Chapter 13 Silver City #3
“You are completely at my disposal right now, aren’t you. This next step in our plan relies entirely on me taking us somewhere and securing us an inordinate amount of silver. Which I think is probably worth something, no?”
“No.”
“And that got me to thinking that I could probably leverage the deep gratitude you must be feeling toward me right now by suggesting that we go and visit an old haunt of mine along the way.”
“We don’t have time, Carrion.”
“I beg to differ. It should take us no more than a couple of hours to load up with the silver. Once we’ve done that, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to go and fetch Hayden, anyway.”
“You could just point me in the direction of Saeris’s brother and go about your business, Swift.”
Carrion looked off down the side street we had stepped into, the corners of his mouth tugging down as he thought about this. The sight of his face like that, in profile, stirred a long-dead memory from the archives of my mind. A memory that was faded and moth-eaten at its corners.
The courtyard in front of the apartment back in Ballard.
My mother had been speaking with someone, and I had been tugging on her skirts, pestering her for Bettell biscuits.
In that gentle way of hers, she had urged me to go and buy the biscuits for myself since I wasn’t a Faeling anymore and had pressed a coin made of brass into my hands.
A whole crona. An old one, worth twice as much as the new ones among the right circles.
The piece of brass had been the most money I had ever held in my hands back then.
I had marveled at it, stroking its surface reverently as I’d walked barefoot down the pathways of Ballard, on my way to Wendy’s to spend my fortune.
The face stamped into the coin had been regal and proud.
The face of Rurik Daianthus.
It took me by surprise, in that moment, that Carrion Swift bore a striking resemblance to his father.
He turned away from the street and looked back at me, his eyes clear and sharp. “I know I’m not very useful to anyone in Yvelia, Fisher. But I want to be. And I can be useful in this. I told Saeris I’d help. I told her I’d come back. So, no. I can’t just leave you.”
A pang of something spasmed in my chest, but I pushed it away, for once annoyed with myself for letting the past work its way under my skin.
There was no denying it: Yes, Saeris had slept with the smuggler.
But she wasn’t sleeping with him now. And she was entitled to her past, as I was entitled to mine.
There was no sense regretting events that had helped form us as beings.
And she was my mate now. My mate. She was beautiful, fierce, clever, independent, and strong.
It made sense that even Carrion Swift—a seasoned thief and well versed in the art of duplicity, by all accounts—wanted to keep his word when he gave it to her.
He was her friend, much as it irked me. And I would accept that.
“All right.” I set my jaw, huffing unhappily. “Fine. Where is this old haunt of yours?”
Swift leaped up from the wall, kicking up a cloud of powder-fine sand when he landed on the ground. He clapped, crowing. “You are going to love this place. They have this ale that, well, yes, it is distilled from rat urine, but—”
“Carrion!”
“I’m joking, I’m joking!” He held up his hands. Still grinning, he turned and started walking up the alley. “Seriously. Can’t you tell when someone’s joking, Fisher?”
The beer tasted so bad that I feared Carrion had not been joking.
He was putting it back so enthusiastically that I figured it wouldn’t kill me, though.
I sipped on the contents of my tankard, watching the humans as they came in and out of the tavern.
The woman behind the bar had recognized Carrion immediately.
She obviously knew him well, too, given that she warned him to behave himself or else she would toss him out on his ass.
A line of questionable-looking individuals stopped by our table.
They all greeted the smuggler and asked him where he’d been, and Carrion came up with a new—and even more unbelievable—excuse for his absence every time.
I hid my face in my beer, ignoring the stares from Swift’s compatriots.
Their curiosity had them loitering at the table for longer than felt polite as they waited for Carrion to introduce his new friend, but Carrion was only loosely acquainted with the universal rules of etiquette and tolerated the awkward silence while he waited for them to leave without breaking a sweat.
I, on the other hand, was sweating. My shirt was plastered to my back. My hair was damp. It was hotter than the fifth level of hell in the tavern, and the temperature showed no signs of abating anytime soon.
