by A. F. Dery
Again, Lord Eladria sighed. “Well, he will have to find someone, that is all. Someone female.” The corners of his mouth quirked upwards a little and his eyes crinkled. “Your maidenly virtue and the appearance of propriety must be our uppermost concern.” And with that, he strode purposefully from the room, leaving Kesara to speculate miserably on what Darius might come up with in answer to that.
Kesara’s obvious aversion to his steward should not have pleased him so much by half, and Thane knew it. But that knowledge didn’t stop his face from all but splitting itself in half with his grin after he’d shut her bedchamber door behind him.
Just because Thane possessed no beauty himself did not mean he was incapable of recognizing it in others. He knew that Darius was a good looking man and that the women of the Keep sighed over him. He was neither blind nor oblivious and had fully expected the man to charm the Ytaren woman as he had all the others. It wasn’t an idea he was keen on and even he could not have put words to why, but it was how it had to be. He had the strangest urge to simply deal with her himself and cut out all other interference, but he knew that wasn’t the way things were done in his Keep and that he was being foolish. Though again, he couldn’t really say why he felt that way. There was just something about thinking of Kesara succumbing to Darius’ charms that made him want to hit something, very hard. Preferably Darius’ pretty face. Then he felt aghast at himself for thinking that way. He liked to think of himself as being beyond such pettiness.
Thane did not, however, think the same of most other people, Kesara included. He decided he needed to know- for her own safety and well-being, of course- just what it was about Darius that had rendered him so repugnant in her eyes, and her own reticence on the subject was plain- something unusual for her, he thought, as she seemed to otherwise speak so freely to him.
That reticence had also been present when he’d asked about her ill-fated flight down that corridor. At the time, he had chalked it up to mere embarrassment- perhaps she’d had a silly reason or even none at all for running down his hallways like that- but seeing her reluctance about Darius, he couldn’t help but think the two were related, and it was a troubling thought.
Which is why, instead of merely sending his orders to Darius through another servant and retiring himself as Graunt had suggested, he decided to take matters into his own hands and get to the bottom of it himself, tonight. Then, he thought, he could rest easy, having fulfilled his responsibility to this Ytaren woman. Yes, responsibility. That, he assured himself, must be what was driving him so.
Thane’s sense of responsibility had always been somewhat overdeveloped, the understandable consequence of his upbringing.
When the steward curtly answered the rapping at the door of his office with a loud “This better not be about the cleaning supplies, again, Marta,” Thane pushed the door wide and grinned, showing his entire top row of teeth.
“Oh, it’s not.”
Even Darius, as well exposed as he was to Thane’s visage, visibly recoiled from behind his desk, then after a rather stunned moment spent with his mouth working soundlessly, finally stammered out something that sounded like an apology punctuated with “my lords” as he scrambled to his feet, knocking his chair over in an artless effort at a bow.
“It’s quite all right, Darius,” Thane said casually, stepping inside. He selected one of the chairs before Darius’ desk and slung himself into it as if he intended to stay a while. “Please, have a seat,” he gestured to Darius’ chair on the floor.
Darius righted the chair with a bit of fumbling and sat. “T-to what do I owe the pleasure, my lord?”
“Oh, just wanted to see how you and your newest acquisition are getting along.” Thane grinned even wider, the tops of his bottom teeth no doubt glinting in the light from Darius’ fire. I should feel bad about this. This is terrible of me. He’s not only my steward, but my fellow Eladrian, a kinsman, and here I am, terrorizing him. But then Thane’s mind went back to Kesara, so small and pale on that bed, bruises already darkening the side of her face, and felt his guilt instantly diminish.
“You mean the Ytaren, my lord?” Did Darius look nervous? Why yes, he did. Thane noted this with interest.
“Have you made many new acquisitions recently? I’ve heard you’ve been complaining about my stinginess even as you are being overrun, is that how it is?”
Darius somehow managed to turn a little whiter. “M-my lord, I would never say-”
“I don’t really care,” Thane interrupted pleasantly. “Would you like to answer my first question now or would you rather to continue wasting my valuable time the eve before judgment day?”
