CHAPTER 13 #3
He swept his fingers along the rim of the barrel, indicating a wax-like seal stamped with the Yolenta crest.
“You see, the seal is intact. Unlike wax seals that melt and flow when exposed to warmth, this resin seal will crumble if cut or heated. The full might of the Yolenta Family stands behind this barrel. The Keepers of Iron do not lie. When your mother-in-law’s chef opens it, the salt will be just as beautiful and fresh as the moment it was mined. ”
I pondered the barrel. “Very well. How much is it?”
“The whole barrel?”
“Yes.”
“One grest, my lady.”
Ouch.
I nodded to Reynald. He reached into his clothes, pulled a single gold coin out, and handed it over to the seller. Our budget had just taken a big hit. Reynald gave the seller our address and we exited the warehouse and went back the way we came.
“Where to now?” Reynald asked.
“I need to see the pier in front of this warehouse, but I don’t want to be obvious about it.”
He considered it for a moment. “Follow me.”
At the next intersection, he started weaving his way through the streets, edging east. We walked for a couple of blocks, made a left, and came to a stone stairway leading up, its steps worn smooth by the salty wind, rain, and countless feet.
We took the stairs. Reynald kept pace with me.
The stairs kept going, climbing higher and higher, until finally we stepped onto a tall bridge guarded by a stone rail. It soared over the roofs of the harbor warehouses, mirroring the coastline.
Below and on our left, the ocean glittered, a placid expanse of blue, rolling to the hazy horizon.
The wide ribbon of the stone wharf bordered the water, and long stone piers stretched from it, out into the ocean, flanked by large ocean-worthy trading ships.
Between the piers, shorter wooden docks offered the smaller vessels a place to moor.
The Combs, the city’s infamous main wharf.
A sparse current of people moved past us: fishermen with carrying yokes across their shoulders, balancing pails of water filled with fish; dockworkers hauling cargo in sacks; teenagers with shopping baskets running errands and carrying messages; a couple of young priests in robes with bladed staffs on their backs .
. . Everyone had a place to be and was on their way there, minding their own business.
I knew where we were now. This was the Spotter’s Rampart, a chunk of the wall left over from the ancient fortifications.
Most of them were long gone, swallowed by Kair Toren as it grew over the centuries.
But this stretch of the old rampart proved useful, so the city kept it, and the Chamber of Works maintained it for the kingdom’s sake.
Reynald and I walked side by side, keeping close to the left rail, out of the way of other passersby. I scanned the ships and the flags flying from the tall masts. Copper, cobalt, and gray. Shouldn’t be that hard to find.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about the pink salt?”
“I’ll wait,” he said. “I’m demonstrating trust.”
Smartass.
I scanned the harbor as we walked. It was hard to tell the warehouses apart from this height, but the Yolentas would have one of the larger stone piers. They did a lot of trade.
We kept walking.
“What’s bothering you?” he asked.
“Why do you think something is bothering me?”
“You didn’t speak on the way to the docks, and then you almost walked into the ocean.”
I sighed.
“Two weeks from now, eighty mercenaries are going to die. I can stop their deaths.”
“What’s the downside?”
“Every change we make alters the flow of events. Remember how I said that our actions are like pebbles we cast into a placid pond? They cause waves and ripples. This wouldn’t be a pebble. This would be a huge rock.”
“Do they die for a good cause?”
“No. They are sacrificed for nothing. It is a senseless slaughter.”
I caught a glimpse of his face under the hood of his cloak. His jaw was set. He didn’t like what I was telling him.
Ahead a scattering of rubble lay in our path. A chunk of the stone wall had broken off and fallen on the bridge, breaking into gravel. We reached it.
Reynald offered me his arm.
For a second, I stared at it.
Oh. He was helping me cross it. I rested my fingers on his forearm, picked up my skirt with my left hand, and stepped over the gravel.
He made no move to step away from me. He kept walking with my hand on his arm.
To keep holding on or to let go? What was the etiquette here?
Back in the warehouse, I was pretending to be a lady. A lady wouldn’t hold on to her guard because he had to have both arms free to do his job. But we weren’t pretending to be anyone right now.
