Looking for Rymiit in the crowded sitting room, Willem began to formulate his excuse for leaving so early. Before he could find his host, though, he was stopped by an apparition.
It had been some time since he’d seen her, but there she stood. She’d just stepped into the room, and all at once the smell was gone, as though the air had refreshed itself in her honor.
“Phyrea,” he whispered.
She either heard him or sensed his eyes on her, and she looked right at him. Willem took a step back and smiled. She stared at him, but didn’t smile back. When she stepped into the room the guests parted for her, and it was as if the air itself gave way before her. They weren’t afraid to touch her, just unworthy.
Willem stepped forward to meet her and almost stumbled to a stop when Marek Rymiit slid between them. Focused only on Phyrea’s jaw-dropping beauty, he hadn’t seen the pudgy Thayan.
“Ah, Phyrea,” Marek said. “Did I invite you?”
Phyrea smiled at him, and the sight of it made Willem’s mouth go dry.
“Ah, Marek,” Phyrea replied. “I came anyway.”
They shared a conspiratorial smile that made Willem feel as though he should get out of that house as fast he could, then they both noticed him at the same time.
“You’ve met Willem Korvan,” Marek said.
Phyrea nodded but didn’t smile, and Willem smiled but didn’t nod. The other guests around them seemed to quiver.
“So these are the young masters?” Phyrea asked Marek.
“The heirs apparent, yes,” he answered with a grin.
Phyrea, unimpressed, said, “This canal-builder I’ve heard about…” She turned to Willem. “It’s not you.”
“No,” Willem said. He wanted to elaborate, but the words failed him. Phyrea wasn’t listening anyway.
“Is he here?” she asked Marek.
“No, he isn’t,” said the Thayan, with a hint of fire in his eyes.
“I’m not surprised,” Willem ventured, “that you and he wouldn’t see eye to eye, Master Rymiit.”
Phyrea scanned the room, bored, even exhausted. She wasn’t listening.
“The young fool our unfortunate ransar has trusted with this exercise in endless ditch digging?” Marek replied.
“You don’t know him?” Willem asked Phyrea.
She shrugged the question off. How could she know Ivar Devorast, after all?
“The last time we spoke, you inquired about a certain item,” Marek said to Phyrea. “Tell me you brought it along.”
“Hardly,” she said, looking around the room so she didn’t register Marek’s annoyed look.
Their host’s expression changed back to its placid, friendly mien and he muttered, “Enjoy my little caucus.”
With a bow Phyrea didn’t return but Willem did, he was gone.
“Phyrea,” Willem said when he saw her begin to take a step away from him.
She turned, impatient, and folded her arms in front of her.
“Come with me,” he said, reaching out to take her by the elbow.
She flinched away from him as if his touch would scald her, and Willem’s heart leaped. “Please,” he said.
She wouldn’t look at him, but turned and let him follow her to Marek’s veranda. They had to wave their way through huge clay pots that someone told him Marek had gotten from as far as Maztica. The plants were local, but appeared unhealthy.
“Phyrea,” he said when he hoped they were alone. He tried to touch her again and she flinched. She made no effort to mask her contempt for him.
“Hate me if you want to,” he told her. “It doesn’t make me want you any less.”
“I don’t hate you,” she said.
Relieved, Willem sighed.
“I would have to think about you at all to hate you.”
She isn’t ignoring me, he told himself, then shook his head to try to rid himself of not only the words but the feeling of relief that washed over him.
“I don’t care if you hate me, or think of me at all, or love me, or think of me as a brother,” he said, the words spilling out of him. “I will serve you. I will be your slave, if that’s what you wish. I will do anything to have you. And I may be the only man in this wretched city who understands youthe only one willing to give you everything and ask for nothing in return.”
She allowed him the briefest, unconvinced glare.
“I understand that you’re the kind of woman that the world has got to come to a screeching halt for,” he went on. “You have to be the center not only of attention but of infinity itself.”
“If you tell me you love me, I’ll kill you where you stand,” she said, and he could tell she meant it.
“And if I told you I thought that might be worth dying for?” he asked.
“Then all you’d be telling me is that you’re a fool,” she shot back. “A boy.”
“If-” he started.
“When I was away from the city last summer,” she interrupted, “at my father’s estate in the country, there was a man. He had me in a way you’ll never have me.”
Willem could swear at that moment that his heart turned to glass.
“You’re pretty,” Phyrea said. “You serve well. You make friends easily. You have position and potential, and all of that meaningless stupidity I couldn’t possibly find less interesting.”
Willem closed his eyes against her words, but they kept coming.
“That man, last summer,” she went on, “was a stone mason. He was nothing… no one. He was a brute, but he was more than you’ll ever be, and no matter what happens between us for the rest of our lives, Willem, you will never be a tenth the man he is. I’m not even sure it’s because he’s so great a man or you’re so insignificant, but likely a bit of both. And not only did he fail to offer me his mortal soul, when he left, he didn’t even say good-bye.”
Willem couldn’t quite breathe.
“There,” she said. “Still want me?”
He moved his lips, but no sound came out.
“You’re pathetic,” she whispered as she brushed past him and disappeared behind the dying potted plants.
A drop of cold rain hit the bridge of Willem’s nose and made him flinch. He took a breath and sighed.
“Yes,” he said to the cool night air, to the rooftops of Innarlith, “I still want you.”
6
l2 Alturiak, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) First Quarter, Innarlith
The brutish man came at her with a hook, but it was his smell that Ran Ai Yu found most disturbing. They all smelled bad, as though they were rotting from withinand they looked it too. She’d fought animated corpses that didn’t stink so bad.
She slit the dockworker’s wrist, and the hook clattered onto the pier. She didn’t recognize any of the words that spewed at her from his mostly toothless mouth, but his intent was clear.
“You will stop this,” she said to the wounded dockworker while she kept him at bay with her sword. “I will pay you fairly.”
Another string of unintelligible curses followed, and the man made the mistake of reaching for the hook. She cut him again, and he backed away.
“I don’t want to kill you,” she said.
Another dockworker fell at her feet, pushing the man she’d cut even farther back from her. That man held some kind of crude club and had been kicked in the face hard enough to flatten his nose and soak his face with his own blood.
Ran Ai Yu glanced back in the direction the bloody man had come from. Lau Cheung Fen stood with the great porcelain ship Jie Zud behind him. He stood on one foot, the other hanging in front of him, his knee at waist level. The morning sun shone from his shaved head, which sat atop his unusually large neck in a loose, comfortable way, as if suspended from above by a wire.
The little hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
Something hit her on the side of the face. Her teeth rattled, and her vision flared white, but she was still able to get her blade up fast enough to slap away the second blow. The man she’d cut had been joined by two more, as ragged and reeking as he. Though it was barely past dawn, they were drunk. Ran Ai Yu heard her passenger kick two more men. She could only hope that he could take down enough of them to get to her before the two dockworkers that fast approached her joined the three she did her best to fend off. They were drunk, slow, and brutish, but five was too many for her.