by Angela Boord
He refills our wineglasses. I spin mine between my manacled hands. “Try me,” I say.
He sits back in the brocade chair with his wine, resting his arms on the armrests, rubbing the polished oak curl at the end with the fingers of his empty hand. “All right. I came to negotiate the silk in good faith. I didn’t know you would be there. My father had nothing to do with the first dance. It was just some idiotic thing I took advantage of because I was there and you were there. I knew nothing would come of it because of your Caprine ties. I didn’t know what my father was doing, treating with yours, but I didn’t have any say in that matter and I didn’t want to know any more.”
I watch him carefully, the way his hand rubs back and forth over the wood knob. “But you came back,” I say.
“I had to come back because we had to pay you for the silk. But I had been careless at home. I had spoken of you. My father heard me, realized who I was talking about, and told me I needed to…take advantage of the situation.”
“That’s a polite way of saying it.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen so fast. My father just thought you’d be ruined and Pallo would cast you out, and then we’d sweep you up. He knew about your mother—about the magic that comes down her line. But you made it so damn easy, Kyrra.”
I run my fingers down the handle of the spoon like it’s the hilt of a knife. “Because I thought you were going to marry me,” I say, trying not to speak through gritted teeth.
“Most girls don’t take a tumble in the bushes that fast, no matter what they think.”
“It’s my fault, then? I should have said no?”
“Well, why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t you? You could have had me legally for the Prinze. All you had to do was ask for my hand in marriage.”
“And then the Caprine would have thought we were threatening them. They would have sent assassins for both of us and my father, too.”
“Oh, so you were protecting me?”
“I was doing my duty to my House, dammit! What I wanted had nothing to do with it. It was just my father using me to get to you.”
He does sound disgusted now. Part of me wants to be sympathetic. To understand. To respond to the face I once found so pleasing, the voice I knew, the body I pressed hungrily against mine.
That part is submerged by my anger and drowned. I stand up.
“Let me have this clear, Cassis. You’ve abandoned your wife and left her at the mercy of your father, built a fortress for your mistress, and now you want me to believe that you found it impossible to say a few words behind the lilacs, such as How can we find a way out of this, Kyrra?”
“You don’t understand—”
I slam my metal elbow down on the tray. The bowls jump and clatter, and my wineglass wobbles and tips over, shattering when it hits the floor. Cassis looks up at me in surprise but not yet fear.
“Did you lose an arm, too?” I ask.
“You seem to have acquired a new one.”
I throw a bowl of stew at him.
He jerks backward, letting go of his wineglass. It falls to the floor, spattering wine everywhere when it breaks, and the pottery bowl hits him in the jaw. The stew splatters his face and hair and the back of the chair.
I hurl the table out of the way and raise my clasped hands to use my metal fist like a club. A neat shot to his temple will put him down, then I can run him through with that sword on the wall and make my escape.
He raises both his feet and kicks me in the stomach. I stumble backward, my boots crunching on broken glass, and grab the other bowl off the table. I toss this one at him, too, like a discus, but he’s ready; he ducks, and the bowl hits the floor and shatters.
I run for the sword on the wall. But five years of war have turned him into a warrior, and he has both his hands. Before I can make the sword rack, he grabs me by the neck of my dress and hurls me down on the floor, into the leg of the bed.
My head bounces back against it. Pain blinds me, immediate and overpowering, and when I finally open my eyes, I have my hands up on my forehead and I’m staring at my own lap.
Damn that head wound Lobardin gave me.
I look up and Cassis is wiping blood from the corner of his mouth. I try to scramble to my feet, but he pulls a dagger from his belt and falls to his knees to lay the point of the blade to my throat.
“Kyrra,” he says, hoarsely. “Don’t make me do anything else to you.”
I laugh. “You say that as if you mean it.”
His hand begins to shake. The blade shudders against my skin. “It’s easy for you to be righteous, isn’t it? But where were you when our armies stormed your land? Were you among the women we took away? No? Your mother chose to put a dagger in her breast rather than go with us, but you, you simply ran.”
