Dark Moon Defender (Twelve Houses)

by Sharon Shinn

  “Let’s try here,” Justin said, and led the way to the stable’s main entrance.

  They dismounted and went inside, finding themselves in a fairly large open space that seemed to serve as reception area, granary, and all-around storage facility. Wide double doors opened off to one side, most likely leading to the stalls. The whole building was fragrant with the smells of hay, horse, leather, and dirt.

  They called out their arrival and waited a few moments before the double doors swayed open and a short, thin, middle-aged man hurried through. He looked a little harried, as if he’d abandoned another task to respond to them. “Leaving your horses?” he inquired in a friendly enough voice. “How long?”

  “Just overnight,” Cammon said.

  Justin scowled and let his face turn sulky. “You’ll be going back tomorrow, but I won’t,” he said. “You work for a man five years—five years!—you expect he’ll treat you with fairness. But, oh no! One slip, and you’re out the door, and no one cares what becomes of you.”

  “It was more than one slip,” Cammon said in a reasonable voice. “And she was his daughter.”

  That hadn’t been scripted, but Justin assumed Cammon had his reasons for introducing the topic. “Well, I didn’t insult her,” he said, still sullen. “So I’m just a common soldier! I can’t talk to a noblewoman? So what if he’s a marlord, living on his great property? I’m still good enough to talk to his daughter.”

  “She wanted to say good-bye to you,” Cammon said. “If you let me tell her where you went, maybe she’ll send a note.”

  Justin shook his head. “I’m done with that life,” he said. “Don’t tell her anything. Besides—who knows? I might only stay here a day or two. I don’t even know if there’s work here in Neft.”

  The stableman stepped forward at that. He’d stood by quietly while they argued, but it was clear he’d been listening to every word. Sympathetic to Justin’s situation, too, by the warm look in his eyes. Justin wondered if this man had romanced a serramarra at some point in his life and Cammon had that quickly been able to pick up on it.

  “There’s work here, if you were looking,” he said. “My nephew ran off to sea and the other boy who worked here went and joined the Daughters last week. Too much for one man to do, but if you’re good with horses, I could use the help.”

  He didn’t want to appear too eager. Justin let his face assume a somewhat scornful expression and looked around. “I know horses,” he said. “How many do you usually board? What kind of hours? What do you pay?”

  “I can’t afford to pay much, but you’ll pick up tips,” the stableman said. “Lot of fancy folks riding through Neft, hoping to meet up with one of the Daughters, or even the Lestra. Lot of merchants and traders coming through, too. They’re not stingy people.”

  “I need a place to stay, too,” Justin said.

  The man gestured back toward the recesses of the building. “If you can’t find anything better, there’s the hayloft. You can bed down for a few nights. Longer, if you like.”

  It wouldn’t do to be restricted to one location like that. Justin had to be free to move from point to point, with no one having a strict accounting of his hours. He kept his expression just shy of a sneer and said, “I have some coins in my pocket. I think I can pay for a bed.”

  “Well, sleep on it if you want, but I could use the help,” the stableman said. “I’m Delz.”

  “Justin. Let me go find dinner and look for a room. I’ll be back in the morning, one way or the other.”

  “Golden Boar, just up the street, has a good dinner pretty cheap,” Delz said.

  Justin nodded. “Appreciate it. We’ll try there. Come on, Cam.”

  A few minutes later they were seated in the Golden Boar, which was dark, crowded, and not particularly clean. The place had an appetizing smell to it, though, so someone knew how to cook, Justin decided. Their waitress was young, yellow-haired, and smiling, but Cammon started laughing as soon as she took their orders and departed.

  “What?”

  “She thought you were handsome. Would have liked you to flirt with her. But you didn’t even notice her.”

  Justin was surprised. He never overlooked anybody. He couldn’t—a Rider always had to assess every stranger for threat and ability. “She was about five feet two inches, probably weighed less than a hundred pounds, light hair up in some kind of bun. Moonstone necklace. No visible weapons. Didn’t look very smart. I noticed her.”

  Cammon was laughing even harder. “Right. She wanted you to think she’s pretty. She wanted you to smile at her, talk to her a little bit. Be interested in her.”

  Justin grunted. “Too much work.”

  “That woman or all women?”

  “All women.” He thought that over. “Well, not Senneth. She doesn’t need anyone taking care of her and making a fuss over her.”

  “Kirra?”

  “She wants people to make a fuss over her all the time!” But he had to think that over, too. “Although she doesn’t need anyone to take care of her. But she’s more trouble than anybody.”

