[i][b]Tarne[/b][/i]

Were Jethec to tell anyone he wished for some action and excitement in times like this, chances were he'd get slapped hard enough to clear the other side of town. Don't matter which side he started on, rich or poor; they'd take the same offense and strike from the same sentiment. He couldn't help where his mind meandered, of course. A man can bear only so much of standing in one spot, contemplating the ache in his ankles, watching old ladies pick up apples and squeeze them inspecting for bruises and put them down again. Thankfully the day must always end. The shadows always reconquer what the light has built. A dyed and polished uniform was hanged for dreary rags; rousing speeches tapered into coughs and grumbles during the long walks home. Jethec walked unplagued by these vanities. He lived for smaller comforts.

He never could keep the lice out of the mattress for long. Sometimes he could swear he felt a weevil wriggling under the burlap, gnawing on the barley chaff stuffed inside. But sleep was the city's treasure, hoarded wheresoever it could be found. Jewels could be pilfered in the night, flames could leap from the hearth and lap up the house, but no one could steal away, not altogether, with their whiles of blissful forgetfulness. People couldn't help but cherish how the hours of hunger, cold, and stink all vanished under this tender trance. Even death was no end to it, for what is death but the longest sleep of all? Yes, to partake comfortably in their panacea was the chiefest of human dignities, and though Jethec's wrappings were coarse, they were also warm, and clean, and easy to anticipate.

Although he did allow himself other comforts, to make the waking hours more bearable. Everyone needed one or two, to tell himself that he could have it worse, that he wasn't the most pitiable soul in Tarne (most people believed it most times). Although the vermin were scarce now, a mouser still patrolled the halls sometimes who Jethec liked to coax into the flat. He would trap this creature in. He dropped a splash of vinegar into a bowl of milk, and teased the creature awhile as the mixture curdled. Then he'd scoop out the curds and watch its tongue as it ate. Sometimes, Jethec would move his one chair from its corner. Kneeling then, he would reach where one of its legs had rested, and pull up there the loose floorboard, and retrieve from that place the silvered dagger he kept buried away from the envious gazes of others. Just to hold it. Just to know that it was his, like an infant with its first blanket. Both of these gave him slivers of pleasure, enough to hold him over to the next long tryst with his mattress and his coverings.

Other matters had to come first, of course. Before his next cabal with Theon, which he sadly could not forgo, there was the mild euphoria of peeling off his boots and socks. Giving them an hour or twice to dry while he sat in that same chair, letting the aches disperse across the lengths of his body. Soothing the corners of his belly with a pickled onion or a gulp of buttermilk. Salt was too precious nowadays, but vinegar could bestow even the mealiest stuffs with some semblance of flavor. Today's fee was a little sack of rye flour; the quartermaster couldn't even be arsed to mix it into a dough first.

Still, peasants' flatbread smelled better than it tasted. As Jethec stopped at his door, and reached for his key, already he could imagine it baking in his little black pot (the other treasure he had to hide away in his apartment like a squirrel its cheekful of acorns, for iron was rarer by the day). The liberation of losing his damp trappings, surely the very same as a snake shedding its old skin. Jethec turned the key. Only he knew at once that he did not arrive at the same apartment as from which he had departed that morning. Something had moved, which does not happen by mistake in Tarne. Who then had visited while he was gone? And with what motive, what goal? Jethec's instincts noticed before his eyes did, but his eyes found the answer not long thereafter: on his floor sat a note. It had been slipped under his door, and was now limping about, caught in the drafts from the hall.

The page had been torn from a holy text, and scrawled over with some sort of crude mushroom ink, already peeling away from the paper.

[center][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][i]Jethek
Found me some real silver this time, so dont be goin on about "gimmee one good reason" like last time, okay. just don't make me say what I had to do to get it———so the old medecine man on [s]Kooper[/s]^[sup]Cooper[/sup]St says litle Torbren needs some horehound leaves to cure his sick. & some cloves for the pain, if ycan find em. You shuld see him Jethek, he can bearly even lift his head from the pilloe. Have a heart for ones, your the only one who can help. drop bye for a chat?
'Liv[/i][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/center]
Jethec read it twice, and glanced over it again for good measure. He walked to the fireplace and dug at the ashes with his hands. They were too cold for the note to burn, but until he found some spare kindling nobody would think to go rooting around that spot for the evidence.

[i]Guess it couldn't hurt.[/i]

Theon lived on the ground floor. All of them down there looked a little like him: their trappings that much cleaner, their countenances that much prettier. (Straighter teeth, softer hands, no pox scars.) The further up the stairs one walked, however, the stronger the stench got. Jethec lived a floor or two from the top; not the worst place, but he had a long walk down to the doors in the morning, and he was worked too hard for too little bread. The neighbors on this floor pretended they were too good for him, for his services, until something dire happened to change their minds, whereupon it was agreed, for a week or two, that he was not so bad at all.