He spits the words as he rises. Then he throws down the dagger. It clatters on the stone floor. “Arsenault would never say where you were, either.”
Out of the corner of my eye, the blade glints on the floor, a temptation just to look at it. I steel myself to look at Cassis. “Why did it matter?”
He looks down at me. “You didn’t have to drink the potion, Kyrra.”
And so it comes down to that. I hurl myself across the floor to grab the knife, but his foot comes down atop my hands. The bones in my left hand pop as he presses his boot down harder and harder. I try to move my right hand, but whatever is wrong with my arm has seeped some of my strength away; it starts to groan, as if it had muscles to tear. I give up, gasping, and stare up at Cassis through pain-watered eyes.
“My father is generous to bastards,” he says, scowling. “He might have taken the child in, raised him up as mine—we could have had an heir. We couldn’t have said he was Caprine, but I might have had an heir. Gods, Kyrra, do you think I like what I’m doing now? I hate hurting Camile, and I love Driese. But when it comes down to it, the Caprine are the only fertile family left, aren’t they? Even my father hasn’t found a way to change that, no matter what magics he uses to twist the innards of our women.”
I stare up at him through a haze of increasing pain. “What?”
“We need Fixers. To heal our women. To subjugate the rest of you.” He doesn’t take his foot off my hands, but he leans down to speak to me. “My father told me your mother could See and so could you. He wanted that baby, do you understand? He wanted it much more than he wanted me.”
Oh, gods. So much of this is starting to make sense now. My mother wasn’t worried that Geoffre would take our lands. She didn’t want him to take my child.
Did my brother meet the same fate?
“Get off my hands,” I gasp.
Cassis takes his foot away, something changed in his expression, then sweeps up the dagger. I clutch my hands to my breast and hold them there like a child guarding a favored toy.
“My father is coming to kill me,” he says. “Now that he has Mikelo, he won’t need me.”
“My mother understood.” I wheeze out the words. “When she gave me the potion.” My left hand aches. I massage it with the fingers of my right hand, but metal does a poor job and my right arm hurts. More than it ever has.
He stops. “What do you mean?”
I take a deep breath and flex my left hand. It burns for a moment, but I don’t think it’s broken. “She knew what Geoffre wanted.”
Cassis’s eyebrows arch. “Are you saying that your mother made you drink those herbs, Kyrra?”
Even I cannot avoid the irony in that statement. Did she make me drink it?
“No,” I say finally. “No, she didn’t make me.”
Cassis stares at me for a moment. I can’t name the expression on his face. Pain—yes, I see that in his eyes. Disgust—well, I expected to see that, too.
What I don’t expect is the muddle of fear and relief, perhaps that I haven’t shifted the blame, that I’ve let it lie where it belongs, buried close to my heart. Or maybe he believed, before, that my mother poured the potion down my throat... Maybe th
at’s where the fear comes from.
I move and the pain in my head makes the moment go black, a small splinter of lost time. When my vision returns, disgust seems to have won out over his other emotions, and Lobardin is standing in the open door. He looks down at me with an expression of unguarded surprise.
“Take her away,” Cassis says, turning his back to both of us, with the briefest glance at me over his shoulder. “I’ve heard all I care to know.”
Chapter 31
Marriage has always been a wound that lies close to my heart. Sometimes, I still find myself woolgathering, wondering what my life would have been like if I had married Felizio di Caprine. How many children would I have borne in eight years? What sicknesses would we have weathered, what childhood falls and accidents, what joys and sorrows? Or would I have suffered his first wife’s fate, dead in childbed, my soul on a farther journey?
They’re old thoughts now, but five years ago, while we were preparing for my father’s second marriage, they bore a brighter pain. In spite of Arsenault. Or perhaps because of him.
We would never have cake. Never wine, or white linen tablecloths, or dancing in the evening. No well-wishes and charms hurled upon us as we walked beneath flowered arches, no fresh-faced young girls standing beside us with their arms full of roses.
