Free The Silver Wolf by Alice Borchardt

fortune,”she whispered. “May the Virgin watch over you. Take care. They are both pigs …” she muttered. “Pigs!”
    Regeane hurried down the stair following Hugo. The sky was gray, as was the light around them.
    “It’s before dawn,” Hugo whimpered. “Where are we going?”
    “The thieves’ market,” Regeane said.
    “I’ll kill that little cunt, Silve, for leaving me with this problem,” Hugo muttered. “What did you do to her? I went looking for her last night.”
    Gundabald probably made him
, Regeane thought.
    “I couldn’t find her in any of the usual tavernas. She’s disappeared. Oh, my head,” he sniffed. “My tongue tastes like the floor of an outhouse. My eyeballs are fried. The food, it burnt doing down, but it was worse going out. It feels like somebody poured hot grease up my ass.”
    “It’s the pepper. Would a jug of wine quiet your nether regions?” Regeane asked.
    “A jug of wine would quiet a lot of regions,” Hugo replied.
    Regeane gave him some copper coins. “Please don’t buy the same stuff Silve did yesterday.”
    “What was it?” Hugo asked.
    “She said it had poppy gum and hemlock in it.”
    “No wonder I couldn’t find her,” Hugo commented glumly. “She’s lying dead somewhere and nobody noticed her because she hasn’t started to stink yet.”
    Regeane’s stomach rumbled with hunger. “Go get your wine,” she said irritably.
    Hugo returned with a wineskin. He dosed himself liberally on their way to the market. He brightened a bit, but continued complaining as they walked. “It’s dangerous,” he said, “even for a man. You might be subjected to insults not proper for a lady to hear.”
    Regeane stopped so quickly Hugo ran into her.
    They were turning into a piazza by then. “Go away,” she whispered between her teeth to Hugo. “Amuse yourself. I don’t care how, but don’t bother me while I’m trying to shop. Now, go away.”
    He did, drifting off after giving her an apprehensive look.
    The little market square was filled with merchants whose mules were still harnessed to their carts. All in all, a highly mobile group. Ready to vanish quickly when the papal guard, the only effective law in the city, made one of its periodic sweeps through Rome. They were close to the river. The insulas surrounding the square were run down. In many cases, the first floors were abandoned to the Tiber’s periodic floods and the omnipresent damp.
    The cloth seller’s cart was sandwiched between a slave dealer’s wretched stock and a load of broken furniture. To Regeane it looked like kindling. Irredeemable junk. The man hawking it was aggressive. On seeing Regeane, he tried selling her a “beautiful” chair—a perfect chair if only she had the enterprise to add one leg. And, he burbled cheerfully, he had several ones that would do. And he would offer them to her at a very nominal price.
    “Firewood,” Regeane said.
    The cloth seller cackled gleefully as Regeane pushed past and began examining the dresses hanging from the staves of his two-wheeled cart.
    She glanced at the slaves, then quickly away. She shuddered. They were a painful sight. All women, too young, old, or ugly to interest the dealers in more attractive human merchandise at the bigger markets.
    By and large, the dresses were equally hopeless. Most were worn. All were too small. Regeane was considered tall. The condition of the cloth discouraged her more than anything else. Silve had told her there were bargains to be had here, but nothing she’d seen was worth flint and steel to turn it into fire and smoke. If she could find good cloth, she was willing to rip out the seams, bleach, dye, and resew. But cloth so rotten it tore while being handled was hopeless.
    “Cleaning rags,” she whispered.
    The furniture seller looked angry. “Firewood!” he said in the Roman gutter argot. “Cleaning rags! Barbarian hellcat. She needs a lesson.”
    The cloth seller laughed again, then dragged something