The Long Road Back: A Jarthen-centric Interquel (pt. 9)

Turned out his ma weren’t the only family Nossi had in the Haven, and it also turned out that Nossi was probably the worst person to be stuck there with considering my preference fer fading into the background. You got to remember that as far as I knew, Nossi was just some young pirate on the Sinn, right? Just some fella with a bit of magick who seemed to have more than his fair share of luck, which I’d thought meant he’d by and large not had to deal with the rougher stuff himself and held a rosier view of the life than the life warranted. Turned out this weren’t quite the case. See, Nossi, he came from a long line of pirate stock and he knew the ins and outs of the life better than anyone else I’ve ever met. And folks in the know about the life knew who he was, too. They knew that he had ties with some of the big Felin fleets through his pa and that those ties lingered even after his pa was cut down years and years ago. And they knew that he had an in with the tethers through his ma, and apparently, the tethers all know each other. I’d thought tethers were little more than whores (though I’d never have uttered a word about that to Nossi) but that’s not really the case. Well, they’re sort of like whores, I guess, but from what I can tell they do as much work outside the captain’s cabin as they do in it. They keep tabs on everything, and just as important, they let folks keep tabs on them. A good famous tether can take a no-name captain and get him a fleet of his own within a year. Seen it happen.

Anyway, it got clearer and clearer to me during that week just why Muladah was keeping Nossi around. As far as contacts went you couldn’t find anyone much better than him and Nossi was doing his damnedest to make a name fer himself on his own terms and saw Muladah as a way to do it. And his terms were loud ones. He took to dragging me to the dark, cramped taverns on Rum Row night after night. During the day, he slept late and traded gossip with the bartender of our inn (who, I found out about halfway through our stay, was his older brother born when his ma was tethered to one of the big T’Langan fleet runners. I can’t say which shocked me more, that the two of them were related given how different they looked or that his brother was actually charging him fer the room), and as soon as night fell, he was dragging me to the back rooms of the bars just as the card games were starting to pick up. He insisted that I’d be a natural at cards given how good I was at chess and that ‘tween the two of us we could fleece anyone and everyone.
“Nossi, I don’t know nothing about cards,” said I that first night he pushed me into a chair. We were at some bar run by a cousin of his. By and large the only spots that would let a hustler like him inside were ones he had ties to, but his luck was such that those spots were the ones the where the really high-stakes games happened.

“C’mon, they got cards in Elothnin. I thought you said you spent time in Susselfen.”

“I did.”

“Well, then, I’m sure you know more than you think you do. Susselfenners are geniuses with a deck, they even give me a run for my money.”

“Well,” I said, watching him deal out the cards, “I’m sure that’s so but I pretty much stuck to the elves while I was there.” He grinned at me. “Not like that.”

“Sure, sure. But, you know, it’s the red elves that are the worst hustlers. So -- ”

“Well, the ones I spent time with weren’t gamblers.”

“Shakhar every soldier’s a gambler at heart. Every war’s a game.”

That struck me as the sort of thing one who’d never been on the front lines would say. But I could see there was no way of getting through to him, so I let him do his best to explain the ins and outs of a couple of different types of poker to me and followed along as best I could. And then, he got to the heart of the matter. He cast a quick look at the door and leaned in close. “Now, if you got a hand like that, a winning hand, tap your cards. Just a little tap and I’ll bluff the rest and flush them out. And if you see me tap mine, you do the bluffing, right?”

“What?”

“I mean, everyone knows I’m half gold here and they all know what that means, and the good ones block me. But that don’t mean half the card sharks out here aren’t just the same as me, you know? And the ones that are, they get lazy and play by magick more than by skill, so you’ll be brilliant with them. And I got the skill to cover us both, got it?”

“Oh, Nossi, no, I’m no cheater.”

He frowned at me and leaned back again. “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. And if I were you, I’d watch language like that out here. And for the record, the only one that’ll count that as cheating in a place like this is you.”

“A’right, sorry. But I still think you ought to find someone else.”

“Nah, you’ll do fine. Besides, I’m stuck with you.”

I was having a helluva time keeping all those rules straight and I doubted this. But I resolved to give it my best shot. After about half an hour, his cousin escorted a tall, thin woman into the room. She was dark all over – her skin was a deep, rich shade of brown and her hair was jet black – with eyes like a tinker. She was dressed like a T’Langan and carried herself with their sort of arrogance, but she reminded me a lot of Moshel. It’s a strange thing, I know that, seeing as how he was all elf and a bookish sort that I doubt would ever have stepped foot in a place like that, but she was sharp-featured and clever-looking and quiet in that odd way he had that always made me remember he was around rather than overlook him.

Nossi grinned when she sat down. “Well, well. What are you doing all the way out here? Thought you said you were sticking to the archipelago.”

Any mention of the archipelago pricked up my ears. I looked up, caught her staring at me and looked away again. But I kept listening, in case she was a way back to the Rebels. She asked him who I was in the patois and he told her I was nobody worth knowing. “Yes, I heard the Sinn was crawling with ones too young and stupid to be worth knowing,” she said. Her Common was accented, the words sort of clipped and stretched.

Nossi laughed and shuffled the cards. “Yeah, well, I heard that a certain someone bit off more than she could chew with the Rahksa fleet and cut ties with her T’Langan half. Too bad you don’t really know who the tink half is, eh?”

“I’m not the only mix out there, it could have been anyone.”

