Niyol made a face, because despite himself the realities of hiring a whore for his sister was still extraordinarily distasteful. "I don't know exactly what she's looking for, and I don't want to know," he said, "but I figure anyone getting paid won't do anything she doesn't like and won't try to stick around." Because that was the real trouble, romance meant ineligible matches, meant marrying men she shouldn't, meant getting knocked up by some lowlife who thought it was his ticket to the good life.

    He looked to where she pointed at the end of the bar, then rolled his eyes, groaned in an exaggerated show of horror. "The bulky side, she says. And the desert's on the warm side, too." He scratched at the stubble already dotting his jaw, reached into his suit to find his pipe. Cheaper way to smoke than cigarettes, an easier way to use the tobacco they grew at home, yet another small indicator of just how spoiled rotten he was. He looked both thoughtful and irritated as he struck a match against his bolo tie, much closer to the expression he'd had when the woman had first hailed him.

    He was probably not going to be able to throw that man out any windows. He hated him on principle. Mai would adore him.

    With a sigh of smoke, he turned that smile back on, pointed at her with his pipe. "I'm going to trust you," he said, "on account of I have a weakness for extraordinarily beautiful women, of which I hope you will not take advantage." He drew on his pipe again, and tried not to think about his sister trying to climb some kind of aryan man-mountain.

    Ugh.

    But he brightened when she offered her hand, took it in a hand soft enough that it was hard to believe he even braided his own hair. "Pleasure to meet you, Vegas," he said, clearly basking in her admiration. "I'm Niyol – that's Niyol. Not Neil." He stressed that last part, because it was not a misstatement he was willing to overlook, no matter how pretty the face.

    Niyol turned his head toward his sister, raised a hand to wave her over. «Mai,» he called, switching languages, «get over here, hurry it up.»

    She practically leapt out of her seat, though her excitement was borne mostly out of boredom. Sitting alone in a whorehouse wasn't actually terribly interesting, no matter how many bracelets she had to fidget with, no matter how many of them were actually puzzles around her wrists. At least one of them she had managed to twist into an uncomfortable configuration, and she was trying to set it to rights as she joined her brother where he stood. «What's going on?»

    «I got you a present,» he said flatly, gesturing to the man in question without enthusiasm. «Will he do?»

    She looked at him, then back to her brother, brow furrowing slightly. «Do for what?» She looked back to the tall blonde, then to the woman behind the counter, and then felt very, very silly. "Oh! Oh." Her eyes went as round as her mouth, and she immediately tried to cover her surprise in a cough.

    Obviously he was a whore. They were in a whorehouse. They were in a whorehouse looking for a whore. But somehow she hadn't imagined this plan ever actually coming even close to working, somehow she hadn't imagined whores looking like that. She found herself utterly unprepared for the reality of what she had mostly agreed to as a way of getting off the reservation for once.

    «He looks like he should be wearing a cape,» she managed finally. «Or a badge. Or getting a kitten out of a tree.» These conceptions were mostly based on things she'd seen men doing on the covers of very questionably written literature.

    «He looks like he's going to give you smallpox and then steal your shit,» Niyol snorted. «So he'll do, then? Please say yes, I would like to get this over with as soon as possible.»

    «Will he actually… does he really want to…» She'd thought that he'd end up finding some waifish doll of a man, someone sickly or strange who'd interest her not at all. And instead he found… a man. A very attractive man. An extremely attractive man. The most attractive man she had ever seen, what the hell did a person even do with a man who was obviously twenty feet tall and–

    «If it mattered what he wanted he wouldn't be a whore,» Niyol said with a roll of his eyes. He hit the brim of her bowler hat with his pipe so it fell down over her eyes, and she huffed indignantly as she set it back to rights. "My sister likes you," he told Anders, summarizing the conversation. "What is the fact that she likes you going to cost me?"

    Mai looked over to the apparent bartender, one hand still on her hat, blinking in surprise. Niyol was the one who made the deals, so he usually acted as her intermediary if there was something she wanted - or something someone wanted from her. She'd had horror stories drilled into her head, besides, about how outside Dinétah they ate rats and drank paint thinner. But if she was going to be doing... with someone who looked like...

    She was going to need a drink.

    "Do you have tequila?" she asked, before recalling that Niyol was holding all the barter goods. She glanced down to her bracelets, but she knew not everyone traded in trinkets. Still, a lady might be more inclined than a ruthlessly practical nomad, so it might be an option. She tugged a thin line of plain silver from one of her wrists and set it on the counter, checking that Niyol wasn't looking. She'd not have him undermining her authority by pointing out her trade was terrible, if it was. She'd rather seem frivolous than stupid, even if they usually went hand in hand.

    He really wanted to punch him.

    He wouldn't. But he'd think about it, as if by doing so Alder would somehow wind up punching himself through sheer force of will.

    Arranging for payment after the exchange of goods was a good way to get conned. It wasn't something he did for livestock or oil, and it sure as hell wasn't something he'd do for his sister. «He's trying to play us,» he said over his shoulder.

    «It sounds like a good deal to me,» she said, peering around her brother's back.

