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  Was she here now?

  It was more than he could deal with. He had heard her, he realized, that night in the caravan. Rowan, she had called. Rowan. It wasn’t a dream—he had heard her. She had saved him from the fire. Ettie.

  Abruptly, Rowan pushed back the stool and stood up. “It’s late. I’m going to bed.”

  Aydin raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He unfolded himself slowly from his seat and made for the door. “Then I’ll thank you for dinner and be on my way.”

  A cool breath on his neck made Rowan turn up his collar. It was colder even a few steps away from the stove. Much colder outside, no doubt.

  Another gust, short and sharp, like a push. No draft he had ever felt had given him such a feeling. Nerves, no doubt—that spooky Tarzine had given him the willies.

  Still, he found himself clearing his throat and asking brusquely, “You have a place to stay?”

  “I will find one. It’s not your concern.”

  Great. For the first time since his family’s death, Rowan really wanted to be alone. But he could imagine all too well how it would feel to be turned out of a caravan, however chilly, into a winter’s night.

  “Look, you can stay here if you want. It won’t be that comfortable, but there’s lots of room.”

  Aydin gazed at him appraisingly, as if to divine whether the offer was genuine. He accepted with another shrug.

  “I suppose if I was going to catch the plague from staying here, I’ve already got it.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.” The prefect of the first town Rowan had come to after his recovery had seen to that. Rowan had thought at the time it was his youth, and the fact that he was alone, that had brought a town official asking after his business. Now he realized it was his haggard appearance, the burden of illness still plain on his face, that attracted attention. Nobody had questioned his entry into a town for weeks now.

  That first prefect had recoiled three full steps when Rowan spoke the word plague, innocently assuming that if the bodies had been left behind, so had the danger. From behind a face covered first by a spread, pudgy hand and then with a hastily produced handkerchief, the prefect said curtly, “Go outside the city walls immediately—well outside! Stay in your caravan and wait for me there.”

  It had been a long, anxious wait before a small squad of people (none of them the prefect) arrived, faces swaddled in shawls, with oil, bundles of kindling and two barrels of vinegar. Rowan had been told to burn mattresses, blankets, clothing—anything an ill person, including himself, might have touched. Only the four extra blankets in their box were spared, and these only when Rowan swore under oath they had not been touched since the previous winter. The entire inside of the caravan was then soaked and scrubbed in vinegar. He slept in the fumes and awoke feeling like he’d been pickled. Only the next day was he allowed in town to buy breakfast and busk for coins.

  In the next town, despite clear evidence that he had already cleaned everything, he was made to scrub down the caravan again. After that, he told anyone who asked that his father had been robbed and killed coming home one night in the port town of Shiphaven, and that if he himself looked sickly, it was only from shock and grief and having too little to eat. It was a good story that sometimes earned him donated food as well as a sympathetic audience. Still, it was a relief when people stopped asking and he could enter a town without bracing himself for the questions.

  “You won’t have a mattress, I’m afraid,” he told Aydin now. “They’ve all been burned. And I managed to burn a couple more blankets awhile back.” The blankets smelled unpleasantly of charred wool but were still in one piece. “We can fold the burnt ones into pads to sleep on and have a good blanket each on top.”

  He piled blankets into Aydin’s arms as he talked, the busy work of hosting a welcome distraction. The tall boy cast an uncertain look around the caravan.

  “That one.” Rowan pointed to the broad platform at the far end of the caravan—his parents’ bed. Ettie’s was too close and besides…Rowan gave himself a mental shake, but the thought persisted. If she was here—and he couldn’t imagine how or why she could be, but if she was—well, he wasn’t about to let anybody else sleep in her bed. If that was crazy, so be it.

  “It’s really cold down here.”

  Rowan briefly reconsidered giving Aydin Ettie’s bunk, or moving the stove onto the floor closer to the beds but rejected both ideas.

  “Good thing you have a big dog,” he said.

  And, as if he understood, the great beast heaved himself from the floor, padded down the caravan and flopped sideways across the blanket Aydin had just laid down for a mattress.

