Dragon Soup, page 9
“Who knows what he told her, what he wrote on that note and what else he may have given her?”
“But why would anyone do this?”
“Do you have any enemies?”
“Me?” Columbina laughed. “I’ve held this position for many years. I’ve paid my bills. There are people who don’t like me or my service, but I’m happy if they don’t cross my path. There are plenty of other inns for them to eat at. I don’t have a lot of money or contacts in high places. If anyone wanted to extort me, they could start by threatening me directly. I’m only a woman on the wrong side of middle age, so I would be an easy target. But they haven’t done that because there are so many better targets. People with a lot of money. People with votes on the council. Those people, like the mayor, wouldn’t have a clue who I am. Why me?”
Perrin didn’t have an answer to that.
Then he remembered how he’d seen the groups of men discussing election schedules.
“Do you think maybe this has something to do with the election?”
“The election? Laeticia?”
He shrugged.
She had said it in a don’t-be-ridiculous tone, and to be honest, he couldn’t see why a waitress would have anything to do with the election.
And to be honest, it was not unthinkable or even unusual that election planners met in an eating house.
A group of new customers came in and Columbina went to take their orders.
Perrin sipped his tea and savoured the pastries. Yes, he really should save a bit of money so that he could come here or to another eating house to pretend he lived a civilised life. Even if just once a month.
When he finished, and Columbina was still busy, he left her to it and walked home past the council offices.
A stately room in the library housed the council’s open register, which detailed publicly available information about the citizens of Tamba and information about major transfers of money both within the town and between Tamba and any of the realms.
Perrin had some trouble finding Laeticia’s name, because as a commoner the details of births and deaths and marriages were not as well-kept, and there were quite a lot of families with the same last name.
Laeticia lived in the harbour district at the back of a warehouse. She had a mother and a brother and sister. Her father had died in an accident when she was little. Her mother worked as a seamstress, her sister and brother were quite young.
Her mother had two brothers, who both worked in the docks, and her father had a sister who did the laundry for one of Tamba’s councillors.
There was no record of anyone from her family ever having visited the realms or having connections to those who did.
If a family included anyone with decent knowledge of magic, and they happened to be poor, they wouldn’t be living in this town. If the family had any ties with people from across the border, they would have a lot more money and they wouldn’t be living in the part of town where Laeticia was registered. If a family had people with magic skills, they wouldn’t be poor, not even middle-class.
No matter how much he looked, and Perrin spent rather a lot more time than he had planned, he didn’t find any evidence that Laeticia’s family had any involvement with people from across the border.
Nowhere did he find any evidence at all that she might have gotten an inheritance.
To him, this started to sound more and more like it had something to do with those gold coins.
But as Columbina had said, two gold coins by themselves were not enough money to buy an inn.
Could they have been magic coins?
Atreyo used to have books of spells and books that described the properties of magical items. Perrin had leafed through the pages with the colourful illustrations of stones, creatures and plants from the realms and the magical purposes people used them for.
People in Tamba wouldn’t normally have books like these. The Bureau might have a few copies somewhere in a secret office occupied by a clerk who was supposed to look at the inspectors’ reports of suspicious activity, but never did.
Atreyo had always been very coy about having these books about magic while living in a city where magic was prohibited. He justified having them by saying that he needed to check if items he imported contained magic. He always said that he’d cleared his ownership of the books with the council.
Perrin could really use those books right now. As far as he knew, the entire library had gone to Atreyo’s family home.
Chapter 12
At night Perrin sat in his room looking at the magic sniffers scurrying around the cage, knowing that there were a few things that he needed to do that he didn’t want to do,but he had reached a stage where he could no longer avoid them.
He had to go to Atreyo’s family. For many different reasons.
If he could present them with a proposal that he was happy to receive a one-off payment for his work for Atreyo’s company in return for dropping his claim on Atreyo’s will, then he might not have to waste time with this dreadful court case.
And if the family weren’t doing anything with Atreyo’s books, he would appreciate if he could at least borrow them, because he needed them. But Atreyo’s brother and sister were both very good at turning around sensible arguments and point the blame to others. Perrin had to be prepared.
He made lists of all the things that he wanted to say, knowing that if he didn’t write them down, he would forget all his prepared arguments as soon as he knocked on the door of Atreyo’s family’s house. They hated him. They had pretended to like him for Atreyo’s sake, but the hostility had begun after the funeral and had only gotten worse. Apparently, they had strong opinions about who Atreyo’s partner should have been, and it shouldn’t have been anyone like him, from a middle-class provincial family without the extensive wealth and history of Atreyo’s.
They lived in a stately house in the fancy part of town, a mansion that went over two floors with extensive balconies and large windows with coloured glass patterns.
