Janu burst out laughing. Every time he came close to stopping, he caught another look of the Khunuchanian’s forlorn face and began anew. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was that his proposal was so damned absurd. Only when his sides hurt so much that his wine threatened to make a second appearance did he finally force himself to calm down and take a few deep breaths.

‘I take it,’ the man said, ‘that that means no?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Janu still couldn’t keep a chuckle out of his voice. ‘I value my hide too much to attempt to kidnap royalty. That alone would be too much, but a dragon as well?’ He shook his head. ‘You’re out of your mind. If you want to study the bond so badly, pick any other dragon. Pick any other rider. Find some poor girl, dress her up as the princess and sneak her in in her place – that would probably have a greater chance of success. But this path you have chosen? Madness. Pure madness.’

For a few moments the man sat stock still, and Janu worried he had deeply offended him. But then he inclined his head. ‘My employer is set on this dragon, I’m afraid.’ A lump moved in his throat. Fear of his employer’s wrath or sadness that he couldn’t accomplish his mission? ‘I understand the risks, though, and I can see why you wouldn’t want to take this on. Can you recommend anyone who will?’

‘No one is that mad,’ he said, shaking his head. Then he corrected himself. ‘No one halfway competent is that mad. If your employer is so set on it, they can send their own people. I look forward to hearing about their spectacular failure.’

‘It would be quite spectacular indeed.’ The man’s voice had a dark edge to it. Janu stiffened, but when he rose, he did so with his hands far from his dagger and his shoulders hunched. ‘If you do change your mind, please let the innkeeper know. She knows how to contact me.’

‘Don’t wait on it.’

The man paused by the door, opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it and left. Janu listened to his footsteps receding, the buzz of good wine and laughter fogging his mind, the scale of what he had just been asked to do striking a bizarre point of clarity into it.

Shaking his head, he gathered up his belongings and wandered downstairs, wishing the innkeeper goodnight as he handed back the cups.

Tonight was a good night. When he stepped outside, a cool, fresh breeze ruffled his hair and he strolled through the dark streets towards his house in the masons’ quarter. Candlelight flickered here and there through the shutters of a window, and the stars shone bright above him. He wished he had arrived earlier in the day, when the markets were still trading, so he could have bought gifts for his nieces and nephews. He had only picked up a few sweets in Avesh. With any luck it would tide them over for a while.

He smiled when he rounded the corner onto his street. There was his familiar house, its three hand-painted storeys. He had painted much of the ground-floor walls himself as a child, and the charm of the memory almost made up for his shoddy artwork.

Then his smile faded.

‘Janu!’ A shape detached from the shadows around the walls and his sister ran up to him, her skirts gathered in her hands, her sandals slapping against the cobbles. She rushed into his arms and squeezed him tight, then drew back. Tears glistened on her cheeks, but her face was tight with anger. When she spoke again, her voice was hoarse and scratchy.

‘I argued with him all I could,’ she said. ‘He would hear nothing of it.’

Janu took hold of her shoulders, frowning. ‘Nothing of what? What happened?’

‘The landlord’ – she drew a deep, shuddering breath – ‘has thrown us out.’

Rage boiled along his arms and into his heart, as if transferring from his sister’s body to his. He peered into the shadows behind her, making out the taller form of her husband and four smaller shapes that must have been his nieces and nephews clustered around his legs.

‘Why?’

She inclined her head, twisting her lips. ‘So that his brother can move in. They move a family out for that, hey? What eunuchs. We had no warning. We have taken what we can, but we have nowhere to go.’

Janu fixed his rage on the light shining through the shutters. ‘He’s in there now?’

‘Both of them.’ She nodded.

Pulling a good handful of coins from one of his pouches, Janu pressed them into her hands and said, ‘Take your husband and children to The Siren Tree Inn in the central district. Tell them I sent you, and book a good room for you all for the night. Save the rest of the money in case you need it.’

‘He still has most of our furniture. Our food. We took what we could, but—’

‘The food is replaceable.’ He squinted again at the shadows, trying to work out if that haphazard stack of shapes was the furniture they could scrounge. He thought he saw the flick of a mule’s ear. ‘Take whatever you have with you. If it won’t fit in the room, the innkeeper might be willing to store them in the basement for now. Now go. Let me deal with that bastard.’

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

‘Be careful, Jun-Jun. Do not push him too far.’

Without another word, he patted her shoulder and stalked towards his house. His dagger burned at his hip. When laughter spilled from one of the upstairs windows, his hand flew to the hilt. He itched to draw it. Instead, as he drew near to the entrance and the concerned face of his brother-in-law, he detached the dagger in its sheath from his belt and passed it over.

His brother-in-law eyed the dagger, then shrugged. ‘You can still beat the shit out of him if you need to.’

Janu slipped through the door. A few scattered pieces of furniture remained in the entrance hall – there the bench his father had carved, there the rug his mother had woven and sworn over when she got the pattern wrong, there the tiled floor that he had laid by hand, piece by coloured piece. The door to the courtyard stood open, and the garden his grandmother had planted and nurtured in her final years waved at him in the grip of the wind.

