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Brother Hamon Friel had a lot of things to remember when he landed at Presidium. He had his map and a list of banks. And tucked into his trousers, under his long, gray and white habit, he had the packet with his warrant and the letters of introduction, and the coded message with the desired terms of the loan. He kept checking two or three times a minute to reassure himself the packet was still there, until it occurred to him that anyone watching would assume he was doing something rather lewd to himself, so he stopped.
He kept practicing his Immani in his head, too; it had been a few years since he’d had any occasion to speak the language, and he didn’t want to sound like a complete fool when he spoke to Immani bankers. The king and queen were counting on him, and he didn’t want to let them down.
Between the map, and the message, and worries about the language, it seemed inevitable he would forget something. And he managed to get nearly all the way through the dockside districts before he realized he had left his trunk on the ship. So, he turned around and went back, feeling like a complete fool.
The city was laid out, in typical Immani fashion, in a regular grid of streets, but somehow he managed to get himself turned around, and it took him the better part of an hour to find the right dock again. There were so many of them!
Hundreds of ships and boats lined the piers, all of them loading or unloading cargo or disgorging streams of hurried passengers. Sometimes the crowd grew so thick that it took Hamon five or ten minutes to walk a hundred yards. It overwhelmed and befuddled him, and when he finally got back to the right ship, he would have liked nothing better than to stay aboard and head home.
Oh, to be back in the little courtyard garden of the monastery, outside Formacaster, where the only sound was the singing from the chapel, and a monk could be alone with his thoughts when he didn’t have work to do!
But Brother Hamon didn’t have that luxury anymore. Formacaster was in the hands of the Sigors now, and the usurper was sending out spies to hunt down the rightful king and queen. If they were ever going to regain their throne, Hamon needed to find a bank to lend them the money to carry on the fight.
It was a dangerous mission, though. This was a pagan land, with few Ivich believers. And beyond that, the Imperial government had long supported the Sigors over the Gramirens. Hamon had no idea whether the merchant banks of the Empire would want to lend King Broderick II any money. Or indeed, if they would even be allowed to. But he’d never know until he asked. And that was why he had come here.
Not that he could complain about his fate. All the poor soldiers killed and maimed, and their widows and orphans could complain. And the courtiers and nobles who had been forced to give up their comfortable lives. And the royal family themselves, too.
Poor King Broderick—losing his father to an assassin and finding out within days that half the country wanted the Sigors back. And poor Queen Therese, forced to go on the run while in the final month of her confinement, and giving birth to the rightful heir in a tent at the bottom of the Styrung Pass, instead of at Wealdan Castle. Attended in that hour of greatest distress by her husband and a local midwife, rather than by the royal physicians. And now she had to care for an infant in a dismal little safehouse, rather than in the clean, sumptuous royal apartments. Yes, if anyone had the right to complain, her majesty did. In comparison, Hamon’s journey was, at worst, a minor inconvenience.
He had been told to go to an inn called the Black Eagle in the Septentrius district, an area of town that people had started calling “Nova Formacastra” due to the sheer number of refugees there. It took him three tries to find the right street, and he had to ask directions twice. But soon enough he saw women in embroidered Kenedalic headscarves shopping in the markets, and he heard the pungent oaths of his homeland drifting from the doors of taverns.
He smiled, relieved that he had found the right place, and pleased to be back among his own people. But then he remembered that not all of these refugees were necessarily Gramiren supporters. The war had ravaged the countryside indiscriminately, and plenty of people had come to the Empire out of desperation, not because they disliked the rule of Edwin the usurper. The name of the inn was a good sign, though—a black eagle was the symbol of the old King Broderick, and now of the whole Gramiren family.
The innkeeper, a big Immani man who spoke excellent Myrcian, confirmed this when Hamon asked for a room. Raising an eyebrow as he regarded Hamon’s monastic habit, he said, “You should know, most of our guests support King Broderick the younger, not Edwin.”
The Leafa church kept officially neutral in the civil war, which meant the fiercest partisans on both sides tended to regard preosts, monks, and nuns with severe mistrust. Some of them were even driven to agnosticism and asked what was the good of having a church at all. Hamon couldn’t blame them; he struggled himself with the question of why Earstien had allowed the Sigors to triumph.
Hamon carried his own trunk up to his tiny room and then, after checking to make sure the packet of letters was still secure under his clothes, he went back down to see about getting something to eat. The innkeeper pointed him to a menu chalked on a slate over the bar. Fried pork cost a dupondius, which was a little more than a Myrcian silver penny. And then potatoes and wine were extra. Hamon didn’t know how long he might have to stay in the city, so he selected some butter and black bread for a quarter-dupondius, and settled into a seat at a small, rickety table in the corner.
