The Blacktongue Thief

10 The Horsegroom

The cat found me again soon after I found Galva.

She’d quit the inn where I’d questioned her last night, and I’d missed our meeting at the tower of Haros. I felt sure she wouldn’t start off anywhere until the next morning—Spanths like to do things the proper way, and dawn is the best time for a journey’s first steps.

After I stopped by the Stag and Quiet Drum to retrieve my goods from the attic, I slipped back down to the main room, where I stuffed greedily and greasily into my face-hole a pie of eel, leek, and mushrooms in a garlicky beer sauce, washing it down with red ale. Watching a Holtish silver shilling, called a knave, turned into four marks, or maids, and two copper shaves hurt, but at least I hadn’t needed to wreck an owlet. Gallardia’s owlet had the same value as the Holtish knave, but the knave coin pictured a thick fucker on a donkey holding a sheaf of wheat he seemed keen to wipe his arse with. A far inferior coin, one that deserves reduction.

While I chewed my eel and moistened my pie crust with ale, I began to reason out where the Spanth went. I remembered the market had three Ispanthian stalls, one that sold olive oil and dried fish, and two that sold wine. One of these also sold leather and never had a line, so this merchant’s wine will have been halfway to vinegar—nothing Galva would suffer. The other merchant barely got to sit down between buyers and had emptied one barrel while I had watched her customers, trying to work out who to nip a purse off of. The stall was shut at night, of course, but a scraped plate, a burp, and a short walk later, my full belly and I were standing in front of the closed wine stall with a cool evening breeze in my hair.

I imagined myself a Spanth chattering away with another from my warm, brown hills. I grabbed my invisible bottle of wine and walked off with that swordfighter’s spring the Spanth had, letting my feet take me where I felt hers would. They led me onto Splitbridge Lane and then onto Splitbridge proper, a Y-shaped stone structure lurching across the wide river. The bridge was two hundred years old, the architectural pride of Cadoth more for its beauty than for its sturdiness; packed with handsome stone and timber shops, inns, bookstalls, statues, and even a fountain with water burbling from an ecstatic-looking merman’s mouth, it looked to be on the point of a stately collapse into the eel-rich murk of the Caddow.

My eyes were drawn to an unnamed inn two stories tall, green tile roof, granite stones, tiny little windows that looked lockable. When I saw the wooden sign in the bottom window bearing the burned-in legend BATH WITH LODGING, I nodded like a Spanth, said, “Bolnu, bolnu,” because it would indeed be good to have a bath, and when you’ve got a modest budget, you bathe at inns like this one some nights and sleep cheap or free the others.

Ispanthians were notoriously clean generally, and unlike most travelers, Galva managed not to smell like the inside of a hot shoe. This felt right. My luck glowed warm. She was here. Riverside or street-side? Whatever they had, obviously, but I could most easily perch street-side. I sat down in an alley and watched two separate rooms that danced with candlelight. I was in no hurry. After an hour, I saw the leftmost window steam at the tops and decided to have a peek.

After using a gutter pipe to climb, minding the bow, pack, and fiddle on my back, I hung toward the edge of the roof with a small mirror on a folding stick and saw her in the bath, facing the window like a wary guest should, but oblivious to my cheat-glass.

That’s when I noticed she had no breasts at all. It wasn’t that she was built small, for I had seen that enough times, hadn’t I? Rather, her breasts were gone entirely, nipples and all, and in their place sat tattoos, and fine ones. Had she been burned? Born without them? Maimed in the field?

However she’d lost her mammets, afterward she had been expertly inked. A raven tattoo, the birders’ mark, was drawn on her scarred, tightly muscled pectorals; a skeleton’s hand on her sternum declared her love for Dalgatha; a sword on her arm wreathed in three flowers, one for each year she studied under a certain master. Exactly the tattoos you’d expect to find on an Ispanthian bird knight betrothed to the goddess of death.

Another thing about her—the feel of magic coming off her was stronger without her mail shirt and gorget to smother it.

But ho, what was this?

Now she called to someone at the door. A girleen came in with wine—of course—and a pitcher of piping-hot water to add to the bath should Galva want it warmed. She did. I scrambled up the roof and around to the other side, found an unoccupied room, and let myself in. Got to the hallway and came up to her open door, all this in forty heartbeats. I waited until Galva was occupied, carefully refilling her glass with wine, then slipped behind her shield, where it lay against the wall. Not that it was large enough to cover me entirely, but there are ways to square the body off so the shape tricks the eye.

It was hard not to laugh at the scene that followed—we’ll just call it a clash of cultures. The maid used coded language to offer Galva sex for money. The knight clearly didn’t understand, so the prostitute/maid got less nuanced, which was already funny because she was from Unther, and their accent is harsh and spitty. When Galva at last understood, she refused so politely the girl thought Galva was interested in sex but not hers, so she asked if the Ispanthian gentledam would like to see a horsegroom, code for boy-whore. Galva lifted her chin, thinking perhaps there was a live horse to be seen, which the maid took to mean yes, so she rang a little bell; but then Galva asked if in truth it was a mare they had here—the goblins’ rotten plague magic had killed all the stallions but mares had fought it better, the ones foaling were entirely proof against it, and some few of them still lived.

Galva meant an actual mare, of course. Spanths love horses more than all the other kingdoms put together, but the girl believed she was speaking in code—in the land of Prostitutia, a mare is a whore who’s borne children already. The maid said she thought Galva didn’t like females, but Galva insisted that she hadn’t touched a stallion in many years but would pay to see a mare. The maid thought Galva meant she couldn’t afford a male prostitute—far more expensive because of the lack of men generally—but might manage the cost of a slightly older female. The Spanth understood that there was some confusion and tried to set it right by insisting she meant an actual horse, that she loved horses, that in the morning she would pay good coin to see a horse.

I guess the maid didn’t get the in the morning part, because I next heard the sound of her simple peasant’s shift coming off and her knees and palms slapping the floorboards. I peeked around the shield—you would have, too—and saw her with her oat-colored hair, her hanging knaps, and pale, freckly Unthermaid skin, pretending to be a horse. She whinnied, and Galva laughed, and I laughed, and Galva heard me and stopped laughing, but I couldn’t, and there she was up out of the bath again dripping wet, swatting the shield aside, picking me up painfully by my nuts and nape and flinging me into the tub, splooshing half the water out. She wouldn’t be mad that I’d seen her nakedness—soldiering had taken the shyness out of dams her age—but she beat me with her shield anyway, though not too badly. Not hard. Mainly on the shoulders. I still couldn’t stop laughing.

“What is so funny?” she said, her accent making it sound like fonny.

“Put your damned pants on first, if you’re going to beat me! I’m not here for the mare!”

“Nor I for the horsegroom!” she said.

“Are you sure?” I said and whinnied.

The Unthermaid whinnied, too.

Now Galva was laughing again.

She put the shield down and put her pants on.

I opened the window to let the steam out, and that’s when I heard it.

Rao. Riii-ao.

I looked down at the cobbled street.

The blind cat had followed me.

His little blind head bobbing and sniffing toward the window.