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The merchant, a roundfaced woman with ruddy cheeks, had a fat, pretty infant balanced on her hip.
“It’s our finest vintage,” she promised. “We keep it on hand special in the ice house. For the king, you know!”
He handed her a single gold stater, and she frowned in worry.
“We don’t have change for it, my lord. Would you have something smaller?”
“Please keep it,” Costis said hurriedly. “It’s a special occasion, and the coin was a gift.” A single gold coin had been enough to buy his uncle’s farm and all his sheep. Which he had then settled upon his sister Thalia as the most satisfying wedding gift he could have bestowed. And Eugenides had given him considerably more than a single coin: an elegant little inlaid ebony chest small enough to fit in one hand, but almost too heavy to carry. It made Costis very probably as rich as Erondites, and just the idea of it made his palms feel clammy.
The woman gasped, inadvertently squeezing the baby so hard it gave a disgruntled squeak in turn.
“At least let me give you a second bottle, then, sir,” she cried. “Pavel, run back to get two bottles of Agilan for this gentleman. Quick, double quick! And the blue glass, not the green!” A small boy of ten or so materialized from the back room and pelted off.
“Ah, are you off to a wedding then? Your own perhaps?” She beamed at him, sly and very willing, he could tell, to wish him health and luck.
“More an anniversary,” he admitted, with the strange mix of mortification and pride he often felt when his thoughts turned to Kamet.
“Ah! Then here, take this, too.” She held out a squat brown jug. “A dessert wine, just in from Brael. It’s called Vivas, have you ever had it? It’s spiced with cinnamon and ginger. For amativeness, I’m told.” She winked.
Knowing his ears had flushed pink, Costis coughed a little, and was mercifully saved from further conversation by the boy returning with two tall blue bottles. He’d only ever had wine in skins or clay jugs - just the bottles themselves would be princely gifts on their own. He stowed them carefully in his leather satchel, wrapping the icy bottles with the fineworked linen shirt his sister had made for him to wear at her ceremony.
“My thanks,” he managed, inclining his head, and rushed from the shop before she tried to press another bottle on him.
*
His next stop was at a storefront another street over. The sturdy whitewashed door was propped open to frame a little man standing at a table, working on something Costis couldn’t see.
“Spina!”
“My friend!” Spina, though quite elderly and stooped, sprang toward Costis to clap his shoulder. “I haven’t seen you since I was still sharpening swords in the Queen’s arsenal!”
“Aris told me you had your own shop now.”
“Indeed. Are you here for something for yourself, or only for hallooing?”
“I have a friend,” Costis said haltingly. Spina’s face brightened. “His eyes are very poor, but he is always reading, and I think it makes his head ache.”
“I have just the thing. Well, mayhap two things. Three things!” Spina danced away to a table with graduating rows of little riveted bits of metal. “Now, is he a fellow who can’t see at a distance? Or is it only near that frets him?”
Costis considered a moment. “Both, I think,” he said at last.
Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, Spina surveyed his wares.
“Take him… this one, and this one. Have him try them both, and send him to me directly if they aren’t quite right. If they are too strong, it could be as bad a headache as no lens at all, you see.”
“Thank you,” and Costis reached for his (absurdly heavy) purse. At least he had tucked it into his vest rather than hanging it from his belt like a lamb shank dangled for a wolf; Kamet would have been very insistent on that point, had he known at all about the gold.
Spina waved him away.
“Your money’s no good here, sweet boy. A King’s guard has no coin to spare for more than wine.”
“Spina,” Costis smiled. “I have a patron. And so do you, in fact. He sent me here when he heard you were giving these away.”
“Pah, I am only twiddling and if they are useful to some, that’s enough for me.”
When Spina had retired, the Queen had given him a handsome sum for his service. He had no wife or children, but was great friends with Petrus, and so helped fit patients at his hospital for spectacles, false legs, and metal hooks.
“The Queen did not give you all that money to have you end starving in the street,” Costis lectured. “There are costs to you: time, materials. You could take on an apprentice, even two. Surely some of the boys Petrus has been teaching at the hospital might be clever enough to follow you?”
“You are very forward thinking lad!” Spina grinned. “I have always liked that about you. And if the money’s not your own, well, there are few things I like better than the gleam of gold.”
