Excitement, certainly. The double-flutter of lust and uncertainty. Giddiness. Elation. Almost all of love’s diminutive, trivial cousins—but love itself? I closed my eyes, delved down into myself, explored each organ, each part of my body in turn—heart, lungs, loins. My ribs ached. My chest was raw from so much running. I’d scraped the skin off the knuckles of both hands climbing the hull of the wrecked ship. They burned when I flexed them. All familiar sensations. Nothing I could identify, cut out, hold up to the light and say, This is love.
Finally, driven partly by the twin needs to drink and piss, I rolled myself out of the bed, crossed to the window, and tossed open the shutters. The sun had risen high enough to peer blearily from beneath a low lid of cloud. Mornings in Dombang are haze—cook-fire smoke mingling with river fog. It was already hot. After using the chamber pot and guzzling half the water from the clay ewer standing beside the bed, I strapped on my knives, slid into my light cotton pants and silk shirt, and went looking for food.
I found Kossal seated at a table by the very edge of the inn’s deck. A cup of ta steamed into the morning mist on the table before him, but he ignored it, focusing instead on the wooden flute he held to his lips. Despite the fact that we’d both lived most of our lives in Rassambur, I’d only heard the priest play half a dozen times. He tended to explore his music alone, in the mountains, staying away from the fortress for days sometimes, his only companions that flute and a large crock filled with water. Coming across him here, on the deck of an inn in the middle of a city, men and women seated at the tables just a few paces distant, was a little like finding a wild crag cat perched on one of the benches, lapping milk from a wineglass.
The other patrons of the inn up early enough to take their breakfast at the dawn hour seemed to feel the same way. They couldn’t know that Kossal was a priest, of course, but their eyes kept flicking to him, then nervously away, then back again, as though they understood that this old man was a creature unlike anyone they knew, something strange and perhaps dangerous, despite the beauty of his music. Kossal himself seemed not to notice the attention at all. He played with his eyes closed, coaxing the smoke-thin notes from his flute as though he were alone atop a sandstone cliff in the high Ancaz. At first I didn’t recognize the song, then realized it was an old, local dance tune, but played at a far slower tempo, until the silences between the notes seemed as much a part of the music as the notes themselves.
When he finished, he laid down the flute, but kept his eyes closed. A few tables away, a man and a woman started to clap. The old priest’s face tightened.
“I will confess that I am tempted,” he murmured, barely loudly enough for me to hear, “whenever someone claps, to give them to the god.”
I studied him, the lines inscribed into his face, then glanced over his shoulder to the applauding couple. I gave them a smile that I hope intimated something other than the possibility of their immediate slaughter at the hands of a priest of Ananshael.
“They appreciate the music,” I suggested quietly.
“If they appreciated it, they’d stop making that racket.”
“But the song is over.”
Oars slapped the water below us. A dozen paces upstream, at the inn’s docks, hawsers creaked. Seabirds screamed their tiny furies.
Kossal opened his eyes. “How do you know?”
“You played the last note. You put the flute down.”
He raised his bushy brows. “And if I picked it up again?” He lifted the instrument, flicked a tongue between his lips, then began playing once more, pouring his breath into the polished wooden tube, listening to it emerge as music. It was the same dance figure as before, but inverted this time, as though the original song had been a cry flung into the world, and this newer, transmuted music the long-delayed response.
“Be careful,” he said, when he finally laid the flute down again, “about saying something is over.”
Whatever that meant.
The nearby couple started clapping again. Kossal ground his teeth, lifted his steaming cup to his lips, and drank.
“I made my fourth offering last night,” I said.
“The Giver of Names. Ela told me.”
I stared. “How did she know?”
“She is your Witness. Said it was quite a night.”
I tried to imagine it. We’d been so focused on trailing the slender boat that I hadn’t spent much time looking behind me. It was just possible that we’d been followed.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“Sleeping, I would assume. That woman sleeps like a drunk pig. Have you heard—”
A new voice, Ela’s, cut him off. “I take issue with that characterization.” I turned to find the priestess sauntering toward the table. She wore a new ki-pan—jade green slashed with black, fine silk slit even higher up the side than the one I’d last seen her wearing. She seemed to have an inexhaustible supply, despite the fact that she’d carried only a small pack on the trek from Rassambur. If she was buying them here, she’d already spent what would have been a year’s wages for one of the local fishermen. “I’m quite certain,” she went on, sliding into one of the seats, waving over one of the servingmen with a manicured hand, “that when I sleep, it is as a graceful dove tucked quietly among gossamer.” She ignored Kossal’s dismissive snort, turning to me instead. “I say when I sleep, because lately I haven’t had the chance, busy as I’ve been following our impetuous young charge all around this lovely city.” She flicked open a filigreed paper fan, began to fan herself with it. “Quite exhausting, really.”
I studied her. She didn’t look exhausted. She looked like she’d spent the still hours before dawn bathing, then applying makeup, then oiling her skin until it glowed a warm, smooth brown. Her tight, cascading curls were still wet. She smelled of lilac and lavender.
“How did you follow us?” I asked, regretting the stupidity of the question even as it left my lips.
Ela glanced at Kossal, lowered her voice, as though feigning concern. “The poor thing is pretty, but I’m afraid she’s not very bright, is she?”
Kossal didn’t bother with a reply, and a moment later one of the young men approached the table, a steaming copper pot of ta in one hand. Like the rest of them, he had evidently been chosen for the perfection of his shoulders and chest, and Ela appraised him frankly as he poured, running her tongue over her lips, making a sound, half growl, half purr, deep inside her throat. He met her eyes, found, to his obvious surprise, that he couldn’t hold that gaze, and looked away, flustered.
Ela leaned over to me when he had gone, her voice a delicious whisper. “I like making them flinch.”
I opened my mouth, found no words inside, and closed it again.
“Of course,” she went on, as though she hadn’t noticed my awkwardness, “it’s easy with these. That man of yours, though—Ruc Lan Lac…” She lingered over the syllables of his name. “He’s not so easy to spook, is he?”
I shook my head, finding my language finally. “No. No, he is not.”
Ela leaned in. “Tell me more,” she murmured. “As I recall, you left off recounting the story just at the point where you’d chased a beautiful, bleeding, green-eyed man out of a concert and into the street. There was something about a fight he needed to get to.…”