by S E Meliers
She scowled as she worked sorting through piles of donated clothing for the children she had saved from the dungeon. She had not organised the charity - that had been Rue, who had a gift for issuing orders in the form of hints and suggestions. The courtiers had flooded their chambers with donations for the ‘reformation school’. It was their kin, after all, she had realised when the first tearful thanks had been issued, discretely, away from Shoethalian eyes and ears. Their first, second, third removed cousins, nieces, nephews, grandchildren. To have these children saved from the dungeon, from further torture; to have them clean, fed, and looked after; this was something the court would support; clandestinely, for fear of reprisal from the Monadistic priests who were less than pleased with the school, but support it they would.
In this act of mercy, thinly disguised as pique and religion, she had achieved what three children and almost ten years of ruling as their Lady had not: their respect and admiration. The surprising thing was that she did not require it. Their good opinion was so far from a priority in her new world that it had ceased to matter anymore than who emptied her chamber pot.
She sniffled, and put her hanky, horribly damp, to her nose.
‘Oh, for Monad’s sake,’ Rue had become very good at cursing using the Monad’s name. ‘Go to bed! I insist. You are no good to me at all in this condition, and it is just tedious to watch you suffer.’
Patience laughed wryly. ‘Oh, forgive me for annoying you!’ she folded a shirt and added it into a pile. ‘It is nothing. A runny nose and a little nausea; nothing at all. I would perish in bed, Rue, tossing and turning and thinking of all the things I should be doing out here. Please do not make me retire.’
Rue considered pursing her perfect rose hued lips. ‘Very well, then, but I am sending to the kitchen for a galleon of beef tea, and you will drink it and declare your adoration of its flavour, or it will be bed for you and no complaints!’
Patience pulled a face - beef tea was a childhood cure-all used by their mother ad nauseum and her belly felt sloshy just at the idea of drinking it - but she did not protest as Rue sent one of the maids they had assisting them on the errand. The room was cluttered with people due to Patience’s high esteem with Cinder resulting in transparently feigned popularity with the Shoethalian nobles, who sought to gain his favour and attention through her. Noble ladies and their maids came to help sort and gain her ear for their families’ machinations, and young noble men, with their attendant servants, naturally followed to pay court to the noble ladies. She could not say, honestly, that much work was being achieved between the fashionably witty observations and whispered confidences, and wished the noble ladies and noble men would just leave the servants behind and go about their business.
She had appropriated the farm and home of one of the Amori noble families who had been declared heathen and were now housed in the dungeons, thinking it was only fair that they support their own children, but had not come up with a suitable way of providing the required education on the Monadistic beliefs. Several Amori noble ladies had volunteered to administer the school and teach manners and grooming, reading and writing, and she had a household clerk who was willing to teach mathematics as long as it got his family and himself away from Amori castle where the Monadistic Priests concentrated their most brutal conversions.
Whilst everyone, who was not already in the dungeons, professed to have converted to the Monad now, there was no one, except the Priests and the Hallows, that she knew who had truly been educated on him. Her school needed to be adamantine against Gallant’s probing investigation, so the word of the Monad taught there needed to be from someone with sufficient authority on the subject, but also someone independent of Gallant’s agendas.
The Priests sought to resolve the lack of education in the Amori population, and also re-enforce the conversion of belief, through forced weekly attendance at prayer sessions during which the history of the Monad was read and repeated by rote. She could have the rescued children attend these sessions, however she did not trust a Priest not to impose a corporeal regime on slow learners, which she felt would not only be highly inappropriate given the children’s state of trauma, but also be, given the inclinations of the Priests, severe and violent.
She most definitely did not want a Priest at the school site.
She sighed.
‘Oh, woe is me,’ Rue mocked sympathetically. ‘Take me away from all this,’ she feigned faintness.
‘Wretch,’ Patience threw a small pair of stockings at her. They stuck in Rue’s headdress. ‘Oh, now, that is very pretty,’ she laughed.
