Chapter Sixty-Eight: First Rule

Cherished Cemil,

I was overjoyed to receive your letter, which arrived today by courier, though less charmed by the note that preceded it, which you laid on my pillow the morning that you left. As you have astutely guessed, I am a little cross with you for not awakening me. Even so, it gladdens my heart to hear you have reached Elmaluk safely, and that the hunts proceeds well. Give Anaya something sweet to eat, from me. May it calm her fiery spirit awhile! For you, my wish is that you’ll get some sleep, and remember me when you close your eyes.

I have something to share. Do you remember the three Tolmishmen I told you about, the ones we thought might prove a useful source of gossip? There was Ansley (the friendly self-proclaimed “heretic”), Sigebert (the drunken family man), and Rylan (the quiet, brawny fellow). They called themselves “Mylo’s men”.

Long story short, they’re to be my new coworkers.

Alone, Osmund made his way to the wharves lining the waterfront. Trying not to look as out of place as he felt, he powered his way past the muscle-bound, rather aromatic men who seemed to emerge from behind every street corner and out of every dingy corner pub, where even in the midst of this embargo he still noted the occasional stink of cheap alcohol. 

The conversation with Emre at the Golden House was still fresh on his mind:

“Is there anyone from your homeland who would recognize the real Prince Osmund?”

“Just Pravin himself, and his daughter Selenne. Most Tolmish immigrants seem to be commoners from outside the capital.”

“And Cemil is away, so we can control how we present the idea to him,” Emre had added, tapping his chin with his unmarked hand. “Hmm. Okay. It could work.”

“What could work?”

“Well, you. You could get a job.”

A job. Simple enough. He’d had a job before. He just hadn’t needed to kill someone at the end of it.

Carried on the scraping sea winds was a diverse spray of tongues, including the Tolmish language as he had never heard it on the castle grounds, all rough and coarse with words slurred together in a foam as dense as the lapping tides. Some of these quays were alive with activity, others empty of both men and boats. Osmund breathed in and clung on hard to the facts. Unless Cemil, as emperor, planned to confine him forever within the Inner Gardens like a rare bird, he was vulnerable until Pravin was dead. Only then could he sever the last thread tying him to the wretched, unwanted prince he had been.

“You! I know you!”

Osmund wheeled around, coming face-to-face not with a kidnapper or assassin, but with the friendly smile and ruddy cheeks of a paunchy man in his early thirties. It was a familiar face, and one that was at least a little more sober than on their previous meeting.

“You’re, um, Sigebert, right?” As luck would have it, it was one of the very Tolmish trio he’d encountered at the coffeehouse! Only now, instead of stumbling out of his seat, he was leaning limberly upon a handcart laden with crates.

“That’s right!” Sigebert’s face suddenly fell. “And I’ve forgotten yours, though I only had the one to keep track of.”

Osmund gave him the fake name. “Halwyn. Of course,” the man grinned. “I remember now. A mercenary who speaks Meskato like a native. A fellow subject of the Crown. Not that we’ve a king, anymore…”

He wiped his red brow, which did nothing to hide the sheen of his sweat, and Osmund was put in mind of the hardworking peasants who were a common sight in Valcrest’s castle town, traveling with the best of their produce and livestock to barter with the royal provisioners. “I might have mentioned I’m actually between jobs,” Osmund ventured. “I don’t suppose…?”

“Need work? I’ll ask around. Possible someone wants a bodyguard or interpreter.”

“What about here?”

Here meant the harbor, dotted with ships and rugged sailors. Sigebert looked around as if to confirm the fact. “Aye, there’s work,” he said slowly, “but Mylo’s a hard man. It’s a thankless life. Can’t be the sort of job you’re after.”

That name. Mylo. The man who would be his path to Lord Pravin. “I’m willing to pull my weight,” Osmund said rather helplessly.

“Ah, ’course you would! It’s only, never mind.” Sigebert awkwardly rubbed his brow again. “I’m putting my foot in it. I only meant we don’t much hear accents like yours down here.”

Oh, Osmund thought, feeling foolish. Even a non-native speaker like Cemil had clocked his aristocratic accent on their first meeting. Why had this not occurred to him before? “I was a nobleman’s servant once,” he said boldly, the lie coming easier and easier. “Not anymore.”

Sigebert visibly relaxed to hear it before abruptly flinching again. “Ah hell, folks’ll be wanting these,” he exclaimed, snatching up the handles of the cart again. “There’s the wharf you’re after. Guild Quay. Nessa’s come to port.” He raised his arm in friendly greeting. “Pleasure to be working with you!”

