Chapter 13 Sage
Sage
When Sage reaches it, the bathhouse certainly isn’t the kind found in cities, with vast marble tubs of enchanted and perfumed water that serve the rich.
Nor is it what she’d expected—a simple wooden tub of water warmed on a potbelly stove, which exists in places without spellcasters or mountains of denaris.
Instead, after a hike that would indeed be unwelcoming for those not accustomed to slipping through the woods in the middle of the night, she finds a small hot spring—perhaps the reason the people of Hexham decided on this patch of the forest for a permanent encampment in the first place.
The steep slope of rocks and roots gives way to a series of rust-colored limestone platforms, looking like a rough staircase for the fabled giants of the Northlands (all gone from Harrow now, along with every god and devil and their earliest creations).
On each step, there stands a wooden hut with a loosely thatched roof.
She descends to the first and finds it sheltering a pool carved out of the stone.
The trees have thinned on the slope so that moonlight shines down, sparkling off the mineral-smelling water through gaps in the roof.
Sage shivers as she strips. It’s even colder out here without the forest to muffle the autumn wind, so that the stars overhead resemble nothing so much as chips of ice.
Then she eases into the pool, favoring her aching knee.
As she shuts her eyes and sinks below the surface, she sends a prayer up to any divinity of the woods who might hear her that the near-boiling water will wash away her memories of the night, along with the dust of the trail.
Foolish. She was foolish to lose her temper like that when they’d barely been allowed into Hexham in the first place, and when the provisions have yet to be handed over.
The man—hardly more than a boy—had just been swept up in the performance, as was she. But Sage remembers his large hand reaching for Araphi, and the cornered look in her wide brown eyes…
And she remembers another town, another time, another party member.
In a floating tavern built on a raft and anchored in one of the algae-hued channels of the Swamplands, Sage had crossed blades with a bandit for the honor of a fixer like Remy (though not really like Remy) with waving hair as dark as Araphi’s, and eyes the color of green sea glass.
She can still feel the throb of a shoulder wound now years old, smell the spilled ale, hear the rustling of footsteps on a rocky slope—
Wait. Not a memory.
In an instant, Sage leans across the damp stone ledge to grab for her daggers among her piled clothing.
Of course they’re not there, so she settles on a jagged, fist-sized hunk of limestone that’s come loose from the ledge.
She briefly considers dressing, but if she’s about to be ambushed, her tunic won’t stop an arrow.
And some villager getting a peek at her before he dies gurgling, throat sliced by her makeshift limestone blade, is the least of her worries.
Better that than getting caught out mid-change.
She grounds her stance on the rough pool bottom as best she can, preparing herself as the footsteps approach.
“Here you are!” the silhouette of Araphi exclaims from the opening of the hut, breathing hard from the climb.
Sage quickly sets her rock on the ledge behind her, glad for the dark that hides her sheepishness. “Announce your approach next time, will you?”
“Because you’re…er…”
Thank the gods the pool is deep enough to cover what matters, but Sage dips lower anyhow, sinking up to her throat. “No, because I might have stabbed you or bashed you.”
“Right. Next time I’ll shout, ‘I’m not an assassin!’ before entering any room. Will that suffice?”
“Did you need something?” She’s irritable now—with Araphi for turning up when she least wanted to think of her, and with herself, for drifting off into memories that are best left dead and buried.
“I asked after you at the stables, and the stable hand said you’d asked to be pointed toward the baths. Rather, he said: ‘Shouted “baths” at me, she did, then blew out into the night like a storm when I pointed yonder.’ ” Araphi imitates the stable hand’s Midlands accent with an actor’s ease.
“What, was I supposed to bring him flowers?” Sage grumbles.
“Anyhow, I’m as filthy as I’ve ever been, and a good soak sounded so tempting. You don’t mind if I join, do you? I could use another pool, if you’d prefer.”
What can Sage do? Send her out into the near-to-freezing night? If she does, she admits that she cares enough about Araphi’s presence to object to it. “Do as you like, Bard.”
“I will then, Ranger.” There’s mischief in her voice that Sage barely has time to wonder at before Araphi lets her heavy cloak fall to the limestone floor and asks, “Help me, will you? I can get myself into my dresses if I lace them first, but I never can seem to get myself out.”
This dress is a complicated confection, terribly suited for travel or riding, with layers of marigold-orange silk held up by neither sleeves nor straps, only a brown leather corset and the shape of Araphi’s…
shape. It must have been in Araphi’s pack, which thankfully wasn’t trampled in the wolf attack.
Even if Sage couldn’t see it clearly in the moonlight, she certainly memorized it while watching the bard’s performance in the lodge.
Araphi spins toward the hut’s entrance to offer the tightly laced back.
When Sage doesn’t move, she glances over her shoulder.
“It’s quite cold out here, you know. Would you mind hurrying a bit?
” Then her eyes dart toward the water’s dark surface, and she makes a show of turning her face away.
“I won’t look, if that’s what you’re worried about.
Here.” Stepping carefully backward, Araphi kneels at the very edge of the steaming pool, nearly within reach.
With a heavy sigh, Sage wades toward her and plants a foot on a submerged outcrop of slick limestone to boost herself up.
The night air is like knives on her wet skin, exposed to the waist. She hurries to work through the knotted laces, then turns to the soft stays beneath.
When her knuckles brush against Araphi’s back through the delicate fabric, Araphi shifts slightly on her knees.
“Stay still,” Sage barks.
