She needed to answer that question first, before she rushed towards Port Lorsin with her sword drawn.
So her first errand was to a moneylender, where she exchanged one of her silver pennies for fifty copper ones, less the lender’s fee. Two thuggish men with heavy wooden clubs hanging at their belts eyed Joslyn’s Imperial Army uniform with suspicion until the transaction was complete. Imperial soldiers were recruited with a single gold regal, and after they had earned that regal with two years of service, they were paid in copper pennies, not silver ones. Which was part of the reason she needed to make the exchange. Paratheen had provided anonymity so far, but if she began paying for things with silver pennies, word of the woman soldier with a purse full of silver would spread far too quickly through the city’s more unscrupulous quarters.
With the copper pennies clinking inside her coin purse, Joslyn headed for the town’s central market square, where she knew she would find a ring of cafés beyond the vendor carts. Paratheen’s cafés were watering holes for Terintan merchants and other locals, which made them not quite as rough as the taverns closer to the docks and a much better place to hear gossip and news.
She found the kind of café she’d been looking for on the far side of the horseshoe-shaped market square and took an outdoor seat that placed her back against the sun-warmed adobe wall. A red-and-white striped awning sheltered the seat from the worst of the midday sun, its canvas flapping gently in a breeze that carried the faint, mingled scents of the ocean, strong coffee, and apa-apa dung.
“May Mother Eirenna bless you,” said a serving girl in Terintan as she approached Joslyn with a tray of pickles, olives, and small triangles of flat bread.
“May rain cool your days,” Joslyn replied automatically.
Both the language and the traditional Terintan greeting warmed Joslyn nearly as much as the uncompromising sun above. And like the sun, after being gone from her homeland for so long, the warmth was both pleasant and jarring at the same time.
Joslyn looked the serving girl over. The yellow dress the girl wore was simple and frayed at the edges, but clean, as was the cream-colored headscarf that hid most of her black hair. Was she a slave? Joslyn wondered. Or the café owner’s daughter? Joslyn supposed it didn’t matter; it wasn’t as if she had returned to Paratheen to liberate more of the city’s slaves.
“Do you serve kuzyn?” Joslyn asked. It had been at least ten years since she’d had the fermented, mildly alcoholic apa-apa milk. Something about the nostalgia Paratheen was evoking in her made Joslyn suddenly crave it.
“Of course, Madame Soldier,” said the girl in a grammar meant to denote polite respect.
“I will take that,” Joslyn said, despite the flash of surprise the formal grammar had given her. She was fairly certain that no one had ever spoken to her in formal Terintan. “And a dish of oranges, if you have them.”
The girl frowned slightly, probably because it was customary to order something more than just fruit with one’s kuzyn, something more like a goat stew, or at least fried shrimp over mashed corn.
Seeing the girl’s discomfort with the order, Joslyn took out six copper pennies from her coin purse and opened her palm to show them to the girl before sliding them back into a trouser pocket. “I will be here for some time,” she told the serving girl. “I promise that I will order more later.”
That seemed to reassure the girl. She nodded again and hustled away to fetch the kuzyn.
Joslyn nibbled absent-mindedly on a pickle while she waited for the girl to come back with her drink and her oranges, leaning back again against the adobe wall behind her.
Joslyn shut her eyes halfway as she opened her ears, spreading out her sense of hearing the way Ku-sai had taught her to do, unfurling it like one of the rolled up rugs the desert people carried to line the floors of their tents.
The café she sat at was one of several surrounding the busy market. The one in the corner of the square, a hundred feet or so from where she sat, seemed to be the busiest. Like the café where Joslyn had taken up her vigil, almost every café had its kitchen inside and its seating for patrons outside, which made eavesdropping easier. At the busy café across from her, a group of finely dressed merchants had gathered in chairs set on a raised outdoor patio, bantering boisterously in Terintan as they sipped their kuzyn and their coffee. Joslyn gradually tuned into their conversation.
“…prices going up and up and up,” one merchant said, lifting his palms skyward for emphasis with each up. He was a wiry, birdlike man who looked as if he might take off mid sentence.
“What do you expect?” asked a heavyset, slouching merchant. “Andreth loved his war. Every Emperor loves a good war.”
“War isn’t always bad for business,” said a third merchant. “This one’s been good for me. The soldiers who flee to Paratheen, they stay so long at my brothels that I’m thinking of renting them rooms.”
“You and your brothels,” said the birdlike one with a hint of disdain. “You’re happy and the mushroom men are happy, while those of us selling silk hardly have any customers left. No highborn to buy in the East — half of them are dead. But no one to buy in the West, either — that damned Emperor raised his taxes too high.” He sighed, seeming to deflate.
The slouching merchant shook his head. “You’re looking at it the wrong way, my friend. Meravin mushrooms are even rarer than silk, and the mushroom men are making more money than ever.”
Their conversation turned to meravin mushrooms, which grew only in the dense forests located between the Northeast and the rest of the East, and Joslyn let her ears roam on, floating from the merchants to a group of horse traders on the eastern edge of the square, to a gang of teenage street urchins squabbling over a game of knucklebones.
None of them gossiped about what Joslyn cared about the most — the death of the Emperor and the trial of his daughter for the murder.
The serving girl arrived with Joslyn’s kuzyn and peeled orange slices.
“Thank you,” Joslyn said.
The girl turned to go, but Joslyn reached a hand out to stop her.
“What news in Paratheen?” she asked the girl as casually as she could. “I’ve been traveling by sea for some time and am hungry to hear something more than sailors’ rumors.”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know if I’m the best source for news, Madame Soldier. All I hear is the talk of merchants and herders all day long, along with whatever my papa says about grain prices. They’re high because of the war being worse, you know,” she added sagely.
“The talk of merchants and herders is more than what I know,” Joslyn said.
“Well,” said the girl, fingering her headscarf thoughtfully. “They say the Emperor is dead.”
“I heard that. Who rules now?”
“His Wise Man,” said the girl. “They say he is old and ugly and hunchbacked and cast an evil spell so he could marry the Emperor’s daughter, even though she’s not even marriageable yet.”
Joslyn lifted an eyebrow. His Wise Man could only mean Norix. But Norix wouldn’t have taken a wife; Wise Men never married.
“Which daughter of the Emperor did he cast the spell on?” Joslyn asked, still keeping her tone light and curious.