December 6

Mike Brooks

For our Advent calendar, Mike has written an EXCLUSIVE SHORT STORY (yes, that’s our excited voice)

Enjoy!

TWENTY YEARS AGO

Princess Tila Narida was seventeen years old, and empty inside from the news of her father’s death. It was apparently thanks to the incompetence of the sar commanding the God-King’s bodyguard, who had only been given that honour as a sop to his lover, Tila’s brother Natan. Said brother was now weeping with their mother. Tila pretended to lock herself in her chambers in the Sun Palace, but instead changed into the simple clothes she had a maid smuggle in to her the year before, donned a hooded cloak, and blackmailed the gate guards into letting her out into the city, where she now wandered the darkening streets, aimless and heedless.

She had always been cautioned against walking the streets of Idramar except during the Midsummer Festival, and even then only under heavy guard. She expected to be set upon by robbers within the first couple of streets, with nothing but bleak acceptance in her soul at the prospect, but it never materialised. So it was that she followed the salt smell of the sea that managed to cut through the offal-tinged stink of the docks, until she reached the slick cobblestones of the waterfront, where the endless ships loaded and unloaded their goods.

She studied the dark water for some time, lost in the faintly reflected yellow smears of the warehouse torches, and the two brighter smudges cast by the long moon and the short moon in the sky overhead. She considered throwing herself in and letting the water take her, and had she been standing on some unspoiled beach or cliff she might even have done so, but the smell of the water and the sight of the flotsam bobbing on its surface repulsed her in some way that she could not properly verbalise. At this moment she cared not whether she lived or died, but she did not want her end to smell like the foul liquid that would flow down her throat to fill her lungs, let alone taste like it.

She turned away from the dark water and her darker thoughts, and followed the wharf south until she reached a circle of light and noise spilling out not from a warehouse, but the doorway of a narrow-fronted building with a blue-painted carving affixed over the threshold. The piece was old, and had suffered under the elements, but it was a decent depiction, and Tila knew enough of the sea to identify it.

She turned right and, not knowing quite why, entered the Blue Shark Tavern for the first time in her life.

It was long and narrow, with a short bar down one side, and lit by cheap candles in sconces on the walls. Not a single one of the rough stools was empty, and most of the space was packed with bodies too: tall men, and short ones; thin men, and fat men, and men that looked like they could lift her with one hand: loud men, and quiet men, although the loud ones certainly seemed to be in the majority. Men roared and shouted, talked over each other, laughed at jokes and tales, and sang snippets of shanties. The air was moist with sweat, and the smell of old sawdust, cheap alcohol and coarse smoke reached down into Tila’s throat and grabbed it with rough hands. The Blue Shark was a sailors’ tavern, and sailors crammed as much into their time ashore as they possibly could.

It was an environment like nothing Tila had experienced before, louder and smellier and above all closer, in the truly physical sense of the word. Men knocked against her and did not even turn around to see who they had bumped into. She ducked under a wooden tankard being waved for emphasis, squeezed through the narrow gap left between the backs of a burly man with crude tattoos and a shaven-headed man with the dark skin of the far north-west…

…and she came face-to-face with a narrow-faced youth in a rough-spun shirt and dark apron who looked to be her own age. He reached out and grabbed her shoulders, and she was so shocked that she stopped still.

‘We’ve told you all before,’ he began angrily, then broke off and frowned. ‘Wait, this man doesn’t know you. Which house are you from?’

Tila frowned back, and recovered herself enough to twist free of his grip. No one had laid a hand on her before! Any servant that did would have most likely lost the offending limb, although they all knew better. ‘Pardon?’

‘Don’t play high lady with s’man,’ the youth snapped, his eyes narrowing as her looked her up and down. ‘Hang on. You’re not dressed like a whore.’

The words bored through the shell of numbing ice that encrusted Tila’s heart, and she briefly had the urge to slap the boy for his insolence, until she remembered that he did not know who she was. ‘Of course not!’ she managed, trying not to sound too strangled.

‘You’re not with one of the houses, then?’ the boy asked, then shook his head in answer to his own question before she could flounder on her own ignorance. ‘Never mind. Let’s see your money.’

