Fray

by Rowenna Miller

  “It is good to know who it was,” Sianh confirmed. “If it were a nameless servant, we might be followed still and never know.”

  I wished I could have argued that I would have recognized every quiet presence I had encountered, but I had to admit that I hadn’t. Kristos watched me, perhaps waiting for such an admission, a confirmation that I had slipped away from our modest upbringing and now took the servants of a noble for granted. In truth, I was disappointed in myself, but also defended my inattention—I had been preoccupied, overwhelmed, and their job was to fade into the background.

  Precisely what a spoiled noble would say, I scolded myself, chagrined. As though their quiet lives meant less than mine, that I could ignore them when I was tired or busy as if they were furniture. “I ought to have paid more attention,” I admitted. “To Jae and everyone else.” Kristos gave me an encouraging smile, and it felt almost like being home again.

  “In any case,” Alba interjected, “we can sleep well tonight, and a good thing. I’m tired and it’s getting dark enough to warrant finding my bed.”

  48

  THOUGH ALBA HAD SAID SHE WOULD SLEEP WELL KNOWING THAT we’d thrown off the a’Mavha, I noticed when I woke in our spare rented room midway through the night that Sianh was sitting by the door instead of sleeping on his pallet. I didn’t say anything, but drifted back to sleep vaguely unsettled by his wakeful presence.

  The pallets were, if not outright hostile to sleeping, not conducive to a restful night even though I was grateful to have Theodor beside me again, and I woke sore from the bed as well as from the previous day on the road. Even so, I was the last one to wake. I limped toward the common room in search of some coffee or at the least some strong tea, and was welcomed by only a traditional Serafan breakfast done poorly—weak mint tea, bread only half-toasted, and bruised fruit. I plucked the few figs from the bowl that weren’t oozing overripe juice and found Alba spreading what may, once, have been fruit compote onto a piece of toast.

  “You look like something peeled off a tavern floor,” she said as she nibbled her toast. “And how fitting. This tastes like something peeled off a floor, too.”

  I pulled a face and approached the figs with even greater caution.

  “Sianh and Kristos are having an argument about whether to change the horses,” Alba continued, as though this were just a bit of news and not anything to attach any emotion to. I had a hard time taking it as such; Sianh and Kristos snipped and tussled like a pair of alley cats. “Theodor is trying to appease both of them. And I’m going to go to the greengrocers to see if we can’t get some provisions that look less like compost.” She stood, brushed off her dark skirts, and dropped the half-eaten toast into a bucket by the door.

  Kristos and Theodor were nowhere to be found, but Sianh was refolding his pack in the rambling, overgrown patch that passed for a garden between the inn and the stable.

  “Thank you,” I said, approaching him. “For… handling things yesterday.”

  “It’s what I was hired for, no?” He buckled his pack. “Though I have strange companions in this job, I admit. A nun who rides like a soldier, a scholar who acts like he’s itching for a brawl, and a princess who snores.”

  “I don’t snore!” I laughed. “And I’m not a princess.”

  “I don’t know anything about your titles,” he said, “but last night you—well, as we put it in Serafan, you were like an otter singing an aria.”

  “An otter, really?”

  “Yes, they make little barking sounds—oh, you think you don’t bark in your sleep like an otter?” He slung his pack up on his shoulder. “Perhaps the Serafan air doesn’t agree with you.”

  “I’ll have to let you know if I’m still snoring in Galitha.”

  “I’ll expect a report.”

  Kristos and Theodor joined us, having reviewed the horses at the stables and determined we were better with our current mounts. Alba wended her way back from the greengrocer’s with a bag of plums that she doled out like a mother with candied fruit peel at the Galatine Threshing Market. “Now,” she said, “I should very much like to know where we are going.”

  “Our good friends,” Theodor said. “The former Princess Annette and Lady Viola Snowmont.”

  “Nobles! Will a pair of fainting flowers like that take us in?” Kristos demanded.

  “What, a title makes someone incapable of helping their friends?” I shot back. “Of course they will.”

