Point of Knives by Melissa Scott Page A

I don’t trust her.”
    “Why not?” Eslingen paused, but there was no good way to say it. “Plenty of the points take fees, and are still good for their word.”
    “My own chief among them,” Rathe said. “Yes, I know. And Mirremay stays bought, or always has. It’s just—she’s too much like her great-grandmother for my comfort, that’s all.”
    And are you like your great-grandmother? Eslingen wondered. He himself had never known his mother, had been left to his father’s raising and the streets and horse barns of Esling, and left there as soon as he was old enough to beg a place in one of the mercenary companies that passed through the city. But Rathe was southriver born and bred, a child of Astreiant, and Eslingen knew nothing at all of the man’s family. He opened his mouth to ask, then closed it again, unaccountably shy. He could still hear Rathe’s pronouncement on Old Steen, a motherless man but no worse than many, and though he’d heard worse, he had no real desire to see even pity in Rathe’s eyes. He didn’t know Rathe’s stars, either, not even his solar sign, but that was a question even more intimate, and he reached for the wine instead, refilling their glasses.
    “The thing is, I can’t see how Mirremay would use the coin,” Rathe said. “If she had it, I mean. Yes, she spent a huge sum to buy the post, but this is gold she can’t use.”
    “Could she change it through a fence?” Eslingen asked. “Or in the Court of the Thirty-Two Knives?”
    Rathe shook his head. “I don’t see how. Not so much of it, not at anything close to its worth.”
    “And Caiazzo can use it on the caravan roads at near its value,” Eslingen said. “But Mirremay—presumably she doesn’t have any foreign ventures?”
    “Not that I know of,” Rathe said, “and I think I’d’ve heard. And that leaves politics.” He shook his head. “I’ll have to talk to her, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.”
    “I assume you mean ‘we’ have to talk to her,” Eslingen said.
    “Oh, yes,” Rathe said. “I’m not going into Point of Knives on my own.”
    One of the bower’s younger servants arrived then with a basket of kindling and a taper, and Eslingen nodded for him to build up the fire in the brazier. He ordered another pint of wine as well, and looked at Rathe.
    “Of course I’ll come with you, and if your sanction extends so far, I’ll even go armed.”
    Rathe nodded.
    “In the meantime, though—” Eslingen gestured to the tent’s painted walls. Outside, the crowd had grown, and a pair of fiddlers was tuning, ready to start the dancing as the great sun set. “There’s nothing we can do about it tonight. Let’s enjoy what we have.”
    For a moment, he thought Rathe was going to refuse, but then the pointsman reached for his wine. “You’re right. We should enjoy this—”
    He bit off the rest of his words, but Eslingen knew perfectly well what they would have been: we should enjoy this while we can. And that, at least, was something he knew how to manage. He set himself to be at his most charming, light gossip and jokes without bite that had Rathe rolling his eyes even as he grinned.
    He kept up the nonsense through the two removes of the meal, feeling Rathe’s mood ease and rise, and when there was nothing left but crumb from the gingercakes, he reached for Rathe’s hand, turning it to kiss the callused palm as though he were in fact the gentleman he pretended.
    Rathe caught him by the chin instead, pulling his head up to fix him with an almost angry stare. “Don’t play-act.”
    Eslingen blinked, startled, but answered with reflexive honestly. “I’m not. I don’t, not—” Not when it matters, he had been going to say, but—that was not a thing said between winter-lovers. “Not now,” he finished, and wasn’t sure that wasn’t worse.
    Rathe glared at him, the gray eyes narrowed, and Eslingen leaned in to kiss him, hard and fierce. There was an instant’s