was about to take her pipe from its holder when she realized she’d left all her tobacco at the house. She didn’t have any, and she didn’t feel right begging that when she’d already come to ask so much of him.
“I heard that your mansion has been confiscated,” he said. “I am truly sorry.”
“Well, I could hardly expect to keep it. The holding in Osterling Fells is gone too, of course. And I don’t think Dawson was actually Baron of Kaltfel for long enough that I’ll feel that loss. I’ll miss the holding, though. It’s a pretty place in winter.”
“I recall,” the man said, smiling. “Your hospitality was always excellent. Even to your husband’s rivals.”
“Oh, especially to them,” Clara said. “What sort of virtue does it take to be nice to your friends?”
Issandrian laughed at that. Good. He might be willing to hear her out. They talked about small things for a few more minutes. The heat of the day wasn’t so bad yet that the with-drawing room became unpleasant. It would come, but not yet.
“I confess I’ve come for more than kind words and comfort,” she said, “though you’re quite good at both of those.”
“How can I help?” he asked.
“You and my husband are acknowledged enemies.”
“Not so far as that, I hope. Rivals, perhaps.”
“No. Enemies. And there’s a sincerity in being a man’s enemy. It puts you in a position to help me. I have nothing to offer you in exchange, but if you can, please speak on behalf of my sons and daughters. Not formally, but in the Great Bear and privately. I should be very grateful.”
“Daughters? I thought you only had one.”
“Elisia and Sabiha,” Clara said.
“Ah,” Issandrian said. He didn’t look so bad with his hair cut short. Now that he’d worn it this way for a time, it became familiar. The difference was only a difference after all.
“You have always been very kind to me, Lady Kalliam,” Issandrian said. “Even when your husband was hoping for my death. I have very little influence anymore, but what I have is yours.”
“Thank you,” Clara said.
After the first, the rest were easy, or if not easy at least inevitable. If she could go begging to Curtin Issandrian, surely her cousin Erryn Meer would be simple to appeal to. And the women she’d had for needlecraft demonstrations, and the poetry group that Lady Emming had arranged, and so on through the city and through the court and through her day.
She was no stranger to these sorts of little informal audiences, but she’d always been on the other side. Offering sympathy with cookies and support without promises. The form was familiar. The only change was the role she played and the stakes she played for.
Elisia, thankfully, had already shed the Kalliam name. Safe in the bosom of Annerin, she could still be seen in court and her position was secure. Vicarian was less secure, but still better than he might have been. He’d been out of Camnipol for the trouble. He hadn’t served in the field. His loyalty was to God and the priesthood of the kingdom. He would have to renounce Dawson, but as long as he did, he should be safe.
Barriath and Jorey were in the greatest danger, and so she concentrated her work there, doggedly calling on everyone she knew, everyone she could think of who might still accept her socially. Anyone to whom she had once been known. She used all those past moments of grace and unnecessary kindness as a tool now. And like any untested tool, sometimes it would work as she hoped. Other times it would fail under strain. She might never know which was which. Nor did it matter, so long as her children were safe.
She stopped at the beginning of evening meals when she could no longer politely intrude uninvited and found a small baker’s shop that sold yesterday’s rolls with sausages and black mustard and beer. She reached for her pipe again and put it away cursing under her breath. She would have to find a way to afford a bit of tobacco. And for that matter, a bit of food. And whatever shelter she could manage after Lord Skestinin’s hospitality came to its inevitable end. One didn’t take in the wife of a traitor indefinitely. If Barriath became commander of the fleet or Jorey won a war in the field, she might remake herself as the mother of a respectable man. But for the future that she could imagine, she was doomed to be her husband’s wife.
For a few minutes, sitting at the little stall with its splintering wooden tables and unsteady chairs, she let herself stop smiling. She was lost now, and emptied in a way she hadn’t ever imagined she would be. Her marriage, her family, the small and peaceable intrigues of the court, and Dawson with his archaic love of duty and his blindness to the inconsistencies of his application of it. Those had been her life since she’d left her own mother’s house. She hadn’t built that life, but rather grown in it.
Now she felt like a flower plant that had been dug up gently and washed in water. She wasn’t injured precisely, but her pale roots were all exposed. If she couldn’t find soil, that would be enough to kill her. She knew it like she knew the sun would rise and the autumn would come.
And the center of it all was the powerful absence of Dawson Kalliam. The man who had loved her better than he had understood her. The constant in her life. She could still remember what he had looked like the first night she’d kissed him. The way he’d hidden his fear behind chivalry and she’d wrapped hers in modesty until she was more than half certain neither of them would do anything, and they would sit in that garden, aching for each other until the earth itself grew old. He’d been young and handsome. The best friend of Prince Simeon. And who had she been? The girl that his father had chosen for him. The marriage arranged before either of them had had the chance to refuse it.
She wondered if there might have been something that she could have done that would have changed his course. She wanted there to have been something. If all this disaster was her fault, at least she would have had some control. But it was a fantasy. There was no dinner party or distracting conversation that would have reconciled Dawson to being ruled by Geder Palliako’s priests. Stones would fly like birds first.
It had been inescapable. And even if there had been something, it was gone now. She sighed and took a bite of the sausage. Too much gristle and oregano, but otherwise perfectly acceptable, and the black mustard hid an abundance of sins. She wept quietly while she finished her little meal and beer, then gathered herself, regained her smile, and returned to the world. She was heartbroken, and she would be for a very long time, but she needn’t be ineffective.
She came back to Lord Skestinin’s house near nightfall. Her feet ached and her back. The hem of her dress was filthy from walking in the common street with the dogs and horses. The smell of animal shit seemed a part of the life of the city she might have to get used to. She bore worse. It was nothing.
As she came into the house, she heard Barriath’s voice raised in anger and Jorey’s responding in kind. Her lips pressed thin, and she followed the sounds of fighting through the dim hallways and into the dining room lit by cheap tallow candles and decorated for a family that didn’t live there.
“He’s my wife’s father,” Jorey said.
“And I’m your brother,” Barriath roared, his face red to the edge of purple. “When did that stop mattering? Next you’ll be cozying up to that son of a whore in the Kingspire, asking him if he’ll give you room and a scrap of meat.”
Sabiha stood in the doorway at the far side of the room, her knuckles white around a bit of lace handkerchief. Her expression told Clara how much damage Barriath had already done.
“Good God,” Clara said, stepping into the room confidently as a bear tamer walking into the pit, “I’d think you were children again and someone had taken your best toys. What is this about?”
“You’re taking shelter with Skestinin,” Barriath said, turning his wrath on her. “I won’t have it. He took my position with the fleet. I served him for years, and as soon as there’s a bit of trouble, I’m overboard like old fish.”
“There are certain realities—”
“I’m the eldest man in this family. That makes me responsible for our name,” Barriath said. “And I won’t have my dignity compromised by this.”
Clara didn’t know what change of expression came to her face, but she saw Jorey’s eyes go wide and Barriath’s blood-thickened face grow apprehensive. A faint smile touched Sabiha’s lips. Clara met her firstborn son’s eyes. One day, he would have been Baron of Osterling Fells, she thought. His future had gone away without warning or reason, and grief made people mad. They did things they would never have otherwise done.
She began to speak, paused, and began again.
“My husband,” she said, softly and with terrible precision, “is not dead. You are my son. Jorey is my son.
