Madoc pointed to a pair of open doors. Beyond, Usha saw a rough little garden behind the tavern. From what she could see, it was more stone than garden—a few scraggly clumps of marigolds and a miserable rosebush gasping its last for lack of water. The garden’s chief attraction, she imagined, was its privacy. To Usha’s dismay, she saw Tamara Halgard walking arm in arm with Sir Radulf there. As she watched, the knight leaned down so that his lips were close to Tamara’s ear.
“That child is a friend of yours, eh?” Madoc drank down the last of his ale.
Usha didn’t move, not even to nod.
Madoc tipped his chair back, the better to see the two as they passed. Usha looked where he did and saw Tamara’s hand slip into the knight’s.
“Madoc, have you seen them here before?”
“Not the girl. Him, though. That’s Sir Radulf.” His glance shot to Usha, and his expression sobered. “But you know that, don’t you?”
His eyes narrowed as though he scented something much more interesting than he’d at first thought. Usha felt the feather touch of soft inquiry in her mind.
“Stop it.”
He didn’t have to. Madoc’s magic failed him. The mental touch faded as though it had never been. But he had other skills, and no vanished god could take them packing with him.
“The knight,” he said, his voice low and thoughtful, “and pretty little Mistress Halgard. If she is a friend, Usha, you’d do her a favor to let her know she’s playing in a dangerous field.” He let his chair drop back, the front legs thumping on the floor. “You’re pretty close with what you know, Usha; but I can guess some things. One thing I’m guessing is that you’d better leave now. If wagers were laid, I’d bet it won’t do to have Sir Radulf see you here with me. You’re keeping interesting company these days—the daughter of a merchant prince, and the merchant himself, maybe, yes? I’m guessing you don’t want the questions to arise. Or unfortunate connections made at the wrong time.”
Usha didn’t argue. She rose to leave, but the mage stopped her.
“If you need help—” He jerked his head toward the garden. “If I can help, let me know. But for now, you’ll be followed again when you leave here.”
Her breath caught in her breast, but he smiled and shook his head.
“By a friend. Don’t worry, and don’t look around to see who it is. This friend of mine is yours, and you’ll get home without hooded strangers in your wake.” Something quick and vulnerable flashed in his eyes then vanished. “Whatever Dezra thinks about me, I’m yours to command, my lady Usha.”
She smiled at the title she’d not allowed since her arrival in Haven. It had lately sounded a wrong note in her ear, a flat sound. But Madoc, the disgraced son of a noble family, a rogue most times, knew how to speak it well. Usha did not discount his offer. She had learned years before that however things seemed, Madoc Diviner’s heart would always be true.
On the way back to the inn Usha was occupied with Madoc’s ideas of connection and conjunction—hers with Qui’thonas, hers with him, with Dez and Aline, and hers with Loren and Tamara’s with Sir Radulf.
It had been her agreement with Aline that she would keep apart from Qui’thonas, for the sake of their work and hers. She’d thought it a good idea, as had Aline and Dez; but Usha wasn’t so sure now.
Now, people were dying.
In the middle of the night, when the streets were quiet and the inn silent with sleepers, Usha woke. She lit a candle and looked for a piece of paper she’d tossed aside a day or so ago. She found it under a drift of sketches—a note from Loren Halgard. By the flickering glow of the candle’s light, Usha read it again: Just for supper, a quiet meal with my daughter and me. I’ll send a carriage for you—only tell me when. Won’t you come?
Usha found an inkwell, and she sharpened a quill. She smoothed the folds out of Loren’s note and wrote a response below his own lines. She folded the paper again, sealed it, and in the morning, she found a quick-footed lad and sent him off to deliver her reply.
Later, Usha thought she might have discussed the matter with Aline, but in the end, she decided that the risk she’d undertaken must be hers alone.
