“Yes, are they still calling you Angeleyes in these parts?” Peering into his face. “I think Demoneyes suits you better today. There’s more red in there than the crater at An-Monal.”
“It’s Padrow’s Day,” he said shortly. “Eyes this color are traditional. And anyway, since when did you know what An-Monal looks like? You’ve never been there.”
She snorted. “How would you know that? I could have been there anytime in the last three years, which is how long it’s been since you last chose to visit your poor aged mother.”
“Mother, please.” He shook his head and looked at her. Aged was, he supposed, an accurate enough statement of his mother’s forty-something years, but it hardly showed. Ishil had been a bride at thirteen, a mother of four before she was twenty. She’d had the following two and a half decades to work on her feminine charms and ensure that whatever Gingren Eskiath’s indiscretions with the other, younger females who came within his grabbing radius, he would always come back to the marriage bed in the end. She wore kohl in the Yhelteth style, on eyes and to etch her lips; her hair was bound back from a delicate, barely lined forehead and cheekbones that screamed her family’s southern ancestry. And when she moved, her robes caught on curves more appropriate to a woman half her age. In Trelayne high society, it was whispered that this was sorcery, that Ishil had sold her soul for her youthful aspect. Ringil, who’d watched her dress enough times, thought it more likely cosmetics, though on the soul selling he had to agree. Ishil’s aspirational merchant-class parents might have secured for their daughter a lifetime of luxury by marrying her into the house of Eskiath, but like all commerce it came at a price, and that price was life with Gingren.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” she insisted. “When were you last in Trelayne?”
“How is Father?” he asked obliquely.
Their eyes met. She sighed and shrugged. “Oh, you know. Your father’s . . . your father. No easier to live with now he’s gray. He asks after you.”
Ringil arched an eyebrow. “Really?”
“No, really. Sometimes, when he’s tired in the evenings. I think maybe he’s beginning to . . . regret. Some of the things he said, anyway.”
“Is he dying, then?” He could not keep the bitterness from his voice. “Is that why you’re here?”
She looked at him again, and this time he thought he saw the momentary brilliance of tear sheen in her eyes. “No, that’s not why I’m here. I wouldn’t have come for that, and you know it. It’s something else.” She clapped her hands suddenly, pasted on a smile. “But what are we doing out here, Ringil? Where is everyone? This place has about as much life to it as an Aldrain stone circle. I have hungry men and maids, horses that need feeding and watering. I could do with a little food myself, come to that. Doesn’t your landlord want to earn himself some League coin?”
Ringil shrugged. “I’ll go and ask him. Then maybe you can tell me what’s going on.”
THE LANDLORD, BY HIS FACE AS HUNGOVER AS RINGIL, DID BRIGHTEN somewhat at the mention of Trelayne currency. He opened the dining chamber at the back of the residents’ bar, ordered bleary-eyed stable hands to take care of the horses, and wandered off into the kitchen to see what was salvageable from the previous night’s feast. Ringil went with him, made himself an herbal infusion, and carried it back to one of the dining chamber’s oak trestle tables, where he slumped and stared at the steam rising from the cup as if it were a summoned sprite. In due course Ishil came in, followed by her men and three ladies-in-waiting who’d presumably been hiding in the carriage. They bustled about, making far too much noise.
“Traveling light, I see.”
“Oh, Ringil, be quiet.” Ishil settled herself on the other side of the table. “It’s not my fault you drank too much last night.”
“No, but it’s your fault I’m awake this early dealing with it.” One of the ladies-in-waiting tittered, then flushed into silence as Ishil cut her an icy glance. Ringil sipped at his tea and grimaced. “So you want to tell me what this is about?”
“Could we not have some coffee first?”
“It’s coming. I don’t have a lot of small talk, Mother.”
Ishil made an elegant gesture of resignation. “Oh, very well. Do you remember your cousin Sherin?”
“Vaguely.” He fitted a childhood face to the name, a wan little girl with downward-falling sheaves of dark hair, too young for him to want to play with in the gardens. He associated her with summers at Ishil’s villa down the coast at Lanatray. “One of Nerla’s kids?”
“Dersin’s. Nerla was her paternal aunt.”
“Right.”
The silence pooled. Someone came in and started building a fire in the hearth.
“Sherin has been sold,” Ishil said quietly.
Ringil looked at the cup in his hand. “Really. How did that happen?”
“How does it always happen these days?” Ishil shrugged. “Debt. She married, oh, some finished-goods merchant, you don’t know him. Name of Bilgrest. This was a few years ago. I sent you an invitation to the wedding, but you never replied. Anyway, it seems this Bilgrest had a gambling problem. He’d been speculating on the crop markets for a while, too, and getting it mostly wrong. That, plus maintaining appearances in Trelayne, wiped out the bulk of his accumulated capital, and then like the idiot he was, he stopped paying into the sureties fund to cut costs, and then a ship carrying his merchandise got wrecked off the Gergis cape, and then, well.” Another shrug. “You know how it goes after that.”
“I can imagine. But Dersin’s got money. Why didn’t she bail them out?”
“She doesn’t have much money, Ringil. You always assume—”
“We’re talking about her fucking daughter, for Hoiran’s sake. And Garat’s got well-heeled friends, hasn’t he? They could have raised the finance somehow. Come to that, why didn’t they just buy Sherin back?”
“They didn’t know. Bilgrest wouldn’t tell anybody the way things were going, and Sherin went along with the charade. She was always so proud, and she knows Garat never really approved of the marriage. Apparently, he’d already loaned them money a couple of times and never got it back. I think Garat and Bilgrest had words. After that, Sherin just stopped asking. Stopped visiting. Dersin hadn’t seen either of them for months. We were both down at Lanatray when we heard, and by the time the news got to us and we got back to the city—it must have been at least a week by then. We had to break into the house.” She shuddered delicately. “It was like walking into a tomb. All the furniture gone, the bailiffs took everything, even the drapes and carpets, and Bilgrest just sat there with the shutters closed, muttering to himself in the dark.”
“Didn’t they have any kids?”
“No, Sherin couldn’t. I think that’s why she clung to Bilgrest so hard, because he didn’t seem to care about it.”
“Oh great. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Another little pool of quiet. The coffee came, with yesterday’s bread toasted to cover its stiffness, an assortment of jams and oils and some reheated broth. The men-at-arms and the ladies-in-waiting fell on it all with an enthusiasm that made Ringil slightly queasy all over again. Ishil took a little coffee and looked somberly back at her son.
“I told Dersin you’d look for her,” she said.
Ringil raised an eyebrow. “Did you? That was rash.”
“Please don’t be like this, Gil. You’d be paid.”
“I don’t need the money.” Ringil closed his eyes briefly. “Why can’t Father do it? It’s not like he doesn’t have the manpower.”
Ishil looked away. “You know your father’s opinion of my family. And Dersin’s side are practically full-blood marsh dwellers if you go back a couple of generations. Hardly worthy of his favors. Anyway, Gingren won’t go against the edicts. You know how things are since the war. It’s legal. Sherin was sold legally.”