CHAPTER 3 #2
Suddenly nothing mattered more than getting clean.
I opened my hand over the rim of the bath. The last of Everard’s copper dens slipped from my fingers and landed on the smooth stone with a soft clink. I took the bag off my neck, put it next to the coin, reached for the soap, and began to lather my hair.
Getting Kair Toren off of me took a minute.
Midway through it, Klemena returned with a stack of clothes and my dinner: a slender glass bottle filled with water, soup, fresh bread, and roasted fish with some vegetables on a wooden tray.
The light dinner. The regular dinner had five courses.
I hadn’t eaten for three days. I couldn’t be trusted not to gorge myself on it and then throw it up.
I gave Klemena one of the nomas from the bag.
It would cover the bath, the clothes, and the dinner.
If I had been renting a room at one of the cheaper legitimate inns, it would’ve paid for a week-long stay with meals.
Klemena asked me if I wanted to keep my old clothes.
I told her no. She bowed, collected my discarded cloak, and left.
As bad as it smelled, they would likely burn it.
I devoured half of the soup and most of the bread before I almost got sick and had to stop.
Now I sat in the bath, leaning my head on the wall behind it, with my hair brushed out and my stomach gurgling.
The rest of my meal waited on the platter.
I would finish it as soon as my digestion settled.
I’d eaten so fast, I had barely tasted the food.
The water in the bath was still warm. They must heat it somehow.
Everyone in the capital knew about the Garden of Soft Blossoms. It sat outside proper society, and yet it was accepted the way upscale strip clubs were accepted in our world. Calling it a brothel would be like referring to the Met as “a little art gallery.”
The Garden had two cornerstones: discretion and safety.
It was a place of expensive courtesans, male and female, but it offered much more.
People came here for entertainment, for gourmet cuisine and rare ales and wine, to get pampered and to escape from their lives.
For younger nobles and the heirs of richer merchants, this was a place to flex in front of their friends and throw their family’s money around.
They could get roaring drunk, pass out at their table, and when they woke up, all their valuables would be right where they left them.
The staff of the Garden would take care of me, not because they were sex workers with hearts of gold or because they felt sorry for me, but because I gave them money.
If that man had caught me before I had paid my fee, he would’ve dragged me off in plain view, and neither of the guards would have lifted a finger to help me.
The noma in my hand bought my safety. Had I fumbled with my bag instead of throwing that coin at the guard, I wouldn’t be here right now.
I squinted at Everard’s copper den next to my bag of money.
Saved by the Sleepless Duke. If this was a fanfic, people would’ve trashed it for sheer implausibility.
There was a relief on the wall across from me, a marine monster winding around a column, carved in great detail down to the scales and wide fins.
It looked like a weird hybrid of a dragon and one of those giant extinct reptiles that ate dinosaurs in the prehistoric oceans.
I was in the Idrid Room, the place where Orsana Kallira, an aide to the Underchancellor of Ceremonies, was murdered.
Would be murdered. It wouldn’t happen for another eight months or so.
She would be sitting right here, probably in the exact same spot I sat, waiting to sell the kingdom’s secrets to an agent of the Crimson Empire, when the Shears caught up with her.
In the book, they stabbed her so fast and deep, she didn’t even have a chance to scream.
The entire bath turned red with her blood.
Orsana and I had that in common. We both died. Violently.
The canvas bag next to the coin assured me that I hadn’t hallucinated my own murder. It had happened. And yet, here I was, alive and soaking in the tub.
There was only one possible explanation. Whatever force had brought me to Rellas wanted me to live.
Why was I here?
Was I supposed to do something? Why dump me naked into a ditch and then have me wander around, starving and cold, for days?
And how did I get here? There was absolutely nothing in the books about visitors from another world. No mention of portals, gates, nothing like that.
In most portal fantasies, some terrible, traumatic event occurred for a person to cross into another world.
Usually, they died. They were stabbed, they fell off bridges, their ovens exploded.
They were hit by a truck. It was such a common trope, there was a name for it.