To get there, Perrin needed to walk past his old house, now the home of Mirella, Atreyo’s sister, and her family. The light was on in the big living room, where he and Atreyo used to sit by the fire. Through the windows, Perrin could see the flames in the hearth. All the furniture had been moved, and it disturbed him to see how cluttered and full of useless trinkets the room was. Atreyo didn’t like clutter. He only wanted beautiful, quality things. He would heap scorn on his younger sister for wearing dresses that looked like you bought them on a street corner in a specials bin. They were all frills, ruffles and flowers, and glittering beads and jewellery. Just a cacophony of statements of style screaming at your eyes. Atreyo’s words.
Mirella and her husband also had two children and lived with a nanny for the children. Perrin understood families made a lot of mess and that they needed space.
In fact, Atreyo had been talking about taking in a kid—of the appropriate class of course—whose family had met with ill fortune, but Perrin didn’t think Atreyo understood what looking after a child entailed. At any rate, Perrin had been happy to do that work. The house was big and empty and needed members of the next generation to fill up all the empty rooms.
So it was with a feeling of sadness that he walked past and listened to the sound of children’s voices drifting from the house. One part of him didn’t begrudge the family this nice house, but he just wanted to be paid so that he could have somewhere nice to live as well.
No, he decided, he didn’t really want the house. It would bring too many memories and was far too big for him.
He arrived at Atreyo’s family’s house, pushed open the gate and walked through the garden with its clipped bushes over the paved path and up the steps to the front door.
The door was a solid piece of dark wood which had been imported from over the ocean. Atreyo had told him the story of it one day, and Perrin had found that almost every part of the house came with such a story about how special it was and how much effort people had spent acquiring it. A door. Seriously.
He walked up to this door, feeling very small and self-conscious. He hadn’t been here for such a long time, and he was sure that this high-class family would have plenty of bad things to say about him and about his relationship. Atreyo was the heir to the family’s considerable wealth, and they had never recognised Perrin’s share in any of it.
And Perrin, foolishly, had believed that living with Atreyo afforded him status.
The door was opened by the family’s stuffy old housekeeper, a man who always pretended he didn’t know anyone. He asked what Perrin wanted, and Perrin said that he was coming to pick up some of his books. The man took the question without showing any emotion on his face.
Then he went into the house and returned a moment later with Atreyo’s sister Mirella.
Out of all the people Perrin had wanted to see, she was his least favourite. His heart sank. He had hoped that the level of activity in his old house meant that Mirella was looking after the kids.
She looked him up and down.
“I was wondering when we would see you here to come and beg,” she said.
Well, at least she left no doubt about what she thought about him.
“I’m not here to beg.”
“Oh, so you are not coming to ask for anything? Are you just coming for tea?”
She said that in a “don’t be so ridiculous” way. As if they would want to have tea with someone like him if he said yes.
“I need one of our books,” Perrin said.
“You said you weren’t here to beg for anything.”
“I’m not begging.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, is that so? Didn’t my brother’s money pay for these books?”
“I’m not sure that we need to go to that level of detail. If it pleases you, and you have a need for this book also, I’m more than happy to just borrow the book. I need some information that’s in it.”
“Oh?” Those eyebrows flicked up again.
While Atreyo’s parents, whose voices he could hear drifting from the house, had made sure that Mirella learned to read and write, Perrin didn’t think she appreciated books, and might even be suspicious of any information in them. Because she didn’t have the patience to read books for herself.
“I also want to give you this.”
He dug in his pocket and pulled out the letter he had written with his demands and calculations of how much money he’d be prepared to accept in return for dropping the claim on the house.
“What’s this?”
“A statement from me with what I would consider a fair settlement in return for me disappearing from your lives.”
“Disappearing?”
“You know, stop making claims and lead my own life. Leave you alone.”
“But there is no guarantee you’ll disappear. You’ll still live in this town.”
“I will lead my own life. I have no appetite for long-running disagreements. The Bureau of Magic Abuse pays me and while it won’t make me rich, I don’t need to be rich. All I want is a place to live.”
She eyed the envelope and seemed to hesitate. “The Bureau of Magic Abuse, huh?”
“Yes, that’s where I work.”
“Inspector Carbin.”
“That’s the one.”
“You go around the inns with those rat-things and set them loose in the kitchens.”
“That’s one of the things we do to detect magic.”
“Huh. Glad we’re not in that business.”
“No.”
But something clearly disturbed her. Maybe it was the knowledge that a lot of the trinkets in the house would probably not pass the magic test and she had assumed that magic inspections was a thing that happened to other people, and yet here was an inspector on her doorstep.
“All right.”
She opened the door further and stepped back.
“Just the book then.”
“And you will pass this letter to all the members of your family and give me a response.”