13
In the stern gray light of dawn, Lady Mearah woke. Her narrow bed, shared last night with her lover, was hers alone again. The smallest of notes lay on the pillow where Tavar had lain his head, a curl of parchment cut from something longer. Not a love note, never that from Tavar Evensong. The lady knight reached for the black silk tunic at the foot of the bed and slipped it over her head. Barefoot on the cool stone floor, she went to the hearth and the embers still glittering from last night’s fire. She breathed on the embers, and small tongues of fire licked up around the edges of charred log. The light glowed on tanned skin, illuminating scars like runes on her arms and legs to tell tales of battle. By this light, Lady Mearah read: Usha Majere was seen again with Madoc Diviner, and a runner has gone out from the Ivy with a message to Steadfast.
A message to Steadfast… to Loren Halgard.
Lady Mearah’s quarters were spare, as befit a knight in the field. They were without any luxury but that of a window that commanded a wide view of the river and Haven. She opened the window shutters and looked out into the steely light. Because of the way the river curved, it looked as though Old Keep and Steadfast sat upon opposite sides of the White-rage. They did not. Each was on its own hill, the two buildings seeming to glare across the water at each other.
Halgard had been eager enough to step into the breach when Sir Radulf commanded the lord mayor’s resignation and the dissolution of the Council. There had been no talk of remaking what Sir Radulf had dissolved—none until Loren Halgard suggested that a frightened populace would respond better to being told the mayor and council had been replaced by one of their own than to news that a dark knight now reigned in Haven.
“You can mow them all down,” he’d said. “Hang them and perhaps inspire a riot that your greater forces might will quell. No one disputes it. But in a merchant city, when you kill the merchants, you kill what made the place valuable in the first place. Let me go between you and them. They know me, and it will make things easier.”
Lady Mearah had thought that clever, and she’d decided this Loren Halgard was one to watch. Now her lover’s words came back to her in memory, ghostly: Usha Majere isn’t one for infidelity, but if she were, she wouldn’t look for an opportunity on the low side of the street.
Steadfast shone steely gray in the rising light of day. The lady knight thought that Usha Majere had certainly found something interesting on the high side of the street, as Tavar suggested. But what, she wondered, was going on at the Grinning Goat to lure Mistress Majere to the low side?
Twilight came down softly over occupied Haven, the light leaving the sky slowly and climbing up to deepest blue. A haze turned gently to mist above the river. Usha smelled a sweetness of honeysuckle in the air. Loren’s driver, the half-elf Rowan, opened the carriage door for her. Two women passing on the street stopped to watch him close the door and spring up to take his seat and the reins again.
“Some people,” one murmured to the other, “are doing rather well these days.”
Usha smoothed the folds of her dove-gray skirt and straightened the bodice, pretending not to hear.
“That’s Mistress Majere. She’s been makin’ portraits for the well-to-do. No shame in it. A woman’s got to live, doesn’t she? No doubt she’s going out on business.”
The first woman sniffed. “Dressed rather grandly for that, don’t you think? And isn’t that Loren Halgard’s carriage? Some as says he’s a collaborator.”
Her friend shook her head. “Some say that, but they’re wrong. I know him. Well, my boy does. Shipped out on his first voyage with Loren Halgard himself. When my old man Gerris died…” She caught her breath against familiar pain. “Why, Loren Halgard came himself to the funeral, and he spoke right kindly to me. And the winter after that, it was hard for us, but my boy and me, we wanted for not
hing. Thanks to Loren Halgard. The man’s no collaborator.”
Not to be deterred, the first woman muttered, “You could say Mistress Majere is on business of some kind, I suppose.”
The woman’s ironic tone made it clear to Usha what kind of business she meant. Her friend laughed and said something Usha couldn’t hear as, with a flick of the reins, Rowan took the carriage out into the streets.
Usha sat in flushed and angry silence.
Old cats, she thought.
And yet, were she honest with herself, she’d have to admit that what the two gossips had seen tonight didn’t suggest a better picture. Usha smiled wryly. The gods only knew what stories would be told of the artist from Solace who went to dine privately in the home of the man said to be the city’s only liaison with the occupation. Her smile dimmed. No one need guess what Dez would say.
