“It doesn’t help that you refuse to let me meet the Beguine daughters at their quarters, and instead hunt them down in the market like some opportunist carpet seller. They’ll never take me seriously.”
Arna shrugged. “My apologies, but I can’t take the risk some member of the household won’t recognize me. It’s not the safest place for a Jadaren. There are those hell-bent on keeping the feud alive. And if Kestrel finds that I came spying after her …”
“If so, it’s only the truth,” said Vidor, tartly.
“And should you keep an appointment with Ciara at House Beguine, there’s no guarantee that Kestrel will accompany her, while all are agreed that every third and seventh day they go marketing together for the needs of the House.”
“Our innkeeper is agreed,” muttered Vidor. “That’s hardly all.”
“Look, Vidor, if this falls through, I’ll take up the issue with my uncle. Fair enough?”
“I’ll hold you to that.” Vidor peered through the increasing mass of people, while Arna looked around for the source of the delicious smell. “Say, Arna, are you sure of your source? I see no pair of sisters bargaining at stalls, and I can’t imagine a Beguine not arguing for the best price.”
“It’s early in the day yet,” replied his friend. “And neither of us knows them by sight.”
He moved three paces to the armory stall, where the dwarf still hammered diligently at a breastplate, wielding her hammer with a delicacy at odds with one so muscular. Arna made a polite bow and addressed her.
“Your pardon, goodmistress dwarf,” he said. “We have business with the sisters of House Beguine, who are to go to market this day. Would you know the ladies?”
The dwarf paused in her work and contemplated him from under bristling eyebrows, unsmiling. Something in his boyish, open face must have struck her as harmless, because she pointed over his shoulder with the head of her hammer.
“It happens that the Beguine girls are over there, at the Widow Bejuer-Vaud’s pie stall,” she said, her voice deep and surprisingly musical.
Arna turned to look, with a certain sense of foreboding. His promised bride was closer than he had thought, and he hadn’t a notion of what to expect.
Vidor had turned to look as well. “There,” he said.
Arna tilted his head to look between the milling mass of folk who had come to do business this day: respectable-looking housewives, sleek upper servants restocking their masters’ pantries, knots of travel-stained adventurers looking to renew their supplies, pickpockets looking for distracted targets.
There was the stall, with neatly wrapped stacked of pies high on the counter, and a portable stove glowing behind it-the source of the tantalizing smell. Several folk-man-size as well as a brace of halflings who mounted a wooden step set out for such as them to view the wares-clustered around the pie shop.
Without turning around, Arna leaned closer to the dwarf. “I don’t know them. Can you tell me which is Kestrel Beguine?”
The lump in his throat, which had been bothering him since the morning, seemed to double in size at that moment. He was about to see the woman he would cleave to for the rest of his life-or would if his uncle and a phalanx of interested parties from both Houses had their way. He felt hot and cold at once, and his forehead felt clammy, as if he were a small boy before his uncle’s desk, being tested in his numbering.
Everything depended on the color of the flame. A yellow flame would simply mean that a close relative of Sanwar’s had sired Kestrel. It would prove Nicol’s paternity, since Sanwar was not aware of any other brothers he might have lying about. A blue flame-well, that would be an extremely interesting situation. It would mean Vorsha was far more duplicitous than he could imagine, and had betrayed both brothers by admitting yet a third man to her bed.
But a green flame would prove the matter of his suspicions true, and Kestrel would be revealed as his daughter, and as her supposed father’s niece.
He lifted his hand and spoke a word, soft and sibilant. Heat flared at the tip of his index finger, and he held it over the green ceramic bowl in time to direct the flame that spurted out into the hairs and Powers within. There was a faint sizzle as the strands, short and long, crisped black and coiled in on themselves like maggots cast into a fire, and then there was a smell like burned meat.
A flame, small yet steady, pulsed over them-a flame green as the cracked heart of an emerald.
“Ouch!”
Kestrel’s hand flew to her head. At the cry of pain, Ciari Beguine left off looking at the stack of savory pies and turned to her sister.
“What’s the matter? Did someone pull your hair?” Ciari cast an angry eye at Widow Bejuer-Vaud’s customers clustering around the stall, as if to force a confession from the culpable party. A halfling standing near her on a convenient stepstool drew back in alarm, but no one looked guilty.
“No, I don’t think so.” Kestrel rubbed at a spot just over her right temple. “It was more of a little jab-as if something bit me.”
She glanced at her fingers and saw a tiny speck of blood.
“Look, Ciari,” she began. “Something did.… Oh!”
She clasped her head again, wincing, and the ledger book she always bore on market days thumped to the ground at her feet.
Concerned, Ciari took her sister by the shoulders and pulled her away from the crush of folk at the counter.
“What’s the matter, my love?” she said, her voice gentling. Ciari was at least a head taller than Kestrel, and built on broader lines. It was a running joke among the Beguine caravan guards that Ciari could take any of them on, male or female, in a fair fight.
“It burned!” Kestrel rubbed at her temple. “It’s much better now. It hardly itches.”
Ciari shifted the market basket on her arm. “An insect?”
Kestrel shook her head. “It felt like someone held a lit straw to my head, but now it’s gone. Sorry, Ciari. I don’t know what the matter is with me. Pay it no mind.”
She bent to retrieve her ledger book, thumbing through it to check for loosened pages, while Ciari efficiently glared away a street urchin who was contemplating an attempt on the sweetmeats she carried in her basket and turned back to her assessment of Widow Bejuer-Vaud’s pies.
The dwarf, engrossed in her work, didn’t look up this time. Without taking her eyes off the silver-chased steel over her knee, she pointed again.
“Mistress Kestrel is the one at the counter over there,” she said.
Arna swallowed hard, braced himself, and looked, holding his breath. Then, impressed, he let his air out with a swoosh. The marriage alliance between House Beguine and House Jadaren, brokered by seasoned merchants with little care for romance and its inefficiencies, wouldn’t saddle him with an unattractive wife-quite the opposite, in fact.
Kestrel Beguine was tall, straight of back and well built, with reddish brown hair braided into an elaborate bun at the nape of her elegant neck. She wore a simple dress, deep blue with a tiny repeating pattern worked in gold thread, a modified version of those the more modish women of Turmish wore. His merchant’s eye told him it was well cut and of fine fabric. A wide leather and brass belt clasped about her waist was hung with all manner of keys and small useful tools-and also served to accentuate her figure. She bore a market basket-his aunt had one similar, although Jadaren Hold had no market-hung over one arm. She was currently speaking intently to the small wizened woman, so shrunk and wrinkled that he would make no wager that she was fully human. Kestrel gestured at a neat stack of pies before her, and the wrinkled little woman shook her head.
Vidor’s hand on his arm made him stifle a shriek.
“Easy, fairlady,” said his friend. “The lovely Beguine sisters are at hand, and it is time to do some business. Many thanks, my friend,” he added to the dwarf behind them, who grunted without looking up from the dent she was coaxing into true.