The first sound to herald the chaos was a single horse running hard into the courtyard. The second was the yelp of the footmen. Dread pulled her toward the main doors almost against her will. When they burst open, Dawson stumbled through on the arm of the door slave. Her husband’s sword was in his hand, and blood soaked his right arm and side. His hunting dogs circled the pair, their ears back and faces rich with concern. She must have made a sound, because he looked up at her sharply.
“Arm the house,” he said between gasps.
The fear that had been welling up in her broke, flooding her with ice. She didn’t know yet what the worst was, but she had no doubt it had happened. She grew calm. She walked to her husband, pushing the dogs aside, and put a supporting shoulder under his arm.
“You heard my lord’s order,” she said to the door slave. “Spread the word. All doors and gates are to be locked immediately. Shutter the windows. Gather the servants and be ready to defend the house. When that’s done, find Jorey and send him to the kitchens.”
“My lady,” the door slave said, and gave Dawson over to her.
With every step Dawson winced, but he didn’t slow. The dogs followed them anxiously. When they reached the kitchens, Dawson lay on the wide oak preparation table and squeezed his eyes closed. As Clara went to the pantry, her head cook came into the room and stopped.
“You aren’t armed,” Clara noted as she took cooking wine and honey from the pantry shelves.
“No, ma’am,” the old cook said.
“You should be. I’ll take care of this. You get your people and see that they’re ready to fight if the need comes.”
“It will,” Dawson said. “The need is coming.”
The cook scurried away, possibly to find a weapon or possibly to flee the mansion. Clara put the odds about even. At the table, she used a carving knife to slit his shirt, pulling it away from the skin with a wet sound that horrified her. A rag hung from a peg at the table’s end, and she wiped away the worst of the gore with it. There were two cuts, one along his ribs just under his left breast, the other above his collarbone. Neither were deep, but both bled freely. She opened the wine bottle, pulling the cork with her teeth.
“They knew,” Dawson said. “Not the details, but they knew something was planned. They were ready for us.”
“Stop talking,” she said. “This will hurt.”
She poured the wine into the cut on his side, and Dawson arched back, sucking in his breath. He did not scream. She did the same again with the other cut. His breath grew ragged. With his shirt gone and some, at least, of the blood washed away, she could see a dozen angry red welts all down his right side and out along his arm. They didn’t bleed, but the skin around them was hot to the touch and tight as a drum.
“What happened here?” she asked as she prepared to honey the wounds. “Spiders,” Dawson said. “That mad bastard cultist must have been carrying a sack of them under his robes. And soon as I cut him, they came boiling out.”
“You cut him,” she said. It was neither a question nor a statement, but something between.
“If I’d meant to, he’d be dead,” Dawson said as she slathered the honey over the lower of his cuts and pressed her cloth to it. “I was trying for Palliako.”
With her free hand, Clara pressed palm to mouth, only realizing after that she’d bloodied her own face. Dawson drew her hand away from the cut and pressed down on it himself. It was still bleeding, though not quite as badly.
“You,” she began, then tried again. “You tried to slaughter the Lord Regent? That’s what this was all about?”
“Of course it was. Palliako didn’t give me an option. I did and Lord Bannien and Alan Klin and a few others besides. This wasn’t done alone or for glory. We’re fighting to save the throne from those foreign bastards Palliako’s wedded himself to. Only somehow they knew we were coming. The guards were on alert. It should never have been me holding the blade to start with, but they couldn’t reach the high table. Not in time.”
Clara’s heart darkened. If there was a way to save this, to make it right again, she didn’t know it. She could only hope that they would win, and even that was thin comfort.
“What happened to him? Does Palliako still live?”
“I don’t know. When I tried to take him, the bastard priest got in my way, and then the personal guard was at my heels. One of the others may have caught him, but I didn’t. Stop. Enough.”
He sat up. The cuts still bled, though less freely. Wine stained his skin more deeply than the film of drying blood, and the honey shined on him. He was old. The hair on his chest was more grey than black now, and his forehead was high where the hairline had begun to retreat. His sword was still in his hand. She wondered if she had anything to salve a spider’s bite, and what sort of spiders a priest carried with him into an ambush.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, proud of herself that the question came out sounding like matter of planning and not a cry of despair.
“We do what we have to,” Dawson said. “We win. There are forces on our side. Allies. We have to gather them and defend ourselves. We have to find Aster.”
“Find him? He’s lost?”
“He is. Once it was done, we were going to throw down our blades right there and surrender to him, but…”
“But now the palaces are thick with violence, and the prince, who was in the middle of it all, is missing,” Clara said. “God. Dawson, how could you have done this?”
“It’s my duty. And however badly it’s played out, the risk was worth taking,” he said, his expression closing. He shifted to the edge of the table and let himself down. “I’ll want something to wrap this with. And a fresh shirt.”
“Stay here,” Clara said. “I’ll bring them.”
She walked through her own house like it was an unknown country. The papered walls, the glowing oil lamps, the rich tapestries that hung from the walls. All of it had taken on the too-sharp sense of something from dreams. The servants were gone, and with no one to help her, she chose two shirts from Dawson’s wardrobe. One was pale yellow to shred and use as bandages. The other was a dark blue that neared black so that when the wounds wept, the blood wouldn’t show so clearly. Outside the bedroom window, she saw three men she knew—the cook’s boy, the footman with the unfortunate ears, and the farrier’s assistant. They stood clumped together like birds in the cold despite the warm night air. They held blades and hammers, pretending with their postures to know the use of them. Clara closed the shutter before she walked away.
Jorey was in the kitchen when she returned to it. His hair was in disarray, the leathers he’d worn to war hung halflaced from his shoulders. He’d started to affect a beard, but it was still only stubble; a shadow across his cheeks no light dispelled. As she stepped in, her son looked up at her. The distance in his eyes was terrible to see.
“Help me bind him up,” Clara said, forcing a smile into the words. “Your father’s a dear man and always has been, but I won’t have him leaking on the floors.”
Dawson chuckled if Jorey didn’t. They stood at the wide table and tore the pale shirt into strips, the cloth parting under her fingers, threads ripping apart.
“Bannien’s got the most men,” Dawson said, carrying on a conversation they’d already begun, “but his estate’s not defensible. Too open, too many low hedges a man could vault. Klin’s isn’t as good as Mastellin’s, but until we know how word of this leaked, we can’t trust the men I’ve trusted.”
“But you can trust Klin?”
“He wouldn’t take Palliako’s side if he was on fire and Geder had the only water in the world. Strange as it is, Klin’s the only man I feel certain I can rely on now.”