by Sharon Shinn
Lindy leaned forward, her expression suddenly mischievous. “And we don’t even have to go to Coravann this summer, because Coravann is coming to us.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mother says that Ryne Coravann is going to be in Forten City for two months! His father is sending him here to—to—help set up some port office? Something about trade, something about an uncle. But Ryne will be here for weeks and weeks! I’m so excited.”
“I’m trying to think if I’ve ever met him,” Karryn said, frowning.
“You’d remember if you had. He’s very handsome but very careless—I’m not sure I’ve ever been with him when he wasn’t drunk—and my mother says his father is ready to wash his hands of him. But charming! He was one of the lords who went to Ghosenhall to woo Amalie when she was trying to pick a husband. I can’t imagine why she decided anyone else was better.”
“Maybe my uncle will let me plan a dinner while he’s here,” Karryn said. “That would be fun!”
“I’m certain my mother will have at least one ball, or maybe a dozen,” Lindy replied. “At any rate, I can’t wait.”
They were still on the fruitful topic of Ryne Coravann’s many assets when there was a knock at the door and the slatternly housekeeper came in. “Were you wanting anything?” she asked. Wen had the impression that she wasn’t so much offering to provide any service as checking to make sure her unexpected guests had not gotten into any trouble. “I could make some tea, I suppose.”
Lindy came to her feet. “No, we’d better go,” she said. “My mother will already be wondering what kept us so long on the road.”
“Yes,” said Karryn, standing beside her. “Time to go home.”
THE return trip passed without incident, though the party didn’t make it back to Fortune until evening had started to settle over the city. Wen spent a little time in the training yard trading blows with Amie, just to counter the sense that the day had been completely wasted. Amie was in her early twenties, a dark whippet of a girl who rarely talked and rarely smiled. But she was a natural fighter; she was the most improved of the raw recruits, and Wen expected her someday to be the equal of Eggles. After a quick meal in the barracks, Wen set off for the house to make her nightly report to Jasper Paladar.
The best part of the day.
Chapter 18
WEN FOUND JASPER IN THE LIBRARY, PORING OVER AN untidy pile of papers. He looked completely rapt; she thought he might have a smudge of ink in his beard. She hesitated to speak, not wanting to disrupt his concentration.
But he had heard her come in, and he looked up with a smile. “Listen to this lovely little phrase,” he said. “ ‘The wakened blood careers / Through the body’s weirs and frets.’ Isn’t that nice? I particularly like the internal rhyme.”
“Very nice,” Wen said, though she wasn’t entirely sure what it meant and she had no idea what an internal rhyme was. “Is it from one of your books?”
“Mine? Sweet gods, no. Mine are very dry and precise. This man is a poet.”
“So that was a poem? I don’t think I’ve ever heard one before.”
Jasper sat back in his chair, letting paper fall to the table. “That can’t be right,” he said. “Never heard a poem? In your entire life?”
“Well, if I did, I didn’t notice it.”
“But songs are poems, set to music—simple poems, it’s true, but they meet all the criteria. They have meter, they have rhyme, they speak of deep emotions. Many of them are cathartic, and most of them create a mood. Any good poem will do the same.”
He seemed to expect an answer, so after a moment she said, “Oh.”
He was shaking his head. “Even in Tilt I didn’t think they raised such savages.”
She grinned. “It’s not the House, it’s the profession. Not many soldiers put much stock in poetry.”
“Not even battle chants to get you fired up to fight?”
“Not the soldiers I know.”
“But some of you do read, don’t you? Now and then? A good story?”
“A few soldiers do,” she allowed. “Especially to pass the time between deployments. But I never picked up the habit. I always thought books were boring.”
He surprised her by jumping to his feet. “That’s because you’ve never read the right ones,” he said, crossing to one of the stacks of books on the floor and beginning to hunt. “I must have Antonin’s Rhapsody here somewhere. Trust me, this is something the most bloodthirsty woman would find appealing.”
She laughed. “That’s an awful thing to say! I’m not bloodthirsty!”
“Well, you’re certainly not a die-away romantic like so many authors expect women to be. I wouldn’t give this book to Serephette, for instance, or Karryn or Demaray Coverroe! But it’s one of the most brilliant character studies of our era, all wrapped in a tale of action and intrigue. You’ll like it. Ha! Here it is.”
