Taking Flight

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It was half an hour before he got around to asking her name.

“Azraya,” she said, throwing another pebble at the dove by the fountain, “Azraya of Ethshar.”

The bird fluttered up into the air, then landed and turned to peck at the pebble, seeing if it was edible.

“You’re from Ethshar?” Kelder asked, leaning back on the bench.

“I just said so, didn’t I?” Azraya snapped.

“No,” Kelder replied mildly, “you said that was your cognomen, not that you came from there.”

“Same thing,” Azraya said, only slightly mollified.

“I suppose it is,” Kelder agreed. “Sorry.”

They were still speaking Ethsharitic, having discovered that Azraya spoke no Shularan, Trader’s Tongue, Aryomoric, Uramoric, or Elankoran, and that Kelder spoke no Tintallionese or Sardironese. Neither of them spoke Krithimionese, but Azraya could sometimes follow it, and Kelder, knowing both its constituent tongues, understood it pretty well. Still, Ethsharitic was the only language they had in common.

“So what’s your name?” Azraya asked.

“Kelder,” Kelder said. “Kelder of Shulara.”

She looked at him doubtfully for a moment, not an unusual reaction to Kelder’s name, and eventually decided that he was telling the truth. Either that, or that the truth didn’t matter.

“Kelder,” she said, watching the dove. “All right.”

“You’re heading east, on the Great Highway?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“West, then? Back to Ethshar?”

“Probably. Which way are you going, back to Shulara?”

“No, to Ethshar.”

She nodded. “So this is where you hit the highway, coming from Shulara?”

“No, I reached the highway in Hlimora at first, and went east to Shan on the Desert. Now I’m heading west.”

She looked up, interested. “You’ve been to Shan?”

Kelder nodded.

“What’s it like?”

He shrugged. “We didn’t stay long,” he said. “I think it’s seen better days.” He was becoming more comfortable speaking Ethsharitic, now that he’d had a little practice.

“Oh,” Azraya said, disappointed. “What about the other towns along the way?”

“Well,” Kelder said, “this place, Krithim, is the nicest I’ve seen yet.”

“Oh,” Azraya said again. She tossed another pebble, and the dove flapped wildly for a moment, then wheeled into the air and flew away. “I guess I’ll be going back to Ethshar, then.”

“Why were you traveling in the first place?” Kelder asked.

“None of your — oh, damn it, it doesn’t matter.” She slumped forward, chin on her hands, elbows on her knees.

At first, Kelder took this to mean that she was going to answer his question, but after a moment it became clear that she wasn’t going to say anything without further urging.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” he said, “but I’m curious.”

She turned her head to glare at him around an errant ringlet of hair. “Why?” she demanded.

“Oh, I just like to know things,” Kelder said rather feebly.

She turned back to staring at the cobbles.

“When I was eight,” she said, “my parents died of a fever.”

Kelder, realizing he was about to get the whole story, nodded encouragingly.

“We couldn’t afford a theurgist to pray over them,” Azraya continued, “or a witch to hex them, or a wizard to cast spells on them, so they died. Two of my brothers died, too, and my older sister — the neighbors were all so afraid of catching it that they wouldn’t come near us, they shut up our house with us inside. That left me, and my younger sister Amari, and our baby brother Regran. I was the oldest, so I tried to take care of them, and I would sneak out of the house and steal food and things for them. And when the fever was gone, I took the boards off the doors, and then the tax collectors came and took the house away because we couldn’t pay, we didn’t know where our parents had hidden their money — if they had any.”

Kelder made a sympathetic noise.

“So we all went to the Hundred-Foot Field and lived there, with the beggars and thieves,” Azraya went on, “in the block between Panderer Street and Superstition Street, in the Camptown district. Our house was in Eastwark, but our old neighbors... well, we thought we’d do better in Camptown, and the Hundred-Foot Field goes all the way around the city.”

Kelder had no idea what this meant — he had never heard of the Hundred-Foot Field or anything else she mentioned. Interrupting to ask for an explanation did not seem like a very good idea, however, so he let her go on.

“I didn’t steal,” she said, “not after we lost the house. I think Amari did, but I didn’t. I begged when I had to, and ran errands for people when I could — one good thing about Camptown, the soldiers usually had errands we could run, taking messages to their women, or fetching things from the Wizards’ Quarter for them, or even just standing lookout when they were supposed to be on duty and wanted a nap, or a little time in bed with someone, or a game of dice.” She took a deep breath. “Regran died when he was two, just before my tenth birthday,” she said. “I’m not sure what he died of, he just got sick and died. Somebody had kicked him, maybe that did something, I don’t know. We’d done everything we could for him, even found a wetnurse and paid her half what we earned for a few months, but sometimes babies just die. After that, Amari and I didn’t stay together much any more, and I lost track of her after awhile. I haven’t seen her in a couple of years now. She might be dead, too.” She paused, remembering.

