“I’ll come back if Serena Fortuna is kind.”
Even if I’d had the price, I wasn’t fool enough to give it on a promise. But I bowed to the girl, which brought a lovely flush to her pale cheeks and set her licking lips much finer than the procurer’s, and I winked at the youth, which replaced his smirk with a soft and subtle eagerness. Perhaps four years older than Jullian, he stretched an arm behind his head and thrust out one slim hip just enough to make a graceful curve.
I cleared my throat and dragged my eyes away. “Tell me, goodman, where in this sober town might I find good mead and honest dice?”
“Cross-hill toward the smelts, you’ll find the Blade. Tell Holur that Tigg sent you for a game and a taste from his cask. He’ll see to you.” He shrugged and turned his attention back to other passersby.
My stomach rumbled as I meandered down the lane that leveled off westward, “cross-hill,” rather than taking the steeper way that climbed the rounded mound of Elanus. A few tight-shuttered houses lurked among others collapsed into weedy ruins. The sweet pale smokes of peat fires laced with pork fat hung over the lane like mist over the bogs. At the far end of the lane, darker billows rose from the charcoal fires of the “smelts,” where the folk of Elanus teased workable iron from treasured pellets dug from the peatlands.
I’d tended a bog-iron smelter one autumn. Hot, smoky, tedious work to keep the fires stoked and burning evenly for days on end. I’d been no good at it. The sheer ugliness of the task could not but set a man’s mind wandering.
Just down the lane, a knot of shouting people broke into cheers. Peering over the bobbing heads revealed a squirming, muddy tangle of scrawny limbs and occasional glimpses of bared teeth and bloodied cheeks and noses. One of the boys, significantly smaller than the other, seemed favored by the crowd, and every twist that gave him a moment’s advantage elicited a cheer and a jostle of backslapping. A stringy man with bulging eyes collected coins from the onlookers. One lad would likely get a meal for his bruises, the other naught but a boot in the backside. I’d earned my share of both. When the pop-eyed man stuck his tin cup in my face, I showed him my empty palms, bellowed an encouragement for each of the boys, and moved on.
A wedge of hammered iron dangling above a lettered signboard announced an establishment blazing with light and bursting with jolly music and fine smells. The Blade. Ah, I did love a friendly tavern, a pocket of warmth and enjoyment amidst all the cold world’s ills. My spirits, far too sober with deceptions, politics, abbeys, and damnable diseases, perked up.
The doxy held the law at bay with tit and toe and tongue.
All while the bandit stole away that night before he hung…
As ever, the singing snared me like a hook trap. I joined in even before I walked through the door, and as I slammed the splintered plank behind me, a woman draped her arm about my neck and warbled the next chorus right in my ear. Laughing, I grabbed her waist from behind and whirled her about as the song required, while other men tried to pinch her tits or stomp her toe. Spoiling for action and good cheer, I let the music liven my feet to glide and pivot, heel and toe. The rhythm of the tabor took us up and down the room through the clapping crowd as I spun her dizzy and protected her from their gleeful pawing.
Well into the doxy and the bandit’s fourth escapade, we collapsed over a table in breathless merriment, and I first glimpsed the woman’s face. Beneath a lank cascade of mud-colored hair swelled smooth cheeks of a pleasant pink and naught else worthy of mention. My brother Max would have called her a mirror-bane.
“Two more on my coin, Holur!” she yelled over my shoulder as our pursuers abandoned us in favor of a new ale barrel being hauled in from the back room. “Though my head be swimming, my tongue is dry. And this fellow sings like a carpenter’s rasp.”
Coins rattled in the piper’s basket, and a new dance went on without us. Still laughing, I dragged the woman up and into my arms, my hands finding a sure downward path toward the generous curves beneath her skirt. Max had always been too particular by half. Such yielding firmness demanded further explorations. My feet moved to a more languorous tempo.
She moaned softly deep in her throat, and a pleasant heat rose from her skin and through her layered clothing. I drew her closer.
“La, sir! I can’t.” Trapping my neck in the crook of one elbow, the woman dragged my head downward until our foreheads touched. Then she grinned wickedly, and with a deft move, stuffed her tongue in my ear, leaving my own lips and tongue poised for naught. Before I could riposte, she slipped my grasp altogether.
She didn’t go far, though. A fellow with a dirty apron and skin the color and texture of oak bark held out two foaming mugs. She took one for herself and shoved the other into my empty hands, crashing her mug into mine for a toast. “To my brave defender!” she said with a smile and an ale-sodden belch. “My name’s Adrianne, by the by. Though I be loath—sorely loath—to leave so game and manly a partner, my da will beat me purple if I linger one jot more.”
“Alas, and I just arrived,” I said, discreetly using a sleeve to blot the remains of her sloppy kiss, as I grinned back at her. “Without knowing a soul to ask where I might find the proper seasonings for my Saldon bread.”
She giggled and touched my face with a plump finger. “Such a fine handsome fellow as you baking feast bread…it’s hard to imagine.”
“I’ve baked my own Saldon loaf since I was sixteen, even if I had to do it on a stone in a thistle fire,” I said and scooped her finger into my mouth for a lick and a nip. She tasted of garlic and ale and woman. “And as I’ve come to Elanus in search of work and already heard the bog iron’s failing, I’d best not lapse in proper honor to the Danae’s feast.”
“I saw a Dané once,” she said, dropping her head on my chest, either because she didn’t want to be heard by our rowdy companions or because she couldn’t hold it up any longer. “In the bog when I was late from town and cut across close to Movre’s Pool. Tall and beautiful she was. Naked, with her blue marks of magic glowing on her skin. Didn’t speak, though her light guided me safe through the bog.”
“More likely Iero’s angel than a Dané, if your tall, beautiful creature was also kind.” More likely yet another tipsy maid waked from a randy romp in a berry thicket. Legend named the Danae spiteful beings who once gave life to forests, lakes, and fields, but hated human folk. Supposedly a furious Mother Samele took the earth from the Danae’s charge and gave it to the impish aingerou after Kemen lay with a Danae queen and fathered Deunor Lightbringer. Even the Sinduri Council professed that if the Danae had ever existed, they did no longer.
The girl shook her head vigorously. “Not an angel. She’d no wings. Some say Danae have wings, as they vanish right in front of you, but my grandmere told me they just turn a corner that human eyes can’t follow.”
“As to my baking needs…I’ve only the clove, ginger, and pennyroyal.” I regretted cutting off the discussion, but the girl’s time was limited, and such a companionable encounter, a staple of friendly common rooms, should yield some fruit.
“Ah,” she said and dropped her voice to a liquid whisper. “Down Smelt Alley, third door, you’ll find Gorb the seedsman. You needs must bang the door and convince the pinchfist to open his locks and trade with you, but he’ll have both hazelnuts and nivat to sell. Mayhap”—she tilted her bleary gaze upward—“I should go with you. I’ll bake a Saldon loaf as well and take it to the bog. Da’s a smith and not got half the work he used to. Raises his yellow bile, it does. Folk pray to Iero about the war and the end times coming, or whine to Kemen and Samele about the weather, but naught’s offered a pin to the Danae that I know of, asking help to replenish the bog iron here at Elanus. They’re most forgotten.”