12. Trouble at the Docks, Part 1
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Breakfast is watery potato soup, served with rock-hard bread. We’re eating it at a rickety table in the common room of The Mariner’s Inn, sunlight streaming in through the open door, rowdy sailors making a racket all around us.

Arcadia looks down at the food, disappointment plain in her expression. Perhaps her romanticized idea of adventuring on the road has crashed into a hard, cold, soupy reality.

She takes the dented spoon, keeps her pinky aloft as she dips it into the soup and puts the spoon to her lips. She presses it into her mouth. The spoon stays in there for some time, and the look on her face can only be described as one of deep regret. She leaves it in, however, as if deciding whether or not she wants to spit it out. Eventually she slips it out of her mouth, empty. But she doesn't swallow. Her lips are pressed tightly together.

After a long moment of gathering courage, her eyes close, she swallows hard, and immediately takes a drink of water.

Then she picks up the hunk of bread in both hands, and struggles for a few moments to tear a piece off. She dunks it into the soup first, then pops it into her mouth and slowly chews. And chews, and chews. She's starting to look irritated at how long it’s taking. The third piece of bread forces her to stop and rest, as her jaw seems to be giving out.

She notices me staring, glares at me as her face reddens. “What?”

I grin at her. “You’re cute.”

The redness on Arcadia's face spreads all the way up to her ears and down her neck. "Shut up!"

I chuckle at her and bite off a piece of my own bread. She takes a deep breath, lets it out with a huff, looks down at her food and begins stirring the soup around like she's trying to work up the resolve to continue eating.

“The trick is to eat it fast,” I say, with a cheek full. “Fill your gut and get on with the day.”

“I refuse.”

I stifle another laugh, which makes her blush more vivid and her glare all the cuter. But we have things to do today, so I hold myself back from teasing her any more than I already have. I spend the next little bit hunched over my plate, wolfing it down. Eat now, taste it later. Or not at all, preferably.

A serving wench glances at us as she passes by our table. Then she double-takes and stops in her tracks. I look up from my bowl at her, raising an eyebrow.

“Ey, you two Arcadia and Rekka?” she asks.

“Who’s asking,” I say.

“There was a fella in here a few hours back lookin for two lasses by them names. Described you both right perfectly, he did.”

Arcadia’s gaze darts to the girl, then to me. "Ah, probably just someone that we happen to resemble."

“This man, what did he look like?” I ask.

The serving girl puts a hand on her hip as lips twist into a thoughtful frown. “He was a lanky old fucker. Skin like leather. Almost bumped his head on the door he was so tall.”

That doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve seen recently. I scratch my head, stare down into my soup for a moment, then look back at the girl. “Was this man in uniform?”

She laughs. “A beggar’s uniform, sure. The cloak he wore’s seen better days, I’ll tell ya that.”

I exchange a puzzled look with Arcadia. She turns her attention the the girl again. “Did he have a message for us?” she asks.

“He just came in, asked if we’ve seen ya. Didn’t say nothin else.”

“And what did you tell him?” asks Arcadia.

“Told him to fuck off if he ain’t a payin customer,” says the serving wench. “Besides, I hadn’t seen ya yet, so I couldnt’ve snitched even if I’d wanted to.”

I can usually tell when people are lying. If this girl is trying to be sly, she’s very good at it. Her expression is relaxed, her tone of voice matter-of-fact. I notice that Arcadia is looking at me again, perhaps waiting for me to pass judgment. I shrug at her, and she nods.

“Well, thank you for stopping to tell us this,” says Arcadia.

Then she slips her hand into her coin purse and produces a small fistful of dinars. To my shock, and the serving girl’s, she claps them into her hand and winks. The girl stares at the coins in her hand with wide eyes for a moment, then she swiftly pockets them.

She thanks Arcadia profusely, and hurries off to attend to her duties elsewhere. Once she’s gone I give Arcadia a hard look. “You shouldn’t be throwing coin around like that.”

She shakes her head, gives me that mischievous grin. “Don’t worry about money.”

“Fine. Let’s worry about hiring a ship to Demeus then. I don’t know who’s looking for us, and I don’t think we should linger here to find out.”

“Yes, let’s,” she says, and she scoots back so abruptly that the sound of her chair scraping the floor startles the people next to us.