  “Well, that might be a way to disguise your reason for coming to Neft, and staying,” Cammon suggested. “Find a girl you like. Or pretend to find a girl.”

  “Right. Then I’ll have even less time to be looking around.” He grinned. “Anyway, I just left some woman behind, didn’t I? How faithless do you want me to be?”

  Cammon smiled. “I think it was a good story. It’ll get around.”

  “What was up with Delz? He fall in love with a marlord’s daughter?”

  “I didn’t pick up the whole tale. Just some thought that there was a woman he cared about, and no one believed he was good enough for her. Seemed like he’d respond if that was your own situation.”

  “Though I’m glad it’s not.”

  Cammon laughed. They talked idly till the waitress brought their food and a couple of glasses of ale. Mindful of Cammon’s gaze, Justin gave her a smile, but was annoyed to see her dissolve into giggles and blushes. So then he looked away, concentrating on his food till she left again, slowly as her feet would take her.

  Women. The first ten years of his life had been filled with them when he had lived with his mother and three sisters in the hovel that someone called a boardinghouse and was more properly a brothel. But there had been no women in the fighting gangs he roved with once his mother died. Hardly any girls on the streets at all—most of them gone to true whorehouses, or dead before they were fifteen. Too fragile for the kind of life Justin had led. Once he signed on with the Riders, he’d been astonished to find there were women among them, women as tough and skilled and fearless as he was, but they weren’t female the way this waitress was. They were just people, companions, friends to be absolutely trusted, because they were Riders and because they were good.

  Then there were Senneth and Kirra—different from all other women in his experience.

  “I think you’re right. You shouldn’t try to find yourself a girl,” Cammon said. He was laughing again. “Just stay with your original story. Left a noble’s service and came here to look for work.”

  “I think the stables will do, don’t you? Any reason I shouldn’t work with Delz?”

  Cammon shook his head. “He seemed honest. Try not to intimidate him too much.”

  Justin laughed. “Did I? All right, I’ll be friendlier.” He looked around the tavern, which was filling up even more as they sat there. A group of seven men settled at the last empty table, situated just inches away from theirs. “Not too friendly, though. I’m supposed to be surly.”

  “I think you can pull it off,” Cammon said.

  Justin laughed again, but a few minutes later they were arguing, loud enough for anyone nearby to hear. “I’m just telling you that if you would offer him an apology—” Cammon was trying to say, as Justin talked over him.

  “I won’t say I’m sorry! I didn’t do anything to be ashamed of! A man has a right to stand up to another man even if he is
a marlord from one of the Twelve Houses! Times are changing, my friend.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  Justin nodded darkly. “You’ll see. The marlords think they own the world, think things are always going to go on like they have. But there are people who don’t want to be living on the sufferance of the Twelve Houses. They’re going to take what should have been theirs all along.”

  Cammon slapped a hand on the table. “I am so tired of all your vague talk of war.”

  “Well, it won’t be vague for long. You’ll see.”

  “So—what? You’re just going to keep riding around Gillengaria, looking for other malcontents? Come home, Justin. This can all be worked out.”

  “No, I won’t come home! You’ve been a good friend to me, but you don’t understand. I’ve left that life. You go on in the morning, but I’m staying here. Or I’ll find some other place. Someplace they’re not in fear of the Twelve Houses,” he added with a snarl.

  Their quarrel had drawn the attention of the men at the adjoining tables, and from across the room, Justin could see the blond waitress watching them with a worried look. She didn’t seem to like loud, outspoken men. Good.

  A patron sitting with the group of seven now leaned over to give Justin a nod and a serious look. “Plenty of men in Neft who aren’t afraid of the marlords,” he said. “This’d be a good place to settle down.”

  “Well, if I can find work,” Justin said crossly.

  “Always looking for men over at the convent,” one of his tablemates said. “Any good with a sword?”

  “I can fight some,” Justin said. “But I just left one civil guard. Don’t feel like shackling myself to a captain again anytime soon.”

  “Other work to be had in Neft,” the first man said. “Good place to be—if war really does come.”

  Justin lifted his glass in a toast. “Oh, it’ll come,” he said. “About time, too.”

  The other men raised their glasses and drank in agreement, then turned back to their own conversation. Justin caught Cammon’s eye and nodded infinitesimally. That had been just enough. Any more ranting would draw too much attention. He just wanted to have a story in place, a persona that had been shaped from the very first moment he rode into town, in case anyone seemed interested in him later and started investigating. He stood, tossing coins to the table, and turned to go, Cammon right behind him. Then he paused and turned back to the table of seven men.

