“But,” she went on, sliding her hand down to grab his, “if you are feeling remorseful, you could always make up for it.”
She sensed Yathana departing for the place between worlds where she went on such occasions.
“Ah?” Zelen stepped forward, taking hold of her shoulders lightly. “And how might I do that?”
“Distract me,” said Branwyn, and pulled him into a kiss.
* * *
Shadows of his past and devils far away fled from Zelen’s awareness, having begun their retreat as soon as Branwyn took his hand. There, in the shelter of autumn-blighted plants and evening shade, he stood with a beautiful woman in his arms, and all moments except that one could go to hell.
Branwyn had a patient nature, he discovered. The sweet pressure of her lips was insistent, but unhurried, seeking rather than forceful. She explored, she learned, not with the cautious daring of an innocent but with the interest of a master jeweler examining a likely purchase, or a smith testing the balance of a sword.
The object of her scrutiny couldn’t match jewels or metal for impassivity. It was mere heartbeats before Zelen was groaning into Branwyn’s mouth. He fought back the urge to pull her lush body against his or to return her kiss with bruising force, because he sensed a challenge in her slow investigation, some balance of power that would shift if his control broke.
Also, it was damnably, torturously erotic.
If slow was what the lady wanted, he could manage slow. There were his hands on her shoulders, for instance, and he could slide them down, taking in soft doeskin and hard muscle and then the even softer roundness of her breasts. He could cup, there, and skim his fingers back and forth, until Branwyn made a husky, wordless noise. Layers made it harder to navigate by feel, but he traced small circles with his thumbs and felt her nipples stiffen.
Her grip on the back of his head tightened, becoming almost painful before she seemed to realize she was pulling his hair and let go. The hand in question moved down his back, leaving a trail of sensation that spread through Zelen like fire on flash paper, and settled on one hip, letting Branwyn curve her fingers over his arse. A step forward on her part brought their bodies together. Her kiss demanded now, rather than seeking to learn, and Zelen was oh so eager to give her everything she would ask—and to suggest a few additions if her list ran short.
The top silver button on her doublet was between his fingers when the bell in the tower rang.
“Ohhell.” It was one word, almost a whisper, and the very frustration of it made Zelen’s cock pulse in response. “Eight?”
“I think,” he managed. He had to free his mouth to speak, and the side of her neck was long and golden, so Zelen started kissing his way down from her ear. “Seems—mmm—a reasonable hour to be.”
But then Branwyn was stepping back. “Then I have to go meet with Marton,” she said, “and come off as respectable when I do.” As if it would help, she tucked a strand of hair behind one ear and smoothed down the front of her tunic. “Pyres take the man.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Zelen. Gods, he ached.
Branwyn’s eyes gleamed blue in the fading light. “You could if you had to give him your attention after this,” she said. “We’ll meet again. Soon, I hope—and thank you.”
She leaned forward for a brief kiss. Then she turned and was gone, a graceful white figure that vanished into the shadows. Zelen leaned against a hedge and seriously considered performing indecent acts in the high lord’s garden.
Chapter 10
Duty had often been taxing and frequently dangerous, but Branwyn didn’t think it had ever been so thoroughly annoying.
Zelen’s kisses had left her thoroughly roused, and she’d had no chance even to satisfy herself. A hasty series of adjustments to her hair and tunic, and she’d gone back out again. For a while, every step she took, every brush of fabric against her thighs or breasts, every motion of the carriage, was a reminder of the too-short interlude in the garden.
Dining with Marton and his family did serve as a very effective cold bath.
They ate in an ostentatiously unornamented room: sober, dark walls and furniture, no mirrors or jewels, and far more space than any ten people needed, let alone the six at the table. The knives and spoons were silver, as was the candelabra. The plates were very thin bone-white porcelain—probably twice what precious metal would have cost, and far more breakable.
Marton, his wife, and his older daughter all wore heavy wool, with high collars, long sleeves, and no color brighter than gray. His younger daughter and her husband were slightly more daring, he in light brown and dusty green and she in a lilac dress that actually showed her arms to the shoulder. Her father kept glancing her way and shaking his head, making Branwyn feel sorry for the woman.
“How do you find the city?” Lady Marton asked as they sat down.
“Very pleasant, thank you. Everyone has been most hospitable, particularly Lord and Lady Rognozi, and the city itself is fascinating. I only wish I had more spare hours to spend exploring it.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” said Marton. “I’ve done my utmost to promote forms of pure and healthy occupation, and I allow myself to hope that such seeds have fallen on fertile soil. I’ll dare to take your sentiments as confirmation.”
Healthy, maybe, snickered Yathana. Plenty of fresh air and exercise.
Branwyn took a hasty sip of wine. It was heavily watered, but that was as well. She had the feeling she’d need to control her reactions. “That must have been quite the endeavor,” she managed.
Apparently it was. She learned more details of Marton’s promotion of virtue, over the next hour, than she ever could conceive of wanting to know, though that did free her from having to make conversation.