Floorboards creaked above him. He made for the stairs. Outside, the clatter of hooves and iron-shod cart wheels heralded his family’s departure. Whether prompted by this or something else, glasses clinked. Janu wished he had the height of the man from Khunuchan, or Galnai – she actually had more muscle on her. Gods, maybe he should have fetched Galnai and Fraidun for this. But no, he had to be diplomatic here. He would only get his house back within the lines of the law.

On reaching the top of the stairs he found his landlord and a younger man sat at the living-room table – a piece his father and grandfather had worked on together. He blinked until the rage abided and his eyes could focus, by which time both men had their attention on him.

‘Mister Mannit,’ his landlord began with a half-smile resting on his face that Janu would have loved to punch off. ‘I understand you have been away for business. You must not be caught up with—’

‘I’ve been caught up.’

After a pause, his landlord spread his hands. ‘Then I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re doing here.’

‘Nor I you,’ Janu said. ‘Per the terms of our tenancy, and per the law in this quarter, I require a month’s notice and the opportunity to buy the property upon termination of contract. I have received neither of these, and yet my family is on the street.’

‘Oh.’ Both the landlord and his son chuckled, and it was all Janu could do not to lunge for his throat. ‘Oh dear, then I’m afraid you haven’t entirely caught up on new developments. The empire issued an edict last week that limits those laws to tenants who are also Harat-Lavician citizens. As an Aveshi, that rules you out.’

A hot lump rose in Janu’s throat. ‘The children were born here.’

‘To parents who were themselves not citizens, yes. If the location of one’s birth determined one’s citizenship, every man in the empire would be rolling his wife over the border to push out wailing infants. Besides which, is the contract in the children’s name? No. It is in yours.’

‘But I’m an imperial citizen, the same as you.’

The man’s smile soured. ‘We are not the same, and the empire’s reluctant outer kingdoms are not equal to its core provinces. In all your time here, you would only need have done some service to Harat to be granted full citizenship. Your failure to do this simple act is your own problem.’

Janu could have thrown up in that moment. His insides churned like a hive of angry bees. It’s not fair, the voice from his childhood came back to him – the small voice made quieter by war and change after change, day after day. It’s not fair. Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes. He forced them to go to further.

‘I have the money,’ Janu said. ‘I can buy it off you, right now.’

‘You didn’t have enough last time.’

‘I have enough now.’

‘And yet I forget,’ said the landlord. ‘Non-citizens can no longer own property. Per the edict, you see.’

Silence stretched between them for a few long moments. By the pain in his fingertips, Janu realised he had curled his hands into tight fists. He made a conscious effort to loosen them.

‘How much would I have to pay for you to overlook that?’ he asked. It was a stupid move. His landlord could very well take the bribe and report him to the empire the next day, if they even managed to get the paperwork through. Maybe he could forge citizenship. Maybe he could bribe an official. There had to be something.

His landlord placed a hand on his breast, though the bitter smile never left his face. ‘I admire your commitment. But this isn’t a matter of payment, you see?’ He placed a hand on the other man’s shoulder. ‘My son is getting married next week. He needs a place to live.’

And his father owned some dozen houses, but of course his son needed this one. ‘How much would it cost for him to buy a house that my family hasn’t already lived in for three generations? A nice new one.’

The man leaned back and regarded Janu. An appraising light flickered behind his eyes – a look that Janu recognised all too well. The look of a man working out how much money he could make from a situation.

‘Well, my son,’ he said, though he didn’t turn to look at him. ‘I have seen some rather lovely new villas in the palace quarter...’

Janu’s heart thudded in his chest. He didn’t care what it cost, so long as he got the house back. ‘How much?’

‘About fifty bezin, from what I have heard. Do you have that much to hand?’

Fifty bezin, the highest unit of currency in the empire. It was over half a government official’s salary, over twice the price his landlord had last given him, and would swallow the entirety of his life savings without quite being enough. He did some mental arithmetic with his latest payment. Ten bezin short. Two more jobs and he would have it, but their jobs came so infrequently that that could take two or more years.

Janu spoke slowly, not quite trusting his tongue. ‘I can give you forty now. If you add the additional ten to buy the home, treat that as a loan to me. I’ll pay it back, I swear on the bones of this house. Treat this place as collateral.’

His landlord rapped his fingers against the table, considering the offer. Janu wanted to haul him across it and yell at him to stop touching his family’s furniture.

At last he said, ‘Very well. Your family can move back in. I will accept loan payments in lieu of your usual rent and consider the house yours when it is fully paid. However’ – he raised a finger – ‘don’t consider me overgenerous. I won’t wait forever to have back what is mine. You have one year. If you haven’t paid the full ten bezin of your loan by then, this house is mine.’

Shit. But what else was there for it? ‘I accept.’