Swallowing against my dry throat, I drew closer.
“Survived your first rehearsal, I see,” came Aiden’s low voice.
A thousand questions crowded my tongue. About what I’d just witnessed. About where he’d gone off to. But I couldn’t ask any of them.
“Where’s Maz?”
The skin around his eyes tightened. “Busy.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or curse that both men used the same one-word excuse.
Aiden shifted away from the wall. “Hungry?”
“Always.”
A smirk flickered over his mouth. “Do you play Death and Four?”
I gazed up at him, keeping my face a smooth, blank canvas. “Not well.”
His light chuckle warmed my skin. “Liar. Follow me.”
Chapter 14
Aiden
The crowdatThe Weary Travelerwas loud and in good spirits as their night of drinking, eating, and gambling began.
Light poured from the candle chandeliers and a few iron braziers. Men and women, dressed in clothes stained from work or travel, flocked to the scarred tables. Smiling barmaids delivered pitchers of beer and bottles of wine to cheery shouts or grumbled thanks. The scent of roasting meat made my mouth water.
I’d always felt much more at home in places like this over somewhere like Melaena’s club. The restrained conversations and side glances from the rich patrons rang false.
But here... here people celebrated another day lived or wallowed in their sorrows out in the open.
Tercel’s sharp eyes immediately spotted me, and he jerked his chin to an empty table. His bushy eyebrows lowered when he noticed Kiera trailing behind me. I rarely brought people here except Maz and occasionally Ruru. But I was always welcome. Mostly because of the mutually beneficial business deals between us.
Where ideals didn’t earn allies, money usually did.
“Friend of yours?” Kiera muttered as Tercel’s gaze followed us to the table near the dead hearth.
“Of a sort. Have you ever been to a tavern before?” I unclasped my cloak and draped it over the chair with its back to the stone wall.
Her eyes halted their perusal of the crowded tavern to dart to me. “Yes. I... I snuck out of the palace a few times when I was younger. Before I was a guard.”
She sank into the chair opposite me and drummed her fingers on the uneven tabletop. I kept finding myself fascinated by those fingers. The thin scars that decorated them. Their deftness. The way she had grasped my knives so tightly last night, as if she never wanted to let them go.
Clearing her throat, Kiera tucked her hand under the table.
I lifted my gaze to meet her guarded one. “Did you get caught?”
“Yes.”
“How did you sneak out?”
“Is this why you brought me here?” she asked sharply. “To interrogate me? I thought we were here to eat and play a game.”
I smiled, relaxing my posture and lazily waving down one of the barmaids. “We are. I was merely curious.” The barmaid bustled up to our table, her arms full of empty mugs. “Hello, Iris, how’s the new baby—Farah, was it?”
She beamed, her cheeks like shiny apples. “Farah, yes. Oh, she’s much better now after that tonic. No more coughing! I thank the gods every day that they led me to you. I can’t... I can’t imagine—” Her eyes suddenly welled with tears.
