Grainy-eyed and exhausted, Cutter went in search of somewhere to eat breakfast. Once his belly was full, he’d head back to the Phoenix Inn and collapse on his bed upstairs. This was the extent of his tactical prowess and even achieving that had been a struggle. He would be the last man to downplay the extraordinary variety of paths a life could take, and there were few blessings he could derive from hav shy;ing come full circle — from his journey and the changes wrought in himself be shy;tween the Darujhistan of old and this new place — and yet the contrast with the fate that had taken Challice Vidikas had left him numbed, disorientated and feel shy;ing lost.
He found an empty table on the half-courtyard restaurant facing Borthen Park, an expensive establishment that reminded him he was fast running out of coin, and sat waiting for one of the servers to take note of him. The staff were Rhivi one and all, three young women dressed in some now obscure fashion characterized by long swishing skirts of linen streaked in indigo dye, and tight black leather vests with nothing underneath. Their hair was bound up in knotted braids, revealing bisected clam-shells stitched over their ears. While this latter affectation was quaint the most obvious undesirable effect was that twice one of the servers sauntered past him and did not hear his attempts to accost her. He resolved to stick out a leg the next time, then was shocked at such an ungracious impulse.
At last he caught the attention of one of them and she approached. ‘A pot of tea, please, and whatever you’re serving for breakfast.’
Seeing his modest attire, she glanced away as she asked, in a bored tone, ‘Fruit breakfast or meat breakfast? Eggs? Bread? Honey? What kind of tea — we have twenty-three varieties.’
He frowned up at her. ‘Er, you decide.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘What did you have this morning?’
‘Flatcakes, of course. What I always have.’
‘Do you serve those here?’
‘Of course not.’
‘What kind of tea did you drink?’
‘I didn’t. I drank beer.’
‘Rhivi custom?’
‘No,’ she replied, still looking away, ‘it’s my way of dealing with the excitement of my day.’
‘Gods below, just bring me something. Meat, bread, honey. No fancy rubbish with the tea, either.’
‘Fine,’ she snapped, flouncing off in a billow of skirts.
Cutter squeezed the bridge of his nose in an effort to fend off a burgeoning headache. He didn’t want to think about the night just past, the bell after bell spent in that graveyard, sitting on that stone bench with Challice all too close by his side. Seeing, as the dawn’s light grew, what the handful of years had done to her, the lines of weariness about her eyes, the lines bracketing her mouth, the maturity revealed in a growing heaviness, her curves more pronounced than they had once been. The child he had known was still there, he told himself, beneath all of that. In the occasional gesture, in the hint of a soft laugh at one point. No doubt she saw the same in him — the layers of hardness, the vestiges of loss and pain, the residues of living.
He was not the same man. She was not the same woman. Yet they had sat as if they had once known each other. As if they were old friends. Whatever childish hopes and vain ambitions had sparked the space between them years ago, they were deftly avoided, even as their currents coalesced into something romantic, something oddly nostalgic.
It had been the lively light ever growing in her eyes that most disturbed Cut shy;ter, especially since he had felt his own answering pleasure — in the hazy reminis shy;cences they had played with, in the glow lifting between them on that bench that had nothing to do with the rising sun.
There was nothing right about any of this. She was married, after all. She was nobility but no, that detail was without relevance, for what she had proposed had nothing to do with matters of propriety, was in no way intended to invite public scrutiny.
This would be. . sordid. Despicable. How could he even contemplate such a thing?
