“A couple cuts, they dressed those in the field.” He paused. “No fear. Was a very small skirmish with some Royalist scouts. Trumped ’em thoroughly. I’m the only fool who took a damn bayonet.” He blanched. “Pardon the language.”
“You have a bayonet wound in your shoulder, you can say whatever you like,” I said. I knew the wounds were cruel ones, created by a triangular blade and seldom healed cleanly without painful festering.
“Nah, it’s better already.” He brushed the bandage on his forehead. “And this one is all my fault, I fell and hit my head on a rock just about as soon as I’d gotten poked. Because I’m a prize idiot.”
“I think if someone drove a bayonet into me, I’d do more than trip.” I laughed. “Do you mind if I—that is, I could cast a little extra luck for you. If you would like.”
He paused. “I don’t know that I would, miss, but thank you. It’s just not been my folks’ way, you know.”
“Oh,” I said. “I—you do know that some of the bandages… and the coats?”
“Yes, sure, we all know. It don’t bother me none.” He fiddled with the edge of his blanket, avoiding my eyes. “I don’t—I don’t mean to offend, but I don’t really believe in it anyway. So for you to cast on me… look, it would be a bit like asking me to join you in praying to the Creator like a Kvys or lighting incense to the ancestors like a Pellian. It’s just not what I believe.”
“I understand,” I said softly. If only everyone could see the light, could feel its gentle joy, I thought, then stopped. There was still plenty to not believe in. Someone could quite easily believe it wasn’t to be tampered with—many of the Kvys certainly did.
“I don’t mean to offend. What you’re doing—it’s real nice,” he said awkwardly. “You don’t have to be here.”
I forced a smile. “I rather feel that I do.”
41
I WOKE IN THE STILLNESS OF MIDNIGHT. EVEN THE USUAL BUSTLE OF activity downstairs was quieted. The majority of the army was encamped at the military school, but I knew that below, on the lawn and in the gardens, patrols still kept watch here, too. The picket lines of an army at war were never asleep, I thought wanly as I padded to the window and looked out. Sure enough, moonlight glinted from a bayonet point at the edge of the portico.
Reassured by the quiet sentinel below, I returned to my bed, but stopped before I slid under warm covers.
There was a footfall in the hallway.
I was sure of it, as I willed the bed to cease creaking and I slid myself back off the edge of the mattress. I shivered; the fire was low and it was too cold in just my shift. But I heard it again—a soft touch of foot on stone, certainly, bare feet or slippers, not army issue shoes or riding boots.
I swallowed. It was understandable, completely, for someone billeted in the house to be up at night, unable to sleep, perhaps checking the sentries outside, reassuring themselves that the night was still peaceful.
Still, something kept me wary, unwilling to succumb to my warm bed while someone waited in the hall outside. I moved against the wall, as the footsteps outside resumed, closer now. Feeling prickles of foolishness at the absurdity of it, I picked up a heavy candlestick and slunk against a thick decorative tapestry. I still glowed like the moon in my white shift, but I was half-hidden.
My door opened.
The figure was female, I was sure, in a dark dressing gown and pointed-toe slippers. Polly. It had to be, the only woman I might expect to see here, at night, who wouldn’t have to slip by a sentry to get in.
Despite the absurdity, I drew charm magic around me and, at the same time, pulled curse into the candlestick, pressing darkness into the metal and holding it there. It felt heavier in my hand.
She didn’t see me; the curtains of the bed blocked her view of my corner, and I saw where she was looking—a lump of pillows and blankets under the quilt that, had I not known better, I would have assumed to be a sleeping form. What Polly, surely, assumed to be my sleeping form.
What was she doing here? I demanded silently, fingers tightening on the pewter candlestick. The weight in my hand was reassuring, but what, exactly, did I intend to do with it?
She stepped inside, movement lithe and quick, and shut the door softly, a faint line of light showing around it where she left it cracked. Quieter that way, I thought.
She stepped toward the bed.
