“Show your mark.”
Direena reluctantly turned her wrist and slid her glove down. Wishing the darkness of the dockside bar would hide the hated thing.
“What’s that one?”
Direena looked at her own wrist in surprise. Her lifemark outline was such a part of her world that she couldn’t imagine not recognizing it. “A brick oven with flames inside. I’m a baker.” That last word tasted like old sawdust on her tongue. It had appeared upon her wrist the moment she’d chosen her lifemark a year ago today on the first day of her maturity as an adult.
“Baker? New one on me,” the big man grunted barely louder than the dozens of other conversations that seemed to shake the ancient dust from the rafters with equal measures of laughter and curses. Had she been half a step farther away, she’d not have heard him. Someone had pointed him out as the boss of the wagon train she’d seen loading in the port, but she hadn’t heard his name in the ruckus.
Heavy clay mugs of brew thumped onto the bar. Laughter as someone missed the target completely in a game of knives—his blade sticking hard in the battered old wood of the wall near a man too soused to notice.
“Got me a cook already. Don’t need a baker. Sorry, lass.”
“I don’t need one either. My mother did.”
His attention left her as one of the bartenders walked by. She was everything Direena wasn’t: long-limbed, well-curved beneath the soft blue burden-beast leather corset, with a long flow of curling black hair. Her skin, the rich caramel of a well-baked crusty loaf, marked her as coming from the Sotor Kingdom though her eyes said perhaps even Werroon. They were a rarity in Cantel, so Direena couldn’t be sure. All that mattered was that she was beautiful, exotic, and sensual. And a knowing smile promised she knew many secrets.
Direena clasped his wrist with a baker’s strength.
The man turned back to her, then tugged once, twice. Not as if trying to shake her off, more as if to test her strength. Whatever he found, he grunted thoughtfully, then pulled his wrist free. But he didn’t shove her off the stool she’d scooted onto beside him, nor did he stand and walk away with his drink. He was a big man, perhaps a few turns of the seasons older than her but she’d asked around carefully and been told that he was already a wagon train boss. Hard to imagine in one so young, but what did she know of waggoneers.
He waved to the barwoman and held up a finger, then pointed at her.
“A half,” she called out then explained more quietly when he arched his eyebrows at her. “I get drunk on a full-measure brew. Unless you were trying to get me soused. I don’t want to wake aboard a ship standing out to sea while you’re pocketing the finder’s fee.” Did such things actually happen? She’d always thought them to be tall tales told to disobedient children. They’d never been told to her.
He snorted. “At your size, not half surprised you don’t drink much. Can’t say as I’ve never done that, but those I did it to earned their long voyage fair and square.”
She could only stare at him in shock. Had she really just asked to sign on with a man who would do such a thing. This was so wrong that—
He burst out laughing. “Oh, you should see your face, baker. You should see your face.”
The heat rushed to it—hard and fast, scorching her cheeks.
“Besides, you’re not irritating me, lass, I just got no use for a baker.”
The barwoman slid a half mug onto the battered wood before her. Then leaned on the counter offering both her and the waggoneer deep views down her cleavage.
“I’d claw out the lifemark if I could,” Direena whispered mostly to herself after the first sip did little to clear the taste of bile from her throat or heat from her face.
The woman quirked a half smile. “I watch once as a man try that.” Her accent was as exotic as she was, deep, throaty, and a little rough. “Drunk as the Great Queen’s Fool, he took cleaver and hacked it off about here.” She chopped her hand hard enough across Direena’s upper forearm to surprise her into jerking her hand back. “I tie his arm off and burn the end of it proper. Good thing he is drunk when I do this. And he leaves a nasty slice in my bar,” she pointed toward the far end.
Direena did her best to stop the instinctual flinch at the imagined pain. She’d earned herself enough burns on the hot stones of Mother’s baking ovens to guess the feeling. To show she wasn’t shocked by that either, she concentrated on lifting her mug and sipping the smooth brew as normally as she could manage while trying not to think about the stench of seared flesh. The temperature was just the proper coolness against the warmth of the evening and the heat of the bodies packed into the bar. The brewer had chosen the proper lifemark. She sniffed the air; her cook however hadn’t done so well as the seared meat wasn’t only in her imagination.
The closer a lifemark was to a person’s nature, the more powerful the synergy. Making the choice could vastly enhance one’s natural skills in a chosen craft.
The waggoneer laughed. “Tonsin was a useless fool before he did that. Chose a lifemark too far from his soul, to spite his father of all nonsense. Afterwards he was a useless fool with one less hand. Driving a train takes two strong hands and more of a mind than the Great Queen or any of the gods blessed him with.”
She’d done the opposite, selecting exactly what Mother expected and regretting it every day since.
