Fray

by Rowenna Miller

  “I served in the light horse,” he said, unprompted. “Elite troops, I suppose, compared to the infantry, but certainly no easier. In Galitha, your cavalry has pages, grooms to care for the horses. Not so in Serafe—we care for our own horses. Like children.” He laughed. “It’s believed in Serafe that the bond between horse and man, if strong enough, makes both better fighters.”

  “And does it?” I asked, cautious, not sure what memories I might be scraping against.

  “As much as the bond between men makes them fight for one another, yes.” He scratched his horse’s mane absently. “This is the first I’ve ridden a horse that wasn’t mine in many years. She’s a dull thing compared to my old comrade.”

  I considered my own mount, a dappled gray mare. I had thought she’d a sullen sort of face and seemed slow and resistant to my commands but had dismissed the thought as foolish. Horses, I figured, couldn’t have personalities. They were beasts of burden, creatures good for drawing wagons and working ferries. “I’ve never been around animals much,” I confessed, hesitantly scratching the roots of my horse’s mane in the same way Sianh did.

  “City living,” he said with a dismissive snort. “I despise it. I’ll take the honest smell of horseshit over the stench of sewers any day. And horses, for all their faults, don’t lie or cheat. People—people are another matter entirely.”

  “You seem to be in an odd line of work for someone who dislikes people,” I said with a laugh that quickly faded at the fatigue in his face.

  “Yes, I am.” He stopped himself. “I was. Making a living off of people’s lonely desires and corrupted needs is no way to live.”

  “I’ve always made my living off of people,” I said. “Off of their needs, their wants.”

  “There is no comparison there,” he said. “You’re gifted with a rare talent. It would be abhorrent to waste it.”

  I didn’t answer. That rare talent had caused more heartache than good in the past months, and I was only beginning to regain any control of it. Corvin’s kerchief was the first thing in ages I hadn’t struggled with, though I expected that facing my grief over my brother would allow my casting to continue to improve. I was still grappling with that loss, the loss of our family and our life together even if I had, at least temporarily, regained him. In any case, what was I now—a seamstress without a shop, a charm caster without clients? I confronted again the exhaustion in Sianh’s face. I hadn’t seen it in the candlelight the night before, but the sunlight betrayed the subtle scars of weariness. I felt that weariness creeping over me, settling into my face, my motions, my thoughts.

  Perhaps this was why he had wanted to accompany us, I guessed, more than the money. This was closer to what he felt his purpose was, further from the warped version of himself he had lived for so long in Isildi. Here he wasn’t a cavalryman without a horse, a soldier without a set of orders. It was imperfect, but it was closer to who he felt himself at his core to be.

  We stopped for the night in a small town nestled in the curves formed by low hills. The sun’s height above the hills still promised hours of good daylight, but Sianh noted that we would not reach another town large enough to guarantee an inn and stables if we pressed on. He didn’t say so, but he also gave both Kristos and me long, assessing looks that told me he didn’t think we were capable of dragging much more from our beaten, tired bodies. He was right.

  The outskirts of the town, which Sianh said was named Croya Fai, or Twin Valleys, boasted several large plantations like the one Theodor and I had visited after the theft of our carriage. Workers in plain unbleached linen trousers stacked crates filled to spilling over with green fruits, and there were more crates listing dangerously by the door of the inn. We shared a wall with them, leaning against the sturdy stone while Sianh negotiated a night’s lodging.

  “Spiny apples,” Kristos provided when he noticed me looking. “They’re harvested unripe but turn a lovely gold in storage.” He sighed. “Delicious.”

  He moved with such ease into Serafan life, I thought with another tinge of jealousy, or loss, or both. His new home, adopted and embraced, without any signs of grief for the one he left behind. I fought to find something to say, to begin to build the foundation for a bridge if not the bridge itself, but I found only trite small talk and obtuse observations. I could find nothing to say to my own brother? If I was honest, I had to admit that I hadn’t had much to say to him before, as he built his rebellion, in the long, tense fall and winter leading up to the Midwinter Revolt. With a wash of guilt, I acknowledged that the distance had started before that. I couldn’t pin the erosion of our close bond on him alone. I had poured myself into my atelier and, as I climbed the ranks of Galatine commoners from day laborer to business owner, I had created and then widened a rift between us.