At the time, those thoughts ached like the ghost of my right arm. After my father issued his commands at our private dinner, I was relegated back to the combing house and my undyed guarnello and apron. Ilena was there when I walked in the door. In her black eyes there was nothing but hate.
Living in the barracks for the past year had helped me avoid her, but the estate was a small place. She hadn’t given up on Arsenault after her first blackmail attempt. He was always polite to her but certainly not encouraging, and I wondered why she kept coming back. As time went on, I began to see Lobardin watching their interactions, but it still surprised me when he began walking with her in the evenings. It was hard to tell with Lobardin sometimes, but it seemed to me that he was trying to set her in his pocket in case he needed an ally against Arsenault.
I didn’t know if Ilena knew Lobardin had hidden motives, though, especially the way she looked at me when I entered the combing house. Lobardin had been ridden off on the back of Utíl’s horse that morning and deposited in the dust beyond the gates, and it looked as if she thought I was involved. I ignored her as best I could while I traded my own clothes for a woman’s. Ilena’s gaze made my skin burn, but I kept my back turned and asked another girl, whom I didn’t know, to tie my apron.
I could ignore Ilena, but thoughts of Arsenault were more insistent.
That first night, after doing a hundred menial chores—scrubbing floors and hauling water and stirring silk—I lay on the rough straw-filled mattress, my body stiff and sore. I listened to the unfamiliar breathing of other women for a long time, unable to sleep. Finally, I gave up, belted on my dagger under my shift, and walked barefoot out into the night.
As the wedding approached, my father posted guards on all the silk buildings night and day, fearing whatever it was that he feared from the Prinze. But I knew, from being lately in the barracks, that Verrin had drawn guard duty for the combing house, and I didn’t think he would stop me.
His silhouette moved in the courtyard when I cracked open the door. I pushed it open slowly and slid through the smallest opening. I had taken two steps when he turned around.
I raised my hand. “Verrin. It’s only me. Just pretend you never saw me.”
He came toward me quickly, gripping his sword hilt. “Pretend I never saw you? Kyrra, your father pulled me aside this morning and warned me—he said if I were to let anything happen to you, he’d have my ballocks on a plate.”
My eyebrows rose. “He said that?”
“Not in so many words, but it’s what he meant.” Verrin looked nervously over his shoulder at the wind-rustled trees, then back at me. “I know what you’re doing.”
“If you know what I’m doing, then why are you trying to stop me?”
He stared at me with a torn expression. I shifted onto my toes in preparation for a sprint into the trees, but then he suddenly relaxed.
“Ah, go, then,” he said, turning around. “I’m not looking at you; I don’t know which way you went. If you do get in trouble, Kyrra—have the decency to do it on someone else’s shift?”
I grinned. “You’re a good man, Verrin.” I squeezed his arm. He grunted, and I didn’t spare him another glance as I ran.
I took the same path I had walked the night I discovered Ilena with Arsenault. Pebbles and broken pieces of beechnuts bit my feet as I ran, but I didn’t stop. I flew over the path like a hind running from a hunter. I ran until I came to the small grotto where the spring poured out of the rock and the armless statue stood guard.
And Arsenault was there, waiting for me.
In the dim spangle of moonlight, I could only make out his outline—the way he prowled the grassy area in front of the wall like a wolf. And then as I slowed, I saw the glint of moonlight on the pommel of his sword and the white slash in his hair. Then he came to meet me, taking my mouth with his kiss.
He smelled of sweat and smoke and earth and metal, and the calluses of his fingers caught at my shift as he ran his hands from my shoulders down my arms.
“Kyrra,” he said, raggedly. “You should have stayed in the combing house.”
“I know,” I said.
“Gods curse me, but I’m glad you didn’t.”
I smiled, but I felt like crying. My voice was like a gate holding back my tears; if I spoke, they would spill, and I wasn’t sure then that they would stop. So, I didn’t speak. I pressed my lips against his and brought him down with me into the grass.