He buttered his first slice and looked around the room. The handful of other guests were all either eating or were deep in conversation with people at their tables. All of them, that is, except for a rather pretty, petite young woman seated alone at the bar. He didn’t think she had been there when he had first come in. She had curly brown hair and big dark eyes, and she was staring at him.
She gave him a wide, dimpled smile, rose from her seat, and flounced cheerfully up to his table to sit opposite him. “Hello,” she said.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said, looking around. “Was this your table?”
“Not at all,” she replied. “I’m looking for someone to talk to.” Her Myrcian was excellent, with only a slight accent. She held out her hand. “My name is Gina.”
After hesitating, he shook her hand. “I’m Hamon. Brother Hamon, as it happens.”
He had a bad feeling where this was going. He might have spent eight years of his life in a monastery, but he had gone to live and work at court after that, and he had certainly traveled a great deal in the last few months. He knew all about the sort of girl who frequented inns, approaching men she didn’t know.
He gave an embarrassed little cough and said, “So you don’t waste your time, you should know that this habit,” he tugged at his gray collar, “means I’ve taken a vow of celibacy.”
She looked him up and down, grinning. “Well, I admit those clothes aren’t terribly fashionable, but I can’t imagine they completely repel women.”
He couldn’t help chuckling. “No, it’s not that I’m trying to make myself deliberately repellant. I’m a monk, you see. I’m a member of the Leofine Order.”
The girl fluttered her eyelashes. “So...you’re a preost, then?”
“Not precisely.” He chewed a bit of bread and tried to think how one explained monastic life to a non-Ivich. “I’m not a preost, but I’ve taken a vow to serve Earstien. I lived in a monastery outside Formacaster—the Priory of the Blessed Illumination—and my brother monks and I prayed and sang hymns and copied works of ancient scholarship.”
“Ah, a monastery,” she said sagely. “I’ve heard of those. I suppose that means you like boys instead of girls.”
Even back in Myrcia, this was a common misconception, born partly from malicious gossip, and partly from the fact that most people couldn’t imagine being celibate, so they assumed monks needed some sort of release.
“It’s not like that,” he said.
“You sound as if you miss it,” she said, leaning forward and resting her chin on her hands.
“I do.”
“What did you love about it, exactly?”
He had never been good at talking to women or girls, except in very rare cases, like Queen Therese, where the relationship between them was clearly established and there could be no hint of impropriety. But strangely, with this girl he’d never seen before in his life, he found talking the easiest thing in the world. He told her about his favorite hymns, and about sitting alone in the courtyard, reading the Halig Leoth and finding some new bit of wisdom that had eluded him before.
“There must have been some things you didn’t like,” she said.
He didn’t see any harm in telling her. They were in a public place, and he had a duty, as a good Ivich, to dispel any myths that Immani pagans might have about Leafa religious life.
“To be honest,” he said, “I didn’t much care for being stuck with a lot of other monks, day in and day out, for years and years.”
He told her about some of the drawbacks of seeing the same people, over and over, every day. Like Brother Fenris’s terrible breath, or the way Brother Roger cleared his throat after every single sentence when reading the lesson over supper. It wasn’t so bad if you only had to hear him do it once or twice, but after the ten thousandth time, or so, it made you want to throw your soup bowl at him.
The girl laughed appreciatively at his stories, and he felt encouraged to go on.
“When I got the opportunity to serve as a secretary at the castle, everything seemed so different.”
“The castle. Do you mean Wealdan Castle?” She tilted her head and fluttered her eyelashes a bit. “Is that what brings you to Presidium now?”
With a start, he realized how close the conversation had veered toward his secret—that he was King Broderick II’s personal secretary on a mission to find help for him to regain his throne. Had the girl done that deliberately? He couldn’t see how she had, yet he now felt wary around her. This mission was too important for him to screw it all up because a girl had smiled at him.
He stood abruptly and bowed to her. “Pardon me, Miss Gina, but I have some very important...um, praying that I need to be doing right now.” He hadn’t finished the bread and butter, but he could get something else to eat later.
“It’s been charming to meet you,” she said, with a very sincere-looking smile.
“Um...likewise,” he said quickly, bowing again and then squeezing awkwardly around her to head back upstairs.
“I’ll see you around, then,” the girl called after him. “I’m in here all the time.”
He went upstairs to his room, pulled out his little copy of the Halig Leoth, and read it for an hour or so, until he stopped thinking about her smile and her eyes and the way she had looked at him.