“My mother has a saying,” she would tell me. “Terrible power, terrible price.”
At least the sakretwaren stalls don’t deal in warlock bonds. I’m not sure Minkja could afford to pay the cost.
A handful of evergreen garlands are strung over doorways and windows in the Göttermarkt, but the real Winterfast decorations won’t start going up until next week. The temples, offerings, and souvenirs of the market are primarily for Almanic gods, whether it be shrines to different Low Gods, or the House of the High, which worships them all as manifestations of an unnameable High God. Still, more than a few venues cater to deities from outside the empire. Traders frequently get stuck in Minkja while Ungra or Östr heckle the empire over the more profitable border crossings; sometimes the merchants decide, for whatever reason, that they like it here, and settle down.
The vendors of the Göttermarkt don’t so much as blink at me hurrying past. Heavy mist is rolling off the Yssar, and between the cold and the damp, we’ve all made a tacit agreement to mind our own business.
Unfortunately, I have to go even deeper into the fog. Yannec’s tavern is right on the docks of the Untrmarkt, which deals in more mundane goods like livestock and produce. The taverns along the docks tend to fill with boatmen swilling one more sjoppen of beer before they pole back down the Yssar to their villages; this late, I suspect only the meanest and drunkest of the lot will be left.
Yannec’s tavern squats in the mist ahead, a brute plaster-and-timber affair making no attempts to convince anyone otherwise. Matching loreleyn have been painted on either side of the door, their coiling, scaled tails faded to mildew green. The wall’s gray plaster shows through their chests, where drunkards have run sweaty hands over their exaggerated bosoms so
many times the paint has worn off. Any port in a storm, I suppose.
I pull off the Reigenbach servant badge and stow it in my satchel.
The sour smell of cheap beer and cheaper men slaps me in the face when I walk into the tavern, but at least it’s warm. Sure enough, the handful of people in the tavern are about as drunk as I imagine Komtessin Ezbeta to be right now, huddled over wooden sjoppens because they’re no longer trusted with ceramic.
Two in the corner are in a bleary, heated debate, and from the sound of it, they’re agreeing, just too angry and beer soaked to know it. Ragne chitters with displeasure, likely at the pungent air, but she falls silent when I jab at the hood.
Yannec isn’t working the kegs, but I hear his off-key singing back in the kitchen. The barkeep is mopping up spilled beer and waves me on. I don’t know what lie Yannec told her, that I’m a daughter or a lover or a friend. I am none of those, but she doesn’t ask questions, and in the interest of keeping it that way, neither do I.
Behind us, wooden stools clatter to the floor, and grunts and swearing tell me the not-a-debate has erupted into violent agreement. The barkeep tosses her sodden rag at the men, then shakes her head and ducks around the bar to deal with the fight hands-on.
I slip past and head toward Yannec, a great salt ham of a man with the thick arms of someone who spends their days wrestling stew. He’s greasing a heavy iron pan in the dank, too-small kitchen. A thin kerchief covers his crown, where I know his bald spot has to be spreading beyond containment. His eyebrows quirk up when I slip through the doorway and clear my throat.
“Rohtpfenni,” he grunts.
“Marthe,” I snap back. I’m too tired for this. I have plenty of names he could use, but he insists on using the one I hate. Probably because he knows why.
Yannec jerks his head at the door. “Just finishing up here. Come on, let’s talk in the back.” He sets the pan down and picks up a colander and a tin pail full of dishwater, then slouches through the door. I follow.
“He stinks,” Ragne whispers. I just poke the hood again. She smacks the back of my neck with her squirrel tail, and I choke on my own startled curse.
We hole up in the back office, where Yannec keeps books for the tavern owner. It’s a cramped room, no windows and only one other door to the alley, with a heavy bar keeping unwelcome visitors out.
Yannec sets the pail down and gestures to it. I didn’t bother packing away the jewelry into individual jars again after Eiswald’s mess, just bundled it all in the servant uniform hidden in the satchel. I pull it out and shake the jewelry into the colander, then submerge it in the dishwater. The oils and pastes float and coagulate into a skin of scum that’s easily scraped off.
I pass the dripping colander to Yannec, who runs his fingers over each ring and bracelet, mouthing sums to himself.
You might be wondering why I would trust a man like Yannec, and the truth is, I don’t. I’ve known him since Fortune sent me to his scullery in Castle Falbirg; I trust his resentment and I trust his greed.
I know when Yannec rode with me and Gisele to Minkja, it was to serve dinner to fine ladies, not to sling grease in this dingy tavern.
I trust that Yannec thinks he deserves better than this, even though it’s his own damn fault for thinking the best cook in backwater Sovabin could hold a candle to traders from all over the world. (If anything, his success was Joniza’s doing, for sneaking spices into his pans when he wasn’t looking.)
And I trust the trinity of want: I bring him profit and, since he’s my only fence, power. He sees me, even if it’s just as a resource, and he won’t jeopardize his cut of the profit.
“Hundred and sixty,” he finally concludes. “After my cut. This’s a good haul.”
That still leaves me short, like I’d feared. “Would you consider . . . loaning me money?” I venture. “Against a future job?”
(Am I planning a future job? No. Does he need to know that? Also no. I’ll be long gone before he figures it out.)
He opens the strongbox and shakes his head, counting out stacks of coins. “Ja, but not tonight. We just paid out wages, so we’ve only eighty gilden in cash. You get the eighty now, and I’ll take the goods to the buyer before dawn and have the other eighty for you tomorrow.”
I press my lips together, trying to smother a frown. I don’t like it. Eighty gilden is a lot of money to leave on credit. And it’s also too much for a tavern to have lying around after paying wages.
Joniza was the one to teach me the trick to sleight of hand. There was one person I trusted in Castle Falbirg, and that was Joniza, because the bard taught me how to lie properly. Or, more romantically, she saw a little girl exhausted and covered in soot and grease, and decided to share a bit of her magic.
“Your hands must always be moving,” she explained, slipping cards through her elegant brown fingers. “Both of them. People know it’s a trick, right? So they try to watch your hands to see it for themselves. But they can only watch one hand at a time.”
Joniza taught me the tricks behind card games like Find the Lady. How to palm a tin coin and slip it into someone’s pocket. How to pluck a silk daisy from behind someone’s ear.
But what she was really teaching me was how to read a person.
How to keep their attention where you want it. How to make them see only what you want them to.
Yannec never bothered learning any of that. So he doesn’t give me anything to look at other than the strongbox he’s rummaging in, the one he claims doesn’t have more than eighty gilden to it. According to his mumbles, he’s counted out twenty gilden already.