9. Caspyn
Chapter 9
The burn of the alcohol dragged down my throat as though it was made of tar. Perhaps it was with how thick the grime was.
This far out from the larger cities like Turin you could never find good spirits unless you paid the price. Treynt was as far away as you could get. Seeing as I was there to earn coin, not spend it, the ‘house mead’ of whatever fruit and honey the older pillowy woman, Mylly, behind the counter had concocted would have to do.
Even if it burned. Something that was probably made worse by the fire I kept pressed against my skin. My fíra magic was flooding me so as to keep my eyes a single shade of blue, something that was required in this place.
“How’s it, dear?” Mylly leaned over the worn wood counter of the bar, her red face almost as close as her mass of breasts that were pressed against the worn wood, her nipples pert underneath the thin shirt. The same as they always were. This was the same game I was sure she played with every customer, as she did to me every time I was there. She always forgot that I wasn’t interested.
“Like fire,” I said honestly, my voice more of a gasp through the burn that was still working its way down.
“Need something to put out the flames?” I hadn’t missed the way Mylly had angled herself forward.
“This’ll be fine,” the words burned and growled as much as the drink as I downed the rest of it.
She didn’t move from her perch on the counter, instead she shook herself closer, eyes practically begging as she leaned in.
“You sure about that, dear?” Any more shaking and her breast would fall in my hand.
“I’m sure.” I lifted the glass, looking at her through the waves of my hair that were falling around my face. “You can bring me another of these, however.”
I had no interest in consuming any more of the stuff, but I would happily down a whole bottle if it meant she would peel herself off the bar top.
It wasn’t that Mylly wasn’t a fine woman. I had lain with Jayse and others enough to know how to pleasure a woman, and to make a woman of any size squeal in delight. I simply wasn’t there for that; I was there for business.
Which I had told her many times before.
Mylly gave me a look that said she hadn’t truly forgotten the last few times I had told her that, her eyes a momentary flash of anger before she sidled away to where the bottle of fire sludge was kept. As she reached it, the door to the side of the bar swung open, a lanky man with an eye patch and scar to match was looking around the old tavern to each of the seven occupants. We were all waiting our turn to go in the back, and besides a traveling couple who were clearly regretting their choice of tavern for a meal on their journey, that was all who filled the darkened space.
The ‘Sea Dollar’ was a common stop for those like me, not so much for those with good intentions. If the female in the young couple didn’t seem so affronted I would wonder if they were there for the same reason as the rest of us.
The man with the patch, Jarrurd, looked right at me and Mylly put down the bottle with a sigh, already moving to the next customer who was also flinching and gasping as he tried to down the house mead.
“Next time Mylly,” I said, clutching the now furiously aromatic satchel as I passed her and her scowl.
“We all know that ain’t true, Caspyn. There won’t be a next time.” She was harsher than I expected, the growl more of a bark as I followed Jarrurd into the back and down the long damp hall that I had journeyed down a hundred times by now.
There were few lanterns on the older Qits, the worry being that the waves would knock one over and send the whole place into an inferno. I doubt that it would happen with the wet that was everywhere, but with how this inn swung and bobbed on the waves it may not have been worth the risk. The shadowed void of The Sway had looked terrifying the first time I had been there, only days after turning seventeen.
My boots squelched on the water that had seeped in from the waves, the walls and doors stained with salt and weathered by the incessant water that was everywhere in this place.
The tavern rocked as the tide came in, sending everything creaking and water pouring in through the walls. The old building was attached to one of the first Qits, the floating city placed on the wrong side of the bay and now known only as The Sway. The old place was built too close to the breaking waves and while it didn’t rock as much as the waves that lashed against its side, thanks to the weights that held it down, it still moved enough that it was mostly abandoned.
It was only the low lives that haunt the underbelly of Okivo that remained there now.
An odd place to sell a head that the queen had commissioned to be killed, but not many were willing to deal with the vile things. Their blood was poison, or so many believed. That among all of the other superstitions, like looking in their eyes will bring nothing but curses to your family, or that touching their skin would bring the scourge.
It was all nonsense.
“Happy hunting?” Jarrurd asked with a voice like gravel on stone as we reached the last door in the long hallway.
“Always,” I growled back, tightening my grip on the bag, while making sure to keep my other hand near the gilded pommel of my blade.
It didn’t matter how many times I had been there, with people like these there was no telling when they would turn on you.
Or when I would turn on them.
The tavern gave a heave to the side, more water pouring over the floor and down one wall. Even with the Qit legs I had been born with I was nearly thrown into the side, into the wet that lined every surface of this place.
