Sham smiled slyly and said, “I think it will contrast nicely with the more daring gowns that have become the style recently, don’t you?”
Sham might have gotten a decent amount of sleep, but it required only a glance at the Reeve’s face when he welcomed her to the state dining area to tell her that he’d managed far less.
He brought her hand to his mouth and greeted her with the solemnness required on such an occasion. Someone had finished the new wheeled chair, though they hadn’t had enough time to stain it or cover the wheels with leather to provide traction—instead the metal had been crudely scored.
“Your timing is impeccable,” Kerim commented as she sat in the cushioned chair next to him. “You missed the vultures gathering for the bones.”
Sham nodded gracefully. “I have found timing to be an extremely useful skill in my work.”
His mouth quirked upward in something not quite a smile, “I expect you have.”
The time for personal conversation ended as Lady Tirra took up her post on Kerim’s other side. Her skin was too dark to be truly pale, and her features were composed, but she looked ten years older. Sham sat quietly in her seat, feeling no desire to antagonize the matriarch in her grief.
Around the room the buzz of gossip was loud enough to be deafening, but at the high table silence reigned.
At last, the High Priest stood before Kerim’s table, facing the rest of the room. When the roar died to a sullen murmur, he began to speak.
“High Ones, we come here to mourn the passing of a bright star. He leaves us one less light to steer by, and we are bereaved by his falling. Tonight we will witness the last, faint reflection of his light as his mortal form is reduced to ashes. Let us remember the illumination he brought to our dark world. Let us remember the untimely method by which he was stolen.”
Beside her, Kerim stiffened and muttered something nasty. Sham touched her rouged lips lightly in thought—this was not the speech he and his counselors had prepared.
“This is a dark and troubled time,” continued the High Priest, playing the crowd. “Lord Ven’s life is not the first of our brethren to be so rudely extinguished, yet they go unavenged and the killer still stalks among us.”
In tones that carried no further than Shamera’s ear, Kerim muttered, “If he keeps this up, we’ll have a riot, and my brother’s will not be the only body on the pyre.”
It was his grim tone that made Sham glance around the room and see the emotions that were rapidly increasing: flames of terror and outrage, fanned by the High Priest’s speech.
Sham did the first thing that came to mind. Though never formally taught, there were a few cantrips that every apprentice learned from an older one: simple tricks like making milk go sour, they didn’t require much magic, which was good as she was still tired from her earlier battles.
“... someone or something killing—” the High Priest’s eyes began to water and the beautifully trained voice faltered as Sham’s cantrip took effect.
He cleared his throat and began again, “Killing ...”
She added more power to the spell.
The High Priest began to cough. A brown-robed man ran up to him with a goblet of water. It seemed to help until the High Priest attempted to speak again.
Kerim frowned and glanced at Sham. Whatever he saw in her face made him relax slightly; he folded his hands loosely and rested them on the table.
When it was apparent the High Priest would not be able to complete his speech, the High Priest’s slender assistant, Fykall, took his place, head bowed as if with heavy mourning.
“High ones,” he began, “—we share our sorrow, and yet we must glory for him who has gone before us as so many others have done. It is the best part of being mortal that we may throw off the robes of this life for the next.” He too, diverted from the approved text, but even Sham, inexperienced as she was with demagoguery, saw it was necessary to control the people first.
The little priest raised his head and surveyed the crowd. Shamera could almost hear the High Priest grit his teeth as the Fykall continued. “This night we must put our fears aside; only by doing so can we properly mourn and celebrate the passing of Lord Ven. We are aided by the trust we hold for the wisdom of a man who has served Altis so well in the past. As the Prophet has spoken: What need we fear when the Leopard is on the field? Altis calls, and Lord Kerim answers with a roar to match victory out of the gaping maw of defeat. Let the murdering jackals howl as they will, when the battle is over, the Leopard of Altis will stand alone on the field of his enemies.”
Right now the Leopard of Altis was muttering under his breath about firepits and cooking pots, noted Sham with well-hidden amusement. He straightened, though, when the priest’s words were met with a roar of approval. As the people quieted the priest took a step back and to the side, clearly leaving the floor to Kerim.
The Reeve rolled his chair back slightly and used the table to lever himself to his feet; at this there was a second cheer.
“My brother has been taken from me,” he said, when the noise had quieted in a voice as carrying as the priests’ had been. He spoke slowly, so he could be heard by every person in the room, “I will find the one who has done this and force them to suffer justice if I must take him to the very throne of Altis myself to see it done.” He could not have said another word if he had wanted to, such was the response he won.
The priest’s blessing on the food was decidedly anticlimactic.
Sham waited until most of the room had turned their attention from the Reeve to their plates before saying softly, “Fykall did a good job of calming the waves.”
Kerim growled, but when he spoke it was equally soft. “I have worked to pull away from Altis’s priests since I became Reeve; some of the people have embraced Him, but none of the Southwood nobles. If they think I’ve become a puppet of the priests, they’ll run back to their estates and stay there until they rot. In one speech, Fykall ruined a decade’s work. I’ll be lucky if a third of the Southwood nobles I’ve managed to coax into Court are here tomorrow.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” replied Sham, remembering Lord Halvok’s pleasure at discovering that the Reeve’s mistress was a Southwood native. “I suspect the need to believe you can help them will outweigh their distrust. You bring them hope: it will take more than a single speech to destroy it.”
He didn’t look reassured.
“In any case—” she said, taking a bite of fish, “—that boat has left the docks, and the tides will see its journey’s end.”
At dusk, Lord Ven’s body was lifted to the pyre and his soul given to Altis in an elaborate ceremony presided over by the High Priest. Kerim touched a torch to the base of the pyre, stepping back as the oil-soaked wood began eagerly to burn.
Long before the flames died down, most of the court retired, to leave only Lord Ven’s family to mourn him. Lady Sky would have been there, but she had taken the news of her betrothed’s death badly. The castle healer had confined her to bed for fear that she would lose her child. Sham waited until everyone else was gone before leaving the Reeve and his mother staring silently at the orange flames.
Early the next morning, Sham opened her trunk and took out her dagger. It was a moment’s work to pull the itching stitches out of her wounds and toss the pieces of thread into the fire.
She put her second-best working clothes on again. The baggy breeches and the black cotton shirt, patched roughly on the left sleeve where she had once caught her arm on a wooden casement, would serve her better than any of her dresses and she wouldn’t have to keep the illusion over the cut on her arm.
She caught up a candle and lit it with a breath of magic before pulling the tapestry aside and peering into Kerim’s room. With no reason to maintain the fire or to light candles and the sun on the wrong side of the sky to light Kerim’s windows, the room was hidden in shadows. Sham’s instincts told her there was no one in the room.