  Finally, the silence became untenable. “You seem to like the food here,” I said. It was a poor excuse for a conversation, but it was something.

  “Well enough. It suits life here, if that makes any sense. The pace is slower and yet more steady than in Galitha. No rush to finish anything before winter, no rush to wrap up a day’s work before dark.” He shifted, wincing as his muscles protested the same abuse that mine squawked about. Several paces away, Alba sat easily on a bench. Who was she, that the day’s ride hadn’t affected her, I asked myself for what seemed like the hundredth time. “And Penny likes it, too, likes having her own work and making her own name for herself. That wasn’t going to happen in Galitha. She misses her family, her friends, but I never asked her to leave. She did that on her own.”

  “She found you?”

  “She found me before I left Galitha City. And didn’t let me out of her sight.”

  “I should have guessed.” I smiled faintly; if the Lord of Keys had wanted to find Kristos, he ought to have tracked Penny.

  “I’ll send for her, once we have a safe place in Galitha. If we ever do. I promised her we’d go back if ever we could, but now—I wish I hadn’t made that promise. Life here is what I’d always hoped for.”

  “It sounds like a scholar’s life,” I ventured.

  “It is. Oh, it is. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot. The amount of grunt work I have to do as an underling—sometimes I miss toting bricks when I’m deep in the weeds of a filing project.” He ran a hand through his hair, snarls lurking in his dark waves catching his fingers. “But the books. So many books. And lectures from even the more advanced students that put the university in Galitha City to shame.”

  “What are you doing with it all?” The question sounded like an accusation, and perhaps it was. He had vowed that the revolt wasn’t the end of his aspirations to change the Galatine political system.

  “You didn’t read my work?” He laughed. “Not that you ever did, fair enough. I send manuscripts by way of Niko to a printer in Galitha City. I assume they’re being printed regularly—I get the occasional final copy.”

  “I read them,” I whispered. “I read them all. We both did, Theodor and I.”

  Kristos paused. “So you did take them into consideration, then.”

  “Yes. Not solely. We had other considerations. Your suggestion of tax code was refused outright—”

  “I guessed that it would be.”

  “But the councils proved an easier compromise than we had anticipated. At least, I thought they had.” My lips kinked into a painful smile. “It should have been you, talking with Theodor all those nights in his study and his garden, developing strategy for negotiation and compromise.”

  “I’m terrible at compromise,” Kristos said with a shake of his head. “But it seems you’ve become as adept a student of politics as I ever was.”

  47

  SIANH HAD SECURED ONE OF THE PRIVATE ROOMS AT THE INN FOR us, but the five of us still had to share the small, bare space. Eight pallets lined the floor, and a pair of crude benches served as the only furniture in the room.

  “The ladies can each stack two pallets,” Kristos said generously.

  “And
we’ll still wake up bruised from the knots in the floorboards,” Alba said with a laugh. “Very well. And shall we make use of the dining room here?”

  To call the common space used for food service a “dining room” was a liberal treatment of the term, and I couldn’t help an immediate comparison to the colonnade in the diplomatic compound or the formal spaces in Viola’s or Theodor’s homes. I stopped myself—I wasn’t a spoiled noble, able to afford turning her nose up at an unassuming inn.

  Still, even Kristos pulled a face as his hand hit the sticky tabletop, and Sianh quietly advised against ordering the vaguely named “meat pot.”

  While we waited for our meals, Sianh glanced around the room, avoiding conversation with Alba and Kristos, who chatted about a book of theological exposition they had both read.

  “We are followed here,” Sianh finally said, quietly and lacking any alarm. Still, the low ceiling and cramped walls of the inn’s common room felt suddenly closer, and I saw only shadow around us. “That man in the corner, perhaps another.”

  “How do you know?” scoffed Kristos.

  “It’s his job to know,” Alba whispered back.