Darius swallowed audibly. “The Ytaren is very competent. She learns quickly. I think she will be an asset to your staff here in the tower, my lord.”
Thane raised an eyebrow and stared at him.
“She really did do very well with the work...”
Thane gave a slight nod of his head and made a waving motion with his hand that was meant to say “go on.”
Darius sighed. “You must have heard about our..altercation. Very minor thing, my lord. There is an adjustment period, going from the kitchens to the tower, and she is a foreigner, after all. We were on quite amiable terms when she left today, I thought.”
“Ohhhh, so that’s why she was running at breakneck speed through my corridors,” Thane reflected in mock awe, as though all the secrets of the universe had just been laid open before his eyes. “She was simply overwhelmed with your...amiability? Dear me, it seems I was misunderstanding the situation entirely.”
Darius frowned. “Honestly, my lord, I’m not sure what you mean. I’ve not been out of my office all afternoon, and I intended to be here another hour more. Some rubbish the maids are telling me about misplaced supplies- nothing to worry over, but of course I mean to stay put until it’s taken care of. She was absolutely fine when she left me. We hadn’t quarreled or anything.”
“Well, I have to say I’d been under a different impression, since she met with an..accident on her way out. She suffered a head injury and will need someone to sit with her- someone YOU will supply, by the way, as soon as we’re through here.” Thane paused to take in Darius’ wide eyes. He looked genuinely surprised. “So you didn’t quarrel, you say?”
“N-no, my lord, not right before she left...I mean, earlier, here in my office, we did, but not when she left, it was all smoothed over by then. If she was still upset over it, honestly, my lord, I had no idea of it!” Darius fidgeted with a quill on his desk. He looked sincerely bewildered.
“What was the ‘altercation’ about that you mentioned, if I may ask?” Thane finally allowed himself to blink and Darius jumped a little. Terrible of me.
“Well...my lord...you see...” Darius was obviously uneasy, his eyes darting everywhere but at his lord. Well, that’s certainly interesting.
Thane composed his face into a blank- or as close of one as he could manage, and when Darius’ eyes settled on him again and he noticed the change, Thane noted another little jump. He struggled with the urge to resume grinning.
“It’s just that....ehhh...I tried to explain to her the proper respect you are due, that is all. You know we work with you in much closer quarters than the kitchens, where she’d worked before, and I always instruct new hires about this. And evidently, she took offense.”
“Well, that’s odd,” Thane remarked, narrowing his eyes slightly. “She took offense at learning she must show me proper respect? I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed her being what I’d call disrespectful.” A good deal more forward than a servant ought to be, he reflected, but he did not believe any disrespect was intended. It had been clear, even before he’d been told, that she had not been a domestic worker before.
“Um, well, I think it was more...something I said about...well, maybe the words I chose...” It was remarkable how quickly the steward’s skin had turned from dead white to bright red. He blurted out in a rush, “Who is to say, with females, stil
l less foreign females? I’m still not quite sure just what took her so badly, my lord, and that’s the truth. I only was telling her to be respectful, and she accused me of talking about you like an animal in a cage or some such business...I was thoroughly shocked. One moment, she was as mild and docile as one could ever wish in a maidservant, and the next, she was sitting in that chair hollering at me about dignity or some such thing. It was quite beyond the pale, but after I reminded her of her place, she did compose herself and made an apology and was just fine again, and that was all there was to it, my lord.”
Darius tried to catch his breath after that long outburst while Thane stared him, this time in open astonishment. Every time he thought this whole situation could get no stranger, the little Ytaren proved him wrong. An animal in a cage? Dignity? Wait, had she been trying to defend him to his own steward?
He didn’t know what to think or even what more to ask. He thought he knew now why Kesara disliked his steward, but the answer made no more sense than the original mystery. He’d more than half expected the man to confess to trying to work his charms on Kesara and it not going as well as it usually did for him, but it appeared not.
“Who can say, with these foreign females,” Thane echoed thoughtfully, and excused himself from the bemused steward’s office.
