Page 8 of Fate of the Argosi

‘I did love the sound of those floppy sandals coming down the passageway,’ she said wistfully. ‘The leather soles always left a few grains of sand on the floor just outside the bars. Never knew why I kept scooping them up and hiding them in the corner of my cell. Lock up a thief all you want, but she’ll always find something to steal, I suppose.’

Beneath the rasping cackle I detected a touch of pride in those words, so I kept her talking. ‘What about that twine they bind the hands of the dead with? I don’t suppose the clerics left any of that behind on their visits.’

Arissa reached into the filthy, mottled rags that barely covered her emaciated bones and produced a ratty tangle of silvery twine. ‘Now this – this took some skill. Too distinctive to fake with strips of the sackcloth we wear down here. So I made a length of string from strands of my hair and tied one end around a sliver of rusted iron I scraped off one of the bars to use as a tiny grappling hook. I spent an entire day and night collecting scraps left behind when they’d wrapped the hands of the prisoners killed that morning in the cells opposite mine.’

The explanation made sense. Daring, ingenious and a little petulant. All qualities I associated with Arissa. On the other hand, head wounds are funny things, especially when accompanied by noxious, narcotic gasses expelled from a spire goat’s belly. There was a more than even chance I was hallucinating all of this, except for one small, confounding detail.

‘Arissa, is there some reason why I woke up imagining a goat was licking my face, but now he’s way over in the corner of the passageway?’

Laughter. A thunderclap followed by a downpour of mischievous chortling. ‘Couldn’t help myself, Rat Girl.’ She rolled off me to sit cross-legged on the floor. ‘There you were, laid out like the slumbering hero in a fairy tale dreaming of the kiss of his beautiful princess, only to discover it’s his horse licking his face. After the goat knocked you out, I used my trusty grappling hook to snare what was left of your little clay jar of solvent. Once that foul-smelling syrup had dissolved the lock on my cell door, I thought to myself,Arissa, you know how Rat Girl’s always had a crush on you?’

‘I neve—’

She ignored me. ‘Well, seeing as how she’s come all the way down for a visit, why not do the hospitable thing, and let herimaginethere’s a goat licking her face when in fact it’ll turn out to have been a beautiful princess all along?’

I leaned up on my elbows to get my first proper look at her. Probably shouldn’t have done that.

She bristled under the scrutiny. ‘What’s the problem?’ she demanded, a brittle challenge in her tone. She tried to brush her hand through her hair the way elegant ladies do, only her fingers got caught in the knots and muck. ‘You implying that I’m not beautiful any more, Rat Girl?’

She wasn’t. How could she be? A whole year they’d kept her down here. More beatings than meals, more spit than water in the leaky wooden bowl she’d had to drink from.

And all those other things she doesn’t want me asking about, I thought.

Still woozy from Conch’s unintentional act of gassy self-defence, I managed to get onto my hands and knees. I crawled closer to Arissa and stared at her long and hard, making sure she saw me doing so. It’s not the Argosi way to coddle people with lies and half-truths. Arissa’s bottom lip was trembling now, the laughter giving way to something else.

‘The girl you once were is gone,’ I told her. ‘You’ll never again see her in the mirror.’

She said nothing, just nodded with a stuttering downward motion of her chin that reminded me more of a servant awaiting the lash than the brash thief without whose teachings and protection I never would’ve survived long enough to meet Durral and Enna and learn the seven talents that had kept me alive ever since.

My hands went to the knot in her hair where her own fingers had gotten snared while pretending to preen a moment before. It took patience, and more time than we had to waste, but I got the knot untangled, because it’s also the Argosi way to see people not only for what they are, but for what they can become.

I rested my forehead on hers. She felt cold as a corpse. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, share my warmth. I didn’t though; my arta precis warned me that Arissa’s prank kiss, bizarre and inappropriate as it had been, was meant to protect herself from more genuine intimacy than she could handle.

‘There’s this woman I came down here to meet though,’ I went on, feeling the oily filth of her brow dirtying my own skin. ‘The one who walks out of this prison tonight, gets a hundred good meals in her, cries herself to sleep a hundred nights. The gal who wakes up one morning and discovers she’s still got that same untamed spirit as when I first met her. Only difference is that now it’s tempered, not by suffering but by survival, forged into a steel so strong she’ll stride across this continent like a titan.’ I sat back on my haunches, took another long look at her and let her see reflected in my face what my arta precis saw beneath all the bruises and the grime and the misery. ‘That woman? She’s gonna be a sight to see, Arissa. A. Sight. To. See.’

They weren’t my words, not really. Enna had said them to me a long while back. But some spells work more than once.

Arissa breathed in heavy and held that dank air in her lungs for a long time before she reached up to a nearby iron bar and hauled herself to her feet. She waited for me to do the same before she asked, ‘You came all this way because you’ve still got that crush on me? I mean, I always knew you were inclined in that direction, but I prefer a big strapping man with hair gold as mine who keeps his mouth shut except while he’s kissing me, not some annoying, can’t-stop-talking-for-five-whole-minutes, scrawny little—’

‘Rat Girl?’ I finished for her.

Arissa held up the disharmony card I’d tossed into her cell when I’d thought she was dead. ‘What is this ugly thing anyway?’ She stared with pinched eyes at the painted image of a young woman with hair like sunlight and a devil’s smile, dressed in outlandish crimson clothes topped by a dusky red frontier hat coming down at an angle across her brow. ‘Is this supposed to be some kind of . . . memento? A token to remind you of a debt you never owed and I never asked you to repay.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Doesn’t look a thing like me.’

I picked up my discarded leather pack, took out the biggest item inside and handed it to Arissa. It had been almost as difficult to secure as the prince’s pardon. You ever tried finding a dark red frontier hat in the middle of Berabesq? Those folks don’t take to hats. Damn near had to steal another sacred horse to afford the idiot thing.

Worth every penny.

Arissa stared at the hat like it was a magical artefact dropped into her hands from the stars above. A potent talisman that would turn her beautiful as she used to be the moment she put it on. It didn’t, of course. Not until she got the angle just right. Then, just for a moment . . . well, best not make a habit of exaggerating, I suppose.

‘I take it back,’ Arissa said, standing up real tall all of a sudden and looking down at me with an appraising eye. ‘Maybe I will lick your face again since you enjoyed it so much the first time.’

She turned and winked at Conch like the two of them were sharing a private joke. The little spire goat gave a bleating snicker like he sometimes does. It echoed so loud in the tunnel it almost drowned out the sound of another, more bitter laugh.

‘Arissa?’ I asked. ‘Is it possible you’re not the only prisoner still alive down here?’

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