Стивен Браст - Tiassa

It was obvious that none of them liked the question much. They didn’t know what to make of this guy—this Easterner —walking around openly armed, and, after all, Easterners were the only people below them socially. Tough decision for them. I put on my best non-threatening smile and waited.

Eventually, one of the women grunted and nodded, which answered my first question: which one of them was in charge. She had almost perfectly round eyes, pale skin even in the dim light of the house, and I’ve had daggers duller than her nose.

“I’m Vlad,” I said.

They rattled off odd-sounding names. The one with the nose I caught as something like a cough. Ouffach, or something like that. I said, “What do you drink here? I tried the wine.”

They all laughed, the way you laugh when someone has just discovered what you’ve known for years.

“Beer,” she said. “Stay with the beer.” She waved the hostess over and ordered one for me. I made a gesture indicating I wanted to buy a round, and she nodded. I’m not much of a beer drinker, but it was all right.

“What are you doing here?” said Ouffach.

“Just passing through,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“Where? I’m not even sure what direction I’ll head in. Whatever I can find. Is there anything to see around here?”

The other woman, whose name I hadn’t quite caught, said, “Just a few miles west of here are the fairgrounds.”

“Is there a fair?”

“It ended eight days ago.”

“Okay.”

The younger man said, “The ribbons are still up.”

The other woman shook her head. “No, they’re gone now.”

“You sure? I was by there day before yesterday and—”

Ouffach cleared her throat, and the other two stopped. She turned back to me. “Are you looking for work?”

“I’m not much for farming.”

“They hire servants at the castle, sometimes.”

“Oh? Did you ever work there?”

“My youngest did.”

“And my sister,” said the guy.

The other woman said, “When I was a little girl I waited on Her Ladyship.”

“Her Ladyship,” I repeated.

She nodded.

“I’ve heard she passed away,” I said.

The other two nodded, but Ouffach squinted at me and said, “How did you hear that?”

Her face was wrinkled, and her skin looked like it would have the consistency of leather.

“I pick things up here and there.”

She wasn’t having it. “You were at the castle.”

I nodded.

“Who?”

“Gormin.”

She nodded slowly. “He talks too much.”

“For a Teckla, or an Issola?”

“He’s no Issola anymore.”

“Why not? What happened?”

“None of your business, or mine.”

Well, that didn’t leave a lot of room for discussion. When discussion fails, try negotiation, that’s what I always say. Sometimes say. Have said at least once before.

I reached into my pouch and found three imperials. I passed one to the woman whose name I didn’t know, and one to the young man. “Take a walk,” I said. Their eyes widened, they took the coins, then they looked at Ouffach. She nodded. They got up and moved to a table on the other side of the room. When they’d left, I pushed the third coin over to her.

She picked it up and studied it, tapped her fingernail against it, then frowned. “Who is this?” she said, pointing to the portrait of an Empress who hadn’t yet taken the throne. Oops.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s gold.”

She tapped it again, nodded, and set it down.

“Why do you want to know?”

I fished around and found another imperial, set it next to the first. “Good enough reason?”

She smiled. She didn’t have many teeth, and the ones she had were yellow. I suddenly realized that, during the Interregnum, Dragaerans’ teeth looked like the teeth of Easterners in my own time. I couldn’t decide if that was funny or sad. I also wondered how much the blacksmith would charge to make her some new ones.

“I don’t know a lot,” she said. “I know it happened a hundred years or so after the Disaster.”

She drank some more beer and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. I nodded and waited for her to continue.

“There’s a dancer, also an Issola. Hevlika.”

I nodded, but inside, all of my ah ha’s were going off.

“It seemed that she and Gormin were sweeping the straw.”

That was an expression I’d never heard before, but it was easy enough to figure out. “Involved,” I said.

She squinted at me with one eye, I guess to see if I was only pretending to misunderstand in order to embarrass her, which I was, but it didn’t work. I flashed her a smile and nodded.

“Of course, they were discovered.”

“Pardon the ignorance of a poor Easterner, but was such a dalliance forbidden?”

For a moment, she looked at me as if I were an alien species, which I was. Then her face cleared and she said, “At the time, Gormin was His Lordship’s steward.”

“Is that like seneschal?” I asked, thinking of Lady Teldra.

She nodded. “He was in charge of the household.”

“Which means?”

“The dancer was part of the household. Surely such a thing is improper among your people?”

“We don’t have stewards. At least, I’ve never met one in an Eastern household.”

“Then who is in charge of the servants?”

“Who is in charge of your servants?”

“The steward, as I said.”

“Yours? In your house?”

“My house?” She laughed. “I don’t have servants.”

“Exactly,” I said.

She glanced at the two imperial coins in front of her, then back at me as if she didn’t entirely believe me. I guess I could see her point: how could someone who could toss around imperials like copper not have servants? Fine. Let it be a mystery.

“So, they were caught, and he was booted out of his House.”

“And ordered into the Teckla.”

“Heh. I’ll bet you made him feel welcome.”

Her lips twitched. “We didn’t make it pleasant for him. But he took it well, and never got above himself, so we stopped. Eventually.”

“And now?”

“Beg pardon?”

“What is he doing now?”

“Oh. The same as he did before, only as a Teckla.”

“And the dancer?”

“She is still there.” Some expression crossed her features too quickly for me to read.

“What?” I said.

“Hmm?”

“What was that look for?”

She looked down. I waited. After a moment, she said softly, “It was cruel.”

I drew circles on the table in the condensation from the beer. “What was?”

Her head came up. “You don’t see? He made Gormin stay there, where he saw her every day, only now he was a Teckla.”

I put that together with what I knew of Dragaerans in general and Issola in particular—he was no longer an Issola, or even an aristocrat. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him, and he’d never consider asking her to. Dragaerans are idiots. “He did that just to be cruel?”

She nodded.

“This was Zhayin?”

She winced a little—I guess the local lord is too important to be called by his name—but then she nodded.

“I’m starting to take a dislike to this guy,” I said.

“He’s been through a lot,” she said.

“You mean his son.”

She nodded.

“And then, his daughter.”

She frowned. “His daughter? He has no daughter.”

“Ah,” said. “My mistake.” And let’s have another “ah ha!” In case that went too fast for you, I’d just learned that her mother was already dead, but the woman who was an adult and a ghost in my age had never been heard of by the townspeople. I didn’t know what that meant, but it meant something.