“If this is how you greet your poor mother, I should have fostered you both with wolves,” she said.
Her boys both grinned and came to embrace her. They were men now, strong-armed and smelling of musk and hair oil. It seemed like only the week before that she’d been able to take them in her arms. Then they started in again, talking over each other, only now the melee of words seemed to center on her and why she was there rather than the politics of the court. Clara beamed at them both and stepped down into the lush green and pale blooms of the summer garden. The fountain, at least, had been maintained, water splashing down the front of a contemplative if underdressed cast bronze Cinnae woman. Clara sat at the fountain’s lip and began pulling off her traveling jacket.
“Your father, poor thing, is gnawing his foot off back at home, and as a favor to him and myself, I have come to keep up some semblance of normalcy. This idiotic bickering has cost me the better part of the season already, and I simply must see dear Phelia.”
Jorey leaned against an ivied wall. Arms crossed and scowling, he looked like the image of his father. Barriath sat beside her and laughed.
“I have missed you. No other woman would call the first armed conflict on the streets of Camnipol in five generations idiotic bickering,” he said.
“I am just as sorry as anyone about what happened to dear Lord Faskellin,” Clara said, sharply. “But I defy you to call it anything besides idiotic.”
“Peace, Mother, peace,” Barriath said. “You’re quite right, of course. It’s only that no one else puts it that way.”
“Well, I can’t think why they don’t,” Clara said.
“Does Father know you’re going to call on Maas?” Jorey asked.
“He does, and before you start, I am to be guarded the whole time, so please don’t bother with the monster stories of Lord Maas and all the terrible thing he’s like to do to me.”
Her two boys looked at one another.
“Mother,” Jorey began, and she cut him off with a wave of her hand. She turned pointedly to her eldest son.
“I assume you’ve taken leave from the fleet, Barriath dear. How is poor Lord Skestinin and that painted shrew he had the poor judgment to marry?”
The streets of the city were full and busy. Carriage wheels clattered over the cobblestones. In the market, butchers sold meat and bakers, bread. Petty criminals scooped shit out of the alleys and off the pavement, guarded by swordsmen wearing the king’s colors if not precisely his livery. The cherry trees that lined the streets sported green fruit with real threats of red. Workmen hung out over the Division, repairing and maintaining the very bridges from which they were suspended. She had not thought it possible that a city could look as it had in better times, sound as it had, smell as it had, and still be bent double under the weight of fear. She had been wrong.
It showed in small things. Merchants too quick to laugh, altercations over precedence and right of way, and the stony expression common to everyone in the city when they thought no one was watching. Even the horses smelled something, their huge, liquid eyes a fraction too wide and their gait just barely skittish.
She’d chosen to take a sedan chair open on the sides with four bearers and Vincen Coe walking beside it. Something had happened to the poor man’s eye just before they’d left Osterling Fells, and the bruise had started to seep yellow and green down his cheek. He wore boiled leather studded with steel and both sword and dagger. It was more than a huntsman would sport, and with the recent injury, he looked quite thuggish.
The mansion of Feldin Maas shared a private courtyard with House Issandrian. Both gates were of the same gaudy ironwork, the houses themselves painted and adorned in such rich profusion they seemed designed by a cake maker gone mad. Curtin Issandrian, of course, was exiled just as her Dawson was, and he had taken all his family and servants with him. Her uncle Mylus had suffered a blow to the head when he was young and spent his life with half his face slack and empty. The square reminded Clara of him, all bustle and action on the left and empty as death on the right.
Phelia stood at the top of the front steps. Her dress was purple velvet with silver thread all along the sleeves and collar. It should have been beautiful on her. Clara gave her shawl to the footman and went up to Phelia. Her cousin took her hands and smiled tightly.
“Oh, Clara,” Phelia said. “I can’t say how much I’ve missed you. This has been the most awful year. Please, come in.”
Clara nodded to the door slave. It wasn’t the Dartinae woman she was used to seeing, but a severe-looking Jasuru man. He didn’t nod back. She stepped into the relative cool of the Maas front hall.
“Hey! Stop, you!”
Clara turned, surprised to be addressed in so curt a fashion, only to see that the comment had been directed at Vincen Coe. The Jasuru man was on his feet, his palm against Vincen’s chest. The huntsman had gone unnaturally still.
“He’s with me,” Clara said.
“No one goes in armed,” the door slave growled.
“You can wait here, Vincen.”
“All respect, my lady,” the huntsman said, his gaze still fastened to the Jasuru, “but no.”
Clara put a hand to her cheek. Phelia had gone pale, her hands flitting one way and another like birds.
“Leave your blades, then,” Clara said. And then to her cousin, “I assume we can rely on the rules of hospitality?”
“Of course,” Phelia said. “Yes, of course. Of course you can.”
Vincen Coe stood silent for a moment. Clara had to agree that Phelia would have been more convincing if she hadn’t said it three times over. Vincen’s hands went to his belt, undid the clasp, and handed it with sword and dagger still sheathed to the door slave. The Jasuru took it and nodded him through.
“I believe you’ve lost weight since I saw you last,” Clara said, walking at Phelia’s side. “Are you feeling well?”
Her answering smile was so brittle it cracked at the sides.
“It’s been so hard. Ever since the king sent away Curtin and Alan—and you, of course. Ever since then, it’s all been so hard. Feldin hardly sleeps anymore. I wish all this had never happened.”
“Men,” Clara said, patting Phelia’s arm. The woman shied away, and then, as if realizing she ought not, permitted the touch with a nod. “Dawson’s been beside himself. Really, you’d think the world was ending from the way he chews at every scrap of gossip.”
“I love the king and God knows I’m loyal to the throne,” Phelia said, “but Simeon’s handled this all so badly, hasn’t he? A brawl goes out of hand, and he sends people into exile? It only makes everyone feel there’s something terrible happening. There doesn’t have to be.”
She turned up a wide flight of well-polished black stairs. Clara followed her. From the end of the hall they were leaving, Clara heard men’s voices raised in argument but couldn’t make out the words. One of the voices was Feldin Maas, but while the other seemed familiar, she couldn’t put a name to it. She caught Vincen Coe’s eye and nodded him down the hall.
Go find what you can.
He shook his head once. No.
Clara lifted her eyebrows, but by then they’d reached the landing. Phelia ushered them into the wide sitting room.
“You can wait here,” Clara said at the doorway.
“If you wish, my lady,” Vincen Coe said, and turned to stand with his back to the wall like a guard at his duty and didn’t show the vaguest hint of going back down the stairs to investigate. It was all quite vexing.
The sitting room had been redone in shades of red and gold since the last time Clara had seen it, but it still had the low divan by the window that she preferred. And, like a good hostess, Phelia had a pipe prepared for her. Clara plucked up the bone and hardwood bowl and tamped a bit of tobacco into it.