His face was alight as he strode over to her with the book in his outstretched hands. Wen could just make out the title printed in gold on the worked blue leather of the cover. He held it out to her like an offering, but she made no move to take it.
“You expect me to read that?” she said.
“Yes, of course,” he said impatiently. “It will only take a day or two—you see how short it is. Then we can discuss it.”
“It would take me a month and I wouldn’t enjoy a minute of it,” she said.
He assimilated that and stood there a moment, looking down at her. She remembered again how tall he was. She had forgotten it somehow during all those days of playing cruxanno, when, seated across from each other, they had seemed more like equals. In stature, if nothing else.
“It would please me,” he said at last.
She didn’t answer that. She would like to please him—she would like to win the approval of any employer, of course—but this was a little like asking her to juggle cows. Even if she tried, she wouldn’t be successful.
“Just read the first chapter,” he said in a coaxing voice.
“I could say I would try, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t get very far.”
“Then—but I know!” he exclaimed. “I’ll read it to you! Come, come, sit down. Just move those papers to the floor.”
She followed him back across the room, but said helplessly, “My lord—”
He took a seat and waved her down, so she perched in the chair opposite him once she had cleared it of bits of manuscript. “It can’t be any more tedious than playing cruxanno, can it?” he said. “You didn’t enjoy that very much, and yet you indulged me.”
“Well, at least I understand cruxanno,” she said under her breath.
“You’ll understand this, too. Just listen.”
So she listened, but he didn’t speak right away. He’d opened the book to its first page and studied it for a moment, as if savoring it, the way she had seen some men savor the scent of wine before taking the first sip. His face changed in a way she found difficult to describe—as if he was overhearing voices from a nearby room explaining mysteries that he had always wanted to learn. When he finally began reading, his voice was also subtly changed—more resonant, more deliberate.
I killed Maltis Fane with a single blow, the easiest strike I’d ever made to bring down a man. He had been focused on me for so long that it was a shock to see him lose interest in my face. He fell to his knees soundlessly, instantly, and his expression was already self-absorbed; he was listening to internal conversations. He no longer cared what I had to say.
Two more men in the house to kill and then I would be on my way. But there was a noise in the hallway and a voice lifted from outside. “Fane?” someone called. “The girl is here if you still want her, but she’s in pretty bad shape.” The girl, I thought. Then I’m not too late after all.
Jasper stopped reading and glanced up from the book.
“What girl?” Wen said.
He smiled. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Is this a book about sold
iers?”
“Not exactly. It’s about a man who believes he has lost his soul. And then believes he has found a way to regain it—though that way involves about four more deaths on the page and a handful that are only hinted at. It raises the question of whether violence can ever be the best resort—can, in Antonin’s words, be holy. But since the action sequences are so exciting, many a young man has read the book for its story and given not even a passing thought to its moral.”
“Well, of course violence is sometimes the best resort. Sometimes it’s the only one,” Wen said.
“Antonin agrees with you,” he said. “Should I read a little more?”
“Yes,” she said, surprising herself with the swiftness of her answer. “I like the way you make it sound.”
In fact, he read for the next hour, and Wen sat there almost unmoving for the entire time. Whoever this Antonin was, he knew how to fight; as Jasper read a scene that described a dangerous duel, she could perfectly picture the slashes and parries. And he had gotten the rest of it right, too—the righteous elation when an unscrupulous man was beaten down, the backlash of emotion when you realized a living, breathing person had died at your hands. Oh yes, those were familiar emotions as well.
She was startled when Jasper stopped speaking and closed the book. For a moment she felt like she had been jerked awake after a particularly gripping dream—to find herself in surroundings that suddenly seemed unfamiliar. Then the sensation faded.
“What did you think?” Jasper said.
“I think that I never knew there were books like that or I might have read one before.”
He looked extraordinarily pleased. “So would you like to take it with you? Or would you like for us to read it together until it’s done?”
“Oh, I want you to keep reading it!” she said. “I don’t think it would be nearly as good if I wasn’t hearing it.”
“Yes, well, I am very vain of my ability to narrate, so you won’t hear me protest, but I think you would find Antonin appealing even if you read him silently to yourself,” he replied. “He’s written a dozen books, you know. If you like this one, we’ll try another, and so on through the canon.”
“How many books have you read?” she asked.
“Too many to count! Well, let’s see. If I am forty-five now and started reading in earnest when I was ten—let’s say thirty books a year for thirty-five years—a thousand at least. Though I can’t say every one of them was worth my time.”
