Free Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman Page A

just stopped. There was Hildie, tiny and fast, who was teaching him to spot pickpockets — mostly by teaching him how to pick pockets himself. Elfrida, who usually posed as a waitress, with long blond braids and rosy cheeks, had once knocked him backward clear through a window with one swipe of her singlestick.
    And then there were the three others: large, alike, fair-haired, and with faces scarred and scowling. Their last job had been as night-soil carters and they were known, collectively, as the Dung Brothers. Ash could never tell them apart and no one ever used their real names. They didn’t seem to mind and, since they preferred to work together, an order to one was an order to all three. They were slower than the others at singlestave, but were so strong that one blow was all they needed to knock an opponent unconscious.
    They practiced singlestave all morning, until Ash’s head was swimming with hunger and fatigue and the Dung Brothers hit him across the room once each, three in a row. They grinned, identical grins, and turned their backs on him dismissively. He was too tired even to feel angry. Then Doronit let him eat.
    She led the way to the front room. Her room. The pale cream walls, unlike the bright colors most Turviters painted their houses, were just a backdrop for the other colors in the room. Margolin rugs on the floor, traded across the desert and then over the mountains, sang indigo and russet in the cool darkness. Blue silk curtains embroidered with dark green butterflies dressed the window. A line of matching glasses sat on the high shelf to the left — clear glass, worth a warlord’s ransom — with a bronze lamp kept alight underneath them to call up their multicolored fire.
    The table, with a centerpiece of indigo linen, had been laid for a formal dinner: two knives, two spoons, a long spoonlike thing with a narrow cup on the end, like a tiny ladle. There were glazed ceramic plates instead of wooden trenchers and a piece of sea sponge floating in a pottery bowl.
    “So. We begin the next phase,” Doronit said. “In order to be most useful, you will need to blend in with your customers. Sit down.” She picked up the tiny ladle. “This is for eating marrow bone.”
    A month later, Ash carefully wiped his fingers and mouth with a sponge, and dropped it back into the bowl.
    The town clerk was about to speak. Ash angled on his bench so that he could see down the room, as well as to the center table. He gave half an ear to the speech, and all of his sight to scanning the room for trouble. It was the main chamber of the Moot Hall, with a gilded ceiling and huge wrought-iron candle-rings on the walls. The tables were set with Caranese pottery and glass goblets. He’d seen rooms like these many times before, when his parents performed at feasts, but he’d never imagined himself being a guest in one of them. Well, perhaps not a guest. He was here to work. But he sat at the same table as the guests, and ate the same food; the serving staff spoke to him with the same respect. He felt warmth spread in his chest. His parents, for all their skill, had never sat at a waxed wood table and been offered food and drink by servants in livery. And thanks to Doronit, his table manners were as good as any merchant’s.
    He brought his attention back to the present with a frown for his woolgathering, although he didn’t expect any trouble. The Annual Gifting Dinners were hardly dangerous. Everyone already knew what they were getting from the city profits for the year. The infighting was over. The grudges were being nursed. But there wasn’t likely to be any . . .
    At the back of the room a door curtain waved in a draft. The councillor’s ghost standing beside it turned her head to look through the gap. Ash stood up and made his way quietly toward the door. That door led deeper into the Moot Hall, not out. There should be no draft. The Dung Brothers, on the other side of the room, watched him impassively.
    He