“I beg your pardon, Highness,” he said. “As always, I welcome your custom here at The Quarely Maid—”
“As you should,” Astrian said. “What other middling low establishment— forgive me, I am being frank—can claim such an exclusive clientele? Now go away and bring us that ale.”
“Here, now.” Hatcher was a husky, hairy man, but at the moment he looked as though he might weep. “No call for that. What’s that you’re sitting on? A bench, and a good one. And what do you call this?” He leaned forward and rapped his knuckle against the wood. “A table. The first place in Badger Street or anywhere near Market Square with a real, true table, this is. I’m not asking His Highness to sit on the floor. I’m not asking him to balance his bowl on his lap. This is quality, this place of mine.”
Morgan looked at the rest of the drinkers, who were seated around trestles made of planks balanced on barrelheads. The rest of the drinkers looked back, pleased by any diversion, as always. “Quality,” Morgan repeated.
“Yes, Your Highness. And, begging your pardon, my prince, but you’ll notice that every leg on this table is the same length. No broken, tipping-over trash in here.”
“Except Porto,” said Astrian.
Morgan could not help laughing. The old man sat up—it was true, he had been leaning a bit precariously—and tried to look indignant.
“But all this quality is costing me,” said Hatcher, determined not to be distracted. “So we come to a delicate matter, Your Highness, if I may be so bold.”
“As if we could stop you,” said Astrian. “You are clearly determined to bore us all until we must find another wayside oasis in which to soothe our nerves.”
“Don’t joke, Sir Astrian. You’ve been good to me—the prince has been good to me—and his custom is always welcome here. Speaking of quality, the Lady Strange herself came in just the other night.”
“Liza? Ah, I miss the girl,” said Astrian. “What is she doing these days? Have those red bumps gone away?”
“Just so,” said the publican, ignoring him. “Liza Strange herself, and you know she’s quality, too. Won’t even bed a man who doesn’t have an income and a house.” Hatcher appeared to have muddled himself a bit, and stopped to get his bearings. “Anyroad, as I said, I’m grateful for your custom, Highness,” he told Morgan, “but there is the matter, begging your pardon, of some unpaid bills.”
Morgan sighed. “Oh, for God’s bloody sake, just send them to Lord Jeremias the royal chamberlain. He’ll make it all right.”
“But that’s just the thing,” said Hatcher. “Before you left for the north, the lord chamberlain sent me a letter, a very stiff letter, and said the household wouldn’t no longer be responsible for your tavern bills. That’s what he said. And that I should stop dunning him. That you would take care of it yourself from now on.”
A minor annoyance was swiftly becoming a rather large source of alarm. “It’s a mistake,” Morgan said. “I’m sure it’s a mistake. Write to him again.”
“Three times already. The last time was the time he answered.” Hatcher looked quite cruelly caught between the urge to toady and the urge not to lose his establishment. “And the thing of it is, Highness, what you owe—” He bent forward and put his bearded face close to Morgan’s ear. “Two gold pieces already, and a handful of silver. And that is without the door that came off last Decander. I had to replace that, hinges and all.”
“So what you’re saying is that I’m not welcome here?” Morgan asked, doing his best to put the chill of outraged nobility in his voice.
“Oh, by all the saints, no!” Hatcher, having taken his brave stand, quickly retreated. “But you see, Highness, I can’t keep extending credit forever. It doesn’t signify, you see that. And now that you’re back, well, I thought we should have this talk. So that I don’t have to take other measures.”
“Other measures?” Astrian leaned over the table. “Are you threatening us, potsman?”
Morgan saw the genuine fear in Hatcher’s face and intervened. “Enough, Astrian. Nobody is threatening anyone.” Except my mood, he thought, because a chance to drink himself into a better frame of mind had now been kicked to pieces. He stood up. This dark building smelling of hops and sweat suddenly felt like the last place he wanted to be. “You will have your money, Hatcher. I swear on my honor as a prince of Erkynland.”
“There,” said the publican, smiling and wiping sweat from his square, red face. “There. As nicely and courteously said as anyone could want. Your companions could take a lesson from you, Your Highness. That’s how the nobility behaves, honest and open-handed.” His eyes narrowed just a bit. “Might I ask when, if it’s not too impolite, sire? Because I owe money to the brewer myself, you see, and he’s been making noises that I have to say I don’t like much.”
“I’ll let you know, Hatcher. Come on, you lot.” Morgan stood and waited for his friends to get up. Porto had a bit of a sway, like a tall tree with shallow roots. Astrian and Olveris seemed almost completely sober, but Morgan knew that wasn’t so. They both built slowly to drunkenness; sometimes it wasn’t possible to tell until Astrian lost his temper or Olveris fell asleep sitting up, which he did almost as regularly as old Porto. In fact, Morgan wasn’t certain either of them was ever completely sober.
Now what will I do today? He had hoped to avoid thinking of such things, had wanted only to drift quietly and forget the trip to Elvritshalla, the humiliation of being kept out of the fight with the Norns, and that strange night on the mountain beneath the mocking moon. What will I do ever again? At the moment, he could think of nothing that appealed, nothing that would change his grim, strange mood.
Why did those terrible trolls take me up on top of that cliff? I haven’t had a peaceful or happy moment since.
He almost wished he had fallen.
Lady Thelía, Brother Etan could not help thinking, was both the most ladylike and the most unladylike noblewoman he had ever encountered. In some ways she was the ideal lady: she never lost her temper in public, as far as he could tell, and she dealt with everyone, whether maid or Lord Constable, with the same evenhandedness. But unlike most of the women in the court, Lady Thelía also had no problem getting her hands dirty. She was completely undisturbed by blood or anything else that was a natural part of life, and she seemed to revel in situations that would send most of her peers running or fainting.
Of course, in one sense those sort of ladies were not her peers at all: Lady Thelía came from a fairly ordinary merchant family, one that had not even tried to purchase a title, despite more than middling success and a better than modest villa in the hills of Nabban. And before she met and married Tiamak, himself among the most unlikely lords in all of Aedondom, she had been a nun.
It’s clear she wasn’t raised to be a delicate bloom, Etan thought as she examined the Sitha woman, this time with her husband watching.
“She has not spoken for days, and as you see, her breathing remains rapid and shallow.” Thelía lifted the woman’s eyelid and examined the eyeball beneath with no more trepidation than if it were a coin or a stone. Anyone who had not spent several days in her company, as Brother Etan had in the last fortnight, would have thought her disinterested, even callous, but he had seen her deep frustration at not being able to help this stranger.
“I am very willing to believe she has been poisoned,” Tiamak said. He turned to Etan. “And nobody can find the arrowheads dug from the wounds?”
Etan shook his head. “No. They were here one day and gone another. I remember at first they were lying on a white cloth, smeared with blood. Lord Pasevalles does not know what happened to them, either.”
Tiamak nodded. “Can you describe them to me?”
“I can try.” The monk closed his eyes, trying to recall that day, when he had found the Sitha fighting an armed guard to a standstill with her bare hands. “What remained of the shafts was very, very dark, I think, as though they had been rubbed with ink.”
“Like Norn arrows. But I am not convinced by that. If you think of anything else, Brother, please don’t hesitate to tell me.” He turned to his wife. “Black arrows. Could they have come from the Norns, do you think?”
She made a face. “Don’t ask me about arrows. You know more of such things than I do—all those years in the swamp hunting for food. And what difference would it make?”
“Because it is uncommon to see black arrows in this part of the world except those used by the Norns,” the small man said. “But I think I have seen such black shafts rubbed with lampblack in the south, when I was growing up.”