“My lady,” the man rumbled. Bowed almost double, he still stood as high as her shoulder. “How may I serve?”
“I’ve come to see Jorey Kalliam, if he’s available,” she said.
“Yes, my lady. And who may I say is calling?”
It was an excellent question, and one with several answers.
“His mother,” she said.
Sunlight streamed through the sitting room’s windows, and a cheerful little fire popped and muttered in the grate. The clean smells of vinegar and soap felt almost like coming home after the months in Abatha’s boarding house, and Clara let herself relax for a moment. A Firstblood servant girl brought in a cup of coffee and a crust of sweetbread. Clara nodded her gratitude and tried not to consume it all too quickly.
The person who stepped through the doorway wasn’t her son. Sabiha Kalliam, once Skestinin, wore a simple gown of pale yellow that warmed the tone of her skin. Her hair draped about her shoulder, its softness at odds with the thinness of her lips and the solidity of her gaze. Clara stood, uncertain for a moment and afraid, before the girl stepped forward and embraced her. She smelled of mint and chamomile, and the warmth of her flesh felt like walking into summer. Clara felt an anxiety she hadn’t known she carried drop away.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, and then ran out of words.
The moment passed, and the two women stepped apart and sat. Clara found herself wanting to take Sabiha’s hand, to preserve the moment of contact a little longer, but the seating arrangements didn’t allow it.
“Jorey will be along soon,” Sabiha said. “How have you been?” The hardness in her voice sounded almost like regret. Clara gestured vaguely.
“Some days are better than others. Much as one might expect, I suppose. I have taken the liberty of stopping by and seeing my grandson. They’ve named him Pindan, which is apparently some sort of family name.”
“My uncle that died,” Sabiha said. “How is he? My … How is my son?”
“He’s a boy,” Clara said, chuckling. “He eats his own weight when he isn’t fasting, gets everywhere he ought not be, and thinks it hilarious to smear mud on people’s legs.”
Sabiha’s cheeks flushed and she nodded. For a man of the court, an illegitimate child might be an annoyance or even an opportunity to boast. Lords had been known to take their bastards as squires or put them into the more lucrative sorts of trade. It was one of many little asymmetries between the sexes.
“And you?” Clara asked. “I haven’t seen you since you left for the season.”
Sabiha lifted her eyebrows and looked down.
“Jorey thought it important that we attend the hunt,” she said. “My father agreed. It was … I don’t know. It was long, tiring, humiliating, and hard. Jorey does what he can to take the worst of it on himself, but it wore on him. He didn’t sleep well, and I don’t know whether the feasts we weren’t welcome to chafed more than the ones he attended.”
“Poor boy,” Clara said, fitting a river of melancholy into the two words. Jorey was her youngest son, and in some ways the one of her children the world had been cruelest with. Vicarian was safely in the church. Barriath, before he left, had been in battles, but only at sea and never particularly vicious ones at that. Jorey had helped to slaughter a city, and the ghosts of it walked behind him. The guilt had driven him to marry Sabiha in hopes of cleansing her name, and instead of raising her up, he had made her position in the court less tenable. Clara thought her son’s spine was made of pure enough metal to stand the strain. She hoped so.
“Some days were better,” Sabiha said.
“And you?” Clara asked, drawing her pipe from her pouch and filling the bowl with a pinch of cheap tobacco. “God alone knows this can’t have been easy for you either.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” Sabiha said, her smile thin and oddly cruel. She took a twig from the fire and offered Clara the ember for her pipe. “I’m used to people pointing at me and whispering down their sleeves. I suppose I’m glad it’s not my past their amusing themselves with. It hasn’t left me with a deeper love of the court in general, though.”
“I imagine not,” Clara said, and drew the smoke into her lungs.
The pause was not entirely comfortable. Sabiha moved her head in one direction and then the other, testing out words without speaking them. Clara waited, knowing well how such things took their own time. The young woman’s hands relaxed just before she spoke.
“I don’t know how to help him.”
“Mother!” Jorey said, pushing through the door. His smile looked almost genuine. Clara rose into his arms. Regret that he hadn’t waited just a few minutes more was washed away by the scent of his hair and the strength in his arms around her. Her little boy had grown to a man, but she would always see him as infant sitting up by himself for the first time, an expression of wordless triumph on his dough-soft face. Holding him, she was neither the widow of a traitor she had been nor the half-formed woman she was becoming, but only the mother of her child. It was enough.
The moment passed and he pulled away.
“It’s good to see you again,” he said.
“And also you, dear,” Clara said. “Sabiha’s been telling me that the hunt was as much a masculine bore as ever, and I was acting as though I missed it.”
“I didn’t think you ever went,” Jorey said, sitting at his wife’s side. Clara took her own seat, gesturing with her pipe.
“It seemed polite to pretend,” she said. Jorey laughed, and Sabiha looked for a moment surprised before she smiled herself. “I’m sorry to say that I’ve come begging.”
“Of course,” Jorey said. “I’m sorry we didn’t leave you better provisioned. But—”
“I have been quite content with what I’ve had,” Clara said. And then, with a bit of effort to keep her tone light, “One of your father’s huntsmen has taken me a bit under his wing. Vincen Coe.”
“Father’s private man?” Jorey said. “The one who always went with him when he was intriguing against Feldin Maas?”
“Yes, him,” Clara said, silently regretting having mentioned him. Only she didn’t want it to seem as if she’d been hiding him if Jorey found out through some other channel, and now that he was back home it was so much more likely that he would, and damn it if she didn’t feel the beginning of a blush rising in her cheeks. “His cousin has a boarding house, and she’s been kind enough to give me a very pleasant room. Not the best neighborhood, but what is, these days?”
She pretended to catch an ember in her throat, coughing to explain the redness of her face. It wasn’t the first time she’d used the subterfuge, though the last time had certainly been a decade or more ago. Jorey called for a servant girl to bring a cup of water, and by the time Clara had drunk it down, she had her composure again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, seeming to apologize for the coughing fit but meaning something more diffuse.
“Are you feeling better?” Jorey asked, and she wasn’t certain what he meant by the question. She answered the simplest option.
“Yes, dear. Just breathed in something I oughtn’t.”
“I was hoping to see you,” Jorey said. “I’m looking at ways to bring the family back into favor.”
“I can’t imagine that will be easy.”
Jorey held up a hand, asking her to hear him out.
“Geder came to me,” he said. “He … apologized to me, in a way. I think despite everything he’d open to rehabilitating me within the court.”
“And would you be open to that?” Clara said, more tartly than she’d intended.
“If he’ll have me,” Jorey said. Sabiha took his hand as if she were comforting a child, but he took no notice. His voice had the light cadence of conversation, but his gaze grew distant. “Geder is Lord Regent. He’s the nearest thing we’ll have to a king until Aster comes of age, and that’s years from now. We’ve lost the holding and the mansions. Barriath’s gone. I’m living on the sufferance of my wife and her father, and you’re in a boarding house, living off the scraps from that. Geder doesn’t associate me with what Father did, even if everyone else does. He can put me in position to win a name back.”