  “So, if I’m going to stay a few days,” he said, with studied disinterest, pretending he didn’t care. “Where would be a good place to put up? Honest place, not too expensive, but clean.”

  “Harry’s got rooms by the week at his place,” said one of the men at the table, and his companions all murmured agreement.

  “Left as you walk out the door, then not but a quarter mile from here,” someone else directed. “Two-and-a-half stories. Easy to find.”

  “Appreciate it,” Justin said, nodding again, and walked out the door.

  They found Harry’s with no trouble, and Justin haggled just loud enough and long enough to convince anyone who might be listening that he didn’t have much money but did intend to stay awhile. Eventually, they agreed on the attic bedroom, Justin to take care of all his own needs, and a weekly bath thrown in. When they climbed to the third floor, they found two narrow, lumpy beds, a window that wouldn’t open, and severely slanted rooflines that allowed Justin to stand only in the very center of the room.

  “Well, you definitely don’t want to be courting a woman if this is the place you’d be bringing her back to,” Cammon said.

  “Slept in worse,” Justin said, slinging his travel pack onto one of the beds. He’d left the bulk of his possessions with his horse at Delz’s stables. “So have you.”

  “And will again,” Cammon agreed, stretching out on the other bed. “So what will you do tomorrow?”

  “Go back to Delz. Take his job. Spend a couple of days in the city looking around, trying to see if there’s any activity. I want to be in place a few days before I go off roving toward the convent. I don’t want to make people suspicious.”

  “How long are you going to be here?”

  Justin shrugged, irritable again. “Senneth thinks a couple of months. I don’t know. I suppose till they call me home.”

  “Maybe I can come back and visit in a few weeks.”

  “That’d be good. Tayse said he’d send messengers now and then so I can give him news. Maybe he meant he’d send you.”

  Cammon sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. His odd eyes were alight with excitement. “I know. You can try to send me information. See if I can pick up on it all the way in Ghosenhall.”

  Justin laughed in disbelief. “And do you think you can?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I knew something was wrong with Senneth the other day, and I was worried, but she’d only turned her ankle.”

  “And you were both in Ghosenhall,” Justin reminded him. “Not hundreds of miles apart. Besides, what kind of information do you think I could send you? Details about troop movements? Names of nobles who’ve come to visit Coralinda Gisseltess? You can’t pick up on anything so specific, can you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cammon said regretfully. “But you could try.”

  Justin rolled his eyes. “All right. I’ll try. If I remember. We’ll see how good you really are.”

  They talked awhile longer, but they were both tired, and these were the first real beds—however uncomfortable—that they’d had for more than a week. So it wasn’t long before they both started yawning, then dropped off to sleep.

  In the morning, they shared a quick breakfast and headed to the stables. Cammon was gone with a cheerful wave, and Justin was left moody and alone.

  Well, alone except for Delz. “So did you give any thought to taking a job here?” the stableman asked.

  Justin nodded and said, “Sign me up.”

  He was here, and he would do his best, because that was what Tayse expected of him, but he couldn’t bring himself to be happy about his circumstances. What was a Rider without Riders at his back? There was nothing for him in Neft. He would endure his sentence of separation, but he would find it an entirely joyless time.

  CHAPTER 3

  ELLYNOR stood in the courtyard with all the other girls and turned her face up toward the quarter moon. Cool, finally, now that the sun was down, now that a breeze had bothered to meander in from the west. The stone walls of the convent, white to reflect the light, still managed to hold enough of the summer’s heat to make some of the smaller rooms unbearable, but it was almost autumn now. Soon, thank the Mother, to be winter again, cold, still, crystalline.

  Shavell led the prayers tonight, facing the rest of them, her eyes closed and her thin hands moving with birdlike motions through the phases. In the darkness, Shavell’s violet robes looked almost as black as the Lestra’s, though you would never mistake one woman for the other. The Lestra was shorter, more powerful-looking, with a commanding presence you felt instantly any time she entered a room. Shavell was skinny, tall, pale—intense in her own way, but without nearly the force of the Lestra’s personality. All the novices were afraid of Shavell, of course, because she could be sharp-tongued and unforgiving, but what they felt for the Lestra was awe bordering on terror. They respected her, of course, but from a distance; they were all afraid she would look at them, speak to them, call them up for some momentous and valiant task. Ellynor herself had never had a conversation with the Lestra and frankly hoped she never did.