Cities and Thrones Read online

  Salazar returned and added another splash from his flask to his mug and to Fredrick’s. “So,” he said, blowing at the steam wafting off his own cup. “It’s a good story. It fits more or less what I’d pieced together from the whispers and insinuations coming from the train crews. But what I’m really itching to know is why Sato did it.”

  She hesitated. He was waiting for her to flake away the plaster of grand, visible events that had been smeared over Recoletta’s final weeks. He wanted to see the schemes beneath them. And she balked because that knowledge was precisely what had forced her to leave.

  He seemed to follow her thoughts. “You left because you were in danger, Miss Lin. The most likely explanation is that you know something. That also makes you dangerous.” He was nudging her, trying to embolden her with suggestions of her own power.

  It reminded her of an earlier conversation she’d had with Roman only two weeks ago, the same evening she and Fredrick had fled. Yet that discussion already felt much more distant. She remembered asking Roman Arnault many of these same questions about what had happened and why, hanging on his answers – and his sly glances and clever, quiet remarks – with bated breath.

  She hadn’t realized it at the time, but he’d had authority then. Even if her affection hadn’t driven her to trust him wholly and irrationally, he had been the only source of answers for her. That had given his words power and lodged them in her heart in such a way that they would be very difficult to pry out even if they’d turned out to be untrue.

  And here she and Fredrick sat, alone with a man asking her for an explanation. After she gave it to him, he would go on to give his own version – perhaps the same as hers, perhaps not – to his people.

  He wanted reasons. Something to give meaning to an as-yet unfathomable series of changes.

  Realizing that her fate might hinge on those very reasons, she gave him the ones she suspected he wanted to hear.

  “Recoletta’s weakening. Rotting from the inside. It was run by a few corrupt inbreds who have no particular skills to lay claim to except an incredible capacity for deceit and self-delusion.” Something hot and turbulent sang in her blood. Even if she hadn’t spared the matter much thought before, she knew everything she was saying was true. Whether she felt this good because her words seemed to have the desired effect or because she could finally speak them, she couldn’t quite say.

  He was leaning in, so she continued.

  “Sato recognized that, which is why he stepped in. But what he doesn’t recognize is that he’s little better. Others are catching on fast, though. You’ve seen the numbers coming out of Recoletta. It’s only a matter of time before his new city collapses on itself.”

  He’d listened, very still and very quiet. Now that she had finished, he nodded once and smiled. “Thank you, Miss Lin, you’ve been most helpful.”

  Silence descended, hemming them in. There was no noise from outside the building, no evidence that anyone was even nearby. Jane wondered whether Salazar had brought them to this room by themselves so that he could kill them now that he had his answers. It would certainly make things easier for him if he really did believe that they were dangerous, and it would preserve his version, whatever it might be, of what she’d just told him.

  But he drained the last of his cider and looked out the window behind them. “You must be exhausted,” he said. “You’ve certainly come a long way. Why don’t you stay on as our guests for tonight and catch a train out? There’s one due tomorrow morning, and I daresay you’ll be less conspicuous hiding in the crowd. There will certainly be enough of one on the train if the last two weeks are any indication.”

  “Thank you,” Jane said. Fredrick breathed a too-loud sigh of relief and looked at her.

  She wasn’t about to admit it to Fredrick, but she was secretly relieved at having a justification to take the train. Besides, as suspicious as she might be of Salazar’s motives, he’d certainly have no reason to want them to get caught. Of that much she was sure.

  Salazar left their mugs in a basin near the stove and led them back into the plaza. On the other side of the square was a three-story building marked by a sign that depicted a triumphant pig holding a bundle of wheat like a trophy. Jane supposed it was meant to be amusing, but mostly, it just reminded her that she was hungry.

  “This is the inn,” Salazar said. “Whenever you want to rest, Matthias can show you to your rooms. He should have stew on the stove, too.”

  Jane had to work very hard to listen to the rest of what he said.

  “I’ve got to attend to other matters now, but you’re welcome to stretch your legs around town. If you haven’t had enough of exploring already, that is. If you need anything, just ask around. Someone will be able to find me.” He nodded and left them.

  Jane and Fredrick didn’t have to discuss what to do next. They both turned into the inn for bowls of thick, hot stew. They ate quickly and silently. It could have been stringy beef and rehydrated vegetables and it would have satisfied Jane, but she was reasonably sure that she would have enjoyed this meal under any circumstances.

  Fredrick finished first, shoving his bowl to the middle of the table. “Hot cider, beef stew, and the promise of a train ride. What else could go wrong?” He belched into his fist. “Besides twelve hours of blissful unconsciousness.”

  Jane ladled the last chunk of parsnip into her mouth. “We’ve still got a few hours of daylight left. Might be fun to explore.”

  “Oh, Jane.” He groaned and folded his hands over his belly. “Haven’t we seen enough farms and fields for a lifetime?”

  “Look at it this way. When are we going to be out here again?”

  He grumbled and pushed his chair back from the table, the legs screeching against the floorboards. “If that’s a promise...”