‘This– what?’ Her earlier words had marked her out as someone of high birth, so Tila deliberately tried to imitate the language she heard the servants use, while she played for time. She had no money with her; she had planned nothing past getting away from the Sun Palace, possibly permanently. Truth to tell, although she theoretically had plenty of money at her disposal, she never usually needed access to it herself. She had people for that sort of thing.

‘Your mon-ey,’ the boy said, speaking slowly as though to a fool. ‘The only Naridan women we get in here are whores and pickpockets; the stevedores go to the sign of the Broken Marlin, and there’s precious few women in that bunch either. So show me your money, so I know you’re not going to steal from our customers.’

Tila knew she should turn around and leave. If she were drawn into a confrontation then she would surely be thrown onto the street unless she revealed her identity, and if that were believed then she might find herself in even worse trouble. And yet, the prospect of this lowborn boy browbeating her fanned the flames of rebellion that had never burned very low across the course of her life.

She looked him in the eye, and deliberately chose a lower form of address. ‘This woman is meeting someone.’

‘Oh really? Who?’

Tila pushed past him. ‘He’s down here.’

She headed towards the rear of the tavern, where a group of men had their backs to the rest of the punters. While they were not exactly making more noise than everyone else, it seemed to be more organised; something prompted a cheer from them as she approached, and caused drinks to be drunk and backs to be slapped.

The tavern youth had not been fooled, and although he did not grab her again, he stuck at her shoulder. He would call her bluff as soon as he realised she did not know a soul in here, and then she would be on her way outside, if not at his hands then at those of the barkeep, whom she judged to be the boy’s father. They had the same sharp cheekbones and distrustful glint in their eyes, but the barkeep looked to have an extra thirty or so years, and while he was not much heavier he gave the impression of being significantly harder; a man of varnished teak compared to the boy’s willow.

Tila could not see what the crowd was looking at, so she squeezed between a couple of bodies and stood on tiptoe, trying to peer over the shoulders of the men in front of her. One of the sailors she nudged out of the way took exception to it: she felt a push in her back and, up on the balls of her feet as she was, did not have the balance to prevent her stumble. She knocked someone’s arm aside as she tried to catch herself, and ended up blundering through into the middle of the rough semicircle.

Something whipped past her head and thunked into the wood of the back wall, and the entire crowd cheered and jeered alternately.

‘What the fuck is this?’ someone bellowed, and her shoulder was grabbed again. This time, however, the person accosting her was not the tavern youth, but a moon-faced man with the lower half of his scalp shaved, and the rest of his long, dark hair plaited at the back of his skull. He had three gold rings in one ear, two silver ones in the other, and he seemed very unhappy. She tried to pull away from him, but he held her firm.

‘This some trick of yours to put s’man off?’ the sailor shouted, turning away from her and apparently addressing a bare-chested man with strange pale scar lines over his shoulders and, Tila winced to see, metal rings through both of his nipples.

‘S’man don’t need tricks to take five coppers from you, Achino!’ the other laughed, scooping coins off a small, square wooden table. He fingered through them and his mouth twisted. ‘And one of them foreign, at that.’ He turned away, and Tila saw that the scars extended and thickened over his back: the marks of a lash, if she were any judge at all.

Achino turned back to her, his eyes burning. ‘You just cost s’man five coppers!’ Other voices were raised, some in support of Achino and others arguing against him, and Tila saw the scarred man confronted by another angry sailor. She had clearly interrupted gambling of some kind, but this was not like when she caught her father’s guards at a game of dice when they were supposed to be on duty. These men had no idea who she was, and their tempers were running high.

The youth shouldered his way through the press and took her other shoulder. ‘S’man will get rid of her, Achino,’ he told the sailor, glaring at her.

‘Get rid of her?’ Achino spat, pointing at the far wall. ‘Shit on that, Draff, she cost s’man money! She’s not going anywhere until he gets five coppers out of her!’

Tila followed the direction of his finger. The wall of the tavern had a circular piece of wood mounted on it, daubed with white paint in the middle and then two rings around that, a crude imitation of the archery targets she had seen her father’s bowmen use. It was pockmarked with holes that were clustered mainly around the white mark at the centre, and five feather-fletched darts were stuck in it. Three had black feathers, and two had white, while a third and lonely white-fletched one nestled outside the larger white circle, a long way from its fellows. Tila did not need telling to realise that this was what had flown past her head when she had stumbled into the ring.

