The Assassin's Edge (Einarinn 5) (2 page)

Chinking noises outside drew me to the window instead. A stout woman in practical brown skirts bent to retrieve shards of earthenware scattered on the track between our house’s ramshackle vegetable garden and the neater preserve over the way. A spill of liquid darkened the earth at her feet.

“Dropped something, Zigrida?” I leant my elbows on the sill. She straightened up, looking around for who had hailed her as she brushed a hand clean on her dress. I waved.

“Livak, good morning.” A smile creased her weathered face agreeably. “It’s Deglain standing the loss.” She sniffed cautiously at the base of the pitcher she’d been stacking the other pieces in. “It smells like the rotgut that Peyt and his cronies brew.”

I frowned. “It’s not like Deg to come home drunk, not at this time of the morning.”

“Swearing fouler than a cesspit and throwing away good crocks.” Zigrida’s voice darkened with disapproval. “But he’s a mercenary when all’s said and done.”

“Not like Peyt,” I objected. Granted Deglain had come to Kellarin paid to stick his sword into whoever might wish this colony venture ill, but a year and more on he’d returned to skills learned in some forgotten youth and half the colonists simply knew him as a tinsmith.

Zigrida grunted as she tucked a wisp of grey hair beneath the linen kerchief tied around her head. “I can’t see any more pieces.”

“There aren’t many passing hooves to pick them up,” I pointed out.

“That’s not the point, my girl.” Zigrida looked up at me, shading warm brown eyes with an age-spotted and work-hardened hand that brushed the lace trimming her kerchief with a hint of frivolity. “It’s time you were out of bed, my lady sluggard. You can get a bucket of water to wash this away.” She scraped a stoutly booted foot across the damp ground before glancing towards the steadily retreating trees that fringed the settlement. “I don’t care to know what the scent of strong liquor might tempt out of that wildwood.”

I grinned. “At once, mistress.” I’ll take Zigrida’s rebukes as long as a twinkle in her eye belies her scolding and besides, doing her a favour always wins me some goodwill.

Tidying up could wait. I dragged the sheets across the mattress brushing a few stray hairs to the floor, bright auburn from my head, curled black from Ryshad’s. Our bed was a solid construction of tight-fitted wood finished with golden beeswax and strung with good hemp rope. Ryshad wasn’t about to sleep on some lumpy palliasse or a box bed folded out of a settle. Lower servants slept on such things, not men chosen for preferment out of all those swearing service to the Sieur D’Olbriot, nigh on the richest and most influential of all Tormalin’s princes.

Then I looked rather doubtfully at the sheets. The mattress was still fragrant with bedstraw gathered in the golden days of autumn but the linen wanted washing, if not today then soon. I had a nice wash house out behind the house but spending the day stoking the fire to boil the water in the copper and poking seething sheets with a stick was scant entertainment. Before I’d come here, laundry was always someone else’s concern as I’d moved from inn to inn, earning my way gambling and with the occasional less reputable venture.

I pulled the top sheet free of the blanket and dumped it on the battered chest at the foot of the bed. Ryshad stowed his possessions inside it with neatness drilled into him from ten or more years of barracks life. He deserved a clothes press like mine, I decided. Ryshad’s help had set Kerse up with a better workshop than any of the other woodsmen of the colony. They were all turning to joinery now they could spare time from shaping joists and beams. Now spring Equinox had opened the sailing seasons, Kerse needed to consider the markets for work this fine right across the countries that had once made up the Tormalin Empire. I knew quality when I saw it; in a girlhood seeming even more distant than the lands we’d left behind, I’d been a housemaid polishing up prized pieces not worked with a fifth the skill of our new bed.

But Zigrida had asked me to fetch some water. I’d better do that before thinking about laundry. I abandoned the sheet and went down the cramped stair boxed into a corner of the kitchen that took up the back half of our little cruck-framed house. Using the belt knife laid on a stool with the jerkin I’d discarded the night before, I carved a slice from the ham hanging by the chimneybreast, savouring the hint of juniper and sweet briar that had gone into the curing. Chewing, I went in search of a bucket in the tiny scullery that Ryshad had screened off from the kitchen. I ignored the flagon of small beer keeping cool in the stone sink my beloved had painstakingly crafted. If I was going to the well, I’d make do with water. Ale was never my first choice for breakfast, nor Ryshad’s, but the winter had seen supplies of wine from Tormalin exhausted.

