Royal Airs Read Online Free Page A

commented. “Can’t imagine you could walk more than five feet on that sprain.”
    Her lips tightened. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
    He shrugged. “My offer is still open. You can have my room.” When she instantly looked suspicious, he added, “I’m not going to ravish you. I’ve never been interested in the very young and very unwilling.”
    “Glad to hear it,” she said tartly. “You’d be surprised at the number of men who are.”
    “Not surprised,” he said. “I’m just not one of them.”
    “I think I’d rather sit here,” she said. “At least until J— At least until my sister comes.”
    On the words, his food arrived, smelling delicious. Samson had a questionable moral code, but he was an excellent cook. “Still hungry?” Rafe asked the girl. “Want anything else to drink?”
    “Just water, if I could. Thank you.”
    Silence fell between them while Rafe dug into the meat pie. He was hungrier than he’d thought. Or it had been a longer night than he’d anticipated. Or both.
    Cora was the one to speak first. “So I’ve been wondering what kind of man you are,” she said idly. “Coru? Maybe sweela. Definitely not hunti.”
    “Somebody else recognized me as coru tonight,” he said.
    “So what are your blessings?”
    He was too tired to lie, so he gave her the truth. “I don’t have any.”
    “What? Why not? Everybody has blessings.”
    “I don’t.”
    She narrowed her eyes and thought that over. “Well, even if your parents didn’t pick blessings for you like they should have, nothing’s stopping you from pulling your own blessings now,” she said. “How old are you?”
    He laughed. “Twenty-seven. How old are you ?”
    “Seventeen,” she said impatiently. Older than he’d thought, but still ungodly young. She didn’t waste time getting to her main point. “This would be an excellent year for you to pull your blessings. Twenty-seven is a very propitious number, because it’s nine threes! It might have been better when you were sixteen or twenty-four, because eights are even better than threes. Maybe you could wait till you’re thirty-two.”
    Rafe had grown up in the country, where people had a healthy respect for all the superstitions of Welchin life—the elemental affiliations, the random blessings, the powerful numbers of three and five and eight. But they weren’t as fanatical about the traditions as the people in Chialto were. They did believe that newborns should receive their own random blessings within five hours of birth, but out on the farms it was sometimes hard to find the three requisite strangers and a nearby temple. They often made do with friends and whatever collection of coins they could scrape up amongst themselves.
    He found it amusing that—with all the other topics that should be weighing on her mind—Cora was worried about Rafe and his lack of blessings. So he was laughing at her when he replied, “Maybe I’ll do that.”
    “Of course, you shouldn’t pull them yourself,” she said. “Ask strangers. Or ask me . I’d go with you right now, if there was a temple nearby. And if I could walk.”
    He toyed with his empty glass of beer, feeling strangely sober all of a sudden. “I did that, actually. A couple of times. Can’t remember how old I was, so maybe it wasn’t one of the propitious years, but I went to a temple and had strangers pull coins for me.”
    “See? You do have blessings. What were they?”
    He lifted his eyes to meet her interested gaze. “Ghost coins. All of them.”
    She sank back against the bench, surveying him with narrowed eyes. “That almost seems impossible,” she said.
    “Seems like a stupid thing to lie about.”
    “You said you did it a couple of times.”
    He nodded. “Same thing happened. Ghost coins. Every one.”
    There were dozens of temples all around Welce, some big, some small, some full of incense and rich woven rugs, others austere and chilly. What they had in common were five