“I fucking hate it here,” I murmured into my cup.
Carrion huffed out a breath of laughter. “Ahh, the Third grows on you after a while.”
I shot him an incredulous look. “Which part? The children starving in the streets? Or is it the hot beer?”
“Isn’t beer supposed to be hot?”
“No. No, it is not.”
“Huh. I didn’t know that.” He shrugged, downing another huge mouthful of his drink.
The magnanimous mood that had struck me earlier had fled a while back, and now I was getting restless. I threw back what was left in my tankard, wincing as I swallowed, and then slammed it down onto the table. “We’re done here, Carrion. Time to go.”
“No, we’re not. We’re nowhere near done!” He looked like a Faeling who’d been told he had to go home early from winter fair.
“I get that you’re popular. I’m sure it must be nice to see your very interesting friends, Carrion, but we have things to take care of. I want to leave this godscursed place and get back to my mate, and there is literally nothing you can say that will change my mind on this. So let’s go.”
“Fisher, Fisher, whoa, whoa, whoa.” He grabbed my arm and yanked me back down into my seat. “Okay, all right. So I might not have been one hundred percent honest earlier back in the alley. I didn’t just feel like stopping by here for a drink. I kind of had to come by Kala’s.”
Gods alive, this male. He was something else. “Explain.”
“Well, as I said before, I am the owner of the Brigand’s Bank. But I’m the joint owner. I have a business partner. We have a vault where we store our items—”
“Contraband.”
“All right, yes. Our contraband.” He pulled a sour face at me.
“The door to that vault requires two keys to open it. I have one. Eric has the other. But since I disappeared some time ago and he probably spent a long time scouring the city for me and came up blank, I’m betting Eric employed the services of a vault breaker and has subsequently gone to ground with our goods. ”
This was precisely the kind of nonsense I’d been expecting. I shoved the table back so I could stand up.
“Wait, where are you going?”
I hoped my expression communicated my feelings effectively, because I didn’t have the words.
“I’m going back to the palace. I’m going to find Madra’s treasury, even if I have to tear the palace down brick by brick.
And then I am going to find somewhere hopefully a little less hot to wait until Saeris reopens the quicksilver. And then I am going home.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Carrion whispered loudly.
“We just need to wait for the vault breaker. Once he gets here, we’ll have him tell us where Eric has taken our stuff and we’ll be in the clear.
We’ll go and pick out what we need, nice and quietlike.
I keep the silver. Eric can keep the gold and all the jewels.
I get to help Yvelia. We find Hayden. We go home, and everyone’s happy. ”
I was going to have no teeth left by the end of this excursion; I would have ground them all to dust. “So your plan is entirely contingent on this vault breaker showing up here?”
“Yes. But he is going to show.”
“And how the hell can you know that?”
“Because he always comes here once his dealings are done for the night.”
“How can you even tell what time it is?”
“There are clocks everywhere, Fisher. Look.” He pointed at a metal prong jutting out of the wall over by the door. It was bathed in light and casting a thin finger of shadow perpendicularly across the stonework.
“That isn’t a clock—”
Carrion jumped to his feet, nearly upending his beer in the process. “Vorath! Vorath Shah!”
A man stood in the tavern doorway, half in, half out. His black hair was wild, tinged with gray at his temples, sticking up in all directions. His dark brown eyes rounded with surprise when he looked in our direction.
“Where d’you—no,” Carrion sputtered. “Don’t you do it. Don’t you run!”
The man ran.
Carrion hurdled over the table, knocking both our beers over.
“Carrion fucking Swift! If that’s another of my tables broken because of you!” hollered the woman behind the bar, but Carrion didn’t waste any time checking the furniture. He was sprinting after the man in the sun-stained shirt and dusty pants who had just fled the tavern without a backward glance.
I had no business chasing vault breakers through the streets of Zilvaren. And clearly that was who this Vorath Shah was. But I followed Carrion all the same, because the vault breaker Vorath Shah hadn’t been looking at Carrion when he’d bolted.
The stranger had been looking right at me.