vegetable patch. She looked up and Lucian pointed to the other side of the stream. ‘Now.’
Phaedra stood, brushed the dirt from her hands and dress, and walked towards him. Kasabian followed and Lucian stared at him with irritation.
‘Mont,’ the man called out. ‘Can we ask …?’
‘No,’ Lucian said. ‘No grain. We hardly have enough for ourselves. I can’t promise you anything.’
The man shook his head.
‘No, lad –’
‘And I’m not a lad,’ Lucian snarled. ‘I’m the leader of the Monts.’
Kasabian took a moment to think and then nodded. ‘Then you are just the person I need to speak to. As the leader of your people, could you please ask your lads to refrain from stomping through our vegetable patches?’
Lucian looked over Phaedra’s shoulder to where a woman joined the sister, Cora, and bent beside her to work.
Kasabian’s eyes were stony. ‘And could you ask your lads to refrain from relieving themselves in the stream? It’s your stream, I know, but it is also a stream used by our women. We mean no disrespect because it is probably not an insult to do so in front of your Lumateran women, but to have men relieve themselves in front of a Charynite woman is an insult for us. Your lads frighten our women, Mont leader. All I ask is that you speak to them.’
The man’s voice was soft, much in the way of Rafuel’s. Maybe it was a weapon to speak in such a way. All his life, Lucian had never heard his father raise his voice. He didn’t have to.
And because Lucian was shamed, he walked away.
Chapter 9
Froi spent the morning with the kitchen staff, who were a chatty lot. They were accepting of his presence amongst them and he enjoyed their company, perched up on a stool watching.
‘If you weren’t a lastborn, you’d be one of us,’ a pretty girl with a wicked chuckle told him. She grabbed one of his cheeks with two fingers. ‘Nothing special about this face, eh?’
‘Face don’t need to be special,’ another joked. ‘What’s between his legs has to work its magic.’
There was more laughing as they kneaded the dough and hammered at the cheese. Two of the servants walked in with a side of salty bacon on their shoulders.
‘The King must be the most grateful man in the world to have such food served to him,’ Froi said. He had been in the palace for three days and was no closer to working out where the King was hidden.
‘Oh, we don’t cook for the King,’ the pretty girl said, popping a piece of pork on Froi’s plate. He was enjoying not having to share his food with anyone and wolfed it down, hungrily.
‘He has his man for that,’ an older woman said, ‘and I thank the gods every night of my life, I do. Imagine if something got into his food. Bad enough that we were almost blamed for what happened to Princess Useless.’
‘Someone tried to poison her?’ Froi asked.
‘You’d think that if someone was going to try, they’d get it right,’ another muttered.
It wasn’t that Froi found it strange that someone would try to kill the Princess, but that the servants spoke about it so openly without fear of retribution.
‘Do you ever see the King?’ he asked, wiping his plate clean with a piece of flatbread
‘Saw him last day of weeping. He doesn’t come down to the main hall no more. They say he’s mistrustful of just about everyone. Except Bestiano.’
Froi closed his eyes a moment, wanting to get the image of Bestiano in the Princess’s chamber out of his head. Suddenly the food he had consumed churned in his stomach.
‘You’re pale, lad,’ the older woman said, pushing him along to make room for the grain sacks.
He waved off her concern. ‘Does no one here refer to it as her birthday?’ he asked.
They all stopped working a moment to look at him.
‘It was the day we wept,’ the cook said coldly. ‘Don’t know how you feel about it in the provinces, but here in the Citavita, it’s the day of weeping.’
Birthdays were the greatest of celebrations in Lumatere. Froi would know. He had never had one, but everyone else drove him insane with suggestions about what to buy the Queen or Finnikin or Lord August. He knew that here in Charyn the day of weeping had some other kind of political importance, however.
The portcullis had been raised more than once that day to let in a parade of livestock and wooden casks containing the best wine in the region. The pretty servant girl explained that the Provincari visited each year for the day of weeping and the King wanted them to be impressed by what the Citavita had to offer the week after next.
‘Always thought it would be over by the time she came of age,’ the cook said quietly. ‘Work that magic between your legs, lad, or there’ll be no Charyn to speak of one day.’
On his way back up the tower to his chamber, Froi found Gargarin stooped on the narrow stairwell, his body pressed against the wall. When Gargarin heard his footsteps, he stumbled to his feet, sweat bathing his brow. Only then did Froi notice the blood seeping through his shirt.
‘Who did this to you?’ Froi demanded, trying to hold him upright in the narrow space. ‘Was it Bestiano?’
He kept a step above Gargarin to accommodate them both. When they reached the second level, Froi placed his head under the man’s shoulders and walked him up to their room. Once inside, Gargarin hobbled to his bed, trying to shuffle through the contents of his pack with one hand while the other held the wound. ‘It’s nothing. A scratch,’ Gargarin said, his voice weak.
Froi ignored him and forced Gargarin to sit. Slowly Froi peeled the shirt from where the source of the wound seemed to be. He looked up at Gargarin in disbelief. ‘You don’t seem the type to provoke dagger attacks.’
Gargarin fumbled through the items in the pack, but Froi pushed aside his hands and reached for a piece of flannel. He went to the water pitcher, dampened the rag and began to clean the wound.
‘Something tells me you’ve done this before, Olivier of Sebastabol.’
‘Who me?’ Froi murmured, trying to see how deep the wound was. Gargarin flinched.
‘Get up,’ Froi ordered. Gargarin obeyed. He was in too much pain not to. Froi removed the sheet from the bed and began to tear strips from it. He ordered Gargarin to sit and began to wind it around his midriff.
‘It’s not so deep,’ Froi said.
Gargarin didn’t respond.
Froi waited for an explanation, but there was none.
‘Tell me who did this,’ Froi said.
As though nothing had occurred, Gargarin shuffled to the desk and sat down. He untied the ribbon around his manuscript and bent his head to study the pages.
A dismissal. Froi walked to the desk and sat on Gargarin’s work, refusing to move.
‘What?’ Gargarin snapped, after a moment.
‘You have a wound,’ Froi said, his voice incredulous. ‘Is it such a common occurrence that someone attempted to murder you?’
‘Someone’s always attempting to murder someone in Charyn,’ Gargarin muttered. ‘And if you don’t get off my sketches, you’ll be next.’
Froi stood and retrieved Gargarin’s pages, but instead of handing them back, he studied them.
‘You draw ditches?’ he asked.
He read the word
He stopped himself from commenting. He couldn’t let on to Gargarin that Olivier of Sebastabol knew anything about the land even though Froi was a farmer at heart. More importantly, he didn’t want to have anything in common with this man, except for the chamber they shared.
Froi flicked through the rest. ‘Is that a garderobe for the palace? You don’t think the King’s eighteen advisors are happy enough shitting into the gravina?’
Gargarin laughed. It was short, but sincere. ‘There has to be a better way in the Citavita than throwing sewage out on the street to be swept down into the gravina,’ he said.