  They stepped out of the inn and back into the square. But, warmed and filled as they were, the cold didn’t seem quite as daunting, and their thick coats seemed to hold their bodies’ heat.

  Jane led Fredrick at a brisk, deliberate pace, walking as if to see as much as possible in what time they had left. She followed the rough-paved streets past a tanner’s shop, where skins hung from beams and scaffolds, and a butcher’s shop next to it, with meats curing in the window. She supposed both shops got their raw materials from the same sources, and she turned to remark as much to Fredrick, but he wasn’t paying attention. His gaze was fixed on something distant and, likely, only present in his mind’s eye.

  She left him to his thoughts and pressed on. Despite his inattention, he followed close behind.

  As they walked on, Jane saw shops, storehouses, homes, and other buildings that she had to but peek inside to guess about. They were sturdy and practical, yet not without a certain savage charm. Theirs was the architecture of durability, something to withstand the relentless and unpredictable siege of the elements.

  She was impressed by the size of everything, how the settlement seemed to exist like a city in miniature. Everything it needed – everything but the factories, anyway – lay in the miles connected by narrow but neat cobbled roads. And other things, which Recoletta needed as well, lay in fields and pastures just beyond the little town.

  As they passed a storefront, Jane was struck by a whim. She jerked her head at Freddie, who followed her inside without a word.

  The store’s shelves were lined with all manner of goods: fruits in jars, pressed against the glass in colors that seemed brighter than real life; sacks of dry grains and beans; bags of flour and sugar; rolls of patterned fabrics; and a dozen little tools and implements made for improvised and autarkic industry.

  She picked up the first thing that caught her eye – a knife with a folding blade – and took it to the counter.

  “How much?”

  The balding shopkeeper started. She felt that twinge of dread at what his answer might be and at how much higher it might be for the foreign rhythm of her accent.

  “Which papers?” the man asked.

  “Beg y
our pardon?”

  “Papers.” He tapped his fingertips together in a rapid pinching motion. “Your money.”

  “Oh!” Her hand involuntarily darted to the pouch where she’d stored most of her cash. The answer froze on her tongue, but only for a moment. For better or worse, she’d already thrown her lot in with Salazar. “Recolettan marks,” she said.

  He nodded. “Twenty.”

  She gasped. “You can’t be serious. I could get the same thing for half as much in the city.”

  He shrugged, expressionless. “Well. You’re not in the city.”

  At first, she thought it was a calculated statement, part of a price hike made in the spirit of vengeance or opportunism. But his tonelessness made it a statement of fact, and he busied himself with a ledger behind the counter so quickly and quietly that she knew he wasn’t getting pleasure out of her disappointment. He wasn’t watching her reaction at all.

  There was only one explanation. The price was twenty marks.

  “Excuse me,” Jane said, drawing his attention from his book. “This knife. You sell it for twenty. How much do you pay for it?”

  He picked at the corner of the ledger page with his thumbnail. “Eighteen.” The price was almost too high to believe, but he spoke with so little emotion that, again, Jane couldn’t help but take him at his word.

  “You buy it from one of the craftsmen here?”

  Finally, his face split in a thin, disbelieving smile. “No, from the city. All of my goods come from Recoletta.”

  “Except the foodstuff, of course. You grow most of that here, don’t you?”

  “We do. But Recoletta owns it. The city owns all our quotas.”

  Jane paused, her mouth slightly agape, waiting for him to reveal the joke. But he only folded his hands on the counter in front of him. “You- you’re saying you grow this stuff, send it to Recoletta, and they send it back here to sell to you again?”

  “Usually we just pay for a reserve of our production to avoid sending it back and forth. And some of the items here are consignment from other communes that produce crops and materials we do not. Also purchased through Recoletta, of course.” His eyes suddenly narrowed and his mouth shrank to a small, firm line. Jane remembered the extra satchels her hunter-guides had carried, stuffed full of pumpkins and acorn squash. Perhaps there were some trades on the side, but nothing this shopkeeper wanted a potential representative of the city to know about.

  In fact, he seemed eager to change the subject now. “If you’d rather pay with other papers – other currency – we take money from anywhere. Madina, South Haven, Underlake, wherever you like.”

  Jane slid twenty marks onto the counter. Who knew if it would have any value where she was headed, anyway.

  The sight of the rumpled blue bills put the shopkeeper at ease, and he gave her the first genuine smile she’d seen since she’d stepped into the shop.

  She kept her fingertips on the corner of the money. “Is there someplace around here I could exchange this for another currency? Whatever they use in Madina, perhaps?”

  “Anyone here could do that for you. We’ve got a little of everything floating around.”

  Jane nodded, leaving the money on the counter. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  She slipped the knife into her pouch and left.

  “That was interesting,” she muttered through a plume of steam when she and Freddie were outside again.

  “I know. Who makes anything out of tartan any more?”

  “I’m not talking about the fabrics, Freddie. Did you listen to a word he said? They buy their own products back from the cities, and it sounds like they pay a fortune for them.”

  Fredrick shrugged and looked around. “Not much here to spend money on.”