Afterward, we lay on the damp, cool earth, charting the stars through the gaps in the leaves above us. The moon had passed its zenith already, but it wasn’t close enough to dawn that I needed to go back. We clung to that sliver of time the way we clung to each other in the darkness.
I lay beside him, my head pillowed on the curve of his left arm, his hand a warm weight on my hip. The stump of my right arm nestled in the space between us, but it didn’t bother me. I traced the line of his scar and he shifted his head to look at me.
I wanted to ask him any number of questions. How he would disguise himself at the wedding, if he had told any of the other gavaros...if Geoffre would notice him anyway, with that glamour of magic sparkling in his wake. But somehow, in the dark, none of that seemed as important as it once had. Less than a month and whatever would happen would happen, but would I go to meet my fate without knowing anything about him? I’d known him for three years, but I still felt as if I knew less than nothing, and I wanted to know everything. Knowledge would be a tether, tying us together.
“The cut that made this scar might have killed you,” I said.
He turned his head toward my hand so that my fingers stroked through his beard. “It happened a long time ago,” he murmured.
“But you know about my arm. You know everything about me. And what do I know about you? Just some stories about caravans and your childhood. I don’t even know where you come from, exactly.”
“Where do people say I come from?”
“From all four points of the compass, if you listen to the stories. I know it’s somewhere north, but I’ve looked at maps and I think your home is off them.” I scooted up a little so my head was propped.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said, “if all you’re looking at is Lieran maps. We called it Frøna, but I doubt you’ll see that name anywhere. The Qalfans label it Tule.”
“Frona,” I repeated, rolling the word around in my mouth, and he laughed.
“That Eterean r makes it seem like a woman’s name,” he said and repeated it, Frøna, slower this time, with a soft r that wasn’t rolled and a closed-off sound in place of our long, round o’s that made it seem like a different letter. Hearing it, I could understand now why he said my name the way he did
, so much softer than the aggressive way native Etereans pronounced it.
“Tule,” I said, “is only a place in stories.”
“Been a while since I’ve been back.”
“Were you scarred before you left home?”
He rubbed my arm absently. “Yes. It was something of a test.”
“Like the one you told my father about, for sorcerers?”
“You make it sound as if I have another life huddling in a purple cape and casting spells over pots of boiling spiders.”
“Do you?”
He sighed. “Your problem is that it’s too hard to tell when you’re serious and when you’re joking.”
I snuggled closer against him. “Your problem is that I’ve learned to tell when you’re trying to divert my attention.”
“Mmmm.” He was quiet for a moment, and the singing of grasshoppers and cicadas in the warm dark filled the gap. When he spoke again, I felt it as a rumble in his chest. “It was that kind of test,” he said. “I passed it and failed it all at once. So, I was scarred. And if I ever tried to return home…people could read it. Like a sign.”
“Your family,” I said.
“No,” he replied in a soft voice. “They’re long gone.”
“Your children, too?”
“Fostered out. Across the sea.”
“So, the scar makes you an outlaw.”
He sighed heavily. “In a manner of speaking.”
I hadn’t meant to make him sad. I reached across him to stroke his hair away from his face. “Tell me a good memory, then.”
“All of them have a bittersweet edge,” he said, pressing his nose and lips into my hair.
“So do mine. But surely, it’s not wrong to hold on to some of them?”
He kissed my temple and remained silent for so long, I thought he was ignoring me. Then he said, “I remember the grass.”
“It rolled for miles on the highland until the land grew rougher and colder. When we were children, we’d jump out on each other with rocks and swords of twisted grass. There were so few trees, the farmers made their houses out of turf. And the further inland one went, the colder it got until nothing grew, and it was just high peaks and snow, even in the summer. It was a little like your underworld—with giant rifts in the ground where steam and sulfur smoke poured out. Some of the springs would boil you alive. And back from our bay, there were huge cliffs, nearly like the ones down the coast at Iffria, where we hunted for bird eggs on the ledges.”