Relieved, Costis stepped in out of the doorway and therefore out of sight of any passersby.
“From the king,” Costis intoned, stacking a little tower of coins in Spina’s knobby hand. It was not a lie; the money had come from Eugenides directly after all, and Costis had no doubt that if Eugenides heard anything about this enterprise from Petrus, the coins would be resupplied regularly with Costis having no hand in it.
“All the gods in heaven,” Spina breathed. “Wait now. I have something for you!” He dove out of the room and there was the sound of rummaging and drawers slamming. He returned with a long brass cylinder.
“Now, I made this to see Ionisa rise in the winter when she’s brightest in the sky - but it works by daylight, too!”
It was a very fine spyglass. Costis found himself quite moved.
“This is a lovely thing. Your metalwork is more famous than your glass! Aris will be quite jealous of me.”
“Then tell him I’ll have one of my new apprentices polish something up just for him.” They laughed together and Costis embraced him.
“You should bring that friend around, whether he needs a different lens or not. I’d like to see the pretty face that finally caught the eye of the Marble Prince.”
Face glowing like a furnace, Costis insisted, “It’s not like that!” While Aris hadn’t coined the nickname, he had delighted in teasing Costis about it. (“The handsomest man in Attolia, save Legarus of course. Stoic as carved stone, with no time now for maids!”)
“So, so, so,” Spina said with a placating pat to Costis’s cheek.
*
Later, much later, on a ship for Roa, rocking on the Ellid Sea, Costis shyly presented Kamet with his gifts.
“I thought we could have a toast. For luck,” he explained, as he unwrapped the fine blue bottles. “I am sorry I could not keep them chilled, but I am sure the wine will still be sweet.”
“Shesmegah above us, how did you come by two bottles of Agilan? Never mind--it is bad luck to throw white sand at a blue flame.” Dark eyes shining, he held out his tin mug expectantly as Costis broke the wax seal.
“The first time I actually ever spoke to the King,” Costis began, as he tipped the bottle into Kamet’s mug. “I had been awake all night and had eaten nothing that day. He served me this, crisp and sweet as morning on an Eddisian mountaintop. Unwatered,” he added with a rueful smile.
“A kinder style of interrogation than you’d have gotten from Relius,” Kamet pointed out. “And what then, did you confess?”
Flushing, Costis admitted, “I told him that he sat on the throne like a printer’s apprentice in a wineshop. In fact, I yelled at him. And the Queen heard me do it.”
Kamet paused, resting the rim of the mug against his plush lower lip.
“That must have been terrifying.”
“You have no idea.”
“Well then. To the King’s health,” Kamet said piously, clinking Costis’s mug with his own.
“To his health, and the Queen’s.”
He watched the line of Kamet’s throat for a long moment before hastily closing his eyes and taking a draft of his own wine. It still tasted like sunlight.
“I have something else. For you. I have a friend who makes these,” he said, and held out the two sets of spectacles, one with delicate brass legs, the other with a sturdier frame cast in silver. “I know that your eyes sometimes bother you.”
Kamet tilted his head, and reached out to run a fineboned forefinger along the browline of the silver spectacles.
“Do you know,” he said, looking up at Costis through his lashes, long and dark as a fawn’s, “If I had been wearing spectacles when we met in my master’s---in the Mede capital, I would have…” He trailed off, mouth pursed in thought.
“Called the guards on me?” Costis said, smiling.
“I would have run the other way,” Kamet sighed. “And none of this would have ever happened.”
“And… what has happened?” Costis asked cautiously.
“You stole me like Anet’s Chariot! We…We escaped the Namreen. You fought a lion! You sang so sweetly that women gave you water, more precious to them than rubies. We crossed over the mountains, you rescued all of us from slavers, you came back from the dead!” His eyes were huge now, earnest and warm. “And all to bring me to your King. And then when we finally arrived, only then did I realize--”
“I would have let you go,” Costis broke in hoarsely. “If I’d truly known you wished it.”
“If only I had understood at the time,” Kamet said, drawing both sets of spectacles out of Costis’s hand. “How much that I had not wished you to let me go.”
He set the spectacles on the table beside his now empty tin mug before reaching out to cup Costis’s jaw.
“Immakuk,” Costis whispered.
Nodding, Kamet murmured, “Ennikar.” And kissed him.
END