Snowtear Page 8

  “My apologies,” the man said, brushing his eyes with the back of his hand. “I miss Sage very much.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Riken said.

  “You…uh…you wanted to ask me something?”

  “Aye, about one of your staff, a girl, Jatta Marllig.”

  “What about her?”

  “How long has she worked for you?”

  “I can’t say,” he said. “Sefen handles the house staff. You’d have to ask him.”

  Grand, Riken thought.

  “Did you know she’d lost a daughter recently?” Riken asked.

  “I didn’t. How horrible. To illness?”

  “Nay, she was taken from her bed in the night.”

  “I…like my Sage? I had no idea. The poor girl. What is becoming of our great city when children aren’t even able to sleep soundly in their beds?”

  “I don’t know, Mon,” Riken said. “But I’m going to find out.”

  They talked a while longer, but Riken could tell it was taking a toll on the grieving man. When the yellow herbs began to take their intended effect, and Gregor’s eyelids became heavy, Riken stood and bid him farewell, telling him to remain strong a little while longer.

  “Talk to Sefen on your way out, Mon Snowtear,” Gregor said, his voice low and sleepy. “He’ll aid you in any way he can. Sefen’s a good man.”

  Aye, Riken thought, a prince, that one.

  Before Riken made it all the way out of the den, Gregor Ullimar’s loud snoring filled the room.

  Sefen was opportunistically nowhere to be found.

  Riken retrieved his own coat from the closet in the hallway. The front door opened just as he reached for the brass handle. Jillian Dumay stepped in.

  “Mon Snowtear,” she said as she slipped the hood of her cloak back to reveal shoulder-length, auburn hair so straight it looked like it had been pressed between the pages of a book. She looked at him expectantly.

  He’d been privy to that look much too often of late. When he knew disappointment was all he could offer, meeting such a gaze felt akin to having hot pokers jabbed into his chest.

  “Min Dumay,” he said. “Well met.”

  “I pray you have news.”

  His expression must’ve answered her question. Her chestnut eyes drooped ever so slightly, and she let the statement hang between them.

  “I should be going,” Riken said.

  “May I walk with you?”

  “You just arrived.”

  “I just want to talk,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  The mid-afternoon sun rested high in a cloudless sky, warm enough to thaw the cheeks but not the snow. A few people traversed the street. No one seemed in much of a rush. In the middle of the street, standing in front of a tall, bronze statue of a horse and rider, a weaver held court with a group of children. They sat around him in a semi-circle, transfixed by his elaborate show. His words drifted in the background as Jillian spoke.

  “Sage is very precious to me, Mon Snowtear. She’s an amazing woman.”

  “Woman? I suppose I’ve been thinking of her as a young girl.”

  “In body only,” Jillian said. “Sage is very much a woman – intelligent, witty, kind, brazen. I loved having her back in the city. She’d been gone for such a long time.”

  “In Burden?”

  “Aye. She left here on her first nameday.” Females of Eastern and Northern origin had their first nameday at twenty cycles of age, when they finally received their parent’s surname. A strange custom, but hardly more so than his Western culture’s tradition of naming infants by what a father sees first upon exiting his home on the day of his child’s birth. In fairness, the ritual had afforded Riken a hardy surname, but he could just as easily been Riken Dungheap if his father had looked just a few yards to his left on that momentous morn. “Ever since she was small, she dreamed of seeing the world. She learned to read early, around four cycles if memory serves. She read everything, devoured texts that would take two people to carry across the room. She loved adventure tales set in far off places. When she was older, she started studying the geography of her favorite stories, making notes of her own, telling me how she would someday visit those places.”

  They turned a corner next to a gargantuan mansion of pristine, black stone. The gargoyles perched on its highest arches watched them as they continued on.

  “Most days, all she could talk about were her fantasies of travel. She loved Winter Moon, I think, but the burning desire to see beyond its borders was unquenchable. She spoke of Christian Drake’s Sanctuary as if it were the most miraculous thing in all of Cryshal. She had so many questions; I had so few answers. I knew she wouldn’t be contained. I knew she would leave me.”