“We’ll read it. That’s all I can promise. My parents and my brother will also have a say in our response.”
“I understand.”
She took his letter and put it on top of the cabinet in the hall, as if it was too hot to handle.
In a small way, he enjoyed making her nervous. And magic inspectors clearly made her nervous.
Perrin walked into the hall where he had walked so often with Atreyo on the way to some ridiculous dinner party with his family.
Perrin had never felt that Atreyo disliked his family, and had never been sure why Atreyo was attracted to him, but when the two of them were at home, he was such a different person. He didn’t do all this rich person arrogant stuff.
But it had always been there under the surface. It was how he had grown up.
Perrin walked past that hated dining room, where he would sit in awkward silence listening to the ranting of Atreyo’s father about some ridiculous thing that only people with too much money worried about, although this was a realisation that had only come to him recently.
They went past the study to the library, which was at the very end of the corridor. It was a beautiful room, but Perrin wondered how often the family came here.
When Atreyo and his brother and sister were receiving tutoring, this was where it happened, but the room had long lingered in disuse, and by the looks of it had now been used to store quite a bit of Atreyo’s possessions that Mirella didn’t want at the house.
Perrin recognised the couch where they would sit by the fire, and he felt an insane longing for that comfortable life he had once led. A life that was oh so very innocent, and only now did he begin to see all the things he had not noticed before.
Magic made them nervous, huh?
The bookcase stood empty against the far wall, and all the books were still inside the transport boxes on the floor in front of it.
Atreyo’s sister remained by the door while Perrin went through and collected the books he needed, getting dust all over his hands.
He gathered as much as he thought he needed, not just the magic book, but also the book about salts and the one about spices, because he didn’t want to come back here again. Then he returned to the door, walked past Mirella, who said nothing when he went into the corridor.
“I presume I will receive a response to my letter?” he said when he was at the front door and she still hadn’t said anything to him.
“I presume so,” she said. “I will leave that to my father.”
But she said nothing further, and Perrin went out the door into the street clutching his books.
Chapter 13
Perrin felt like he had scored a victory when he walked home, through the streets of the town while the edges of the books were cutting into his arms—who ever thought it was a good idea to carry books this far? They were heavy.
When he came back, Dorella had already closed the tea room and gone home.
It was a pity, because he wanted to tell her that he had followed her suggestion and surely the family would see sense and pay him out, rather than go through the court to get money—for what? They had so much already—from someone who didn’t have any.
He stumbled up the stairs in the dark, opened the door to his room—and slipped. He almost fell, but managed to hold on to the doorknob. A couple of books fell out of his arm and landed on the floor with heavy thuds. Damn, those books had not been cheap.
He fumbled his way into the room. He almost tripped over the books, managed to find the cabinet against the wall and turned up the wick to the lamp.
There was straw on the floor.
Of course, there was only one place where that could have come from: the magic sniffer cage. It lay on its side on the carpet.
Oh no, disaster. Where were the magic sniffers? How had they gotten out?
And then another thought: in Tamba nobody locked their doors. Had the visitor staying in the room across the hall come into his room? The door to that room was closed and the strip underneath the door was dark.
Who was this man? What did he want? What else had he searched?
It was dark, so Perrin needed to make another light first. His hands trembled. The idea that someone would come into his room and rummage through his things upset him deeply. Also, without the magic sniffers, he couldn’t work.
Perrin dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. He couldn’t see the magic sniffers there, but he could see some of their droppings, which looked like short, little black sausages.
He lifted the clothes on the chair next to the bed.
With a sense of dread, he was wondering whether the creatures had got out of the window, but it was closed and the gap was rather small. He knew they could squeeze themselves through small gaps, but didn’t think that they could fit through gaps that small.
Then he heard a squeaking noise in the wardrobe.
Of course, they were very keen on dark spaces.
He open the door to the cupboard and directed his light inside, to find Yaro hiding between his shoes. Perrin grabbed a towel, threw it over the animal and carried it to the cage. He made sure the cage door was shut properly. The clip that held the latch in pace was definitely not too sturdy.
It didn’t look like anything else in the room had been disturbed. Perrin checked the few valuable things he possessed, and everything was as he had left it. His money was in the drawer next to the bed, a jewelled pin that Atreyo had given him was still in the side pocket of the bag where he had tucked it away, and his good clothes still hung in the wardrobe.
Now, where was Fergus?
There were bits of fur all over the floor in the wardrobe. Of course, this was why people warned you should only release the magic sniffers individually. They were males, and they fought.
He called out, “Fergus! Fergus!”
He couldn’t see or hear anything.
This required a different approach.
The fruit bowl still stood on the table, untouched. He cut up an apple, gave a piece to Yaro, and held the other in his hand.
