Free Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman Page B

flicked the curtain aside, his hand on his dagger. Doronit was behind it, smiling.
    “Good,” she said. “Very good.”
    She patted his cheek, then looked through the doorway to where the merchants sat. Doronit was dressed in blond lace and dark rose silk, cut low across her breasts. Her dark hair with its touch of red was dressed high with sapphire pins. More beautiful than any woman there. More desirable. But not exactly an honored guest; only the most important merchant families were given grants at the Gifting Dinners. She was there to work, like him. He could read in the tension in her arms and the set of her cheek her desire to be in the select company at the high table.
    “You deserve to be at the high table more than any of them,” he said. “Whatever I can do . . . You should have everything. You know I want to help . . . I could . . . I mean . . .”
    What did he mean? That he was a prattling fool was what he meant. She would despise him, turn away from him. But although she had stiffened, displeased by his perceptiveness when he first spoke, by the end of the muddled speech she was smiling.
    “I know I can trust you. It is good to know I have someone who cares for my interests,” she said warmly. But she gave him a little push, like one you would give a child. “Go back to your place, sweetheart.”
    He went, the feeling of Doronit’s hand on his back, on his cheek, still warm, not knowing if she laughed at him or valued him, turning her words from this way to that in his mind. But because he wanted her to value him more than he wanted anything else, on the way back to his seat, he watched for signs of trouble. The councillor’s ghost watched Doronit out of the corner of her eye.
    Ash knew Doronit was training others. She disappeared, sometimes for days. She had other houses in the city, other businesses apart from hiring out safeguarders. He didn’t even know how many. It disturbed him, if he let himself think about it.
    Were her other employees better than he was? Quicker, smarter? Better at killing? He needed to be indispensable to her.
    And when she was gone, maybe she was meeting a lover . . . someone more her own age, more sophisticated, more intelligent, more charming . . . She was twice his age, he knew; he couldn’t think of any reason why she would be interested in him. Yet she had taken him to live in her house; she was kind to him, buying him clothes, teaching him herself rather than leaving it to one of the others. She touched him . . . He remembered every touch, every glance, every smile. Surely she wouldn’t act like that if she didn’t like him? If he worked hard, learned quickly, became polished and strong, maybe then . . . ?
    At the town clerk’s dinners and the Merchant House settling days, when merchants and creditors came together in the house’s settling room, to pay their debts and strike new bargains, he kept a lookout for others she favored. But he couldn’t, even using her training on how to read people’s eyes and faces, find anyone she smiled at with more warmth than him. She employed many other safeguarders, but no young ones, like him. No one who lived in her house, ate at her table. He let that comfort him. And finally her lessons turned to areas where he was not entirely ignorant.
    Doronit had timed it carefully. She needed, she thought, to bring him closer to her before Midwinter’s Eve, so she called him into her office one morning in early autumn. The office was a plain room at the front of the house where she organized contracts with her customers. No glass or silk curtains here, she thought with satisfaction. The workmanlike wood and leather and painted shutters were a kind of disguise to reassure the merchants, who were about to entrust their treasures to her staff, that she was efficient, businesslike, although in an unusual trade for a woman. Her office looked organized, which she was, and simple, which she was not. There was a big slate on the desk, with