The door to the chamber opened, however, instead of the expected beef tea, a Hallow entered, immediately casting the room into silence. The Shoethalian’s viewed the Hallows with as much fear and awe as the Rhyndelians did, if not more so due to being raised on stories of glory and gory death at the Hallows’ hands. ‘All but the Lady Patience, leave,’ the Hallow commanded. The room emptied with an efficiency that Patience wished they had applied to the sorting of clothes. Patience recognised the Hallow’s voice; it was the one she was starting to think of as ‘her’ Hallow. She was not, however, sure if the Hallow was a benevolent presence in her life.
‘Rue,’ she whispered when her sister remained, not wishing to expose Rue to the Hallow’s ire or ill intentions. ‘You should go.’
‘I am not leaving you alone,’ Rue replied glaring defiantly at the Hallow. ‘I am not leaving her.’
The Hallow shrugged; a rustle of feathers and bone. ‘Do as you wish. You,’ there was emphasis, ‘do not concern me.’
‘And she does?’ Rue put her hand on Patience’s shoulder. ‘What concern is she to you?’
The Hallow pushed back the cloaking hood and shook her hair free in a moment of womanly vanity. Patience wondered if that momentary slip was a ploy to set her at ease. ‘Prince Cinder asked me to keep an eye on her whilst he is away and unable to protect her.’
‘Against whom would she need protection?’ Rue asked, her fingers clenching in expression of unity and comfort on Patience’s flesh .
‘Are my children in danger?’ Patience felt the oily sickness of worry roiling in her belly yet again; it was becoming a familiar companion to her days and nights since the Shoethalian invasion. She swallowed hard to hold it at bay.
‘Only if you are unwise, my Lady,’ the Hallow assumed a seat with the air of one completely at ease. ‘The Priest, Gallant, may take this opportunity whilst Cinder is away to try to expose your belief in the Monad as false.’
‘Why is he so set against me?’ Patience was baffled. ‘I have done everything he has asked.’
The Hallow considered. ‘The Prince Cinder grows too fond,’ she decided. ‘In Cinder’s fondness, you gain power in the court and over the Prince’s decisions. Any power that is not Gallant’s own presents a threat. He would not, I think, seek to destroy you, rather to gain a method by which to control you, or reduce you in the Prince’s eyes.’
‘And how would he do this?’ Rue demanded.
The Hallow shrugged. ‘There are so many means; maybe he will have someone offer you an alliance in the hopes of baiting you into an unwise action, and thus expose you mid-plot. Or, maybe he will insinuate someone in your trusts, someone that you will speak unwisely before, and thus give him a weapon to use against you. Maybe he will simply place evidence that you are engaged in a plot against the Prince or the Monad about your rooms or person, to be discovered. He will not move directly against you, I think, both because the Prince has ordered him to leave you alone, but also because he suspects the Prince would not leave you without some form of protection – which, of course, he did not.’
‘Maybe you are the one sent to gain our trust and thus imply us in heresy or plot?’ Patience suggested quietly.
The Hallow grinned, a sudden and bright expression of delight that lit up her eyes. ‘Very clever, my Lady. Now you are thinking. But no, I am not.’
‘How can I trust you?’
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��You cannot, of course,’ the Hallow leaned back in her chair. ‘Anything I say could be a lie. However, you will listen, and you will think on what I have said, and in listening and thinking, you will exercise a caution you may not have done without my words, and thus my task is achieved regardless of your belief.’
‘Why,’ Patience leaned forward in her chair, examining the other woman intently. ‘Why do you try to help me?’
The Hallow looked away, a muscle in her jaw defined. ‘We are monsters in your eyes, we Hallows,’ she said, turning back and meeting Patience’s gaze. ‘But once we were children, and we had mothers. Some of us had mothers who loved us very much, as you love your children. We were taken from our mothers, and subjected to torments you cannot even imagine in order to reform us to Hallows. Some break, and these Hallows are the true Hallows, as they believe the dogma, others… well, others are tempered, we may do terrible things in the name of our god, but we, at least, know that they are terrible.’