  “How did she end up in Burden of all places?” Riken asked. Even saying the name brought a hint of acid to his tongue.

  “That place,” Jillian said. “I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say that she liked the idea of putting the entire breadth of Cryshal between herself and her mother.”

  “They didn’t get along?”

  “It’s not my place to say. They have always just…clashed, if you take my meaning.”

  “Min Ullimar doesn’t seem the motherly type.”

  “I raised Sage from birth. I’d been with the Ullimars for only a few months when the Min became with child. She was a beautiful baby. Widest, bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.” Jillian seemed lost in thought for a moment, then she laughed softly. “She was bald as a polished stone until she was three. Not a single hair on her head. Her mother hated that. I always thought it gave her character, made her as unique outside as in. The Min would put her in these dreadful wigs, but Sage was crafty. As soon as her mother left, the wig would go sailing across the room.”

  Jillian didn’t appear to need Riken’s help with the conversation, so he just walked on quietly, occasionally letting his eyes linger on the smooth, tanned skin of her face or subtle red of her slender lips. Her plain attire and lack of adornment did little to dampen her quiet, unassuming good looks. He liked listening to her voice, soft but deep.

  “When she was almost three cycles, she developed a tremendous fear of thunder,” Min Dumay said as they passed from Saffrom into Abigail Row. “Whenever a storm came, late in the night I would lie awake in bed, waiting for the soft sounds of her footsteps heading down the hall. She’d open my door quiet as a mouse, and slip into bed with me. I came to love storms.”

  Her voice broke an octave, and Riken thought for a moment that she might cry.

  “In bed, curled up as close as humanly possible to me, she’d rest her forehead on mine, her tiny fingers coiled in my hair. I remember the warmth of her breath on my face. For such a beautiful child, she had the worst breath back then. It cleared up later on, for sure, but, oh it was foul. I didn’t care. I just held her.”

  “You loved her very much,” Riken said just to add some measure of comfort.

  “I did,” Jillian said. “I do. The day she came back home was the happiest of my life. I didn’t bear her, Mon Snowtear, but Sage is my daughter. By the Fire, her mother has never realized what she has. I don’t know how a person can be so blind. Sure, she misses Sage now, but it’s probably more that something of hers has been taken without her permission. She doesn’t know what true loss is.”

  Jillian stopped in the middle of the cobblestone street and turned to face Riken. Her hands slipped out from the long sleeves of her grey dress and clasped his, her eyes wet, staring into him.

  “You must find my Sage, Mon Snowtear,” she said, her voice quivering. “Whatever you have to do, you do it. Understand? Whatever. I won’t lose another one. I won’t. Not again.”

  “Another?”

  “I won’t,” she said, squeezing his hands with strength he couldn’t believe she possessed.

  “What do you mean another, Min?” Riken asked, wincing as she clenched tighter.

  “I lost a daughter before. I can’t go through that again. It almost end
ed me the first time. If it hadn’t been for Sage, I…I…she’s all I have in the world. She means everything to me. I don’t care if you have to scour the depths of Perdicion itself, you find her, Mon Snowtear.”

  “You had a child die?” he asked quickly.

  “I lost a child,” she said, her voice pathetically low, tears trickling down her cheeks. “Just like Sage, she was taken from me. Do you know what that’s like? Have you any idea? I was negligent. Again. I should have known. I should have done something.”

  “This wasn’t your fault, Min.”

  She threw his hands down, almost pulling his shoulders out of socket. Her face turned livid, and she almost screamed, “Don’t speak to me as if you know. You don’t. You can’t know what it’s like. Do your job. Earn your coin. Find her. Please, for the love of the Fire, please found my little baby.”

  Her anger collapsed into a fit of crying, and her entire body slumped as if she would fall. When Riken put his arms around her, she didn’t fight, nor did she reciprocate. She just hung there in his grasp, limp and weeping.

