Ringil moved around the table to the vacated seat, inclined his head in the woman’s direction, and lowered himself onto her chair. The velvet plush was warm from her arse, an unwelcome intimacy that seeped up through his breeches. The diners on either side of him looked studiously elsewhere. He held down an urge to shift in his seat.
You lay frozen in your own piss for six hours at Rajal Beach and played dead while the Scaled Folk nosed up and down the breakwaters with their reptile peons looking for survivors. You can sit still in a whore’s heat for half an hour. You can make polite Glades conversation here with the great and gracious of Trelayne.
Grace-of-Heaven Milacar cleared his throat, lifted a goblet.
“A toast, then. To one of our city’s most heroic sons, returned home and not before time.”
There was a pause, then a sort of grumbling tide of response around the table. The faces all buried themselves hurriedly in their drinks. It was, Ringil thought, a little like watching pigs at a trough. They finished the toast and Milacar leaned across his nearest guest to get his face less than a foot from Ringil’s. His breath was sweet with the wine.
“So now the theatrics are out of the way,” he said urbanely, “perhaps you’d like to tell me what you’re doing here, Gil.”
The pale eyes were crinkled at the corners, amused despite themselves. Between the trimmed mustache and goatee, the long, mobile lips were downcurved with humor, taut with anticipatory lust, tips of the teeth just showing. Ringil remembered the look with a jolt under his heart.
Milacar had gone bald, or nearly so, just like he’d said would happen. And he’d shaved it all down to a stubble, just like he’d always said he would.
“Came to see you, Grace,” he said, and it was almost the whole truth.
“CAME TO SEE ME, HUH?” MILACAR MURMURED IT LATER, AS THEY LAY in the big silk-sheeted bed upstairs, spent and stained and curled together, pillowed on each other’s thighs. He raised himself slightly, grabbed Ringil’s hair at the back of his neck, and dragged his face, mock-tough, back toward his flaccid crotch. “The fuck you did. You’re a lying sack of highborn shit, Gil, same as you ever were.” He twisted his fingers, tugging the small hairs, hurtfully. “Same as when you first came to me fifteen fucking years ago, Eskiath youth.”
“Sixteen years.” Ringil beat the grip on his nape, tangled fingers with Grace, and brought the back of the other man’s hand around to his lips. He kissed it. “I was fifteen, remember. Sixteen fucking years ago, and don’t call me that.”
“What, youth?”
“Eskiath. You know I don’t like it.”
Milacar pulled his hand free and propped himself back a little on his elbows, looking down at the younger man who lay coiled across him. “It’s your mother’s name as well.”
“She married it.” Ringil stayed with his face bedded in the damp warmth of Milacar’s crotch, staring off into the gloom near the bedchamber door. “Her choice. I didn’t get that much.”
“I’m not convinced she had much choice herself, Gil. She was, what, twelve when they gave her to Gingren?”
“Thirteen.”
Small quiet. The same muffled bandlight from the dining chamber spilled in here unrestrained, an icy flood of it across the carpeted floor from the bedroom’s broad river-facing balcony. The casements were back, the drapes stirred like languid ghosts, and a cool autumn breeze blew in past them, not yet the chill and bite there was in the upland air at Gallows Water, but getting that way. Winter would find him here as well. Ringil shifted, skin caressed to goose bumps, small hairs on his arms pulled erect. He breathed in Grace’s acrid, smoky scent and it carried him back a decade and a half like a drug. Riotous wine and flandrijn nights at Milacar’s house on Replete Cargo Street in the warehouse district; carefully steeping himself in the decadence of it all, thrilling at the subtle compulsion of doing Grace-of-Heaven’s will, whether in bed or out. Down to the docks for collections with Milacar’s thuggish wharf soldiers, sneaking the streets of the Glades and upriver for deliveries; occasionally chased by the Watch when someone got caught and squealed, the odd scuffle in a darkened alley or a safe house, the odd few moments of forced swordplay or a knifing somewhere, but all of it, the fights included, too highly colored, too much fucking fun at the time to really seem like the danger it was.
“So tell me why you’re really here,” Grace said gently.
Ringil rolled over, rested his head and neck on the other man’s belly. The muscle was still there, firm beneath a modest layer of middle-aged spread. It barely quivered when it took the weight of his sweat-soaked head. Ringil gazed up idly at the painted scenes of debauchery on Milacar’s ceiling. Two stable lads and a serving wench doing something improbable with a centaur. Ringil blew a dispirited breath up at them in their perfect little pastoral world.
“Got to help out the family,” he said drearily. “Got to find someone. Cousin of mine, got herself into some trouble.”
“And you think I’ve started moving in the same circles as the Eskiath clan.” The belly Ringil was pillowed on juddered with Milacar’s laughter. “Gil, you have seriously overestimated my place in the scheme of things these days. I’m a criminal, remember.”
“Yeah, I noticed how you were sticking to your roots. Big fuck-off house in the Glades, dinner with the Marsh Brotherhood and associated worthies.”
“I still keep the place over on Replete Cargo, if it makes you feel any better. And in case you’ve forgotten, I am from a Brotherhood family.” There was a slight edge in Grace-of-Heaven’s voice now. “My father was a pathfinder captain before the war.”
“Yeah, and your great-great, great-great, great-and-so-on grandfather founded the whole fucking city of Trel-a-lahayn. I heard it coming in, Grace. And the truth is still, fifteen years ago you wouldn’t have given civil house room to that prick with the dueling cutlery on his hip tonight. And you wouldn’t have been living upriver like this, either.”
He felt the stomach muscles beneath his head tense a little.
“Do I disappoint you?” Milacar asked him softly.
Ringil went on staring up at the ceiling. He shrugged. “It all turned to shit after ’55, we all had to ride it out somehow. Why should you be any different?”
“You’re too kind.”
“Yeah.” Ringil hauled himself up into a sitting position, swiveled a little to face Grace-of-Heaven’s sprawl. He got cross-legged, put his hands together in his lap. Shook his hair back off his face. “So. You want to help me find this cousin of mine?”
Milacar made a no-big-deal face. “Sure. What kind of trouble she in?”
“The chained-up kind. She went to the auction blocks at Etterkal about four weeks ago as far as I can work out.”
“Etterkal?” The no-big-deal expression slid right off Milacar’s face. “Was she sold legally?”
“Yeah, payment for a bad debt. Chancellery clearinghouse auction, the Salt Warren buyers took a shine to her, chain-ganged her out there the same day apparently. But the paperwork’s scrambled, or lost, or I just didn’t bribe the right officials. Got this charcoal sketch I’m showing around that no one wants to recognize, and I can’t get anyone to talk to me about the Etterkal end. And I’m getting tired of being polite.”
“Yes, I did notice that.” Grace of Heaven shook his head bemusedly. “How the blue fuck did a daughter of clan Eskiath end up getting as far as the Warren anyway?”
“Well, she’s not actually an Eskiath. Like I said, she’s a cousin. Family name’s Herlirig.”