A little of the wine-inspired recklessness seeped away. There was only one remedy for that, and the maqtabba was entirely adequate to his purpose. It took him very little time to denude the room of all the lesser gold and silver fittings—doorknobs, drawer-pulls, and the like. From one of those drawers he took a large drawstring pouch of money kept there for incidentals. He was al-Ma’aliq, and the Shagara working did not defend against him. There was no lock because none was needed. Others could not even slide this drawer open, but he could.
Praising his deceased cousin Rihana for being royal enough to scorn carrying money on her exalted person, he weighed the pouch in his hand. He untied the sash from his waist and spread it across the table, then quickly folded the coins and doorknobs and such into it, twisted it to secure his booty, and wrapped it once more around him. He paused to smile slightly, recalling that great-grandfather Azzad had carried the famous necklace of pearls this way, long ago, the only wealth he had saved of all the vast al-Ma’aliq fortunes.
At the maqtabba’s door he hesitated, then returned to the desk. In the drawer that had held the money he left behind his grandfather Alessid’s hazzir, the necklace that had kept him safe through dozens of battles. Whoever found it would know who had been here; what they might think about why he had left himself unprotected, he cared not.
He kept the two rings. He had promised himself he would never take them off. All the other hazziri—the earring, an armband, two silver discs sewn into the heels of his boots—these he had already sold. But the rings he would keep as long as he lived. They were reminders of who he had once been: al-Ma’aliq, al-Gallidh.
Qamar walked unchallenged out of the palace at Joharra. At just past midnight he was enjoying a tasty meal and a large jug of very good wine at a clean, refined tavern that specialized in traditional Tza’ab cooking. Tomorrow, he decided, on his way out of Joharra, he would take the time to find out exactly what had happened to Rihana and Ra’amon and who was in charge now. On reflection, he decided it was probably Allim, a seasoned war-leader who could take care of the incursions from Cazdeyya and—what had the guard called it? Taqit? Taqim? Qamar didn’t have it in him to care, not tonight. Tonight, he cared only about getting very, very drunk.
He stayed drunk all through the autumn and winter.
He found a congenial seaside town and called himself Assado, and said he was from the newly established Tza’ab town of Shagarra in the southeast, which his atrocious accent and somewhat limited vocabulary seemed to confirm. No one ever discovered much more about him than his name. He kept to himself and his wine jars. Indeed, he had chosen the town for the potency of the imported wines in its dockside taverns. Once or twice someone saw him ambling drunkenly down the pier or along the beach, and several of the tavern girls had graced him with their favors, for he was a handsome youth—at first, anyway. As autumn became winter, and the wine did its work on his body as well as his mind, all that remained of his beauty was the large dark eyes with their extravagant lashes and a certain withered sweetness to his smile.
At about the same time his money was running out, there arrived in the seaport an old man and a young girl. No one in the dockside taverns had ever seen them before, and no one ever saw them again. Nor did they ever see again the youth who called himself Assado.
Something smooth and gentle was beneath his back, cradling his relaxed body. The quiet soothed him. His skin and hair felt soft and clean, and his muscles were loose, as if he’d just had a hot bath and a shave and a long rubdown with expensive oils, the sort of thing one expected when one was a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih. There was a scent of green grass, a tang of sandalwood, accented with a subtle hint of a woman’s perfume, and a taste on his lips of mint tea.
All in all, he felt quite blissful. He must remember to remember whatever tavern it was that served wine as good as this.
“Eiha, about time you woke up.”
Head turning lazily, he sought the voice above him. Her face was indistinct, a pale oval framed in wildly curling fair hair, backlit by white-gold sunlight. The eyes were brown, nearly as dark as his own. He wished she would lean closer so he could see her more clearly, hoping her face was as fascinating as her voice—low and soft, the oddities of a barbarian accent attractively negated by the lilting rise and fall of the syllables.“So what’s your name, qarassia?”
She sat on the bed beside his hip, facing him, hands folded and head cocked to one side. She wore something white with a dull sheen to it, no embroidery or decoration. He still couldn’t quite focus on her face, but her voice told him she disapproved of him. “You still look dreadful. Better than before, but still—”
Whenever before was a total blank, it usually meant he’d been very, very naughty. Father would glower, Mother would glare, and Ab’ya Alessid would shake his head and turn away to hide a smile.
He realized that there was a lot of before that he couldn’t remember. The days all blurred together—or, rather, the nights did, for he spent the daylight hours sleeping. Ayia, to be honest, he spent them insensible, sometimes in his rented bed, sometimes on the street, sometimes on the beach, sometimes in a back corner of whatever tavern he’d honored with his noble presence that evening. Never yet, though, had he woken in a bed like this one. He was stretched out on a fine, soft mattress with sheer white curtains languidly swagged around carved wooden posts. White velvet was under his back, and his head rested on a white silk pillow. The whole of it was rather cloudlike and quite lovely.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“By Acuyib, yes!” He struggled to sit up; a light, insistent hand on his chest pushed him back down.
“Not just yet. Here.”
He slurped from the glass she held to his mouth, then spluttered. Water? “Take that goat piss away and bring me wine!”
“Look like a tavern maid, do I?”
“I can’t be sure if I can’t see you properly, can I?” He gave her his best big-melting-brown-eyes smile—the look was a good one on him, and he knew it. “Come closer, qarassia, so I can see your face. And if you’d be so kind, please tell me where I am.”
“Can you manage to take a single breath without trying to use it to seduce someone?”
“I’ve no idea,” he replied blithely.“Though I must admit I don’t usually find myself in bed with women like you.” Abruptly aware that he had been rude without meaning to be, he blinked up at her. He still couldn’t quite see her features.“Forgive me, I really didn’t intend that for an insult. I meant that it’s so rare to exchange more than a few words with a woman in these circumstances.”
“These are not those circumstances.”
He arranged his face into a sulk. “Why not?” Squinting up at the face that slowly came into focus, he gave a snort of disappointment, because she was really rather plain. The dark eyes were lovely, and the masses of pale curling hair, but the rest . . . ayia, had he caught sight of her at a feast, he wouldn’t have troubled even to find out her name.
But it came to him that he already knew it.
“You truly don’t know where you are, do you? And before you begin worrying about it, you didn’t succeed.”
“At what?”
“Drinking yourself to death.”
“So much I had already realized,” he drawled. “For instance, this cannot be Acuyib’s Glory. Aside from the fact that it’s the last place I’d ever end up—again, forgive me—you aren’t my idea of the sarhafiya The Lessons so confidently promise.”