Well, well, they’d all have to manage, the gossips of Haven, and Dez, too. Usha had never denied that Loren was an attractive man, charming and attentive. Sitting in his carriage, rattling through the cobblestone streets where dark knights gathered to patrol the night, she looked down at her hands folded on her lap and remembered what she’d forgotten—the warmth of Loren’s hands when he’d held hers the night he walked her home from the unveiling of “Pride and Promise.”
Usha unclasped her hands and looked out the window.
It might be as the old gossip had said, that Loren was a collaborator. If that were so, Usha would be sorry. But if it were so, cultivating Loren’s interest in her would put her in a position to learn things Qui’thonas would want to know. She might prevent another ambush, more deaths like those of the farmer and his family out in the empty moors of the Seeker Reaches.
The ride through Haven at the end of the day was cool and pleasant. The clip of the horses hooves, the ring of the bridle iron drew the attention of people hastening along the streets to make it home before curfew. Where once she would have hurried, too, tonight Usha didn’t have to worry about curfew. Loren had assured her that his crest on the doors of the carriage was her passport: So she watched the sky grow dark, the stars pricking through. Knights and foot soldiers paced the wall, patrols gathered at the major crossroads. In the woods, or by the river’s edge, or perhaps in secret shadows soon to fall, Dezra and Qui’thonas would be running through the night, escorting a frightened family out of Haven and into the far reaches beyond Sir Radulf’s occupation. After the ambush on the moor, Aline had redoubled her caution and her determination. Knights may stalk the streets, dragons haunt the sky, but Haven had been a free city of free people. If people wanted to leave Haven, Qui’thonas would find a way, the only fee being the promise to cry the tale of their captivity abroad.
Aline redoubled her efforts, and tonight, riding in the carriage of the man who had made himself the liaison between Haven and the occupation, Usha was initiating hers.
Fireflies winked in the darkness beneath the trees lining the rising road to Steadfast. Havelock Gance’s house was a finer one—larger, with half-timbered additions and wide reaching gardens, but Loren’s, high upon a hill above the White-rage, was older. There wasn’t much that went on there that a man with a good eye couldn’t see from the behind the crenellated wall of the Old Keep. Loren’s was a stout granite square of a house, built in the days of pirates and raiders, made for defense and not altered much over the intervening years. It had always been known as Steadfast.
Loren stood on the bottom of the eight broad steps to the house. There was nothing of pretense or posturing about him. He waited eagerly for Usha, and he didn’t mind who knew. He helped her from the carriage and dismissed Rowan with a nod. In the purpling twilight, his eyes were smoky gray, a little gleam from the silver earring he wore caught Usha’s eye and sparked her smile.
“Usha, it’s so good of you to come. I’d thought… well, I hadn’t thought you’d even answer my note. Not after what happened.” He jerked his head toward the river and Old Keep.
He’s a collaborator. He’s not a collaborator. Usha felt the tug of both assertions as she lifted her hand in a small gesture to dismiss Loren’s apology. “I don’t hold you responsible for that. You’re doing what you can.”
As she said so, Usha found herself wanting to believe it. She dropped her glance as though the next thing she said was almost too difficult to speak.
“The Council, the lord mayor…”
He took her hand and held it gently. “The lord mayor is well. His council is… in exile, if you will. But unharmed.”
“Under guard, then.”
Loren shook his head. “Not at all. They go about freely, their families unmolested. Why, Lorelia and Havelock were here to visit only the other day.”
“Then I assume a new council has been convened?”
“No.” The word sounded sharp, abrupt. “They don’t want a council now. They want—”
They. The occupation.
“Sir Radulf wants you,” she said, her voice chill.
Loren said nothing for a long moment. Then, “Usha, I’m not claiming anything that isn’t mine. I’m…” He shook his head, his eyes those of a man who had long been arguing this point with himself. “I’m what works now. I’m keeping their place.”
A comforting explanation, Usha thought.
“To return it to them… when?”
Shadows deepened. In the gloaming they seemed to creep out from under the trees and up the hill from the river itself.
“I don’t know,” Loren said, and in his frank, gray eyes Usha saw that he told the truth. He didn’t know, and to his credit he wouldn’t pretend he did.
