Page 99 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

exchanging little-known facts with customers in between attending to the finer

details of business management. Her mother had drowned soon after their arrival
in the new city: This might have been an accident, but Eirini thought not. The
river Danube ran through her new city of residence, and her mother had often
said that if she could drown in any river in the world she wished for it to be the
Danube, a liquid road that would take her body to the Carpathians and onward
until it met the Iskar as it crossed the Balkan mountains, washing her and
washing her until she lost all scent of the life she’d lived. Then let the Iskar take

her to lie on beds of tiny white flowers in old, old glades, high up on the slopes.
Or if she stayed with the Danube, let it draw her along miles and miles of canals
to collect pine needles in the Black Forest. As many as her lap could hold . . .
Thinking of her mother’s words, Eirini the Fair had journeyed farther up the
river and given the ashes into its care. Arrivals from her father’s territory

frequented her bar and freely cursed the tyrant’s name as they told tales that
intrigued her. If what these people were saying was true, then the tyrant’s
drownings had come to an end. It was said that her father’s territory was mostly
underwater now, that there was no king, no flag, and no soldiers, that there were
only cities of the drowned, who looked as if they were having a good time down
there. Eirini the Fair heard that one of the only pieces of land yet to be
submerged was notable for having a large prison on it. The man who told Eirini

this paused for a moment before asking if he could buy her a drink, and she left
an even longer pause before accepting. He was handsome but the scent of his
cologne was one she very strongly associated with loan sharks. Even so, can’t
loan sharks also be caring boyfriends, or at the very least great in bed?
“Hi, excuse me, sorry for interrupting,” a glamorous newcomer said, as she
took a seat at the bar beside the probable loan shark. “Can we talk in private?”

—

ALL LOKUM wanted to know was what Eirini the Fair had taken with her when
she’d left the palace. Eirini had neither the time nor the inclination to provide a
list of articles to her father’s plaything. But Lokum rephrased her question to ask
if Eirini had taken anything of her father’s while leaving the palace, and then
Eirini remembered the key. Just a metal shape on his dressing table, bigger than

most keys she’d seen, but still small enough to pocket while she bade her father
farewell and hoped she’d managed to inconvenience him one last time.
—