“You are sure the Codian Priests have a temple at Camp Town this year?” Cyril asked, for it was a point to which he often returned.
“Absolutely your Grace, I have confirmed it time and again with the Shugak. They have raised an entire pyramid, of wood of course and not stone, and are operating it as a sort of hospice.” Pagette turned to Towsan. “It will be the most distinctive structure in Camp Town, I expect, for the Jobians put up a far better class of building than the Shugak, gods know. Not the sort of thing every breeze threatens to topple.”
Cyril was quiet for a time and Towsan gave his Duke the silence to think. Pagette waited on tenterhooks, not bothering to conceal his eagerness. The man was a native Chengdean and while no more of his Duke’s plan had been explained to him than was absolutely necessary, he did possess the sort of brain that would have figured it all out by now. Pagette surely understood that the fate of the Duchy could well be in the balance, though Towsan suspected that the light in his eyes had still more to do with the substantial payment he had been promised than with any sense of local patriotism.
Cyril finally sighed. “Where is this pretty assassin now?”
“The Stars and Stones on the docks,” Pagette said. “She and her man took two rooms as it is the only inn not stuffed to the rafters with refugees. Not at the pretty penny the owner is still charging.”
“That innkeeper has no soul,” Towsan muttered. Pagette shrugged.
“But he has stacks and stacks of silver. Many are the men who will make that trade.”
“Arrange a meeting, Pagette,” Cyril said. “Let us say, in three hours.”
The man bowed deeply, still smiling, and was quickly out the door and gone. Cyril made no move to leave the room right away so Towsan waited beside him.
“I should bring Claudja,” the Duke said. “She has a good eye for people.”
“She always did, your Grace.”
Cyril looked at his oldest vassal and opened his mouth as though to apologize, which would have been a mortification for Towsan. Instead the Duke only reached out and squeezed the knight’s narrow shoulder with a strong hand. Towsan lowered his eyes.
Cyril looked out the open door at the sky above the courtyard walls, somber blues and purples starting to play across the undersides of clouds.
“Sunset,” Cyril said. “I know where she will be. Would you like to come, Gideon?”
“Not tonight, your Grace.”
Cyril nodded, and clapped Towsan’s shoulder. The Duke turned and left, and after a moment the old knight reached up to the hanging lantern and flicked open the tiny door. He licked a thumb and finger and snuffed out the light, then stood alone in the darkening room until his face was set and expressionless, before striding out himself.
Cyril went back into the main citadel but moved widely around the throne room through side passages typically only used by servants. He passed several of the familiar household staff who stepped aside and nodded rather than bowed. The Duke had never been comfortable with a great deal of formality when no one else was around.
He wound through a closed kitchen and at one point had to take a staircase up to the ducal apartments, and then another one back down. He was bound for a detached courtyard on the same level as the main upper yard, but which was accessible only from above.
As Cyril stepped back outside he was chilled by a northern breeze he had not felt in the enclosed courtyard within the citadel. This yard was far smaller, just a wide L-shaped walkway jutting from the northeast corner above a sheer cliff, which made defensive works redundant. Instead there was only a low stone wall enclosing an area of paving stones interrupted by regular squares of bare dirt, a few sprouting saplings but most of which were beds that would wait until spring before flowering.
The view was among the best in the castle above the city, for none of Chengdea itself could actually be seen. From here the citadel seemed to float in the sky high above checkerboard farm fields stretching east and the Black River flowing in from the north, with the tangled murk of the Vod Wilds to the west safely across the wide water. The spot was particularly beautiful at sunset but Cyril scarcely noticed the gorgeous sky, for his daughter was sitting on a stone bench and to him she was the most beautiful thing in the world. He had a case to make.
Claudja Perforce, Duchess of Chengdea, had inherited her mother’s looks along with her title. Her features were fine, actually exquisite, with a delicate nose and mouth that only seemed a trifle small for the largeness of her steel gray eyes. She had Jasmine’s pale skin, wholly without blemish, but from Cyril and the Balabushevych’s once of Orstaf she had dark, slashing eyebrows and a mass of brown hair tumbling about narrow shoulders for her frame was slight. She was dressed as she had been for three months all in the black of mourning, plain dress, coat, and a scarf. She sat on the edge of the bench with her spine as straight as a ramrod, and before her was a square gap in the pavement from which no flowers would ever grow again, for it was the grassy mound of a grave. The name on the stone marker said only Sir Lucas but it was inscribed beneath the carved coat of arms of the Towsan family. The Knight-Baron’s holdings were on Chengdea’s eastern edge, and it was there that the Towsans had rested for five hundred years. It was there that someday Sir Gideon’s bones would lie, and later those of his elder two sons. But the old knight had acceded to the Duchess Claudja’s gentle wish that the youngest of the family would lie here, on the spot where Lucas had proposed marriage, and Claudja had accepted.
Seeing her, Claudja’s father felt like an intruder. Her small size did not add to Cyril’s grudging awareness that his only child was a young woman now of twenty-four years, and that the things weighing on her were grown-up matters. Not the kinds of things that a father’s hug could ever banish. He could still tell her now that everything would be fine but since Jasmine’s death neither of them could believe that as they might have, once. Now with Lucas gone, the fine young man who Claudja had looked at from the beginning in the same way Jasmine had come to look at Cyril in time, the father feared that their daughter might never come to feel that way again.
Claudja had heard the door and she turned to look up at her father. The light of dusk was gentle on her face. She smiled faintly with her mouth but not her eyes, and there was no joy in it. Cyril walked toward her slowly, setting his heavy feet softly for every scuff seemed an interruption of his daughter’s private grief. Claudja rose and with a last look back turned away from the cold headstone. She met Cyril halfway and her dry eyes narrowed as she looked at his face.
“Some news?” she asked.
“Pagette,” Cyril said, and found he had to clear his throat.
Claudja lifted her chin, for her father was much taller.
“Has he found someone?” she snapped, suddenly all business.
“Perhaps,” Cyril said without enthusiasm. “There is a Miilarkian taking passage shortly. A young woman Guilder.”
“ Wahine Guild awarhe?” Claudja said, for she spoke the Trade Tongue with full fluency as befitted the female head of a noble Daulic household. Cyril’s command of that language was spotty, though he had gotten her drift.
“That is what Pagette thinks.”
Claudja looked somewhere into the breeze and she blinked once or twice though her gaze remained steely. Her mother had looked just the same when she was thinking, and it had never taken either of them very long to get where their mind was going.
“That’s perfect,” Claudja said. “When may I meet her?”
“We may head down into the city at any time.”
Claudja nodded crisply and turned for the stairs back up to the apartments. Cyril looked and then called after her, and she turned.