“Or maybe he doesn’t like seafood,” one of the oldsters told her. “You might try washing it out after you use it all night.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like girls.”

“You do like girls, don’t you, Malden?”

“Don’t you like me?”

“Learn some manners!” Elody shrieked. “Mirain, fetch him some wine. Gerta—you get some pillows together, make him a pile to lie on. The rest of you go finish putting your faces on, it’s only an hour till we open. You don’t get paid for fawning over our boy! Malden, Malden, it’s good to clap eyes on you. How you’ve grown. Come in, come in!”

Elody was a madam who knew more of hospitality than any ostler. After all, she’d been entertaining men all her life. She let him take her plump arm and directed him into the courtyard garden that gave the house its name. A single withered lemon tree swayed there over piles of freshly strewn rushes. It was here the tupenny whores entertained their clients—the penny trulls (called penny uprights, sometimes) never bothered to lie down. In the rooms above, which had curtains instead of doors, wealthier clients might be entertained by girls who advertised themselves as virgins (unlikely) or by their varied specialties, which ranged a wide gamut.

Malden was led beneath the tree and provided with a bed of cushions and a cup of mulled wine. It wasn’t very good, but he pretended to sip at it to appease his hostess. She smiled and saw to his every need and asked a million little questions about his life since leaving this place that had once been his mother’s house. These questions he answered only vaguely, or with outright lies—Elody knew perfectly well how he earned his living, and wasn’t asking for real information anyway.

He imagined he could have found this same reception in any brothel between the Golden Slope and the city walls. One of his jobs when his mother had still been alive was to run errands back and forth between the various houses of prostitution, and he learned early on that whores had three special talents other women lacked: one was the obvious, but another, less widely advertised, was that they took care of their own. They had to—even by the liberal standards of the Free City of Ness, a working woman was on the absolute bottom rung of the societal ladder. If they had problems, they turned to one another to solve them, because no decent citizen would ever stoop to aid a whore. The children of whores were treated like royalty among their number—because outside the walls of the brothel, they would be treated worse than livestock.