Lynn Abbey - The Brazen Gambit

"What about unlicensed-"

Yohan cut her short with a slash of his finger. "The difference between licensed and unlicensed doesn't show on the signboard. Remember: stay close."

And they did. She wrapped her hand lightly around one of the traces; that gave her more freedom to look for a pestle-it seemed that every hawker's sign displayed a striding lion-as they wandered the market. Traders hailed them from every ramshackle doorway of cloth, wood, or bone. Bold, ragged children begged for ceramic bits or offered to sell pieces of bruised fruit obviously scavenged from the gutters of Urik's more reputable markets. One child leapt into the cart and grabbed two handfuls of straw before she and the fanners could chase him away.

"What's wrong with them? Are they that hungry? Should we offer them something?" she whispered anxiously to Yohan.

"Stay close," was his only reply, repeated through clenched teeth as the raids became more frequent.

Every dwelling or stall in the elven market seemed equally old, equally dilapidated and despairing. There were no signposts for the streets that met at odd angles and irregular intervals. Had she not heeded Yohan's warning and kept dose to the cart, she'd have been quickly and hopelessly lost. The tumult of noise and color, so attractive in her imagination, grew less so when it devolved into hostile stares and furtive bent-mind probes of her inmost thoughts.

She was unprepared for that Unseen onslaught from anonymous minds. In her previous visits to the city, she'd dealt only with templars-broken, mean-spirited individuals, each and every one of them, but, by their master's order, untrained in the arts of the Unseen Way.

No stray curiosity or inquiry penetrated the defenses she'd learned from Telhami, but time and time again she caught an unwelcome glimpse into another mind. The imaginations of those who dwelt in the elven market were as foul as the sewer channel in the middle of the so-called street they followed.

The market was not her grove; the confidence she'd felt when Telhami upbraided her about the dangers a city-man like Pavek posed to any solitary woman evaporated like morning dew. Her grip on the cart trace progressed from feather-light to a panicky clench.

One of the fanners shouted that his knife had been stolen. He plunged toward a twisted alley, determined to catch the culprit. Yohan intervened quickly, hauling the farmer back to the cart and staring down the hard-faced denizens who swarmed out of nowhere, ready to support the thief, not them.

"Nothing happened," Yohan assured me grumbling mob.

"But my-" the poor farmer wailed, until Yohan pinched bis wrist to quiet him.

"Everybody, move on." Yohan used a commanding tone she'd never heard from him before.

"We ought not have come here," she whispered.

He replied with a grunt that could have meant anything at all, then pivoted the cart sharply on its left wheel. They went down a rubbish-strewn alley to the lion-and-pestle signboard he'd somehow spotted during the fracas.

"Wait here," he told the farmers. "Sing out if anything happens."

His hand on her arm guided her into a dusty shop. The proprietor, a human woman of indeterminate age, pushed away from a table covered with fortune-telling cards. The long red gown she wore might once have belonged to a wealthy woman, but the silk embroidery threads had been plucked out and now the lush floral patterns were mere dots and holes across the cloth.

"What's your pleasure?" she asked with a voice coarsened by too much wine and too little fresh air.

"You need to ask?" Yohan gestured toward the fortune-telling cards.

Akashia recognized the ritualized rudeness that passed for civility in the city. She used the style herself with the yellow-robes. It didn't bother her, or it hadn't until Just-Plain Pavek became a man in her mind, not a templar. And it bothered her even more with this woman who, on second glance, was only a few years older than she was herself. But the shop was filled with magic-laced things she could not name and the air itself was thick with Unseen inquiries; she held her peace, staying close by Yohan.

"Ral's Breath." Yohan's arm dropped quickly from hers; the old dwarf was embarrassed.

"You've come to the wrong place, then. Never sold the baby powders; never will." And staring bluntly at Akashia's belly, the woman let out a snorting, bitter and private chuckle. "Good luck. You'll need it."

"Why?" Akashia asked, disregarding Yohan's admonition that she be quiet while they were in the shops.

"You won't find any, that's why. It's gone. Old Breath, new Breath, good and bad: it's all gone. Sold or confiscated by the yellow-robes."

"Confiscated?"

"Where've you been, girl? S'been weeks since the orators harangued that the stuff'd been tampered with." She swore and wiped a weepy nose against a dirty sleeve. "Never worked much anyway, 'cept with babies and old men. But it's gone now."

"Would you like some?" she asked gently.

Yohan's fist clamped over her elbow like a vise.

"S'all been confiscated. Ain't none left in the city. You got some, you keep it far and away from me. Don't carry no stuff from the rotted-yellow customhouse. Don't want no rotted yellow-robes bustin' in here, roustin' me outta house and home."

The woman took a deep breath, staring at the single roof-beam of her establishment. Aware of her own foolishness- treating a vendor of the elven market as if she were a woman of Quraite-Akashia tightened her mind-bending defenses. But the woman was no master of the Unseen Way; her vacant expression was the product of a Tyr-storm of wildly suspicious thoughts whipping through her mind.

"You bringin' me trouble?" she shouted. Her eyes were sharp-focused now, and filled with rage and madness. "You settin' the yellow-robes on me? You wantin' my place, my trade?" She swore and stalked forward, head down and shoulders raised. "I'll give you trouble. I'll give you more trouble than you dreamed-"

The hysterical woman came toward Akashia, Yohan sidestepped between them before harm was done.

"No trouble," he insisted, retreating with cautious, well-balanced strides, pushing her back toward the curtain door.

"I'm sorry," she apologized as soon as they were both in the alley.

The red-dressed woman's shouts quieted to inarticulate muttering, but they could still hear her moving through her shop. Fingers with ragged nails appeared at the edges of the curtain, pulling it taut, lashing it to the flimsy frame.

"Go away! Go away, you hear! Take your trouble somewhere else!"

The Quraiters were eager to obey. Yohan grabbed the cart traces and, without saying a word, started for the street. Once they were milling through the crowds, Akashia insisted softly, "It was my fault,"

Yohan pursed his lips together and adjusted his grip on the traces. He was as angry as she'd ever seen him, and angry at her as well-which, she knew, was an anger he., found difficult to express.

"I'm ashamed of myself." She said the things she thought he'd want to say, that she needed to hear. "I was wrong. I made a terrible mistake, thinking because she was my age, she was like me-"

"Don't talk, that's all," Yohan grumbled. "Let me do the talking. All the talking."

"I won't forget again," she assured him. "We learned something, though. The Lion-King's confiscated the remaining Ral's Breath. He must know it's been tampered with. Pavek's-"

"There's no 'must' with Urik or the lion. We don't know anything, yet."

They went along in stony silence awhile, until she spotted the distinctive signboard slung out over a cross street

"Do we try there?" she asked. "I'll be quiet, I swear it."

"See to it," Yohan replied with the same sternness he'd used in the earlier street confrontation.

Then, after rolling the cart from the street to a less-trafficked alley and leaving the two farmers to stand guard beside it, he led her into the apothecary's shop.