  “His name is K’waaf.” A snort of derisive amusement. “But in keeping with local tradition in the prosperous land of Prosper, I call him Wolf.”

  ROWAN SLEPT POORLY and rose early, tired of lying in his hard bunk thinking—or trying not to think—about Ettie. He would buy a mattress with the money he had found, emergency or not, he thought. He was too young to feel so stiff each morning.

  He stuck his nose experimentally into the gray dawn. It was damp and misty, with a bank of cloud lowering over the town. A rainy day to come, he guessed, and poor prospects for playing or traveling. The market square was deserted in the half-light, the streets silent but for the occasional banging of a shutter or door and a burst of raucous shrieking of crows from—Rowan craned his neck, following the sound—maybe the bell tower? Sure enough, a flapping black form rose from the structure in a swell of sound, as though ejected by the sheer force of its neighbors’ cawing. It settled on the pinnacle, only to be jostled off by a second crow. “Doing their best to scare the sun back under the world,” his father used to complain.

  That was about ravens, not crows, he reminded himself, and then the memory was back, live and present and crushing in its loneliness. It was a family story, one they used to laugh about together, and Rowan could not imagine how he would ever laugh about it again. He had been nine or ten. Still using the old button box, and just starting to join his parents for selected tunes or easy engagements. They had traveled in the caravan to the calving festival in Grassy Creek, and arrived late to find a very crowded camp area surrounding the festival grounds. His mother had been worried. “We might have to stay off the grounds,” she said. She liked the caravan easily accessible for meals, and his father liked it close by so he could keep an eye out for thieves. Then his father had pointed triumphantly to a lovely big site under an ancient beech tree. There was room for four caravans there at least, and they hurried to claim the shady area closest to the trunk.

  It wasn’t until the next morning, when the ravens let loose a dawn chorus from the top branches of the tree loud enough to wake the dead, that the family understood why no one had joined them in their prime camping spot. “Like birds, do you?” an old man—a rope seller, Rowan found out later—had asked them with a wink and a broad grin as they were setting up. Each morning, as the late nights piled up, the ravens became harder to endure until finally the dawn broke when Rowan’s father leaped out of bed and started yelling back at them in a crude but passable imitation of their exuberant, ear-splitting calls. Soon Rowan and Ettie were shrieking and giggling, flapping from one bunk to another in awkward leaps.

  Rowan smiled, remembering. When he realized he was smiling, he felt guilty. He would never be able to tease his father about those birds again—and with that realization, the grief came again and broke over him like a wave.

  “Why don’t you just shut up,” he muttered, glaring at the bell tower.

  He needed breakfast. Good thing he’d held back that loaf of bread from Aydin and his giant dog.

  SIX

  Samik sniffed at the steaming cup Rowan handed him—not a true tea, just hot water with a few dried bergamot leaves thrown in—and pointedly set it aside. Surely Rowan didn’t consider this drinkable?

  “So,” he said, leaning back and folding his arms. “Your turn now to ask the questions.”

/>   Rowan fidgeted in his chair. The little twitch in his right eye, the one Samik had first noticed when Rowan was telling the appalling story of his family’s death, had started up again. Rowan was dying to ask more about his sister’s ghost, that was obvious. Yet he had also been violently upset at Samik’s observation and had abruptly changed the subject. Samik wondered if he’d stumbled into some primitive Backender taboo.

  “If you’re Tarzine, why don’t you have an accent?” Rowan finally blurted out.

  “That’s easy. My mother is a Backender. She taught me.”

  “A what?”

  “A Backender.” Samik shrugged. “It is what we call you. Because you have the back end of the Island.”

  Extraordinary. Samik watched Rowan’s face redden as he seemed to go through some internal struggle—could he really be about to start an argument about which end was the back end? But whatever was angering him, he dropped it and instead asked, “Then how did your parents meet?”

