Following the events of Bloodharvest.
Chapter 2
After leaving Bloodharvest, fighting Laptra, and allowing her strange storm to disintegrate over the tree-ocean, the Arsae, Phillius captained the Dream in Emerald south in a mad, full-speed run. We survived intact, though I’m not sure if that was his plan. But if goblins chased us, they weren’t going to catch Phillius.
We arrived at the Grand Fountain Harbor, an immense tree-port of the Solange on the border of the vast forest, sailing in on treetops in a ship of clockwork with the shape of a dragon. I’m not quite used to being this showy, but it worked. Everyone saw us arrive. Prince Aehr’s unexpected homecoming, the return of all of his people, and the manner of our arrival drove the people mad. Elves gasped and yelled. Elves! They stood on benches and shouted, cheered, and runners left for the royal palaces to announce to the kingdoms that Aehr had come home.
Prince Aehr was about my height, which I liked, gentle, fiercely loyal to his people, and wise. He wasn’t very practical. He’d gone chasing after wolves and got himself captured by goblins, but I trusted he wouldn’t be doing that again. That being said, we hadn’t found the wolves. He talked about them, his wolves, a startling amount, and he would talk about them with me. He was also a prince, and whomever he married would be a princess.
Her Majesty cried. She hugged her son like, well, like her son had been captured and taken to Bloodharvest, the goblin death-prison from whence no one returned. I was very polite and respectful, told the Queen I had fulfilled my contract, and noted I’d rescued all forty two of Aehr’s attendants as well. They weren’t in the contract, but I don’t think that was disregard on the queen’s part; I don’t think anyone had expected them to be alive. I hadn’t. But they were, they were here, and we speeched at each other before elvish throngs.
The only one who didn’t look happy was Her Majesty’s Surrogate, who’s creepy-sounding title actually just meant he paid her bills. Royalty wasn’t supposed to handle money. He looked positively ill to see me victorious. I thanked him graciously, commended him on a job well done (because he was going to pay me), and hired a mariachi band to sing The Praises of Elegy outside his window. Culturally, elves refuse to acknowledge rudeness, so when I left he was still pretending the band didn’t exist.
And I got paid! Sort of.
The deal I had worked might have been more clever than wise, because instead of taking money, I received options for ten cargoes of winter wheat. The elves didn’t really understand, but they did write the options. They had tried hard to figure out my scheme, so the price was non-negotiable, the delivery date was fixed, and even the method of payment was established. But I had been to Celephias where the real villains of finance lived. The contract was a resellable bearer document.
The elvish wheat market is one of deepest closed markets in the world. Every deal is based on the last, which means there are no new sellers. Unless you’ve done a deal before, you can’t do a first. Outsiders can’t get in.
Unless you have a guaranteed option to sell ten cargoes. Someone with that wouldn’t just have an in, they’d be a wheat major. Ten cargoes is a lot of wheat. I didn’t have ten ships, wheat to put on them, or about forty marks to buy the wheat if someone else had the ships.
Around the time the elves noticed Othrak, a goblin I’d rescued because Aehr owed him (see? Loyalty! Aehr was loyal. He needed someone loyal. I’m loyal), I went to the windcallers. Celephians have mastered the arts of banking and shouting to each other across great distances. They use the high winds, the ones that ring the world, to communicate across continents, and they use them mostly for financial shenanigans. The question isn’t, ‘are the Celephians up to mischief?’ It’s ‘what mischief are the Celephians up to now, and how much is it going to cost me?’ Fascinating people. I like to visit but don’t ever want to live there.
A broker met me at woven cane doors and brought me to a bright, interior room. It looked like a silo, with an open ceiling showing the high tower rising toward the sky, and two more doors forming something like an airlock. The doors had panels of fabric woven through the rattan, making them basically soundproof. We would conduct our business in privacy at a glass desk in mahogany chairs.
“What about above? Isn’t listening to voices on the wind what you do?” I asked.
“The winds are bound in a gyre above, and they trap sound. If you screamed for hours, no one would hear you.”
