CHAPTER1
Matti laid his fingers on the polished edge of the bar’s wooden surface and forced himself to stop counting sheep. And yards of twill. And looms in need of repair, and outstanding debts.
Instead, he counted today’s collection of ink smudges, bruise-black on the brown skin of his hands: six. He counted the number of blue dyes that would have been used in the fabric of the bartender’s layered skirt: four, possibly five if the palest shade was true dimflower and not just the result of fading.
The tense throb of pain like a fist clenched in his hair eased, grudgingly, to a quiet ache. Bearable. Normal.
It was busy in the drinking house, the post-dinner hour that usually found Matti heading back to his study to finish the paperwork that a member of his family had tugged him away from in order to eat. Matti counted the number of flavoured jenever bottles on the shelf behind the bar—fifteen—in the time it took Audry to finish serving her current customer and sweep her sky-coloured skirts to stand in front of Matti.
“And here’s a face we haven’t seen in a while! Something tells me you’re here for a celebration, Mr. Jay.”
Matti hoped the smile he’d pulled onto his face wasn’t the wrong size, or the wrong shade of abashed. “News travels fast.”
“Mattinesh Jay and Sofia Cooper. A match surprising exactly no one.”
Matti kept the smile going. There was a silence in which Audry politely didn’t say, Pity she’s in love with someone else, and so Matti didn’t have to say, Yes, isn’t it?
Audry said, “Wait here a moment. I’ve got something in the back that I think will do nicely.”
Matti cast a glance over the room as Audry disappeared. His cousin Roland made an extravagant sighing motion and pretended to check his watch when Matti’s eyes landed on their table. A burst of laughter came from a dark-skinned woman nearby; she was wearing a dress that rode high at the knee to reveal a fall of lace like frothing water, a northern style of garment that Matti’s own northerner mother seldom wore these days.
At the closest table the Mason Guildmaster, Lysbette Martens, was deep in conversation with a senior member of the Guild of Engineers. Martens met Matti’s gaze with her own and nodded brief acknowledgement. He was sure she was weighing his presence as consciously as he was weighing hers. This was a place to be seen, after all.
“Here you are. Red wine for young lovers.”
Matti turned around again. Audry named the price for the bottle as she uncorked it and set it on the bar. Matti paid her, ignoring the lurch like a fishhook in his stomach at the amount on the credit notes he was so casually handing over. Mattinesh Jay, firstborn of his distinguished House, had no reason not to indulge in one of the finest bottles of wine that money could buy.
No reason that anyone here would know about, anyway.
Matti took the bottle in one hand and hooked three glasses with the other. Making his way over to the table, his mind circled back to dwell on the wrong sort of numbers. The money in Matti’s purse was painstakingly calculated: enough for the first round of engagement drinks, and enough for him to hire a top-of-the-range duellist who would step forward in the awkwardly likely event of someone challenging for Sofia’s hand at the wedding itself.
Matti’s skin prickled cold at the very thought of what might happen if Adrean Vane challenged against Matti’s marriage to Sofia and won. His family’s last hope would be gone. Matti would have failed them in this, the most useful thing he could do for them.
He was so caught up in this uneasy imagining as he wove through the room that he collided, hard, with another person’s shoulder. Matti was both tall and broad, not easily unbalanced; the unfortunate other member of the collision made a grab for Matti’s coat, couldn’t get a good grip, and tripped to the ground with a caught-back “Fu—”
Matti tried to step backwards. They were crammed into a small space between tables and there were people moving around them. His first panicked instinct had been to keep the wine bottle upright and the glasses safe, so he didn’t have a hand free to steady himself on a chair.
He wasn’t quite sure what happened next, except that he ended up wobbling and stepping forward instead, and he felt his boot come down on something that was not the floorboards. A small, pathetic, grinding mechanical sound crawled up Matti’s nerves, heel to head, and reached his ears even amidst the noise of the busy room.
“Sorry!” he said at once. “I’m sorry. Was that— Oh, Huna’s teeth.”
The man on the floor jerked his head up, staring at Matti, and Matti stared back.
For a moment all that Matti could see was the wide, straight line of the man’s mouth, set beneath an equally straight nose, and the frame that set off the whole: the dark, luminous copper-red hair that seemed to be trying to grow in about ten different directions.
The man’s tongue darted out in a nervous mannerism, wetting his lower lip. Something in Matti’s own mouth tried to happen in a yearning echo.
“Would you please lift,” the man said precisely, “your godsdamned foot?”
Heat flooded Matti’s face. He snatched his foot backwards with enough force that his heel collided with a chair leg.
The redheaded man stood, his fingers closed convulsively tight around a small velvet bag. His brown coat was shabby and made of a coarsely woven fabric, though his shirt was good and his trousers had probably been equally so before they’d been overwashed into a patchy shine.
“Fuck fuck shitting—fuck,” the man said in tones of despair, with a lilt to his accent that placed him at least one city-state farther east: Cienne, or possibly Sanoy. He shook the contents of the bag into his palm and ventured into new realms of inappropriate language as he did so.