  Kristos clamped his mouth shut, but I knew what he was thinking—he still didn’t trust Sianh completely. There was something more, some unanswered rivalry in which Kristos wanted to best Sianh and Sianh refused to engage.

  “I know because I saw him three times in the village, and he didn’t seem to decide where in the hell he wanted to go until we came here. Then he made up his mind. He hasn’t ordered anything, and he’s looking at everything but us.”

  “Fine. What now? We sneak out and—”

  “No.” Sianh stood up. “Stay here. The a’Mavha are men like any men. And this is likely some hired scout, not one of their best. We will want to act before their best arrive.”

  Prickles ran up and down my back, but I stayed perfectly still. Theodor paled, but Alba pursed her lips and leaned back.

  “Where is that boy with the bread?” she complained.

  Kristos leaned toward her, hissing, “Have you heard a word—”

  “Of course, you idiot. But until Sianh bashes that fellow’s head in or whatever he’s planning to do, we’re ordinary patrons here. Besides, I don’t want that gangly boy tripping Sianh up or getting himself hurt. So where is he, exactly?”

  I pointed—the innkeeper’s son was scouring a table at the far side of the room. Alba nodded. “Fine.”

  Sianh didn’t say anything as he left the table, and I didn’t realize he had decided on the moment to confront our stalker until he had him by the throat, pinned against the wall. He shouted at him in resonant, commanding Serafan, and though I had no idea what he had said, the man blanched and the rest of the patrons deferred to Sianh as he lowered the man to the ground and dragged him by the arm to the back of the inn.

  I gaped, expecting the innkeeper to intervene, but he didn’t. Instead, he watched with mild amusement as Sianh shouldered a door open and forced the far shorter spy inside what I assumed was a storeroom. Then he limped over to us. Glancing at us, he said, in broken market Pellian that I barely understood, “If he breaks, you buy.”

  Kristos swiftly replied in Serafan. I heard a muffled thud from the storeroom; the innkeeper ignored it and asked Kristos a series of short, pointed questions, which Kristos answered. At one point the innkeep held up his hand, shaking his head and speaking loudly over Kristos’s answer. Theodor and I edged closer to one another, finding each other’s hands under the table.

  Sianh reappeared, the other man nowhere to be seen. He hailed the innkeeper, who scurried away as quickly as he could with his bad leg.

  “What did he say?” I asked Kristos as soon as he was gone.

  “Sianh? Said to call the local constabulary.”

  “No, the innkeeper. Why didn’t he throw us all out?”

  “He could tell that our friend there was in the service. They’re spooky about veterans, Serafans. So he wasn’t going to cross him. But even more so, he doesn’t want trouble. If we’re willing to handle our own matters, all the better for him. I tried telling him that the man was probably a’Mavha and that’s when he told me he didn’t want to know. The less he knows, the better.”

  “Doesn’t want his inn to get a bad reputation,” Alba said. “And more, doesn’t want to be known by the a’Mavha.”

  Sianh strode across the room, the other patrons backing away in his wake, and dropped heavily onto his empty place on our bench. “He confessed immediately to everything. Or nearly so. We will not be bothered again, I do not think.”

  “What did he say?” Theodor demanded. “Is it true that Merhaven hired him? Is there—”

  “Not here, I don’t think it’s wise. Out of respect for the innkeep if nothing else.”

  By the time our lentils and sausage arrived, we had all, even Alba, transformed into antsy children in chapel, fidgeting and biting lips and fingernails. I barely tasted the stew—though what there was to taste, I wasn’t sure, as the cook wasn’t wasting any resources on spices.

  “Do you think,” Alba said as she mopped up the weak gravy from the lentils with a hunk of oatmeal bread, “that it’s safe to stay here? Or ought we to move on for the night?”

  “No less safe than before, and better than the road, I’d say. Don’t forget that catamounts and nightsbane snakes are as real a danger as men with knives.” Sianh had cleaned his plate efficiently and waited for the rest of us to finish. It became clear that none of the rest of us were hungry enough to polish off what passed for stew, so he gestured for us to leave, but not before pocketing all of our leftover bread. “It keeps well,” he replied simply to my questioning look.

