by Vale Aida
In later days, out of the jumble of memories that constituted that year’s Midsummer Eve, that moment would take on disproportionate significance to her mind, acquiring a vivid, underwater quality like something out of a fever dream. It took her several flustered heartbeats to recognise Iyone Safin, who was taller up close, and younger than she had previously thought. She stood among her attendants, statuesque in shades of amber and bronze, hair coming loose from the bun at the back of her head to frame her face in artless chestnut waves. “Lady Shandei?” she said.
A pair of acolytes ran up to them, looking displeased, but at Iyone’s sharp look they fell back again. Her sleeves were rolled up nearly to the elbow, as if for work, though the hands were smooth and unblemished. Shandei felt weak and heavy-headed. Her tongue tied itself into knots, then unravelled altogether. “That’s me. What—if I might—milady has need of me?”
Flint-grey eyes regarded Shandei’s face, dipped to her feet, and rose again. Distantly, Shandei was aware that the chatter drifting to them from the courtyard was no longer desultory. The supplicants had drawn together in twos and threes, muttering. Some stared openly at Shandei; others had left the line altogether to peer out towards the street. “Oh, nothing of import,” said Iyone. “I’ve just witnessed an accident involving a bridge and two old men, and I thought it my pious duty to inform the priestesses that some of their devotees may be a little… delayed.” Her eyes glinted. “What a pleasure to meet you. I was sorry to hear about your father.”
Shandei glanced behind her to the throng of people in the yard. Her palms were beginning to perspire. “If I may ask—what accident, your ladyship?”
“Iyone. Please.” She turned around and walked back through the doors, and without thinking, Shandei fell in step next to her. Heavy stares followed them across the courtyard, the thought behind them nearly audible. There she goes, that idler with no schooling and no money, taking up with a councillor’s daughter. Whatever next? “The Carnation Bridge performed an admirable curtsey, as bridges do, while Lord Willon and Lord Yannick were passing beneath it on their way here. Judging by the yelling I heard, Lord Willon at least suffered no hurt to his lungs and vocal apparatus, but one never knows. The Efrens have had such execrable luck this week.”
Under Iyone’s purposeful look, Shandei’s mouth went dry. Oh, Mother. I was nowhere near him. They had reached the street, full of people talking at the top of their lungs, though no one seemed to know what had happened. The bridge in question was out of sight behind the citadel, a couple of streets away. Shandei started towards it, but Iyone’s hand closed around her wrist, surprisingly strong, and drew her to the side of the road. “Elysa. Take the others and find out what happened.”
The tone of command was undeniable. One of the maids, a stout older woman with flyaway grey hair, nodded and hurried off with the other attendants. Iyone turned back to Shandei, who was conscious of nothing but the man’s life on her conscience and the woman’s hand on her arm. “Go home,” said Iyone, in the same peremptory voice. “Go round the temple and use the back way. Don’t pass the bridge, don’t stop to talk to anyone.”
Shandei might have swallowed sawdust. “I don’t understand.”
Iyone’s eyes were no longer laughing, though they retained their jewel-like crispness. “Really? Have you heard nothing about Lord Willon’s mysterious ill-wisher? The Thorn?”
“I didn’t—” She tripped over the half-truth. Iyone had yet to release her. “I don’t know anything about that bridge. Or the servant who got stabbed, or—or any of the other things.”
“What you know is irrelevant,” said Iyone. “As a matter of fact, I know you did nothing to the bridge, because I have had you followed since the rumours began. Yes,” she added, seeing Shandei’s expression. “High-handedness is a bad habit of mine. Anger is perfectly within your rights. However, first consider this: Yours is the first name people will attach to these accidents once they start thinking hard enough. Regardless of your guilt or innocence, you are in spectacular danger.”
Shandei had begun to realise that this run-in with Iyone was no coincidence. Suddenly dizzy, she said, “Maybe I am the Thorn. You wouldn’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter one whit to me,” said Iyone. Her grip was patient and steady. “The Efrens are nothing. I don’t know you. I am trying to help you because my brother feels responsible for your family. You may take or leave my advice. That advice is to go home now, quickly, and stay there until I call on you again.”