I snapped my head down and looked at the broker, really looked at him. Something like glass shattered in my head. My impression, a bland-looking southerner with a calculated tan and fine suit, vanished. Instead I saw a tall figure in a yellow robe and a hood that hung open at the neck and low over his forehead, spreading like the hood of a cobra. A mask of thick knitting covered his face. Some stray threads as thick as a finger hung loose and jiggled when he talked, the stray tentacles of a hunting jellyfish.
“Hello, Elegy.” The stranger in yellow smiled. His mask pulled up on the edges, but his hood concealed his eyes.
Oh, no.
I’d actually been to Bloodharvest three times total, once accidentally, but once before I went for the elves. I’d been paid more money than I knew how to spend for the second trip, but I had figured it out. Oh, how I had figured it out. That’s what lead to going back. Now I was going to be smart. I wasn’t going to earn and waste everything in a useless cycle. I was going to invest!
That time, this yellow stranger had hired me. I’d rescued a something named Luthas, a faceless creature of the deep who managed to smile too much. I’d cut Luthas free from a wall where he’d been manacled with irons, old and rusty even in the dry, deep air, and he’d vanished into the dark. Aehr shouldn’t have been in Bloodharvest, and the elf prince had deserved a rescue. Luthas I probably should have left where he was.
“Hello,” I said and smiled like my teeth hurt. I didn’t know his name.
“But don’t worry, Elegy. We’re friends, and you have nothing to fear.” He kept stretching his face like he was smiling. “I’m here to help. Your options are non-divisible, and ten cargoes is a lot of wheat. You need to sell them all to one buyer. There’s a merchant, Hyrma Trui, in Citi Kageran who would love to buy them all, and he would offer you a delightful price.”
I said, “Oh. Great.”
I barely even heard myself say it, thinking about whether I should draw a knife on him.
“I agree.” The stranger winked and left.
My fingers and toes hurt like they’d been exposed to terrible cold. I gasped and massaged my hands. A woman in subdued blue clothes looked in.
She asked, “Excuse me, ma’am, have you been helped?”
Had I?
I didn’t answer the question. “I need assistance, please.”
“Oh, excellent. Esmerelda Blaine, pleased to meet you.”
“Astrologamage Elegy.” We shook hands.
She looked curiously at me. “Can I get you something to warm you up?”
“Yes, please.”
“Let’s sit.”
We did. She gave me spiced rum, and it took the edge off.
I said, “I have wheat options to sell. It’s a single contract for ten cargoes. Strike price, date, all that is fixed.” I showed her the paper. “Can you find a buyer?”
“Maybe. May I see it?”
I gave her the paper.
After reading, Esmerelda said, “I can move your trade, but it will be tricky. It’s winter wheat, and winter is coming soon. In the north it’s already here. Most merchants who can move this much grain will already have buyers for some, if not all, of their harvest, and the ones who can pay top dollar certainly will.”
“But possible,” I said.
“Certainly. I’d like to manage your expectations, though. I can reasonably get you a mark per contract, maybe a mark and a half. Fifteen total marks would be on the high-side, and it will take several weeks of searching. They’re valuable to the right buyer, but there aren’t a lot of buyers.” She shrugged. Esmerelda had wispy white hair and dangly earrings. “My commission is the greater of one mark or five percent, and that includes surety. Would you like me to go ahead?”
She looked at me with a polite smile with a whole lot of little stuff in it. She was eager for the job, with high-eyebrows and a slight forward lean. She was closed to negotiations, with hands folded, palms toward herself. She did well, with careful makeup and diamonds. She wore them subtly. Her dangly earrings had silver teardrops that caught my attention, but studs on the ear-posts had big rocks. Her wedding ring, white gold and more white diamonds, was almost hidden under her lace cuffs. She wore one simple necklace, the only obvious piece that wasn’t somewhat hidden, but it was just a chain of small silver links.
Nothing, nothing on her was yellow, not even gold.
My mouth spoke of its own volition. “Please do. Would you check Citi Kageran? There’s a merchant there, Trui, who might be interested.”
“My pleasure. I’ll walk you to the clerk, and he can start surety while I run your order to the callers. We should be able to call your order before you leave.”
We got up and walked out the double doors. The main hall was moderately busy with rich people in riches and rich people in deceptively poor clothing, and possibly a few poor people in both too. I didn’t know where I fit in.
