CHAPTER 13 #2
“No, I like it.”
It reminded me of an assam tea blended with some sort of sweet spice or fruit.
Mercenaries and soldiers all across Rellas drank this tea by the campfire in the early mornings before long marches and in the evening before the night watch.
One famous knight had even declared that there were three essential ingredients to winning a war: a commander who was admired by their troops, weapons of Rellasian gray iron, and firepit tea.
Shana sat in a chair across from me, poured herself a cup, and loaded it with honey with a slight frown on her face.
“Am I confusing?” I asked.
She nodded. “A bit. I’ll figure you out. Gort says you know people’s secrets.”
“Something like that.”
“He’s hiding something from me. He won’t tell me what it is, and the kids don’t know either. Do you know?”
Gort wasn’t half as slick as he thought. “I have a good guess.”
“Is he sick?”
“No. It’s not another woman either, if you’re worried.”
She barked a short laugh. “Oh, I know it’s not another woman.”
“It’s not important now, because both of you are here,” I told her.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
I had to impress her. I would need to ask the Magnars to do some strange things in the near future, and having Shana’s support would go a long way. I had to choose carefully.
“You could’ve picked Kurem of Las. He came to you the night before your wedding and begged you not to marry Gort.”
She paused with her tea halfway to her lips. I gave her a few moments to recover.
“Do you ever regret it?”
“Picking Gort?”
“Yes.”
She sighed. “No. I love him.”
“It must’ve been a hard life with him being gone so much.”
“If Gort was a blacksmith or a farmer, I would still love him. But he is a soldier. That’s what he knows how to do.”
In Rellas, being a mercenary was a job like any other.
Most people didn’t choose it because they loved war.
They picked it because they were out of options, and it was a way to make a living.
The nobles frequently squabbled with each other and their conflicts sometimes flared into small-scale wars, with the official blessing of the Throne complete with papers and royal seals.
The nobles hired mercenaries to get the upper hand, and when they didn’t, the Throne often did, to supplement the King’s Army.
“You’re right, it wasn’t an easy life,” Shana said. “It was tough, and yet we made it through. Hreban stole my husband’s Green Purse from him. But you pay well. We’re going to get our justice, and once this job is over, if we live through it, we’ll get a farm of our own. We’ve earned it.”
That was their dream. They talked about it when the going got tough.
One day they would get a farm with fruit trees and a little house.
They would have a calm and peaceful life, free of marching through the mud to almost certain death.
Will and Lute wouldn’t have to risk their lives to put food on the table.
All Gort and Shana wanted was something a little bit better for themselves and their kids. Just like my parents.
I sipped my tea.
There were hundreds of Gorts and Shanas out there, working to get their own little farms and a little slice of peace. Two weeks from now, eighty of them would die.
I had a hard decision to make.
“Maggie,” Reynald said on my left.
“Yes?”
“We’ve run out of land.”
I stopped.
We faced the harbor. Ahead the stone wharf stretched, and beyond it the ocean shimmered, the water a flawless turquoise darkening to a heartbreaking blue.
To the left lay the fishing docks. About a hundred yards away, a team of fishermen was pulling a huge fish onto a ramp leading from the water.
It was trapped in a net, hooked by enormous ropes to a big wheel-and-pulley contraption, and one of the fishermen led a pair of horses connected to the wheel, winching the net ashore.
The fish glistened with purple and blue, its spiny fins bristling in the thick net.
Its head and chest were as big as one of those oversized Ford Transit vans, and I couldn’t even see its tail.
Four stelkas bickered by the pulley, fighting over the fish guts someone had dumped on the stone.
None of them had a crescent-shaped white patch on their chest.
Normally I would’ve gaped at the scene, but right now I just wanted to get to our destination. We needed to go north along the coast, away from the fishing dock and toward the commercial wharf.
“Which way?” Reynald asked.
“To the right.”
We made a right and headed down a wide street, parallel to the wharf, with massive warehouses rising on both sides.
Reynald, Gort, and Clover had come back from the market an hour and a half ago, followed by three delivery people pushing carts loaded with their purchases. I told them I needed to go to the docks, and Reynald immediately volunteered to escort me.
I had included “outfit that would make me look like I’m from a minor noble house” in the shopping list, and Clover had come through with flying colors.