    «That's the point, it sounds like a good deal until it's over and done and he decides what he wants is enough oil to swim in.»

    «That doesn't sound enforceable,» she giggled. «Agree to the terms, Niyol,» she said, in a pleading tone, as if she were trying to coax him instead of giving him an order. Niyol's jaw went stiff, practically grinding his teeth as he realized he was going to have to agree to less-than-ideal terms.

    The fact that the man was going to be with his sister was bad enough without adding a bad deal on top of it.

    Mai was already looking back to the bartender, shiny silver gears turning in her head. "Can I get some of that whiskey, too?" she amended. "I'll pay for the both of us."

    "That... sounds great," Niyol lied, while his sister inexplicably tried to ingratiate herself with a man whose affections were being purchased regardless. "We have a-"

    Hastily throwing back her shot, Mai interrupted Niyol by pushing him away from the bar counter so he was no longer standing between her and Alder, a feat she managed mostly thanks to the element of surprise and a lower center of gravity. She held out a hand through the newly vacated space, face flush with liquor and nervous anticipation. "Hi," she said breathlessly, "I'm Mai. Niyol didn't tell me your name?"

    Mai tried, and failed, to stifle a bout of nervous giggles as he kissed her hand. Logically, this was the furthest thing from romantic. But logical wasn't the word for eyes like that, for a smile that set her stomach all to fluttering and shot lightning up her spine. Such a lovely change of pace, compared to men who couldn't even be bothered to pretend, not even a little and not even for a moment.

    It wasn't asking that much, really, to wish that they'd pretend. Her brother's bafflement puzzled her so much, when he should have known better than anyone how much a person could appreciate being lied to.

    "Pleasure to meet you, Alder," she said, all wide smiles and glee. It faltered on his name, because though she did not have much of an accent, her instinct with his name was to go too short on the last syllable, to gloss over the vowel. Just the slightest bit off, but she could tell and it irritated her. She might have been able to get the hang of it, but standing around saying his name repeatedly seemed unbelievably awkward. More awkward, rather.

    Biting down on her lower lip as he went to make their arrangement official, she realized she'd been twisting her left braid around her fingers. Ordinarily she fidgeted with her bracelets, but her subconscious seemed to make some kind of distinction between idle and anxious fidgeting. She took his arm as soon as it was offered, and it took her two steps to match his every one.

    That nervous giggling escaped her again at his question; his curiosity made it feel less staged, less arranged. A real question, asked by a real person. "Where I live…" Oh, but this was going to be very difficult to explain for any number of reasons, and only some of them were cultural. "Dinétah has all sorts of eligible men," she said, "but I don't much care for them, and I have a hunch they don't really like me either."

    A little sad to have to let him go, she held her dress as she sat to keep it from sliding higher on her legs. "There may have been a – slight – misunderstanding. On the part of my clan. Regarding some meetings I was having with men that would been very, ah, not allowed. If that was why I'd been meeting them. But I wasn't." It seemed a bit silly to want to make certain a gigolo didn't think she'd been sleeping with scavengers. "So they got it in their heads that I'd gone some kind of man-crazy, and when trying to get me safe and married didn't work, my brother thought. Well. He thought he'd get it out of my system with a man he could pay to leave after."

    She rubbed her hands over her cheeks, as if she could somehow cool them with her fingers after this lengthy and embarrassing confession. "I could have just explained how they were wrong, but at first I thought they'd give up after too long, and then when my brother had this idea… I don't get to go out much. Niyol, he goes whoring all the time, but when a woman leaves the reservation it's a whole thing so having an excuse was. Being able to have Niyol take care of all the arrangements to go out, normally he'd never. I wasn't actually planning to – bilagáana aren't – this whole plan has sort of gone all sideways on account of you're pretty." She ducked her face downward in such a way that she could hide it behind the rim of her bowler, disguising a look as if she were flinching away from the literal death by mortification that surely approached.

    This was going to wind up costing them a fortune. Not least because all it would take was a sob story, the slightest hint of desperation, and his sheltered little sister would be absolutely beside herself to give him anything she could.

    Irritating. The metaphorical blank check itched at him like an open sore, and he considered going back out to where the warriors assigned to guard them were waiting. More than he got when he left Dinétah alone, and in those cases they usually came along for fun as much as protection. These ones were all business, because outsiders couldn't be trusted with women unless they had knives to their throats. Not that he was planning to call the whole thing off just yet, but it might be a good idea to warn them in advance if he thought someone was trying to take more than he was owed. They had a zero tolerance policy about that kind of shit, these days.

    Closing his eyes for a moment, he took a deep breath, let the air move through him and chase away the stiff irritation of his limbs. That lazy smile returned as he stuck the pipe back between his teeth, took a long drag this time. "Well I could go for a drink," he declared to Vegas, moving closer to the bar so he could lean against it again. "How about I have some of whatever's your favorite?" he suggested, and he could only hope she did not have a particular taste for rotgut. He probably ought to have been saving his goods for whatever Mai's new pet would be charging, but he felt a petty desire to treat himself as a response to her behavior.