This Liv's apartment, meanwhile, overlooked everything from a broken window at the end of the uppermost hall. Jethec climbed up to see her, climbed and climbed. The dog barking, the spouses screaming, the babies wailing, these he heard now in perfect clarity, whereas most nights they were but a shudder in his ceiling. A whole other world, this; were the city tenements always so stratified? Or was this Tarne's solution to the overcrowding—to waste removal? [i]Guess the stink can't offend the anyone-who's-anyones from this high up.[/i]

Two quick rasps with his knuckles. Jethec didn't wait long for the door, though he clutched his purse and shifted his scrutiny all the while.

"Thank the Maker," Liv said, already ushering herself aside to let her guest past.

"Good evening, Lora."

She visibly bristled at the name, and tried very hard not to look it. Moving to the table, she held up a knife and a lemon for Jethec to see, but he held his hand out vertical in reply, a polite refusal. He could already smell the vapors from a pot of boil, mingling in the air with the musk of mold and mildew. Liv cut into the lemon and started wringing it into two cups. The fruit had a corona of brown, bruisy flesh around its middle. "I can't believe there are still tea leaves left in this city. Those church nuts have been sweeping it all up for their incense or something. Did you hear what their criers were saying in the streets this morning?"

"Must've missed it."

"You musta missed it! When you spend your whole day at market?"

Jethec stared a beat. She thought him a liar, then. "I can't go looking for your medicine tonight," he said. "Maybe two, three nights from now." When Liv looked over she had the look about her of the wolves in the treeline.

"Why not tonight?"

"I'm already on a job."

The rest of her body was swiveling now, to catch up to her glare. "Jethec!" she whimpered, sounding adequately pathetic. "What's more important to you than my boy? Tell me, so I can outbid 'em! Fuck! He could already be dead in there!"

In a door's stead the other room had a musty red-brown carpet nailed over its frame. Jethec could admit that he felt the dread it radiated, the nearness of death. Then again it could have been coming from anywhere in the building.

"Hold on." Liv dashed for her bedding, another burlap sack like Jethec's, but darker, grainer, and stained with patters of old blood where the sleeper's thighs would go. She rummaged around the bedding's underside, where she had shoved whatever secret she had meant to keep til now. Jethec was quite amused with this cliché, until Liv's cracked, withered hands produced something far more pale and lustrous, as delicate-seeming as silk.

"I—I told you," she said, shoving the necklace and pendant at his hands. "I can pay this time."

Jethec hadn't the wherewithal to refuse at first. Opening his fist, he appraised the chain first, the more desirable part. No broken links. Very little tarnishing. The pendant, however, a good luck sigil, seemed a more personal piece. Years of clutching and rubbing had worn down, erased, the finer features.

"I can't take this from you."

"A thanks for last time, then."

"No," Jethec said. "I mean I don't want it."

It was then like he had taken a sledgehammer to a dam. The insults and the insinuations came at him as a deluge. Many called him a coward, in so many words. [i]Fair enough, that one.[/i] More alluded to his height, his weight, his manhood, and late-night activities involving fat prostitutes and farm animals. Jethec weathered it all, but when a desperate Liv began waving the name of the sheriff around, promising a good long talk in the morning if Jethec would not save her boy, she soon learned how many threats he would suffer. The world went bleary as her head was thrown back against the wall. Her skull struck hard lumber.

Her breaths whistled as Jethec loosened the grip on her throat. He tried to kiss her. When she wrenched her face away from his, he grabbed her by the jaw and wrenched it back.

"Stop."

"A night with you, a memory of you, these are worth far more than a thimble of silver, Lora."

"Don't call me that. You vile bastard, you don't get to call me that."

"'Vile,' am I?" She couldn't breathe again. Her eyes were bulging, but Jethec gestured at the red curtain, gestured long and hard with a finger from his free hand, til they moved to see where he was pointing. The whole weight of his arm and shoulder pinned her scrawny neck to the wall. "Does your son agree? Maybe so. Could be he'd rather die waiting for someone less 'vile' than me to happen along with his medicine—a man of principle, is he, [i]Lora[/i]?"

She was on the floor again. The colors rushed out from the corners of her vision; she gasped long and deep and wiped the spittle from her cheek. The dizziness was fading, but her body felt sluggish, and a hot pain spread out across her neck.

Jethec looked down into his hand, as if he blamed it, like it had acted of its own will and malice. No apologies came, and he offered nothing of his to help Liv back onto her feet. "I'll see what I can find," he snarled, clodding toward the door. He hung the necklace on a nail. "I will visit again two moons from now. Be ready with a warmer welcome—and the [i]usual[/i] payment."