Though that raised a question that Daniel supposed he had to address sometime. “But say, Hogg,” he said. There was enough still to drink upstairs that his guests weren’t going to miss him—or the fresh bottle—for a minute longer. “I don’t mean to complain, but are there going to be questions raised about . . . ?”
He dipped his chin in what could be read as a gesture toward the brandy bottle.
“Oh, don’t worry yourself, sir,” Hogg said. He eyed the bottle with critical pride. “They’ll all be filled, resealed so’s the vineyard couldn’t tell, and put back neat as you please. The local slosh is plenty good for a jumped-up grocer like Admiral Lasowski anyhow.”
Daniel grimaced. He thought of saying something about the unopened bottle, but he decided that would be too much like refusing to kiss the girl good-bye in the morning.
“Ah, not to pry . . . ?” he said instead, prying. Compliance of the purser and stewards in something this blatant couldn’t simply have been bought.
“One of the stewards thought she could play poker,” said Hogg with a reminiscent smile. “She and her buddies fleeced me all the way out from Cinnabar in florin-limit games, they did. When we got here, I told them I’d gotten into my master’s private funds and could play for real money.”
Daniel snorted. “My private funds would just about stretch to a florin-limit game, that’s so,” he said.
“Ah, but they didn’t know,” Hogg said. “Take my word for it, sir: the best investment you can make is convincing some snooty bastard that he knows what really he don’t know. The stewards got the purser to back them with the big money, so that made things a good deal simpler.”
Oh, yes. A purser dipping into his ship’s accounts could spend the rest of his life on a prison asteroid. That was much more of a problem than questions about a dozen bottles of wine souring on a long voyage.
Daniel laughed loudly. He eyed the stairs, then said, “Go on ahead, Hogg. I’m going to wait a minute to let my head clear before I navigate my way up.”
Hogg bobbed again obsequiously and shuffled away on the narrow treads. The servant had probably drunk as much as any member of the dinner party, but he had a lifetime of training besides his barrel-shaped body with plenty of mass to stabilize the alcohol. Daniel drank like a naval officer, but Hogg drank like an admiral.
Two women came out of the landlord’s apartments, talking quickly in a local dialect. They were heavily muffled; in the darkness Daniel wasn’t sure whether they were sisters, nieces, or some combination. He walked farther into the courtyard so as not to be loitering at the door of the latrine.
Kostroma City had no street lighting, and the citizens shuttered their windows at night. The stars shone as bright as they did in Bantry, but they weren’t the stars of Daniel’s childhood. The “bird” flitting around the eaves tracked its prey by heat-sensitive pits in its snout, not echo location like its equivalent nightflyers on Cinnabar and Earth.
Even Kostroma’s seawater tasted strange on Daniel’s tongue. It was tinged with a different mixture of salts and less of them in total than the fluid that lapped the shore of Bantry.
Anger and Uncle Stacey’s stories had taken Daniel Leary far from home. Standing here in the night, though, he knew he’d found another home: the stars in all their wonderful profusion.
Adele nibbled through the dozen thin slices of meats and vegetables set before her on a wooden skewer with charred tips. The provisions merchant had listed the ingredients in a voice pitched to be heard by the aristocrat from a minor island seated across from him. If Adele heard correctly—gathering information was instinctive for her, both a blessing and a curse—one of the slices was “poisonous love-apple.”
She smiled despite herself. “Poisonous” would cover most of the love affairs she’d seen played out; though that was a subject of which she had only academic knowledge or interest.
They’d consumed twenty-two of the menu’s thirty dishes. Because Adele had never attended a Kostroman banquet before, she hadn’t realized each dish would be a separate course. At this rate it would be well after midnight before the gathering concluded.