I’ve never seen someone abandon their breakfast with such enthusiasm.

Arcadia leaves a few more coins on the table, then we walk out of The Mariner’s Inn and onto the busy streets of the port. People from every corner of the empire and beyond congregate here, conducting their daily business under clear skies and bright sunlight. We fall into step beside a man pulling a cart laden with fresh fish. It groans and creaks under the weight of the morning’s catch, its wooden wheels clattering over the cobblestones, jostling stacks of silvery fish as their scales glint in the sunlight.

Arcadia walks with her eyes downward, and her steps delicately choose the largest of the stones, avoiding the cracks between them. "Do you recognize the man she spoke of?"

I shake my head. “Afraid not. No Legionary I know dresses in rags. And if it were a spy or something like that, I imagine they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves by blatantly asking around for us.”

There isn’t much else to say about it. Evidently Arcadia feels the same way, because she gives me a little shrug before hopping over another crack between the stones. It leaves me vaguely nervous. I don’t like unknowns, but at the moment we have other things to focus on.

The port of Ecea is entirely man-made, built in the shape of a massive hexagonal harbor with a single inlet canal. Bridges zigzag across said canal, tall enough to accommodate even the largest ships passing underneath. Naval ships make berth on the north side of the harbor, while mercantile vessels use the south. Knowing this narrows down the area we have to search, but it will still take some time to locate the right ship for us.

We spend a good portion of the morning asking around, speaking to fishermen and privateers and merchant mariners and the like. There is a livestock trader from Asgoph who’s headed to Demeus tomorrow, but his ship stinks so severely of manure that we politely tell him we’ll keep looking. Somebody lets us know there’s a family of Zhou fishermen headed there, but when we find them, all they do is yell at us in their language until they’ve run us off. We find a Rakethi spice peddler who offers us free passage anywhere we like, as long as we agree to be his wives during the voyage. Thanks but no thanks.

Arcadia climbs up onto an unattended barrel by the dockside, sits on it cross-legged, and heaves out a sigh. “I should just buy us a ship.”

I smirk, sidle up to her and lean my hip against the railing. “Unless you want to hire a crew, the best you and I could manage is a rowboat.”

“We’ll get one with a little sail. You take the oars and I’ll conjure up some wind.”

She makes me roll my eyes and smile. I don’t have a retort for that, so I let the conversation lull, folding my arms and scanning around the area aimlessly. I’ve been on the lookout for a ‘lanky old fucker with leathery skin’ since we set out this morning, but so far I’ve sighted too many people who might fit the description for it to mean anything.

There’s a ship docked a few feet away from where we’re sitting. It’s a smaller one, the kind that can be crewed by about five people, a round-hulled vessel with a curving prow and stern and a single sail. The gangplank is down, and there’s a team of four longshoremen unloading large terracotta jars into a wagon a few paces away.

One of them fumbles his grip on the jar he’s carrying. He yelps in alarm as it pitches forward, the lid falling off and pouring grain all over the gangplank. Which is bad luck for the man who happens to be walking up the opposite side. He slips, wobbles absurdly with his arms waving, then falls sideways into the harbor with a loud splash. The sudden wiggle of the gangplank makes the first one go ass over appetite. He falls forward, faceplants onto the dock, his jar shattering between the weight of his body and the cobblestones.

Arcadia and I wince at the same time. She hops off the barrel she was sitting on and hustles over to the man, and I follow.

“Hey, are you alright?” she asks, as she crouches down and lays a hand on his shoulder.

His face is red, wrenched with pain. “I think I twisted my ankle.”

I glance down at his foot, wince again when I see the ankle in question. It’s bright red and already swelling up.

“Can you fix it?” I ask Arcadia.

She looks up at me, an eyebrow cocked. “Fix it? How would I do that?”

“You know…” I shrug, lift a hand and wiggle my fingers mysteriously.

That earns me a frown. "I can't just wiggle my fingers and fix everything."

Arcadia grabs the hem of the man’s tunic and rips off a section of it, using it to bind his ankle. While she’s handling that, I walk over to the edge of the dock and peer down into the water between it and the hull of this ship. Sure enough, I see the other longshoreman down there, sullenly swimming up to the stone ledge. I whistle down at him, which gets his attention, then I crouch and offer my hand. He takes it, and with one tug I’ve hauled him up out of the water.

