"My dear, I cannot tell you how glad I am that you have found a solution to your problem," the woman said warmly. "I had not troubled you in the hopes that if I left you to think, you would find a patroness somewhere. A young woman as resourceful as you are could not help but find a solution if you were simply given a chance. You had such good ideas for the use of your old house-I thought that a moon or two to get your ideas together and get over the shock would be much better than pestering you at a time when you were confused and under stress."
Xylina was touched, both by the words and the feeling that the woman meant them. Lycia seemed to think that the woman meant them, too, for she warmed even further.
"Not that you wouldn't have come calling at the end of a moon or two," Lycia said, her voice heavy with a certain amount of friendly irony.
The woman shrugged. "And would I have had a choice?" she asked, quite reasonably. "The Queen would be demanding her taxes of me, too. I cannot afford to forgive a debt of that size any more than you could afford to take it on, Lycia, and you well know it. But whatever I could do, I intended to do. I was trying to think of some way that Xylina could work off the debt; perhaps she could have leased her slave to me-it wasn't my debt that I worried about, it was the tax. Tax-collectors have no heart."
Lycia shrugged, but she appeared to soften a little more. "The law has less heart than tax-collectors. At least you had the good taste not to come around here like the jackals at the battlefield, looking for bones," she admitted. "So thank you for that."
"Indeed, thank you very much," Xylina said softly, and smiled. "If I am ever in a position to pay that favor back, be sure that I will."
The woman blinked, as if she had not expected that from the girl, and somewhat sheepishly handed Xylina the bottle of wine. "This is by way of congratulations," she said. "I would like to toast your good fortune-if you would permit me."
"I would be honored," Xylina said honestly. She opened the wine and Lycia sent for goblets; it was a good vintage, not a stingy one.
And this time when their second visitor left, the smiles that followed her were cheerful and not full of malice.
Xylina sat on the side of Faro's cot. He looked better now than he had for some time, but there was no doubt that he still needed rest.
He had listened to her with a puzzled frown on his face, and Xylina did not blame him. Told baldly, the entire story sounded like something out of a tale. "I still do not understand this," Faro said, when Xylina finished her story. "This makes very little sense. We do not know this woman, you say that you do not think your mother knew her, and she is no friend of Lycia's who was a friend of your mother's. Why should she help you in this way?"
"I don't know," Xylina admitted. "I agree that it makes no sense at all. I wish that it did, that I could find some kind of explanation. It was not conjured gold, so it can't be a trap of that kind, at least."
Now that the debts had been retired, she had an even larger one-and now that she was away from Hypolyta's rather mesmerizing gentleness, very little about the woman's actions made sense to her. Lycia was inclined to take it all at face value, but the more Xylina thought about it, the more it seemed to be some kind of trap.
Evidently Faro felt the same. "Could this be the work of your enemy?' he asked. "Is this a trap of some kind? Was everything properly witnessed and sealed?"
"So far as I can tell," she said, handing him the contract. "It is all properly notarized, and she called in witnesses from outside as the law requires."
He looked it over carefully, frowning as he forced his watering eyes to focus properly.
"It seems absolutely correct to me," he admitted. "And I have made many such contracts in my time. But Xylina, can we retire such an enormous debt?"
She sighed. "We can only try, Faro." She looked past him, at the blank wall, wishing that the future would reveal itself on that wall. "We can only try."
Six months later, she had a new house and a thriving business.
The house was small; smaller than the original had been. There wasn't a garden any more, and not much of a front area. There was one large room for her hired guards to sleep in, a kitchen, a small reception-area, a bathing room and her own bedroom. Faro still slept in her room, on a pallet across the door.
The rest of the area had been devoted to a training yard. True to his promise to do anything to help retire their debt, Faro had (reluctantly) agreed to train young slaves in unarmed fighting and staff fighting. Not that there weren't other men perfectly capable of giving them the same training-which Xylina was quick to point out- but none of them had Faro's current notoriety for trouncing ambushers.
That notoriety was considerable. As the story spread- slowly, of course, since she was of no real importance, but it did have some amusement value-the total number of ruffians he had killed grew, doubling and even tripling the original number. Soon there were many Mazonites who were interested in having him train their litter-bearers or bodyguards. After all, it was a nuisance to have to get a permit for one's slaves to bear arms within the city; it was much easier to give them staves and special training. Pressure from women worried about the "gangs of runaways" changed the law to permit slaves to bear staffs at any and all times, though not swords.
Any man could learn to handle a staff, and one did not have to worry quite as much about watching one's back as when the slaves were armed with edged weapons. The very idea of men with swords-even for a short period of time and under the proper supervision of a female-made some Mazonites very nervous. That was all to the good so far as Xylina was concerned; it meant that she and Faro had more business.
That was the positive side of their situation. On the negative side, Xylina had been forced to hire six guards to watch over her property. There had already been two more attempts to set her house ablaze; both foiled because she or Faro had caught the fire before it began to spread. Xylina had practiced the conjuration of fire-stifling vapor, learning well from her mistake with water on oil. There had also been a number of attempts at ambushes. It would have been cheaper in the long run if she had been able to buy the slaves outright, but at the moment she could not afford that many trained men.
But she did not have time to think about her finances. There were training-contracts to arrange, a household to run, the training itself to oversee, and a hundred details to take care of. There never seemed to be any end to it. And she never had any time to really look into her financial state. She could only assume that since there was more money going into their account than leaving it, that everything was fine.
There was, however, one matter she realized she had to address. "Faro," she said one evening before sleep.
"Yes, mistress?" He had been about to lie down across her doorway, as usual.
"I think I don't know exactly how to say this," she said, aware of the awkwardness of the situation, but determined to get through it. "I don't want to offend you."
"I think you could not do that if you tried," he said with a low laugh.
"You have been a good slave and a good guard and a good friend. You have served me so much better than I had any right to expect. But I may not have treated you with the same consideration."
"I have no complaints, mistress."
"You are a man. You-surely have male needs. And I -"
"I think this is a dialogue we do not need to finish," he said gruffly.
He was misunderstanding exactly the very way she had feared. "I want you to be-be satisfied-somewhere. As I understand other slaves are. So that your life will have some-some pleasure. But I don't know how it is accomplished."