"I think I already have his opinion," Sir Fonid said with an unexpected twinkle in his eye, then stepped smoothly aside to let the newly arrived stable boy dash past rather than into him. "If you'll give your horse to the boy, I'll do what—looking after—needs to be done."
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! watched just long enough to be sure the boy really did have experience with war horses, then went inside to join the quietly waiting majordomo. His dark eyes were studying me openly, and when I reached him he began leading the way across the very wide entrance hall.
"I understand you haven't been home for some years now, my lady," he said in a way that made me feel we were already friends. "You and the sergeant, J take it, have a previous acquaintanceship to draw on?"
"I don't remember him, but apparently he remembers me," I answered, giving most of my attention to the house and its familiar contents as we walked. "He seems to remember how—high-spirited—I was as a child, and now hasn't much use for the Blade I've become. Just before you got here, he was ordering me to behave myself."
"A rather impertinent attitude to be taking with a lady of the Duke's family," Sir Fonid murmured, still inspecting me with those eyes. "A lady nobiy born may always be counted on to behave in a proper manner—or so I've found it to be. 1 hope you berated him soundly for his insolence."
"Berating isn't nearly as interesting as doing things my way, Sir Fonid," 1 replied, moving left with him toward the wide stairway leading above. "And as for always behaving in a proper manner—why, of course I do. Don't you?"
i turned my head then to look straight at him, letting him see exactly how far off his calculations had been. I didn't wonder that the household ran well under him, not with all the ways he obviously knew to handle people, but I don't enjoy being handled—or admire attempts to back me into a corner. If I was a "lady nobly born," which I was, and that sort always did a certain thing, then it followed that I had to do the same. Sir Fonid looked back at me, apparently understanding that our ideas of "had to" were not going to coincide, and a faint smile curved his lips.
"I think I'm beginning to have a bit more sympathy for the sergeant," he said, having stopped at the bottom of the stairway. "You remind me quite a lot of your father, Lady Sofaltis, which I find myself surprised to discover in a female who is also rather young. Have you already dismissed your escort, or would you like me to arrange billeting for them?" "I had no escort," I said, allowing him the chance to fall
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back and regroup as I turned my attention to starting up the stairs. "What I would like is my old apartment supplied with food and drink, to be ready for me as soon as I've finished saying hello to my sisters. Are they still in the same apartments they used to have?"
"Of course, my lady," he agreed with something of a bow as he climbed beside me, his expressionless face saying he would treat me as he probably did my father until he found my weak spot. 'Til escort you there, and then see to the refreshments."
Nothing needed to be said to that so all I did was nod, but I couldn't hdp noticing that so far my homecoming wasn't much of a joy for those around me. I supposed they would have been happier if I really was the sweet, shy, well-mannered little thing I'd been pretending to be on my last visit, but that was only because they didn't yet know I was going to be my father's heir. Once they found out, of course, it would make all the difference.
My sisters had grown an enormous amount since the last time I'd seen them, and only Sella faintly remembered me. She'd been about seven the last time I'd been home, old enough to retain something of the memory, but Saeria had only been five. At ten and twelve they found meeting their older sister an exciting event, especially since I wore a sword the way "ladies weren't supposed to do," and I was almost wheedled into a chair to tell about every exploit I'd ever had. I would have been hopelessly trapped if a servant hadn't appeared then to tell them it was time for their embroidery work or some such, and I was able to escape by promising that I would spend hours with them at another time. They were little-girl disappointed but went with the servant without much in the way of rebellion, not exactly the way I'd done it when I'd been their age. I thought about that as I left Sella's apartment, and was still thinking about it when I got to my own.
