SanClare Black (The Prince of Sorrows) (26 page)

“
Well, I just thought I’d say hello,” Michael said into the silence. He felt bruised by Pol’s thoughts, but Pol thought he’d been hurt by the long, awkward silence.

“
I’m sorry.” Pol blushed again. “I’m kind of tired today, myself. And...well, I have some news.”

Michael
had moved as if to climb down from the rafters, but he stopped and frowned at his friend. “What news?”

Pol stopped brushing and
looked up at Michael, keeping a hand on the mare’s back as if to steady himself. He hesitated, as if afraid, but finally just said it. “I saw Nanna Tierna. She came here yesterday morning, but you’d left already.”

And I missed her!
But, aloud, Michael only said, “And?”

“
She isn’t a nanna anymore. She hasn’t been for a long time. It sounded a little strange, like maybe she quit but Mabbina threw her out, too. Like it was both things. But what it means is that she went back to her family, and the only way they’d take her back was if she promised to marry, and now she’s getting married, so this was her last chance to try to see you. I guess it was sort of a scandal, everything that happened—Mabbina throwing her out or her quitting or whatever—”

Michael
looked stricken, and Pol rushed on. “She said to say it wasn’t you! She said that Mabbina hated her, too, and this would have happened sooner or later, and she would rather have fought for you and been branded, too, than to have stayed a nanna. She said she wished she had been branded, too.”

“
No, she doesn’t.” Michael’s right hand moved reflexively to touch the brand scarring his left.

“
I know, but she meant well to say so. She thinks she means it.”

Michael
looked down at his hands but didn’t see anything at all. “I waited for her to come see me when I was at Landsend,” he admitted. “When she never did, I knew she was gone, because she would’ve come to see me if she’d been there. No matter what they said, she would’ve.”

Pol nodded.
“She said to tell you she was sorry. She said to tell you that she wishes—”

“
—everything was different,” Michael finished, his voice still soft. “She wishes she’d never met Magister Vaznel. She wishes she’d never convinced me to go to see Sirra Avram. She wishes she’d never taken me to JhaPel.”

Pol bit his lip and looked away.
“Yes.”

Michael
had always forgiven Nanna Tierna because she had tried so hard to help him and to care for him, and she truly loved him.
But so much of what she set in motion ended in disaster.
There were times when Michael felt sorrier for her than he did for himself, and he sensed Pol agreed with him.

“
She brought this for you.” Pol held out a thin, worn booklet.

“
My drawings,” Michael whispered. He couldn’t say anything more. The sight of that booklet brought everything back from his first sight of Whiltierna to...

Michael
slipped gracefully from his precarious perch and dropped down to stand on the mare’s back, careful and sure. She barely seemed to notice.

He might have been raised since birth around horses
—
which would support the Reinra theory
, Michael thought. But it did seem his body knew all about horses even if his memory didn’t.

He knew
Pol envied his ease, but he watched affectionately as Michael slipped down to sit astride the mare’s broad back.

Michael
took the notebook from Pol’s outstretched hand and held it to his chest. Overwhelmed, he crumpled over the mare’s neck and buried his face in her beautiful, cream-colored mane.

He took a long, deep breath and blew it out as he sat up again, then
slipped off the mare’s back and dropped to the ground, graceful as a cat.

“
She’s the sweetest one here.” Michael offered Pol one of his almost-convincing half-smiles. “Give her an extra treat or two for me, all right?” And he slipped out the stall door.

The temperature had dropped precipitously since h
e’d first gone into the stables—reminding Michael that it was only the very beginning of spring and still as likely to snow as to rain—and he hurried back toward the inn to escape the chill, the notebook still clutched to his chest.

He arrived at
the main entrance just as the inevitable rain began to fall—
There go my chalk drawings
—and was waved in automatically by one of the several burly men who stood guard there day and night.

The bu
ilding housing the Red Boar seemed dropped into the middle of Fensgate from Court Row—a parish that included the castle and Prince Leovar’s mansion—and was massive even by that fine area’s standards. In Fensgate, it dominated everything around it.
Impossible to miss, and yet I managed to do it.

He wondered, as he often had, if any of the people he
’d asked for help that long-ago night had given him the right directions.
Or had they all been playing games with me, knowing I’d come to no good end.
Knowing what he now did about Fensgate and its inhabitants, he’d come to suspect that this theory was the truth.

Michael
crossed the wide, elegant entrance hall and pushed through the ornately etched, plate glass doors into the glittering central salon.

The girls, most of whom lived at the Red Boar, were lounging around the vast room, none of them yet ready for the night, some sipping tea or
coffee, some eating an early supper. Varian, the house musician, was playing the sort of quiet, thoughtful tune on the pianoforte that no one ever wanted to hear during open hours.

Michael
shivered at the abrupt rise in temperature from the brisk outdoor air and sniffed as his nose began to run.

“
Catching a chill, dear?” Risa swept up beside him as if she’d been waiting for him to arrive. “Can’t have that tonight of all nights!”

Michael
sighed inwardly.
Another thing I forgot,
he scolded himself. Though the stated rules for being a Red Boar streeter were that you were able to pick and choose whom you liked and say yes or no as you wished, there were times when that rule was more true than others. Harly
appreciated
the assistance of certain streeters in entertaining special guests. Tonight, it was Michael’s turn.
Again.

The Red Boar played at egalitarianism, and anyone could gain entrance to the
central salon if they had the price of admission, but it took either good connections or a much larger investment to move beyond that central salon to the exclusive gaming parlors, private rooms, and streeters’ beds which lay beyond.