Even the food was…virtuous. The majority of it was bread and boiled vegetables, without spice or butter. There was also what Branwyn thought had been a chicken, though it too was boiled and flavorless. Lady Marton asked if she’d heard of Kalara Meraniv’s theory of food and consciousness, and when Branwyn admitted her ignorance, helpfully explained it. Meat, apparently, tended to—and here the lady actually dropped her voice—“excite the senses inappropriately, if eaten without moderation.”
Oh, said Yathana, so that’s what’s been wrong with you.
As meals went, Branwyn had eaten worse, but that had been in the field, where how long food lasted and whether or not she could find it at all had been much more important than how it tasted. She’d eaten better at cheap roadside inns and in the houses of peasants who lived mostly on bread and porridge and saw whole cuts of meat once a year. Expensively bad food was a new experience.
“And that,” Lord Marton said, branching off a rambling statement about the Temptations of Youth that Branwyn hadn’t really followed, “is why I welcome your news and the opportunity you bring us.”
* * *
“If you’ll pardon my asking,” Zelen said, moving a smooth piece of polished aventurine ahead three spaces on the marble board, “what do you think about this war in Criwath?”
Altien gave the question, and the board, a long evaluation. He sipped from his goblet of wine in the meantime, tentacles curling delicately around the brim. “For my people, if there’s any chance Thyran has returned—and it sounds from what you say as though that chance is very great—then we must begin preparing. There’s little we can do to assist directly. I’m no warrior, and we fare poorly when we go too far from the sea. But we can protect ourselves and supply a few needs, and with forewarning we can make a place for any who seek refuge, in case the worst does happen.”
“Do they know?” Zelen asked, startled by the immediate action in the answer. He’d expected depth—he’d never known the waterman to be shallow—but as a matter Altien would contemplate while he talked, not one he’d already fully thought through and come to conclusions on.
“I’ve written messages home
about the situation,” said Altien. “I assume others of us here have as well. I suspect that Criwath has sent an envoy to my people, too, and to the dwellers-in-earth. It’s what I would do, if I were a king facing such a threat.”
Zelen eyed the board. His yellow and green pieces had taken half the neutral territory. Altien’s lapis and garnet ovals were making a complicated pattern on the outside. “And for us? Humans here?”
“I couldn’t say. Thyran is unmistakably a threat, and will remain so. There’s no ocean that can polish his edges to smoothness. If Criwath wants to strike now, that might be wise.” The tentacles lifted, expanded to briefly show Altien’s gold-colored beak, and then fell again. “But I’m no tactician.”
“Obviously,” said Zelen, gesturing to the board.
Altien made the clicking sound that was his laugh. “I couldn’t say if it would be best to put all your forces behind an attempt to eliminate the problem now. If it can be done, it seems wise—but those from our city would be going blind over unfamiliar ground, and if Criwath is wrong, our soldiers might be more useful in the city’s defense. But then, Criwath’s generals likely anticipated that.”
Zelen picked up his goblet. It was mostly empty. “I don’t know why I bother with the question,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Father will make the decision, and damned if I’ve been able to change his mind in thirty-two years.”
“You bother because you wish you could,” said Altien. It was a dispassionate statement, with no more emotion than he used when describing injuries: attend, the patient has a knife in his side here. “And because when your father does make the decision, you hope to justify it to the council and, more, to the envoy you admire.”
“I did warn her. And she doesn’t seem the sort to hold it against me.”
“So you hope.” Altien sent five pieces, mixed red and blue, forward on the sides. “What sort of a person is she?”
“Beautiful,” Zelen said immediately, then realized that he sounded young and dangerously close to writing insipid poetry, and cleared his throat. “Clever, or interested, or likely both. I was never bored, talking with her—and I wasn’t talking the whole time either.”
“I wouldn’t have said it.”
“Poram’s arse you wouldn’t.”
“Go on.”
What was he going to tell Gedomir? It was wise to begin lining up those facts. “She’s been in the war for a while. I’d wager she was a soldier of some sort before that. High-ranked enough to talk with the army’s wizards, but that’s to be expected if they’re trusting her as a diplomat. I almost wonder if she’s nobility traveling under a false name, or born on the wrong side of the blanket.”
“Why would she disguise herself? Humans generally take pride in noble birth, from what I’ve seen, and listen more to those with such advantages.”
Zelen picked up a polished citrine star. “We do,” he said, “but we’re also more cautious around them. She might want to keep us off guard. And nobility from another country, a country we haven’t always gotten on with…”
“There could be resentment.”
“She could be a target.” He put the star down with a click, uncertain if the space he’d chosen was tactically sound but not inclined to care. “If you wanted power over Criwath, or favorable terms, you could do worse than take one of their more valued people hostage. It’d be hard for them to strike back during a war.”
Altien sat still, six-fingered hands motionless on the edge of the table. “Is that common?”
“Not common, but it happened occasionally, from what I’ve heard.” Zelen poured himself more wine. “The Great Winters, and after, rather cut down on official visitors.”
He wanted to believe that in their aftermath, having faced down the common foes of Thyran and twisted nature, people would have moved beyond such practices. More, he wanted to think that nobody would seek such an unjust advantage against a country Thyran was actively menacing.
Almost two decades in the council meant he couldn’t really convince himself.