The rum had been a little strong. I looked at Esmerelda. “How is the water?”
“Solange Sweetwater,” she said as she walked me to the clerks. “Tastes like Elvenhome.”
#
Esmerelda talked Hyrma Trui of Kageran into offering me double the strike price.
I don’t know if Aehr’s family had one hundred twenty six marks. If they did, they would bleed for it. But they could move wheat while Trui was in the market. No one got bankrupted, my prince’s ransom was perfectly reasonable, and if Aehr’s family needed some help, I could do that again too.
My scheme hadn’t hurt anyone. I’d kept it secret to protect myself, but I hadn’t done anything wrong. There was no reason to feel bad about this at all, and the sweetwater tasted like Elvenhome.
But the contract was a bearer document, so I had to take it to Kageran for delivery. I left Aehr explaining to his people that yes, Othrak, a goblin, was going to live with them. He explained that Othrak was now a hero to the Star-Drinking People. He told them of rescues in the dark, the Well of Memory, and Laptra’s bizarre, psychotically-personal evil. He even sang my praises for the fight on the thunderhead. He’d promised to do so, but I’d expected him to dodge. Instead he stood before the kings and queens of elvenhome, come together to rejoice in his return, and sang of me and him in a voice like nightingales. For an infinite moment, I was the most important person on Pallas. I started getting feelings outside my heart; tingles in my fingers and face, and I had to leave before I did something stupid.
Arguably, a human interested in an elf at all was stupid, being interested an elvish prince was definitely stupid, and me, a non-mythically beautiful woman more adept at sneaking around goblins and occasionally stabbing one than court niceties, chasing an elvish prince was no doubt more foolish than any of the above.
I’m the sort of girl who breaks into goblin prisons and swears too much. I am that fool.
Want to know an expectedly weird thing about elves? They don’t swear. They don’t curse. They don’t invoke their gods in vain. I swear like a fucking sailor, and they ignore it. They’re not offended, but swearing isn’t elvish so to them, it doesn’t happen. Just talking to elves made me realize how human I am, how not they are, and how absurd I was being, thinking too long of Prince Aehr of Elvenhome.
But that didn’t matter, because I wasn’t really thinking of Aehr, because if I did, I’d have to stop swearing.
I left in a hurry because those options had a hard settlement date and soon. Phillius scared me, but he sailed quickly. I sailed for Kageran on the Dream in Emerald.
#
On the western edge of the Arsae, the black of the Hyades falls over cliffs. No human has seen the bottom of the Three Sisters waterfall and lived. There the ghosthearts of the Arsae grow thick and tall, taller than the cliffs that bound the deep Karas, and tall as mountains beyond the lake itself. They form a green rise like a wooden wave, eternally breaking against the cliff. The foam is their leaves, branches, the little sticks that fall from higher bows, and the tiny monoleaf thyf that grows in the highest canopies. The whole copse sways with the wind as a wave slowed down in the moment of breaking.
A gallows overlooks the edge. It’s on a long, flat platform that juts past the rock with carved channels so the waterfall roars underneath. The gallows tree faces the breaking wave of the Arsae: a straight trunk with one crossbar branch. The end of the crossbar hangs over falling water. No one occupied it when Phillius sailed the Dream in Emerald to the edge and tied off to the hanging post. It worked fine as a pier.
Kageran resides further up the lakeshore, maybe a mile and a half walk. The water didn’t seem to move until it passed over the cliffs, and then it roared. It was winter now, but in the summer the lake surface is green with waterfern and lilies.
Phillius walked to the edge of the hanging platform, looked down the black chasm, and nodded at whatever he thought. I stepped off the boat and walked gingerly across the gallows platform. It was bitterly cold, far colder than the air over the Arsae. Tiny icebergs, little frozen bits of lake scum, and snow-covered logs floated by under the platform and fell. The old wood creaked underfoot, and I was carrying a heavy duffel. Once on stone, I looked back at Phillius.
He looked at the empty gallows arm, the falls, and the bare rock nearby. The arm had seen use, and there were no gravesites. Then he nodded to me.
We parted silently. I would have felt odd saying goodbye knowing he wouldn’t reply.
An hour later I climbed into Citi Kageran.