‘If you know,’ Rue said, ‘that what you do is wrong, why would you continue?’
The Hallow laughed, without mirth. ‘Why do so many people convert? One must do what one must do, in order to survive. Oh, I know all this noble fallacy about doing the honourable thing, the right thing,’ she scoffed. ‘It serves no purpose if you die. You may save one person and sacrifice your own life, but if that one person was in peril in the first place, they probably do not have the means by which to protect themselves in the long run, and thus will probably only die eventually anyway, and you will have given up your life for nothing. When I die,’ she glared, ‘it will not be for nothing.’ She stood suddenly. ‘I have said too much,’ she scowled at them as if it were their fault.
‘Please,’ Patience stood too. She did not know what to say. The atmosphere was heavy with emotion and secrets, and things she could not put a name to. ‘I need someone to teach the children of my school about the Monad; do you know someone who would not be cruel?’ She was surprised by her own question, having had no intention to ask it until it had been asked.
The Hallow blinked. She half turned as if not deigning to reply, but paused, the motion thwarted midway. Her hand rested on a small shirt laid out on the table. ‘I may,’ she conceded after a long moment. ‘I will ask.’ She strode out of the door.
‘Odd,’ Rue said in the empty room. ‘Just odd.’
‘Yes,’ Patience couldn’t disagree. ‘But honest. In my gut, I feel she is honest. I think she is truly trying to help me.’
‘Maybe you remind her of her own mother,’ Rue sighed and sat at the table. ‘So, what do you think? Who will she produce to teach the children about the Monad?’
‘I do not know,’ Patience sniffed painfully; she could not find her hanky. ‘But I think maybe we need to follow her advice and be more cautious about who we let into our rooms, and the children’s rooms. Let us have a quick look around, whilst everyone is out, to see if we can find anything worrying…’
They spent a few minutes searching the cupboards and ornate boxes around the room. In one drawer, Rue turned up a piece of parchment and a small reed vial. ‘What is this?’ she asked.
‘Not mine,’ Patience’s mouth felt dry. ‘Read it.’
‘My Lady, please find as requested a vial of vayliun. Two drops in the Prince’s goblet will render him unconscious, more could be fatal,’ Rue gasped and scrunched the parchment. ‘Quick, quick, we must dispose of this!’ she exclaimed anxiously.
‘Into the fire with the parchment,’ Patience ordered taking up a roll of thread and breaking off a string. ‘Give me the vial.’ She took the little vial into the bedchamber and hurried to the window. She tied a piece of thread tightly about the vial and leaned out the sill. The other morning, whilst doing this self-same thing in an effort to watch Cinder depart from the courtyard, she had caught her sleeve on a splinter. She slid a loop of the thread about the splinter and carefully let the vial drop until it was suspended. The tiny vial, no bigger than her smallest finger, against the stone should not be visible from outside. From inside, suspended from the outside of the sill, it could not be seen at all. She pulled the shutters to and fro experimentally, and then checked to ensure the vial was not dislodged by the action. No, all was well.
‘What did you do with it?’ Rue asked as she returned to the receiving chamber. ‘We should have burnt it.’
‘We do not know what it is, beyond its name: maybe burning it releases deadly fumes,’ Patience shook her head. ‘No, I have hidden it very well.’
‘My goodness!’ Rue fanned herself with her hand. ‘That was alarming.’
‘Indeed,’ Patience sat, her heart thundering in her chest, and a strange plan forming in her head. ‘I think I need a rat.’
‘A rat?’ Rue was astounded. ‘Whatever for?’
‘I wish to test the potency of the poison in that vial,’ Patience decided. ‘If it is truly as strong as the note said; or if it is poison at all.’
Rue considered. ‘Poison is a very useful thing, after all,’ she agreed. ‘I will see what I can do.’
