Chapter 57

“Ah—perfect.”

Steam rolled. Roy leaned against the marble rim of the bath, bare to the waist, eyes closed, feigning sleep.

Mount Carbon was bitter with cold, yet coal and water were plenty, so the baths kept hours through the night. Smiths, guards, pit hands—after a hard day they came to soak, to wash the grit and sweat away, to unmake the day for a while.

It was broad daylight, eight or nine in the morning, and the great hall could hold a hundred men. Besides Roy, an outsider, only a few dwarves who’d finished the night shift lounged in the pools.

They wore towels. Most carried potbellies, thick arms, dense black chest hair. Take the faces away and they might have passed for apes. Roy’s skin was smooth, his fine hair barely visible, his complexion much paler than the weather-darkened dwarves around him.

That made them look. Roy wrapped his towel tighter and listened. Two dwarves opposite jabbed and whispered.

“Is that one a human? No chest hair, no handsome beard, not a hint of manliness ... ugly as sin.”

One of them preened the floating whiskers on his own chin and scoffed.

“Human men are all hairless chicks. No dwarf woman would look twice. But brothers, be wary; they keep coveting dwarf women, they’ll try anything.”

“Enough. Show some respect. You lot want a night in the cells? He is the High Elder’s guest.”

Roy felt a prickly oddness. He was no exotic aesthete. He would not be taken with a beardy, hulking dwarf woman in a hurry—unless she were a sorceress. He thought it through and grinned inwardly. The dwarves’ fear for their women seemed to be born of low birthrates, a notion that made children and strong-bodied dwarf women precious.