“Well, she’s not actually an Eskiath. Like I said, she’s a cousin. Family name’s Herlirig.”
“Oho. Marsh blood, then.”
“Yeah, and she married in the wrong direction, too, from an Eskiath point of view.” Ringil heard the angry disgust trickling into his voice, but he couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. “To a merchant. Clan Eskiath didn’t know what was going on at the time, but really, I don’t think they’d have lifted a finger to stop it even if they had.”
“Hmm.” Milacar looked at his hands. “Etterkal.”
“That’s right. Your old pals Snarl and Findrich, among others.”
“Hmm.”
Ringil cocked his head. “You got a problem with this all of a sudden?”
More quiet. Somewhere in the lower levels of the house, someone was pouring water into a large vessel. Milacar seemed to be listening to it.
“Grace?”
Grace-of-Heaven met his eye, flexed a suddenly hesitant smile. It wasn’t a look Ringil recognized.
“Lot of things have changed since you went away, Gil.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
“That includes Etterkal. Salt Warren’s a whole different neighborhood these days, you wouldn’t recognize the place since Liberalization. I mean, everyone knew slaving was going to take off, it was obvious. Poppy used to talk about it all the time, Findrich, too, when you could get him to talk at all.” The words coming out of Milacar’s mouth seemed oddly hurried now, as if he was scared he’d be interrupted. “But you wouldn’t believe how big it’s grown, Gil. I mean, really big money. Bigger than flandrijn or krinzanz ever was.”
“You sound jealous.”
The smile flickered back to life a moment, then guttered out. “That kind of money buys protection, Gil. You can’t just wander into Etterkal and thug it like we used to when it was all whore masters and street.”
“Now, there you go, disappointing me all over again.” Ringil kept his tone light, mask to a creeping disquiet. “Time was, there wasn’t a street anywhere in Trelayne you wouldn’t walk down.”
“Yes, well, as I said, things have changed.”
“That time they tried to keep us out of the Glades balloon regatta. My people built this fucking city, they aren’t going to keep me penned up in the dreg end of it with their fucking silk-slash uniformed bully boys.” The levity sliding out of his tone now as he echoed the Milacar of then-ago. “Remember that?”
“Look—”
“Of course, now you live in the Glades.”
“Gil, I told you—”
“Things have changed, yeah. Heard you the first time.”
And now he couldn’t cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed-away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds. Pleasure into loss, lust into regret, and there, suddenly, the same sick spiral of fucked-up guilt they sold down at the temples and all through the po-faced schooling and lineage values and Gingren’s lectures and the new-recruit rituals of bullying and sterile manhood at the academy and every fucking thing ever lied and pontificated about by men in robes or uniform and—
He climbed off the bed as if there were scorpions in the sheets. Last shreds of afterglow smoking away. He stared down at Milacar, and the other man’s scent on him was suddenly just something he wanted to wash off.
“I’m going home,” he said drably.
He cast about for his clothes on the floor.
“They’ve got a dwenda, Gil.”
Gathering up breeches, shirt, crumpled hose. “Sure they have.”
Milacar watched him for a moment, and then, abruptly, he was off the bed and on him like a Yhelteth war cat. Grappling hands, body weight heaving for a tumble, pressed in, wrestler close. Raging echo of the flesh-to-flesh dance they’d already had on the bed. Grace-of-Heaven’s acrid scent and grunting street fighter’s strength.
Another time, it might have lasted. But the anger was still hard in Ringil’s head, the frustration itching through his muscles, siren whisper of reflexes blackened and edged in the war years. He broke Milacar’s hold with a savagery he’d forgotten he owned, threw a Yhelteth empty-hand technique that put the other man on the floor in tangled limbs. He landed on him with all his weight. Milacar’s breath whooshed out, his furious grunting collapsed. Ringil fetched up with one thumb hooked into Grace-of-Heaven’s mouth and the other poised an inch off his left eyeball.
“Don’t you pull that rough-trade shit on me,” he hissed. “I’m not one of your fucking machete boys, I’ll kill you.”
Milacar choked and floundered. “Fuck you, I’m trying to help. Listen to me, they’ve got a dwenda in Etterkal.”
Locked gazes. The seconds stretched.
“A dwenda?”
Milacar’s eyes said yes, said he at least believed it was true.
“A fucking Aldrain, you’re telling me?” Ringil let Grace-of-Heaven free of the thumb hook. “An honest-to-Hoiran member of the Vanishing Folk, right here in Trelayne?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m telling you.”
Ringil got off him. “You’re full of shit.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, it’s either that or you’ve been smoking too much of your own supply.”
“I know what I’ve seen, Gil.”
“They’re called the Vanishing Folk for a reason, Grace. They’re gone. Even the Kiriath don’t remember them outside of legends.”
“Yes.” Milacar picked himself up. “And before the war, no one believed in dragons, either.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Well, then you explain it to me.” Grace-of-Heaven stomped across the bedchamber to where a row of gorgeous Empire-styled kimonos hung from a rack.
“Explain what? That some albino scam artist with a lot of eye makeup has got you all making wards and running for cover like a bunch of Majak herdsmen when the thunder rolls?”
“No.” Milacar shouldered himself brusquely into plum-colored silk, tugged and knotted the sash at his waist. “Explain to me how the Marsh Brotherhood sent three of their best spies into Etterkal, men with a lifetime of experience and faces no one but their lodge master could match with their trade, and all that came back out, a week later, were their heads.”
Ringil gestured. “So this albino motherfuck’s got better sources than you, and he’s handy with a blade.”
“You misunderstand me, Gil.” Grace-of-Heaven smeared on the uncertain smile again. “I didn’t say these men were dead. I said all that came back were their heads. Each one still living, grafted at the neck to a seven-inch tree stump.”
Ringil stared at him.
“Yeah, that’s right. Explain that to me.”
“You saw this?”
A taut nod. “At a lodge meeting. They brought one of the heads in. Put the roots in a bowl of water and about two minutes after that the fucking thing opens its eyes and recognizes the lodge master. You could see by the expression on its face. It’s opening its mouth, trying to talk, but there’s no throat, no vocal cords, so all you can hear is this clicking sound and the lips moving, the tongue coming out, and then it starts fucking weeping, tears rolling down its face.” Milacar swallowed visibly. “About five minutes of that, they take the thing out of the water and it stops. The tears stop first, like they’re drying up, and then the whole head just stops moving, slows down to nothing like an old man dying in bed. Only it wasn’t fucking dead. Soon as you put it back in the water . . .” He made a helpless motion with his hand. “Back again, same thing.”
Ringil stood, naked, and the bandlight through the opened balcony windows felt suddenly colder. He turned to look at the night outside, as if something were calling to him from beyond the casements.