Enough people had witnessed their collision, or had their heads turned by the stream of expletives, that there were a fair few necks craning to see what was in the man’s hand. Matti, at whom the shaking fingers of this hand were pointed most directly, couldn’t help seeing for himself the ragged, glinting pile of cogs and jewels and glass. Only the intact cover—monogrammed in a swirling, engraved H—spoke of this pile’s previous existence as a pocket watch. A very expensive pocket watch, by the look of it.
The man’s breath hissed out through his teeth. “Guildmaster Havelot is going to use my arm bones as a fucking lathe. He only had it made to order, and he only trusted me to pick it up, didn’t he? Two hundred gold. Fucking fuck.”
“I’m so sorry,” Matti said again. He recognised the name: Havelot was the Woodworker Guildmaster in Cienne. “Truly. I can—” He stopped. The abrupt lack of his words created a silence that seemed to suck noise into itself, as conversations died to murmurs and the onlookers sensed something interesting.
The man looked straight at Matti with a stubborn lift of his chin. His brows, the same absurd colour as the rest of his hair, had sprung up into the beginnings of hope; as Matti’s silence grew longer, they lowered again. And then lowered farther. He swept a look down and then slowly up Matti’s own outfit, and now pride warred with scorn in the way those maddening lips pressed together.
Matti felt sick. His own coat was made of the finest wool, a midnight blue cut perfectly to his figure, and the rest of his clothes were of the same quality. He was holding a bottle of extremely good wine. Anybody looking at him would make immediate assumptions about the amount of ready money that Matti might have, and the ease with which he would be able to reimburse a poor clerk, if he’d just ruined a pricey piece of artificer’s skill that the man’s employer had trusted him to travel all the way to Glassport to collect.
Of course they would make these assumptions. That was the point.
Matti swallowed and felt the burning heaviness of his purse redouble. He’d be left with enough to a hire a duellist, yes, but not one of the highest skill. It wouldn’t buy himself and his family the absolute security they needed.
His friends were looking at him. It seemed like every pair of eyes in the drinking house was looking, and in another moment the murmurs of curiosity would turn to murmurs of disapprobation. I thought Matti Jay had more honour than that, they would say. What’s two hundred gold to someone like him?
Besides, the plain fact of the matter was that Matti had broken the watch. And he couldn’t pretend that he and this man with his proud mouth and poor coat, patched at one elbow, were on an equal footing. Even if he were left without a bronze, Matti would still have influence, connections, the weight of his family’s name. That was still worth something. For now.
So that was that.
“I—I really am sorry.” Matti set the wine and glasses down on the corner of the nearest table and pulled his purse from inside his coat. He kept his gaze on the man’s face, on a pair of eyes that were either grey or brown—impossible to tell from this angle—and urgently willed them not to look away. To a degree that seemed irrational, he wanted to banish the judgemental expression from the man’s face. “Of course I’ll cover the cost. Two hundred gold. Who did the work?”
The man glanced down at the metal scraps in his hand, as though the answer might be hidden in the pile. “Speck,” he said at last. “Frans Speck, in Amber Lane.”
“He’s a fair man. Tell him what happened and he’ll rush through the repair job,” Matti said. He held out the century notes.
The man tipped the wreckage of the watch back into the bag and closed his hand around the money, slow and wary. His fingertips had rough patches that scraped against Matti’s own, sending a tingle up Matti’s arm.
“I appreciate it,” the man said. He looked less cold now, though still nowhere near warm. “You’ve saved my life. Really.”
Matti forced himself to smile. Forced himself to say, “It’s nothing,” as though it really were nothing.
The man nodded awkwardly at Matti and tucked both money and bag into a pocket. Then he turned and was gone, headed for the door.
Matti somehow made his way to his table and sat down. His heart was pounding so loudly that he could barely hear anything else, and he wanted to shout at his own blood to be quiet and let him think. He needed to be alone in his study. He needed to contemplate his options, and make lists, and pore over the accounts for the thousandth time, in case they transmuted themselves into a picture of prosperity instead of the ugly, desperate reality that nobody outside of Matti’s immediate family knew about.
“Two hundred gold,” he said, before he could stop himself. “Two hundred.”
“We saw. Hard luck,” his cousin Roland said, making a face.
Perhaps it was stretching the term to call Roland and Wynn his friends, but they were the closest thing Matti had to members of that category, and the only people he’d been able to think of to form his wedding party. At least the three of them never found it too hard to pick up their acquaintanceship again, even if it had been months since their last conversation.
Wynn turned the bottle of wine to inspect the yellow butterfly on the label. “How appropriate that we’re drinking wine from your betrothed’s own winery.”
“Audry’s idea of a joke, I think,” Matti said. The word betrothed had landed in his ears like a piece of music played in an unfamiliar key; his mind was still turning it over, trying to decide how it felt about the melody. His hand was shaking as he poured the first glass, sending the stream of dark wine shivering and slipping. He’d steadied it by the time he poured the second.