  Riken felt the eyes of the passersby on him. Regardless, he stood there in the middle of the street, holding the distraught woman until she’d spent all her anger and grief. When she rose and turned away from him, he let her go without a word. He watched as she labored back up the street, looking as if she were pulling a giant boulder along after her.

  He drew in a deep breath and allowed the revelations of the intense exchange to stew in his mind. He shook his head in disbelief.

  Jatta Marligg wasn’t the only Ullimar employ who’d had a child go missing.

  What in the bloody Seven Layers did that mean?

  Chapter Nine

  While his head throbbed with a million questions darting about like angry hornets, the rest of his body still ached from his altercation at Bare Bones. Since Riken’s self-imposed restrictions didn’t permit him to drink nearly enough to ebb the pain, he’d have to requisition relief in another form. Gregor Ullimar’s own self-medication had kindled a solution.

  The best herb shop in the city was on Traders Row. Hieman Dirkwood acquired the majority of his stock off the docks when Crystalline was in port. The cheap stuff, he grew in pots behind the shop.

  The sign hanging over the entryway read simply “Herb Shop”.

  “You know,” Riken said as he stepped inside, immediately greeted by the musty, sweet smell of the mingling smokes clinging to the air, “you could’ve come up with a more interesting name for this place.”

  “You say the same each time you darken my door,” Hieman said, sitting behind his desk, chomping on a long pipe. On his balding head, he wore a beaten, leather hat with a tear on the brim. Riken had never seen the man without it.

  “It’s true each time.”

  “Why would I do so?” Hieman asked.

  “Inimitability. Something to make you stand out from the rest of the crowd.

  “I have the finest herbs in all of Winter Moon. That makes me stand out from the junk peddlers.

  “There’s one just up the row called Fragrant Airs. Seems to have a goodly amount of business,” Riken said, examining the rows of herb boxes lining the inclined shelves on one wall.

  “That it may, but folk in the know only deal there the one time. Any repeat clientele that old horse trader Munn Greffitor gets don’t know fine herb from a burnt pile of sheep shit. I don’t crave that kind of customer.”

  “Still, Fragrant Airs has a nice ring.”

  Under a crop of bushy, white eyebrows, Hieman leered at Riken.

  “Bah,” the man said with an exasperated wave. The motion caused a thick patch of yellow smoke to whirl about his head. “You buying, or just here to torment my ears?”

  “Buying.”

  “Then more buying, less chatter.”

  “Could work on that demeanor too.”

  Hieman went back to chomping on the end of his pipe, obviously tired of the exchange.

  Despite Riken’s need to delight himself at the shopkeeper’s expense, Hieman Dirkwood did indeed have the preeminent selection of herbs in Winter Moon. Riken counted no less than seven varieties of blue herbs alone.

  There were six different types of smokable herbs. Brown, the most abundant, and therefore cheapest, had no effect that Riken knew of save a penchant for tiring the lungs with repeated use. It was mostly employed by people with a taste for the art of smoking that weren’t in need of the other herbs’ secondary advantages. Like yellow, which, when utilized, achieved for the bearer a mellowing effect akin to drinking three stout mugs of ale. The blue herbs upped the ante somewhat, a single roll impeding the need to drink oneself stupid to garner that luscious drunk-off-the-ass feeling. Those who dabbled in the green enjoyed hazy, dreamlike states, and were able find even the act of staring for hours at their hand utterly fascinating. The lavender herbs, pricey enough to make a man miss a month’s worth of meals for a single bag, generated impossibly vivid, fantastical visions inside one’s head. Riken had only experimented with that once, not a wholly displeasing exploit, though he could’ve done without the three subsequent days he’d lost.

  The red, that was for dulling pain.

  “I’ll be needing some red today,” Riken said.

  “Bed some man’s woman again?” Hiem asked, staring at Riken’s black and yellow eye.

  Finally, Riken thought. He was beginning to think no one cared about his plight in the least. Neither of the Ullimars nor Jillian Dumay had taken the time to inquire about the bruises on his face. Though he supposed they had greater worries on their minds, a simple acknowledgement would’ve been nice.

