“Don’t be dramatic.” Everard faced me. “It doesn’t matter what he tells you. The truth is the Demarr family is formidable but of limited means. The Empire looms large across the border, ready to swallow them, while at home bigger predators hunt each other for power and money. In this ocean of monsters, the Demarrs have to swim in someone’s wake. I’m a great monster. They require my support. They cannot survive without it.”
“Sauven Savaric is also a monster,” I said.
“Yes, but Sauven is far away, and I’m right there in the Demarr backyard.” Everard smiled and pulled the coif to cover his face. “Something to keep in mind for the future. Shall we?”
We approached the doors. The two guards at the entrance of the Garden eyed us. It was too early in the morning for the Garden kind of shenanigans, and the plaza was deserted. Galiene and Hade would be taking their morning tea right about now. And here I was, some random woman accompanied by two armed men with their faces covered.
“Tell Galiene of Sosna that a woman without shoes is here,” I said.
The left guard went inside.
Moments ticked by.
Two men walked out of the Garden. One was the guard who’d gone to deliver my message, and the other was tall and muscular, with russet skin and short curly hair. A neatly trimmed beard hugged his jaw. He seemed to be somewhere on the crossroads of late twenties and early thirties. The mage from my first night.
The mage studied me for a moment. “She will see you. Just you.”
“No,” Everard said.
I faced the mage. “I didn’t come here for my own sake. Your mistress invited me. If she no longer needs my help, I will simply go home.”
The mage studied me.
There was exactly one sentence in the entire series devoted to this man. At some point, Hade got desperate and hired some people to break Galiene and her daughter out of Hreban’s mansion. The book said,Hade’s mercenaries failed, and the Garden’s only mage met his end with them.No name, no description, nothing.
Powerful mages were rare. The best analogy in our world would be doctors with an unusual medical specialty, like neurosurgeons. There was something like one neurosurgeon per ninety thousand people in the US. Mages weren’t quite that endangered, but the fact that the Garden even had one was odd. For some reason, Damaes chose to tolerate his presence and autonomy. He was literally irreplaceable.
“May I see what’s in your basket?”
Everard held the basket out to him. The mage moved the piece of cloth covering the contents aside, looked at them for a long moment, and put the cloth back.
“Follow me.”
Galiene’s office lay all the way up on the fourth floor in an airy, light tower with tall pale walls and massive arched windows. The window on the left offered a stunning view of the city, the one on the right showed a hillside cushioned in greenery. Beautiful flowers bloomed in ornate pots, artfully grouped on the floor by the windows, their white and vivid red blossoms almost glowing in the morning light.
The wall between the windows was filled with shelves supporting books and treasures: boxes carved from stone and wood, glass vases, and small statues. A large wooden desk stood in front of the shelves. Galiene sat behind the desk looking exactly as I remembered, regal and cold, with her dark blond hair curved at the nape of her neck into a spiral. Today her gown was pewter gray.
On the left, Hade waited in a padded chair, her eyes sharp.
The mage took up a position by the door, just behind us.
I took my hood down.
“You found shoes,” Galiene said.
“Among other things. What can I do for the Garden?”
Galiene’s face was impassive. Whatever it was had to be bad.
“We are being harassed,” she said.
“In what way?”
“Our shipments are going missing, our people are being accosted, and our patrons are being robbed.”
It sounded like Ulmar Hreban’s petty brand of revenge. He couldn’t touch Galiene directly, so he was using his money and hired muscle to complicate her life.
“We’ve hired additional guards to take care of the last two,” Galiene said. “But we can do nothing about the shipments.”