“Good. You have two or three for me today?” Jarrurd turned, blocking my way from the door that I knew Yersua was behind.
“One.” I didn’t miss the quirk of a smile on Jarrurd’s face. I usually brought more.
Before he could comment on it, I slammed the foul bag against his chest, his nose curling as the aroma hit him.
Warning pulled at my magic that was boiling under the surface, but I kept it and my eye color carefully contained. No one knew about my magic.
Well, not anyone alive.
Jarrurd was still recoiling from the smell as he opened the door to a space as dark and damp as the rest. Hinges creaked and water sloshed as I entered, the slam of the door as Jarrurd closed it more of a wet slosh than a bang. It might have been ominous if I hadn’t been there before, if the desk that sat in the middle of the room and the burly man behind it wasn’t familiar.
He didn’t even move as I stomped through the water toward him. He sat back in his chair, a lit cigar damp and sagging between chapped lips as he rocked with the waves so that he always stayed upright.
“Well, if it isn’t the fabled Wanderer!” Yersua growled, the usual grind of his voice far too jovial. It sliced through me, the warning perking my senses. The story had reached him, but which parts? The wrong parts could get me killed, especially with him. I grit my teeth, pulling my magic up even as I willed myself not to reach for my knife.
He grinned, trying to sell his excitement, but the look was gritty, his yellowed teeth made worse by the lack of light. If the scent from the bag had a face, his would be it. His eyes were near dark, his cheeks far too red, his lips more cracked and broken for even a life on the Qits. His was a deaths’ mask, a look that was one foul step away from demise.
“That’s not my name.” I spoke carefully, Yersua, however, just smiled.
“Oh really, because from what I have heard that is what you are calling yourself nowadays,” he continued in that voice, blotting the cigar out in a stained dish.
I refused to look away from Yersua as I counted the exits and took stock of the weapons that I already knew he was hiding behind the desk; two knives and one sword that he had inherited from his father. I had taken enough unseen walks through the space thanks to stolen time, I already knew it all. I knew I could finish him before he was able to reach for the blade he kept strapped to the underside of the table. He wouldn’t be able to make a sound before the splash of blood and water of his head landing on the floor echoed through the door.
I had never felt as though I would need to fight him; but I had also never seen him with that face.
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” My words were as hard as the mask I currently wore.
“Don’t you though?” he mused, those dark eyes flashing red. “Because the stories I’ve heard this last week, about the dangerous man who hunts Fae. A man who carries two golden blades and has eyes two different shades of blue. They sure sound like you.”
His smile stretched even further and my nerves coiled. By the Goddess I was fucked. He had heard about the eyes, the dual shades that would connect me to so much more. Things that he would kill me for.
“My eyes are not two different shades of blue.” I was firm, my magic flaring as I made sure it was still pulled taut, that my eyes were still a single shade.
He laughed as the Qit rocked, his table and chair sliding two feet to the left and sending me right into the wall.
“Don’t lie to me, Caspyn. It’s dark in here, but it’s not that dark,” he chuckled, the sound more like a bark. “I’ve seen the color slip more than once. Besides that one bastard eye of yours is so light it's near white. Like ice. There is no hiding that.”
He laughed again, but I wasn’t foolish enough to react. There was no point in countering that, the muscle in my jaw feathered as he grinned victoriously.
“So, what of it?” I snarled after a moment, not even attempting to disguise my slow placement of my hand on my knives now. His eyes followed the movement, but he laughed again, the sound matching the creak of the Qit as it swayed.
“Nothing. Nothing.” He waved it away, even though his eyes did not leave mine. “I don’t care what people call you, so long as you don’t bring me trouble. You keep bringing heads, and I’ll keep you around.”
He tried to ease the tension, but I didn’t relax so much as a muscle. There was something else there, something in how he shifted his weight, in the way his hands rested on the arms of his chair, his knuckles white against the aged wood.
I didn’t move my hands from my belt. He had heard the story of the Wanderer, and he had known enough to connect it to me. He had clearly connected those eyes to my wanted poster from all those years ago, the one that had been put out after all those deaths on the bridge in Callay. The bridge that his brother had just so happened to be thrown from. Of course, Yersua’s brother had been my only target that night.
Just like all the other threads in my plan were unraveling, so did this one seem to be. If I wanted to use Yersua for the sole purpose I had planned for him I had to act now.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get your heads. Unless the queen has bigger use of me,” I spoke slowly, careful in my wording as I watched him.