“Come inside now. The air is damp, and—” he looked up to the windows of Steadfast glowing brightly with light from within—“it’s getting dark.”
Loren put his hand under her elbow. Usha permitted it with only the slightest hesitation. His hand was warm and strong. This close, she smelled the river on him again, and now something more—the bite of tar and the tang of the pine oil used to polish a ship’s deck. Some of Loren’s ships had gone down to the sea with the rest of the merchant fleet. Others remained, and clearly their master had been spending time aboard.
If his cousin had trouble with disappearing servants, Loren did not. A tall, elderly man opened the oaken door and held it wide. Loren led her into the great hall where a flight of stairs climbed to the second story. Another servant moved between four tall pillars and two high banks of candles, lighting the last of them against the coming night. The hall smelled faintly of honey, and the candles glowed as though they held light within. These were not thick-skinned candles from a ship chandler’s shop. These were beeswax, not dipped but hand rolled and bearing the hexagonal imprint of the hive. At the top of the stairs, others had been lighted, and torches flared in silver cressets on the wall, one set in the wall at every fourth step.
Voices drifted down to them—a woman’s and a man’s. Usha couldn’t recognize them, not at this distance. Loren’s hand slipped from her elbow, leaving a faint trace of warmth along her arm as it did.
“We’ll dine in the solar tonight. Tamara has been looking forward to seeing you again.”
This, Usha doubted even as she managed a gracious smile. She gathered her skirt, the hem lifted a little off the stone, and walked beside him up the long flight of stairs. At the top, the gallery ran around the stairwell and the doors from there into the solar stood opened wide. The scent of freshly cut fruit mingled with the tang of wine. Servants had laid the table near the hearth for the supper’s first course. Tamara sat on one of the two cushioned benches beside an open window, a small crystal cup in her hand. She sipped wine, and her eyes shone like sapphires in the light of the tall candles placed on either side of the benches. Her dark hair was plaited with ribbons of silver, bright love knots of the kind the women of Haven traditionally wore for their suitors. She was not alone in the solar. Sir Radulf Eigerson, the image of a perfect knight, stood in attendance.
Usha glanced at Loren and saw his surprise,
perhaps his disapproval in the tension in his shoulders. Then he relaxed, hiding the emotion as Tamara looked up.
“Father,” she cried, still laughing at something the knight had said. “Look, you have company.” She acknowledged Usha with a strained smile. “Why, you have more company, I should say.” In the sing-song rote of a student addressing her elderly tutor, she said, “Good evening, Mistress Usha.”
Sir Radulf turned and bowed. He stood in dusty boots, light mail sliding over a black shirt like a darkly scaled second skin. The gemmed grip of his sheathed sword winked in the candlelight.
“Loren! I hope I haven’t caused a problem arriving untimely.” Tamara’s hand slipped into his, and he smiled down at her absently. “And Mistress Usha. It’s a surprise and, of course, a pleasure to see you again.”
The knight’s eyes met Usha’s, and she heard the screams of terrified people, saw the flash of a dragon’s eye. In that glancing moment, Usha knew he wasn’t in the least surprised.
“Sir Radulf,” she said, her voice cool.
“But I haven’t come to dine,” he said, answering a question no one had asked. “I’ve come to take Loren away for a while. You will forgive me, if I promise to have him back in time for the wine and cheese, won’t you?”
Again, Loren’s shoulders tightened, again they relaxed, and Usha said, “Of course.”
Tamara reached for Sir Radulf’s hand, but he was already across the room, his hand on Loren’s shoulder and turning him toward the door.
“Come,” he said to the girl, over his shoulder and as an afterthought. “It seems Mistress Usha is prepared to forgive. Make allowances, Tamara. Your father is essential tonight.”
The word hung strangely in the silence. Essential. Why, essential? What would they speak of? Where would they go? Sir Radulf’s voice had gone cold when he said it, and his blue eyes had changed to ice. Usha didn’t imagine the conversation they’d have would bode well for whoever was under discussion.
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