Vaenuth waited at the bottom of Master Kivrad’s estate. An enormous log wall surrounded the yard, but a grey stone building built of massive bricks supported the nearby staircase. She sat, with long legs crossed, in a silk cushioned armchair beneath a green forest canvas. The relief from the sun was nice, but the city of Rainrest was brutally humid. As always.
“Kivrad is making us wait,” said Banno, a massive man that had accompanied Vaenuth. He eyed her.
Vaenuth wore her dark hair—long only on the top of her scalp—to the right today, and it hung to her shoulder. On the left side of her face, a small silver chain linked the stud in her nostril to one of her earrings.
She had donned a blue vest today, a faintly patterned silk drape that hung from each shoulder to cover each breast. A couple strings held it in place. The crisscrossing pattern of her lower torso ink was covered partially by the garb, but it’s design, following the shadow of her chest was clear. Wearing it as she was, Vaenuth’s slave brand—a fist-sized circle between her shoulder blades—was also concealed. The lion’s head she herself had branded below the other, unwelcome scar was not. She had wrapped a white sash around her waist, to conceal other, self-given scars; those days were long gone, but she only hid them when waiting for someone of such prestige.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “He won’t keep me much longer.” She understood the workings of the male mind. She had been forced to learn it.
Banno sighed, and folded his tree-trunk arms. He stood beside her chair, eyeing Kivrad’s guards and occasionally resting his hand on the hilt of the single-bladed sword at his waist. It was a bronze weapon, with a cloth-bound grip. His dark skin beaded with sweat, despite the shade.
Commotion at the top of the nearby wooden stairs proved the truth of Vaenuth’s prediction.
Kivrad descended, a heavyset man with tanned olive skin and a jet-black moustache. He was unarmed, bare-chested, and escorted on either side by men in bone and boiled leather armour. With confidence, he strode into the covered patio and bowed his head before Vaenuth. “You are far more… intriguing that I expected,” Kivrad said, as way of greeting. “I’m pleased to see you in person, at last.”
Vaenuth, having risen to her feet, returned the bob of the head, the chain across her cheek jingling ever so quietly in her ear. “Your letter suggested you might be interested in making an investment?”
His correspondence had reached her and her caravan when they arrived at Nokire from the Passes, and she had made the decision to barter their last stock in Rainrest instead of Rema, to see what the wealthy Kivrad might offer.
“You are a deadly woman,” he said, drawing out his syllables with a wave of his hands. Sweaty bubbles of skin separated his thin eyebrows from his yellowed eyes. “And, despite your paleness, a beautiful one.”
Vaenuth pursed her lips impatiently, and scratched her tattooed arm—sixteen black rings rose, inch by inch from her wrist to her shoulder, each a single loop around the muscles of her arm. His comment was a familiar one to her. Originally born in Bellasa on the Great Isle, she had inherited white skin. Though the last half-decade of work in the sun had tanned her, she was still the only white woman in northern Numa’nakres.
The comments about her beauty were equally ill-received. Vaenuth had been enslaved in the River Town of Ith, the part of that city where men could pay for whatever they wanted. Her home: a cell with a bed, in a whorehouse called “Statha’s Girls.”
She shivered despite the humidity and glared at Kivrad. His words had stirred memories better left hidden. She was a free woman.
“What do you want, Master?” she asked. “I have business to get to.”
“Very well,” he said. “To business.”
They sat, each taking an armchair. Kivrad’s guards took up station behind him. Their faces were invisible behind skull-like masks. Banno stoically remained at Vaenuth’s side. Before he began, Vaenuth noticed someone else coming down the wooden stairs of his manse. She realized, with a sinking fury, that it was a half-naked girl. The girl turned, as soon as reaching the yard, and disappeared behind the building. So that’s why Kivrad was so late, Vaenuth realized. She regarded him with unveiled loathing.
“I apologize for my cordiality,” the big man oozed. “I’d like to fund an expedition, you see, to procure a specific type of gemstone.”
“I can trade for sapphire or emeralds with some of the northern mining towns. You must understand though, my primary range of trade is with Slither tribes.”
