Free Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn Page B

the shops,” Annova said. “You have a cultured voice and a soft way about you. You could probably hire on as a salesgirl.”
    “I would have thought those positions were taken by family.”
    “When there’s family to be had,” Annova said. “When the sons and daughters don’t run off, wanting a more exciting life.”
    “I might be able to do that,” Zoe said cautiously. “Work in a shop.” She liked the idea, actually. It sounded friendly and productive. Something that would occupy her mind and her hands so the days didn’t seem so empty.
    “Let me know when you’re ready to look for work,” Annova said. “There are one or two people I could introduce you to.”
    Zoe felt her smile returning. “I’ll bring you another bag of candies if you find a job for me!”
    “Then I hope you want to work soon!”
    They finished the meal and parceled out some of the sweets, Calvin taking two at a time and chewing them with exaggerated ecstasy. Annova gathered the dirty dishes and laid them aside, scoffing when Zoe offered to take them to the river to wash.
    “I’ll do it tomorrow. Something to make me get up in the morning,” Annova said.
    Zoe gestured at the Marisi, just now sparkling with glints of garnet and amethyst as the fading sun scattered it with jewels. “It seems much lower than it did ten years ago,” she said. She remembered that Darien Serlast had complained about drought here in the eastern half of the country, though they’d always had plenty of rain in Zoe’s village. “Smaller.”
    Calvin nodded. “It is. You see that dip there, along the river’s edge?” There was a shelf that dropped a couple of feet below the flats where most of the squatters were camped. Zoe nodded. “That’s how high the river used to be on an ordinary day. Of course, when it flooded, this whole area would be underwater.”
    “I can remember a night or two when we all had to pack up and scramble out with barely an hour’s notice,” Annova put in. “Sometimes the water kept rising, anyway—one summer it covered the streets a half mile inland.”
    “You never saw such a mess when the water went down,” Calvin said. “Of course, we didn’t lose anything. We didn’t have anything to lose.”
    “Did everybody down here get out safely?” Zoe asked.
    “Oh, we had plenty of warning,” Calvin said. “It had been raining the whole quintile, so everyone was watching the river, to see what it would do.”
    Annova turned to him. “And none of us were here the second time it flooded, remember? They’d already cleared us out.”
    “That’s right, I’d forgotten.”
    “Cleared you out? Who did? Why?” Zoe asked.
    Calvin waved his hand in the general direction of the palace. The deepening twilight was thick enough to obscure the building from view, but not yet dark enough for the candlelight in the windows to shine brightly against the black. “The king—or rather, his guards,” he said. “Whenever some important visitor comes to the city, we’re always rounded up and shoved out of the flats. We’re too unsightly , camping out here like a troop of vagabonds.”
    “You can see the flats from the palace windows,” Annova said. “And whenever ambassadors come from other countries, we’re hidden away. But it’s not so bad. There’s usually a place set up for us on the western edge of town, just outside the canal, with water and shelter made available.”
    “It’s almost like a festival,” Calvin added.
    “And we’re always allowed back here as soon as the rich visitors are gone.”
    “I like the sound of that,” Zoe said with a smile. “Maybe we’ll have some dignitaries come to the city while I’m living here.”
    They finished off the bag of candy while night rolled slowly down out of the mountains. Small lights sprang up all around them—campfires, mostly, with the occasional lamplight turning a whole tent into a softly glowing mound of color. The air was rich with scent—smoke, onions,