"I'll think about it."
"That's a yes. That's a blacksmith yes, I can tell." She settled back down against me, smug and warm and impossible, and tucked her cold feet up between my legs out of what I can only believe was pure spite.
I jerked and swore. She laughed into my chest. I pulled the blanket up over the both of us and held on, and didn't let go.
15
REMMEN
The ice had meltedto nothing twice over, and I was wringing out the third cloth when I admitted the eye was going to do exactly as it pleased.
It had been a serviceable eye yesterday. Then I'd put it between Lorkin's face and Zarcal's swinging elbow in the business of hauling the two of them apart, slept on it, and woken to a thing the color of a bruised plum that half the town had already strolled past the hall to admire. The mayor of New Knossos behind the founding charter with a shiner like a dockside drunk. Marvelous. A fine advertisement for the civilized life.
I pressed the cloth to it anyway and looked down the length of the hall.
It was quiet at midday, dust filtering through the air in the high window-light, the long room empty all the way to the dais. A year ago I'd had it strung with vines and white blossom and star-figs glowing in the rafters, and stood at the front of it while Kazan put a ring on a human woman and half the hard cases in town shuffled about not knowing where to put their hands.
There'd been dancing. I'd been made to do some of it, badly, by a small determined human who laughed at my feet and never once apologized for it.
I didn't think about that. Much.
What I thought about, more and more lately, was whether I'd been a fool to sign us to the Agency in the first place.
It looked clean on paper. Everything did. Bring the program in, give these men something to live toward, make the whole grim miracle official with a seal and a contract. And it worked, which was the maddening part. But the working came with a cost. A bride came, and a male nearly killed her in his own kitchen, reliving a war that was years over. Two of my brothers put a wall and half a house into the street and put this into my eye. And every match that took drew another careful glance from off-world, because nothing unsettles the Council quite like a frontier full of monsters finding out they can be happy.
A knock came at the doorframe. I knew the weight of it before I looked up. You don't come off the sand and ever stop reading a door.
"Nezara."
"Mayor." She came in without waiting to be asked, the way she always did, dusky gold and unhurried, and took a long inventory of the eye. "It's come up well."
"It has the whole town's compliments." I set the cloth down. "Tell me you're here about drainage. Or the grain levy. Anything a man can solve with money."
"Sit before you fall down. You look like you’ve had a bad week."
I was already sitting. I let it go.
Inwardly I groaned, because it was never drainage. It was always more of this, more files and flags and the careful unpicking of other people's catastrophes, today of all days. But I made myself run the sum I run whenever the program weighstoo heavy, the one that comes out the same every time. Kazan and Maisie, a year on, still looking at each other like the other one hung the moon. A town full of killers trying to become men.
It worked. I knew it worked. I only wished it didn't keep handing me the invoice.
Nezara settled into the chair across the desk and looked at me, and I did not care for the look.
I'd watched her wear it for other males. It was the look of a woman reading a file that was also a person, weighing him against a list. She'd worn it at Kazan once, and look where that had gotten him.
"No," I said.
"I haven't said a word."
"You've got a face. You're about to ask whether the mayor's given any thought to his own situation. Whether a male in my position mightn't be steadied by the right, ah." I waved a hand. "Arrangement."
"And would he?"
"He's busy." I leaned back into it. "He's got a town held together with twine and good manners and a Council hunting for an excuse. He hasn't the hours spare to be steadied." The practiced answer came out the way practiced ones do, frictionless, already worn to a shine. "Perhaps when the term's up. When there's someone fit to take the chair and I can be a man with evenings again. We'll see, then."
She let it sit. She lets everything sit until you can hear for yourself how thin it landed.
"Mm," she said.