Opening the door showed my sitting room spotlessly clean and dust-free, the silvered curtains fluttering freshly at the windows, the furniture uncovered with pillows fluffed, and a tray holding a pitcher and goblets on the table next to a heavy leather chair. It looked like I really had been expected, but happily no maidservant had been moved into the smaller bed-
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room as yet. As I walked toward the pitcher and goblets I remembered the last girl sent to "help" me, not more than halfway through her second under-decade and already so stuffy that I had been able to imagine her in her sixth. She'd ridden me unmercifully the entire time I'd been there, bullying the "shy young lady" with straight-faced but glittering-eyed glee, and I hadn't been able to do more than think about dismembering her. This time, though, if she was still in the house and assigned to me again . . .
I couldn't have been more than two steps from the pitcher and goblets when a quick knock came at the door, and then it was thrown open to allow a big man to stride through. He wore the brownish red leather of a Fighter with a swordbelt firmly about his hips, and although his dark hair was beginning to be streaked with gray his weather-creased face was still as young and alive as it had always been. His dark and merry eyes found me at once, and without hesitation he strode forward with arms opened wide. I couldn't remember a time when Traixe hadn't greeted me like that, and I turned back to meet him with a hug of my own.
"Sofaltis, girl, it's so good to see you again," he said in his very deep voice, crushing me carefully in the painless bear hug he always gave. "And you've grown even taller than the last time we—"
His words broke off as though something unexpected had just occurred to him, and then I was being held out at arm's length, his eyes narrowed and his big hands on my arms. Traixe had been my father's most trusted advisor and a priest of Evon since well before I was bom, and I didn't know a single soul who could be inspected by him like that without privately reviewing their latest actions in the hopes of finding nothing he would disapprove of.
"This is just another prank, isn't it," he said rather than asked after a moment, the end of his inspection shifting his gaze to my face. "You thought it would be amusing to come home dressed as a Blade, pretending to be something you're not. Tell me I'm right."
Most people who wanted to continue enjoying full health and life made it a practice to tell Traixe exactly what he wanted to hear, and then worked hard to be sure it was the truth. I, however, didn't have that pleasant option, which
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made me even more aware of the hands wrapped around my arms.
"If you'll remember, I always said I wanted to grow up to be just like you," I offered, my voice so small and hesitant I might as well have been Sella or Saeria. "As a matter of fact I promised, and you know how I feel about promises. . . ."
This time it was my voice that trailed off, but only because Traixe had closed his eyes, as though in the grip of deep pain. It's always best to be yourself, my father had a habit of saying, and I couldn't help wondering who had given him such misinformation.
"The last time we saw you, you were as proper a young lady as it's possible to be," he said after taking a very deep breath, and then those eyes were on me again. "I want to know how you go from that to this in only half a decade time. You spend two or three seasons green before you even rate a Company medallion, and no Fist alive and wanting to stay that way would— No, no guesswork. I want to hear it from you."
"Do you mind if I get a drink first?" I asked, deciding that if he was going to let me live long enough to give him the information he wanted, I might as well take adva
ntage of it. "Long-winded explanations after longer rides tend to be wearing on the throat."
"I don't have the time for you to be long-winded," he rumbled ominously, but still let my arms go. "Get your drink and we'll both sit down, and then I want to hear it all—briefly."
"I think I'll need Evon's help for that,'1'1 I said as I turned back toward the tray, not missing the way he flinched at the words. He couldn't be very used to hearing women call on Evon, I knew, but he didn't jump on me for it. Traixe wasn't anything if he wasn't fair, and he knew as weU as I that I had the right.
I filled two goblets automatically while trying to decide where to begin and what could be left out, then carried them over to where Traixe stood waiting in front of two brocaded chairs half-facing one another. I handed him his cup with a smile then raised mine to my lips, took a sip—and almost spit it out again. I didn't realize I'd said anything until the big man put those eyes on me again.
"It's been a while since I heard barracks-talk like that," he
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remarked, not in the least amused, "If I hear it again, we'll start right now with helping you to unlearn it. What's the matter, did something sneak up and bite your—boots?"