Shandei released a shaky breath. “Are you a friend?”
“As someone I know would say,” said Iyone, with a double-edged smile, “that is a matter for philosophers. I am going to see if Lord Willon needs rescuing. Do what you will.”
With a finality just short of bereavement, Shandei felt the hand withdraw from her arm. The crowd swallowed Iyone in its midst, and she was alone again.
She gathered her nerves, and did exactly as Iyone suggested.
11
To Iyone’s disappointment, Willon Efren was alive, unhurt, and in a towering rage.
The bridge had not fallen in. A strut had merely come loose from where it was abutted on the roof of a tavern, crushing two servants in the Efrens’ train. Willon and Yannick were unhurt. Nobody had been killed, though one would not know it from the impressive bluster to which Willon treated the entire street, and the swoon into which Yannick fell. It took Iyone a quarter of an hour to disperse the crowd and convince the injured parties to take their histrionics indoors. She did not miss, and did not comment on, the rose petals drifting among the fallen carnations on the road.
Afterwards she collected her father and mother at the manor, and went with them to pay the Efrens a visit. Yannick had his own house and lands, but at present he was propped up on a daybed in Willon’s sitting room, palpitating under three blankets. “We could have been killed!” he said, over and over again. “Willon, for heaven’s sake, must they kill us all before you give up?”
“Ask her,” said Willon, scowling across the daybed at Josit, who had just arrived. “Your bridge almost killed us, your ladyship. We could take this to the magistrates.”
Josit glanced up, and caught Iyone watching her. Her voice was debonair with boredom. “I have already filed a civil suit with the magistrates. The tavern roof was ill-maintained, and my freedmen would have been in grave danger when they went up to tend the carnations. I have hopes,” she added, “of an exorbitant compensation.”
As Willon started to argue, Iyone removed herself to join her mother at the window, so recently curtained in mourning black. Lady Aretel narrowed her eyes, keen as a panther. “Josit tells me you ran into this girl Shandei at the temple today.”
Iyone’s brows shot up. “Did she? How did she know?”
Aretel ignored the question. “Why the sudden interest in this young lady?”
As far as Aretel knew, her daughter only ever paid attention to comely blonde women for one reason, and it was not the goodness of her heart. In this case, it was probably best not to disabuse her of her theory. The truth, or what Iyone knew of it, was far less palatable. She still dreamt too often of Hiraen’s exhausted, pleading face from the rainy night in the colonnade. “I don’t prey on mourning orphans, Mother. Where’s Oriane, by the way?”
Aretel never missed a change of subject, but this time she let it slip. “At home. She sent her sympathies and a bottle of wine. They say she’s been afraid to go near the Efrens since Vesmer’s funeral.”
It was difficult to imagine Oriane being afraid of anything. “What happened?”
“Nothing, except that she got home after the burial and found a white rose on her pillow. The long-stemmed sort, the kind you lay at gravestones. No doubt it was meant as a threat.”
“Oh, dear,” said Iyone absently. Her thoughts were already elsewhere, trying to make sense of this new riddle. “Lord Willon’s supporters are melting away one by one. How unfortunate.”
Her mother frowned. Yannick chose th
at moment to start wheezing above Willon’s querulous voice, and Iyone turned back sharply to the group sitting around his sickbed. “I told you a hundred times it’s the girl,” he was saying. “The one who fancies you murdered her father. I told you to have her put away.”
“That rude little thing?” asked Willon, screwing up his face in distaste. “What was her name again? Shiera? Shayna?”
“Shandei,” said Iyone, though no one had asked her. Willon’s head snapped up, as if he had just remembered that she was there. “I was with her at the temple today. If she induced any bridges to fall on you, I didn’t notice.”
Aretel had interposed her restraining presence at Iyone’s side. It was not like her, after all, to get involved in Council matters. Yannick frowned. “Her brother took up with the Silvertongue. And he, we know beyond doubt, has a vendetta against us.”