  She threw her head back, staring into the flat white sky. “That’s not the point.” She looked back at him. “For people with nothing to buy, though, they have access to quite a few currencies.”

  He scratched the back of his neck. “Where do you suppose they get it?”

  Where money flowed, so did information. She’d always thought of the cities as isolated from one another, even while she’d marveled at foreign goods at the market. Yet she was beginning to see the shape of a thousand little official and unofficial channels where perhaps her information would have value. “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  As they toured the rest of Meyerston, Jane found herself looking for anything out of place. It was like watching for shoots of green in the snow, and now that she was paying attention, she was surprised at how much she noticed. Baskets that she’d specifically seen woven in Shepherd’s Hollow. Apricots, dried for storage, which one local admitted came from a commune further north. Tools and manufactured goods that didn’t bear the mark of any factory in Recoletta.

  Fredrick only furrowed his brow when Jane pointed this out. “Of course some of them originate in other communes. Other cities, even. The shopkeeper told you they have to buy these things through Recoletta.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think they buy all of through the city.”

  “Under-the-table deals, then.”

  “Of course,” Jane said. “Demand meeting opportunity.”

  He sighed, looking back in the direction they’d come. “Does this give you a sudden desire for apricots?”

  “No, it gives me an idea.”

  Chapter One

  Arbitrage

  Jane owed much of her early success in Madina to her initial observations of the souk.

  She and Fredrick reached Madina after almost three weeks of travel, blending in with the latest wave of Recolettan emigrants. Their slower journey had allowed them to adjust in ways the other expatriates had not; Jane found herself hearing her home city’s accent like something foreign and seeing the shock and bewilderment that she hadn’t had the luxury of experiencing when she’d left.

  But Roman’s final warning and the threat of Sato’s retaliation had taught her caution that few of her fellow migrants had learned. Newcomers revealed their ignorance – and their vulnerability – as soon as they opened their mouths. Even though Recolettans and Madinans spoke the same language, the cities’ relative isolation had incubated distinct patterns and connotations, and the subtleties were different enough to leave a wide margin for error. Recolettans asked for directions and assistance in the panicked tones that suggested they’d accept any answer. Whitenails demanded favors of locals who clearly saw no significance in their long, manicured fingernails. Some asked about prices while waving wads of money. In a way, she couldn’t blame them. They’d never been anywhere else before.

  When Jane arrived, she knew she needed to get her bearings. She needed to find the kind of meeting place where a variety of people crossed paths to exchange information and other things of value.

  She needed a market. Fortunately, she knew how to find that.

  She and Fredrick had pulled into town, fresh off the train from Meyerston, early in the morning. If Madina was anything like Recoletta, it was the time of day when merchants would be bustling to set up their stalls and others would be on their way to complete morning errands. So, dragging an exhausted Fredrick in her wake, she followed the tides of people.

  In Recoletta, the market had been not only a place of commerce, but also a place to trade information. Neighbors greeted one another with fresh tidings on their lips, and the day’s news wafted across the tiered levels and open stalls along with the scents of fish and the shouts of vendors. Aside from the Council chambers, of course, it was the best place to hear what had happened and what was on the horizon.

  In this regard, the souk of Madina put Recoletta’s market to shame. People were so familiar and talkative that Jane couldn’t tell at first whether they all happened to know one another or whether social bonds in Madina were so flexible that total strangers simply happened to greet one another this way. This kind of quick and public intimacy would have been considered forward in Recoletta, particularly between people of such apparentl
y varied social stations (which Jane could only guess at based on their apparently varied styles of dress). Yet here, people seemed to compete with one another in the sharing of news.

  Unlike Recoletta, where information was exchanged in a tit-for-tat fashion, here, information was given out extravagantly and abundantly.

  But information was only one thing Jane needed.

  Next to her, Fredrick scratched the rough fabric of his shirt. “I’m hungry.”

  He sounded cranky and petulant, but Jane realized that she was, too.

  Fredrick’s head swiveled around the souk, suddenly sensitive to the suggestive aromas around them. “How much do you think those things are?” he asked, pointing to a stall a dozen feet away where a man was selling skewers of rounded fritters.

  Jane led them closer. She couldn’t tell what they were, but they smelled delicious – warm, savory, and heavy with the scent of frying oil. She watched a woman approaching the stall hand over a few jingling coins in exchange for a skewer.

  Jane thought about the money in her pockets. A meal of fritters wouldn’t be a problem. Nor would a few dozen after that. But lodgings – particularly something safer and more comfortable than the local equivalent of Recoletta’s crowded, crime-ridden bunkhouses – would cost more. If Sato had sent someone to search for her, a public bunkhouse was the last place she wanted to be, particularly given how easily information seemed to circulate around here.

  It was a paranoid thought but not, given their flight through the communes, an unreasonable one.

  She would need to find a job, but she didn’t know how long that would take. Seeing the number of refugees in her midst, she suspected the competition might be fiercer than she’d hoped.

  So her thoughts returned to the money in her pockets. Booking passage on the train had, unfortunately, cost her more than she’d planned.