His very obvious altering of a common Blade saying was meant to show where he stood on the question of language, but I'd heard him use worse than what I'd said any number of times, when he hadn't known I was listening. If I hadn't had a question to answer, I might have mentioned the point.
"What's the matter is this—drink," I said, looking down into my goblet with a grimace. "I wasn't expecting iced sweet fruit."
"Why not?" he countered, deliberately drinking from his own cup to show me it could be done without certain verbal accompaniment. "Iced sweet fruit is the drink usually brought to proper young ladies. Are you trying to tell me you're not a proper young lady?"
The calm stare he was giving me was a direct descendant of the ones I'd gotten all too often as a child, usually after being caught doing something I shouldn't have been doing. That same question had always accompanied the stare as well, but for the first time I was hearing it as a fuJI-grown Blade rather than as a small girl-child. Traixe, well into his fourth under-decade, was still a better fighter than I would ever be. but I found myself straightening where I stood and meeting that stare unblinkingly. The question he'd put to me so often was too close to a standard insult every female Blade ran into on a regular basis, and my reaction was too automatic to even consider letting the matter slide by.
"By Evon's Silver Bracers—!" Traixe exclaimed, taking one step back with a convulsive movement of his right hand. He stopped the movement almost before it began, but his calm had been shaken very slightly out of his grip.
"Sofaltis, you startled me," he said, his brow creased with the disturbance he felt. "The way you looked at me—for an instant I thought you were going to draw on me. What could I have said—" His eyes widened as he realized exactly what he'd said, and then he shook his head as he put a hand over those eyes. "And I complained about the language you used," he said with a deep sigh. "I'd forgotten what circulates as proper for a young lady among Blades. I apologize, of course,
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sincerely and humbly. And why the hell didn't you draw on me?"
He was so indignant so quickly that it was my turn to be startled, and then 1 was laughing and shaking my head the way he'd done. If female Blades made a habit of starting fights over that insult, male Blades who associated with -female Blades started them faster and a lot more often. None of us who were female knew exactly why that was, but that particular insuit could set our Fistmates off faster than an attempted backstabbing.
"I didn't draw on you because I only just got home," I told him after a moment, still chuckling. "That means I'd like to wait awhile before inviting a sendoff, especially of the final sort. I may take you on some day, Traixe, but not before your ninth or tenth decade."
"Well, at least they taught you more good sense than you used to have," he said, trying to look and sound gruff rather than pleased and flattered. "I can't wait to find out how this all came about."
"I suppose it was something of an accident," I answered, taking the hint to get started while I gestured him to a chair and took the other myself. "When I first got to Aunt Illi's house, she and 1 didn't exactly hit it off. We both knew why I'd been sent there, and while she was determined to see me become a true lady of quality, I was just as determined that I wouldn't become one. We went back and forth for weeks, Aunt Hli fighting with every weapon she could think of— including patience—me ignoring overtures and orders alike, and then she had an inspiration. She was sure her idea would work, so she went ahead and made the arrangements."
"For hiring someone with a belt to use on you, 1 hope," Traixe said, back to giving me that look again. "If you hadn't been the daughter of my lord Duke—and he too softhearted where females are concerned—you would have had it from me the very first time you pulled your shenanigans. Is that what she did?"
"You're closer than you know," I said with a grin, not about to tell him how relieved I'd been when I'd first found out he wasn't allowed to discipline me with anything but lectures. If he had been permitted a free hand, so to speak, my excursions of freedom, as I'd liked to call them, might
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not have been quite so frequent. "Aunt Illi had gotten so sick of hearing me flatly refuse to be a lady of quality, she decided to give me a chance at my only other 'option.' Being nobly born I had to be something of quality, so if I refused to be a lady the only thing left was being a gentleman. The arrangements she made were for me to begin serious weapons study, which would have been done as a matter of course if I'd been a boy."
"Thinking that would change your mind if anything could," he said with a nod and another deep sigh, then rubbed at his eyes with his free hand. "The theory was sound, and one I might have tried myself if I'd thought of it. How quickly did it backfire?"
