And at this precise moment, Bren said to himself, he didn’t give a damn what the servants gossiped.
The gentleman of service went back to the door, delicately took a tray from his female fellow-servant standing oh so modestly and properly outside, then came back and set it down on the bath edge.
It held the unguents and oils and linaments Jago had requested. A small box of plasters Timani set above the water-zone, and then stopped dead, staring at Bren’s gun on the shelf on eye level with him. Underwater, next to Bren, Jago had braced a foot—to spring, it might be.
But then, without coming near that deadly object, the manservant slipped out.
“One should not have left that there,” Bren muttered.
“One should not,” Jago agreed: never a syllable of flattery or excuse over a security breach, and likewise she was probably annoyed with herself. Then came the drift of remarks passed outside: Tano, very near the bathroom door, accosted the servants to discuss clothing, clean and otherwise, and the urgent need for shirts and underwear.
“We shall be gossiped about,” Bren muttered. “One deeply apologizes, Jago-ji. Not least about leaving the gun there.”
“Better to be gossiped about,” Jago said, sinking back, “than taken for the furniture, nandi.” A wicked smile chased the frown, and a wink. “That is a true domestic. He is not Guild.”
That was good to know. Meanwhile Jago was close and soap-scented, and in good humor. For a few moments after, just to spite fate and the local gossip, they indulged in conventions some human, some atevi, some common to both, and several things that downright hurt—but about the pain, he didn’t, at the moment, care.
Being alive was good. Being with Jago was glorious. He had intended to spend his bathtime extracting splinters, and dismissed the notion for perhaps ten whole minutes— before they got out to give the others the chance at the tub.
Then he found that the hot water had him dripping blood from that gash he hadn’t thought amounted to much, not to mention the sensation of air hitting the raw spots.
“I shall ruin the towel,” he protested, when she wanted to stop the flow.
“One is very certain, Bren-ji, that the staff has bleach at their disposal.” Jago settled him on the dressing bench and set to work with the bottles the servant had brought in on the tray, some preparations that stung, most that he was glad to find didn’t. She salved spots he wouldn’t have anyone else reach, pulled splinters from his hands, including one quite nasty one on the side of his right hand, and stuck plasters onto several cuts. They were plasters designed for her complexion, not his, in inconspicuous places.
And somewhere in that process the pain greatly eased, pain he’d carried so many hours he hadn’t even realized it, until the steady presence of misery changed to the sting of treatments. He returned the favor on her scratches, rubbed liniment left-handed into her shoulders. They had both become far more pleasantly aromatic than the condition in which they had arrived, and were both towel-wrapped, evergreen-smelling and warm by the time Banichi came in. He laid his own gun on the shelf and claimed the bath, sending water over the side. Then Tano and Algini added themselves to the tub, and the slosh-drain became a vital necessity.
Bren retreated from the flood with Jago and took up watch in the bedroom. There was no bathrobe provided by their host. There was no help with his hair from the servants, but Jago put on most of her uniform and he, wrapped in a luxurious huge towel, plaited Jago’s damp queue while she sat on the floor in front of him, one of the rare times he could persuade her to take precedence, for duty’s sake.
The servants slipped in the front door again. Timani, the man, brought them soap, towels, combs, brushes, and a stack of black uniform shirts, and tried not to notice the impropriety in progress, not looking at Jago nor quite at him.
The two fled back out the door, in haste, and Jago outright laughed at the retreat.
“Hold still,” Bren complained, and replaited the last few turns, which, with her movement, had escaped the half-tied ribbon and his unskilled fingers. His own hair was still wet. When braided, it tended to curl right out of its ribbon, unless very expertly handled.
Hers was always straight and sleek and perfect.
So was she, once she stood up: straight and sleek and perfect, wearing her last uniform tee and black leather pants.
“I shall track down the servants and see what the laundry staff intends to do about your clothes, nandi.”
“And underwear,” he said solemnly. “I am down to the very last.”
He suffered a kiss on the forehead and sat afterward with his eyes closed, listening to Jago put on her coat and leave, listening to the Atageini house elsewhere recovering from last night’s attack, upstairs and down, inside and out. A mecheita in the general direction of the stableyard bawled its complaint at the heavens.
Someone had begun hammering with a vengeance in the last few minutes, two someones, or a strong echo, coming from somewhere inside the house—he thought downstairs, and indeed, they had been moving scaffolding in the foyer. Servants shouted instructions and questions at one another in halls that, before the attack, had been orderly and quiet. This room, unprepared and lacking amenities, was probably one they accorded some village lord’s third son during the seasonal hunts and otherwise never touched. He had a go at plaiting his own hair, with indifferent results. He could by no means tie the ribbon, but he clipped it into a finish.
And he recalled then he was supposed to be guarding the room, and he had left his gun and pocket com on the shelf in the bathroom. He got up and went after the means for self-defense.
“The door opened,” Banichi observed, tilting his head back from his comfortable place in the tub, Tano and Algini having arranged themselves around the other rim.
Atevi hearing. Jago had not been that noisy in her leaving.
“Jago went out to question the staff,” he said, “she says about my wardrobe, but likely about other things, too.”
“The house is full of strangers coming and going, Bren-ji.
Atageini, Taibeni.” A high member of the Atageini house staff having been in Kadagidi employ, it remained a wonder they had not all been murdered in their beds on the first night, if the traitor had once found a way past their personal security. “Your staff earnestly asks you stay away from the doors. If there should be an arrival, even of the servants, immediately duck in here and trust that we shall leave this bath in very rapid fashion.”
“I shall sit far to the inside of the room,” he promised Banichi.
The water around his staff had gone murky. The bathroom smelled of strong evergreen soap. “But the servants have already been here.
Shirts have arrived. One assumes there are enough for all of you, nadiin-ji.”
“Good,” Banichi said, and heaved himself up to his feet, sending tides over the edge. He climbed the ledge, leaving the water to Tano and Algini. “But one does not approve this coming and going of strange servants.”
“Jago was here at the time.” He was mortally sorry to have disturbed Banichi’s bath. “And, Banichi-ji, one is quite sure ill-meaning servants could equally well poison us at dinner or shoot us in the halls—”
“Access,” Banichi said, wrapping a towel about his waist.
“Everything is a question of access and the propriety of the house.
This Timani is vague on the matter of his man’chi, and until someone owns up to him and his partner, we do not allow him—”
The foyer door had opened, not a furtive opening, but a thump. In a single stride Banichi elbowed Bren out of the way, had his gun in hand, and stood to meet an arrival in the bedroom.