My heartbeat grew faster, pressing against my throat, limiting my inhale. What could she possibly want from me, at midnight, that she couldn’t ask during the day?
Nothing good, I realized, eyes widening with horror as I saw the glint of silver in her hand. A blade.
In one movement, she flung back the top quilt and the knife lowered toward where my throat would have been, had I been asleep in the bed. Her movements arrested suddenly, and she stood upright, defensive, back pressed against the bed and knife at the ready.
I barely breathed. She would find me if she searched any more thoroughly. I was standing mere yards from her, and a single flutter of the bedcurtains or tapestry would reveal me. She was smaller than I was, but she had a knife—
I shook off the idiocy of that thought, of weighing who would win in a fight. I had never even been in a fight, save slapping and kicking my brother a few times. But surely Polly hadn’t either, I reasoned. And further, what choice did I have, if she came at me with the knife?
She pulled the curtains nearest her aside, and all of the hangings moved. Her eyes snapped to me, to my white shift in the bare darkness.
Before I could reconsider, I flung the candlestick at her, a glint of dark sparkle tracing its flight across the room toward her. I winced; if I missed, I was without a weapon. And if I hit her, square in the head with a cursed, heavy candlestick?
I pushed aside the thought of killing Theodor’s sister as the projectile collided with her breastbone at the base and her nose at the tip. The knife clattered to the floor, and I rushed toward it before she could recover it. Hating myself, I pointed it toward her, and she shrank away from me.
“Stand up,” I said simply.
“I owe you nothing,” she half spat. Blood poured from her nose onto the fine silk of her dressing gown, but she didn’t make a move to wipe it away.
“I owe you less,” I retorted. She stood, still edging away from me. In the clear moonlight from the window, I could tell that her nose was broken. “You’ll want the surgeon,” I said. “Let us find him, shall we?”
“What?”
“It’s broken.” My voice was flat. “Your nose. I’m sure of it. I presume you’ll want it set.”
Her hands hung lank by her sides. “You can’t be serious.”
“Quite serious. I’ve seen broken noses, in the taverns and such.”
“I’ve no doubt you have,” she said, scraping up an imperious tone despite her swiftly swelling nose and the beginnings of a black eye. She finally wiped her face with a wince. “But you can’t be taking me to the surgeon. You wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t?” My mouth tilted into a humorless smile.
“They left me behind for one reason,” Polly said, delicate jawline set firm and angry under smeared blood. “To kill you.”
“Why you?” I didn’t question her willingness.
“Who else would be allowed close enough? The officers, some soldier—you wouldn’t let them stay two doors down from the Rebel Prince’s betrothed, would you?”
“I suppose not.” I exhaled. Sianh anticipated that someone—many someones—might try to eliminate me, but he hadn’t guessed at who. We should have, I chided myself.
“I knew what would happen if I failed,” she said bluntly. Her deep blue eyes met mine. “You’ll have me executed, I know. Not you, personally. Or is that one of your specialties now?”
“None of this is my specialty,” I whispered. The thoughts came rapid and haphazard, and they were foolhardy in this situation, stupid even. Still, I caught them and turned them into a plan. “I’m not having you executed. No one need know
this happened.”
Her eyes flashed blue fire. “What, you would hide this from your own people?”
“Yes.” I toed aside the bed curtains pooling on the floor, disgusted with her and myself. “Theodor was devastated by what this war did to your family. To know that his sister tried to kill his betrothed? It would gut him.”
Pain crossed Polly’s face, briefly, before the hard mask settled into its familiar lines again. “I cannot be responsible for my brother’s choices.”
“I never asked you to be. You’re clearly too busy with your own,” I hissed. “Come on now.” I hesitated. “I’ll put the knife away once we’re out in the open.”
“I wouldn’t”—she swallowed—“have done this for you.”
“I know full well,” I muttered, losing patience. “Go!” She finally limped out the door in front of me, acutely aware, I made sure, of the blade in my pocket. “If anyone asks, you fell down the stairs.”
