Pursuit of Freedom

Synopsis

Loshev’s business was closed. Dan was convicted, Nathan Fox had the council seat he had bargained for, and the three men who arranged both had a boy to find. It emerged that they had sat through the trial in Dan’s own clothes: Aldo had swapped out Koa’s wardrobe without mentioning it, and Koa never noticed what he had on. Tariq al-Mahir did not laugh, and remarked that old people have long memories. Yullen Gemsmith blamed Arkaias, whose followers pull exactly that sort of thing.

Fox had already booked the road: passage on three boats down to Haudh-Gwenn, part of it out of Gemsmith’s pocket, the first keelboat before daybreak and the whole run under three days. Aldo asked what he himself was being paid. Fox smiled and said that his own payment, for a crime pardoned, had been his freedom, and let the matter sit there.

They caught Gemsmith walking home. He confirmed that they still meant to bring Cleven back, and then did the thing nobody else in that town had done: he apologized. He had put his thumb on the scale that sent Aldo out on a harrowing errand instead of simple community service; he knew it; he said so plainly. Aldo noted afterwards that of every councilman who owed him that, new or old, only one had ever offered it.

It was Awalan’s day, which shuts the shops, so Gemsmith opened two of them. They would have to stand among people who buy other people, and be taken for the same, so a tailor spent two and a half hours fitting off-the-shelf finery, courtier and dilettante both, two outfits a man, delivered next morning in a locked cedar trunk. Then an apothecary, a friend of Gemsmith’s, who walked them through a dozen preparations before giving his name at the end of it: Kylar. They came away with wound-sealing salve, scent-masking cloaks, rage-drops, smoke pellets, a powder that holds off sleep for half a day, and a dozen doses of the cheap hangover cure Aldo insists on calling medicine, the whole haul paid for by selling Kylar the smaller of the two stones they had carried out of the ruins. Mikhail spent the last evening walking Trinity Barnaby’s patrol and playing her Aldo’s song about Dan on a lute nobody had tuned since Aldo last mangled it; she forgave the performance.

The river took three days: keelboat, a plank crossing mid-stream onto a sailing ship over the lake past Forven, then a keelboat again. Mikhail was recognized aboard from an old fishing trip and sang for it, Aldo joining in. At the burned little thorp where Koa had once been run out, Mikhail found himself hailed as a sorcerer supreme, the mage who scared Orsugo back into the woods east of there. Martha, who butchers for that village and keeps its speakeasy behind the shop, was warm to him and cool to the other two, and put them in her barn; a woman asked quietly whether Orsugo was behind the slaving, and the room fell to arguing about him instead. Martha sent them east to Harad, to a man everyone there simply calls the Captain. They passed Harad next morning without stopping; the crew would not lose a day’s profit for it.

Haudh-Gwenn stands on the outer corner of a river fork with no bridge across it, so that the big ships can pass, and by local reckoning it is the largest city on the continent. Riding in they crossed a district that smelled of Keif, where a tout pointed them at the Rusty Nail and a man called Tony, and a knot of tenement children staged a scuffle around them that the party read correctly and backed away from. They took rooms at the River’s Edge, whose keeper, Kogi, had buried his mother not long before and inherited the place.

Then the work. Aldo went out as a sailor, under a sailor’s name, in a face Koa could not see through even after being told whose it was, while Mikhail took the room with a song. The first tavern was a loss: Mikhail spotted a classmate from the university and they left before he was spotted back. The second, deeper into the bad end of town, took their weapons at the door and gave Mikhail the best crowd he has had. Halfway through it a man sat down across from the sailor and spoke a language of pints and crates and winds blowing north, and wanted to know only whether the merchandise would step on anybody’s toes. He would walk him out to the ruins by the market when the moon got low and close the deal there. Aldo went. Koa and Mikhail went after him.