the family’s star on the rise—would change the story people told about her. And changing
It was as profound a gift as a young man could offer the woman he loved.
“Jorey, dear,” she said, “weren’t you saying that Bynal followed horses? I’m sure he’d be interested in the bay mare that your father brought from the holding.”
“I don’t… That’s to say…” Jorey pressed his lips together until the color was all driven out from them. “Yes, Mother.” When the boys had gone, Clara sat across from the girl. She had a good face, but worn. It wasn’t only that she’d borne a child, though God knew that could change a woman’s body in ways the midwife never mentioned. It was sorrow. And shame. They’d been ground into the girl’s skin like soot. Of course they had.
“Lady Kalliam,” the girl said. The pause lasted five heart-beats. Six. Tears were welling in the girl’s eyes, and Clara felt them answering in her own. She blinked them back. Empathy was well and good in its time, but that wasn’t this.
“Don’t ever be grateful to him,” Clara said.
Sabiha looked up, confused. A tear escaped, tracing silver down the girl’s cheek.
“My lady?”
“Jorey. If you love him and he loves you, then God knows nothing’s going to stop the pair of you. But you mustn’t be grateful to him. It will poison everything if you are.”
Sabiha shook her head, another tear coming free but the last one. Her eyes were drying.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
Clara shook her head. She couldn’t find the words that would explain it. How to explain the difference between a marriage grown from love—more than love, from complicity—and one that was unequal from the start. She had seen too many women married from ambition, and she had seen where they ended. She didn’t want her boy married to one of them. But the girl was a girl. Even if she’d suffered hard times, she could no more understand what Clara was saying than a songbird could swim.
“Sabiha, dear,” Clara said. “Does he make you laugh?”
Clara couldn’t see the memory behind the girl’s eyes, but she saw that it was there. The shape of Sabiha’s eyes changed and brightened, her lips grew a degree fuller as she forgot to press them thin. Clara knew the answer before the girl nodded.
“All right, then,” Clara said. “I’m going to need more time, though. Jorey’s father is loyal as a hound, but change bothers him. I’ll need… a week. Can you and Jorey wait that long before asking permission?”
“If we have to, we can do anything.”
Clara rose, bent, and kissed the girl gently on the top of her head.
“Spoken like a Kalliam,” she said. “Go find them, then. Tell Jorey what I said.”
“You don’t want to talk to him?”
“Not now,” Clara said, her heart sinking.
She watched as the girl rose and left. There was happiness and relief in the way the girl walked, in the angle of her shoulders. She radiated. It wouldn’t last because nothing ever did, but it was good to see it all the same. Something bright moved at the corner of Clara’s vision, calling attention to itself. A sprig of lilac had bloomed, a dozen tiny flowers bright in the sun. It felt like an omen.
How odd, Clara thought, that speaking to this girl would be the thing that clarified the other task she had to do.
There was little call for huntsmen in Camnipol. Guards, yes. Servants, yes. The sort of personal servant who might take on extra duties or serve at the whim of a nobleman or his wife. She found Vincen Coe in the servants’ wing among the small corridors and tiny rooms that divided the architecture of the great from that of the low. He was a young man, hardly older than Jorey, with wide eyes and a body well accustomed to hardship and work. She had saved him once when her husband’s pique had nearly ended his service. He had saved her once when Feldin Maas would have cut her down. He rose when he caught sight of her, and she pushed away the memory of his lips against hers and the taste of blood. It had been a single stolen kiss, and he’d been bled nearly white when he’d presumed. Since then there had been no talk of it. Not even acknowledgment that it had happened. Nothing.
And there would be nothing.
“My lady,” he said, the words crisp as a bark.
“Coe,” she said.
There was no call to continue. It was her place to command and his to follow. She didn’t need to explain herself to him, except that she did need to.
“Is there a problem, my lady?”
“I love my family dearly,” she said. “And I will protect them from whatever dangers I can. And at whatever price is asked.”
“Of course,” he said. He didn’t understand what she was saying any better than Sabiha Skestinin had.
“I need you to return to Osterling Fells,” she said. “I want you to oversee the construction of my husband’s new kennels.”
The shock on his face was like a blow. His face paled.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Have I given offense? What did I… ?”
Clara clasped her hands behind her. The air in the servants’ quarters was somehow thinner than in the main house. Harder to breathe.
“We both know what this is,” she said. “Are you truly going to make me explain it?”
“I…”
The huntsman bowed his head, and when he lifted it again, his expression wasn’t of a servant speaking to his master, and the depth of his voice gave his words an extra meaning that mere grammar didn’t carry.
“I will serve my lady as she sees fit,” he said. “I have no other task.”
“And if she sees fit to send you to the holding to look after the kennels?”
“If she sees fit to send me to hell, my lady.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” she whispered.
For a moment, time stopped between them. A single moment with the duration of a season, because it was the last. Clara turned and walked slowly back to the main house. Her breath was returning to her slowly. She squared her shoulders. She wanted to go to her rooms, to sit with her embroidery and her pipe and recapture, if she could, a few moments of the quiet of winter. She wanted to be calm again. She wanted to be still.
But Dawson’s voice carried through the front hall as she entered it. She knew from the tone of it that he was annoyed, but not truly angry. His moods and temper were as familiar to her as her own clothes, and as comforting. Two of his hunting dogs paced nervously in the corridor outside his study, whining under their breath and looking from Clara to the closed door and back again. She paused to scratch them gently behind the ears.
Dawson sat at his desk. A letter spilled out over it. She didn’t need to see the royal seal. The quality of the paper and the precision of the handwriting was enough to know it came from King Simeon. She felt a moment’s relief. It wasn’t likely to be anything to do with Jorey.
“A problem?” she asked.
“Simeon’s moved back the audience with that half-wit bastard from Asterilhold,” Dawson said.
“The ambassador, you mean?”
“Yes, that,” Dawson said. “And the new date’s the same as Lord Bannien’s feast. And if that’s not enough, he’s asked for a private audience next week the same time I had a table of cards at the Great Bear with Daskellin and his fat cousin who doesn’t know how to play.”
“Ah,” Clara said. She stepped toward him, her hand on his shoulder. He took her fingers in his, kissing her gently without even being aware that he was doing so. Affection was a habit between them, more genuine for being unconsidered. She felt the rise and fall of his body more than heard his sigh.
“That man,” he said, “has no idea the things I sacrifice for him.”
“He never will,” Clara said.