The wharf in question was bustling, laborers in sea- and sweat-stained cotton hauling goods down from the docked boat. Osmund watched the tides of men and wandered until he got the attention of a passing Ansley and his brown curls, his arms laden.

“Name was Hal, right?” Before Osmund could say a word, the other man hefted his burden onto him: furs, mink and ermine and stoat. The pelts were surprisingly heavy, and smelled of dust and damp. “Nice seein’ ya. Lend a hand? We’re unloading the Queen Nessa. Take these and find Rylan.”

The creative backstory Osmund had been busily preparing evaporated in a flash, irrelevant. “Right!” he squawked, and hurried to his mission, bundling the weighty furs to his chest.

At the end of the wharf, dockside, was a storehouse where the others were bringing their burdens. Osmund ducked inside. The interior boasted an unusual profile of smells, muted beneath something earthy and herbal. Stacked to the ceiling were crates, barrels, and urns of varying sizes, and against the wall fabrics had been laid upon a rack to air out. He became distracted by one particularly expensive-looking brocade, and forgot to watch his step until—

“Watchit,” cautioned a gruff voice, a firm grip snagging in his jacket to steady his fall. The furs went toppling to the floor.

Osmund straightened himself with a flush, spinning to look his savior straight in the eyes. It was Rylan, the big fellow who’d barely spoken a single word during their chance meeting at the coffeehouse.

“Thanks.” He averted his eyes from that stony face, bending down to scoop up the pelts that he’d dropped and thinking it was just his luck that he’d immediately make a fool of himself. He forced a laugh to break the tension. “Sorry, I should have paid closer attention. Um, along this wall?”

Rylan nodded, uninterested in both his thanks and his apology. Then he addressed the empty room. “Ken. I told you.”

Out from behind a stack of crates stepped a youth, a boy. Not a boy, Osmund realized after a tick: a girl wearing trousers. Though perhaps it was wrong to assume. “I didn’t do it, it fell on its own,” she protested.

“He tripped,” Rylan said. “Be more careful.”

Osmund saw now that they were bickering over the rolled-up rug he’d apparently stumbled over. “Well, who are you?” the girl asked him in an accusatory tone, and now he was the one on trial. “Watch where you’re going in here. That’s the first rule.”

All he could do was chuckle nervously. To be scolded by a teenaged girl was certainly a first. “My sister.” Rylan hurtled through the formalities. “Kenadie.”

“Halwyn,” Osmund said, squirming beneath the unwelcoming stares from brother and sister alike. “I-I was hoping for steady work. Do I need to meet with your boss? What was his name—Mylo?” He threw out the name casually, angling for a bite.

“Friend, Mylo doesn’t care who you are.”

Osmund turned. It was Ansley, thank the heavens, laying out a few fox pelts on the rack beside him. “Long as you got two good arms, he’ll take you on. Keep your head down and there may even be opportunities for a bit of extra coin.”

“What kinds of opportunities?”

The other just smiled. “I recommend keeping your curiosity to a minimum.”

Osmund decided not to press further, at least while things were new. They finished laying out the skins, and Ansley patted them with a flourish, digging his fingers into the rich fur. “Nasty place, a ship’s hold,” he piped conversationally. “Rich blokes don’t fear hunger, not even death really, they all think they’ll croak as old men in their feather beds. Mold and rot though, that’s when they stain their breeches.”

Ken rolled her eyes and retreated back into the depths of the storehouse. Osmund heard movement, so she was apparently working. “You don’t like the manly banter, my young friend, go back to spinning!” Ansley called.

“I hate spinning! I’m through with ‘women’s work’!”

“She’s not so bad to have around,” said the curly-haired man to Osmund with a confidential grin. “Beats smelling this lot all day. Though she’s not much better, if I’m honest.”

Ken’s muffled voice carried. “Get stuffed.”

This sort of exchange was apparently business as usual. Osmund was halfway to a smile, himself. “You all seem close,” he remarked. “Did you know each other before coming to the Empire, by chance?”

“You dreaming?” said Ansley. “These two innocent farm brats? I’d have robbed them blind back home. And Sigebert would be on his knees fellating the king, if we still had one. Goddamn royalist.”

Osmund tried not to grimace at the vulgar imagery. “Hold on, thief? I thought you said you were a heretic.”

“One begets the other,” Ansley said, haphazardly kicking a clay fragment out of his path. “Hard to come by a living honestly when your whole town’s disowned you.”

