Free Weight of Stone by Laura Anne Gilman Page A

not at any price.”
    Jerzy hadn’t really expected that there would be; while those at Mahault’s social level might consider them daily essentials, the price kept even the most basic healwines out of the reach of most farmers or guildsmen, and the more powerful or well known a Vineart, the more coin a spellwine with his sigil would earn. A land-lord or guild master might distribute spellwines among his people, at need, but a small island village without direct patron or generous lord? They would likely never see magic used in their lifetime.
    “No matter,” he said to Mahl, feeling the lack in his gut and on his tongue, the accomplishments of the morning floating away like dust.
    A Vineart without a vineyard. A Vineart without spellwines. A Vineart without enough experience to have a deep quiet-magic, and what he had done that morning likely used up the little he had left. No Vineart at all, without even his belt and knife to identify him. He was useless except as physical labor, nothing more than the slave he had once been, the absence of soil under his feet and fingers like a physical ache once again.
    “You aired out belowdeck?” Ao spotted the last of the bedding and drew the proper conclusion. “Good man! I think I’d have rather drowned than spend another night in that stink hole. Why they couldn’t design these ships with sleeping quarters above the waterline … oh yes, I know the whys, but it still frustrates. I once spent an entire month belowdeck, on my first trading voyage. I was barely ten, along only to listen and haul freight, and had to sleep under the bunk of my sponsor, for there was no room anywhere else …”
    Ao’s usual chatter was good cover, but Jerzy didn’t think that his mood had escaped either of his companions. Ao was a trader, trained practically from birth to read people, and Mahault was the daughter and granddaughter of maiars, and had grown up surrounded by politics and negotiations as her birthright. A simple slave had no protections against them.
    Mahault, not even pretending to listen to Ao, finished handing their acquisitions up from the raft to the ship itself, and then climbed over the railing, the skirt of her dress trailing damply against the deck. As usual, she did not waste time with niceties. “I hope that you had brilliant thoughts about what we should do next, because as much as I enjoy being at sea, we can’t be aimless much longer. Ao used the last of his baubles and tricks on this trip—we’ve nothing left to barter save ourselves, and I doubt any of us are good enough fishers to feed us that way.”
    Jerzy looked at Mahault, both flattered by and quietly resenting her assumption that he would have their next move decided, as though hewere the oldest and wisest of the three, rather than the youngest and least experienced. Hadn’t he already proven that he didn’t know what he was doing?
    He was spared having to answer for a moment, when she looked over the railing and said something in a language he did not recognize, but sounded rude. The sodden ropes had loosed, and the driftwood planks were floating away. Ao threw the paddles they had been using overboard as well, watching as they sank below the surface. “Barely worth the riddle I traded for them,” he said. “Not that it was a very good riddle anyway.”
    “You traded words for a raft?”
    Ao grinned at him, for a moment the worry and exhaustion sliding off, his attitude that of the cocksure know-everything Jerzy had first met. “In a small village like this? A song or riddle or new story can make the poorest, most homely of men into a lord among the ladies,” he said, clearly pleased with himself. “You’ve never won a fair maid’s attention with a well-turned tale of life among the vines?”
    Jerzy had never tried for a maid’s attention, fair or foul. While a female might occasionally work in the vineyards—usually an older woman without family to house her—slaves were all male, and he