“We found him the next morning,” Jordan finished, “shivering, sweating, and mad from thirst.”
The bishop rolled his amber eyes. “You expect us to believe that?”
“It matters not,” I replied, “what another believes when your witness is God. But enough stories from me. It’s late, and you’ve still a long journey ahead of you. Perhaps the truth will reveal itself in your dreams.” A howl sounded from the darkness. “Or perhaps not. I’ll take the first watch.”
Twenty-Second Verse
Few things in Jael’s life had compared to the horrors at the Hibernis Fair, of the deep western woods, those beneath the frozen earth of pale Quiet Tower; yet there, in the great hall of Castle Aestas, amidst the chatter of a hundred nobles, at the high table of Duke and Duchess Stoltz, terror gripped her like it hadn’t since she was a girl.
“Relax, Leonhardt,” Trey whispered with a side-ways smile, talking out each side of his mouth, one moment to his aunt Ariel, then to Jael, then across the trencher to Troy and Brandon, and Harpe’s father Sir Brandr, then back again to his cousin pouring out of her chair over his every word. He was born for this, to mingle amidst the rich and noble—in his element: crystal and gold. But Jael, she was mud among the roses, flung up where she did not belong—an ox in a ball gown. No amount of preparation could change that now. Though they tried.
They’d arrived six days prior after as many on the road by the creaking wheels of coaches. Trey had been loath to return to Aestas that way; he’d complained to Leonhardt at least a dozen times of his desire to arrive horsed and armoured before cheers and adoration. Jael did not think he knew how guilty that made her feel. Her injuries were what kept them from riding, injuries which would have had time to heal had she seen through Ogdon’s farce. Instead, she was lured into yet another scandal: a priest was arrested, and Gildmane decided to leave prematurely. I should have let him die at the bottom of the bog, she thought whenever she saw Sylvertre. She thanked God their encounters were sparse since departing Quiet Harbor. She thanked the captain, too. His orders were what kept she and Ogdon apart, were what barred him from attending the welcoming ball for the Saint’s Cross—though she wished it were her who had been barred.
Trey had warned her no sooner than the evening of their arrival, and even then, she’d believed it a jest till breakfast the following morning when Lady Sofiya asked after what manner of gown she’d be wearing. Jael looked on the marred reflection gazing back from her silver plate and thought, What does it matter? A horse is a horse no matter its barding.
Six days later, the only thing to change was her plate from silver to gold. She knifed a duck leg and wild boar sausage from the trencher to obscure her reflection, then drained a glass of its golden apple cider—nearly jumped from the bench, startled by the sudden materialization of a servant to fill her cup.
“Still adjusting to luxury?” quipped Duke Johan Stoltz, leaning entirely off of his throne, beaming at Leonhardt, though they’d only seen each other sparingly the entire length of her stay. A happy thing, that; for every time she saw the man was more jarring than the last. He looked nothing like she’d imagined of a dignified Summerlander: tall and blonde like Trey or Brandon. Instead, the duke seemed an artificial man, small at the joints as his beautiful, young daughter, yet weirdly muscular in his shoulders, back, and neck. And worse was his face, his complexion in particular was that of blanched canvas and painted like a whore’s its color and contour. No doubt he was a blue blooded northerner—the true north: the mountains of Kayin, the cold eastern reaches, the Hibernis Enclave.
Looming dangerously over the trencher—a moat of grease; the roast duck, a brackdragon—Stoltz tucked his hair into the collar of his doublet, like it was a pendant, something separate from his body. That’s when Jael recognized the inky strands for what they were. A horse-hair wig, fake, just like his smile as he said to her, “It’s a crime, what my nephew deprives you. He’s behind the times, I say! It’s been a decade since Lucius’s war, yet on he goes with swords and soldiery. What for? The future has already come, and I dare say the next saint will be even more progressive than Paul. What good will all this battle draught be then? No one enjoys a melee anymore. You should be learning the subtleties of the lance, and the horse, and etiquette: how to speak and dress and, by god, how to use a fork!”
Jael felt her face flush and checked that each of her hands had the correct utensil. Knife in the right, fork in the left, just as they’d been arranged at the outset. She might have sighed her relief, that she’d done at least this one thing right, but Leonhardt knew better. The heat in her cheeks meant her scars were turning dark, apparent for the whole hall to see. Her head and body slouched, heavy with humiliation as she tried distracting herself with cutting sausage on her plate. To her chagrin, her right hand moved like a foreign appendage, mistranslating dexterity for clumsiness.
The conversation continued, Trey leaping to defend his decisions, Lady Ariel embarrassed, commenting on her husband’s liberal speech. Jael seized the opportunity. Intent on escaping one exchange for another, she glanced across the table, saw Brandon’s attention rapt in whatever Troy and Brandr were discussing—something about heavy lancers disappearing over the next century. They were a vestige, Brandr argued, from an ancient civil war when armoured men killed armoured men—would have vanished long before if not kept alive for tourney and tradition. Troy disagreed; as for why, Jael didn’t care to listen. It was better,