I wore a green gown the exact shade of lawns from the weed killer commercials, a cloak of slightly darker green, and my hairdo was a work of art secured with a pricey silver ornament shaped like a flower.
My shoes were much better, too. I looked like I had just enough money and status to be annoying.
Next to me, Reynald broadcast kickass bodyguard.
He wore his outfit from the teahouse, and he’d added a lancer’s coif to it.
The coif fit over his face and hid everything except a narrow part around his eyes.
Originally the coif had served to protect the faces of Rellasian lancers from their heavy helmets, but now it functioned like a local version of a sheisty.
Masons wore it to keep from breathing in stone dust, butchers put it on it to keep the gore from their face, and private guards and mercenaries used it to look more scary.
Together with the hood of his cloak, the coif took Reynald from menacing into downright sinister territory. A good thing, too. The more threatening he looked, the more credibility it would give me.
I’d been turning the problem of the mercenaries in my head over and over, trying to account for all possible consequences, and gotten nowhere. It gnawed at me. I knew what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, it was completely opposite of what I should do, and I had trouble justifying my choice.
There it was, on the left. A warehouse with a painted wooden shield above the door. A copper warhammer on a field of dark cobalt blue striking a gray anvil. The Keepers of Iron. The Yolenta Great Family.
“Do I look like a noble?” I asked under my breath.
“Yes,” Reynald told me. “Green suits you, Maggie.”
Great.
I made a beeline for the open door. Reynald got there before me, stepped inside, pulled his coif down off his face, and glowered.
The interior was filled with goods, some in barrels, others in chests, grouped by type, with samples on display: chunks of ore in different colors, some sort of powdered stone, big hunks of crystal . . . Quartz, maybe?
A seller hurried out from behind a short counter, keeping an eye on Reynald, and bowed to me. “How may I help you, my lady?”
“Do you sell pink salt?”
“We do, my lady. Right this way.”
Clover’s outfit did its job. Excellent.
He led me down the aisle to a group of barrels. One of them stood open, filled to the brim with small, coarse pebbles of pink rock salt.
“We also offer raw rock and fine grinds,” the seller said.
I needed to aim for just the right mix of clueless and put-upon. The kind of woman who normally couldn’t be bothered to step foot into a shop like this.
I looked at Reynald. “Is this what they call a trader rock barrel?”
“Yes, my lady,” Reynald said.
The barrels stood about twenty-five inches high. My grandpa used to have an old bourbon barrel about that size. He used it as a side table on the porch, by his rocking chair.
An overly obsessive reader once calculated the volume of one of these barrels based on Rellas’s units of measurement to settle an argument on a fan forum.
It came in right at sixteen gallons. According to that post, a gallon-sized chunk of Himalayan pink salt weighed about eighteen pounds, based on halite’s density.
The actual weight per gallon varied, depending on the size of the particles and type of salt.
Either way, a sixteen-gallon barrel was very heavy.
And I had no idea why I remembered that so precisely. The numbers just popped right into my head.
“They seem small,” I said to Reynald. “Much smaller than grain barrels.”
“They are very heavy, my lady,” he said, his expression completely neutral. “They are sized for ease of transport. Grain barrels are larger because grain weighs less.”
The seller grabbed one of the rock pebbles and held it up to the sunshine coming through the door. The small chunk glowed softly with diffused light.
“Our pink salt is of the finest quality. Directly from Gassargand.”
“Directly?” Tell me more. I need to know when your ships arrive.
The seller hit me with his best buy-my-stuff smile. “Yes, my lady.”
“But is it fresh?”
The trader blinked.
“Salt is always fresh, my lady,” Reynald said with a completely straight face.
“Absolutely!” The seller nodded. “It was mined just a few weeks ago across the sea and shipped here. Our ships arrive every three weeks, my lady!”
“When is the next one due?”
“Next Fifday, my lady.”
We had four days. Very little time. I needed to hurry. I looked at Reynald. “Should I wait for the fresher salt?”
“I assure you, there is no difference in quality between this barrel and the next shipment,” the clerk promised.
“It wouldn’t be significantly fresher, my lady,” Reynald told me.
I wrinkled my nose at the barrel. “And the whole barrel is pink salt? It is for my mother-in-law. It must be perfect.”
“Of course, my lady. The entire barrel is the best grade of pink salt. The calla resin seal proves it.”