“Three,” I murmured to myself.
I’d been back in Dombang less than a week, and I was almost halfway through my Trial. The easy half. I had ten days left to make four more offerings—fine. Ten days to fall in love. My limbs felt heavy, suddenly reluctant. The water lifted me, carried me lazily eastward. There was a peace in being so still in the midst of so much motion. I imagined the Neck beside me, also floating, caught in the soft grip of Ananshael’s warm and unrelenting hand, both of us carried all the long, silent miles to the waiting sea.
“Someday,” I said.
He didn’t reply.
Slowly, I opened my eyes, rolled onto my side, and started swimming for the bank. There’s no point setting a trap, after all, if you don’t plan on being there when it springs shut.
7
The Purple Baths comprised a steaming labyrinth of pools—public and private; cold, hot, warm, perfumed; some intimate, some large enough to float a small oceangoing ship—all beneath a soaring wooden roof held aloft on massive pillars of mahogany and dripping with red-scale lanterns. Almost as amazing as the bathhouse itself was the sheer acreage of naked human flesh. I was used to seeing women and men in all states of undress—Rassambur is no place for the prudish—but I had forgotten the scope of Dombang’s bathhouses. There might have been five thousand people in the vast hall on the evening when I stepped inside—the night after I’d killed the Neck—some submerged to their necks, others floating lazily on their backs, still others plucking towels from massive stacks, rubbing palm oil into their skin before getting dressed, turning to the nearest companion—male or female, stranger or friend—for help reaching shoulders and backs.
A good number of those ministrations ranged well beyond the purely practical. Sex in the bathhouses was frowned upon, but no one looked twice at the two men kneading a woman’s naked buttocks, or the lovers in one of the hot pools, the length of their bodies pressed tight together. I wondered suddenly at the wisdom of choosing this place, of all the spots in Dombang, for my reunion with Ruc, then glanced down at my body, aware in a way I had not been for years of my own nakedness. I was a shade paler than most of the city’s inhabitants—a legacy of my foreign-born father—and slightly taller than most of the women. I certainly had more scars. Eyes lingered on me as I passed. I wondered what Ruc would see. Did I look like the woman who had accosted him outside the Si’ite temple years earlier, or had I changed?
It was a relief to sink into the massive pool running down the center of the hall. Warm, lemon-scented water closed over me, steam wreathed my face, and as I floated out toward the middle, people lost interest, shifted their gazes to the naked bodies closer at hand. Just what I’d hoped for. Although the main pool was open to all eyes, no one paid it much mind—the city’s richest and most beautiful preferred the smaller, more secluded baths tucked behind carved screens along the walls. Anyone looking for gossip was looking there, hoping to catch a glimpse of something exciting.
When I reached the perfect center of the pool, I sank down until just my nose and eyes were above the water, then waited, wondering if my plan was insane. I had little doubt that Ruc would come—he was thorough enough to search the Neck’s jerkin, and there was no way he would ignore the note I’d hidden there. Meeting him, however, was just the first step. It was possible that he had changed, possible he hated me for the way I’d disappeared six years earlier, possible he’d arrive in the bathhouse with a dozen Greenshirts at his back. And my own unknowable emotions were even more worrisome.
Back at the statue of Goc My, Ruc had seemed like the man I remembered: casual, confident, just a little dismissive. On the other hand, I’d only seen him for a few moments, and from some distance. Hardly enough time to guess if I could fall in love, to know if whatever ember had smoldered in my breast all these years could be coaxed into an open flame.
I’d half convinced myself that the whole thing was a fool’s errand, that I’d be better off hurling myself at one of the other innumerable naked beauties in the pool, when I saw him. Most men and women tend to sink slowly into the bath, luxuriating in the clean water, letting it wash them, wash over them.
Not Ruc.
He waded in as though the pool were an impediment beneath his attention. He had none of the awkwardness of men trying to walk through water. Instead of just charging ahead, churning up a bow wave, holding his arms awkwardly clear, he moved like a knife slicing the surface, slow but inevitable. I’d missed the way he moved. That smoothness alone was worth watching, never mind the fact that he was naked.
I remembered those shoulders, broad but lean and well muscled. I remembered running my hands over those ribs, trailing my nails over the brown skin, and I remembered slamming my fists into him, trying to find the liver or the kidney beneath that solid flesh. I remembered his fists, too, and though he was too far away for me to make out the detail, I could see, in my mind’s eye, the scarred knuckles, the crook in his middle fingers where he’d broken them over and over. Dark stubble covered his face—he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. And then there were those green eyes, unmistakable even through the steam.
He was still ten paces off when he spoke, his voice low and level. “You owe me a bottle of quey.”
Six years. Six years since I’d walked out on him in the middle of the night, slipping away from the room we shared without warning or explanation—six years in which, for all I knew, he could have thought I was dead—and instead of any shock, any expression of surprise or disbelief, this was what he had to say.
“I suppose,” he went on, drawing closer to me, “you didn’t bring it with you.”
“As I recall,” I replied, matching his lazy drawl, “the bottle was already half empty when I finished it. We split the first half before you unchivalrously fell asleep.”
“Half a bottle of quey then.”
I smiled. “I’d be happy to. Name the place and time.”
“Here,” he replied. “Now.”
“You just got here.”
“And I already found what I’m looking for. How exceptionally fortunate.”