As I opened the kitchen door and crossed the rudimentary cobbles Ryshad had laid to get us dryshod to the gate, a girl came running up to Deglain’s house, across the track. It was twin to our own, sunlight white on lime wash still fresh over the lath and plaster solidly walling the timber frame. It had been interesting watching them being built; Ryshad had explained exactly how the weight of one part leant on another that pulled something else, the tension keeping the whole house solid.

The buttercup yellow shawl over the girl’s head gave me a moment’s pause but then I recognised the lass. “Catrice! Is everything all right?”

She ignored me, hammering on Deglain’s door. Deg opened the door, only a crack at first. Seeing Catrice, he flung it wide and tried to fold the girl into his arms.

She resisted his embrace with a forceful shove. “You stink!”

Deg’s reply didn’t have the piercing clarity of Catrice’s outrage so I couldn’t make out his words but his blinking eyes and unshaven disorder were eloquent enough.

“I’ll not sleep in the bed of any man who falls in it half dressed and full drunk,” she shrilled, hysteria sharpening her tone.

“Do you suppose her mother knows she’s here?” Zigrida came to the fence on her side of the precisely delineated alley separating our two properties. With a whole continent to spread ourselves over, there would be none of the squabbles over boundaries that plague the higgledy-piggledy burgages of Ensaimin’s close-packed towns.

“She’ll be none too pleased when she finds out,” I commented. Catrice was the only and much cherished daughter of one of the southern Tormalin families come to make a new life in this untamed land the year before. They were still apt to take their consequence rather too seriously for my taste. Zigrida was from the north, close to the Lescari border and, as such, considerably more down to earth.

Whatever Deg had to say for himself was enough to set Catrice to noisy weeping. She didn’t resist as he pulled her into an awkward hug, clumsily wiping at her tears with the edge of her shawl.

Zigrida watched the pair disappear inside. “You reckon something’s boiling up?”

“Could be something, could be nothing,” I shrugged. “But we’d best be ready to stick in a spoon to quell any froth.” In general, colonists and the mercenaries hired to defend them rubbed along easily enough together but there had been a few awkwardnesses. The sons and daughters of sober yeomen occasionally found the free and easy attitudes of the soldiery rather too enticing for their parents’ peace of mind.

“Are you going to send for the corps commander?” Zigrida asked.

“Perhaps.” Halice, currently in charge of the mercenaries, had been a friend of mine for years and I served as her unofficial deputy when I had nothing better to do. “Did you see Ryshad this morning?” I’d got used to staying asleep when Ryshad rose with the dawn to pursue one of his myriad projects around Vithrancel.

“That Werdel came calling first thing. They’ll be out at the clay fields.” Zigrida’s tone was warm with approval. She liked Ryshad.

I smiled too. I was more than content with a cruck-framed house, it’s how four-fifths of Ensaimin’s towns are built but Ryshad considered wooden buildings as nothing more than temporary. Before the previous autumn’s Equinox had barred the ocean to ships, he’d recruited the son of a brick-maker known to his stone-mason brothers in Zyoutessela and had half the men of the colony digging clay on the promise of a share in the bricks and tiles. As soon as the scarce frosts of Kellarin’s mild winter had passed, Ryshad reminded everyone they’d promised to help build a drying shed while Werdel puddled and shaped the weathered clay for a successful trial of his new kiln. Fired with enthusiasm, my beloved had bored me to sleep these past few nights with explanations of how to turn quicklime into mortar.

I swung my bucket idly by its rope handle. “You’ve been baking bread this morning?” Zigrida had a smudge of flour by the spray of colourful flowers embroidered around the laces of her sober green bodice.

“What’s it to you?” She cocked her head on one side.

I hefted the bucket. “Water for you today in return for a loaf or so?”

Zigrida laughed. “Fresh bread will cost you more than a few pails.” A frown deepened her wrinkles as she pursed thin lips. “You can give me an afternoon in my garden, helping with the fruit canes.”

I shook my head in mock consternation. “You drive a hard bargain.”

“Then do your own baking, my girl.” Her smile lifted a generation from her laughing eyes.

I waved a hand in capitulation. “I’ll get some water and then I’ll call round for the bread.”

