What From the Water Rises #12

In which a former guard loses track of his former monarch.

The weekend market in Zuenos was, at most, half the size of its Sehmeri equivalent.

On those days when the wharfside merchant street in Sehmera’s capital hosted its outdoor bazaar, Phaeon had always stopped by, although he rarely had the gold to spare on novelties. It was bright and alive, merchants displaying their newest and most fascinating goods while musicians played in the road and the mingled smells from makeshift food stalls filled the air.

Here on the island, it was purely utilitarian. The wares were not exotic goods imported from the far reaches of the empire, but basic supplies: rolls of cloth and simple garments, herbs and flowers for cooking or healing, the rare fruits that grew on the opposite shore of the island, every variety of fish and crustacean found in the surrounding waters. These were sold not by professional merchants who sang out their offerings, but by anyone who bothered to haul a handmade table or blanket to the roadside to offer up whatever they had. And, of course, they traded only for what they needed, not for the sake of wealth.

By all appearances, it was a simpler, quieter gathering—but something about it made Phaeon tense with uncertainty. The crowd was suffused with the same strange, foreign air that infected everything on Isle Ezu; relatively small and quiet though it was, he couldn’t help but regard every passerby with suspicion.

During his first visit here, he’d managed to swallow his discomfort long enough to exchange a bucketful of tiny crabs for a few bundles of leafy greens and then fled. This time, though, he’d come at Azar’s urging, and the prince had insisted on accompanying him to see for himself how the islanders lived and traded. 

They stood on the slope of a nearby hill, watching the flow of people; Azar, so new to exploring the world outside the palace walls, asked to observe from a distance before plunging in. Silently, Phaeon hoped this would prove enough; some of the passersby on their way into the market shot them odd looks as they walked past, and it was making his heart hammer in his chest.

“It’s okay,” Azar said, pitching his voice low. It was a statement, not a question. “Nobody’s looking at us.”

“Some of them are,” Phaeon murmured.

“Take your hand off your sword, then. You’re the one who’s acting strange here.”

Phaeon had not realized his palm had come to rest on the pommel until that moment. Embarrassed, he dropped it and resumed his observations. Few people carried weapons here, he knew; if they did, it was because they meant to advertise their sword fighting services to potential clients. The dueling on Ezu was a pale imitation of the art as practiced in Sehmera; it was a warped parody of the nobility’s practices, taken to its pettiest and most absurd extreme—

“You are touching your sword again,” Azar intoned.

“I apologize.” He shook his head, clasping his hands behind his back to keep them occupied. “I’ll stop.”

“You don’t even want to go in,” Azar said, ignoring the apology, as he always did. “We could come back later, if it’s too busy for your tastes—but I think we’re likelier to blend in when it’s still this crowded.” He considered for a moment before adding, “If you can stop going for your sword, at least. You don’t have to carry it around all the time, you know.”

Though he would never feel comfortable roaming this faintly sinister place with no means to protect his prince—his former prince—Phaeon responded with a nod.

“We should go,” he said. “I’ll keep my hands off my sword. I promise.”

After shooting him a questioning look, Azar walked down the hill and slipped between two vendors to enter the throng.

The market occupied a curve of the road leading from the council chambers down to the ocean; this particular section of the street was not residential, but home to meeting halls, guilds’ offices, and storehouses. Few worked on the day of rest in Zuenos, so the buildings sat empty while vendors lined the streets and their prospective customers hauled whatever they intended to trade up and down the road.

This week, Azar and Phaeon had brought little with which to barter; Phaeon had managed to forage and fish only enough to feed the two of them recently. Though Azar had tried to help, his efforts were not enough to give them a comfortable surplus, and all he carried with him was a little pouch of the fragrant red flowers that grew just inland of their home. He’d been so happy to find a cluster of them, pluck off their petals, and leave them on a sunny rock to dry. Phaeon didn’t have the heart to tell him they were likely next to worthless, too common and limited in their applications for anyone to value them.

There was nothing here they needed, anyway. Azar seemed more enthusiastic about the notion of experiencing life on Isle Ezu than he was interested in acquiring anything here, and Phaeon was willing to humor him, despite his anxieties. They moved with the crowd, Azar’s attention darting between the stalls and blankets while Phaeon watched the people around them with unguarded suspicion.

Suddenly, Azar broke away and knelt before a young woman displaying a selection of folded clothes across a knit blanket. Phaeon followed and greeted the girl, who nodded in response.

“What would you like for this?” Azar asked, leaning in to touch one with a finger.

Phaeon narrowed his eyes down at the garment. It was a vivid red, dyed with the slightly poisonous berries that grew near the beaches. Most people on the island wore simple, undyed clothing, if they weren’t still wearing the clothes they’d had on their backs when they arrived.

Azar was, of course, accustomed to ornamentation—to being beautiful and accenting this beauty with jewels and brightly colored patterns, long hair worn loose around his shoulders. Not only would returning to this fashion flag him as an outsider, it was the surest way to mark him as being among the highest of nobles back in Sehmera.

“We’ve brought almost nothing to trade,” Phaeon said. The flowers Azar held probably weren’t worth the amount of fruit it had taken to produce the dye, much less the cloth and the labor of sewing and coloring it. This was a luxury good, and the two of them barely collected what they needed to survive.

“We could come back,” Azar replied. He ran his fingers over the cloth, tracing down the stitching along the hem. “What is this worth to you?”

The girl shrugged, stone-faced. “Nothing you could forage by the time I leave today.” After an appraising look at Azar, she added, “I don’t think this one would fit you, anyway. I’ll sew something for you, custom—but it’ll take at least a week, and I need a generous offer upfront. Not to mention compensation for my time if I have to take measurements and make a new design.”