To her credit, she didn’t shriek or faint when Hamish set her nose, and to his credit, he didn’t ask any questions, though I could imagine the outlandish scenarios Lady Apollonia, in her silk dressing gown with a broken face, must have conjured. It looked like we were in a brawl and she was on the losing end—a rumor I was sure I would hear repeated in the coming weeks.
Better that rumor than the truth.
42
LADY APOLLONIA OF WESTLAND LEFT TWO DAYS LATER FOR WEST Serafe, claiming she had only just gotten word from a distant cousin-by-marriage that he had offered to open his home to her as a refugee. I suppressed a snort—she was no refugee, but no one else questioned her decision to leave. I was suspicious, of course, of any connection to West Serafe, but I knew that Theodor’s family was large and supplied with well-connected cousins, and in the end, it didn’t matter. Polly had tried, and failed, at her mission in the Civil War.
She waited for an escort to the docks near the military school, and I waited with her. “Are you sure you want to go? As you said, no one can guarantee your safety,” I asked. Her eyes were still rimmed in purple and her nose was wrapped under a linen bandage circling her delicate face. Alba was the only one who had questioned the injury, with a single, deftly raised eyebrow that I had answered with a shake of my head. Polly’s secret went with her.
“I have no real choice, have I?” Polly said, gazing into the distance.
“No one is forcing you to leave your home.”
“You’d let me stay?” She barked a laugh. “You cannot trust me. Even a common seamstress is not a fool.”
“I lock my door now,” I replied simply. We stood in silence a long, uncomfortable moment. I knew I didn’t have to wait with her, not for propriety’s sake or politeness, but I wanted to see, for myself, where she went. It was like having a spider in the room; I felt better if I knew where it was than if it scuttled out of sight.
“It will end badly for you. You do realize that, don’t you?” Polly finally said. Not maliciously, but with a strange edge of curiosity.
“Perhaps you are too confident that your Royalists will win.”
“I’m not. Not after what I saw here. I—I confess I believed Pommerly when he said you didn’t have an army, and Merhaven when he said the Serafan casters would negate any influence you might have. I never believed them,” she added with a slight crack in her voice, “when they said Theo couldn’t lead. That he was too soft. I never believed that.”
“Then perhaps,” I said, “it will end badly for you, not me.”
“It likely will.” She shrugged. “But for you as well. It does not matter who wins this war. The country is split open like an overripe plum. It’s going to rot now, don’t you see that? If we win, it’s rebellion and insurrection for decades, likely, that we’ll have to keep suppressing. Bad enough. But if you win?” She bit her lip, then winced as it pulled the swollen skin around her nose taut. “If you win, it’s chaos.”
“Why do you all believe that?” I threw my hands up, frustrated. She shied away from my white gloves as though I might hit her. I calmed myself. “Why don’t you believe that a change in governance could mean anything but anarchy? We can create a government that will rule Galitha fairly, and peacefully. We already are—the Council of Country is quite literally in deliberation now in your old ballroom.”
She shook her head, hair rolled and powdered as though this was an ordinary morning out on the lawn. Perhaps going on a hunt, perhaps a picnic. She smelled like lilacs, cloying powdered lilacs. “You can’t. You won’t. You’ll fight and fracture and make your own people suffer for a fool’s dream.”
“That’s not true. You’ve convinced yourself it’s true, but it isn’t—you only believe it because,” I said with dawning understanding, “because you want to believe it. If you believe anything else, that the common people can govern themselves, then everything you’ve lived for has been a lie. All your duty, all your honor, all your importance—your very existence doesn’t matter.”
“Our existence held Galitha in security—no, prospered her!—for centuries. And you think you can do better?”
“Security and prosperity mean nothing if they aren’t shared. And yes. I do believe that the people can do better. We can prosper and secure this nation, too. But even if we don’t surpass your ability to build deep coffers and stack up gold, giving the people the freedom to govern themselves is worth it.”
