“How dare you!”
“Oh, I dare.” Ringil let one hand slide up to rub casually at his neck, alongside the upjutting spike of the Ravensfriend’s pommel. “I dare.”
“You owe me your life!”
Ringil slanted a look at his father, calculated more than anything to further infuriate Kaad, to dismiss him as a threat worth keeping his eye on.
“How much more of this do I have to listen to?”
Gingren smouldered to anger. “That’s enough, Ringil!”
“Yeah, I’d say so, too.”
“You tell.” Kaad, getting up now, face still mottled with fury. “Your degenerate, your fucking ungrateful degenerate son, you tell him—”
“What did you call me?”
“Ringil!”
“You tell him where the lines are drawn, Gingren. Right now. Or I leave, and I take my vote with me.”
“His vote?” Ringil stared at his father. “His fucking vote?”
“Shut up!” It was a roar fit for a battlefield, a great tolling bellow in the confines of the kitchen. “Both of you! Just shut up and start acting like a pair of adults. Kaad, sit down. We’re not finished. And Ringil, no matter what you think, you’ll keep a courteous tongue in your head while you’re under my roof. This is not some roadside tavern for you to brawl in.”
Ringil made a small spitting sound. “The roadside taverns of my acquaintance have cleaner clientele. They don’t like torturers much in the uplands.”
“What about the murderers of small children?” Kaad seated himself again, with the same fastidious attention to the drape of his cloak. He shot Ringil a significant look. “How do they react to that?”
Ringil said nothing. The old memory seeped in his mind, a flow he stanched before it got properly started. He placed his hands around the flagon of steaming tea and stared downward. Still too hot to drink. Gingren saw his chance.
“We’re trying to help you, Ringil.”
“Are you really, Father.”
“We know you’ve been sniffing around the Salt Warren,” said Kaad.
Ringil looked up abruptly.
“You’re having me followed?”
Kaad shrugged. Made a small, worldly gesture. In Ringil’s head, recollection of the walk home slipped into focus. Sounds of soft pursuit. The prickle at his neck. Watchers among the trees, scuttling away.
He let the smile that was a gash split his face again.
“You want to be careful, Kaad. You let your Committee thugs creep up too close on me, you’re liable to find yourself fishing them out of the harbor in chunks.”
“I’d advise you against threatening Chancellery staff, Master Ringil.”
“It wasn’t a threat. It’s what’ll happen.”
Gingren made an impatient noise. “Point is, Ringil, we know you’re not getting anywhere with Etterkal. That’s what we can help you with. What Lord Kaad here can help you with.”
Something like a sense of wonder crept up in Ringil. He sensed vaguely the shape of what was before him, felt carefully around its edges.
“You’re going to get me into the Salt Warren?”
Kaad cleared his throat. “Not as such, no. But there are, let us say, more profitable avenues of inquiry that you might pursue.”
“Might I?” asked Ringil tonelessly. “And what avenues are those?”
“You are looking for Sherin Herlirig Mernas, widow of Bilgrest Mernas, sold under the debt guarantors’ charter last month.”
“Yeah. You know where she is?”
“Not at this precise moment. But the resources of the Chancellery might very well be opened to you in a way that they have not yet been.”
Ringil shook his head. “I’m done with the Chancellery. There’s nothing worth knowing up there that I don’t already know.”
Hesitation. Gingren and Kaad swapped glances.
“There is the issue of manpower,” began Kaad. “We could—”
“You could provide me with enough Watch uniforms to turn the Salt Warren upside down. Break some heads and get some answers. How about that?”
Again, the exchange of looks, the grim expressions. Ringil, for all he’d known what the response would be, coughed out a disbelieving laugh.
“Hoiran’s fucking balls, what is it about Etterkal?” Though, if Milacar was to be believed, he already knew, and was starting to realize it must, after all, be taken seriously. “The place was a fucking slum last time I was here. Now everyone’s too fucking scared to go knock on the gate?”
“Ringil, there is more to this than you understand. More than your mother understood when she called you back.”
“Yeah, that’s becoming very clear.” Ringil stabbed a finger at his father. “You wouldn’t lift a finger to help Sherin when they sold her, but now I’m banging on the Salt Warren gate, it suddenly merits attention. What is it, Dad? You want me to stop? Am I going to upset the wrong people? Am I going to embarrass you again?”
“You take this matter too lightly, Master Ringil. You do not understand what you are about to involve yourself in.”
“He just said that, Kaad. What are you, a fucking parrot?”
“Your father is motivated principally by concern for your well-being.”
“Candidly, I doubt that. But even if it were true, that leaves you. What’s your end of this, you conniving old fuck?”
Fist slammed onto the table, Kaad half risen from his seat.
“You will not speak to me in that way,” he said thickly.
Then he was reeling backward off the stool, falling, both hands up to his face, mashing in the sound of a high shriek and streaming with the heated tea. Ringil got up and tossed the emptied flagon across the table after him, onto the flagstone floor, where it lay, still steaming slightly from the mouth.
“I’ll speak to you exactly how I like, Kaad.” He was oddly cold and calm now, tranquil in the understanding that this and all it implied had been unavoidable from the moment he agreed to come home. “You got a problem with my mouth, I’ll see you on Brillin Hill Fields about it.”
Kaad rocked back and forth on the floor in the puddle of his own cloak. His hands still clutched at his face. He made a mewling sound through the fingers. Gingren stood mute with disbelief, staring from the downed justice to his son. Ringil ignored him.
“If you can get someone to show you which end of a sword you’re supposed to pick it up by, that is.”
“Hoiran damn your fucking soul to hell!”
“If you really believe what you preach, he’s already done that. Alongside all my carnal sins, I don’t think roughing up the local magistrature is going to impress the Dark King all that much. Sorry.”
By now Gingren had gone around the end of the table and was kneeling by Kaad’s side. The justice slapped away his efforts to help. He climbed to his feet, face already turning pink and raw looking across nose and one cheek where the tea had evidently burned worst. He pointed a trembling finger at Ringil.
“On your own head, Eskiath. This will be on your own head.”
“It always is.”
Kaad gathered his robes about him. From somewhere, he mustered a sneer. “No, Master Ringil. Like all your kind, the consequences of what you do are borne by others. From Gallows Gap to the cages at the eastern gate, it is others, always others, who pay the carriage for your acts.”
Ringil twitched forward a quarter inch. Held himself back.
“Now you’d really better get out,” he said quietly.
Kaad went. Perhaps he saw something in Ringil’s eyes, perhaps he just didn’t see any way to salvage value from the situation. He was, after all, a political animal. Gingren hurried after him, one furious backflung glance at his son in lieu of words. Ringil stood still a couple of moments after they’d gone, then slumped under the gathering weight of the comedown. He leaned flat palms on the table in front of him, gazed at the emptied flagon there.