“Fuck,” she said.
Vincen slid down to sit, his back against the wall. His eyes were alight. “You are the most amazing creature in the world.”
“I know I’m being silly, but knowing doesn’t help.”
“That’s what makes you amazing,” Vincen said. His voice was warm and soft, and there was laughter in it, but not at her. She balled the silk in her fists and tugged at it. And then she laughed too.
“This is trivial, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “How you look to them is important… and not even that. You could come before the court dressed as a swordsman or a beggar and not be ill at ease if you’d chosen it. It’s not being able to control what they see of you that leaves you feeling at sea. I understand it. I do.”
She felt her own smile growing to match his. “Then why are you laughing?”
“Because you will be more beautiful now than any of them, and more so by standing out proud. I’ll go fetch you new powders, and Sabiha will have gowns from before she had the baby that we can use until the tailors come.”
“I can’t wear those,” Clara said. “They’re cut for a girl half my age.”
“Then you can go naked and be even prettier,” Vincen said.
“Oh,” Clara said. “Now you’re only trying to distract me.”
“I am alone with you for the first time since we left Porte Oliva,” Vincen said. “I’m surprised I can still use words.”
She shifted, pulling her legs out straight before her, sitting across from him like they were two children exhausted from too much play. Vincen’s skin was sun-darkened as well, his hair longer than he usually wore it and shaggy and light. With all the time they had traveled in company, it had become easy to gloss over him. To think Yes, Vincen is here and take comfort in his presence and move on. She had managed somehow to forget that he was beautiful. And if he was, then perhaps she might be as well, in her own way. She reached out, touching the sole of his left foot with the toes of her own.
For a long moment, she didn’t speak. And then she did. “I love you, Vincen. You make everything in this mutilated world a bit better.”
“Only when I’m with you,” he said. “When you’re gone, I sulk.”
“Come over here,” she said, and he did.
Later, she sent a Dartinae girl out to the perfumers for new powders and appealed to Sabiha for aid with gowns. Between the constraints of color and size, the options were few. Clara chose a pale-green ensemble with a fairly conservative cut, though it was more daring than she would have affected on her own. When the time came to go out for the evening and make her return to court known, Vincen was among the guards and footmen, standing a little apart. His hair was combed and freshly trimmed. His borrowed uniform had bright glass buttons down the sides for decoration. She didn’t stare, but she appreciated. When he saw that he’d caught her attention, he made the faintest bow and a smirk that matched it. The boy was taking entirely too much joy in teasing her. Someone would notice. She couldn’t find it in her to chide him.
The affair was only in the middle of the scale of court events. Lady Emming had opened her garden, which meant that Clara hadn’t needed a specific invitation. There was neither music nor a dance, which signaled what sort of guest was expected, and no one was so forward as to barge in where they were unwelcome. In her absence, the style of court had shifted to the positively macabre. Cerrina Mikillien was actually wearing a cloak decorated with rabbit skulls, but she was only the most extreme of a larger trend. Clara in her new-leaf-green gown and glowing skin became a fashion of one and as difficult to overlook as a rose on snow. When asked, Clara admitted she had spent some time in the company of the army. When the questioning grew too specific, she mentioned Dawson and got teary and her interrogators were forced to leave the issue aside.
There was, after all, gossip enough to go around. Geder Palliako, it seemed, had all but retired from courtly life. He’d gone off on some little campaign to Asterilhold at the beginning of the winter. Another apostate, another splinter cult, another small slaughter of the sort the spiders engendered. Some ascribed his withdrawal after returning from it to the rise of the Timzinae in Elassae. Others to the slaughter of the hostage children. The general wisdom was that he was in council with Basrahip, planning the brilliant endgame for the nations-wide war he’d begun.
Clara left not quite as early as form permitted, but nearly so. The other women of the court—and with as many armies as still were in the field, it was a court overwhelmingly of women—would spread word of her arrival and outlandish appearance before morning, she was sure. Well, it was awkward, but it would give her a new opportunity to find which members of the court were her allies now. And she was mother of the brilliant Lord Marshal who’d swooped in from the west to parry Elassae’s blow. That was some protection. At worst, she expected to be called eccentric. If Jorey hadn’t enjoyed his current grace, the word would have been cracked. A bit of drama, a few uncomfortable probings by women of equal dignity, a few people laughing down their sleeves at her. A minor scandal at worst. A small loss, and easily born.
She was mistaken.
Hornet, the actor friend of Cithrin bel Sarcour and Master Kit, arrived in the morning dressed as a courier. She met him in the withdrawing room that overlooked the garden. Sabiha was resting in the shade, nursing her daughter, while Lady Skestinin chided the gardeners. Vincen stood discreet guard in the hall to keep them from being overheard. Hornet stood at attention, playing his role to the hilt. He seemed to be enjoying himself in it.
“Cithrin bel Sarcour is in Camnipol?” Clara said. “With Lehrer Palliako?
“Yes, Lady Kalliam.”
“Has she lost her mind?”
“No, m’lady. I’ve traveled with her a fair bit, and she’s always like this,” Hornet said. “Yardem Hane’s come as well, though he rode off south to fetch Master Kit and the captain when he heard you’d made it close.”
Clara sat on the divan, waiting for panic or outrage to overwhelm her, but they didn’t. She felt the same anxiety and bright, breathless excitement that she remembered from when she was a child steeling herself to jump into a cousin’s swimming hole from too great a height. “Has she a plan, then?”
“Yes, ma’am, and she was hoping for your help. It’s a little gathering of friends and family that needs arranging. Only it’s going to decide the fate of the world, so we’d like to get it right.”
Marcus
Karol Dannien’s army was on the road, stretched out north to south, braced for their attack. Marcus made something like fifty sword-and-bows protecting the supply wagons. Jorey sounded the approach, and their little force moved forward, approaching the vastly larger enemy’s vulnerable flank.
“Watch for it,” Marcus said under his breath. “Careful. Don’t over-commit.”
But the young Kalliam had been through the exercise enough now. The ripple in the Timzinae ranks as the order went out, the soldiers shifting to the counterattack. Jorey lifted his hand, and Marcus and the others slowed, inching toward a battle they couldn’t win.
The reinforcements from the north had been telling. Old men, sickly boys. Half a dozen women with shoulders as broad as a man’s and expressions that dared you to question their presence. These were the defenders Camnipol had to offer. The story of the vast dark empire with unstoppable armies defeating city after city, sweeping across the world like a dark tide, had been a sheet over a more prosaic story: an inexperienced war leader had overreached and left himself as vulnerable as a naked man in a dogfight. If the armies of Elassae reached Camnipol, Marcus didn’t give the city good chances. The best scenario was a sack as vicious as any he’d ever seen. The worst was Antea’s capital set on fire as an example to the next petty tyrant who thought to invade Timzinae cities.