“Yeah, well you’re the only one out there named -- ”

“Faliah,” said she, a little more loudly than necessary.

Nossi raised his eyebrows and shrugged, shuffling the cards in some ridiculously showy and elaborate way. Who he was showing off fer is anyone’s guess since the girl clearly had her mind on other things and I’d made it obvious I could’ve cared less ‘bout such things. “Oh. Huh. Strange, you look just like a girl I knew back in the day.”

“I get that a lot. You, what’s your name?” she said, pointing at me.

I let out a nervous laugh and held out my hand. “Jarthen. Er, Shakhar. He calls me Shakhar.”

She glanced at my hand hovering there across the table like it was a rat edging a bit too close to her food. “What do you call yourself?”

I pulled my hand back. “Nothing that ought to matter to you. He’s right, I’m no one important.”
She glanced up at me, her face still and blank at first, then a bit perplexed and irritated. She frowned and looked at Nossi, who just laughed and patted me on the back. “Attaboy, Shakhar.”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing. You want to play a hand of Thrali Bann while we’re waiting for a fourth, Faliah?”

“What’s Thrali Bann?” I asked.

He smiled a little wider. “An old T’Langan game.”

Faliah crossed her arms and kicked her boots up on the table, pointedly looking away. “I don’t know any T’Langan games.”

“Sure you don’t. My mistake. Say, you looking for a crew? The Sinn’s restocking since we lost the dead weight.”

“If I wanted to be on a ship, that’s where I’d be.”

Nossi looked up. “You sticking on the isles?” She shrugged. “Well, for the right price I’m sure I could find you a position.” She pulled out a knife and started cleaning her fingernails. Nossi laughed and leaned across the table. “Hide it all you want but I felt you get all curious and hopeful. Leave word with Chalivva back at the Black and Gold and I’ll get you squared away if you got the goods.”

She flicked her eyes over at him and Nossi frowned and rolled his eyes. “I have to check. Considering.”

“Folks like Shakhar get by just fine without. Just ‘cause you got it don’t mean you got to use it, especially when you know you’re talking to someone as honest and upstanding as me.”

“Given how honest and upstanding you were with your last captain -- ”

“That’s no reflection of how I am in the games, you know that.”

She nodded and went back to cleaning her fingernails. “Duly noted.”

After a bit, Nossi’s cousin appeared with a Felin fella trailing along behind her. Nossi looked him over and nodded and he sat down at the table. I darted forward and pointed out that given the way everyone seemed to know what he’d been up to that perhaps Felin fellas weren’t the sort he ought to be playing with. He smiled and whispered back that unless I had summat more than a hunch I ought to pipe down and trust him.

“But, Nossi -- ”

“You keep your mind on the cards and I’ll take care of the rest.”

I sighed and pulled away again, pretending not to notice the way that dark girl and that Felin fella were eyeing me. They kept right on eyeing me the entire night, too, through hand after hand of cards. I have to confess that although I did try and keep my head in the game I weren’t much of a player. I couldn’t keep the rules straight to save my life. Sometimes I lucked into a hand now and again and managed to win it, but more than once I thought I’d had a winning hand and it turned out that I didn’t or I thought I had a useless one and it turned out it was a helluva lot stronger than I’d guessed. And as the night dragged on and on, Nossi got snappish and irritable as all hell. But once we were heading back to the Black and Gold and he was picking through his meager hand of winnings, he was his usual self again. I apologized fer my sorrowful performance but he just shrugged and said not to take anything he’d done over the course of things personal and that he was sure I would get better with practice. Then, he asked me if Faliah had gotten to me at all.

I laughed and stared out at the empty street. Dawn was starting to break and the pirates had all stumbled off to wherever they slept before we’d come stumbling out of the bar. “Aye, a bit. I can’t say nothing fer you, but months and months on a ship with all that male company made her look awful good to me.”

“What?”

I laughed a little more. Such talk don’t come easy to me. “She’s mean as a snake and those clothes weren’t doing her no favors, but hell, she was pretty enough.”

Nossi smirked at me and shook his head. “That wasn’t what I was asking.”

“Oh.”

“Though that does explain some things. For the record, one like her isn’t going to be won over by you throwing hands. She likes a challenge.”

Like I said, he gave me far too much credit. I hadn’t thrown any hands. Not on purpose, anyway. “What were you asking about?”

“She’s a shaper. She reads folks, she can spot a liar a mile away. Ever been read by a shaper?” I shook my head. Though, it turns out maybe I had been looking back and just didn’t know it. But at the time I’d never heard of them before. “Feels like burning when they do it, like pins and needles stabbing at your throat.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It is. And she was trying to read you all night. I take it she didn’t get very far, given how bad-tempered she was getting towards the end there.” He shot me a sheepish, apologetic sort of look and let out a small, quiet laugh. “Speaking of, I am sorry about that back there. She can hide it, I can’t. And me and her go way back, she knows I can’t play right if I’m all annoyed like that and she didn’t block me. In any case, I wasn’t mad at you, she was mad at you and it sort of bleeds over, right? It’s the magick.”

“Oh.” I thought about that fer a moment, how odd and distracting it would be to have everyone’s mood forever washing over you like that. And how uncomfortable he made whatever she could do sound. “All that magick, it strikes me as more trouble than it’s worth.”

“It’s got it’s place. Just like you’ve got yours. Let’s get some sleep.”