Just a few jackasses who’ve been away from their wives for too long.
She was practically starving, and though she didn’t want to stop at any campfire, it was the only way to get not only food, but information.
Liv picked a campfire with some kind-looking farmers huddled around a pot of stew. She couldn’t see everyone before she entered the circle, of course, but a few of them looked kind, and it was the best she could do.
“Good evening,” she said, a little more cheerily than she felt. “I’d give half a danar for some stew. You have any extra?”
Eight heads swiveled toward her. An older man spoke. “It’s a mite thin to call it a stew. One rabbit, a couple tubers, and the leavings of a javelina leg between nine mouths.” He smiled, self-effacing. “But Mori did find a grapefruit tree the soldiers missed somehow.”
Feeling reassured, Liv came closer. The man looked at her eyes, blinked, and said, “If you’re getting hassled, you should put on your spectacles, young lady.”
“Hassled? Why would you think that?” Liv asked. “And it’s Liv, thank you.”
“You look as skittish as a deer at a watering hole, that’s why.” He handed her a tin cup of broth with a few chunks. He waved off her attempt to pay him. She ate the thin stew and the small, underripe grapefruit they gave her, and mostly sat and watched.
After a time, the men returned to their talk of war and weather and crops they hadn’t bothered to plant this year, citrus trees they hadn’t bothered to prune because if they bore more fruit, it only meant the bandits would spend longer close to their village. They weren’t bad men. In fact, they seemed quite decent. They had their complaints about King Garadul, and one muttered darkly about a “Lord Omnichrome” before remembering that a drafter was present, but they reserved their hatred for their occupiers.
The nuances of the rotating rule of Garriston were lost on them. They didn’t differentiate between the better and worse occupiers. They hated them all. One had lost his daughter a number of years before when a patrol had passed through their village and an officer had simply taken her. He’d gone to Garriston afterward to try to find her, but never did. The others had come partly for their friend, partly because they had nothing else to do and taking a city might drop a few coins into their hands, and partly because they hated the outlanders.
And so men will die and kill for an offense ten years old, committed by some other country.
There was no point reasoning with them, even if Liv had cared to. Fools who could be our friends at some other time, her father had said. After she finished eating, she put on her yellow spectacles, drafted a few luxin torches that would last for a few days to thank them for the soup and the fruit, asked directions to where the drafters were camped, and then headed out.
No one bothered her on her way. Once a man called out to her as she passed, but the comment dried up on his lips as he saw her colored spectacles—even now, in the darkness, they respected drafters.
The drafters’ tents were separate from everyone else’s—not because they were guarded or staked off, but evidently no one wanted to camp too close to them. Liv slipped her spectacles off, but kept them in hand, in case someone challenged her.
She moved past a wagon surrounded by Mirrormen and painted all violet—odd, but she didn’t slow, she moved with purpose, as if she had orders. It was a trick she’d learned in the Chromeria. If you stood around, some full drafter would find something for you to do. If you looked busy, you could get away with almost anything.
She passed a number of fires with drafters being served a lavish dinner by cooks and wine or ales by a large number of slaves. The drafters all wore their colors on their wrists in either cloth or metal vambraces or in large bracelets for some of the women. The hem of their cloaks or dresses also echoed the color. Other than that, everyone wore his own style. In general, though, these drafters were much more interested in loudly proclaiming their colors in broad swathes across their clothes than was common at the Chromeria, where a woman might have a single green hairpin to let others know she was a green.
They were a raucous, privileged group, but as Liv watched from the shadows, she saw that the men and women here often glanced to the south—not to the huge pavilion guarded by drafters and Mirrormen alike that Liv assumed was King Garadul’s residence, but to another set of bonfires. She grabbed a pitcher of wine from one of the slaves’ tables and headed over. In the dark, her own apparel didn’t look too different from the slaves’.
What she saw, beyond the forms of the slaves, took her breath away. People—or monsters shaped like people—were talking, drinking, cavorting, drafting.