“It does seem likely, but awfully strange. And how would they have managed the… the deed?”
“In the usual way, I would suppose. Not that you know anything about that.”
“No more than you do!” She grinned, then bit a finger, thinking. “Still, if it’s true, do you think we could cross into the spirit world and hide there?”
“If I knew where to find a crossroads. If you could even cross with me.”
“The magister crossed.”
“He was raised among hunters. Didn’t I mention that? It’s a dangerous place, Bee.”
She frowned. “And this world is not? Tell me, Cat, did all that coin you now possess come from him?”
“Yes.”
Through narrowed eyes, she regarded me shrewdly. “Did he like you?”
“Yes, certainly he must have, because that is how young men show young women they like them. By trying to kill them.”
“But you said he said afterward that he was sorry.”
“He never said that!”
“Maybe not in those exact words. But he said—”
“Leave it! I do not ever again want to talk or think of Andevai Diarisso Haranwy.”
“How quickly you snap, for someone who claims to be undisturbed by the flies buzzing all about her.”
“Somehow, that makes me feel like a steaming pile of fresh manure out in a field.”
She smirked.
“Our pardon.” Two men reeled up like gasping fish. They wore the respectable clothing of apprentices and clerks, and the younger had dressed his up with a bright orange and brown dash jacket. Because of their pallor, it was easy to mark the flush of drunkenness in their cheeks. I shifted my sword to my right side so I could if necessary draw it quickly.
The younger one straightened his jacket and then addressed us. “You fine gels look like you have an empty cup, which we would gladly fill.”
Bee skewered them with a glare. “Was that meant to be poetic or merely crude? You may move on.”
“No reason to knife a man just for asking!” They departed, unsteadily, and made their way to a table crowded with young men who greeted them with the hoots men shower upon the unfortunate. A few blew kisses in our direction. I thought about how much we were like the table and the wall, nothing to bother looking at, nothing at all, and they turned back to their conversation and, I hoped, forgot about us.
Bee was carving lines in the smears of gravy left on the bottom of the bowl. “How could he do it? Use the vision of a woman who was walking the dreams of dragons to plot a military campaign?”
“Who? Camjiata? Do you ever see Camjiata in your dreams?”
“How would I know? I’ve never seen him except in caricatures. Some make him squinch-faced, hunchbacked, and spittle-ridden, while others claim him as mighty and black-haired. Rather like you, now that I think on it, so perhaps you are secretly his love child.”
“I am not—” Words caught in my throat. I stuck a spoonful of stew into my mouth and chewed to make them go back down. It was no stranger a notion than the other possibilities. “Anyway, how would an imprisoned man know about you?”
“Couldn’t someone who walked the dreams of dragons dream about someone who walked the dreams of dragons? If he had a wife who dreamed, she might have told him.”
“If she was a diviner. But diviners are notoriously imprecise. And I’m not sure what that has to do with walking the dreams of dragons.”
She looked up, resting the spoon on the bowl’s rim. “You said that when a dragon turns over in its sleep, the world changes.”
I shuddered. “Yes, in the spirit world. I saw it happen.”
“What about in our world? You called it a tide. Wouldn’t that tide run through this world, too, somehow? If things are connected, as you say.”