"Oh, just about from the very first day," I said, swallowing down some of my grin when the satisfaction in my voice brought his stare to me again. "I was taller than most of the boys training with me, faster than all of them, and didn't believe in crying if 1 got hurt. At first the armsmasters, at Aunt Illi's orders, were harder on me than on any of the others, but once we began getting deeper into the drills they went from riding me to teaching me in almost the blink of an eye. J hadn't known that armsmasters never question talent, only train it, and neither had Aunt Illi. By the time she found out, it was much too late."
"But didn't she withdraw you and try something else?" he asked, not up to understanding that part of it. "If it wasn't working, why did she continue with it?"
"Traixe, the Countess Illi happens to be that rarest of all people, someone with a born sense of honor," I said slowly, trying to make him see it in the proper light. "What she wanted for me was what would be best for me, and when she saw how really happy I was she refused to take away that happiness. If she'd found my talent in sewing, or stately dances, or playing a lap harp and singing, she would have seen me thoroughly trained in that; once she found that my talent—and interest—lay in swordwork, she did her duty with the same thoroughness she does everything. By the time I was fourteen I was accepted into a Company, and I had my medallion even before I came home for my last visit."
"An acquisition you didn't see fit to share with your father or me," he said, still sour. "Was that because of your age, or
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because you were waiting for the perfect moment to break the good news?"
"Mostly the first," I admitted, still fighting with my grin. "Aren't you the least bit proud of me? And prouder now than you would have been half a decade ago? We went through some pretty heavy fighting before first snow, but the Silver Gleaming had the lightest casualty rate of any Company involved. How about it, Traixe, not even a small pat
on the back?"
"If it was up to me I'd give you more than one pat, and not quite on the back," he growled, slamming his almost-untouched cup down on the table between us before getting to his feet to prowl up and down. "Not only do you not learn what your father wanted you to learn, you corrupt a Countess, join a Sword Company, and fight as a Blade in a war we all thought you were safely protected from! Is that what you want me to congratulate you about? How close you came to getting killed?"
He stopped to glare at me with the question, his eyes really angry, and somehow that made me remember what Rull had said just before I'd left Fyerlin. It came to me then that I was also still holding a goblet, so I reached to the table to put mind down next to his. When I looked back Traixe was closer than he had been, and then he was reaching down with a sigh to pull me to my feet and back into that familiar bear hug.
"Of course I'm proud of you," he said with the sort of gentleness most people didn't know he was capable of, his hand stroking my hair as he held me to him. "I couldn't be prouder if you were one of mine rather than one of the Duke's, and I know your actions are and always will be of the sort to make Even's name shine. Pride has nothing to do with worry over your safety, child, especially in times such as these."
"Which is, after all, the reason I'm home now," I said at the reminder, raising my head while trying to understand how I could have forgotten. "Traixe, how serious is the trouble we're facing?"
"Serious enough to make us desperate," he answered, letting me go with a pat on the shoulder. "I won't say any more than that, I know your father wants to tell you himself,
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but you'll have to wait until he gets back. He's out hunting with the Counts and Barons he's currently guesting."
"I heard he wasn't home/' I said with a frown, reaching for my cup before remembering what was in it. "Why would he be guesting the Counts and Barons at a time like this? And that reminds me: how did you know I was here?"
"I'd asked Sir Fonid to let me know the moment you arrived, and he did," Traixe answered, scowling down at his own cup. "As far as the guesting goes, that's part of what you'H be discussing with your father, but I've just thought of something that makes me feel a good deal better than I've been feeling. I'll still be supplying you with some of my men as a bodyguard, but now 1 don't have to worry about whether or not they're perfect, Ali they'll need to do is slow any attackers long enough to give you warning; if a Blade of a Fist in the Silver Gleaming can'l handle it after that, no one can."
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