Prisoner of Fate (18 page)

‘Honey?’

‘She shares with me now,’ Buttermilk replied. ‘It’s okay. She’s one of us,’ she explained when she saw Swift’s distrustful expression.

‘What does she do?’

‘Same as me. Relieves people of purses they don’t need.’

Swift sighed and ran her hand across her cropped red hair, flicking off raindrops. ‘Got anything to eat?’ she asked as she moved to the small fire.

‘Bread. Smoked ham. Cheese. I’ll get you something.’

While Buttermilk organised food, Swift stripped off her wet clothes and warmed herself. ‘Got anything dry I can wear?’

Buttermilk put a hank of ham on the small wooden table near the window, pulled the red curtain across the solitary window for privacy, and reached for a cheese on a shelf. ‘Go in the first door. It’s my room. There’s an old green smock hanging on a hook. It’s not much, but you’ll have to make do.’

‘Thanks,’ Swift said, and headed for the bedroom to put on the smock. When she returned, Buttermilk was hanging her damp clothes on a chair before the fire.

‘I thought you’d want these dry. You could do with some new clothes.’

Swift helped herself to the food. ‘Have you heard anything?’ she asked between mouthfuls.

‘Your work on the prince is around the streets. Roughcut and Fist are looking for you. Have you been back to your place?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t, then. The city watch know where you live.’

‘Thanks,’ Swift muttered between mouthfuls. ‘Anything else?’

Buttermilk shook her head. ‘So what will you do for a place now?’ she asked.

‘Find somewhere else.’

‘You can bunk here for a few days.’

‘Just tonight. I’ll get a place where I won’t cause any trouble for anyone.’ She drank from a green water jug. ‘Have you seen Runner?’

‘No,’ Buttermilk replied. ‘Not for a couple of days.’

Swift ate in silence after that, and when she finished she stood before the fire, checking her clothes. ‘I’ll sleep on the floor, if that’s all right?’

‘I’ll get you a blanket,’ Buttermilk offered.

Swift stretched out on the floor before the glowing embers. After her journey from the bush, sleeping under the stars and huddled under a crumbling wall when the rain set in the previous night, she was grateful for the warmth, but she struggled to sleep. Runner and Jewel troubled her mind. Her daughter was safe with Sparkle in Littlecreek, as long as the king’s men didn’t find out about her. She hoped Nail kept his promise to watch over his daughter. Runner was at far greater risk. Questions in the right places, an informant lured by the king’s gold, and the authorities would quickly discover Runner’s existence. Maybe they already knew. Whatever the case, she had to warn him directly by going to her sister, Passion. Runner could disappear easily, but Passion might have to leave her home as well. If the king’s soldiers ever learned that Passion was her sister they would interrogate her to learn Swift’s whereabouts, and because Passion would know nothing of that it would go hard on her. She remembered the dream she had in the bushmen’s hideaway. Her son really was in danger. She had to save him to stop the dream becoming true.

With sleep finally closing in, she decided to warn her sister of the potential danger to her now that she had assassinated a Kerwyn prince. For all the years that Passion had watched over Runner in Swift’s regular absence, it was the least she could do.

‘I am the riddling purple haze
That makes reason what it needs to be
If laughter is the cure.

My amber mistress straight embraces
A single draught and I am she
And I am again pure.’

‘T
HE
E
UPHORIC
R
IDDLE
’,
A POPULAR DITTY SUNG BY EUPHORIA
ADDICTS; FROM
R
USTIC
R
AMBLINGS
, S
ONGS AND
L
YRICS OF THE
P
EOPLE:
A
COLLECTED ANTHOLOGY
,
BY
S
CRIBER
N
IGHTWATCH FOR
K
ING
H
AWKEYE
I
RONFIST THE
S
ECOND

T
he man, a thin, hawkish-faced individual in his late forties with straggly greying hair, coughed and said, ‘You are certain the goods will reach the city before the next full moon?’

Crystal Merchant fixed the questioner with her emerald eyes and replied, ‘If I say the goods will be here by that time, they will be here.’

‘I was only checking the facts.’

‘The facts are, Hardwood, I keep my business promises.’ She lifted a playing card from the table and deliberately turned it over in front of Hardwood. It was a joker.

‘I don’t think anyone is doubting your word, Mrs Merchant,’ a round and shaven-faced man intervened hastily. ‘Hardwood, her word’s good.’

Hardwood turned his attention on the speaker, and said icily, ‘Thanks for that, Smoothhand. If her word’s good enough for an entrepreneur like you, it’s good enough for me.’ He stood from the negotiating table, picked up the joker, slipped it into his pocket and rubbed his hands as if satisfied to be leaving. ‘My porters will be waiting at the warehouse the night of the
full moon to collect my goods. It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Mrs Merchant.’

