Her right hand twitched in her lap. Only a short reach to grab his hand.
Only two words: Don’t go.
“Tell me you will,” he insisted.
“Yes,” she answered, and watched him leave.
‡
Two hours later, she emerged from the whorehouse, drunk and lightened of nearly eight grams of dust. Berun was nowhere to be found, so she bought a packet of sempa resin from a street vendor and smeared it on her gums. After fifteen minutes of searching, she located a normal inn crowded with reveling travelers. She ordered a lager and sat down to survey the crowd. A number of nationalities were represented, though porcelain-skinned Ulomi men comprised the majority, and Tomen were absent altogether.
At a table in the center, a group sat playing kingsmader, a Stoli tile game at which Churls possessed no skill. She knew the rules, but nothing of the nuance.
The inn’s banker weighed her dust and counted out four grams in bone chips. All she had left.
She sat down, nodded to her fellow players, and selected her tiles. Across from her sat three young Ulomi men with straight backs and even straighter teeth. The youngest appeared no older than sixteen, and when he moved his arm to raise the bet his robe parted, revealing the white elder-cloth suit he wore underneath.
He caught Churls’s stare and smirked. He whispered to the largest of the three, causing this man to wink at her.
She ignored them. It soon became clear that she was not the only one. The couple on Churls’s right, a Stoli merchant and his wife by the look of them, frowned at the table every time one of the three men spoke. The cauliflowereared Castan, a fighter obviously, stared right through them and did not so much as twitch at their bawdy jokes. Only the olive-skinned woman, shaven-headed and ethnically ambiguous, noted their presence with any enthusiasm. She eyed the thinnest of the three, the one with the smattering of light freckles on the bridge of his nose, as if she intended to eat him.
Churls hemorrhaged chips. Before long, she became the butt of the youngest White Suit’s jibes.
“You know what they call a woman in the Castan badlands?”
“There are two types of people who can’t gamble. One of them is in this room.”
“Ever heard of a bluff?”
“What’s the difference between an Adrashi whore and an Anadrashi whore?”
She listened and smiled when he or one of his mates announced the punchline. All the while anger stewed in her stomach. Though the boys were young and most likely had not yet mastered the use of their suits, she knew backing away from the table, getting away with a portion of her money, would be the smart thing to do.
Unfortunately, she was not in a smart frame of mind.
The scrape of her chair against the wood floor signaled a situation that would soon get out of hand. A hush fell over the room. The bald woman frowned, picked up all but two of her chips, and left the inn.
“You owe me an apology,” Churls said. Her heart boomed so loud she did not hear the words.
The youth rolled his eyes. “I said a lot of things. Which one hurt your feelings?”
Churls leaned forward, knuckles on the table. “Stand up.”
The largest called over his shoulder to the bar. “Get her a drink. Maybe then she’ll have the courage to ask for a fuck.” He looked Churls up and down. “We could fuck you.”
A smile touched the corners of Churls’s mouth. She switched her grip and overturned the table, sending chips and tiles to the floor. Surprised by her maneuver, the three White Suits tumbled out of their chairs and backed up close to the bar.
She rounded the table and followed with a smile so wide it hurt.
‡
The boy’s cheek collapsed under her knuckle, accompanied by the satisfying crack of shattering bone. She followed her fist forward with two quick steps, shoving the boy into his companions. The three fell backward, toppling and tripping over bar stools. Someone screamed and the bartender pulled a crossbow from under the counter. The movement might as well have been in slow motion. Churls hopped forward and slapped the weapon from his hand.
“The fuck you will,” she said. “Stay put and shut up.”
The boy with the dented face remained down, but the other two regained their feet quickly. The smaller moved away from the counter, putting tables and chairs between himself and Churls. He was not her main concern. He had not been running his mouth. One of those who had was already down, possibly dying, and the other would soon join him.
Blood pounded in Churls’s veins violently enough to make her whole body shake. She could not have anticipated how the sempa resin and alcohol would interact in her system, but discovered she liked it.
Fear could not touch her. Vedas was a distant memory.
All that remained was rage, pure and simple.
The big man, barely more than a boy himself, shrugged off his robe and pulled his elder-cloth hood over his head. He smiled and flexed his chest. Like the other two, he was beautiful, broad and sculpted and sheathed in white. His teeth were alabaster tiles, his bone-pale skin shone with health. Unlike his smaller companion, he did not look scared in the least.
“Glad you did that,” he said in his thick Ulomi accent. “Been looking for a fight all night. It’s too polite, this city.”
As he spoke, the material of his suit thickened visibly along his shoulders and forearms. The hood covered his temples, rose over his chin and onto his cheekbones—far slower than Vedas managed with his own suit.
Churls returned his grin. “Pretty boy doesn’t want to get his face ruined.”
The man gave himself away too easily. The twitch of his right pectoral signaled the punch. As it flew, Churls gripped his forearm in her left hand and twisted inside his guard, pressing her back against the solid wall of his torso. Using his own forward momentum, she bent at the waist, levered down on his arm and threw him. A table split in two under his weight.
To his credit, he rolled clear and stood rapidly, guard up.
She had not moved. “Come on. Clear a way. We’ll wrestle.”
He kicked the rubble of the table to one side. “Castan fucking bitch. My grandparents have a row of your ancestors’ heads mounted above the hearth. You know what grandpa says about them? Know what he says their mouths are good for?”
Churls pushed off from the counter. “I don’t care.”
The man shrugged. As his shoulders dropped, he slammed both palms into Churls’s chest. The graceless, full-bodied attack took her by surprise, forcing the air from her lungs, and she stumbled backwards into the bar counter. He followed with quick jabs, the first two of which grazed her temples.
Buoyed by alcohol and drugs, the light battering amused her. He was not a formidable opponent, despite the speed and strength his suit granted him.
Laughing, she batted the third punch aside, planted both hands on the counter behind her, and thrust her kneecap into his groin. He grunted, unharmed, just as Churls had expected. It was meant as a distraction.
She slammed her forehead into his nose, relishing the crunch of crushed cartilage. He reeled back and tripped on a splinter of wood, crashing to the floor.
She stepped forward and stopped, sword halfway out of its scabbard. The man was dead.
“Shit,” she said. “Shit.” She set chair upright and fell into it. “Shit, shit, shit.”
She felt eyes upon her and looked up. “Get the fuck out,” she told the remaining White Suit. “If your other brother’s still alive, take him with you. No. Don’t say a fucking word. If you say anything, I’ll have to kill you.”
Only words. Her anger had expired the moment her backside hit the chair. She watched the man check his dent-faced brother for a pulse—another sign of inexperience. Just a glance at the boy, and she knew he was alive. Take him to a good healer, and he would be as good as new. Being young and resilient had its advantages.