“. . .”
“Well, no . . . but you could wash them off again before that?”
“. . .”
“No, it’s been a while since I last gave a lion a bath, but—”
My second, more theatrical cough, caught their attention.
“Come!”
And so I ducked, Snorri ducked lower, and we went in.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the blue gloom within the tent. Dr. Taproot I judged to be the skinny figure seated behind a desk, and the more substantial form leaning over at him, hands planted firmly on the papers between them, must be the fellow objecting to bathing lions.
“Ah!” said the seated figure. “Prince Jalan Kendeth and Snorri ver Snagason! Welcome to my abode. Welcome!”
“How the hell—” I caught myself. It was good that he knew me. I’d been wondering how to convince anyone that I was a prince.
“Oh, I’m Dr. Taproot, I know everything, my prince. Watch me!”
Snorri passed me and snagged an empty chair. “Word gets around. Especially about princes.” He seemed less impressed than I was.
“Watch me!” Taproot nodded, birdlike, a sharp-featured head on a thin neck. “Message-riders on the Lexicon Road carry gossip along with their sealed scrolls. And what a story! Did you truly jump an arctic bear, Mr. Snagason? Do you think you could jump one of ours? The pay’s good. Oh, but you’ve injured your hand. A hook-knife, I hear? Watch me!” Taproot’s chatter came so rapid and moved so fast that without your full attention the flow of it would hypnotize you.
“Yes, the hand.” I latched onto that. “Have you a chirurgeon? We’re light on funds”—Snorri scowled at that—“but I’m good for credit. The royal coffers underwrite my purse.”
Dr. Taproot offered a knowing smile. “Your debts are the stuff of legend, my prince.” He raised his hands as if trying to frame the enormity of them. “But fear not, I am a civilized man. We of the circus do not let a wounded traveller go untended! I shall have our sweet Varga see to the matter presently. A drink, perhaps?” He reached for the desk drawer. “You may go, Walldecker.” He shooed away the scar-faced man who had stood in silent disapproval through our conversation. “Stripes! Watch me! Good ones. Serra has black paint. See Serra.” Returning his attention to me, he fished out a dark glass bottle, small enough for poison. “I have a little rum. Ancient stuff from the wreck of the Hunter Moon, dredged up by scallop men off the Andoran coast. Try it.” He magicked three tiny silver cups into being. “I’m always one to sit and chat. It’s my burden. Watch me. Gossip runs through my veins and I must feed the habit. Tell me, my prince, is your grandmother well? How is her heart?”
“Well she’s got one, I suppose.” I didn’t like the man’s impertinence. And his rum smelled like the stuff the herbmen rub on chilblains. Now that I had a chair under my arse and a tent about me and my name and station recognized, I began to feel a little more my old self. I sipped his rum and damned him for it. “Don’t know anything about how it’s ticking, though.” The idea of my grandmother suffering any frailties of the flesh seemed alien to me. She’d been carved from bedrock and would outlast us all. That was how Father had it.
“And your elder brothers, Martus, isn’t it, and Darin? Martus must be coming up to twenty-seven now? Yes, in two weeks?”
“Um.” Damned if I knew their birthdays. “They’re well. Martus misses the cavalry, of course, but at least he got a damn chance at it.”
“Of course, of course.” Taproot’s hands were never still, plucking at the air as if snatching scraps of information from it.
“And your great-uncle? He was never a well man.”
“Garyus?” Nobody knew about the old man. I didn’t even know he was a relative for the first few years after I took to visiting him in the tower where they kept him. I climbed in through the window so nobody saw me come and go. It was Great-Uncle Garyus who gave me Mother’s picture in a locket. I must have been about five or six. Yes, not long after the Silent Sister touched me. The blind-eye woman, I called her back then. Gave me a lepsy. Fits and shakes for a month. I found old Garyus by accident when I was small, clambered in before I noticed the room wasn’t empty. He scared me, hunched on his sickbed, twisted in ways a man shouldn’t twist. Not evil, but wrong. I feared catching it, that’s the honest truth. And he knew it. Good at knowing a man’s mind was Garyus, and a boy’s.