But it was one thing to hear tell, and another to see them with her own eyes.
It was a big world she’d stumbled into, full of rules she didn’t know and races she’d never seen and languages she didn’t speak. Full of magic. Lila had discovered that the hardest part of her charade was pretending that everything was old hat when it was all so new, being forced to feign the kind of nonchalance that only comes from a lifetime of knowing and taking for granted. Lila was a quick study, and she knew how to keep up a front; but behind the mask of disinterest, she took in everything. She was a sponge, soaking up the words and customs, training herself to see something once and be able to pretend she’d seen it a dozen—a hundred—times before.
Alucard’s boots sounded on the wooden dock, and she let her attention slide off the foreign ships. The captain stopped beside her, took a deep breath, and rested his hand on her shoulder. Lila still tensed under the sudden touch, a reflex she doubted would ever fade, but she didn’t pull away.
Alucard was dressed in his usual high style, a silvery blue coat accented with a black sash, his brassy brown hair pinned back with its black clasp beneath an elegant hat. He seemed as fond of hats as she was of knives. The only thing out of place was the satchel slung across his shoulder.
“Do you smell that, Bard?” he asked in Arnesian.
Lila sniffed. “Salt, sweat, and ale?” she ventured.
“Money,” he answered brightly.
Lila looked around, taking in the port town. A winter mist swallowed the tops of the few squat buildings, and what showed through the evening fog was relatively unimpressive. Nothing about the place screamed money. Nothing about it screamed anything, for that matter. Sasenroche was the very definition of unassuming. Which was apparently the idea.
Because officially, Sasenroche didn’t even exist.
It didn’t appear on any land maps—Lila learned early on that there were two kinds of maps, land and sea, and they were as different as one London from another. A land map was an ordinary thing, but a sea map was a special thing, showing not only the open sea but its secrets, its hidden islands and towns, the places to avoid and the places to go, and who to find once you got there. A sea map was never to be taken off its ship. It couldn’t be sold or traded, not without word getting back to a seafarer, and the punishment was steep; it was a small world, and the prize wasn’t worth the risk. If any man of the waters—or any man who wished to keep his head on his shoulders—saw a sea map on land, he was to burn it before it burned him.
Thus Sasenroche was a well-guarded secret on land, and a legend at sea. Marked on the right maps (and known by the right sailors) as simply the Corner, Sasenroche was the only place where the three empires physically touched. Faro, the lands to the south and east, and Vesk, the kingdom to the north, apparently grazed Ames right here in this small, unassuming port town. Which made it a perfect place, Alucard had explained, to find foreign things without crossing foreign waters, and to be rid of anything you couldn’t take home.
“A black market?” Lila had asked, staring down at the Spire’s own sea map on the captain’s desk.
“The blackest on land,” said Alucard cheerfully.
“And what, pray tell, are we doing here?”
“Every good privateering ship,” he’d explained, “comes into possession of two kinds of things; the ones it can turn over to the crown, and the ones it cannot. Certain artifacts have no business being in the kingdom, for whatever reason, but they fetch a pretty sum in a place like this.”
Lila gasped in mock disapproval. “That hardly sounds legal.”
Alucard flashed the kind of smile that could probably charm snakes. “We act on the crown’s behalf, even when it does not know it.”
“And even when we profit?” Lila challenged wryly.
Alucard’s expression shifted to one of mock offense. “These services we render to keep the crown clean and the kingdom safe go unknown, and thus uncompensated. Now and then we must compensate ourselves.”
“I see….”
“It’s dangerous work, Bard,” he’d said, touching a ringed hand to his chest, “for our bodies and our souls.”
Now, as the two stood together on the dock, he flashed her that coy smile again, and she felt herself starting to smile, too, right before they were interrupted by a crash. It sounded like a bag of rocks being dumped out on the docks, but really it was just the rest of the Night Spire disembarking. No wonder they all thought of Lila as a wraith. Sailors made an ungodly amount of noise. Alucard’s hand fell from Lila’s shoulder as he turned to face his men.
“You know the rules,” he bellowed. “You’re free to do as you please, but don’t do anything dishonorable. You are, after all, men of Arnes, here in the service of your crown.”
A low chuckle went through the group.
“We’ll meet at the Inroads at dusk, and I’ve business to discuss, so don’t get too deep in your cups before then.”
Lila still only caught six words out of ten—Arnesian was a fluid tongue, the words running together in a serpentine way—but she was able to piece together the rest.
A skeleton crew stayed aboard the Spire and the rest were dismissed. Most of the men went one way, toward the shops and taverns nearest the docks, but Alucard went another, setting off alone toward the mouth of a narrow street, and quickly vanishing into the mist.
There was an unspoken rule that where Alucard went, Lila followed. Whether he invited her or not made little difference. She had become his shadow. “Do your eyes ever close?” he’d asked her back in Elon, seeing how intently she scanned the streets.