Crystal smiled the habitually bittersweet business smile that she’d developed through the years working with her husband and waited patiently for the two men and their three brutish bodyguards to depart. When they were gone, she scooped the papers from the table and returned them to the filing shelf. She checked the blue rings on the taper-timer. They’d consumed almost two precious hours, negotiating the quality of product, the price, the delivery time. Despite her reputation, the new ones always queried her reliability to deliver, as if it was ritualistically required. Only last week, she refused a potential customer because she considered his cynicism insolent. Her husband, Will, nicknamed the Joker because he used joker cards as his trading identity, had established a solid name shipping various goods and, after his murder, she so efficiently maintained his business with a firm hand and an iron will that she increased the flow of trade and profit to the company. No one had the right to question the Joker’s integrity.

Crystal strode across the room and entered an adjoining chamber where four young men sat at a table, playing a silent round of dice. A small pile of shillings and pennies sat in front of one whose mop of unruly red hair desperately needed brushing. ‘You can go back to your quarters, gentlemen,’ Crystal announced. ‘There are no more meetings today. I’ll send Lin to fetch you tomorrow when I’m ready to go.’ She watched the red-haired man gather his winnings, and said, ‘Keep beating these fools at dice, Hunter, and I won’t have to pay you.’

Hunter grinned and pushed the coins into his breeches pocket, and as he turned to follow his companions he said quietly, ‘My plan, Mrs Merchant, is
to make enough so I don’t have to work for anyone else but myself.’

‘A good plan, Hunter. You’ll get yourself a good wife if you stick to that plan.’

‘I don’t want a wife, Mrs Merchant,’ Hunter replied, grinning, as he bent to pass through the doorway. ‘I want to keep my money. A wife will only spend it for me.’

Crystal had a retort on the tip of her tongue, but the young man was already out of the room. He was a good young man, quick to the temper sometimes, but basically decent at heart. Will had hired him to labour in the warehouse when he was barely eleven. Eight years later, Hunter was a head taller than most men and his frame had bulked into solid muscle, and he’d learned how to fight the hard way, in the warehouse, taking to task others foolish enough to tease him about his mop of red hair and his freckled complexion. After Will’s murder, Crystal took the advice of Will’s trusted foreman, Flip Lockmaster, and employed four young men to act as her permanent bodyguards. Hunter was one. ‘Your husband was a good man, Mrs Merchant,’ Flip carefully explained after Will’s funeral, ‘but he was too confident about the intentions of his enemies. You need to be more careful, Mrs Merchant. You need to be vigilant.’ So she stayed vigilant. She kept her bodyguards, screened all of her prospective customers, kept spies employed to watch her husband’s established trade partners and trusted no one.

She opened the heavy wood-and-metal door separating the business area of her house from the living quarters, and as she entered the lounge a dark-haired girl rose from a squatting position before the fireplace. ‘I’ve almost finished cleaning the grate, Mrs Merchant,’ the girl announced. ‘Do you want another fire tonight?’

‘Yes, thank you, Apple,’ Crystal replied. ‘Can you also ask Cook to make something without meat tonight? Tell her I’m not overly hungry.’ She headed for the stairs leading to the upper bedchambers, but stopped at the foot with her hand resting on the antique wood banister and added, ‘Make sure you eat before you go home, too.’

The house was meant to have belonged to her grandfather, passed down to him by her great-grandfather, but that was before her grandfather changed his name and entered the order of the Jarudhan acolytes, and that was many years before the Kerwyn invasion. Her father, Cliff Market, inherited the house from her great-grandfather at age fifteen. Astute, he quickly learned his grandfather’s smuggling business, and after the war ended and Port of Joy was rebuilt he became so adept that he was able to establish a monopoly on the trade of narcotics into the city. To keep the old and the new kings happy, he ensured that unlimited supplies of whatever the king wanted reached the royal chambers, together with a generous tithe on the profits he generated from his sales. Although she was Cliff’s only child, Crystal’s husband, Will, inherited the business when Cliff was killed in a boating accident, and Will showed that he was equally capable of maintaining what was a thriving and lucrative trade. Now the house belonged to Crystal.

A sprawling mansion of twelve rooms on three levels, it was a living place that had grown out of proportion as each generation added new spaces. The house originally belonged to an infamous family whose ancestry was reputedly connected with piracy along the Western Shess coast and through the Fallen Star islands during the reign of the early Shessian kings, and beneath the old house there was a network of cleverly constructed tunnels leading to various points around the city and along the coast. Her grandfather showed
them to her on one of his sabbaticals from the temple. He also warned her to stay out of the tunnels because they could be dangerous, but she explored them without her father’s permission, until she was discovered by a group of men who angrily marched her to him. ‘I don’t want you wandering the tunnels, Crystal,’ Cliff ordered. ‘Businessmen like their privacy.’ So she stayed out of the tunnels until her father died. Then, working with Will, they became her domain as she oversaw the trafficking of smuggled goods in and out of the city through the tunnel network.

At the top of the stairs, she walked along the landing to her bedroom door, opened it with the key she wore around her neck on a gold chain, and stepped in, closing the door behind her. The cobalt curtains were swaying gently in the cool evening breeze, framing the apricot, grey and indigo sunset glow over the ocean. She’d left the doors to the balcony open during the day, but the air was losing its comfortable temperature so she crossed the room and pushed the doors shut. Across the city, she heard the distant clang of the time tower bell, tolling the eighteenth hour. She hesitated, transfixed by the beauty of the colours fading in the wake of the sunken sun.

