And so he found himself alone with his wine and half-eaten steak. Golitsin had been right about the lack of meat, but incorrect about the amount of wine it would take before he didn’t care. Even with his head swimming with drink, he could still taste the sawdust filler when he chewed.
Sawdust and meat that wanted to return, he discovered. Return from the slurry of death in his stomach and emerge once more into the land of the living. Abel stood up, stumbled blindly in a direction he had decided might lead to a chamber pot, or at least to an empty alleyway.
And she was there, leading him. Gliding through the crowd, clearing a path in front of him, taking him through a curtained doorway, down a hall, and into a stall where a genuine toilet and washbasin sat. He heard the sound of rushing water somewhere nearby and looked around until he realized it was under him, under the floorboards. He was over the River.
He saw that when she opened the toilet hatch and he looked down fifteen feet into dark, rushing water.
“Don’t fall in, Sweetbread,” said the voice from behind the cerulean veil.
“I can swim,” Abel said. Not well, he knew, but he could. He’d learned, at Raj and Center’s insistence, in the lake at Hestinga.
“It isn’t that,” said the voice. “It’s that the carnadons would have you to pieces before you managed to drown in the cataracts.”
Her tone was playful, but with a trace of contempt, as well.
Not for me, Abel thought. More like for all men.
Aye, Raj said. You’ve got the right of that.
Abel turned away from the open hole. “Actually, I don’t think I need it now, I-”
That was when the swell hit him. He jerked back, and hung his head as fast as he could over the opening and let rip only just in time for the bulk of it, the spill of it-steak, wine, day’s rations, everything-to rain down in a putrid waterfall to the River below.
“Ah! Ah, by the bones and breasts of the Lady,” he cried out, “let this stop.”
He didn’t notice then, but later realized that this was when it must have happened, that she realized he was either a Scout, knew the borderlands, or was a Redlander himself. For who else would think to call upon Irisobrian at such a time?
He felt her hand upon his arm, softer this time. “Here now, drink some water,” she said. The other hand had dipped a clay cup into a nearby pitcher.
He took it, rinsed his mouth, spat into the River again and again until he’d banished enough of the taste of his own innards to resist the urge to turn once more to the blank hole and start the puking process all over again.
She handed him a bit of cloth. “Wipe your mouth.”
He did.
And then what looked like a weed.
“Chew this.”
He examined it, turned it in his fingers, didn’t recognize the small leaves or the pungent smell.
It is mint, Abel, Center said. Probably imported from the Schnee foothills. Quite safe.
He chewed. Good. The nausea faded.
“Can we-I would like to…not go back out there,” he said. “I mean, I don’t really have anything to pay you with.”
“You are inside, are you not? You have paid the night charge.”
“But I thought that just covered a pallet.”
A laugh from behind the cerulean veil, this time not contemptuous. Sweetly amused. “Come.”
She led him out and down the hall in the opposite direction from the main hall. At the very end, they passed through a beaded curtain and onto a veranda.
The view was stunning. They were at least a fieldmarch from the near River bank, suspended over water that was raging through the rocks of the cataracts below. Far on the opposite side of the River, nearly a quarter league away, firelights twinkled through the silhouettes of willow and fern trees.
High above, Duisberg’s three moons gathered.
She led him along the veranda, which seemed to encircle the perimeter of the structure. He paid no heed to where they were going, only looked out at the expanse of the River, the white flash of the rapids in moonlight. And listened to the surge of the water pouring through the teeth of the Land.
“Here,” she said, and pulled him through another curtain. The River was gone. He counted three doorways, and then she pushed aside another, a beaten flax curtain, and he followed into a chamber.
It was not what he expected. Not fancied with fabrics or colored papyrus. A makeshift bed. A table with a washbasin. A clay oil lamp.
“This is mine,” she said. “Where I sleep. Where I live.”
“Oh.”
“We can have time here,” she said. “At the other, they will roust you when the sand has run its course through the tumbler. And if you don’t come out, they will use sticks.”
“I don’t want them to use sticks.”
“No, this is better,” she said. “Also, seeing is not allowed there. Here, you can have this.”
She reached up and worked a clasp loose near the back of her neck. Then she carefully began to unwind the veil.
Which gave him a moment to step back and look at her completely for what, he realized, was the first time.
She was of medium height. Her skin had a darker hue, not sun darkened but naturally so. Her breasts were ample, not small or overlarge, her nipples brown and, so far as he could tell, perfect. She smelled of something he had never experienced before. Something wonderful.
Lavender, said Center.
Lavender. As she lifted her arms to undo the veil, he glimpsed the undersides of her forearms. Something odd. He looked closer. Three stripes. They were covered with something, something chalklike, to hide them. But here in this light, so near to her, they were quite clear scars. Scars like those he had seen before.
Blaskoye clan scars.
The veil fell away. Her eyes were blue. Lapis lazuli.
“Thon schonet er, damme Blaskoye,” he said to her.
You are very beautiful, Blaskoye woman.
He saw the recognition, the understanding, as she started back.
“You-you speak with an accent,” she said. “You are not a clansman.”
“I am a lieutenant of the Scouts.”
“Ah, of course. A sworn enemy.” He thought he heard the contempt that had vanished seep back into her reply, but this time it sounded as if it were directed at herself. “I should have known. I should have.”
“Yes. An enemy.”
“I had thought you might be…someone else.”
“Who?” he asked. “A Redlander? Is that what you thought? Is that what you are?”
“Not anymore,” she said. She dropped the veil beside her washbasin on the table. “Have you killed many Redlanders?”
“No,” he said. “A few.”
Only one woman. She looked like her. The same eyes, at least. He tried to push the thought from his mind, but could not.
“Have you fucked many Scouts?” he asked her.
This caught her off guard, and she laughed.
Her lips, he thought. They don’t tell you about the lips, full like that, behind the veil. Before he could stop himself, before he even knew what he was doing, he reached up and touched her lips, ran a finger across the softness, pulled his hand slowly away.
“You will be the first,” she said.
And she was the first, his first. He didn’t tell her. Perhaps she knew. It wasn’t pretty. Her bed creaked, and several times she had him slow, stop the noise. If they were discovered, she whispered, he would be dragged away, she would be beaten. So finally they pulled what covers she had off the bed and he took her on the floor, which squeaked less.
And somewhere below them, he knew the River ran, the carnadons gathered. He pushed the face of the Blaskoye woman he’d killed from him mind, willed himself to replace it with her face, her form.