“All right, all right. You’d think you’d be in a better mood. We’re getting what we came for, aren’t we? I saw you shake hands with Viktas. She’ll sell us the supplies we need?”
Her head spins as they return to business, but of course this is all business and nothing more. “We struck a deal, yes.”
When she’d first approached the woman, she’d been wary, scowling out across the gathered audience to make sure Remy was keeping away, as promised. “Never mind our horses, I wouldn’t sell that basilisk’s cloaca a bucket of piss if he were aflame,” she’d said poetically.
“He did say there was an unpleasant history between you two.”
“Unpleasant?” Viktas scoffed. “Did he tell you we rode together in the queens’ army? Not just rode together, but joined up together. Though it was the king’s army back then.”
Stunned, Sage shook her head. The Agent, a soldier? “I know him no better than I know you,” she admitted, to herself as well as to Hexham’s spokesperson.
“Ask him, then. Go ask him where he was when our battalion was pinned down by Perpignese battle mages.”
“You were in the Battle of the Broken Pacts?”
“Aye, younker.”
Sage frowned and settled back on her rough-hewn stool.
What was it about herself that read as nobleborn to the woman?
She was wearing her one remaining tunic without bloodstains; perhaps that was it.
She longed to ask Viktas what name Remy went by back then, when he would’ve been around Sage’s age, but she doubted it would help matters to focus further on the Agent.
And what would she do with the information on the road, anyhow?
Get the party outfitted to continue into the Northlands, get the tooth, and get on her way, never again to cross paths with her once-associates: That was the plan.
That was always her plan. “I don’t trust the man an inch,” she said, “but he’s not the party leader.
I am. You’d be selling to me. Or imagine you’re selling to her, if you like. ”
Onstage, Araphi was in the early verses of a ballad.
A bittersweet song about a young man who’d been traveling but longed for the place where his roots first grew before time and the inescapable forward spin of the world transplanted him.
When he finally returned, the waterlogged soil of his home was no longer fit to feed him, but his love for the land remained.
Remy’s suggestion to choose a song from the Swamplands had been a clever one, but Araphi’s magic (and it was magic; nobody here could deny that) was responsible for the silvery shine of tears in Viktas’s eyes as she quieted to listen.
“Extraordinary,” she said at last in a choked voice.
“Don’t sell me the supplies for the sake of the basilisk’s cloaca,” Sage murmured so as not to overpower Araphi’s song.
“And don’t let him cheat you out of what I’m more than willing to pay.
A denari may not be worth more than the metal it’s made of in Hexham, but you still pay taxes to the crown.
We all do. The price of breathing Harrow’s air, isn’t it?
And we’re carrying enough to cover a significant portion, I’d wager.
Think of it this way: The more you pry from the man holding the purse strings, the less likely he’ll be to come back and trade with you again. ”
By the time the ballad was done, they’d struck a hard bargain.
She’s no idea how much lighter Remy’s traveling funds will be now—perhaps it’ll mean no inns for the rest of the journey—but she knows he can spare it, and they’ll all be paid the same regardless.
They’ll leave Hexham tomorrow with fresh horses and tents and enough foodstuffs to make it to Briarwall only a day behind schedule, without needing to stop to hunt or forage.
“You did well,” Sage now admits to Araphi while fumbling at her laces with icy fingers—strange, when she has so much experience at loosening corsets. “I don’t think Viktas would’ve softened without you. Doubt she would’ve let us into the village at all.”
“Glad to be of service,” she says, sounding genuinely pleased.
It feels good to please Araphi Clauneck. Better than it should.
In the end, Sage nearly rips the corset off, then steps away to plunge back into the pool.
She hardly has the time to submerge again when Araphi lets her corset slip down over her hips, swiftly followed by her gown.
Sage refuses to flinch at the naked silhouette of her stamped against the night sky beyond the hut, all slim shoulders and gently sloping hips, and calves that she could bite into like pieces of round fruit…
Gods, she should have sent Araphi away when she had the chance.
She looks down as Araphi turns to slip into the pool, almost moaning with pleasure. “It’s so warm!”
“As hot springs tend to be.”
Araphi rests her arms on the slick stone ledge behind her, the water lapping at her sternum. “So then. On to Briarwall in the morning, and then to the Swallow…and then?”
“Then home, I suppose.” Not that there’s any such place for Sage.
While Viktas teared up over her memories of a childhood in the Swamplands, Sage thought of the Rookery without any particular longing attached to it.
If anything, she longed to long for a place…
though she immediately buried the thought and returned to the business of haggling.
“Then home,” Araphi echoes.
For an heiress, she sounds distinctly unexcited about returning to the capital and its comforts.
“What will you do with your share of the purse? A wedding present for your fiancé?” Sage asks, quickly crushing the firefly spark of something bright and hungry in her chest.
Araphi snorts, very un-heiress-like. “I’ve no intention of giving Denby anything beyond what our agreement dictates.”
“You make a wedding contract sound like a business deal.”
“I suppose I do,” she says coolly. “But I don’t want to talk about Harrow. I have more immediate plans.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. For instance, right now? I intend to kiss you.” Araphi’s eyes are darker than the water as she watches Sage, and she smirks at the audible hitch in her breath.
“If that’s disagreeable…if I’m disagreeable to you, then you’d better tell me.
Because I’ve been wondering how you taste since we first met in Bloomfield, and after you saved my honor in the village”—she flashes a dangerous grin—“I mean to find out.”