  “You are sure they can be trusted?” Alba murmured. Sianh didn’t speak, but his rigid face asked the same question.

  “Yes! Of course.” Theodor huffed. “Sophie would never have suggested it otherwise.”

  “I don’t like it,” Kristos said. “You sure they won’t turn on me the second I walk in the door?”

  “I’m sure,” Theodor half shouted.

  “Well enough for you to say,” Kristos rebuffed him, muttering under his breath, “powdered prig.”

  “And you would be a dead man if it weren’t for me!” Theodor replied. “Yes, we’ll be safe with Viola and Annette. Yes, they’ll help us. What do you want from me, a notarized guarantee?”

  “Is there a solicitor present?” Kristos mocked him.

  “Enough!” I interrupted. “You don’t have to like each other, but we’re going to have to at least try to trust one another!” I heaved a sigh. “That means all of us—nuns and former soldiers included. There is a damned civil war on, and unless I’m mistaken, the right side of it stands to lose unless we can muster up something resembling leadership to scrape together a proper army. That leadership, as much as it pains me to admit it, seems to be my idiot brother and my horse’s ass of a betrothed.”

  Alba hid a smile, and Sianh nodded approvingly. “Horse’s ass?” Theodor said.

  “When you lower yourself to squabbling like a child, yes.”

  “I already knew you thought I was an idiot,” Kristos said with a shrug. It was the closest I’d see to an apology from him.

  “Then we’ve wasted enough time arguing over silly trifles—the road isn’t short and we should make haste,” Sianh said.

  Despite feeling as stiff as new buckram, I was grateful that Sianh didn’t slow our pace. I wanted to get to Viola and Annette as quickly as possible, to leave Serafe behind and return to Galitha, even if Galitha was not the home I’d left but a swiftly swelling battlefield. Theodor rode next to Sianh, questioning him on tactics, bayonet drill, methods for encamping an army, and more that I could barely follow. Midway through the morning, Kristos fell in step beside me.

  “Not used to traveling on horseback either, are you?” he said with a laugh. I was struck again by how much older he looked, his beard softening his hard jawline and buffering his quick smile. Or, I considered, his smile might not be as easy or broad as it once was.

  “That obvious, is it?” I leaned painfully in the saddle, aching to stretch muscles that I couldn’t engage.

  “You aren’t one of them completely, then, if you can’t ride well.” I wasn’t sure if I heard relief or bitterness as the underlayment of his joke.

  “Hardly,” I said simply. “I kept my shop until this month.” I didn’t elaborate on the possibility that it might be gone. “I still live in our old row house. Well, I did.”

  “You slept there?” Kristos said, suddenly harsh.

  “Where I sleep really isn’t your business. I never asked where you were, who you were with.”

  “I never shared a bed with a noble,” he replied. “I’m sorry, but I can’t understand it. What do you see in some powdered dandy that you didn’t see in our neighbors, our friends? When you didn’t marry, didn’t even want to take a walk with any of the boys—and then men—we knew, I assumed you didn’t want to marry at all. I even thought maybe you didn’t like men.”

  “I couldn’t marry and keep my shop.” My reasoning had always been so simple, yet few people seemed inclined to listen to it.

  “And now? You can marry the future king of Galitha and keep your
shop?”

  “Of course not!” I nearly shouted. “But I can still create, can still sew. And I’ve found something else, something more—being an advocate. A voice.”

  “The gossip rags had other words for you.”

  “I know. I don’t even know if I’m very good at it, but it’s important, and I feel… called to it, I suppose. I thought you might understand, after studying here. That you might know what it’s like to have a vocation.”

  “I’m leaving it now,” he answered. Kristos’s gaze was focused, down the narrow highway and resting in the far-distant hills we rode toward. “We are at a great crossroads, Sophie.” My name sounded so sweetly familiar coming from him, an echo of a lost yesterday. “The fight in Galitha—it’s for more than the reforms. It’s for the future.”

  That sounded like Kristos. Ideals and theory and belief colliding into an insistent demand for action. “And what part will you play in it?” I asked, afraid to know.

