99

"A taskmaster's battery!" you say, clapping your hands with an eagerness you scarcely feel. "Brilliant, it's been ages! My old schoolmaster used to give me tests and weep when he saw my answers—because of how their quality and refinement reflected on his tutelage, I'm sure."

"A peasant from Ruffino's coastal span," Lord Bisqueath says, ignoring you, "is like infected by th'unwholesome wind that blows fishmonger's boats in stinking blasts. Canst smell the scales and guts yet on this fool?"

There's a ripple of dark laughter as he makes a show of sniffing in your direction and gagging at the imagined pong. At least, you assume it's imagined, taking a clandestine whiff of yourself.

You try to press through with a smile. "The dockyards were not my prim'ry haunt—"

"O no? Then where, more wholesome, did you carry on with lusty sailors and fishmongers' wives? Atop a table in the pub, perhaps?"

A Sour Mood