  “She wasn’t his,” Riken said.

  “He know that?”

  “And I didn’t bed her.”

  “Hardly worth the trouble then,” Hieman said.

  “Quite.”

  “Cheapest I got is some red from the fields. Five kyn to fill your bag. Course, by the look of those new clothes, I’m guessing you’re in work now. Two lyn’ll get you red good enough you wouldn’t feel a pin prick your finger.”

  “Sounds grand,” Riken said as Hieman rose from behind his desk.

  “Toss me your bag,” the man said, and when Riken had, he grabbed a metal scoop from a shelf, dipped it into one of the open-lidded boxes, and shoveled out a healthy supply.

  “A Taste of Winter Moon,” Riken said.

  “Hmm?” the man asked as he spilled the scoop’s contents into Riken’s herb pouch.

  “For your sign.”

  “Nay.”

  “Haven’s Reserve.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Like that, huh?”

  “Sign stays as is,” Hieman said, then dropped Riken’s pouch into his hand. “Two lyn.”

  When Riken opened the door to his room and saw two unexpected guests sitting on his bed, he immediately wished he’d smoked his newly-acquired pain duller on the walk home.

  After a brief moment of surprise, he asked, “What can I do for you two fine gentlemen this evening?”

  The men rose. Both seemed shaped from the same robust mold. Heavy clubs swung around from behind their backs. One had a scraggly beard on a rotund face peppered with a field of dark brown freckles. The other was clean-shaven with long, blonde hair and a purple scar beneath his left eye. Before Riken could make it to the door, one of the brutes jerked him back by the scruff of his shirt and hurled him across the room.

  Rubbing his head, which had connected hard with the wall, Riken pushed himself from the floor with an irritated moan.

  “Look, fellows,” he said. “As you can no doubt see, I’ve already been in one tussle this week. Think we could reschedule this one for a later date? How’s next summer sound?”

  The two came at him in unison with slow, assured steps, their clubs dragging the floor.

  “Weapons are illegal within city borders, you know,” Riken said, trying to meld himself into the wall at his back. “Now fists, those are all proper and lawful. Plus they give a man more o
f a sense of accomplishment. Wouldn’t you agree? Tools sully things, if you ask me.”

  Freckles bumped into Riken’s bedside table. He reached down with his free hand, gripped the edge, and smashed the table into the wall. One of the splinters landed on Riken’s shoulder.

  “No bother,” Riken said. “I’ve been meaning to get a new one of those for ages. My thanks for the nudge, Mon. Now, if you two gentlemen could just inform me what your presence here pertains to, I’m sure we could work something out.”

  The first swinging club caught the underside of his jaw, lifting him off his heels. The second, crushed into his stomach, sent the wind from his lungs. Riken doubled over, gagging, and two subsequent blows rocked his prone spine. When he collided with the floor, the real beating began.

  When they’d finished, Blondie kicked him in the stomach so forcefully Riken flipped onto his back. He hadn’t yet smoked his herbs, but the men had helped in that regard. He couldn’t feel a thing now, save the gooey stream of blood dripping from his mouth.

  His two attackers towered over him for a long moment, and Riken was sure their next move would be to bring one of those damning clubs down on his skull. When their shadows retreated from his face, he breathed a sigh of great relief. The act erased the notion that he couldn’t feel anything as broken glass exploded in his chest.

  He heard two sets of lumbering footsteps, then the creaking of his door.

  “Forget Sage Ullimar, Snowtear,” one of the men said from the doorway.

  His blood seeping into the cracks of his dusty floor, Riken couldn’t muster a response, until he heard a low growl from the staircase, then he thought of one.

  Feeling the faintest tingle in the back of his head, Riken commandeered Bess’s eyes, using them to look up at the two men. To Bess’s left, Renny growled at the men. When Freckles raised his club over his head, staring intently at Bess, Riken sent Renny for the man’s crotch.