  “I don’t know. I’ve lived well in exile,” he said. “I’ve loved the life I’ve been given, the life of a scholar. Long days in the library, reading and translating and discovering worlds I never knew existed. And then long evenings in the wineshops debating and playing charades and snapdragon when things grew too serious.”

  “It sounds not terribly unlike Lady Viola Snowmont’s salon,” I said, “not that you want to hear that.”

  “I suppose I’m more open to hearing it now than a year ago. There is potential in the nobility, in some of the nobility, to move Galitha where she must go.” His gaze rested on Theodor’s back, the easy way he took to the saddle, his intense conversation with Sianh.

  “They can’t do it alone,” I ventured.

  “Very well,” he said, a bit of his old smile creeping into the corners of his eyes. “I can do some good. I started something last year. I didn’t intend much of what happened, but I did intend change.” He regarded me with more understanding than I’d felt from him in a long time. “I finally saw what you were afraid of. Change is a bird that, once loosed from its cage, may not fly in the direction you desired.”

  “Sometimes it flies right back and pecks you in the face.”

  “Or shits on your shoe.” Kristos laughed. “But it’s loosed from its cage now. I turned the key. I should do what I can to shepherd its path.”

  49

  WE REACHED THE ESTATE VIOLA AND ANNETTE HAD BOUGHT just before nightfall, the thick scents of flowers seeping into the street like a fog. “White gardens,” Kristos said, nodding toward the walled grounds of the estate. “Common here. The night-blooming flowers are almost all white and smell like a puddle of mixed perfumes.” I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not.

  Theodor presented himself to the Serafan maid who answered the door, and she blanched as if she were a night-blooming flower herself and ran for her mistress.

  “Our reputation precedes us,” I joked weakly. The others didn’t laugh. Any complacence we had begun to indulge in on the road, moving farther from Isildi and from the danger at the inn, faded now.

  Viola hurried to the door after her maid. “When I said you should come to see me, I hadn’t meant quite this soon,” she said, embracing Theodor and glancing past me at my strange traveling companions. “Come inside.”

  Theodor and I followed Viola into the open hall of her new home. The doors were open to courtyards and gardens outside, and faintly cool breezes moved through the house. Alba moved after us with the possessed confidence of a highborn woman, but Kristos and Sianh hung back, moving gingerly as though afraid their boots would mar the mosaic floors.

  “I’m sorry to intrude on you,” I said, and explained the reasons for my unexpected flight from Isildi as quickly as possible. “But where is Annette?”

  “An acquaintance called and asked if she could help with a bit of Galatine translation in a business matter.” Viola watched Kristos and Sianh, both of whom were acting as though they had forgotten what to do with one’s arms. Alba stood poised as a statue. “You did collect quite the entourage. The one with the beard is your brother? The great incendiary writer of the Midwinter Revolt?”

  I nodded. “One and the same.”

  “I rather want to slap him and sit him down with a bottle of port for a long talk, all at the same time.”

  “He has that effect,” I answered. “The Serafan is Sianh and the Kvys nun is Sastra-set Alba.”

  “Indeed,” Viola replied with a twitch of a smile. “We’ll arrange your passage tomorrow. Port Triumph is an hour’s ride, at most, but the captains are deep in their cups by now.” She hesitated. “That is—if you still want to return. You’re welcome with me.”

  “I know,” I said. Viola began to say more but stopped herself. Instead she called to the maid and arranged sleeping accommodations for all of us, in her swift and subtle way. She was at home here, speaking in low voices to maids in Serafan and wearing a loose Serafan housedress, pale lavender cotton enveloping her the way a cloud cushions a setting sun. I wondered if Viola had the rare gift of seeming at home anywhere, in a Galatine ballroom or a Serafan garden. Would she seem as comfortable in a Kvys convent, I wondered? In a cold and hard-bitten Fenian countinghouse?

  Alba slid close to me and took my hand. “Your friend is a thorough hostess,” she said, nodding toward a tray of lime tonics that had appeared. “And she is trustworthy.” I began to answer before realizing that it wasn’t, for once, a question. Alba had ascertained this for herself.

