“You’re quiet this morning,” Vicarian said. Clara smiled.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“Can I ask you something?”
Her heart began to tumble in her chest, but Vicarian’s demeanor hadn’t changed, or if it had it was only a bit embarrassed. She saw no malice in him, or no more than she ever did since the change. “If I may reserve the right not to answer, I don’t see why not,” she said, forcing a lightness she did not feel.
Vicarian nodded more to himself than to her. He rubbed his palm against his cheeks. It was a gesture he’d learned from his father, and seeing it here felt like an omen. Not a good one. “Mother, did you think no one would find out?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. She lied, and she saw in his face that he knew. But he hadn’t revealed the plot yet, had he? Surely if he’d told anyone, she’d be on her way to the gaol in chains, and Cithrin and the others beside her. The gaol or the Division. Perhaps there was something in him that was still her son, Dawson’s son. She held her breath.
“He’s my age,” Vicarian said. “Or if he’s older, not by more than a few years. And he’s a servant. A huntsman? What would Father think?”
Clara lowered her head. Bright relief ran against shame. It wasn’t the banker and the dragon he’d discovered. It was Vincen.
“I hope your father would understand,” she said. There was no point in denying it.
“Jorey has done everything he could to return the Kalliam name to dignity,” Vicarian said. “I love you, Mother. Never doubt that. But you’ll become a joke in the court. Chasing after the army was peculiar enough, but at least there was a way to tell the story that you did it from bravery and love of the throne. Spending your nights with your dead husband’s huntsman?” He shook his head. “You know this has to stop. If not for your own dignity, for Jorey’s. And Sabiha and Annalise. Can you imagine what that little girl’s life will be like if the name she took from you comes to carry the reputation for fucking the servants?”
The truth was, she hadn’t. Now that she did imagine it, she didn’t like the picture. She didn’t ask how he’d found her out. It didn’t matter.
“This has to stop,” Vicarian said, “before someone else finds out.”
“You’ve made your point.”
They were almost at the low wall and the wooden gate that led to the paths of the royal quarter. The huge priest, Basrahip, stood by the open gate, embracing another man who looked much like him. One of the original priests come from the Keshet, she supposed. She was a fool. An idiot. A randy old widow like the jokes all painted, and it had taken her monstrous son to show her how she looked through other people’s eyes.
“It has to stop,” he said again.
“I said you’ve made your point.”
He turned away with a grunt, and the carriage stopped. She heard Vincen’s horse clatter to a halt, but she couldn’t look back to him. She stepped out of the carriage, her legs unsteady beneath her. Did Lady Kalliam know? Did Sabiha? Did Jorey? And if it did stop, if she did send Vincen away as she’d always known in her heart she should, what of her would be left?
“Brother Kalliam,” the huge priest said, wrapping his arms around Vicarian’s shoulders.
“Minister Basrahip,” the thing that had been her son said, returning the embrace. “You remember my mother?”
“Of course,” Basrahip said, bowing to her. “The fearsome Lady Kalliam and the swordsman who fights at her side.”
Did he know too, then? Only, no. Basrahip and Vincen had met each other before. Had faced Feldin Maas together once in some long-vanished world. God. How had she ever thought that any part of her life could be kept safe from any other? Everything mixed. Everything bled into all that surrounded it.
“Are you well, my lady?” the priest asked.
“Fine. Or, no. I’m not. But I’ll be fine, Minister Basrahip,” she said. “I find I need to refresh myself.”
“There are no servants or guards to lead you,” he said, apology in his voice. They were all so goddamned polite. She hated that. “The Kingspire today is the temple of the goddess first. Tomorrow, it will be the seat of the empire again.”
“I believe I can find my way,” she said, and walked away briskly before anyone could stop her. She was weeping again, and bitterly. The humiliation had flanked her, and now the full edifice of her composure was crumbling. She marched toward one of the smaller buildings whose use she neither knew nor cared. She prayed that Vincen would not follow her. Or that he would. She turned and found herself in a stables. A dozen horses stood calmly in their stalls, considering her with huge, soft eyes as she sat on a wooden stool and quietly cursed.
It was his voice. It was the spiders in Vicarian’s voice. The power they held to make anything seem plausible, to seem true. He’d as much as called her a foolish old slut, and she couldn’t help but believe it. It was his curse and his magic, the venom of dragons still deadly after thousands of years.
“It isn’t true,” she said. “It isn’t true.” Except that maybe it was. Some part of her had already thought or feared to think everything he’d said. That the spiders had said it didn’t mean it wasn’t also true. In the distance, she heard voices fading in the direction of the Kingspire. She had to get up. She had to find Cithrin and the others, prepare herself for Geder’s return. She heard footsteps and wiped her eyes with her sleeve, ready to put a brave face on whatever indignity came next.
“Lady Kalliam? Are you all right?”
“Prince Aster,” she said. “I would say I’m well, but that might be overly simple.”
“I saw your son going to the tower, but no one knew where you were. I asked Basrahip, but he didn’t know. I was afraid that maybe…”
“All’s well,” she said, biting the words as she said them. “The plan is still intact.”
“It will be over soon,” Aster said, taking her hand, offering her comfort and perhaps asking some in return. “They’ll be dead and we can put it all right.”
She saw the shadow in the doorway even as the last words passed the prince’s lips. She thought for a moment it was another horse wandering loose, but of course it wasn’t.
Minister Basrahip was come to see if the prince had found her, if she was well, if there was anything he or his false goddess could offer. He stepped in among the animals as Aster finished speaking and stopped, as stunned as if he’d suffered a hammer blow. His huge eyes blinked, his mouth gaped, and then, as understanding blossomed in him, he flushed.
There could be no explaining their way free of this.
“Go,” she said, pushing Aster behind her. “Find Cithrin. Tell her.”
“But—”
“Go!” Clara shouted, and with that, Aster fled.
She stood before the priest, her hands at her sides but in fists. The priest’s gaze shifted from side to side, as though he was seeing more than only her. His jaw clenched until she could hear his teeth groan, and his voice was raw with anger. “What is this?”
It didn’t matter what she said now. There was no deceiving her way out from under it. So, then, she was ready to be damned for what she was. “There is no goddess,” Clara said, speaking each word clearly and sharply. “You have spent your life in service to a deceit.”
He roared, surging forward, and the world seemed to narrow to her body. The sounds all around her stuttered into silence, and she was on the ground, her face pressed against the hay and filth. Her cheek bled where he had struck her, but she felt it only as a rivulet of wetness, both warm and cool. In their stalls, the horses shied and kicked, frightened by the violence. She rose to her feet, but Basrahip was gone, running on tree-thick legs toward the Kingspire.
She neither thought nor hesitated, only lowered her head and ran. She was a woman, and older than the priest, but he had spent his winter sitting in a temple worshipping a lie while she’d marched through snowbound mountains, and she was half his weight. She had no doubt that she could catch him.