He managed to maintain a smooth face, but he felt his cheeks growing hot. There was only one way she could know pink ribbons had any special significance to him. Tylin had told her. It had to be. Burn him, women would talk about anything!
The arrival of the serving maid with their drink saved him from having to make any response. Jera was a smiling young woman with nearly as many curves as the singer, not so well displayed yet not really concealed by the white apron she wore tied snugly. Her dark woolen dress fit quite snugly, too. Not that he gave her more than a glance, of course. He was with his wife-to-be. Anyway, only a complete woolhead looked at a woman while with another.
Jera placed a tall pewter wine pitcher and two polished pewter cups on the table and handed a thick mug of ale to Selucia, then blinked in confusion when Selucia transferred the mug to Tuon and took a cup of wine in return. He handed her a silver penny to settle her discomposure, and she gave him a beaming smile with her curtsy before darting off to another call from the innkeeper. It was unlikely she received much in the way of silver.
“You could have smiled back at her, Toy,” Tuon said, holding the mug up for a sniff and wrinkling her nose. “She is very pretty. You were so stone-faced, you probably frightened her.” She took a sip, and her eyes widened in surprise. “This actually is quite good.”
Mat sighed and took a long swallow of dark wine that smelled faintly of flowers. In none of his memories, his own or those other men’s, could he recall having understood women. Oh, one or two things here and there, but never anywhere near completely.
Sipping her ale steadily—he was not about to tell her ale was taken in swallows, not sips: she might get herself drunk deliberately, just to experience a hell fully; he was not ready to put anything past her today. Or any day—taking sips between every sentence, the maddening little woman questioned him on customs. Telling her how to behave in a hell was easy enough. Keep to yourself, ask no questions, and sit with your back to a wall if you could and near to a door in case of a need to leave suddenly. Better not to go at all, but if you had to. . . . Yet she quickly passed on to courts and palaces, and got few answers there. He could have told her more of customs in the courts of Eharon or Shiota or a dozen other dead nations than in those of any nation that still lived. Scraps of how things were done in Caemlyn and Tear were all he really knew, and bits from Fal Dara, in Shienar. Well, that and Ebou Dar, but she already knew those ways.
“So you have traveled widely and been in other palaces than the Tarasin,” she said finally, and took the last bit of ale in her mug. He had not finished half his wine yet; he thought Selucia had not taken above two small swallows of hers. “But you are not nobly born, it seems. I thought you must not be.”
“That I am not,” he told her firmly. “Nobles. . . .” He trailed off, clearing his throat. He could hardly tell her nobles were fools with their noses so high in the air they could not see where they were stepping. She was who and what she was, after all.
Expressionless, Tuon studied him while pushing her empty mug to one side. Still studying, she flickered the fingers of her left hand over her shoulder, and Selucia clapped her own hands together loudly. Several of the other patrons looked at them in surprise. “You called yourself a gambler,” Tuon said, “and Master Merrilin named you the luckiest man in the world.”
Jera came running, and Selucia handed her the mug. “Another, quickly,” she commanded, though not in an unkindly way. Still, she had a regal manner to her. Jera dropped a hasty curtsy and scurried off again as though she had been shouted at.
“I have luck sometimes,” Mat said cautiously.
“Let’s see whether you have any today, Toy.” Tuon looked toward the table where the dice were rattling on the tabletop.
He could see no harm in it. It was a certainty he would win more than he lost, yet he thought it unlikely one of the merchants would pull a knife however much his luck was in. He had not noticed anyone carrying one of those long belt knives that everybody wore farther south. Standing, he offered Tuon his arm, and she rested her hand lightly on his wrist. Selucia left her wine on the table and stayed close to her mistress.
Two of the Altaran men, one lean and bald except for a dark fringe, the other round-faced above three chins, scowled when he asked whether a stranger might join the game, and the third, a graying, stocky fellow with a pendulous lower lip, went stiff as a fence post. The Taraboner woman was not so unfriendly.
“Of course, of course. Why not?” she said, her speech slightly slurred. Her face was flushed, and the smile she directed at him had a slackness about it. Apparently she was one of those with no head for wine. It seemed the locals wanted to keep her happy because the scowls vanished, though the graying man remained wooden-faced. Mat fetched chairs from a nearby table for himself and Tuon. Selucia chose to remain standing behind Tuon, which was just as well. Six people crowded the table.
Jera arrived to curtsy and proffer a refilled mug to Tuon with both hands and a murmured “My Lady,” and another serving woman, graying and nearly as stout as Mistress Heilin, replaced the wine pitcher on the gambler’s table. Smiling, the bald man filled the Taraboner’s cup to the brim. They wanted her happy and drunk. She drained half the cup and with a laugh wiped her lips delicately with a lace-edged handkerchief. Getting it back up her sleeve required two tries. She would come away with no good bargains this day.
Mat watched a little play and soon recognized the game. It used four dice rather than two, but without a doubt it was a version of Phi, Match, a game that had been popular for a thousand years before Artur Hawkwing began his rise. Small piles of silver admixed with a few gold coins lay in front of each of the players, and it was a silver mark that he laid in the middle of the table to buy the dice while the stout man was gathering his winnings from the last toss. He expected no trouble from merchants, but trouble was less likely if they lost silver rather than gold.
The lean man matched the wager, and Mat rattled the crimson dice in the pewter cup, then spun them out onto the table. They came to rest showing four fives. “Is that a winning toss?” Tuon asked.
“Not unless I match it,” Mat replied, scooping the dice back into the cup, “without tossing a fourteen or the Dark One’s eyes first.” The dice clattered in the cup, clattered across the table. Four fives. His luck was in, for sure. He slid one coin over in front of h