He tried not to think about it anymore, but his curiosity, far from satisfied as he had hoped, kept gnawing away at him. Thane was tempted almost beyond bearing to manufacture some excuse to see if Kesara was awake and demand to know what she was about, but he managed to restrain himself at the expense of a couple hours’ sleep. When the sun rose, and he with it, he was bleary-eyed, but his weariness quickly vanished in the face of an almost boyish excitement. It was judgment day, after all.
Despite the rumors to the contrary at Court, Thane took no pleasure in meting out penalties and punishments, but justice was something he took a grim satisfaction in. His people trusted him to be fair and to apply the law to their situations with a clear eye and discernment. In just nearly three decades’ of rule, he had never heard a complaint. Of course, those same rumormongers at Court would likely say that was because the only people with the right to do so were usually sentenced to swift execution, but Thane held no truck with such petty cynicism.
After he’d completed his morning ablutions, broken his fast and donned the imposing black and scarlet ceremonial robes that the occasion merited, he made it his first order of business to visit his broken Mirror. The irony of that did not fail to impress itself on him.
When he’d knocked at her door and the servant who had been sitting with her answered, the poor maid about fell over herself to get out of his way. He looked every inch the Dread Lord, dressed as he was. The robes were pure black, in a simple, austere, fitted cut, with scarlet silk embroidery at the neck and hem. The embroidered design was one of criss-crossing swords worked into the intricate knot-work as though impaling the long, flowing lines. At his throat, where the collar hit, his coat-of-arms was embroidered in miniature- a crossed hammer and chisel, both “bloody.” His favorite ax was polished to a glittering shine and strapped to his back within easy reach.
With his hair slicked back into a black leather thong at his neck, he knew his scars were standing out gruesomely and his deformity could be no more exposed. He had not thought of his appearance at all in his haste to interrogate her this morning, but he felt a sudden inexplicable surge of anxiety tighten his chest as he saw her go pale at the sight of him from where she sat propped up on her bed as he strode into her room.
But to her credit, she did not react otherwise. “Good morning, my lord,” she said. “Are you in need of something?” She tilted her head at him, as he’d noticed she did when she seemed to be puzzling over something.
“Good morning, Kes,” he said, trying to be equally pleasant. “I just wanted to ask you about some things.”
She looks terrible, he thought. The bruising from their collision was starkly obvious now, making her tan skin look as white as his steward’s had the evening before. For the first time, he noticed her hands, where they were clasped in her lap, were trembling.
So he had scared her. He was surprised at his own feeling of remorse at that thought.
“But I’ll come back later…” His eyes fell fortuitously on the breakfast tray on her bedside table. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“But I’m your servant in your Keep, my lord. Whether you mean to interrupt or not, it’s certainly your right,” she gave him a small smile, but the corners of her mouth wavered in it.
“No, no, it’s fine. It’s the judgment day, you know.”
“I do know, your steward told me,” Kesara said, biting her lip. “I really wanted to see it. The hearings, I mean.”
“You did?” Thane eyed her, disbelieving. Again, she tried to smile, though she wasn’t much more successful this second time.
“Yes, I did. I do. Too bad I’m not really a flying rabbit.”
That surprised a laugh from him, which caused him to quickly clamp his mouth shut. Dear gods, it won’t do to terrorize her. I must still be on a roll from last night, Thane thought anxiously.
But again, she didn’t so much as flinch. If anything, she appeared to have relaxed a little, unknotting her fingers to smooth down the sheet over lap.
Strangely heartened by this, he said firmly, “If you want to go, you’ll go. There are plenty of able-bodied men about to carry you down to the Great Hall.”
“Great Hall? I don’t remember ever cleaning that one,” Kesara said, sounding impressed. She hesitated. “But I don’t want to be any more trouble, especially if it involves being laughed at.”
Thane suppressed a grin. “Oh, don’t worry. You won’t be any more trouble than you already are.” And he bowed slightly to her narrowed eyes.
