Irons in the Fire Read Free Page A

Belatedly he saw that the way ahead was blocked by the hunters and their horses. Some of the householders had emerged to castigate the men trying to lash the pig's trotters together before slinging it on a spear for carrying triumphantly away. As he turned and followed Wyess, he swallowed, trying to ease the dryness in his throat. The shivers running down his back were slow to fade.
    He looked up. With every storey of Vanam's tall houses built out further into the streets than the one below, only the barest strip of twilight sky was visible above. Torches already burned in nearby brackets. With the Lesser Moon absent and the Greater Moon rapidly shrinking through its last handful of days, this festival's nights were dark ones. The flames struck a gleam from the golden brooch on Master Wyess's hat.
    "This way." Wyess caught Tathrin's elbow to draw him into an alleyway. There was no gainsaying him. The merchant was still strong enough to wrestle the barrels of furs in his warehouse should the need arise.
    The cutting between two buildings might originally have been wide enough for two men to pass each other. Now Tathrin found his shoulders brushing plastered walls on both sides where the wooden-framed houses had warped and settled so closely together over the generations.
    They reached a small courtyard with darkened windows looking down on three sides. In a door's recess on the far side, Tathrin saw shadows surround a candle lantern. Pewter clinked and a girl's giggles gave the lie to her coy protests. Not love, just festival's passing pretence of devotion. Such sweet nonsense wouldn't silence the echoes of distant death still ringing in Tathrin's head. He knew. He'd tried.
    "Still got your purse and your ring?" Wyess pounded loudly on a solid wooden gate set in the wall on the fourth side of the courtyard. "Mind them both. The city's full of thieves at festival and any number could be drinking in here."
    That prosaic reminder recalled more immediate concerns. Tathrin felt the solid silver of his scholar's ring secure on his finger and the discreet lump of his purse belted not merely inside his doublet but within his shirt. "Yes, sir."
    A hatch in the wooden gate slid open. "Who's knocking?" someone growled in the darkness beyond.
    "Lastel Wyess."
    "Fair festival to you, Master."
    The unseen voice turned cheery and Tathrin heard the bolts withdrawn.
    "Come to drink Raeponin's health?" A grizzled man with a hefty cudgel opened the gate.
    "Not tonight." Wyess shook a coin out of his glove and tossed it to the porter. "My compliments to Master Avin, but we're just cutting through."
    As Tathrin followed Wyess through the narrow garden and into a paved yard, the damp scents of brick and soil were the closest he'd come to a breath of fresh air all day. The quiet after the cacophony of the festival streets prompted happier memories of peaceful days at home. He gathered his wits, resolutely setting aside the pig's death and the unwelcome recollections it had forced on him. "Master, where are we?"
    "Taking the back way into the Dancing Stoat." Wyess laid a hand on the latch of a door. "Start learning your way around the back alleys of the lower town." He turned to wag a finger at him. "Make some friends among the lesser classes, especially among our countrymen. I'm relying on you."
    "I know, Master." Tathrin found it ironic. He'd spent two years striving to soften his Lescari accent, finding it so often disdained by the university's mentors. Then he had completed his studies and been forced to look for employment, and his despised birthplace had proved to be as much of an asset in Wyess's eyes as his proficiency with mathematics.
    Although Wyess's own voice no longer betrayed his Lescari origins. Did he ever think of whatever family he had left behind? Tathrin wondered. Did he recall the constant fear and uncertainty? The quarter days when paying the ducal levies meant everyone going hungry to bed? There were no festival feasts for