Rogue
The EAerymen paused by a street corner to watch a young woman at a stall. They tried to look unobtrusive, casually chatting and leaning against a low wall, their gazes disinterested and drifting. In their native EAeryian Mountains, they may have been successful, but here in Rhyndelian lands, they were giants, towering two heads above even the tallest man.
She doubted, actually, that even amongst their own people they would go unnoticed: they were beautiful men, mouth-watering in fact, and every woman, and most men, in the area had at least noted their presence. The sun glinted off of Ash’s loose locks, caught the sheen of sweat on heavily muscled arms bared in high collared vest-shirt with elaborate EAeryian embroidery. Coal’s darker hair was braided back, leaving his strong features stark; his teeth flashed white in a charming grin as he laughed with his brother. It was a good act, but Rogue was also a hunter and could see the readiness in their casual stance, the way they subtly changed angles with their target.
Their quarry wore her hair covered by a shawl, a common enough practice amongst the commoner women. The tail of a plait hung free down her back the colour of copper in the sun. Red hair, Rogue considered. She had watched the two EAerymen for several days now, and always they hunted young red haired women.
It was not that they had been secretive about their purpose in Amori and the Rhyndelian lands, but rather that she was so unused to honesty that she did not trust their word. They had said openly to anyone who asked that they hunted a young woman whom they had been escorting to a sacred duty high in the mountains. Most were honoured by this duty, and went willingly so they did not suspect that this woman had other plans; thus she had managed to slip away from them. They were not specific on how she had managed to escape them; Rogue gathered they were embarrassed that two skilled warriors had managed to let her slip by them and remain at large. The result was that they could not return to their homeland without her or their dishonour would be considerable.
Could they really be that honest? she wondered. And, if they were honest about that, did that mean that they had been honest about everything else? She was intrigued, and a little entranced.
There was a subtle shake of the head between the two men: this was not their girl. They turned their attention elsewhere. She wondered how they intended to find their quarry: surely they were not hoping just to stumble across her? She knew they enquired at various shops, taverns and inns, as she had made her own subtle enquiries in their wake. For a while, they had followed a strong trail from the main square where a foreign red haired girl had been seen for quite a while searching for work and on the edge of starvation. But, the trail had vanished, as had the girl.
Rogue began to think, as she suspected they did, that the girl had perished. She wondered what this meant to them. Would this enable them to return home? She found herself deeply engrossed by this question. What would it mean to her if they returned to the EAeryian Mountains?
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She shifted from her shadowy alcove. Today, she did not wear the cloak of a Hallow. Today, she was just a woman, like any woman in the city streets, just going about her business. She wore a long russet skirt and a modestly embroidered bodice over a high collared shirt touched with lace, her hair neatly dressed high on her head: a prosperous housewife, unremarkable, unnoticeable with her basket of shopping on her arm.
The skirts were uncomfortable, hindering her stride and swelteringly hot with the petticoats beneath, and she doubted that an ordinary housewife would have to contend with them pulling on the knives strapped to thigh and ankle. She sighed and trailed along behind the EAerymen as they meandered into the less salubrious areas of the city. In this area of town, a well shod housewife shopping would be odd. She abandoned her basket in some lucky rag picker’s barrow. It was empty but for a few carrots, but that was wealth to one such as he.
She undid a button or two of her shirt, dishevelled her hair a little and looped her skirt up into its waistband so the petticoats showed. At a casual glance, she might be mistaken for a light skirt – a prostitute. It was late afternoon – a little early as light skirts tended to walk the night hours, but late enough that the opportunistic girl or two might acceptably be abroad – after all, sex was not just for the night, and men would pay for it at any hour. She adopted the hip swaying loiter of the light skirts as she followed the EAerymen through the streets. She had to knock back a proposition or two; one at knife point in the shadows when her refusal was not accepted and the would-be rapist dragged her off the street to force her acquiescence. There were times she was thankful to be a Hallow, and not an ordinary woman.