“I thought we were done with Savonn and his imaginary plots,” Lord Lucien grumbled. “By now the boy will be deep in the Farfallens with all his supporters. How, precisely, is he supposed to have done this?”
“Voodoo?” Iyone suggested, favouring Willon with an icy smile. “Sorcery? When one discards logic, after all, the possibilities are endless.”
Willon stared at her with a mixture of consternation and disgust, as if a brightly coloured snake had just crawled over his foot. “Perhaps,” he said, looking back at her father, “not all the Silvertongue’s followers were brave enough to follow him into the mountains. Some few—the weak, perhaps, or the battle-shy—must have stayed behind.”
The unspoken insult was plain. Her father’s voice swelled by several magnitudes. “Look here—”
Josit said, “The girl Shandei does have a blood feud. She takes it seriously.”
Several beats of silence met this pronouncement. Yannick gave Willon a meaningful look. Lucien glanced at Iyone, then at her mother. Josit took a sip from her glass and settled back in her chair, placid and disinterested.
And she could afford to be. As plots went, this one was masterful. Foolproof, even. Shandei was the perfect scapegoat for anyone working to further Savonn’s interests. One only need suggest her name, and let the Efrens’ paranoia do the rest. It was, like everything else about Josit, terribly elegant.
“She does,” said Iyone, after a brief moment’s thought. This did not have to be painful. She had always wanted an excuse to match wits with her tutor head on—even if the circumstances were, thanks to Hiraen, a shade less than ideal. “But these disasters have befallen everyone in Lord Willon’s periphery except Lord Willon himself. My lord has been frightened but not hurt. If filial revenge is the Thorn’s goal, she is failing hilariously.”
Yannick frowned. “Also true.”
Iyone turned her smile on Josit, who returned it like the Sphinx, small and unfathomable. “Observe, however,” she went on, “that she has done a marvelous job of preventing poor Lord Willon from becoming Governor. It appears there are many people who share this motive.”
“Lucien,” said Willon, pointedly ignoring her, “I wish you would prevent your ill-mannered dependents from barging into Council meetings. It’s extremely rude.”
Lord Lucien shrugged, pouring Yannick a fresh glass of hot brandy. “This isn’t a meeting. Iyone just wanted to reassure herself that you and your good cousin were uninjured.”
“Did she?” asked Willon, aggrieved. “Then why was she…”
He stopped, as if a new thought had struck him. Then he jerked his chair round to look at Iyone properly for the first time. “Why were you with Shiera? Shayna? Why were you there when the bridge collapsed?”
Aretel stepped forward. On the verge of laughter, Iyone shut her mouth before her mother could tell her to do so. Her father, less amused, put down the brandy bottle with a loud chink. “Willon,” he said, “are you quite sure you wish to make that implication in front of me?”
“Well, it’s hardly far-fetched!” Willon exploded. “Yannick and I are being terrorised. Even Oriane’s been threatened. Only your family seems to be safe from this Thorn. Doesn’t it strike you as the least bit suspicious?”
Into the deafening quiet, Iyone said, “There’s also Josit.” She produced a virtuous curtsey. “I’m leaving now.”
* * *
The Council took a long time dispersing, held back as always by parting gripes and insincere niceties. Iyone wandered out onto the lawn to wait. Rearing above the sculpted hedges out here was a sleek alabaster centaur, larger than life, familiar to her from the paradisiacal years of her childhood. She and Hiraen and Savonn had often trailed their parents to some interminable function at the Efrens’, and been shooed out by the adults to play in the garden. She was tall enough now to reach up and brush her fingers over the uneven place where once—during a particularly endless supper—they had taken turns to climb the plinth and scratch their initials into the centaur’s flank. Hiraen, the oldest and boldest of them all, had gone first, clutching the sharp pebble Savonn had produced from somewhere about his person. Then, while Savonn stood a giggling watch below, he pulled her up beside him and kept a steadying hand on her shoulder as she carved her name with her tongue between her teeth.