  It was too early to go to the cramped, low-ceilinged room we’d booked for the evening, so we gathered in the stables instead. “I don’t see a need to change our horses,” Sianh said. I was about to interrupt and press for details about what the a’Mavha had said, but then I realized that Sianh was purposely diverting our conversation elsewhere.

  “Agreed,” Kristos said. “I’d rather not change them at all, if our pace doesn’t overtire them. You never know when you’ll get an old crank.”

  Alba shrugged. “Shared horses are shared horses.”

  “On that, Sastra-set, we can agree,” Sianh said with a slightly deferential nod. “I, too, hope our pace does not warrant changing them.”

  “Changing them?” I had just, barely, gotten used to the plodding mount I’d used thus far.

  “The Serafan stable system—one of the things you don’t realize you’re getting by without in Galitha,” Kristos said. I swallowed any response to the perceived insult. Yes, as usual, among this group as handily as among nobles, I was uneducated and narrowly experienced. “It’s a public service, allows for travel by anyone with the money to pay. One needn’t maintain a stable and pasture to have access to road travel. Actually, I ought to draft a plan for a similar system for Galitha and send it—” He stopped abruptly as he recalled that Galitha had more pressing issues than public stables.

  “So at any waypost we may exchange our horses. If you are dissatisfied with yours, of course, we can make a trade,” Sianh supplied.

  “It didn’t throw me off, so I suppose I’m satisfied,” I said. Might as well embrace my ignorance. “Now. What did he say?”

  Sianh glanced around us. No one was here, loitering outside the horse stalls, though several grooms shared a plate of roasted vegetables near a shingled building I took to be an office. “I think we may speak openly,” he said. “That man, with several of his associates, was hired to kill you. That is all he knows. The motivations of his clients didn’t interest him. In fact, the job was arranged through their superior, their handler, and he maintains he doesn’t know who the hire was. Only that you were the target.”

  “He’s the only one?” Kristos said.

  “The only one who left Isildi. Our gamble was well laid—they didn’t presume she would leave the city unless by ship to Galitha, an
d so continued their search within it and monitored the harbor. He will not bother us again.” Sianh allowed himself a small smile. I didn’t ask what he had done to ensure that, but I had a fairly good guess. “So we should be able to continue, unmolested, to Port Triumph.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” I said. “No offense meant, Sianh, but the sooner I’m out of Serafe, the better.”

  Alba tilted her head as though considering this, but decided against speaking. Kristos shrugged. “If you think you’re safe in Galitha, think again.”

  “Safety isn’t why I’m going to Galitha,” I countered.

  Sianh interrupted the argument before it could begin. “One more thing—you may wish to know that the a’Mavha, and their client before them, had an informant inside the diplomatic compound keeping them apprised of your movements.”

  I tasted the unpleasantness of that thought like sour wine, unwelcome yet lingering. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. One of the servants?” I hadn’t managed to learn the names of most of the white-uniformed attendants in our wing.

  “Your, shall we say, ‘friend’ Jae.”

  “What?” A servant, I had believed. But Jae? Even after I’d realized he wasn’t being kind to me for friendship’s sake alone, I would never have pegged him for a snake. His quick smile and easy manner weren’t a complete façade, and he didn’t seem calculating enough to be a spy. “But Jae hoped to be considered for a marriage contract with Annette.”

  “That may be precisely why he turned to working with Merhaven,” Alba said thoughtfully. “He is part of the underlings of the upper class of the States—related by blood but not in line to inherit anything but a name. He was not in the running for a marriage contract, and it was foolish of him to attempt to work his way into your confidences to reach one. He looked for another way to advance himself.” I recalled what Jae had said—the son of a second husband, not of the main house. Not like Dira, who I would have expected from her coldly aristocratic bearing to be in alliance with nobles like Merhaven. I had thoroughly misread both, to my detriment. I had unwittingly allowed Jae access to my research at the library, and he was likely the one who had fomented rumors that I was studying curse magic there.