Death was a requirement, because without dying one couldn’t reincarnate in a different world.
Nothing like that had happened to me. I had a routine day, took a shower, crawled into my bed, read some online comics, and fell asleep. My oven couldn’t explode because it was electric. Nobody had stabbed me in my sleep because my alarm system hadn’t gone off. There was no truck-kun.
Was I dead in my world? Was I missing?
If I was missing and the time back home flowed at the same pace as here, by now my parents would be frantic. We texted each other every day. They were probably searching for me. My brother was probably getting emergency leave from the army to help them.
Suddenly I missed my family so intensely that I pulled my knees to my chest, trying to curl into a fetal ball in the water.
I missed my parents. I missed my brother. I missed their voices, their texts, their hugs. I missed their jokes and their laughter.
I missed my home. Things didn’t exactly go the way I had hoped after I finished college, but I had managed to build a cozy life for myself.
My apartment was small, but it was comfy, full of books, and mine.
I didn’t love my job and my grocery-delivering side gig, but I tolerated them well enough.
They were the price I had to pay to sleep in a soft bed under a solid roof, drink coffee in the morning in my cute kitchen, and play games on my Steam Deck at night. I lived in a nest of safety.
There was no safety in Kair Toren. It was the kind of place you wanted to visit only from the comfort of your home, while wrapped in a blanket and sipping on some hot cocoa for courage.
You dove into it, let it thrill you and crush your emotions, and then surfaced, grateful to be back in your own little corner of existence.
I wanted to go home. I closed my eyes and pictured myself on my tiny balcony, sitting in the rocking chair my brother had bought for me and hauled all the way to my third-floor apartment.
There would be a view of the picnic area and two large oaks in front of me and a round table on my right with a steaming cup of my favorite green tea in a mug that said Good morning. I see the assassins have failed.
I imagined myself in that chair and wished for it with all of my being. Nothing happened. I was still in the bath. I had already tried dying. That didn’t work either.
Maybe there was some purpose to my being here, something that only I could accomplish and then I would get to go home. Or maybe this was it. This was my life now.
A hard lump blocked my throat.
Okay, no. I was safe for the moment, true, but falling apart in the Garden wasn’t the wisest thing to do. I needed to stay sharp.
Worrying about what really happened wouldn’t get me anywhere.
It didn’t matter what took place in the “real” world because right now this world was real enough to harm me.
It had injured me, starved me, killed me, and resurrected me, and I had felt all of it.
Lecke’s knife hurt. Drowning hurt. My feet still ached from running on the streets, and my whole body hummed like every cell in it had simultaneously developed a toothache.
This was my reality right now. If five years later I woke up in my bed like none of it had ever happened, it wouldn’t matter because I still had to survive today. And tomorrow.
I needed a plan. First, I had to avoid dying at all costs.
I had no idea how my resurrection worked.
Would I revive every time someone killed me, or did I have a limited number of lives?
I didn’t want to find out. Not only that, but the pain had been excruciating, and the echo of that hurt still rattled around deep inside my bones.
Thinking about it made me shiver, which was a mistake because all of me was terribly sore.
Survival was crucial, but so was safety.
Even if I could revive every time I died, I could still suffer while I was alive.
Broken bones, cuts, bruises, hunger, all of that would hurt just as much.
The difference was, after it killed me, I would resurrect and endure it all over again. Now that was a cheery thought. Yay.
I had to find a secure place to stay. Somewhere safe where I could hole up while I figured out what to do next.
The Garden didn’t rent rooms. All patrons were kicked out by two am with very rare exceptions.
I had been here for at least a couple of hours.
It was probably close to ten or eleven pm.
The majority of the inns were in the Inn Quarter to the east, all the way across town and walled off in their own section.
Kair Toren liked to keep track of their visitors.
If they got unruly, the city could simply lock them up within the Inn Quarter and call it a day.
The current arrangement had come about because a century ago, a rebel princess had snuck her army into the city by having them pose as merchants and random travelers and then tried to take the capital.
The municipal regulations had relaxed a little since then, but not much.