it is to be back in the city. I do love the holding in its own right, but it simply wasn’t built for the summer sun. Vincen will be… You remember Vincen? He’ll be seeing to the things we brought, if you could find someone to help him?”
“Yes, my lady. Your sons are, I believe, in the summer garden.”
“Sons?”
“Captain Barriath arrived some days ago,” the slave said.
“Jorey and Barriath in the same house. Well, that can’t have been pleasant.”
The door slave smiled.
“It is good to have you back, my lady.”
Clara patted the old man’s arm as she left the heat and warmth of their private square for the dim and cool of the mansion proper. She saw at once how things had slipped. The flowers in the hall vases were wilted. The floor had a layer of grit blown in by the wind and not yet washed away. The air was close and stuffy the way it got when the windows had stayed shut for too many days in a row. Jorey had been much too amiable with the house staff. Or else he was growing to be as oblivious as his dear father. Either way, something would have to be done.
She heard the boys’ voices before she reached the garden. Jorey’s voice was higher, shriller, more demanding. Barriath tended to spit his arguments as if they tasted bad. From the time Jorey had had words, the two had been like fire and rain to each other, but they were devoted to one another. Clara had had much the same relationship with her own sister. No one can harm her but me, and I shall destroy her. Love was so often like that.
At the steps down into the summer garden, she paused.
“Because it’s simplistic, that’s why,” Jorey said. “There’s a hundred things happening, and they all tie into each other. Now that there isn’t going to be a farmer’s council, are we facing another grain revolt? If Northcoast’s really on the edge of another round of succession wars, will Asterilhold be distracted from us? Are the new Hallskari ship designs going to mean more piracy in Estinport and less in Tauendak? You can’t take everything like that and press it down into one thing. The world’s more complex than that.”
“There are fewer choices than you believe, brother,” Barriath said. “You won’t find someone against the farmers and supporting Asterilhold. If you want one, you take the other. No family will forbid mixing races and also trade with Borja. The king isn’t like a sculptor with a fresh stone, able to make whatever he sees fit. He’s like a man walking into a sculptor’s yard picking from what’s already there.”
“And you think the prince is the only way he can show his favor?”
“The only one that matters,” Barriath said. “If his majesty gave every favor and grant he has to Daskellin, and sent Aster to be the ward of Maas, he’d still be saying that in the long term, the kingdom will be shaped by Maas’s vision. That’s why Issandrian-”
“But if the king-”
The two voices intertwined, neither boy listening to other, and the threads of their arguments tangled into a single ugly knot. Clara stepped out into the garden and put her hands on her hips in feigned accusation.
“If this is how you greet your poor mother, I should have fostered you both with wolves,” she said.
Her boys both grinned and came to embrace her. They were men now, strong-armed and smelling of musk and hair oil. It seemed like only the week before that she’d been able to take them in her arms. Then they started in again, talking over each other, only now the melee of words seemed to center on her and why she was there rather than the politics of the court. Clara beamed at them both and stepped down into the lush green and pale blooms of the summer garden. The fountain, at least, had been maintained, water splashing down the front of a contemplative if underdressed cast bronze Cinnae woman. Clara sat at the fountain’s lip and began pulling off her traveling jacket.
“Your father, poor thing, is gnawing his foot off back at home, and as a favor to him and myself, I have come to keep up some semblance of normalcy. This idiotic bickering has cost me the better part of the season already, and I simply must see dear Phelia.”
Jorey leaned against an ivied wall. Arms crossed and scowling, he looked like the image of his father. Barriath sat beside her and laughed.
“I have missed you. No other woman would call the first armed conflict on the streets of Camnipol in five generations idiotic bickering,” he said.
“I am just as sorry as anyone about what happened to dear Lord Faskellin,” Clara said, sharply. “But I defy you to call it anything besides idiotic.”
“Peace, Mother, peace,” Barriath said. “You’re quite right, of course. It’s only that no one else puts it that way.”
“Well, I can’t think why they don’t,” Clara said.
“Does Father know you’re going to call on Maas?” Jorey asked.
“He does, and before you start, I am to be guarded the whole time, so please don’t bother with the monster stories of Lord Maas and all the terrible thing he’s like to do to me.”
Her two boys looked at one another.
“Mother,” Jorey began, and she cut him off with a wave of her hand. She turned pointedly to her eldest son.
“I assume you’ve taken leave from the fleet, Barriath dear. How is poor Lord Skestinin and that painted shrew he had the poor judgment to marry?”
The streets of the city were full and busy. Carriage wheels clattered over the cobblestones. In the market, butchers sold meat and bakers, bread. Petty criminals scooped shit out of the alleys and off the pavement, guarded by swordsmen wearing the king’s colors if not precisely his livery. The cherry trees that lined the streets sported green fruit with real threats of red. Workmen hung out over the Division, repairing and maintaining the very bridges from which they were suspended. She had not thought it possible that a city could look as it had in better times, sound as it had, smell as it had, and still be bent double under the weight of fear. She had been wrong.
It showed in small things. Merchants too quick to laugh, altercations over precedence and right of way, and the stony expression common to everyone in the city when they thought no one was watching. Even the horses smelled something, their huge, liquid eyes a fraction too wide and their gait just barely skittish.
She’d chosen to take a sedan chair open on the sides with four bearers and Vincen Coe walking beside it. Something had happened to the poor man’s eye just before they’d left Osterling Fells, and the bruise had started to seep yellow and green down his cheek. He wore boiled leather studded with steel and both sword and dagger. It was more than a huntsman would sport, and with the recent injury, he looked quite thuggish.
The mansion of Feldin Maas shared a private courtyard with House Issandrian. Both gates were of the same gaudy ironwork, the houses themselves painted and adorned in such rich profusion they seemed designed by a cake maker gone mad. Curtin Issandrian, of course, was exiled just as her Dawson was, and he had taken all his family and servants with him. Her uncle Mylus had suffered a blow to the head when he was young and spent his life with half his face slack and empty. The square reminded Clara of him, all bustle and action on the left and empty as death on the right.
Phelia stood at the top of the front steps. Her dress was purple velvet with silver thread all along the sleeves and collar. It should have been beautiful on her. Clara gave her shawl to the footman and went up to Phelia. Her cousin took her hands and smiled tightly.
“Oh, Clara,” Phelia said. “I can’t say how much I’ve missed you. This has been the most awful year. Please, come in.”
Clara nodded to the door slave. It wasn’t the Dartinae woman she was used to seeing, but a severe-looking Jasuru man. He didn’t nod back. She stepped into the relative cool of the Maas front hall.
“Hey! Stop, you!”
Clara turned, surprised to be addressed in so curt a fashion, only to see that the comment had been directed at Vincen Coe. The Jasuru man was on his feet, his palm against Vincen’s chest. The huntsman had gone unnaturally still.
“He’s with me,” Clara said.
“No one goes in armed,” the door slave growled.
“You can wait here, Vincen.”
“All respect, my lady,” the huntsman said, his gaze still fastened to the Jasuru, “but no.”
Clara put a hand to her cheek. Phelia had gone pale, her hands flitting one way and another like birds.