‘If you’ve got any money, now would be a good time to bring it out,’ the youth called Draff hissed at her, shaking her shoulder. Tila swatted him away, but Achino would not be moved so easily. He opened his mouth to shout at her again, and some form of self-preservation that she thought had deserted her made her claw the clasp of her cloak away from her throat. It was silvered steel with a small garnet inset, and she held it up in front of the sailor’s face.

‘This woman has this,’ she told him, proud of how little her voice shook. ‘The stone is valuable.’

His brows lowered and she could almost see the calculation going on behind his eyes, trying to work out if he were being cheated.

‘Nari’s teeth Achino,’ Draff said urgently, ‘that must be worth a silver at least! And there’s a jeweller on Crane Street: you could easily sell it on when he opens. High tide’s not until mid-morning anyway, and you won’t be sailing before then.’

Achino reached for it, but Tila pulled it back. ‘It’s worth a silver, but this woman only owes you five coppers. That’s not fair.’

‘S’man’ll give you fair,’ Achino growled, tightening his grip on her shoulder until it became painful.

‘Play you for it!’ Tila gasped, trying not to buckle under the pressure. ‘You put five coppers down, this woman will put this down!’

Achino looked like he was going to argue, but other sailors appeared beside him, laughing.

‘Go on, Achi, give her a go!’

‘You’re not scared to wager against a girl, are you?’

‘Fine,’ Achino said with a glower. He let go of her shoulder, although Tila felt sure she would feel his fingers there for a day or more, and delved into a drawstring pouch on his belt to pull out five more golden-brown discs that he slapped down on the same table from which the scarred man had so recently scooped up his winnings. Tila placed the clasp beside them, and swept the cloak from her shoulders, drawing a chorus of whistles and hoots from many of the sailors as she did so. She did her best to ignore them, but her earlier numb acceptance of street robbery or drowning had cracked and fled, and she felt exposed and vulnerable in front of these men.

We are never weak, her father had told her once, or at least had told her brother while she was present. But even so, it is important never to let anyone see us as weak. The memory of his face and voice threatened to send the aching hollow inside spiralling outwards to consume her, but she fought it down, straightened her shoulders and leaned towards Draff to whisper in his ear. ‘How do you play this game?’

He blinked in shock, the first genuine double-take Tina could remember seeing in her life. ‘You’ve just challenged him to a game that you don’t even know the rules of!?’

Never let anyone see you as weak. She shrugged casually. ‘It’s more exciting that way.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘You each have three darts. The closest throw to the middle wins.’

Tila nodded. ‘That seems simple enough.’

Another sailor, this one with a shaved head and more wrinkles than Tila’s grandmother, had plucked the darts from the far wall and picked up a disc of lacquered wood about the size of a golden crown, black on one side and white on the other. He nodded at Achino. ‘Challenged gets to call.’

‘Black!’ Achino growled. The other sailor flipped the disc, snatched it out of the air and slapped it down on his forearm with his palm covering it, then pulled his hand back to reveal a circle of pale wood. The crowd responded with gusto, their shouts ranging from what sounded like joking accusations that the man had fiddled the throw due to finding Tila attractive, to claims that this was further evidence of Achino’s bad luck this evening and that things were only going to get worse for him.

Achino took the white-fletched darts with a shrug and waved Tila back. ‘You throw second, girl.’

‘That’s the rules,’ Draff muttered to her as she took the black-fletched darts. ‘He lost choice of darts, so he gets to throw first.’

Tila studied Achino as he lined himself up behind a well-trodden white line painted onto the tavern’s floorboards, and kept largely free of sawdust. He gripped a dart between thumb and his first two fingers, lined his body up side-on to the far wall, closed one eye, and threw. The dart arced through the air and struck the board with a thunk, landing halfway inside the bare wood between the central painted dot and the first ring around it. The crowd cheered good-naturedly: it sounded like it was regarded as a decent throw, but nothing special.