* * *
“I’m glad to hear it,” Branwyn said carefully, “but I would welcome hearing more of your point of view. It might inspire me when I speak to your fellows, after all.”
She even smiled. Masterful bullshit, said Yathana.
Marton smoothed his oiled hair. “Why, only that war brings out the finest qualities in our youth, of course. The discipline of combat allows them to rise above animal instincts and seek greater purpose.”
Branwyn, who’d been in Oakford the night before the siege started and the day after it ended, stifled her reaction with bread.
“It instills camaraderie, besides,” Marton added, “and inspires heroism,” and Branwyn’s amusement deflated.
She’d seen both. She’d seen their aftermath too: the weeping, the blood. Branwyn remembered a girl, no more than sixteen, cradling the gutted corpse of her friend. The Mourners had pried it away eventually. There’d been no herbs to spare on calming her down.
Camaraderie. Yes.
She got the bread down while Marton kept talking.
“I know,” he said, in the tones of one making a very generous concession, “that I met your initial agreement with skepticism, Madam Alanive, and for that you have my deepest apologies. It was a hasty reaction to the source of your information. While I cannot fully approve of the Sentinels, I must grant that their…way of being…is necessary in the world we now inhabit, and they’re not given to falsehood as such. Having had the leisure to consider the issue—”
“You believe that a war would do Heliodar some good,” Branwyn said, managing not to sound entirely flat.
“Father doesn’t welcome war,” said the younger daughter quickly, “not as such. But presuming that it’s ongoing—”
“Just so. The gods,” said Marton, inflating his chest like a horse resisting a saddle band, “provide crucibles in which to shape the young people of our land for worthy causes, instilling in them a sense of pride and of loyalty to their homeland, and diverting their thoughts from the idle pursuits that lead to rank debauchery. So they have led you to us, to bring us to this moment of noble decision, and I have every confidence that we shall prove worthy.”
He continued in that vein for a while—what seemed like a long while to Branwyn. She nodded and smiled in the right places, uttered vague but complimentary sentiments in others. All the time she thought of Zelen, who wasn’t precisely a young man, and of those more wide-eyed with faith in what people like Marton said. She imagined them marching off to fight skinless horrors and mind-warping evil, full of conviction that this would be an uplifting experience and that they’d come back better and nobler for it.
Criwath needed the soldiers. If Darya, Amris, and Gerant were right—and Branwyn had no reason to doubt that they were—the world needed the soldiers. The consequences of failure were a slaughterhouse, where desperate people killed and fed on each other or even worse. Thyran hadn’t succeeded before. This time, he might.
It was good that Marton was on her side. Branwyn told herself that throughout the end of the dinner and through the final goodbyes, when she gave Marton and his family a courteous bow and expressed her ideally sincere-sounding hopes that they’d meet again.
“Let me off here, please,” she told the carriage driver a few minutes into the ride.
“Are you well, madam?”
“Yes.” No. “Yes. The walk will do me good, though.”
Something, Branwyn thought, had damned well better.
Chapter 11
Gedomir snorted. “She’s a career soldier, she knows details about Oakford, and she’s persuaded at least Lady Rognozi that the matter is serious? I would have expected far more after a week, given your…abilities.”
“We haven’t exactly spent the whole week together,” Zelen responded. He leaned back, his chair on two legs, his
feet on the desk of his private study, and a goblet of brandy in one hand. It was a comfortable position. More to the point, it irritated Gedomir. Zelen saw a muscle twitch under his brother’s right eye every time he took a sip. “She’s had others on the council to meet with, and it’ll be suspicious if I’m always on the Rognozis’ doorstep like an abandoned kitten.”
He’d had his duties as well, but it was better not to mention them. Gedomir was skeptical enough about the clinic when it didn’t get in the way of what he wanted.
“Can you arrange to be there in the future, when she speaks with the others?”
“Possibly, sometimes, if I can find out when and where and if I know the people well enough that I won’t be called out for it, or thrashed by a pair of footmen for being an impudent young wastrel. And I still might find out no more than I have already.” Zelen saw his brother’s expression darken. “Have you considered,” he pressed on, “that the lady might have neither dark secrets nor a hidden agenda? Sitha love us, Branwyn’s asking for help for her kingdom, not plotting to undercut you on the whitefish trade. I can understand disagreeing, but—”
“Naive as always,” Gedomir said. “What if the council should agree and propose the assistance in the form of a tax that would ruin us, or a levy of all able-bodied citizens under forty? Or what if this is Criwath’s plan—lure our military might, or our treasury, off chasing phantoms, then overtake us?”
“Why would they now?”
“Because they can, fool.” Gedomir sighed. “Don’t mistake me; her cause may be just, though I suspect Criwath doesn’t have the capacity to properly judge such a threat, and we may all agree in the end. If we don’t, and if disagreement must turn to action, it’s better to be fully prepared. That is where you come in.”
“It’s wonderful to know that you have a use for me.” Zelen took another sip of brandy, relishing the burn more than the taste. He couldn’t find a flaw in his brother’s argument, not then—perhaps it was the way all true heads of houses thought. The others on the council had never spoken to him about it.
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