Zigrida nodded and disappeared within her own doors. I headed for the nearby outcrop of rock offering plentiful clean water from one of Kellarin’s many springs. It was a pleasant walk. Halcarion’s blessing loaded the knot of trees around the wellspring with richly scented blossom as soon as the Winter Hag had quit her watch. Maewelin hadn’t disputed the Moon Maiden’s authority with late frosts or sudden storms and even people who barely paid lip service to either goddess had celebrated all the traditional rites of thanks at the recent Equinox.

With winter keeping everyone close to home and making improvements, a broad stone basin had been built around the spring so I didn’t have to wait long before I could dip my pail beside busy goodwives and less eager maidens about their mothers’ bidding. I sympathised with the sullen faces; I’d walked out on hearth and home at much the same age, fleeing the drudgery of service to someone else’s whims and malice, buoyed up with all the ignorant confidence of youth. But I hadn’t sulked about my errands when I had been my mother’s least reliable housemaid. I’d taken any chance to get out of the house, to learn more about life and pocket any coin I could win with a smile or a jest.

“Livak, good morning to you.” One of the bustling women nodded approval at my brimming bucket. “Wash day at last, is it?”

That immediately raised my hackles. “Not that I know of, Midda. Tell me, you haven’t heard who it is setting up as a laundress, have you?”

Midda looked puzzled. “No.”

“Oh well,” I shrugged. “Still, if you come across her, pass the word that I’ll be on her doorstep with a hefty bundle every market day.”

I smiled but Midda was frowning at the thought that something might be going on that hadn’t reached her ears. With luck, once she set about interrogating her gossips, the spreading word would prompt some woman or other to set up her own wash tubs to steal a march on my mythical would-be laundress.

Mind, I’d still have to find some way to pay for someone to do my washing. I felt a little mildewed as I walked back, swinging the bucket to see how far I could tilt it before I risked slopping the water. There was a sizeable share of what little coin the colony boasted secure in a coffer beneath our bedroom floorboards but that was precious little use to me. Work was the currency of Kellarin and it was Ryshad’s skills that were putting credit in our ledger to buy me the prettiest plates from the potters or the softest blankets bright from the looms.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t have talents of my own but there was just precious little scope for them. I could usually find a friendly game of runes or someone happy to play the White Raven against my Forest Birds to while away an evening but these placid craftsmen and farmers weren’t in the habit of laying bets against their luck with the fate sticks and, after the first half season or so, were hardly inclined to wager against my chances of driving their raven clear off the game board.

I lifted the bucket and cupped myself a drink of water. Halcarion save me but I’d hand over that whole coffer of coin for a decent cask of wine. Mind you, I thought wryly, I wasn’t the only one fed up with water and ale. Whatever fruit Zigrida’s canes might produce after my untutored ministrations wasn’t destined for pies; she’d told me as much. But fruit cordials would never match the velvety seduction of Angovese red or the aromatic coolness of Ferl River whites.

That idle thought prompted another that stopped me in my tracks. Aft-Spring’s winds would soon bring ships and it was a safe bet they’d carry trifles and trinkets to tempt the colonists as well as the necessities of life we couldn’t yet make for ourselves. Traders from Tormalin would be wanting coin on the barrelhead, not unquantifiable promises of bartered labour. If I found some opportunity to set people like Midda fretting about that, I might get more takers for my money staked against their sweat. Come to that, traders in an anchorage without any of the usual amusements would probably be only too eager for a casual game of runes. It would take more than a winter’s idleness to leave my fingers too stiff to lighten some Zyoutessela merchant’s purse.

My spirits rose as a new notion occurred to me. Those ships would surely be carrying wine. If I bought up as much as I could, I’d have something better to trade for goods and services than the donkey work I’d been taking on, just so I wasn’t sitting on my hands and living off Ryshad’s efforts. I wasn’t about to do that here in Kellarin, any more than I’d have taken his coin to be called his whore back home.

Those same ships could take letters back to Tormalin for me. I considered how I might have them carried to the more distant trading centres of Relshaz and Peorle. As sworn man to D’Olbriot, Ryshad had had the right to use the Imperial Despatch and I wondered if they ever carried any unofficial correspondence from men who’d left their Prince’s service. In the right places, I had friends who could ship an entire cargo of wines and liquors across the ocean with my name branded on every barrel. If I became the woman the colony turned to for its wine, where might that lead me?