Achino stepped back and gestured at the line with what he probably thought was a mockery of a courtly bow, but looked more like his upper body was having a fit. Tila ignored him and stepped up to the mark, then copied his stance as best she could. Side on like an archer, but facing the other way… left foot straight forward, right turned and facing at the target… She selected a dart at random from her left hand: it was a little longer than the distance between the tips of her thumb and little finger when her hand was spread, with what looked like a thick needle extending for about two finger-lengths from the front, and the rest consisting of a narrow cylinder of wood with the feathers attached at the rear.

She flexed her arm a couple of times, trying to find a natural movement. It did not seem to come, so she threw anyway.

Her dart sailed through the air, and landed in the outermost white ring.

The crowd hooted with derision, and Tila felt her cheeks heat with embarrassment and anger, but she turned and calmly stepped aside. Achino took his place again, a satisfied smile on his round face, and lined himself up for his second throw. He loosed his dart more quickly this time, but his accuracy suffered as a result, and his smile faded a little as his dart landed in the white of the inner ring, further from the centre than his first attempt.

Tila resolved not to make the same mistake, and when she stepped up for the second time she took care to line herself up properly. She flexed her arm a couple of times, testing the weight of the dart, then tried to remember how much effort and what angle she had put into the last one, and adjust accordingly. She threw her arm forward, feeling incredibly awkward as the motion placed all her weight on her front leg, and her second dart wobbled through the air to miss the target completely and bounce back off the harder wood of the wall, before landing softly in the sawdust.

The sailors’ hoots reached new volumes.

Tila sorely wished she could stick them all in the eye with her third dart, but there was nothing for it other than to swallow her anger and embarrassment and let Achino have his third throw. The sailor stepped forward with a mocking wave to those who had accused him of being scared to wager against a girl, but he took more care than on his second throw. He set himself deliberately, took a deep breath, let it out, and threw.

His dart clipped the edge of the central white mark, an even better effort than his first throw.

Actually hitting the centre seemed cause for much celebration: Achino punched the air and the tavern was filled with raucous shouting and laughter, roughly equally split between congratulations and jovial abuse. Tila’s stomach sank, the brief flush of vigour she had felt upon entering the tavern draining away and leaving only an empty coldness in its wake, the same dead hopelessness that had led her to venturing into the city in the first place. She should have stayed in the Sun Palace. What had she hoped to achieve by absconding? She had found nothing but filth and humiliation.

However, she still had one dart left, and a remaining spark of stubbornness refused to let her back out of throwing it. She stepped back up to the mark, now vacated by the celebrating Achino, and held the dart by the feathered end, letting it dangle from her fingers. She did not bother to line up in the same unnatural-feeling stance as before: instead she placed her left foot forward, drew her right arm back, and flung the dart overhand like she had seen a couple of the guards do with knives at a gate post once, when they thought no one was watching. The dart streaked through the air in a black-edged blur, and struck the target with another gentle thunk. It was not central.

It was, however, more central than any of Achino’s darts.

There was a moment of disbelieving silence, and then utter anarchy broke out. Some few men were shouting that she was a cheat, although how anyone could cheat in a game like this Tila was not quite sure. Quite a few more let loose with some of the most sulphurous cursing she had ever heard, although she had no idea whether this indicated approval or disapproval of her feat. Most, however, seemed to be torn between enthusiastic congratulations of her, and merciless mockery of Achino. The moon-faced sailor approached her, his face thunderous, as Tila scooped her clasp back up.

‘There are your five coppers,’ she said, gesturing at the coins she had left in place.

‘A wager is a wager,’ Achino said sullenly. ‘They’re yours.’

Tila turned to Draff, who was staring at her open-mouthed. ‘How much is a mug of ale here?’

‘One copper.’

‘And wine?’

‘One copper.’

‘Good wine?’

‘...two coppers.’

She plucked the coins up and handed him three. ‘A mug of ale for him,’ she said, nodding towards Achino. ‘And wine for this woman.’

Several sailors asked her name: she told them it was Livnya, the name of her childhood nurse, who had passed away in her sleep three years before. She was asked if she had hustled Achino, and when she queried what that meant and was told, she honestly replied that no, she had not practiced that technique, nor deliberately missed with her first two shots. She was asked if she could do it again, and when she tried she found that four times out of five, she could: her accuracy was not perfect, nor completely consistent, but she rarely landed outside the first circle of bare wood. Several of the sailors imitated her method, with varying degrees of success. Debates broke out about whether or not using the darts in that way was actually against the rules, but others pointed out that the people arguing against it were usually the ones who tried it and were not any good at it.