Wen couldn’t imagine reading a hundred books in a lifetime, let alone a thousand. “Is that all you do during the day? Read?”
“That describes my perfect day, but no, in fact, it is not! Even when I lived in my own house, overseeing my own life and not Karryn’s, I rarely could spend an entire day reading. But I probably manage an hour a day, at least, usually in the evenings.” He surveyed her a moment. “Actually, I have read significantly less since you took up residence at the House. Between conversations and cruxanno games, you have absorbed much of the time I would ordinarily spend perusing a book.”
Was that a complaint or merely a statement of fact? “I could come less often or stay more briefly,” she said.
“No, no, your company has been a worthwhile trade for the loss of scholarship,” he said with a smile. “A man like me sometimes needs to be forced to be social, to take part in the pageantry of the world. I vowed long ago that I would not allow myself to be swallowed up by words—either the ones I wrote or the ones I read—that when I was offered a choice, I would take the interaction with the present human over the musings of the absent author.” Her bafflement must have been obvious because he started to laugh. “I’d much rather talk to you than read a book,” he summed up.
“Well, then,” she said, because the statement pleased her but she didn’t know how to react. “That’s good. And when I come back tomorrow night, we can read together.”
“The perfect compromise,” he agreed.
She came to her feet. “Of course, if you’re going to make me read books, I suppose it’s only fair that I make you learn to wield a sword,” she said.
He stood, too, leaving the book in the middle of the table among the welter of papers. “Horrifying thought,” he said.
“I could at least teach you how to protect yourself from an assault by a lone attacker.”
“I feel safe enough. It’s Karryn I worry about.”
“I am starting to feel that Karryn is well-protected,” Wen said. “Orson and the others are coming together nicely. Pretty soon they’ll make a fine guard.”
As soon as she said it, she wished she hadn’t, for his next logical question would be: Then how soon will you be leaving? The truth was, she wasn’t quite ready to go yet. She knew she should; she was getting too comfortable, losing her sense of urgency. Some nights she lay awake thinking she would pack her bags in the morning and leave at first light. Other nights she just fell straight asleep, untroubled by dark thoughts. Those nights were the strangest, and the most unfamiliar.
Perhaps she could stay here just a little longer. Rest her soul just a few more weeks.
And Jasper did not ask the expected question; she sometimes had the sense that he hoped she would forget her plans to leave the city. “I’m glad to hear that they’re improving,” he said. “But I wouldn’t think they’re fully trained yet. I imagine it takes years before a group of disparate individuals really pulls together as a cohesive unit.”
“Sometimes,” she agreed, feeling oddly relieved.
“So you have more work to do, my Willa! I will see you tomorrow and you can tell me how much farther you’ve progressed.”
KARRYN was back at the training yard in the morning, greeting all the guards by name. They fought that morning as if performing for the queen herself, no one holding back. There would be some spectacular bruises in the barracks tonight, Wen thought, but no one would begrudge the manner of earning them.
Davey sauntered over after the first hour of the workout. With his right wrist splinted, he had been forced to practice bladework with his left hand, and he’d done fairly well at it, too.
“Does the serramarra care to take a little practice?” he asked Karryn, showing her his injured arm. “You see I’m hurt. You could probably take me on with no trouble.”
“Davey,” Wen said in a warning voice.
He gave her a look of injured innocence through a floppy fall of dark hair. “I think it would be an excellent idea for serra Karryn to learn to defend herself.”
“Probably, but not from you,” Wen replied.
Karryn looked between them, intrigued but uncertain. “Why not?”
“Because even injured, he could give a good accounting of himself against most men, and he’d certainly overpower you,” Wen replied.
“I’ve never held a sword,” Karryn said.
Quick as a flash, Davey had pulled his practice blade and offered it to her. She took it gingerly, obviously unprepared for its weight, and let the tip fall to the grass. “That’s so heavy! How do you swing it around like that?”
Davey rolled back a sleeve to show off a pretty impressive array of muscles in his curled arm. “You build strength over the months and years,” he said.
“I’d never be able to fight somebody with a sword,” Karryn said.
Now Davey pulled a short blade from his belt, this one true metal. “Dagger, then,” he said, offering it hilt first. “Can’t use it except in close quarters, but you can certainly do some damage.”
