When, near midday, she returned, feet aching, to Lord Skestinin’s house, the fight was already under way again.
“I’m a sailor,” Barriath shouted. “I could drink three times that and be more sober than you are waking up.”
She was accustomed to the sound of fraternal battle, but the voice Jorey spoke in now was low and cold and unfamiliar.
“You’ve disrespected my wife in her own home,” Jorey said. “You have to leave.”
Clara walked through the hall, her spine straight. Not here too. She could stand to fight the world, if she had to. She would endure the pain of waking alone in her unfamiliar bed with the echoes of her husband’s death still in her ears, but she couldn’t do it all here too. There had to be one place—one—where she could rest and draw strength. If it wasn’t her family, she didn’t know where it could be.
“I’m not staying,” Barriath said as she stepped into the room. “Wouldn’t do it on a bet. But take it clear, I’m not the one looking down on Sabiha. She’s your wife and so she’s my sister, and it’s her fairweather friends you’re talking to. Not me.”
Both her boys turned to her.
“What,” Clara said. The exhaustion in her voice weighted the word so heavily that it was all she could manage. “What?”
Jorey looked to his brother, then down. When he spoke, his jaw was set forward. It was something Dawson had done too. Clara wondered whether it was the boy imitating the man, or if there was something in the blood that would have made Kalliam men do that even if they’d never met.
“Sabiha arranged a garden party,” Jorey said. “A half dozen of her old friends. Some that had stayed by her even through the… last scandal. They all sent regrets.”
“And he’s blaming me,” Barriath said. “I wasn’t rude. I didn’t track these girls down and tell them to turn their backs on Sabiha.”
“You didn’t need to,” Jorey said. “Everyone knows we’re here.”
“We’re not,” Barriath said. “You are, but I’m elsewhere. I’m sorry, Mother.”
She wanted to ask where he was going. How she would reach him. All the thousand questions that would have let her keep some semblance of family together. But she was too tired, her mind too scattered. He brushed past her as he walked out the door, and she felt like the motion of his passing could have knocked her over. Jorey hadn’t moved. His face was pale and pained. Sabiha had appeared at his elbow.
“Mother, this isn’t going to work.”
“It will,” she said. “It’s only hard now, but it will work. Barriath is in mourning. We all are. You have to treat him gently.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “You said that you wanted me to be to Sabiha what Father was to you.”
“That’s right. I want that.”
“Father put you ahead of everyone. Everything. If you’d asked him to, he would have done anything. There was no limit.”
“That’s true, I think,” she said, but Jorey was shaking his head. Tears flowed down his cheeks the way they hadn’t since he was a child. Not even on the terrible day when Geder had killed her husband.
“I can’t do this,” he said, and then again, more softly. “I can’t.”
“I will,” Sabiha said, and put a hand on Clara’s shoulder. “Please. Come sit with me for a moment, my lady.”
Clara let herself be led to a window seat. Sabiha sat beside her, holding her hand. The girl looked thinner. And not just in her face and body. For a time just after the wedding, there had been joy in her. A hopefulness born of seeing the changes that her new reputation brought. That was gone now, and Clara knew why. She knew, almost, what Sabiha was steeling herself to say. The words that had defeated Jorey.
“We love you,” Sabiha said, “and we will always be your family, but you need to leave this house.”
It was strange. Clara actually felt the words cut into her. It was a physical sensation at the neck and heart.
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s hard enough for Jorey alone,” Sabiha said, her fingers pressing Clara’s hand. “But everyone saw him when he renounced Lord Kalliam. They’re willing to give him a chance. Well, some of them are. But you didn’t speak. Bar riath didn’t. And truly, even if you had, my lady, no one can see you without seeing your husband too. You were too much the same thing, and even with him gone, you carry him with. You see that, don’t you? You understand?”
“I do,” Clara said. “I feel him myself.”
“Until the court forgets, at least a little, having you with us taints us more than it protects you.”
“I will go,” Clara said. “If there’s room at the holding, I can… exile myself, I suppose.”
“We were thinking that we could pay for a boarding house,” Sabiha said. “Something that wasn’t in my father’s name. Something to give us a little distance in the eyes of the court.”
“I can see why that would be wise,” she said. “I’ll gather my things.”
“No, please,” Sabiha said. “I’ll have them brought. You shouldn’t have to.”
“None of us should have to,” Clara said, patting the girl’s shoulder. “But we live in a world of necessities. Don’t bother yourself. I understand. I should go now.”
“No, please,” Sabiha said. “We’ll have someone go with you to find the right place. And we’ll bear the price of it.”
Clara’s smile almost felt real. She took her hands out from the girl’s grasp and stood. She kissed Sabiha and Jorey both, each of them on the forehead, and took herself back out. There was no staying now. No sitting in the kitchen and discussing what sort of boarding house might be right for the widow of a famed traitor and enemy of the throne.
By renouncing Dawson, they were supposed to have gained something. Protected it. Kept it. And perhaps they had. Perhaps if Jorey hadn’t said what he’d said, Clara would have even less than she did now. But she could hardly imagine it. She felt like the queen of nothing.
She walked without knowing where she was walking to. Her feet ached terribly, but she ignored the pain. Once, she’d ridden through the city as the small people in the street made way for her, and she’d thought nothing of it. Now she found that she was moving aside to let carts of meat or turnips pass. She was avoiding the eyes of the men and women she passed.
When the great arcing span of the Autumn Bridge rose up before her, she began across it, but at the midway point, she stopped. It wasn’t even that she intended to, it was only there that she was when her resolve finally broke. Leaning against the great beams and looking down over the abyss of the Division, she felt something like peace come over her. Not peace, not really, but something like it. The world looked almost beautiful at this distance. The Kingspire. The walls of the city. The clouds scudding quickly overhead, caught in some unthinkably high wind that she herself could not feel.
She considered how little it would take to step over the edge. Not that she intended to. Self-slaughter was too easy, in its way. But it did have its appeal. She’d never been religious, but neither had she refused the priestly stories of life and justice on the farther side of death. Perhaps Dawson was there waiting for her.
But not yet. Vicarian’s position wasn’t assured, even now. And Barriath… poor Barriath, turned out of the house by his own brother. He needed her still. And Jorey would. Even Sabiha might. And how terrible would it be for the girl to have sent her husband’s mother out, only to have her leap off a bridge. The poor thing would never recover.
No. Another day, she would. Later, when all her children were taken care of and no one would feel responsible for a decision that was utterly her own. Then she could come, dressed perhaps in bridal array, and take one last brief dance with Dawson. She was weeping now. She didn’t know how long she had been. Days. Weeks. All her life, it seemed. All those years of content had been an illusion. A thin line that she had walked over an abyss. Without a home to go to, without a friend to rely on, she was reduced to the aspect of a madwoman wailing on the bridge, and she found the role fit well enough.