Kivrad bowed. “Of course, of course. But I seek cerussite, white lead, as they call it.”
“Haven’t heard of it,” Vaenuth said. “And I doubt I’d be able to get that from the Sl—”
“Yes, I know,” Kivrad said. “It may be obtained from villages along the Logren Rivers. There is a mine for it, you see, and sometimes it is even found in the water.”
Vaenuth shook her head. “I don’t go to the Logren Rivers, Master Kivrad. Scalelands tribes go that way. They don’t bother the river towns, but they will bother my caravan.” She glanced at Banno, and he seemed as impatient with the negotiation as she was.
“Mistress Vaenuth,” the greasy man said. “I offer you excellent pay for such a journey. But more-so, I offer you a favour.”
“What favour?” Vaenuth asked.
“Whatever favour you would like,” he said. “I have contacts, here, in Trader’s Bay, and in Rema. I could put you in the Iron Palace, if you wanted. I have… resources, and people—I mean skilled employees for your caravan. Name your price.”
“What is so significant about the white lead?” Vaenuth asked.
Kivrad shrugged. “There are some here, in Numa’nakres, who favour a white make-up made from it. But it is difficult to procure. I will make a great profit from it, and so will you, yes?”
A blood bug landed on Vaenuth’s knee, despite the thick incense in the air, and she swatted it lightly with the ends of her fingers. When she removed her hand a small red circle had been left on her tanned white skin. She wiped it away. “Very well, let us negotiate the price then.”
Kivrad was annoyed, later, that Vaenuth did not desire to join him for supper. He said that they had caught a boar for the occasion, but did not demand her company. Banno looked relieved they did not stay, though he had raised an eyebrow when the Master offered boar.
There was a small door in the wall, which accessed the small street between the estate and the next property. Outside, two more of Vaenuth’s trusted men stood waiting, Tagg and Pressip. “Back to the camp?” asked Tagg, rising from a squat against the wooden palisade wall. Pressip barely stirred; he was a small, quiet man, and stood nearby rubbing a whetstone against the edge of a long knife.
“She turned down boar,” Banno told them, as they began to walk down the street. Blocked by the wall, the view of Lake Chillag now appeared. It was a large, round lake, dotted with colourful fishing boats.
Tagg chuckled. “He was that bad?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Vaenuth said. A bird squawked above them, and flapped away through the forest canopy. They followed it, down from the ridge or Rainrest and into the crowded streets of the town.
Rainrest was one of the most western places that Vaenuth had ever been. There were other places further west, but they did not trade with Numa’nakres, and the Ascended Emperor had no interest in their lands. Here, in Rainrest, was a mix of silks and spices, iron mined from the Yurna Mountains, bronze imported from Copper Cove. Some people wore full robes of colourful red and blue fabrics, some were virtually naked, and everyone was sweating. Incense or coffee covered most of the stench. A hubbub of bartering, arguing and working drowned out anything else that Vaenuth’s group of traders might say.
“Catfish and eels!” called a merchant, “Good prices!”
A hammer in a nearby work area drowned out the words of another seller, a woman with a basket of red-bellied piranha.
Dominating the busy streets was the smell of rich, dark coffee. It made her stomach swell.
“Vae!” Banno called. She itched the second brand on her back as she turned to hear him, and her hand came away dripping with sweat. “Want anything?” he asked. He meant for food. He made sure she stayed fed, like a loyal servant.
“I want something,” she said. “But none of this.”
That evening, after they rejoined the rest of the caravan at Vaenuth’s camp for a small dinner and a meeting to discuss their new job, she returned to town to find someone for company. Vaenuth never paid, and never accepted pay. She was not a whore anymore… just a free woman who had never found the pleasure the world seemed so obsessed with. She spent the first few hours of the night in a stranger’s inn room, but, as usual, did not find what she was looking for. She returned to her camp, getting a small grin from the guards on duty, and tried to get some restless shut-eye before the next day of unbearably humid and ultimately disappointing life.
But they had a new job.