and a large crock to the station manned by my men, and they’ll fill both.”
Ruc turned back to the statue without another word. The other Greenshirts scanned the mob warily, ready for the assault, but even as I watched, people were repeating the message—Rum. Free rum.—and those at the fringes were starting to slip away. A basket of olives and crock of red rum weren’t extravagant prizes by the lights of any reasonably wealthy merchant, but most of the men and women gathered in the square weren’t merchants. No one grew olives within three hundred miles of Dombang, and red rum was the kind of spirit they might enjoy once a year—at a wedding or a funeral.
The bodies were still there, of course, as was my handprint, the paint dry in the early-morning heat. Anger still simmered in the crowd, but it was cooling quickly; Ruc had given the mob nothing to do with that anger, nowhere to direct it. I could see why the bureaucrats in Annur had begged him to come back to the city, to take charge of the Greenshirts; he’d just sidestepped a riot for the price of a few barrels of rum.
I like the fights, he used to say, that I can win without too much punching.
It was a strange claim, coming from a bare-knuckle boxer, and I never really believed him. Ruc had always seemed ready for the violence, eager. Which was lucky for him, because, though he didn’t know it yet, this fight was just getting started, and if I had my way it was going to involve a lot more than punching.
4
The sun hung well above the peaked roofs to the east by the time I returned to our inn. A few dozen patrons were scattered in ones and twos around the teak tables, sipping cups of steaming ta, plucking dewy fruit from their bowls, moving slowly and talking low to spare their headaches from the night before.
A bare-chested young servingman greeted me as I stepped off the bridge onto the deck.
“Welcome back to the Dance,” he murmured, a sly smile twitching at the edge of his lips.
I realized suddenly what I must look like: a young woman, obviously wearing yesterday’s rumpled clothes, her hair all disheveled, returning to her own inn in the surreptitious hour after sunrise.
“I hope you had a pleasant evening,” he continued blandly.
I shrugged, met his eye. “About average.”
“I’m desolated to hear it.” His smile did not look remotely desolated. “I hate to think of a woman like you forming an ill opinion of our city. Perhaps tonight you would permit me to be your guide? If you enjoy plum wine, I know an establishment—”
I cut him off. “I prefer quey.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A strong drink for a strong woman. There is a place I know—”
“I’m sure it’s delightful, but the only place I want right now is a quiet table and the only company I want is a large mug of ta.”
If my brusqueness bothered him, he didn’t show it. He just winked, gave a practiced half bow, and gestured me to a table at the far end of the deck, right next to the railing. I realized as I sat down that I was tapping a finger against the knife strapped to my thigh. I’d left the statue of Goc My in high spirits, but something about the young man’s flirtation had curdled my good humor. It wasn’t the mere fact of his advances; I’d heard worse a thousand times over in a dozen different cities. In fact, it was the banality of the scene that rankled, the ease of his invitation, his obvious indifference to my dismissal. The whole tiny episode just served to remind me how casually most people navigated the seas of romance and attraction, how love and all its more sordid derivatives seemed to come so naturally to everyone but me.
“Bad habit.”
I looked up to find Kossal lowering himself into the chair across from me. As a single concession to the heat of Dombang, the old priest had traded his heavy robe for one of much lighter wool.
“Talking to people?” I asked.
“That too. But I meant the knife.”
I realized I was still tapping at the hidden blade with one finger. Grimacing, I shifted the hand away, wrapped it around the handle of my mug instead.
“Where’s Ela?” I asked.
He shrugged, laid his wooden flute on the table in front of him. “Tangled between one naked body and another, I’d expect.”