I had planned on using Yersua and his love of gossip to help gain my entrance into the Runturin, but with how he was watching me, I didn’t assume that would be possible anymore.
Sure enough, he laughed, the sound riotous and far too loud.
“The queen? What in the world would the queen want with you?”
“She wants the heads of those monsters, and I am the one who brings the most. It’s not what I want with her, it’s surely what she would want with me.” I swayed with the motion of the waves, the floor creaking and sending more icy brine over my boots. Yersua continued to laugh.
“Let me tell you something, Caspyn.” He leaned forward as the inn rocked, the motion sending him into the desk and some of the papers there floating to the damp ground. “The queen don’t care about these heads.”
“She put out that call for them.” My fingers tapped against the thick leather of my belt as I rocked to the side again, careful to keep my focus on him.
“Naw, that was from the office of the Runturin. Could have come from anyone, but not her. When we take the ears to the Runturin, they pay us and ask us all the same stuff I ask you. When you found the monster, when you killed ‘im, and how. They dot it on a map, pay us, and that be it. The queen don’t care about the heads, and she certainly don’t care about you.”
He laughed again as the door opened and Jarrurd walked back in, holding the purple blood prints of the ears that served as my receipt on a torn strip of parchment. The small scrap was just as wet and damp as the rest of this place, just as Jarrurd was. Jarrurd who had walked in with a dagger on his hip that he had not had before, no sign of the money he usually brought with him in his hand.
Fuck.
“But if it’s the queen you want, I think I know another way you can reach her,” Yersua continued, his hands having moved from the worn armrests on his chair to under the table, right where he kept a long blade.
Double fuck.
Goddess be damned, this was about to get interesting.
“Oh yeah? What is that?” I said, voice low as my eyes continually darted between the two men. I had no time saved in my Sypher’s magic, only the fire of a fíra, something that I really wasn’t interested in using right then.
I supposed my lifetime of training would have to work. I could easily take down Jarrurd before he could draw his blade, perhaps throw a dagger at Yersua before he too drew. All of that would not be without sound however, and with the splashing that was now echoing down the hall, it was not only these two that I was about to face.
“This,” Yersua slipped one of the pieces of parchment out from the file, the ink smudged and the picture nearly unrecognizable.
I knew what it was at once, a bounty poster from when I was seventeen, from that very first job.
The posters had been hung everywhere after I had killed a man in Turin and robbed him of enough gambling winnings to feed my Qit for a year. Which it had, through an ‘anonymous donation’ to the town coffers.
That kill was my first, and I had been seen which is why the bounty had been called. It wasn’t a kill I regretted, however, the man was selling and gambling away children. He deserved what came for him.
It was also that kill that had led me there, although I had stepped atop The Sway months before I would actually end the former owner's life. Months before I would hear of the brother who was now attempting to avenge him.
Even though I knew the poster, I stared at it in forced confusion, careful to narrow my eyes as though I was trying to read the smudged ink.
“Is that about the Prince’s marriage?” I said the first thing that came to mind. The confusion didn’t hit my voice, it was as dangerous as before.
“No,” Yersua snarled, his lip curling as everything rocked again and more water sloshed around my shoes. “This is the bounty slip for the man who killed my brother. An assassin with a dark complexion and eyes of two different shades of blue. An assassin I had only heard about again recently, although this time he was called the Wanderer, and hunts Fae with curved blades. Just like you.” He stood, the muscles in his shoulders flexing as he extended his blade from underneath the desk.
Yesterday, my life had begun to unravel with the knowledge of how little time I had left; now, all those threads were exploding together. I couldn’t stop it.
“I didn’t–”
“Don’t lie to me!” he roared, the mask he had been wearing so well slipping away as he stood, the tip of that long sword stretched over the desk to point right at me. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t grab my blade, even as I heard the dagger of Jarrurd and at least five others in the hall grind against their sheathes as they too were drawn.
I thought fighting the Fae had been fun.
I hadn’t taken on this many without my time magic since all those years I spent fighting alongside the assassins. It wasn’t only that dangerous mix of my magic that wound its way through me, it was anticipation.
“I’m not lying. I didn’t kill him. The bottom of the cliff surely did that all on its own, even if I hadn’t removed his arms before I threw him over the edge.” I shouldn’t have smiled. I shouldn’t have basked in that rage and agony that was on Yersua’s face.
But, I did, that twisted part of my soul delighted in it.
Yersua was screaming in anticipation of a quick kill, his blood shot eyes raging as he lunged, his sword shaking in his fury. He didn’t reach me, none of them did, for at that exact moment the Qit rocked to the side and sent everyone into the wall.