Kelder wanted to say something comforting, but before he could think of anything and phrase it in Ethsharitic, Azraya resumed her story.

“I told you we lived near Panderer Street,” she said. “Well, the panderers noticed me, after awhile, and I started avoiding them. And by the time I was thirteen I didn’t run any more errands on Pimp Street or Whore Street, either.”

Kelder did not recognize the Ethsharitic words for panderer, pimp, or whore, but he could make a guess what she was saying.

“And after awhile, I decided that I was tired of it. I was tired of the Hundred-Foot Field, the mud and the flies and the lunatics talking to themselves and the thieves going through your bedding every time you were out of sight, and I was tired of being harassed by the pimps, and I was tired of the soldiers and their errands — they were propositioning me, too, by this time. So I went to the markets to find work, but I didn’t find anything at first, just more pimps, and slavers, and farmers who wouldn’t take me as a field-hand because I’m not big enough. I was too old to apprentice — I should have found something when I was twelve, but I didn’t, I missed my chance.”

Kelder nodded in sympathy. Maybe he should have found an apprenticeship on his own, regardless of what he parents wanted — but he hadn’t.

“Anyway, eventually I got to Shiphaven Market, and I thought I would sign up to be a sailor, but there was someone there looking for volunteers to join a dragon hunt in the Small Kingdoms, and I thought that would be wonderful. It was a way out of the city, and I may be small, but I’m not stupid, and I’m stronger than I look — I thought I might help in a dragon hunt. So I signed up.”

“A dragon?” Kelder looked at her with renewed respect. She was brave, anyway — either that, or crazy.

She nodded. “The reward was a thousand pieces of gold, he said. I knew I couldn’t kill a dragon myself, but I thought maybe I could help out and get a share.”

“Where was this dragon?” Kelder asked. “How big was it?”

“It’s in a place called Dwomor,” Azraya said, “south of here. I don’t really know how big the dragon is — as far as I know, it’s still there.”

Kelder had heard of Dwomor; it was one of the larger Small Kingdoms, up in the high mountains in the central region. If one was looking for a dragon, that was a likely place to start, he had to admit. “You didn’t kill it?” he asked.

“I didn’t try,” Azraya said.

“Why not?”

She sighed.

“They signed up a whole boatload of us,” she said, “and we all sailed off across the Gulf of the East, and up a river to Ekeroa, and then they loaded us in wagons and took us to Dwomor, and we all got introduced to the king, and it all looked good, nobody bothered me, nobody tried to touch me, all they cared about was the dragon, I thought. Dwomor wasn’t exactly beautiful, but it was different, anyway. The whole castle was full of dragon-hunters, and they were forming into teams, and I thought I’d be able to join a team and get a share — and then the Lord Chamberlain took me aside and explained a few things.”

“Like what?”

“Like what the reward was,” Azraya said bitterly. “The recruiter lied. Oh, there were a thousand pieces of gold, and a position in the king’s service, but those weren’t the reward; those were his daughters’ dowry. The reward was that whoever killed the dragon got to marry one of his daughters. He had five of them, not counting the married one, so he was sending the hunters out in five-man teams. Five men.”

“Oh,” Kelder said, understanding the situation immediately. Surplus princesses were a well-known phenomenon in the Small Kingdoms, a common subject of lewd jokes — there were never enough princes to go around, and custom decreed that princesses could only marry commoners under exceptional circumstances. Slaying a dragon qualified a commoner as exceptional.

“I don’t know if they’d have sent me back to Ethshar,” Azraya said. “I didn’t wait to find out. I just set out, to see where I went. I’ve been wandering for months, through Ekeroa and Pethmor and Ressamor, doing what odd jobs I could, stealing when I couldn’t eat any other way, and last night I arrived here in Krithim, and now I need to decide whether to give up and go back to Ethshar, or to keep looking.”

“Looking for what?” Kelder asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just someplace to live, I guess, where I won’t have to beg or whore or sleep in the mud.”

She paused. Kelder thought she had finished, and was about to say something, when she added, “Or sell my blood to some slimy old wizard.”