His new companions were certainly a mismatched bunch. Perhaps that was the thread that bound them all together. “Don’t you want to know what I’ve done?” Osmund found himself saying.

“Well, no way you’re really a mercenary, I know that much,” Ansley said, nonchalant as ever.

“I could be anyone. I could be worse than a thief or a heretic. You aren’t curious?”

Ansley considered the question for a moment. Then he shrugged.

“You’re one of us,” he said at last. “That’s good enough, yeah?”

They labored the rest of the afternoon, getting an honest sweat going. Osmund rolled barrels and pulled carts until his muscles tremored from the strain.

In the storehouse, he finished rearranging a small number of delicate clay urns within their packaging; apparently they were going on delivery tomorrow. He stepped aside to let Rylan inspect his work. “Good,” the man said without further comment.

“Thanks for today,” Osmund tried again.

“Yeah.”

The first step was to gain their confidence. “Halwyn” had done all he could today to be helpful and agreeable. The rest would hopefully follow.

Donning his jacket, he stepped outside and walked a while along the wharf. The docks at night were an eerie place, but they were strangely beautiful too: the sea an endless black, the sky overhead dazzling with stars.

When he had been poor and hungry, wandering the streets, something had always kept him from standing where he now stood. The sight of the uninterrupted ocean might have once made it unbearably real: the fire, the usurper, the solitude. But here he was, in the realm of sailors, merchants, and their many-masted ships, planted firmly on his own two feet.

Osmund spotted Ansley’s curly-haired silhouette. He thought he saw Sigebert too, and beside them, another man he did not know.

“Ah, new blood’s here!” Ansley said chummily on his approach. “This is our man. Halwyn, here’s Mylo.”

Osmund rushed to mask his surprise. Mylo. Bald as a coot, but with brows thick enough to hone a knife, which were currently set in a mean glower. He looked like the kind of character Osmund dreamed up for villainous bit roles while reading his novels.

“Okay, new blood. Keep it simple. You’ve had a taste of it. Can you keep up?”

“—I can. Yes.”

“Shipping season’s almost done with. I can only pay you for a few weeks’ labor. You gonna come to me and beg when the work dries up? …Uh-huh, right answer. Show me your papers, boy. Come on.” 

Fumbling, and with his head still shaking no, Osmund reached into his back pocket and produced a copy of the official Meskato document he’d just had forged the previous afternoon. Apparently, to do most things in Şebyan—be hired, born or married, or die—one first had to acquire the proper documentation, and now, thanks to Emre’s connection at the Bureau, the former nobleman’s servant (named for a prince to whom he naturally had otherwise no relation!) finally legally existed. Despite being fictional, of course.

“Unmarried,” Mylo read aloud. “No family. Only your own mouth to mind.”

This seemed to be a good thing. “Come back again tomorrow,” the man said. “Early. Don’t get lost.”

To the others he said, apparently continuing an earlier conversation: “And remember this client doesn’t want a fuss. Don’t run your mouth in town about what you see. That understood?”

“Our lips are sealed,” chirped Ansley.

Mylo stalked away, and Osmund stared after him. “Don’t worry about Mylo,” Sigebert reassured him, seeing his face. “He might be a mean old mutt, but he takes care of us. Just needs to find out what you’re made of first.” He smiled. “But I think you’ll fit in here just fine.”

When Osmund got home that night, he began a letter to Cemil. He’d been excited to craft his reply—having received a short missive from the Meskato prince, informing him of the hunting party’s safe arrival—but then he remembered Emre’s words: “And Cemil is away, so we can control how it’s presented to him.” In other words, Osmund would have to lie to protect himself. Again.

But was it so bad? After all, getting to Pravin wasn’t his only goal. Getting dirt on the Merchants’ Guild benefitted Cemil, too.

Taking up the pen, he drafted a brief passage about his new job, including his hope for finding a lead on the counterfeiters and so relieve some of Cemil’s burden, and a reference to Sakina’s wellbeing, though he did not mention her recent string of romantic disappointments (read: lousy dates). He planned to end the letter there—his lover was a busy man, after all. But his pen kept moving.

It’s already strange to be without you, he wrote. Once we have moved to the palace and into separate apartments, I suppose it will be some comfort at least to know you’ll never be very far away.

A little brown bird landed on the window’s edge and sat a while, chirping. Osmund watched her, curious to see how long she would stay, until at last she took wing and disappeared. Which distant lands would she visit next? He wondered at it. But here on the ground, he’d never know.

Yours,

Osmund.