  “My father saw her in the slave market in Baskir, and was so struck by her beauty—especially her pale blond hair, a rare color in our lands—that he bought her. Soon after, he set her free, and soon after that they were married.”

  Rowan suddenly looked as if he had bitten down on something vile, and Samik felt his stomach tighten. He had seen this reaction before, had learned in fact to tell only his most deeply trusted friends about his mother’s past. But there was no slavery in Prosper, and he hadn’t thought to find such prejudice here.

  “Your mother was a slave?”

  “I have told you she was.” It was Samik’s turn to be angry now, his voice cold and tight.

  “A Prosperian citizen, sold as a slave?”

  He had misunderstood. It wasn’t disdain for his slave mother he was seeing, it was some kind of national outrage. How simpleminded to think slavery was somehow worse for Prosperians!

  “Why not?” he answered. “Slavers don’t care who you are. Our own people are taken.”

  “So you don’t agree with the slave trade?”

  “Of course I do not.” Samik glared at him, the pale eyes so fierce that Rowan hesitated before he spoke again.

  “But your father…”

  “My father does not keep slaves. He bought a person he could not stand to see in chains and freed her. She is not the only one he has freed. He knows this does nothing to fight the trade itself, but he is an emotional person and sometimes his heart wins over his head.” Samik offered a frosty smile. “My mother, at least, is glad that it does.”

  “Fine. Sorry.” Rowan made a show of slicing more bread and refilling his cup, and Samik relished his little victory.

  “Next question?” Rowan looked rather startled at Samik’s willingness to continue, and he hesitated before diving in once more.

  “Well, then. What are you doing here in Prosper?”

  “Ah.” At last, something worth talking about. “That is a very long story, and I will need more than this dishwashing swill to get me through it. Do you have any spirits?”

  “Spirits?” Rowan’s eyes grew round, and Samik remembered with amusement that the word spirits had two meanings.

  “Wine, ale, brandy. Corn mash in a pinch—maybe I could put some in with these gray leaves…”

  “Oh, that. I’m afraid it’s all gone. I—well, I finished it one night when I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Did it work?”

  A wan smile. “Made me sick, mostly.”

  Oh, this boy was such an easy target, it was almost impossible to resist teasing him. But there was a story to be told, and unlike Rowan, who had shared his history with painful reluctance, Samik was eager to tell it. He had come to realize that confiding in Missus Broadbeam was a mistake. She knew things about him that might help Jago’s men, in the unlikely event that they traced him to her. But it wasn’t natural to keep everything to yourself, day after day. Luckily, Rowan was on the move himself. They would never find him to question.

  “On the day I left home,” Samik began, “I was wakened at an ungodly hour when my little brother landed on my head.” He put on a shrill, high-pitched voice in imitation: “ ‘Samik, wake up! Samik, wake up! Samik, wake—’ ” Samik paused, noticing Rowan’s confusion. “Samik is me,” he explained. “Aydin is my maternal grandfather’s name. I borrowed it for this…journey.”

  Rowan nodded, and Samik continued. “I was about to smother him with my pillow when he said, ‘Father wants you in the cellar as soon as you’re ready,’ and I remembered what day it was.

  “My father, Ziv, is a wine merchant. Not the biggest, but the most exclusive. We supply wines to Emperor Nazir himself.” It was a great honor to supply the emperor, and Samik was proud of his father’s achievement. But Rowan’s sour look suggested he was not just unimpressed but even annoyed. Samik couldn’t imagine why Rowan would begrudge his family this success. He wondered if all Backenders were this prickly, or if Rowan’s countrymen found him difficult too. With a mental shake, he brought himself back to his story.

