“Because if they let you in and out without reporting it up the chain of command,” Joslyn said, “who else do they let in and out? What if your assassin was able to work with someone inside the palace due to the negligence of the exact same guards? What if you’re not the only one who has bribed them?”
Tasia fell silent. “They are good men,” she said after a moment. “They wouldn’t do that.”
Joslyn did not reply.
The palace was situated on a hill that sloped gently upward from the bay, and north of the palace, which was the direction in which Tasia and Joslyn now walked, the hill declined sharply.
Tasia glanced over her shoulder. Already, the palace behind them loomed large, towering authoritatively above the surrounding city streets. The further down the hill from the palace they traveled, the smaller and more cramped the buildings became. They’d already walked out of the northern edge of the tony Ambassador Quarter and were headed into the slightly seedier Merchant Quarter, a large, diverse district that housed traders and shopkeepers of every stripe, along with a number of taverns, inns, and brothels that served the sailors and other travelers who entered Port Lorsin by ship. From the docks southeast of the palace to the Merchant Quarter was only a short walk — even shorter for those who could afford a rickshaw or hired carriage.
The western side of Merchant Quarter was almost upscale, as it bordered the palace to the south and the Ambassador Quarter to the southwest. The eastern side was rougher, and it was towards the east that Tasia angled as they walked down the long hill.
“Do you have a destination in mind?” Joslyn asked beside her.
Tasia turned right down an alleyway, hopping over a pile of horse manure that she saw just in time. “Not particularly. A tavern where I can get good and drunk.” She barked out a half-laugh.
“Is that… wise, Princess?”
“Stop pretending to be Norix,” Tasia said. “I don’t care if it’s wise or not. It’s all I can really handle right now.”
Joslyn nodded.
The truth was that Tasia didn’t even really care if they found a tavern. She was happy just to be outside the constricting walls of the palace, especially after the ups-and-downs of her strange day. The announcement of her trip to the east early in the afternoon; the argument with Mylla over her impending marriage early in the evening.
Mylla. The companion she thought she’d have for a lifetime. The one she’d first started sneaking out of the palace with two years ago. Tasia swallowed past a lump in her throat.
For the Princess, escaping into the city streets while the rest of the palace slept provided the kind of solace that some people received from walking along the shoreline, or meditatively watching a sunset. There was an intoxicating freedom — and peace — in her anonymity here, an anonymity she would lose soon, now that she was her father’s heir.
“The first time I snuck out was with Mylla, two years ago,” she said to Joslyn as they walked. “I was months away from my eighteenth birthday, and feared my father would force some marriage on me right away. I was so upset after he introduced me to the first suitor — a wealthy lord’s son from the Central Steppes — that I locked myself in my chambers for a week and stopped eating. Mylla was the one who first made friends with the night guard. She brought me outside the palace walls in a blindfold, telling me she had a special surprise for me.” Tasia smiled at the memory. But the smile, and now the memory, had turned bittersweet. She supposed that every memory she had of Mylla would be tinged with the tang of bitterness soon enough. “I cried when I saw she’d led me outside the palace walls — not unhappy tears, either, mind you. It was the first time I’d ever been out of the palace without a royal escort. I think I fell in love with Mylla in that very moment.”
Tasia looked at Joslyn out of the corner of her eye, but the guard’s eyes remained focused ahead of them, twitching back and forth as if trying to track each detail, each movement of the street ahead.
“Are you even listening to me?” Tasia asked.
“Of course I am.”
“Then what did I just say?”
Joslyn stopped, ushering Tasia behind her as a cart pulled by an old, tired-looking donkey ambled by. “You said…” Joslyn began, and she proceeded to repeat everything Tasia had told her. Verbatim.
“So you do listen,” Tasia said.
“Yes. Always.”
Tasia groaned. “I should stop talking about Mylla. We need a place to drink.” She grabbed Joslyn’s wrist and tugged her across the street, heading for a street cast in shadow. “Come on. There’s a place down this way — the Speckled Dog. The Sunfall Gate guards talk about it all the time, it’s supposed to be a real dive. Filled with off-duty guardsmen and soldiers on leave from the war in the East. I’ve always wanted to go — to see where the ordinary soldiers drink, that is, not to the East.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Gods. I still can’t believe my father is sending me.”
“Going to the front is good,” Joslyn said. “It will show the lords that you are more than a figurehead, a symbolic gesture by your father to maintain the locus of power within his own house. It shows you will rule.”
“I never asked to rule,” Tasia muttered.
“You never would’ve been happy being only the wife of the Emperor, either,” Joslyn countered.
But Tasia was only halfway listening. “Look!” She pointed and grabbed Joslyn’s arm, making the guard immediately tense beneath her grip. The sign above them depicted a crudely painted dog, with Xs for eyes and a tankard of ale next to it. There were no words on the sign. But then again, many soldiers were like Joslyn — illiterate.
An arrow on the sign pointed downwards. Tasia found the top of a set of narrow, steep stairs and followed them down to a plain and windowless wooden door.
“I hope you like bad ale and watered-down whiskey,” she said to Joslyn with a grin, and pushed the door open.
#
The Speckled Dog turned out to be every bit as seedy as Tasia had hoped. Every table, barstool, and lantern inside the dim basement tavern was coated with a layer of grime; every surface she touched left her fingertips with an unpleasantly sticky residue. But for Tasia, the unpleasantness itself was pleasant. Dirty and dark meant that for a few hours, she could pretend to be someone other than the Princess of the Four Realms, heir to Emperor Andreth.
And who should she be this evening? She was in her baker’s girl costume, but maybe she could be someone else — a washerwoman or a chambermaid. Or perhaps a courier traveling to the capital city from abroad, bearing the letters of rich men writing their cousins in the capital. Maybe a courier who sometimes doubled as a trader, carting apricots from the Capital Lands to exchange for the coveted apa-apa wool that the desert tribes cultivated.
Yes. She would go with that. It would explain Joslyn’s presence at her side — her traveling companion, a nomad hired for translation, guidance, and protection through the desert.
The sun was still in its last throes before giving in to night as Tasia and Joslyn walked through the tavern doors, but inside the underground room, it might as well have been midnight.
Tasia stopped just inside the doorway, surveying the space. Her imagination had painted the single-room tavern much larger when the guards had told her about it. The site of epic brawls as drunken sailors tried to prove their superiority to drunken soldiers, and of epic duels as two men fought over the same woman, the Speckled Dog had been huge in her mind. But now Tasia saw it was barely the size of Mylla’s bedchamber, nothing more than a series of rough plank tables and stools arranged haphazardly on a dirt floor, with a door in the back of the room that presumably led into the kitchen. The whole place stank of fish and stale ale.