Kushiel’s Dart

It provoked not a few whispers, that a Didikani woman would dare sport a Tsingano gall-I understood those words quickly enough, for "half-breed" and for coin-wrought jewelry-but it achieved its purpose. One of Manoj’s many nephews spotted us in short order, and came over to lean on the woven saplings of the paddock fencing to talk with Hyacinthe. When he learned of our desire to contract horses and men alike to travel west for a lucrative trade, he brought us to meet with Manoj.

We met with the King of the Tsingani in his tent, which was brightly striped and well appointed. I’d been expecting another ancient, like Ganelon de la Courcel, I suppose, but I had forgotten how young the Tsingani wed. It was hard to gauge his age-they weather quickly, on the Long Road-but I think him not much over sixty. He had fierce, staring dark eyes, iron-grey hair and a resplendent mustache.

"You want to take my people and my horses west?" he demanded. "Who are you to ask such a thing? What is your kumpania?"

Those are not, of course, the words he used; like the rest, Manoj spoke in the Tsingani dialect. Some of it, I could follow. Some I gathered from the general nature of the exchange. Some I did not understand, and Hyacinthe translated later. What I recount now is as I recall it, woven out of whole cloth like a Mendicant’s fable, only closer to the spirit of memory.

"I seek a handful of brave men and good horses to make a great bargain, Kralis" Hyacinthe said smoothly.

Manoj beckoned one of his nephews near and whispered in his ear, then shooed him away. "Tell me of this trade."

Hyacinthe bowed. "The Queen’s Admiral and his fleet are docked at the Pointe d’Oeste. I have knowledge that they will be in need of horses."

It was true, actually; if Quintilius Rousse was going to take a single ship across the Straits, he would need to have a handful of men well armed and mounted to ward the remainder of the fleet and secure their beachhead. Kusheth was neutral territory at best. But none of us would divulge these details.

"I have not heard this," Manoj said dismissively. "Who are you to come by this knowledge? You have not given me your name or your kumpania."

"I come from the City of Elua, and I know many people there and hear many things." Hyacinthe held the patriarch’s gaze. "I am Hyacinthe son of Anasztaizia. I am born to your kumpania, Grandfather."

A middle-aged Tsingano woman dropped an earthenware cup in the corner of the tent. It fell with a dull thud, unbroken. Otherwise there was no sound. Manoj blinked wrinkled eyelids under ferocious brows.

"Anasztaizia’s son?" he said slowly, wondering. "Anasztaizia had a boy? A son?"

"I am her son," Hyacinthe said simply.

After that, pandemonium broke loose. It began with Manoj shouting for one of his nephews, a nervous man of around forty, who ran into the tent and threw himself upon his knees before the Tsingani patriarch. It ended with cries and embraces and Manoj weeping openly as he drew Hyacinthe up to kiss him on both cheeks.

I pieced the story together later, for it was at this point that I lost the ability to follow what was being said. It seemed that the nephew Manoj had summoned-Csavin, his name was-had run afoul of a Bryony House adept the one and only time the kumpania of Manoj had entered the City of Elua.

Bryony is the wealthiest of the Thirteen Houses, for wealth is their specialty, in all its forms, and there are those to whom nothing is more titillating than money. If one stripped the staff of the Royal Treasury, one would find a full half of them bear Bryony’s marque, for her adepts' acumen is legend.

Bryony is also the only House whose adepts are willing to wager for their favors.

And they almost never lose. Not even to Tsingani.

I had believed-as Hyacinthe had-that his mother had fallen enamoured of a D’Angeline, for that was the story she had told him. It was out of love, to protect him from a more sordid truth; she had lost her virtue, her laxta, because her cousin Csavin had laid it as a wager upon the table with a Bryony adept, believing he could not lose. Tsingani know a thousand ways to cheat the gadje.

He had lost.

Not only had he lost, but in the face of the Dowayne’s Guard of Bryony House, he had paid his debt with coin that was not his, deceiving his cousin-Manoj’s daughter, who was young and desiring of adventure-into meeting with a patron who paid good coin to Bryony House for the pleasure of seducing a Tsingani virgin.