Chapter 37 #2
“How about there?” Senna pointed her beak at a farmhouse not far from the river, dark but with a thin coil of smoke still escaping one chimney, made silver in the silver light.
They slept that night in the stables by the house, Rue too tired to argue with the tenants. Sharp got the largest and deepest pile of hay, complaining all the while about it scratching, and Rue the smaller, nibbled at throughout the night by an old mule with a seemingly bottomless appetite.
Only when wrapped in a malodorous horse blanket and having dipped all her toes into the well of sleep did Sharp ask a question that reached beyond the circling of her wandering mind.
“You had children, Mollandra!”
“I did.”
“Girls.”
“Yes.”
“Three of them.”
“Triplets.”
“How are they?”
“One dead, another hopefully dead, and the fate of the third I don’t know.”
Sharp fell silent after that, and Rue lay staring at the darkness, thankful for the questions that her old friend hadn’t asked.
Rue chivvied Sharp out of the house at dawn, tipping the remainder of her coins into the hands of a wide-eyed farmhand named Arthur Dun while his comely wide-eyed wife, Martha, watched on.
“It’s too much, ma’am.” Arthur had upgraded her from “muddy vagabond” to “ma’am” when the daylight revealed Sharp’s soiled finery and by association conferred some degree of respectability onto Rue.
He looked ready to call her “highness” as he stared at the modest pile of copper bits and the two silver crowns in his broad palms.
Rue shrugged. “Give us some bread and cheese to take with us if you’re feeling guilty.
” It was the last of what she’d kept in her pouch along with the weed for her pipe.
She was sure the mercenaries would have taken it after killing her, but it had been small change as far as Gressa and her lieutenants were concerned, not worth bothering with as they’d searched her for clues to her purpose.
“Who are these people?” Sharp wandered out into the muddy yard in her muddy shoes, frowning at the ducks.
A skinny dog ran up barking. Sharp fell to her knees before it, unleashing an awful growl, and the hound reversed course in a remarkably small space, tearing away with its tail between its legs and yipping in terror.
Sharp stood up awkwardly, laughing before noticing the filth on her dress. “And why is everything so dirty?”
Half a day on the river and an afternoon’s walking brought them through the wagon-choked One Line Road to the western gate of Chaim City.
While still on the boat Rue had stolen Sharp’s sword from her, poking the blade through her own smock in such a manner that her pocket concealed the hilt.
She had foreseen problems if the guard at the city gates spotted the weapon in the possession of an old woman.
She also had foreseen problems with Sharp murdering the first person to jostle her.
In the end, nobody cared about two old women entering the city. The guard waved them through without a first glance, let alone a second.
“Instructor Maggery would be proud of us,” Rue muttered. Maggery had always been critical of Rue’s efforts when it came to disguises. “We’ve finally perfected the old-woman look, albeit by becoming old women.”
Together they pressed on through the crowded high street.
Ahead of them the castle loomed on the outcrop of rock that long ago brought the first wanderers to a halt at this particular bend in the river and encouraged them to stay.
As the emperor’s new governor of Regon, the baron had had several choices when it came to setting up court.
The last incumbent had taken the citadel in Ryecrest, but Chaim City lay closer to the border with Abrona and the emperor’s palace.
Better to stay as near as possible to the heart of things.
The baron had almost certainly never been within a day’s ride of Pye or any of the other hamlets burned on the Regon–Tavoland border to justify the war he wanted to start.
“Keep close to me!” Rue took hold of Sharp’s hand the second time she got separated and hauled her on despite her protests that she was shopping and didn’t need a guide.
More than a decade had passed since Rue had troubled herself with cities and all their complications. The stink and the noise brought it all back quickly enough, though, and soon she was deploying her elbow to good effect. She spotted a side street whose hanging signs offered what she sought.
She dragged Sharp out of the high street’s flow.
“Don’t.” Rue stared down a ragged child who’d been in the act of reaching for Sharp’s nonexistent pocket. “First: it’s a dress. Second: if she’d seen you before I did you’d be missing fingers.”
The girl scampered off, blowing a raspberry, ignored by Sharp, who stood blinking at all the signs.