Thane felt oddly ebullient as he walked down to the audience chamber. It was rarely used, except for the judgment days: he wasn’t the kind to entertain. His father had been, though, and he could still remember the large, sprawling hall festooned with hundreds of tiny candles in the great glass chandeliers, like clouds of fireflies illuminating the revelry. The marble floors had glittered with their reflected pin-pricks of light, the magnificent tapestries and wood carvings that adorned the walls had seemed to glow warmly in the light. There had been great bowls of blown glass brimming with fresh blossoms, the brilliant blues and whites of the fare-me-wells that grew in profusion on Eladria’s mountains, their sweet, heady fragrance mingling with the scents of candle wax, wine, and the sweat of the dancers, who whirled about the floor in pairs like pinwheels made of satin, velvet, and brocade. At the head of it all had been the throne, a magnificently carved seat of solid, burnished oak, on which his father had reclined in full regalia, always one buxom maidservant or another in constant attendance on him. Thane could not once recall having seen his mother at these occasions.
And ah, how he had loathed them! Mere excuses to torture him, he had thought with the single-minded selfishness of youth. His father always insisted that he dress up “for the pretty maids.” The same ones who obstinately refused to look him in the eyes, no doubt, but his father was never one to allow the bitterness of reality to intrude into his sweet fantasy world. Encased in the uncomfortably starched, high-collared clothing that had been the fashion at that time, stared at behind fluttering fans for far different reasons than his father had ever been scrutinized for, the music too loud, the room too hot with the roaring fire and the candles and those sweating bodies spinning past.
The only thing worse than merely being present had been being forced to participate. This, too, Thane recalled with distasteful clarity, the way those finely dressed young women had stood as far away from him as was humanly possible whilst dancing with him, their bony arms straight and rigid and their eyes resolutely fixed no higher than his shoulders while they palely endured their sentence. They had barely seemed to breathe until it was over, and then it was a sigh of relief when they dipped their concludin
g curtsies. He couldn’t fault them for that; he shared their sighs with relief at least equal to their own.
But judgment days were different. There was no ornamentation of the Great Hall, nothing but the relatively austere banners of his country hung upon the walls. The chandeliers were not lit, and there was no music apart from the murmuring, shuffling, coughing and whispering of the crowd, punctuated by the occasional wailing child. The large glass windows were thrown open for air, plain wooden benches were dragged in and arranged in rows for the petitioners to await their hearing at the far side, and he sat in that throne for the only times he had ever done so after he had been crowned, not an hour after his father had breathed his last. Other chairs were arranged alongside his, a place of honor for each attending judge. They looked understandably diminutive by comparison, but the honor incurred by earning such a seat was without question.
He realized he wanted very much for Kesara to see this, perhaps more than she actually wanted to see it herself. He took great pride in it and in the justice of his people.
As he strode into the Great Hall, everything set up exactly as he expected, exactly as it was every year, the noise of the crowd gathered quietened to a low hush. He gave a respectful nod to the throng, who seemed to move as one in making signs of respect in return as he turned to the guard by the door and murmured his instructions. He then moved to take his seat, pausing in passing to grip the forearms of a few of the older men present who had served as his superiors in the Army, years ago, and who had long since retired to father children and work the rock they lived on.
When he was settled, a horn was sounded and everyone came to order, as if following the familiar steps of one of Thane’s father’s dances long ago. The chief magistrate of the region, a man who, for all the world, never failed to remind Thane of a large graying bear, began to loudly recite the rules of order for the hearing. They washed over Thane like a soothing echo from the past, unchanged for centuries. It was about halfway through that the guard he’d spoken with reappeared at a side door, bearing one red-cheeked Ytaren. He marveled that she blushed so easily. She never would have been able to survive a reign like his father’s had been, Thane mused. The guard took her to a chair that had been set up by the wall, a little apart from the assembled crowd. Thane had thought to spare her undue jostling with this arrangement, but he was surprised at how she didn’t look nearly as out of place there as he’d imagined she would. She didn’t seem to be even remotely abashed at being set apart from the others, instead looking around with wide-eyed interest. She finally looked his way, took in the throne, and met his gaze. He raised an eyebrow inquisitively and she silently mouthed “Wow.” His cheeks ached with the effort of restraining his grin.