  “Can I ask,” I said, hesitating, “how is it that you can ride so well?”

  Sastra-set Alba laughed. “We are not born nuns, Sophie Balstrade.” She stepped lightly away to inspect several paintings hung along the hall—Viola’s work, I knew.

  The door swung wide and Annette hurried inside. I held back from greeting her; worry consumed her face and she was not nearly as surprised to see us as I had anticipated. Behind her, mirroring her worry, was the last person I had expected to see near Port Triumph.

  “You were supposed to be halfway to Galitha on the Gyrfalcon by now,” Theodor said, striding forward to embrace his brother.

  “Merhaven left without me.” Ballantine nodded in greeting to me and Viola, politely letting his gaze skim over Sianh and Kristos.

  “That seafaring rat.” Viola caught Annette’s hand. “And the lovely Lady Merhaven, too, I imagine.”

  “Both rats,” Theodor said with a wry laugh.

  “I won’t disagree,” Ballantine said. “I waited at the docks for you and Sophie, but Merhaven came instead. He sent me ashore for provisions and sailed without me. Quite deliberately, of course.”

  “It was an entire plot, to prevent my return to Galitha,” Theodor said. “And you were too close to me to be trusted.”

  Ballantine held up a hand. “I know, you needn’t rehash the whole thing. I think they’d prefer you out of the game entirely. The anti-reformists have begun calling themselves Royalists. Because they’ve got Father on their side, you see, and that makes them ever so official. It tarnishes their maker’s mark if the royal house is, in fact, divided.”

  “Royalists? That’s rich,” Kristos snorted. “What ought we to call those in favor of the rightful, lawful governance?”

  “I believe the common folk out of Havensport and Hazelwhite and the other places have that covered, as well; they’ve adopted the name ‘Reformists’ from the bill, and it’s taken off—more palatable to the moderate common folk than the old Red Cap designation.”

  “I imagine,” Alba said quietly to Theodor, “that even with your father siding with the Royalists, many among them fear your influence on the common people.”

  Theodor glanced at Alba blankly, then shook his head. “There is a Kvys nun lecturing me on the power dynamics of my own nation.”

  “Yes,” I said, “there is. But Sastra-set Alba has been insightful thus far. And she’s been a great help in rescuing me from underbelly assassins.”

  “The a’Mavha aren’t underbelly assassins,” Kristos
interjected. “Only the finest quality assassins for offing foreign dignitaries.”

  “It seems I’ve missed some good stories. At any rate,” Ballantine said, “we’re going to need a new ship.”

  “This is all quite too much to arrange on a poor night’s sleep and an empty stomach,” Alba said gently. “As it is too late to do anything about arranging passage for anyone, perhaps we ought to retire for the night and hold our own summit tomorrow?”

  “I think that’s the best thing for everyone,” Viola said hastily. “No use making any drastic decisions on no sleep.” She swiftly ushered everyone to their rooms, still sparsely furnished as she and Annette had only so recently acquired the house. Yet each piece of furniture and each framed painting was carefully selected and positioned to show it to its best advantage. I sighed. I hadn’t wanted to drag trouble onto Annette and Viola’s doorstep before they had even had a chance to enjoy their life together.

  Theodor was asleep before he even took his breeches off, his stockings and boots in a messy pile on the floor, but I couldn’t fall asleep. Despite an aching weariness that settled deep in my bones and eyes as dry as the dust in Isildi, my thoughts fought sleep like a drowning man, flailing in a current of exhaustion and refusing to be swept away. When I did fall into fitful rest, I woke with a start, time and again. I finally rose and padded down the hallways of the grand house, feet hot on cool tile, until I found the door to the white garden.

  I wasn’t alone in my insomnia. Sianh sat cross-legged beneath a sprawling double-blooming magnolia, his arms above his head as though reaching for some invisible fruit caught in a high branch. The creamy white blossoms brushed his dark hair when the wind moved, and I caught their thick scent mingling with the sweet hair oil Sianh used. His eyes were closed.