Azar’s hands stilled; he sighed and let the fabric slip from his fingers. “Next week, maybe,” he said.“I’ll see what I can offer then.” He stood and glanced at Phaeon—not an imploring look, like he’d half-expected, but something more like determination—then thanked the girl before turning to continue.

A few steps beyond, Phaeon tilted his head to murmur, “Did you actually want that?”

“Probably not,” Azar said, not bothering to lower his voice. “If I find something valuable enough to meet her standards, I’d rather keep it for us. I just don’t know how to talk about these things. Without gold, how are we expected to know what anything’s worth?”

Phaeon did not answer. They walked without speaking, Azar’s attention returning to their surroundings. Soon, they passed a cluster of fishermen selling live fish—a young man waited behind them with a cleaver, a block of wood, and a bucket for blood and entrails—and came to a couple of Mesaanotis dressed in black, displaying herbs and multicolored bits of stone on a wide wooden table. To Phaeon’s horror, Azar stopped beside them and leaned in to assess the herbs.

“For wizards,” Phaeon murmured.

“Oh,” Azar said, stiffening where he stood. He glanced up at one of the Mesaanoti women and asked, “Are they?”

She let out a surprisingly deep laugh and shook her head. “Not a wizard, are you?” she asked, her baritone voice gently teasing. “Well, if you’re unskilled but interested in magic, I think the artificers’ guild has a table near the end of the road. But you’re always welcome to learn magic from us, of course.”

Azar breathed out a little sound that might have been a nervous laugh, and it reminded Phaeon of his duty.

“No, thank you,” he said firmly. He put a hand on Azar’s shoulder, beckoning him to leave, and whirled away. 

Heart pounding, Phaeon elbowed his way across the street. The island was crawling with wizards, he knew, but that didn’t mean he and Azar needed to interact with them more than necessary. He glanced back just long enough to ensure Azar still followed him before exiting the market.

After finding his way back to the hillside where they’d first stood to observe, Phaeon paused to catch his breath. Only then did he realize it was not Azar’s footsteps directly behind him, but a stranger’s—a stranger who was reaching a finger for his sword.

Phaeon spun around, grasping the hilt, but the stranger just cowered with his arms crossed over his face. He was so young, now that Phaeon looked at him—and he was Sehmeri, round-faced and dark-haired, in the same simple style of clothing that Azar wore now. Had Phaeon mistaken him for Azar all along?

“Please, sir,” the boy said, interrupting his rising panic.

“You can’t go around trying to touch people’s swords,” Phaeon said, fiercer than he meant. He squinted behind the boy, searching for Azar. When the child stayed there, cowering, he demanded, “What do you want from me?”

In a cracked voice, the child asked, “Would you champion for me?”

“No,” Phaeon said. “No, I don’t do that. You’ll have to ask somebody else.” Without another word, he pushed past the boy and reentered the street, swallowing his fear so it would not overwhelm him. Had Azar even followed him away from the wizards in the first place? Or had Phaeon abandoned him there—left him alone among all of these strangers, these Isle Ezu people who he did not trust or understand?

Either way, he could do nothing but move with the crowd, scanning every face for Azar’s. When he reached the dressmaker’s display again, he squatted to ask her urgently whether she’d seen him, but she just shrugged. He pressed on, approaching the wizards to boldly ask where he went, but the woman who had spoken to Azar said only that she saw him walk away.

From there he went to the end of the market, emerging near the water—no sign of Azar waiting there. He spun around and traced the street from its end to its mouth, pushing against the flow of bodies, scanning each face for Azar’s features. It guilted him thoroughly that he’d mistaken a peasant boy for his former prince; even with his hair shorn and his clothes plain, shouldn’t he recognize Azar’s unreal beauty, the grace of his movements?

Abruptly, he came again to the market’s opposite edge—but there, he found the hint of something happening, a buzz of excitement and anticipation that clashed against Phaeon’s fear. People were drifting westward, apparently drawn away to something outside the city center.

If Azar had left the market, he probably did so to explore the city, Phaeon reasoned; either way, he was better off expanding his search area than traveling circles up and down the same street. He tailed the others from a distance as they went west through the city and came to a plaza, joining with a growing crowd that formed an open circle. When Phaeon approached, he realized with shock that they were waiting to spectate a sword fight.

No—not a sword fight. Not quite. One of the men in the center of the circle held a war hammer. The fight had not begun, and he was warming up by swinging the hammer in long arcs while his opponent stood, sword in hand, and followed the movement of his opponent’s weapon with wide eyes.

Phaeon pulled his attention away from the spectacle and searched the edge of the group, but found no sign of Azar hovering nearby. The person next to him—a Mesaanoti of ambiguous gender—shot him a concerned look, their lips parting as if to ask him a question.

But Phaeon turned and hurried away. He didn’t want to speak with this strange person, he didn’t want to witness whatever excuse for a duel was about to begin, and he didn’t want to waste any more time.

He retraced his path, then climbed up the small hill behind the market and stared down at it. What would he accomplish by continuing to run in circles? To keep asking for help would only draw more attention to Azar, and he didn’t want anyone looking too closely at the prince’s face.

But what else could he do?

Either Azar had returned home—which he didn’t dare try to confirm, in case he wasted precious time on that desperate hope—or he was still in the city somewhere, alone and unprotected. Phaeon could keep running in useless circles, could keep following the curve of the market up and down until the last vendors packed up, could stand here and watch from above and wait.

Frozen by indecision, he defaulted to the final option. He waited on the hillside, one hand resting on his sword, watching.