  “Not all of my father’s customers are, let’s say, loyal supporters of the empire.” And some, he thought to himself, are nearly as powerful and far more dangerous than the emperor himself…

  THE WARLORD JAGO, who ruled over the inner badlands south of the River Hanajim, was arriving this day to place his annual order. The household was in an uproar—Jago was an important and difficult customer, a lavish spender notorious for his vicious temper. Samik had been up late with his father the night before, ensuring the cellar was in perfect order while Ziv reviewed his selection and order of offerings and double-checked that each bottle and glass was spotless. Samik’s mother and his Aunt Kir, who lived with them, had driven their staff into a frenzy of housecleaning and cooking and shopping, for while the warlord rarely left Ziv’s office on his visits, there must be a range of delicacies available to sample with the wines, and there was always the possibility he would decide to stay on for a meal, which would then have to be produced instantly. It was no exaggeration to say an underdone piece of trout could ruin the whole deal with this man.

  Before Jago’s arrival, Samik’s eight-year-old brother, Merik, was shooed off in the care of a young maid named Elida so he wouldn’t be underfoot. “Two birds with one stone,” said his mother triumphantly as she sent them out the door.

  “What’s that, my dear?” Ziv was only half listening, preoccupied with the business to come.

  “You probably didn’t notice the way Jago stared at Elida last year—but I did. The poor girl felt like a suckling pig about to be eaten,” said Samik’s mother. “Just as well she’ll be out of sight today.”

  The meeting went off without a hitch. Samik served while the two men talked, sniffed and tasted. He knew the routine in his sleep, but most customers were unlikely to care about a sloppy pour or a misplaced napkin. He was nervous, feeling it in the tightness of his stomach and the tremor in his fingers. But he managed not to fumble or spill anything, and his father’s strategy—to hold back the best for last and introduce it as “something special I have been saving for you, Lord Jago”—worked perfectly, adding a lucrative incremental sale on top of an already large order.

  “As soon as possible, mind,” Jago cautioned, as they followed him up the cellar stairs. He was a big man, not tall but wide, and his broad shoulders and barrel chest nearly filled the narrow stairwell. Samik had a sudden vision of the man missing a step and crushing them both like a boulder as he fell, and he had to suppress the urge to fall back a few paces.

  “If you will allow Samik to escort you to your carriage, I will make arrangements immediately, my lord.” Though making it seem like a service, his father would be all too happy to comply—sooner shipped, sooner paid was one of his favorite mottoes.

  “Do so.” Jago paused on the stairs, breathing heavily. “Damn this business, with its underground storage. They should invent a wine that thrives in the light of day.”

  “Indeed, my lord.” Ziv was too smart to point out that mo
st customers were content to sit in the ground-floor office and have sample bottles brought up to them; it was Jago himself who insisted on visiting the cellars and choosing the specific bottle from each vintage to sample, saying, “So I know what I’m drinking is what I am buying.”

  Samik trailed after the warlord as he proceeded to the front door—the man knew the way perfectly well and hardly needed an escort. His mother waited to greet Jago, curtseying prettily and enduring it graciously when he grabbed her by the waist, puckered up and smacked her noisily on both cheeks. As close to the mouth as he could manage, Samik thought with disgust, but he held his peace.

  Jago’s carriage awaited in the cobbled street beyond the gate. “Allow me, my lord,” said Samik, as he darted ahead to hold the gate open. Jago went through and headed for the carriage door his man held waiting. “A pleasure doing business with you, my lord,” Samik said to the back of Jago’s head. But the man had already forgotten him.

  Jago had one foot on the step of his carriage when Merik came flying down the street, howling like a dervish from the Forbidden Caves. Head down, hands clapped over one eye, he showed no sign of seeing the three people standing in his way.

  “Merik, watch out!” Samik shouted, but it was too late. His brother ran smack into Jago’s broad backside. The man looked immovable as a mountain, but he must have been off his balance, because he fell right on top of the bawling boy.

  Elida came puffing up in Merik’s wake. “He got a hornet sting,” she began and then stopped in confused shock and growing horror.

  Samik and the coachman, who had both jumped in to help, were thrown back violently by a snarling Jago. The coachman resumed his station by the coach steps, face stony, eyes averted. Samik stood back warily, waiting for the big man to rise so he could scoop Merik into the house.

  But he didn’t rise. With a string of curses, he turned on the boy pinned underneath him and began to beat him.