that her children were safe, that they had the chance to reinvent themselves in Palliako’s court. She had only lost Barriath, and that to exile rather than death. And yet she sat in the dining hall with the richest dinner she’d enjoyed in months, the windows all opened, and the evening breeze setting the candles to flutter and snap, and her pleasure was tainted by doubt. She felt she was helping her boys scramble up a tree as she cut it down. But that was simplistic. If Palliako fell and a new Lord Regent took his place, the court would still be made from the same people. Rearranged by the rupture, perhaps, as they had been before and would be again.
Still, she could wish that Vicarian had saved his favors for a better occasion.
After the last of the meal was finished, Elisia made her farewells and went off, Corl and his nurse trailing along behind with her guardsmen. Clara wasn’t sure when walking with guards had become normal for members of court, but it was now. Then they sat together in Lord Skestinin’s narrow drawing room. The taste of Jorey’s tobacco reminded her what real leaf was like. She was in real danger of becoming used to the cheap-ground that sold in the alley mouths near the Prisoner’s Span. They joked and played at tiles and cards. Except that Dawson and Barriath weren’t there, it was a perfect evening, and it passed too quickly into night.
When, at last, Clara prepared to make her own farewells, Jorey took her discreetly aside.
“I haven’t been keeping you up with everything,” he said. “I didn’t want to raise hopes if I wasn’t sure. But from the last letters I’ve had, I think Lord Skestinin is going to back me at court. Between his word and Geder still seeming to like me, I think I’ll be able to take on the management of some of his lands while he’s with the navy.”
“That’s lovely, dear,” Clara said, tears jumping to her eyes. “I’m so glad for you. And Sabiha too. She’s … I’m so glad you married her. She seems simply perfect. And by that I mean strong, because strong is so important in a woman’s life, even if no one particularly says it.” She was babbling, words flowing without her knowing what they would be or if she meant them.
Jorey took her hand and pressed something into it. A small cloth purse of the sort she usually took her allowance from him in.
“It comes with a slightly better income,” he said. “Sabiha and I talked about it, and we wanted you to have part too.”
“Oh, I can’t,” Clara said, her fingers curling around the coins. Clutching them. “Really, you mustn’t.”
“I must, Mother. And I will.”
It didn’t help stop the tears. She kissed Jorey’s cheek and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
“You are very good to me,” she murmured. “You have been very, very good.”
“I turned you out,” he said.
“Of course you did, dear,” she said, and for a moment, her new self spoke. The woman she was still becoming. “I will always be complicit in what your father did. It’s part of who I am now. Your distance from me was necessary, and it still is. You did right.”
“Still—”
“No, dear. No
Jorey looked at his hands.
“I don’t believe that for a moment,” he said. “But thank you for saying it.”
Vincen Coe waited at door to the street, chatting with the door slave and looking in the torchlight like a servant waiting for his master. That gave Clara pause. Treating Vincen as if he were only what he had been before seemed somehow monstrous. And yet what option did she have? She could no more invite a lesser huntsman formerly in her husband’s service to sit at the table with Jorey and Vicarian than she could call Dawson back from the dead. She tried to imagine Vincen sitting in the drawing room with Jorey. Or worse, with Elisia. The familiarity with someone so clearly of a lower class would make her daughter’s eyes explode. She really was more Dawson’s child than her own. Nor would it be a kindness to Vincen to place him in a context in which the gulf between their stations was made obvious.
Sabiha was the one to see her safely to the door, to Vincen’s arm, as was appropriate after all for the lady of the household. She’d done the same a thousand times while Dawson sat in the drawing room with his dogs. Vincen stepped forward, bowing the way he would had he been only what he seemed. Clara had the sudden and powerful impulse to put the young man’s arm around her waist. Sabiha would certainly have been shocked, but she had also stepped outside what women were permitted, and shocked wasn’t the same as scandalized.
“Clara?” Sabiha said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes, dear, I am. Just lost in my own mind for a moment.”
Sabiha took her hands and smiled into her eyes. Clara smiled back from across a gulf as wide as the Division that only she knew was there. Then the moment passed, and Clara marched off resolutely into the dark streets of Camnipol, Vincen walking a pace behind and to the left, as a good servant would until they crossed the bridge and Clara brought him to her side. Even with his injuries and the time spent recuperating, Vincen’s arm was solid. Clara tried to remember when Dawson’s had been the same, but in truth, he hadn’t. Strong, yes. But Vincen was a degree shorter than Dawson had been, and the proportion of his arm different. Their two bodies couldn’t be mistaken. Vincen was unavoidably and utterly Vincen, and Dawson was gone past all recall. She had mourned him for a year, as best she could when she was mourning everything else and rejoicing in between.
It had been a year, and imperfect as it was, she had done the best she could. Her children were reestablishing themselves in the lives they’d chosen or forged or found.
All around them, the city was preparing for a bad winter. The men and women of noble blood knew that the food would be thin this season the way they knew a particular march, recognizing it by the first notes. The men and women in the streets of Camnipol would be the ones playing the instruments and singing the melodies. For Jorey and Sabiha and even Vicarian, it would be the difference between eating meat every day or only once a week. For Abatha and Vincen, for Aly and Mihal, it would be the difference between eating every day or every other. And as hard as winter would be, spring before the first crops came would be worse. It expressed itself in small ways: the timbre of the voices of begging children, the weariness and resignation in the shoulders of carters, the growing competition for day-old bread. Things she might have lived and died and never have known had only a very few things gone differently.
And instead, here she was, walking through the darkness with this peculiar, unlikely masculine animal at her side. They reached the far side of the Division, passed by the great yellow taproom with the same band of players she’d seen there before in the yard, declaiming to perhaps a dozen people.
“You know that I am entirely too old for you,” she said.
“You’ve said so, m’lady,” Vincen replied as he had before.
“You should find a woman your own age.”
“None of them are as lovely as you.”
She coughed out a laugh. “And I’ll wager you played with fire when you were a boy.”
“M’lady?”
At the mouth of an alleyway she paused, and he paused with her as she had known he would. She put her hand on his shoulder and, before he could grasp what was happening, shoved him into the wall. She felt the impact in the palms of her hands. She only had to bend her neck up a little to reach his lips, and she kept the pressure constant, pinning him in place like a flower pressed in a book. Her mouth opened his, and she bruised him. For a moment, he was too shocked, and then he wasn’t. When she stepped back, he staggered.
Her breath was fast, her heart racing. The warmth in her body was strange and wild and familiar as an old coat, long forgotten and rediscovered. When she laughed, it came from low in her throat. It came from the girl she had been at eighteen.
“My lady,” Vincen said unsteadily.
“Clara, Vincen,” she said. “My name is Clara. Now take me home with you.”
Marcus
