Free Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged by Kelly McCullough

didn’t turn. “They are, lord, and heading for Marchon house on a couple of stolen
     horses. Heyin wanted the baroness to leave the city immediately, but she refused to
     go without warning her people at the house and collecting Bontrang.”
    I was sure that latter was the more important of the two. If it were somehow possible
     to separate us, I wouldn’t have let anyone else go after Triss for me either. “How
     long ago was that?”
    “You won’t catch them at the house if that’s what you mean,” said Lineya. “She said
     that if you could come in the next few hours, you should meet her at the place where
     the two of you landed on the glorious day that you flew together. Otherwise, she said
     that you would have to seek her at ExileHouse.” Then, without looking at me or saying another word, Lineya headed off into
     the crowd.
    “Crazy woman,” I said, though not without affection.
    Lineya?
asked Triss.
    No, Maylien, calling that desperate sail-jump we took off the Channery Hill cliff
     a “glorious flight.” It was neither glorious nor flying. It was hardly even a sail-jump—more
     like falling and getting it wrong.
    Point…crazy woman?
    I saw where he was going there, but this was a more mundane sort of craziness than
     the hereditary insanity that had taken her father and now seemed to be at work in
     her uncle.
    Not that way, Triss. The only one whose safety Maylien ignores is her own. In that
     way, she’s practically the polar opposite of Ashvik and Thauvik.
    I didn’t include Maylien’s sister in the list. Sumey had fallen to the curse of the
     restless dead. Somewhere in the years she spent in exile—far from the safety of the
     court and the baronial guard—she had become one of the risen. How or where she’d encountered
     the risen that had infected her with its particular variety of the curse of the restless
     dead was something Sumey hadn’t shared before her death. Neither that nor how she’d
     managed to learn how to prolong her human seeming far beyond what was normal among
     her kind. While she had been subject to bloody hungers that somewhat mimicked the
     madness of her older relations, they came from a wholly different source. It was a
     fact Maylien would do well to remind herself of whenever she had one of her periodic
     panic attacks about going the way of the rest of her family.
    Come on,
I sent,
we need to meet Maylien.
I would have to get rid of the borrowed uniform on the way.
    *
    The Downunders was one of the shabbiest neighborhoods in a city rife with slums. Lying
     on the south side of the city, it had started out as a series of temporary markets
     andshelters for the drovers and teamsters who brought in the goods that didn’t travel
     well by ship. That was half a millennia ago. The city bounds had long since swallowed
     those temporary buildings whole, but it had never quite gotten around to tearing them
     down and starting over. Instead, people had tacked brick sheds onto canvas tents,
     and then later covered over the tarps with rough plank roofs, and replaced canvas
     flaps with poorly fitted doors—all without ever knocking down the original tent posts.
    The area where I was supposed to meet Maylien had a touch more polish and architectural
     stability, but that was only because the Elite colonel who was trying to burn us out
     of the sky on our way down had started a dozen buildings on fire in the process. The
     residents had replaced them in much the same way that buildings were always replaced
     in the Downunders: by scavenging in the wreckage and adding the permanent on top of
     the temporary, but at least the canvas was new and the mortar between the charred
     old bricks was fresh.
    The burning leather shop where we’d landed had been replaced by a lopsided teahouse.
     I found Maylien sitting at a tiny table on the porch outside despite the chill. She
     was wearing stained leather and wool in the browns and greens the Rovers tended to
     favor. She had her