A few dozen better-dressed citizens roamed the narrow street under the watchful gaze of guards set at the doors of each establishment.
“Darkmon and sons. Fine silver—”
“Come on.” Rue jerked Sharp along. “We need a jeweller.”
Sharp shook her hand free of Rue’s. “You are a very rude and rather dirty—”
“Enough of this.” Rue took the hand back, dredging up the awful blackness inside her once more, suffering as she pulsed it through Sharp.
“You know me. You know this.” She focused the power on Sharp’s memories of their past, trying to open the doors that this age-wrought illness had closed across her friend’s mind.
“…Mollandra…?”
“Yes.” Rue spotted a gemsmith’s. This far from the town centre, half the establishments, even on a well-heeled street sporting silversmiths and gemsmiths, bought much of their merchandise off those who thieved it from the gentry living closer to the seat of power.
It was the sort of halfway place Rue needed.
At a wholly legitimate jeweller’s, even with Sharp’s faded elegance, any deal of the sort she was about to make would end with them in a cell.
“Focus now. I’m going to need you to sell something.”
“Sell what? Where are we?” Sharp looked around curiously, just as she had been, but with a different light in her eyes.
Rue stopped outside a silversmith’s, the third the street had offered them so far.
She knelt with a groan next to the scraper set by the door so that people could remove the mud from their boots before entering.
Doing her best to shield her activity from prying eyes, she pulled the necklace of clay beads from around her neck.
It had a sturdy cord, but she still considered it a miracle she’d managed to keep it through all her recent beatings.
She set one of the beads on the scraper’s support.
“Not too hard…” and hit it with the hilt of her knife “…not too soft.” The bead broke into several pieces, revealing a brilliant diamond almost the size of her smallest fingernail.
She swiftly pocketed the gem before fastening the necklace back around her neck, five beads remaining.
She prodded Sharp across the street to the gemsmith’s.
“Do not lose this.” Rue presented the diamond to Sharp.
“Sparkly!” Sharp promptly took it between finger and thumb. “Don’t lose it?” She splayed her hand, turning it this way and that.
“Where…” The gem had vanished. “Dark gods, Sharp!” Rue bent, staring at the flagstones for any sparkle.
“What’s this?” Sharp reached behind Rue’s ear and produced the diamond. “Lose it? You have me confused with someone else, my dear Molly.” She sniffed. “You may have let yourself go, but I…am still sharp.” And, so saying, she stalked past the burly fellow at the door and into the shop.
Rue followed, praying that this spark of her old friend would catch light and summon her from the darkness of her mind.
The shop’s interior suggested an establishment that sold to other merchants, artisans, and the like, rather than the intended wearers of its goods.
Dimly lit and walled with innumerable tiny drawers, all secured by locking bars, the place smelled faintly of pipe smoke and old leather.
A scrawny man wearing a white-ish apron over a black tunic emerged from a doorway at the back and eyed them both with suspicion.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a tone that very much suggested he could not.
“I have a diamond!” Sharp announced, holding it up, before seeming to run out of purpose.
“That she wants to sell.” Rue nudged her.
Sharp’s participation would ensure a better price.
She at least looked as if she might legitimately be selling off the remnants of her estate to fund her decline.
In Rue’s hands the gem would clearly be stolen property and subject to all the discounts expected.
In fact, the doorman might be called in to take it from her, given that she looked incapable of putting up a fight and was certainly not going to be taken seriously if she reported the theft.
Even with the gold now filling her pockets from the sale of her gem, Rue knew that the path to the castle would require a number of steps.
The social ladder can be scaled at speed, but seldom can it be leapt in a single bound.
A peasant with ten times the cost of a fine new set of clothes from the most exclusive tailor in the land will still not get past that tailor’s threshold.
They would need to be so loaded with gold that they could hardly walk in order for that “exclusive” to be overcome along with the damage to the merchant’s reputation.
While Rue fretted and paced, Sharp seemed quite delighted by the process of buying Rue three successively grander sets of clothes, with a bath in between sets one and two.
Each change of garb was the price of entry to the next stage.
Sharp herself upgraded in a single step, from her faded and outdated finery to vivid, contemporary plumage that would see her through the doors of any house in the city.