can’t not help to try, especially when I’m asked.”
Wintsenay started to expostulate, to deny. He broke that off and looked down at the nice carpet someone of wealth had recently presented his master. Like the medallion, it was another expression of gratitude for another of the white wizard’s services.
“I’m sorry, master. He’s a good man, Ab is. Used to be so fat and strong and jolly all the time, you know. Now he looks like somebody’s huntin’ dog that’s been run hard for a solid week of nights. He sure needs and deserves somebody’s help.”
“You play tricks with me, sirrah Wintsenay, and so will you need somebody’s help. Now get your treacherous butt out of here and take the rest of that ugly corpus with it.”
Wints understood the first part well enough, and acted on it. He was setting his slow brain to the working out of the rest of his master’s meaning as he departed, touting at speed.
Strick sighed, shook his head, and slapped an inordinately big hand down on the fine cloth covering his desk: a large piece of deep blue velvet that trailed gold tassels on the side facing the visitors’ chair. After a moment he spoke, loudly but not shouting as before.
“Avneh?”
A girl in her teens bustled in, also in the distinctive blue of Croy:
Strick’s color. Former streetgirl, former hangerout at the low dive called Sly’s Place, former alcoholic, former aspiring whore. Now she was recep- tionist and devoted servant of the man who had rescued her. Servant, as in acolyte of a god. He called her niece and enforced her calling him “uncle” in self-defense: the grateful teenager had wanted to give herself to him in every way. She had also just outgrown one tunic ofCroyite blue and had to have a new one to accommodate her steadily plumpening body.