His arm was steady as a rock. I could feel the hard muscle underneath through the fabric of his shirt.
This felt so oddly intimate. I had walked side by side with men before, I had held hands with men before, and it never gave me warm fuzzy butterflies like this.
We had connected, and there was power in that connection.
It drew me in. I wanted to keep my hand right where it was and keep walking just like this.
I glanced at his face.
He hadn’t pulled his coif up. His expression was relaxed, softening the harsh contours of his features within his hood.
His eyes were a light gray-green. He was still broadcasting menace and dangerous edge, but it was directed outward, at other people.
Walking with him like this felt like the safest thing in the world.
He looked at me. There was a hint of warmth in his eyes.
Oh wow. All those people crushing on Arvel and Solentine had no idea what they were missing.
The rules of conduct for unmarried men and women were strict.
Touching was generally discouraged unless there was romantic interest, deep friendship, or a family connection.
Walking together like this was sending all sorts of signals I shouldn’t be sending.
First, we had only known each other for three days.
Second, neither of us was emotionally stable at the moment.
Third . . . I liked touching him entirely too much. I had to let go.
I gently raised my hand. He smoothly let his arm drop, and we once again walked side by side.
“Tell me about the mercenaries,” he said.
“These people have families. Children, spouses. Instead of ending, their lives will go on and the paths of their families will diverge from the future I know.”
“That is a significant change,” he said.
“Yes. I promised myself that I would only do what was absolutely necessary. There is no logical reason to save the mercenaries. More, saving them is risky. First, it will be dangerous and second, it has a chance to send the future in a new direction that could endanger us. You, Clover, Kaiden, and the Magnars.”
He didn’t say anything, leaving me space to talk.
“When Shana found out she was pregnant with Will, she cried,” I told him.
“Her father had abandoned her when she was a child, her mother had died, and the day after that funeral, she had enlisted in the King’s Army.
She liked being a soldier. She didn’t know anything about having babies, and there was nobody to teach her and no home to go back to. ”
Reading about it had broken my heart.
“But she loved Will before he was even born, and she loved Gort, and so she left the army and went to live with her in-laws in a tiny village that was barely large enough to support a single forge. The house was already crowded with Gort’s parents, his brother and sister-in-law, and their kids.
The family lived hand-to-mouth, and Shana and Will were more mouths to feed.
She didn’t fit in. Meanwhile Gort volunteered for every mission that would earn a bonus.
It took him three years, but he got her out of that house and into a shack of their own. ”
Reynald probably knew most of this, but I had to get it all out.
“When Gort lost his shot at the Green Purse, he became a mercenary, because that was all he could do. Two years later, Shana joined him as part of the supply convoy. They took their kids with them. A lot of mercenary companies do this. On a long campaign, there will be a supply train following them with wives and husbands and sometimes kids.”
Reynald’s face told me nothing. He just listened.
“The mercenaries who are going to die are not the youngest or the healthiest. It’s an old-dog campaign.”
Old-dog in mercenary speak meant a slow-paced campaign, the kind that didn’t pay that well, but didn’t call for any long marches or heroics either. Old-dog campaigns were fought by veterans, experienced, steady, but past their prime.
“These people are the second tier, looking for a simple, short campaign and willing to work for less, because few jobs come their way these days and they have to take what they can get.”
They were like Gort and Shana. Trying to keep afloat.
“You want to save them,” he said. There was no judgment in his voice. No emotion at all.
“Yes. Eighty people. Eighty families. That’s so many lives.
But if we do save them, there’s no telling what the consequences will be.
Preventing this event from happening doesn’t mean that the powers behind it will just abandon their schemes.
It could cost more lives than it will save in the long run. ”
“But you don’t know it will?”
“I don’t. I wish I was wiser. I’m afraid of making a mistake that other people will have to pay for.”
I realized we were standing still. “Why did we stop?”
He nodded at the ocean. “The Yolentas’ pier.”
To the right and just up ahead, a long stone pier cut into the ocean. Three large ships waited by it, their complex segmented sails stowed and secured. Long flags with copper, cobalt, and gray streamed from their masts.
I needed to stop venting and concentrate on the reason we had come here.