“Huna smile,” he said, opening the toasts by lifting his own glass. “Thanks for agreeing to stand up with me, you two.”
“Drown your sorrows in this one, and by the time we hit the next bottle you’ll remember that you’re here to celebrate. And that once you’re married to Sofia Cooper,” Roland went on, lowering his voice sympathetically, “Jay House will be rolling in enough money to replace a hundred watches.”
Except that Matti had to get himself successfully married in the first place. And he’d just lost his best guarantee of doing so.
He let the old, gorgeous wine flood down his throat until a good third of his glass had vanished. He felt lightheaded; it had to be panic, because the wine couldn’t be working that fast. Panic and a sense of becoming unmoored. And the image of the man’s face, pale and sharply beautiful, gazing up from where he was kneeling at Matti’s feet.
“A fair effort,” Wynn said, when Matti put the glass down. “But I’ll show you children of Huna how it’s done.” He raised his own glass. “Agar fill your plates and cups.”
Matti smiled and drank again, accepting the toast. Maybe the wine was working after all. He could still feel his panic, the wound-up watch of his worry, but he shoved it away into a recess of his mind: its own small, dark velvet bag. It would be safe enough there. It would last until tomorrow. Matti’s ability to worry was shatterproof.
For now, he was going to drink.
* * *
The sun was making a personal project of finding Matti’s eyes as he walked through the Glassport streets the next morning. Every gap between eaves and chimneys was a new opportunity for glaring rays to assault his eyelids. His head felt like one of the snow-baubles you could buy in the winter markets, flurried and shaken into a confusion of water and oil and small flecks of metal, and fragile. Prone to cracking. The sunlight was one source of cracks; the rumble of carts and carriages, raised voices, the rattle of machinery—the everyday racket of city life, which Matti could easily ignore on a normal day—was another.
Matti was not a drinker, as a rule. His family brought out the occasional decanter of good spirits if a deal was being struck or they had particular reason to please someone. On those occasions Matti had learned to spin out a glass across hours, to honour the work of Maha’s children by rolling each sip over his tongue, and to forget that alcohol had any ability to muddle the thoughts.
He’d also managed to forget that the state of existence known as Maha’s Revenge awaited anyone who had, for example, spent the previous night sharing two bottles of wine among three people and chasing all of that with glasses of rosemary jenever. Not that Matti could remember the jenever portion of the evening. He’d made an educated guess at that upon waking, based on the smell of his wrinkled shirt.
Matti had escaped his house relatively unmocked for his delicate state. His family knew where he’d been and what he’d been celebrating. The slight change in the set of his father’s shoulders, the new and terrible light of relief in the communication-dense glances his parents exchanged … those were a form of celebration too. A piece of lowered horizon glimpsed after a long, long uphill trek, whispering at the possibility that soon their feet might find the road sloping downwards.
Matti had awoken to the twins hurling themselves onto the lump of him in his sheets, delighted to find their older brother abed at a time of day when he’d usually have been awake for hours. Joselyne had chased them away and brought peppermint tea, which had helped the uneasy roil of Matti’s stomach but hadn’t done much for the head-bauble.
As much as Matti would have liked to stay in bed, or even to sit in his study with a plate of greasy spiced potato dumplings at his elbow, there was something he had to do this morning.
Matti ducked his head to avoid another piercing sunbeam and rounded the corner into the street that held his destination. The city’s only agency of swords-for-hire had its office tucked incongruously above an apothecary’s shop front, with a narrow flight of stairs leading up from street level. Matti passed through a doorway with the symbol of Pata, patron god of soldiers, guards, and duellists, set as a plaque above the doorframe. The room it led into was small, with a single window looking out onto the street, and it was dominated by a pair of wooden cabinets set on the opposite wall. A man with thinning blond hair sat behind a desk in front of the cabinets, and he was climbing to his feet even as Matti walked in.
“Mr. Jay,” he said. “What can I do for you, sir?”
The man’s face was vaguely familiar, but even Matti’s trained memory couldn’t attach a name to it. “I’m afraid you’ve got the advantage of me.”
“Tolliver.” He extended a hand and Matti shook it. “Hardy Tolliver. I stood swordguard for your sister’s naming ceremony, several years back. This was my father’s agency. Now it’s mine.”
“I need to hire a best man.”
“Of course. Is there reason to expect a challenge?” Hardy Tolliver’s voice was polite, his face impeccably blank. Matti didn’t have the energy to try to work out if Tolliver was being deliberately obtuse, or just displaying professional courtesy. If he knew who Matti was, he might well know more than that, and it wasn’t as though Adrean Vane made any secret of either his feelings for Sofia or his enthusiasm for the blade. He’d even set those feelings to music. There’d been a time last year when you could barely walk down a street in the city without hearing someone whistling “Wildflowers Under Glass”; it was the kind of tune that nestled merrily in the ear for days on end.
Copyright © 2024 by Freya Marske
