Slowly, I climbed up the lakewall and hopped back over. Still no guards. Not even a fuss in the crowd, just the usual small groups of twos and threes, scurrying along with their heads down. Maybe the Elder thought he could find me at one of the taprooms. I grinned. He’d find no Melana anywhere. Or was it Meletta? Didn’t matter. She was gone as goose grease.
There might be guards looking for me, but bright green League uniforms were easy to spot. Folks tended to give way when they saw armed men coming.
My stomach rumbled again. A painful rumble that twisted up my guts and said it was way past breakfast. And lunch. And supper. I headed for the docks, but my guts also said I was too late to cut bait.
“The boats are out, Nya. I’ve got nothing for you.”
“Sorry, Nya, I already had some boys wash the docks. Did it for cheap too.”
“If you’d been here earlier I had carts to load, but that’s all done now.”
Every berth foreman had the same answer, though a few looked sorry to turn me away. Especially Barnikoff, who usually found something for me to do. He’d lost three daughters and he liked having me around to tell stories to while he scraped barnacles off the hulls, but there were no boats in dry dock today.
Nor was there any work at the bakery, and the butcher had enough people to yank the feathers off chickens and guineafowl. The glassblower had two girls running sand and didn’t need me. A line of strapping boys my age waited outside the blacksmith, scowling at a girl I knew. Aylin was dancing by a river-rock garden wall outside the show house, a peek at what you’d see inside if you paid the outrageous prices for their food, drink and entertainment. She gleamed, her pale shoulders stark against the deep red and gold of her dress. Yellow beads traced her neckline and glittered at the ends of her short sleeves.
I headed over. With all the officers, aristocrats and merchants that went past her every day to spend their stolen wealth, Aylin knew more gossip than a crew of old women. If anyone had work for me, she’d know about it and I could sure as sugar use a job fast. My pockets were as empty as my belly. Rent had been due yesterday and I could avoid Millie for only so long. Warm nights promised I wouldn’t be cold, but there were other things in the night for a girl sleeping under a bush to worry about. And most of them wore blue uniforms.
I wove through the flow of people coming off the ferry and hopped up on the wall behind Aylin.
“Please tell me you know about some work. I need good news.”
“Hi, Nya.” She tossed her long red hair and waved at a well dressed merchant walking by. He flipped up his brocaded collar and ignored her. “Nah, just the usual stuff. Are all the jobs taken already?”
“I got a late start. Think the canal master is hiring leaf pullers?” Water hyacinths clogged the canals every summer and made it tough for the pole boats to get through. Dangerous work, but it paid well.
“Feel the need to dodge crocs?”
“Feel the need to eat.”
Her smile vanished. “Oh, that bad?”
“Would I risk becoming a meal to get one if it wasn’t?”
Her smile returned. “Hey, handsome, come inside! We have the
prettiest dancers in the Three Territories,” she called to a muscled soldier in Baseeri blue. He elbowed his friends and waved, but didn’t come over. “No, you’re smarter than that. I was telling Kaida the other day how you—”
“Aylin, are they hiring?”
“Oh, no, not any more. Morning, gentlemen! Come inside, three plays a day, the finest actors in Geveg!” Another set of soldiers went by, all wearing the blue and silver osprey emblem on their bulging chests. Baseeri soldiers always lined the streets, but I hadn’t seen so many on patrol since the occupation began.
My toes twitched with a sudden urge to be anywhere else. “Why all the soldiers today?”
“Verlatta’s under siege.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded and her dangling shell earrings swayed in time with her hips. “I had a Baseeri officer stop to talk on his way in last night. Said His Dukeship is after Verlatta’s pynvium mines.”
Even the late-morning sun couldn’t keep my shivers away. Baseer was two hundred miles upriver, on the borderlands between the Three Territories and the Northern Reaches, but it felt like the Duke was breathing down our necks again. He’d already conquered Sorille and now controlled most of the good farming land, but he hadn’t had any pynvium mines until he conquered us. We tried to fight him, regain our freedom, but it hadn’t worked. Once he had Verlatta, he’d rule all three lands his great-grandfather had granted independence to long ago.
“First our mines, now theirs. You’d think the Duke would have enough to heal everyone in Baseer by now.”
Aylin shrugged. “It’s not for the healing—it’s for the weapons. If he’d stop wasting his pynvium on weapons, he wouldn’t need so much. A vicious circle is what it is. Greedy toad. It’s his own fault.”
Aylin was right, but it was more sick than vicious if you asked me. Send your soldiers into battle and use their pain to fill your pynvium weapons, just so you could go attack other folks and steal their pynvium, so you could heal your people because you used all your pynvium to make the weapons in the first place. Stupid. Just plain stupid.
“There are a lot of people,” Aylin mused, watching the refugees shuffling off the ferry. The Duke had long since set up checkpoints on all the mainland bridges and roads, and without proper Baseeri travel seals, you didn’t get to pass. Getting proper travel seals wasn’t as hard as you might expect—it just cost you everything you had. Folks had tried forging them, but checkpoint soldiers were very good at spotting fakes.
“Too many people,” I agreed. Families in tailored clothes with the bright beaded collars popular in Verlatta shuffled beside families in sewn-together rags. Each person carried a bag or basket—probably all they could grab before they fled Verlatta.
And every last one of them would also be looking for work in Geveg.
I glanced at a pain merchant’s shop down the way, its sign swinging in the breeze. Teasing. Taunting. Tempting. Maybe I could risk it. Plenty of refugees around I could sneak some pain from and one sale might get me through a few more days. I just had to find someone who looked bruised or cut, nothing too serious that a Taker might recognise wasn’t a real injury of mine. Their lack of real training might be a lucky break for me.
Maybe Aylin knew which Takers couldn’t sense? She’d want to know why though, and much as I liked Aylin, I wasn’t sure how good she was at keeping secrets. With five pain merchant shops in Geveg, the chances of one having a senseless Taker were—
A man was watching us, almost hidden behind a hibiscus bush two shops down. Dressed fancy too, in smooth yellow and green silk. He wasn’t carrying anything, so he wasn’t off the ferry. An aristocrat’s son? He glanced from me to Aylin and his lips wrinkled in a vaguely familiar frown.
“I’d better get going, see if anyone needs a hauler in the market,” I said. The show house was Baseeri-owned, so I didn’t care if my stained shirt and wild curls scared away its customers, but I didn’t want Aylin to lose her job over it. “You’ll let me know if you hear of any jobs?”
“Of course.”
I hopped off the wall and the world spun around my head.
“Easy there.” Aylin grabbed my arm and kept me standing. “You OK?”
“Just a little dizzy. Moved too fast.”
“You’re so skinny I could wear you in my belt loops. Do you need money for something to eat?” She reached for a pocket.
“No thanks, I’m all right,” I said quickly. I couldn’t