“You…”
“We did!” Laric assured him, rocking with laughter in his seat. “Dumwei, claiming his right as birthday boy, goaded his brothers into a drinking game. By midnight, all six of them were sprawled out and snoring like harvest hogs. So late last night—”
“This morning,” Sharrar put in.
“This morning, Sharrar and Hyrryai and I—”
“Hyrryai?” Shursta looked at his mesh-mate. She would not lift her eyes to his, but the corners of her lips twitched as she tore her roll into bird-bite pieces.
“—snuck into their chambers and sewed them in!”
Shursta hid his face in his hands. “Oh, by all the Drowned Cities in all the seas…”
Sharrar limped around the table to fling her arms about him. “Don’t worry. No one will blame you. I made sure they’d know it was my idea.”
He groaned again. “I’m afraid to ask.”
“She signed their faces!” Laric threaded long fingers through his springy black hair. “I’ve not played pranks like this since I was a toddlekin. Or,” he amended, “since my first-year wife left me for a man with more goats than brains.”
Sharrar slid down beside him. “Laric, my friend—just wait till you hear my plans for the hoopball field!”
“Oh, the weeping gods…” Shursta covered his face again.
A knee nudged his knee. Hyrryai’s flesh was warm beneath her linen trousers. He glanced at her between his fingers, and she smiled.
“Courage, husband,” she told him. “The best defense is offense. You never had brothers before, or you would know this. My brothers have been getting too sure of themselves. Three meshed already, their seeds gone for harvest, and they think they rule the world. Three of them recently come of age—brash, bold, considered prize studs of the market. Their heads are inflated like bladder balls.”
Sharrar brandished her eating blade. “All it takes is a pinprick, my sweet ones!”
“Hush,” Laric hissed. “Here come Plankin and Orssi.”
The brothers had grim mouths, tousled hair, and murder in their bloodshot eyes. Perhaps they had been too bleary to look properly at each other or in the mirror, for Sharrar’s signature stood out bright and blue across their foreheads. Once they charged the breakfast table, however, they seemed uncertain upon whom they should fix their wrath. Sharrar had resumed her seat and was eating an innocent breakfast off three different plates. Laric kept trying to steal one of them back. Hyrryai’s attention was wholly on the roll she decimated. Orssi glared at Shursta.
“Was it you, Sharkbait?” he demanded.
Shursta could still feel Hyrryai’s knee pressed hard to his. His face flushed. His throat opened. He grinned at them both.
“Me, Shortsheets?” he asked. “Why, no. Of course not. I have minions to do that sort of thing for me.”
He launched his breakfast roll into the air. It plonked Plankin right between the eyes. Unexpectedly, Plankin threw back his head, roaring out a laugh.
“Oh, hey,” he said. “Breakfast! Thanks, brother.”
Orssi, looking sly, made a martial leap and snatched the roll from Plankin’s fingers. Yodeling victory, he took off running. With an indignant yelp, Plankin pelted after him. Hyrryai rolled her eyes. She reached across the table, took back the plate of oranges from Sharrar, and popped a piece into Shursta’s mouth before he could say another word. Her fingers brushed his lips, sticky with juice.
It did not surprise Shursta when, not one week later, Laric begged to have a word with him. “Privately,” he said, “away from all these Blodestones. Come on, I’ll take you to my favorite tavern. Very disreputable. No one of any note or name goes there. We won’t be plagued.”
Shursta agreed readily. He had not explored much of Droon beyond the family’s holdings. Large as they were, they were starting to close in on him. Hyrryai’s mother Dymorri had recently asked him whether a position as overseer of mines or of fields would better suit his taste. He had answered honestly that he knew nothing about either—and did the Blodestones have a fishing boat he might take out from time to time, to supply food for the family?
“Blodestones do not work the sea,” she had replied, looking faintly amused.
Dymorri had high cheekbones, smooth rosy-bronze skin, and thick black eyebrows. Her hair was nearly white but for the single streak of black that started just off center of her hairline, and swept to the tip of a spiraling braid. Shursta would have been afraid of her, except that her eyes held the same sorrow permeating her daughter. He wondered if Kuista, the youngest Blodestone, had taken after her. Hyrryai had more the look of her grandmother, being taller and rangier, with a broader nose and wider mouth, black eyes instead of brown.
“Fishing’s all I know,” he’d told her.
“Hyrryai will teach you,” she had said. “Think about it. There is no hurry. You have not been meshed a month.”
True to his word, Laric propelled him around Droon, pointing out landmarks and places of interest. Shops, temples, old bits of wall, parks, famous houses, the seat of the Astrion Council. It was shaped like an eight-sided star, built of sparkling white quartz. Three hundred steps led up to the entrance, each step mosaicked in rainbow spirals of shell.
“Those shells came from the other Nine Islands,” Laric told him. “When there were nine other islands.”
“And you think there might be more?”
Laric cocked his head, listening, Shursta suspected, for the derision that usually must flavor such questions. “I think,” he answered slowly, “that there is more to this world than islands.”
“Even if there isn’t,” Shursta sighed, “I wouldn’t mind leaving this one. Even for a little while. Even if it meant nothing but stars and sea and a wooden boat forever.”
“Exactly!” Laric clapped him on the back. “Ah, here we are. The Thirsty Seagull.”
Laric Spectrox had not lied about the tavern. It was so old it had hunkered into the ground. The air was rank with fermentation and tobacco smoke. All the beams were blackened, all the tables scored with the graffiti of raffish nobodies whose names would never be sung, whose deeds would never be known, yet who had carved proof of their existence into the wood as if to say, “Here, at least, I shall be recognized.” Shursta fingered a stained, indelicate knife mark, feeling like his heart would break.
Taking a deep, appreciative breath, Laric pronounced, “Like coming home. Sit, sit. Let me buy you a drink. Beer?”
“All right,” Shursta agreed, and sat, and waited. When Laric brought back the drinks, he sipped, and watched, and waited. The bulge in Laric’s narrow throat bobbled. There was a sheen of sweat upon his brow. Shursta lowered his eyes, thinking Laric might find his task easier if he were not being watched. It seemed to help.
“Your sister,” Laric began, “is…”
Shursta took a longer drink.
“Wonderful.”
“Yes,” Shursta agreed. He chanced to glance up. Laric was looking anywhere but at him, gesturing with his long hands.
“How is it that she wasn’t snatched up by some clever fellow as soon as she came of age?”
“Well,” Shursta pointed out, “she only recently did.”
“I know, but…but in villages like Sif—small villages, I mean, well, even in Droon—surely some sparky critter had an eye on her these many years. Someone who grew up with her. Someone who thought, ‘Soon as that Sarth girl casts her lure, I’ll make damn sure I’m the fish for that hook! Take bait and line and pole and girl and dash for the far horizon…’”
Shursta cleared his throat. “Hard to dash with a game leg.”