“What’s happening down there?” someone calls out above me.

I look up, see a man standing near the prow of the ship. He’s about my age, perhaps younger even, and thoroughly Ecean. Long white-blond hair, grayish blue eyes, a fine green tunic that suits his tan complexion. There is a frown on his face as he leans over, placing his hands on the rail. The soaking wet longshoreman I just rescued looks up at him glumly.

“Your lad went for a tumble,” says the longshoreman.

The young man directs his attention to the other laborer, then the mess all over the gangplank. I see him curse under his breath and turn around to bark an order to his crew, and a moment later there’s a sailor rushing down to sweep the spilled grain away.

Arcadia is still crouched by the side of the man with the injured ankle. She stands, looking up at the man giving out orders. "Sir, we're looking to purchase passage to Demeus. Are you headed that way? Even if you aren’t, we can make it worth your while. The sooner the better."

When she says we can make it worth his while, a big smile sprouts on his face. “Sooner the better eh? What’s your hurry?” he asks.

"A Praefecti got a little handsy with me at a party, and my friend here may have broken his jaw. We'd rather not stick around and hear what false crimes he's drummed up against us."

“So it’s a swift getaway you’re looking for,” he says. Then he grins, drums his fingers against the railing for a moment. “I could oblige for… A thousand dinari.”

“Done,” says Arcadia.

He flinches, his eyebrows aloft. “What do you mean, done? You’re supposed to haggle with me.”

“I don’t care about haggling. You stated the price, and I agreed to it.”

“You don’t care?” he says, and I find the heartbroken look on his face endearing. “Negotiation is one of the cornerstones of trade, woman!”

Arcadia smiles when he calls her ‘woman.’ I don’t think this young fellow realizes he just did himself a favor. “So do you want my coin or not?” she says.

He chews his lip, apparently searching for some stipulation to add to the deal. That’s when he glances at me. “Have your muscular friend there help us unload our cargo, and we’ll set sail for Demeus straightaway.”

Arcadia looks my way, as if to ask permission with a glance, and I nod at her. “Very well,” she says. “We have an agreement.”

I smirk, gesture at my mostly bare torso. I threw that red tunic away this morning, so I’m just in my strophium. “And look, I’m already dressed for it.”

My gesture pulls Arcadia’s gaze like gravity. But then she looks away, grinning and blushing a little, chewing on her lip. Suddenly I find myself much more in the mood for exercise.

The laborer I fished out of the harbor leads Arcadia and I up the gangplank, and the young captain gives us both a bow. “Pleasure to do business with you,” he says. “Captain Posca, at your service.

We introduce ourselves to him in return, and then that longshoremen has me follow him below decks, to the store room. I see that the work is about half complete, row after row of big-bellied terracotta jars stacked tightly together to prevent them from breaking during the voyage. The man I’m with walks by me and squats down to wrap his arms around one, grunts a little as he stands up with it and turns to exit.

I let him go by, then I do as he did. The jar is about as heavy as I expected it to be, which is to say that lifting it is no trouble at all. I’m able to stride out of the store room and down the gang plank with ease. I set my jar on the back of the wagon and return to the store room for more. I realize after a few trips that I’m already working faster than the others, but I don’t really care if they feel bad. Arcadia and I are trying to get the hell out of here.

So I start taking them down in twos, holding one under each arm. This time when I come up out of the store room, I see Arcadia leaning against the rail, chatting with Posca. They’re smiling at each other as they converse. It makes me feel a needle-prick of jealousy, but then Arcadia notices me passing by, and the way she gazes at my torso makes me feel anything but jealous.

Ahh. Freedom is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Despite my help, unloading all this cargo does eat up a good amount of time. As we work I notice the sun climbing higher in the sky, and by the time it nears zenith I’m sweaty all over. It feels good though. Not just being admired by Arcadia, but doing something mindless and physical. It’s almost meditative. I get lost in the simple pleasure of it.

Which is unfortunate. Because I don’t hear the measured, clanking footsteps of soldiers marching in formation. Not until they already have us surrounded.

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