The Yolentas’ pier ended in front of the three warehouses. On each side, a narrow street ran deeper into the city, perpendicular to our bridge and passing under it. The street that we had taken to get to the storefront was directly under us, running along below the bridge.
I crossed the bridge to the other side and looked at the two side streets.
The street on my left curved and veered north.
The one on my right ended in a small plaza with two other streets, one going southeast and the other eastward.
Narrow alleys branched off from both like capillaries from larger veins.
I needed a plan. Luckily for me, I had an experienced tactician next to me. Reynald had planned hundreds of battles and skirmishes.
I kept my voice low. “In four days, the next shipment of the overpriced pink salt will arrive at this pier. I want to steal one of the barrels and replace it with the one we bought.”
“Stealing a barrel from the Keepers of Iron.” Reynald raised his eyebrows. “Why not?”
He looked slightly wicked, like a villain planning something dangerous yet fun.
“Can we do this?”
The blademaster surveyed the tangle of streets below. “Yes.”
“Safely?”
“No plan is foolproof, Maggie. But probably.”
“I promise I will explain everything once we have that barrel.”
He shook his head.
“What?”
“Wondering what sins the Yolentas have committed.”
“Maybe I just want to steal their salt.”
“No. That’s not you. The Yolentas have done something special. Something that’s more than their usual schemes and backstabbing.”
“You’re right.”
I turned and leaned my back against the rail. The ocean on the other side of the bridge was so beautiful.
Reynald leaned on the rail next to me, his profile a grim suggestion in the hood of his cloak, the humor gone. And just like that we were back to the deadly warrior vibes.
“Once when I was younger, the force I led was pinned down by the opposing army,” Reynald said. “They outnumbered us, and things looked bleak. I’d made some enemies among my peers. I didn’t expect reinforcements.”
His voice was calm and measured. Reynald wasn’t a bootlicker. With him, it was always mission first. Achieve the objective with the fewest casualties possible. He didn’t care to stroke people’s egos, and he wasn’t always liked by his commanders.
“Just when I thought we were done, another knight came to our aid with his troops.”
This wasn’t in the books. Reynald Karis was telling me something about himself that he probably kept private. He was trusting me with it.
“Nobody would’ve blamed this knight for not showing up.
It was heavily suggested to him that he shouldn’t try so hard on my behalf.
Yet he rendered aid anyway, because he had judged it right and that was the kind of man he was.
He knew there would be consequences. People would make things difficult for him.
When I brought it up, he looked me in the eye and said, ‘Fuck ‘em.’”
I blinked. “That’s really what he said?”
Reynald nodded.
“I had expected something more . . . profound.”
“So did I. But he was a soldier, Maggie. Not a sage. His superiors wanted him to let other soldiers die to settle a grudge. He held them in contempt. He didn’t worry. He didn’t waver. He felt nothing but disdain and a distinct lack of fear.”
His expression turned harsh.
“Fuck the kind of people who would sacrifice eighty souls to further their ambitions. You can’t bear responsibility for their actions.
I’ve lost people before. Trust me when I say this: The weight of knowing you could’ve saved eighty lives and didn’t is too heavy to live with.
If you want to save the mercenaries, do it.
I will stand with you. The powers behind it will do what they will do, and we’ll deal with that, too. ”
“You will back me up?”
“I will.”
I could’ve hugged him. Instead, I nodded, pushed away from the rail, and we walked side by side back the way we came.
“We can steal the barrel,” Reynald said, his expression thoughtful. “Just one question.”
Anxiety nipped at me. “What kind of question?”
He looked at me, his expression deadly serious. “Will it be fresh enough, Maggie?”
Damn it. “I know that salt is a mineral. I wanted to find out when the next shipment was coming in.”
Reynald laughed. It was such an unexpected sound. When he smiled, his whole face lit up, his eyes turned bright and green, and I wanted to smile back at him, but when he laughed, it was on a whole other level.
“It’s not funny,” I told him.
“You’re wrong. It’s hilarious. You’re hilarious.”
We reached the staircase.
“Hold my arm, Maggie. I don’t want you tumbling down the stairs.”
“I can walk on my own, thank you very much.”
He laughed again.
I picked up the hem of my gown and concentrated on not falling.