“I’ve spent most of my day staring at corpses,” Naum remarked, seemingly out of the blue until Hastur realized he was addressing his earlier comment on the quality of his day. The reeve continued, “I’m glad I didn’t find more when I got here.”

He gave his cigarette a deft flick, knocking the lingering ash onto the tray near at hand and Hastur had to focus very hard on Branimir’s face rather than his long, graceful fingers. They were laced with faint scars, ghosts of old spells gone wrong, fights won and lost…

“Me too,” Hastur said and took a long, bracing drink of his ale. He needed something more to occupy his hands, though, so he got the serving girl’s attention again and after a brief pantomime across the increasingly busy barroom, got her to bring his pipe and tobacco from behind the counter where he’d left it before the fight.

He packed the bowl but soon found himself in the same position Naum had a minute before when he realized he didn’t have any matches on him after all. An idea occurred to him and, unable to repress a cheeky smile, leaned towards the reeve and arched his brow in silent question.

Branimir shot him a flat look, but after a moment, sighed and obliged, lighting a fingertip and holding it over the bowl of Hastur’s pipe to light the tobacco while the man took a few slow, steady pulls to get it started.

When he was confident it wouldn’t go out immediately, Hastur sat back with a satisfied sound and leisurely rolled the smoke over his palate then blew it back out again in a perfect ring. “Real nice, that. No matchy aftertaste,” he observed, intrigued by Naum’s magical flame.

The reeve shot him a look that bordered the quizzical then huffed a laugh in spite of himself. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

Hastur grinned around the bit of his pipe. “Light many pipes for folks?”

“I have not,” Naum answered and Hastur found himself unaccountably pleased.

“Color me honored, then.”

“I’d rather you color yourself honest,” the reeve said seriously and met Hastur’s gaze again, sharp eyes searching the other man’s face. “You’ve cornered that little crew of miscreants into needing you, haven’t you?”

Hastur snorted and smoke poured out his nostrils like a dragon. “What are you, their mother?” When the reeve didn’t reply, Hastur continued, “Could be I did, but its not like I fed them the fool idea of holding this place to ransom in the first place— that’s on someone else. I just took advantage of the opportunity when it came round.”

Naum narrowed his eyes fractionally over the rim of his tankard. “And what opportunity is that?”

“You’re pretty, Branimir, but not so pretty I’d forget you’re a reeve,” Hastur pointed out “Now drink your ale and quit trying to make me incriminate myself.”

~~~

Hastur flirted with an ease Naum had never mastered and his unexpected compliment sent him rigid in his seat. The other man followed up with a lopsided smile that was disarming in its innocuous charm and Naum felt the back of his neck start to go hot so he averted his eyes as quickly as he could manage without looking affected. He masked his embarrassment behind a cloud of cigarette smoke while they sat in silence for a time.

Plenty of people tried to flirt with and otherwise grab Naum’s attention but it was a rare thing indeed for the reeve to be affected by the attention. He’d thought it before when the man had first invited him for drinks back at the watch house, but Hastur was a dangerous man— just not in the ways Naum was accustomed to.

Well, from what he’d seen of his fight against the gang today, he was dangerous in the traditional ways as well, but Naum knew how to handle that. What he didn’t know how to handle was how the man’s easygoing charm managed to get under his guard and threaten the reeve’s objectivity. It was clear Hastur was building up a gang of his own— an illegal activity the reeve really should put a stop to, though the would-be gangster had managed to tiptoe around Naum’s obligations by not openly admitting to anything.

Then again, this was Ashtown. Even if Hastur had just come out and said he planned to start a gang, there wasn’t a lot Naum could have done about it. The law only held sway in the neighborhood for so long as the gangs that ran the place allowed it to— or if the duke decided to send in the Red Guard and a small army of the City Watch to back it up.

Greenhorn watchmen often went on about how the gangs of Ashtown should be brought to heel by the strong arm of the law— Naum had been one of them when he’d first become a reeve. Age and experience had shown him just how foolish a dream that was, however, and now he was left as another cog in the system trying to do what good he could only to lie awake nights wondering if he wasn’t doing more harm than good. He followed the letter of the law but the older he got the less he felt like the practical application of the law and his own moral compass aligned.

Naum put down his tankard and pushed it away from him. He didn’t drink often and now he remembered why.

“Those new friends of yours were likely trying to work their way into White Street’s good graces,” Naum remarked.

“Know much about the current scene with the gangs?” Hastur asked, tone conversational while he watched Naum with his black eyes.

He’d seen those same eyes in a few faces over the years, and while the inability to distinguish their pupil was as unnerving as always, Hastur’s inspired an extra strange little fluttering sensation behind the reeve’s breastbone.

“I know enough,” Naum said and swept his gaze across the other patrons in the barroom around them. “I know that, contrary to my title, their words are the law in Ashtown, no matter how much the watch claims otherwise.”

“Pragmatic of you. You don’t seem terribly upset by it,” Hastur remarked, seeming intrigued by Naum’s apparent ambivalence.

The reeve sighed in spite of himself and stubbed out his cigarette in the tray. “Age has simply made me a realist. If you could snap your fingers and arrest every gang member here tomorrow, Ashtown would collapse and the people would probably all starve. Like it or not, the gangs are the only thing keeping the people here afloat— even a sinking ship is better than no ship at all,” he said bitterly.

When Naum looked at Hastur again, the man was wearing a thoroughly inscrutable expression the reeve couldn’t make heads or tails of. Regardless, Naum knew the ale had made him too honest and now he regretted opening his mouth at all. He should have known better.

~~~

“I should go,” Naum said and Hastur blinked at the suddenness of it.

“Stay,” Hastur tried to insist, “have another round,” but Naum shook his head and got to his feet, brow furrowed, eyes dark.

“No,” the reeve insisted, but hesitated just long enough to say, “Thank you for the… for the drink,” before he turned on heel and walked away without looking back, same as he had when Hastur had invited him for a drink in the first place.

Hastur watched him go, disappointed to see him leave so soon, but intrigued by the nature of their conversation all the same. He’d never known any reeves on a personal basis in the past, and Mikey had stayed clear as well, but it seemed to Hastur that Naum Branimir had more doubts about the nature of his job than most men in his position.

“Your handsome friend leave already?” the serving girl asked when she returned to refill his tankard.

Pulled from his reverie, Hastur looked up at the woman. She was in her mid-twenties with big, expressive gray eyes, long chestnut hair, and impressive curves. Elya, he recalled, a niece or some-such of Prishka’s that worked evenings in the barroom. He’d bumped into her upstairs coming out of a variety of different rooms since he’d started staying there, so he suspected she was doing a little extra work on the side, but he’d let well enough alone considering it wasn’t any of his business.

“Yeah,” he replied and took a drink of his fresh tankard. “Better places to be than here,” he mused a little, intending to come off wry but sounding more wistful than anything.

Elya smiled, a little wistful herself as she stared in the direction of the door the reeve had left through. “He certainly seemed quite the gentleman— you don’t see his type south of the wall often, that’s for sure.”

Hastur tapped the bowl of his pipe out onto the ashtray by his hand and sighed. “You don’t see his type much of anywhere, believe me.”