And there were reasons for this.
Harly had a plan. Michael didn’t know what it was, but he knew these specially-requested assignations he agreed to from time to time were a part of this larger plan. Harly would request his cooperation, and he would bed whatever special patron Harly wanted him to bed, and, much more importantly to Harly, he would learn whatever useful secrets the men were foolish enough to divulge.

Michael
had become very good at extracting secrets from men determined to impress him. His highborn airs, education, and beauty lulled them into a sense of being amongst their own kind; his notorious past with Prince Leovar, Camarat’s scandalous heir to the throne, lent him a sort of highborn-by-proxy status in their eyes.

Most of the men who burbled secrets at him assumed he already knew far more than he did.
Leovar had always been circumspect when it came to matters of state, though he’d been a great one for filthy stories, gossip, and nikking in barely-concealed alcoves.

And tonight, some mouth
-breathing, firstborn lordling gets to paw me because Harly said if-you-please.
It annoyed him. He never felt more like a whore than at these moments. But it could be worse.
I could be wearing a dress and nikking anyone and everyone I’m told to down at the One-Eyed Sailor.

As the Seventh
Prayer bell began to toll far off in the distance, the Auditor walked through the glass doors, pausing to gaze around at all of them with a fond smile on his face. Michael thought the rail-thin, over-tall man was surely one of the oddest he’d ever met, but he never failed to be delighted to see them all.

“
Likes our money, ‘e does,” Irini muttered as Michael moved to the bar to ask the barmaid for a cup of coffee and to store his notebook behind the bar for safekeeping until he went home. Meanwhile, the Auditor worked painstakingly through the group, alphabetically. As usual, the barmaid gave him his cup with a wink and a stunning smile, and, as usual, he winked back.

He
’d half-finished his first cup by the time the Auditor got to him, and they went through the ritual of figuring up the amount Michael owed the Crown and then counting it out precisely. The Auditor wrote up the receipt, initialing it, having Michael initial it, and then taking out his heavy embosser and squeezing the Royal Seal into the paper for good measure.

Though many moons had passed since the first time
Michael had gone through this little ceremony, the Auditor patted him on the arm as he moved on to the next girl, saying, as he always did, “You’re the most successful boy streeter in all of Fensgate.” Michael suspected he was
the
most successful streeter, but the Auditor was judicious, surrounded, as he was, by his competitors for that title.

“
It doesn’t hurt that you’re the most beautiful boy...well, most beautiful
anything
in all of Fensgate.” Risa flicked Michael’s cheek with the end of her feather-edged scarf.

Smiling sourly,
Michael made a rude gesture at her—one of the small vocabulary of hand-signal words the Red Boar streeters used to talk about their patrons without anyone knowing. Even Daren, the strong-arm, didn’t know what all of the signals meant. Risa laughed and made an even ruder gesture back at him, turning his sour smile into an answering laugh.

He stood beside her, transformed from the half
-starved, cringing, miserable boy she’d escorted from the hospital so many moons ago into a slender, elegant, sleepy-eyed beauty, in such high demand he was able to turn down more offers than he accepted while still earning enough to pay all of his obligations. Risa had kept her promise to make him famous, but he valued much more highly his acceptance as a part of Fensgate’s humble society—an unexpected but welcome side-benefit of his arrangement with the Red Boar.

And he was not the only former ward of
JhaPel who now worked at the Red Boar. Nella, with whom he’d once shared a lovely ongoing flirtation and some even more lovely kisses, had shown up at the back entrance a few moons ago. She’d been thrown out of the highborn house where she’d been apprenticing to be a ladies’ maid when she’d been caught by the lady of the house having sex with the lord.

At least she enjoyed her fall.
That much was clear to Michael. Maybe being a streeter wouldn’t have been her first choice, but, like Risa, it wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to her, either, and now she had the honor of being the youngest and prettiest of the girls.

Having just finished with the Auditor,
Nella moved to stand by one of the windows facing the street, where she nursed a cup of coffee and frowned at whatever it was she saw. The curtains were drawn back to catch the waning daylight, and, his attention drawn by Nella’s stare, Michael could see that someone was standing out at the post in the middle of the roundabout, doing something.

“
Oh, shize, is it another notice?” Irini crossed the room to stand in the door and have a better look.

Sighing,
Michael pushed himself away from the bar where he’d been standing. “I’ll go see what it says,” he announced as he headed out to take a look. He was the only one at the Red Boar aside from Harly who could read. Harly’s literacy was minimal and more geared toward bookkeeping and contracts. Michael, on the other hand, could—and did—read books.

All the girls already done with the Auditor
followed him out, darting across the cobblestones as the traffic passed by—drivers swearing—to the safety of the post’s island. Others had already begun to gather and some were squinting at the black ink glyphs they couldn’t decipher, frowning at what could only be bad news. In no time at all, a crowd had gathered. When they saw Michael, however, they parted to let him reach the notice.

T
he paper was already growing translucent in the heavy, misting rain, making the print hard to read. “Taxes are going up again,” he called. Others repeated his words to make sure everyone heard, and a series of groans sounded at each repetition, though it was only what they all had expected.

“
On everything?” someone asked.

“
Everything that matters to us.” More groans, but the noise subsided respectfully as Michael began to read off the percentages listed, taxing every way anyone in Fensgate could possibly earn a living. The crowd dispersed slowly, a few leaving to mourn their personal bad news after he’d read off each listing.