She sighed. “We won’t ever agree. But when this country is in anarchy, rotting from the inside out, split open by wounds you helped create—not me!—don’t think you’ll be safe. Just because you’re one of ‘them.’ You won’t be.” She pursed her perfect pink lips as she spoke, like a spun-glass bottle full of poison. “They won’t be satisfied, and they’ll turn on you. Or they’ll see you as too close to us—you, who spent so many hours with Viola and Annette, who gave herself up to a noble’s bed.”
“You underestimate their humanity,” I chided her.
“No, I understand humanity quite well.” Her eyes narrowed, as though remembering something painful, then she straightened. “I know this much, too. You’re a woman. There’s danger enough in that.”
“I’m not your ally simply because we’re both women,” I said as the wagon pulled up the road, ready to ferry us to the docks.
“I never would have suggested it,” Polly replied.
We rode in silence to the docks, and a corporal in Reformist gray and red unloaded her small leather trunk and portmanteaus. Scanty luggage for what might be a very long exile. I saw her on the boat myself, a barge moving toward the ocean and its ports.
I walked from the river docks to the military school, where Sianh stood with a few young—too young—newly minted Rock’s Ford Academy officers, wearing gray and red that would have grieved many of their noble parents to the marrow. One of them was Jeremy, his hat cocked at a rakish angle over his eye. They watched the unit working through bayonet drills in front of them, the sun glinting off the metal even though the wind was damp and cold.
“Going well?” I asked as I approached.
“They are progressing,” Sianh said, allowing himself a small smile. “I have created a few elite units by combining the professional soldiers who defected to us with the best of the recruits from this summer. If all goes well, these fellows will be their officers.” He nodded to the young men who stood near me, looking too young, too green for this role.
“They’re still too far apart,” one of the young men said. “See? The blond at the end, he’s edging too far away, he’d get the man next to him gored.”
“His arms are longer than that man’s by an ell,” Jeremy replied with a laugh. “We should have them lined up using Maraun’s Rule to minimize height and build differences.”
“But we don’t have the numbers Maraun was working with,” a third said.
“Hey!” The first young officer trotted across the field. “Not like that.” He took the musket from a soldier and faced off against his neighbor. “Not loose at the stock like that. Your control i
s coming from there, like—see?” He lunged forward like lightning and parried the bayonet of the neighboring man, who was so surprised he nearly dropped his musket.
I bit back any argument I had about the young officers not knowing their business well enough. I still wondered how they would stand up to the rigors of campaign life after their upbringings, or the thick horror I knew they would see on the field, but if Sianh was confident, so was I.
“I was just going to join the officers’ mess for the midday meal,” Sianh said. “Would you have time to join me, or are you returning immediately to Westland Hall? Theodor will be there, and I am sure he would appreciate seeing you.” Sianh weighted his request carefully, but I heard it clearly—the time spent as head of an occupying army in his childhood home had been difficult. No one here, I was sure, understood quite like me—and even if they did, he was in no position to crack in front of the men he was supposed to lead. I knew I couldn’t convince him to stay at Westland Hall, and he couldn’t be convinced to let me barracks with him.
“I’d like that,” I said. “I suppose I can walk back to Westland Hall after. It’s not far—a mile, maybe? I’m on my own schedule.”
“Very well. I suppose it is safe enough, you walking from one of our encampments to another.” He looked around us. “In what I can only guess was some sort of game park.”
“It is rather nicely manicured, isn’t it?” I said.
“It is not a forest at all.” He shook his head. “I hear all about the wilds of Galitha, the southern forests choked with brambles and great towering hardwood trees. And I am encamped here.” He gestured with wide arms. “A picnic lawn.”
“We marched through enough wildwoods,” I reminded him as I matched his quick stride.
“We did indeed. It seems that the nobility of your country is much like mine—it has a curious habit of domesticating its countryside to suit its whims.” He paused. “But I forget myself. I should not criticize.”
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