She chuffed, which I took as the kind of laugh you make when you suppose the other person has made an obvious joke and you wish to be polite. “How may I help yee?”
This was not going to be easy. “Are you associated with the offices of Godwik and Clutch who have branches in both Havery and Adurnam?”
Her purple crest rose. “We is.”
I stuck out my hand in the radical’s manner. “I am Catherine Bell Barahal. I have met Maester Godwik. And Chartji. And Caith. That’s why I’m here.”
“I am Keer.” No feathers covered the palm of her taloned hand. The press of her skin against mine reminded me of summer in the north, when the long sun pulls the earth’s sweat up out of warm soil.
She released my hand and indicated the table.
“That’s right,” I murmured. “Wash, drink, and eat before beginning negotiations.”
I washed and dried my hands, after which Keer washed and dried her hands and rinsed her mouth, so I went back and copied the mouth rinsing. She settled on one of the high platforms. Her height and sleek predator’s muzzle made me feel I would be at a disadvantage if I sat lower, so I hopped up onto one of the other square platforms.
Her gaze flicked to my cane. “Shiny, that.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
She flashed me a view of sharp incisors, an intimidating gesture meant, I hoped, to express amusement at my laconic answer. I desperately wanted to know how trolls, like fire mages, could see my cold steel in daylight, but I sensed this was not the time to ask. A troll came in and poured us each a cup of a fragrant tea whose bitterness made my eyes water. We drank as the serving-troll peeled and cut fruit into ceramic bowls small enough to cup in the hand, and sprinkled it with nuts.
As we ate, I looked around. The office was fitted out with interior gaslight, which I had never seen in Adurnam. Slatted windows opened into a chamber where two trolls and a man wearing ink-covered aprons were setting type in a press. Discarded sheets of paper with uneven printing advertised a citizens’ meeting: in support of the Proposal for an Assembly composed of Representatives elected from the entire Population of Expedition.
When we had finished eating and drinking, Keer cocked her head, looking at me first with one eye, then with the other, then full on, muzzle slightly pulled back to hint at teeth within.
I found my voice. “My business is this. I need to send an urgent message to two family members in care of the Adurnam office of Godwik and Clutch. Since your office must exchange dispatches with your Europan offices, I thought I might be able to include a letter with your post.”
“Yee shall have better fortune after hurricane season.”
“Hurricane? What is that?”
“Hurricane is the local word for cyclone. The cyclone is a violent storm which forms over water. Hurricanes rise most commonly in July, August, and September. Elsewise the ocean waters is too cool to sustain them. Therefore few ships risk the voyage to Europa until late October.”
Beyond the screen, pens scratched across paper. Late October would be too late to warn Bee. “Is there no way to send a dispatch now?”
Keer shifted her shoulders in a sliding way that struck me as quite inhuman. She said, “How met yee with Godwik and Chartji?”
A shiver of alarm crawled up the skin of my back, for with a lunge she could rip off my face with her talons and then eat me neatly down with those teeth, as long as I didn’t fix my sword through her heart first, if I could even find her heart and if she only had a single one. Instinct urged me to trade information for information.
“First, we were chance met at an inn. Later, my cousin and I went to the law offices because Chartji had told us to come to her if we needed legal services. We were offered employment. Not by Godwik himself, mind you, but by his associate, a professora named Kehinde Nayo Kuti.”
Keer exuded an odor, like sun-dried grass, that made me think of a creature waiting for its prey to creep into view. “Tell me a story of Godwik.”
A cautious smile carried me forward. “He told me a tale about his fledging trip with his age cohort. Six to a boat and six boats in all, north to the shores of Lake Long-Water. They planned to battle into the teeth of the katabatic wind that sweeps down off the vast cliff face of the ice. But I never heard about that, for meanwhile, and before they even reached Lake Long-Water, he and his thirty-six companions were reduced to twenty-seven after battles with saber-toothed cats, foaming rapids, a marauding troo, gusting winds, and a party of young bucks from a territory whose boundaries they had violated. You may wonder how it all started!”