So the night rolled on, with Tila drinking her sour wine slowly, buying a drink for those she defeated from the money she won from them, and marvelling at the odd sensation of being part of a like-minded crowd of people, all gathered together for the same purpose. It was not something she had experienced before, and she certainly would not have expected it to come from being with a group of lowborn. Then again, they must have assumed that she was, if not like them, not too dissimilar. She had never been in the presence of people who thought they might be her peers before, other than her disinterested brother.

And then she stepped away from the crush of sailors, having narrowly defeated the man with the lash scars — who was now more drunk, and therefore less accurate than he had been earlier in the evening — and found herself the subject of study by a short, bland-faced man wearing a hooded cloak not unlike her own. Had she been pressed to guess she would have said he had seen some forty summers, but she would not have been surprised to find out that her guess was off by ten either way: he had faint wings of white in his dark hair at the temples, and a ghost of it in the stubble that peppered his chin and cheeks.

‘Your name is Livnya?’ he asked, handing her a wooden goblet of wine. She looked down at it, then gave it back to him.

‘It is.’

‘You don’t like wine?’

‘Not at present.’ She folded her arms. ‘What do you want?’

‘You’re not going to ask this man’s name?’

‘This woman is not interested in your name until she knows why you are speaking to her.’

He nodded and pursed his lips slightly, then moved a step closer; not so near as to intimidate, but enough that he could lower his voice to a point where, in the noisy tavern, no one would overhear.

‘This man’s name is Yakov. He thinks we may be able to help each other.’

Tila raised her eyebrows. ‘You do? In what way?’

‘You’re new to this city,’ Yakov said, matter-of-factly. Tila opened her mouth to retort that she was born here, but then shut it again. Neither her voice nor her vocabulary would allow her to pass as any Idramar native this man would have met, and her knowledge of the city was far more theoretical than practical. So she simply nodded, and let him think he was correct.

‘You have a talent,’ Yakov said, looking briefly towards where darts were still being thrown. ‘This man can find a use for people with talents. In return he can pay, and could help make this city more accommodating for a newcomer like yourself.’

Tila narrowed her eyes. It was not hard to fathom his meaning. ‘You would want this woman to throw sharp objects at… people?’

Yakov tilted his head slightly, inquiring. ‘Would that be a problem?’

‘This woman does not imagine that you are asking her to join a travelling circus,’ Tila commented, remembering a troupe of performers who had entertained her family a few years previously, and which had indeed included a man who sought to impress by throwing knives dangerously close to his wife as she stood against a block of wood.

‘No.’

Her first instinct was to report the man to the Keepers, but to make them listen to her seriously she would probably have to reveal her true identity. That could lead to all sorts of unfortunate repercussions, even assuming they believed her. Her next impulse was to flatly refuse his offer and leave the tavern, but a stray memory stopped her: her father, ranting about how little he actually knew of what went on in his city. Thefts and smuggling and knives in the dark, he had said angrily to her mother. How much is chance, and how much is arranged by those who wish to see us brought low? Your husband would kill to have a loyal eye on those streets, aye, he would! It would be worth it if he might know what occurs and who orders it, and then shape events for the benefit of the country!

Her father had been a clever man, a sharp man. Her brother Natan, for all the love Tila bore him, so far showed little sign of having inherited that mind, or at least not the ability or inclination to put it to use. He took more after their mother’s gentle soul. Tila feared for him: in fact, she feared for them all now. She feared, too, that responsibilities would rest over-heavy on her brother’s shoulders, and that those whose obedience should be unquestioning would begin to have doubts. Her brother would need a loyal eye on the streets more than their father ever had, but Tila thought him unlikely to realise this, or act upon it until it was too late.

Chance, good fortune, or the blessing of her divine ancestor had given her an opportunity. She would have to be canny and careful, and it would take more planning than she could do here and now, but she could make a start.

‘Perhaps we may be able to help each other after all,’ she said quietly. ‘Although this woman will not need your assistance when it comes to somewhere to stay…’