Juliet McKenna - The Assassin's Edge

’Gren turned to wave us forward. I was in a mood to take a gamble as well. “I don’t know about you two but I’m more than ready for a bath.”

The sturdy woman waited with Sorgrad and ’Gren while her sons or whoever they were took themselves off to their daily duties. She stood, feet solid on the irregular cobbles, arms folded across an ample bosom. Her face was creased with age and disillusion, mouth sunken on to almost toothless gums. She was certainly the oldest Elietimm I’d seen thus far and her speech was sufficiently fast and slurred that I understood none of it.

“We can wash in the laundry house,” Sorgrad told us. ’Gren was already unlatching the door. “She’ll send some food out later.”

“Please thank her for us.” I smiled to convey my gratitude but all I got in return was a dour grunt before our grudging hostess stomped off. “What did you tell her?” I asked in a low tone as Sorgrad ushered me towards the wash house, a low building with an irregular roof ridge and more than one loose slate.

“I said we were travellers who had visited Olret with a view to trading and had been seeing what his lands had to offer in return for our goods.” He was looking thoughtful. “I said we wanted to make ourselves presentable before returning to his keep.”

“It was Olret’s name made the difference,” ’Gren piped up. ”Until then, I thought she’d be setting the dogs on us.”

“I don’t suppose they get many visitors hereabouts.” Ryshad unbuttoned his jerkin as we crossed the wash house’s threshold. He unlaced his shirt and pulled it over his head, grimacing at both the smell and the ingrained stains of paint and dirt. I wasn’t any too taken with him smelling like a hard-ridden horse either but I doubted I smelled of roses or anything close.

“It won’t have time to dry, even if you wash it,” I advised reluctantly as I shed my own foetid clothes.

“Shiv?” Ryshad grinned. “Don’t you mages help out in Hadrumal’s laundry at all?”

“Are you mocking the arcane mysteries of elemental magic?” The wizard was already stripped to his breeches and unlacing them. “Actually, apprentices generally work these things out when they’ve done something stupid or dangerous and need to wash out the evidence.” He laughed at a sudden memory. “Let’s get ourselves clean and then I’ll see about the linen.”

“You don’t want Pered choking on your stench, do you?” I joked. With the door shut and warm steam hanging around us, I began to relax for the first time since we’d come to these islands. Perhaps it was the familiar scents of damp cloth and harsh lye just like the wash house at home. Knowing Ilkehan was good and dead certainly did a lot to calm my nerves. Now we could get clean and fed and then join the celebrations at Suthyfer. It would be good to swap yarns with Halice now that the danger was safely past. My spirits rose still further.

“Do we get in here?”

’Gren was naked, pale skin stark beneath the paint on his face. He peered into a broad stone basin in the centre of the floor where clouded water steamed.

Sorgrad threw his breeches and underlinen aside and joined him, leaning on the waist-high rim wide enough to rest a bucket on or, in ’Gren’s case, a buttock. “I don’t think so. That’s a hot spring in there and we don’t want to foul it.”

“Do you suppose there might be a wash tub?” I shivered in my shirt as I looked around the laundry. It had bigger windows than the main house with some bladder or membrane dried stiff and yellow and cut to fit the bone frames. The frames were none too tightly fitted and let in wicked draughts as well as a fair amount of light. More cold air whistled along a crude drain running down the centre of the sloping floor to disappear through a hole in one wall.

“You could just about get in here.” Ryshad was stood something halfway between a horse trough and a sink, one of several standing against one wall with long lengths of coarse cloth looped on racks above them. Long and narrow with steep sides, each seemed to have been carved from a single block of pale grey stone veined with faintest white. All but the one at the end were heaped with thick brown blankets soaking in lye and waiting for someone to sluice water through them and beat out the dirt with the bleached bone paddles racked above.

“Find the plug.” I grabbed a pail from a stone ledge and dipped it into the stone basin. The water was hotter than I’d have liked for a bath but I wasn’t about to complain.

“Soap root.” Sorgrad was investigating the contents of small baskets and bowls on a shelf. He tossed me a tangled mass of slick fibres.

I wasn’t impressed but didn’t want to upset our reluctant hostess by using anything better that had taken time and trouble to concoct from her scarce resources. My mother had given me more than one lecture on the costs and aggravation of soap making when my only concern had been simply looking pretty and smelling sweet for whatever swain I’d fancied flirting with.

I sloshed the bucket into the trough and Ryshad did the same. The clouded water smelled faintly reminiscent of a colic draught from an apothecary’s shop but that was still preferable to wearing stale sweat and old smoke when we returned triumphant to Suthyfer and everyone’s congratulations.

“In you get,” Ryshad smiled at me. Warm with the olive skin of southern Tormalin and dusted with black hair, his broad chest and strong arms looked quite bizarre against the paint staining his hands and forearms.

I dumped my stale shirt on top of my grimy breeches and swung a leg over the hard edge of the trough, careful not to slip on the smooth base. Crouching in the shallow water, I rubbed at my arms with the pulpy root until I won a faint lather that turned a faint blue-grey. “It’s coming off.” I scrubbed hard at my face with the crumbling shreds.

“Close your eyes.”

I barely had time to heed Ryshad’s warning before he dumped a bucket of water over me. Once I recovered from the shock, it was wonderful to feel the heat scouring me clean. “Wait a moment.” I squeezed as much foam from the soap root as I could into my hair.

“Let me.” I closed my eyes, savouring the deft touch of Ryshad’s strong fingers. Slick, his hands moved to my shoulders, blunt thumbs digging in gently to loosen muscle knotted by exhausted sleep on a cold stone floor. Just his touch roused my blood and I hoped the others would put my sudden blush down to the heat of the water.

“Eyes closed?” His hands left me and another bucketful came crashing down on my head. I puffed and wiped water from my eyes, appalled at the colour of the water I was kneeling in. Had I really been that filthy?

“Who was that?” Sorgrad was in the middle of soaping his own hair with grated root when a figure went running past the window.

’Gren didn’t pause as he scoured his face. ”No idea.”

“Nor me.” I couldn’t have said if the person had been male or female, young or grown, not through that clouded excuse for a window.

“Watch out!”

’Gren didn’t so much rinse his brother down as slosh a bucket full in his face.

“Did you see?” Ryshad turned to the mage but Shiv was sitting on the rim of the spring’s basin, tracing a slow circle in the steaming water with a curious finger. His intense concentration looked ludicrous coupled with his lean nakedness. I tucked away a private observation that Pered was a lucky man.

The mage looked up. “Sorry?”

“What’s so fascinating?” Sorgrad had stripped enough colour from his hair to leave it dun and lifeless but the paint on his arms was proving more stubborn.

Shiv began scrubbing at his own hands. “The way the fire beneath the rocks reacts with the water. I wonder—” He broke off and looked more closely at the inadequate lather. “This isn’t doing too much good.”