That was just like Hiraen, she thought. Protector, defender, leader of the van, loyal to a fault even if it would cost him the seams of his own soul. She would have to find a way to untangle this calamity he had wrought.
A foot scraped on the grass behind her. She turned and saw, without surprise, that Josit had followed her from the house.
They gazed at each other, alone with Willon’s leafy potted plants and the centaur’s disapproving stare. “So,” said Josit presently, “you have appointed yourself Shandei’s defender. I take it you enjoyed her company today?”
She moved round to the centaur’s far side, where they were less likely to be overheard from the porch. Iyone followed her. “Very much,” she said. “As you already know, since you are spying on me. Which of my servants is in your pay? Elysa?”
Josit laughed, fluid and melodious. The mirth was genuine. “Wouldn’t it ruin your fun if I told you?”
It was inconvenient that Josit knew Iyone so much better than she knew Josit. She said, “Shandei is determined to find her father’s killer.”
“And,” said Josit, “we both know it wasn’t Willon.”
Popular opinion held that Iyone Safin had never in her life been afraid. Even Savonn half subscribed to this belief. That it was patently untrue was known only to herself and Josit. She forced a steadying breath into her lungs. “She thinks you’re being kind.”
“I have told her,” said Josit, “that justice is not kindness. And you know, better than most, that kindness is not necessarily just.” Whatever betrayed itself on Iyone’s face made her smile. “Don’t grow attached to your pawns, Iyone dear. It makes for bad chess.”
Adrenaline made Iyone vicious. “Are we talking about chess? You think you’re playing against those old men. But if you want to use this frivolous, defenceless girl in your schemes, you are now playing against me. And I tend to win.”
Behind them, Willon and her parents had emerged on the porch, trying to smooth over their argument with small talk. “She is hardly defenceless,” said Josit. “Though, admittedly, rather unwilling to kill… A good thing I had her followed the night she confronted Vesmer.”
“And he had to die,” said Iyone, “just so you could strike a blow against his father?”
Josit made a helpless gesture. “There is nothing to twist a parent’s heart like the death of a child.”
The voices were drawing closer: Willon was walking her parents to the gate. Without lowering her voice, Iyone said, “I didn’t know you’d had children.”
She watched Josit’s eyes. They flicked to the side, judging the distance between them and the approaching group. Willon was discoursing loudly, frequently interrupted by both her father and mother, and it was not likely they had been overheard. But the damage was done. Weakness had been revealed. And weakness, deftly explored, offe
red leverage.
Josit recovered quickly. “One can’t know everything,” she said. “Will you take some advice from your old tutor? Have a care for yourself, and stay away from the girl. It will be terribly sad if you end up on the gallows together.”
“I take advice from no one,” said Iyone.
Fear was impermissible. She stalked over the lawn to join the others, and did not turn around, though the quizzical, laughing gaze burned between her shoulderblades for a long time.
12
A few days away from Astorre, it became evident that the Betronett force was not alone.
Their course from Onaressi had been rambling and oblique. They left Anyas to hold the fort with a hundred men, which was as much as Savonn would spare him, and then struck off into the wilderness west of Forech’s Pass, where half a dozen smaller forts stood. Most, like Onaressi, had been occupied by squatters claiming to be anything but Saraians. These they drove off. It was simple if tedious work, and Savonn took his time, making each skirmish a game and a lesson for the greenhorns. Their numbers were down to three hundred by the time they garrisoned each fort and returned to the Pass, and between fighting and training, Astorre had begun to take on a mirage-like sheen in Emaris’s mind.
He had gone to scout ahead one afternoon with some of the boys Savonn had foisted on him. The Pass wound through a treeless ravine scoured by little streams, the short grass speckled with patches of slippery ice that glistened in the shadows under the overhangs. They trudged through the dense undergrowth on the bluff that overlooked it, all on foot, since they had left their horses and wagons with Anyas. Emaris rubbed his chin absently. None of them had been near a razor since Onaressi, and his scratchy stubble was fast developing into an even scratchier beard. “Does anyone think,” he said, frowning, “that the grass down there looks a little flattened?”