She was still staring westward at the dissolving vestiges of the sunset when she was disturbed by a knock at her bedroom door. ‘Yes?’ she called.

The door opened and a tall, elegant blonde woman stepped into the darkened room. ‘There is a stranger asking to speak with you.’

‘Who is it?’

‘A beggar. The boys are keeping him at the front door.’

‘Why would a beggar come to my door, Lin?’

The blonde woman hesitated before replying, ‘He claims he knew your grandfather.’

Crystal turned from the evening light to face her house companion. ‘Did he give his name?’

‘Chase.’ Lin drew a breath, and added, ‘He’s very young. Shall I send him away?’

‘You mean he couldn’t have known my grandfather, don’t you?’ Crystal pulled a hair tie from her ponytail to let her thick black locks drop past her shoulders, and shook them loose. ‘Did he say what he wanted?’

‘Only to see you. Shall I have him removed?’ Lin repeated.

‘No,’ Crystal replied, and walked past Lin onto the landing. ‘Let’s see what he’s got to say. Did you speak to him?’

‘No.’

‘Good. You can play me,’ she said, before descending the dark staircase with Lin in tow.

Apple had the lounge fire burning vigorously, and the heat had attracted the two household cats to the hearth. They looked up expectantly as the women crossed the room and passed through the oak-and-metal door into the business chambers. Hunter stood at the doorway into the hall where visitors were received, and two more young men, Shaft and Woodturner, awaited Crystal’s instructions. ‘Let our visitor in,’ Crystal ordered. ‘He can come into the meeting chamber.’ The outer door swung open and an unkempt figure with dank mousey hair hanging loosely about his face warily entered. Crystal’s bodyguards watched him closely as they pointed to the room where the two women waited. Crystal assessed the stranger and noted that under his grubby exterior there was a handsome, lithe physicality that would be attractive in the right clothes after an extensive application of soap. He had all the trappings, however, of a common thief.

‘State your business,’ Lin abruptly ordered.

‘I’d like to speak to you in private,’ the visitor asked,
glancing at the dark-haired woman beside the blonde one, and at the bodyguards.

‘This is my personal maid,’ Lin explained, ‘and these men are in my absolute trust.’

Crystal noted that the young thief seemed reluctant to say any more. He looked at the bodyguards again and scratched his head. ‘All right,’ he finally said. ‘I have a message from your grandfather.’

‘My grandfather’s been dead almost as long as you’ve been alive,’ Lin bluntly told him. ‘How could you have ever possibly known him?’

The thief coughed and shifted his feet nervously, before saying, ‘He said I should tell you that the platypus’s name was Brightwater.’

Crystal gasped and covered her mouth. Aware of her companion’s unexpected response, Lin asked, ‘When did he tell you this?’

‘I was in the Bog Pit with him. He asked me to speak to you.’

‘About what?’

The thief again seemed uncomfortable sharing what he knew. ‘I don’t think this is even for trusted ears,’ he said.

‘Mrs Merchant?’ Crystal interrupted. ‘Can I speak with you in private?’ Lin nodded, and followed Crystal from the chamber into the lounge. Framed against the firelight she said, ‘He knows something that was a special secret between my grandfather and me.’

‘What? The platypus’s name?’ Lin asked.

Crystal nodded. ‘Only my grandfather knew that. It was our little secret. He showed me a platypus in a creek when I was young and I wanted to keep it, but I couldn’t. Grandfather said I could give it a name.’

‘Then is his story true?’

Crystal shook her head. ‘No. It’s impossible. Grandfather died in the Royal Gaol fifteen years ago,
before the king could grant a pardon that my father sought for him. I don’t know how this thief knows what he does, but it’s impossible that he could have talked to my grandfather.’

‘He seems to want to tell you something important,’ Lin noted.

A grim smile crossed Crystal’s mouth. ‘He’s clever. Someone’s paid him to get close to me for whatever reason, perhaps even to attempt an assassination. Using my grandfather’s secret is a very clever ruse. I’m just curious how he knows it.’

‘Torture. They wouldn’t have treated your grandfather well in the gaol. Perhaps a gaoler overheard his confession when he told them your secret,’ Lin suggested.

‘That’s an odd confession,’ said Crystal. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘So? What do we do?’

Crystal flexed her fingers before bending to pat the tabby cat curled by the fire. ‘Have the boys rough him up and send him back to whoever sent him with a clear message that the ruse was stupid. Have Hunter follow him. I want to know who’s making a play against me this time.’

‘Gladly,’ Lin answered, and returned to the meeting chamber to carry out Crystal’s orders.

Crystal heard a cry of protest in the adjoining room, followed by a thump and the sound of a man grunting at the loss of breath. She straightened from the purring cat as Lin re-entered and they sat together on the leather and fur-bedecked lounge, discussing the possibilities behind the young thief’s visit while they waited for Cook to bring their dinners.