“It doesn’t matter what I want, Mother. It’s what I worked for, and it’s what I have to do,” he said. “Can you understand that?”
In the doorway, Vincen Coe stood with his eyes downcast, his expression empty. The nights of sleeping in his arms were over. The mornings waking up beside him. In Lord Skestinin’s house, there would be no more walking arm in arm. He would call her my lady again, and not Clara. The injustice of it was exquisite.
It’s what I worked for, and it’s what I have to do. She had raised him in her image after all.
“I understand,” Clara said. “Let me gather my things.”
Lord Skestinin’s manor had been closed for the winter, and setting a house in order wasn’t a simple task. When Clara stepped down from the carriage, she could already hear the voices leaking out to the street. Inside, the dining room was still draped in dustcloth, and the pale halls were damp from having only just been scrubbed. Three maids were turning down her new room for her. A widow’s room with beautiful view of the winter-dead gardens and a narrow bed. She sat on it as she might have on the creaking frame that she’d become used to. The mattress was so soft, she felt as though she were sinking into it. As if it were devouring her.
“Will there be anything else, my lady?”
Vincen stood in the doorway, and his face looked grey as stone. His hair was pulled back and he stood stiff and straight. He would have rooms in the servants’ quarters now. A bunk and maybe a small stove. A box for his things. I didn’t choose this, she thought. Forgive me.
“Not at the moment, Vincen,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Always, my lady,” he said, and the tone in his voice made one of the maids look up in surprise. So not even that much was permitted. Clara watched him walk away. She waited for the space of two breaths, then rose, pretended to brush dust from her skirts, and strode out to the corridor as if she owned the house and everything in it. Vincen was walking slowly, his hands clasped behind him.
“Coe?” she said. “Might I have a word with you?”
He turned as if stung and stood there silently. She raised her eyebrows.
“C-certainly,” he said.
“Excellent. This way, please.”
She walked toward the gardens, but instead of opening the iron and glass gate that led into the yard, she turned left into the gardener’s alcove. As she’d suspected, it was empty.
“Close the door, please,” she said.
“My lady …”
“Stop that, Vincen. Stop it now.”
He hesitated. There was fury in his eyes.
“Clara,” he said.
“Much better. Now close the door.”
“It will ruin you,” he said. “I will ruin you. When you were disgraced, it was different. You were like us. But you’re rising again, and if we’re—” He stopped, and began again, his voice hushed. “If we’re seen alone together, it will destroy you.”
“I have been destroyed,” she said. “It didn’t kill me.”
“It will hurt your sons. Your daughters. Your standing in court. I won’t risk you. I can’t do that.”
“Do you really think I would be the first woman in court to have an affair?”
Vincen closed. She saw it happen.
“I’m sure many women in places of power have had affairs with servants,” he said. And there it was. The gulf she could not cross. He was a servant again, and she was a woman of standing.
“You said you would follow me anywhere,” she said. “Perhaps you meant anywhere but back.”
“I will go find my quarters, m’lady. With your permission.”
She stepped over to him, reached past him, and pushed the door closed. His mouth was hard and unresponsive at first. But only at first.
“I have not changed,” she said. “I am the same woman I was this morning. It’s only circumstances.”
“I know, Clara,” he said. “And I’m the same man. It’s just … it’s just that I’m having a terrible day.”
“I am too. But it won’t be the last day there is.”
He kissed her again, and there was a real hunger in it this time. She put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close. They stood there for a long moment and then stepped back from each other.
“Find your rooms,” she said, “and then explore this house from the basement to the roof. Know it as well as you would a hunting grounds. Learn everyone’s name and their place and, as best you can, their schedules. I will do the same. I don’t know how we can make this work, but we will.”
“And your letters to Carse?”
“Those too,” she said. “Though it seems I won’t be trying to alienate Geder from his new Lord Marshal. Which is a pity as it went so well last time.”
A distant voice caught her. A man’s voice calling Mother!
“Vicarian’s come,” she said, opening the door again and pushing Vincen out before her. “Go. Now. I will find you later tonight.”
She listened to Vincen’s footsteps fade and turned to look at the ghostly reflection of herself in the windows of the gate. The woman who looked back seemed almost unfamiliar. She smoothed her hair.
“Well, then,” she said, and the woman in the glass looked back at her with a gentle smirk. She turned back to the main part of the house, slipping again into the guise of noblewoman and baroness, and followed her boy’s voice to the main part of the house. She found Jorey and Vicarian standing in the front hall grinning at each other. Vicarian’s robes were the brown of the spider priests, and his face looked thinner than when she’d seen him last, but also oddly bright. She had the sense that if she touched him, he would feel fevered.
“Mother,” Vicarian said, catching sight of her.
“No, stay there,” she said. “Let me look at you.”
Vicarian laughed and took a pose. The initiation hadn’t changed him so much, then. She came forward and embraced him, and there was no strange heat, no sense that he had changed. It felt good having her boy back in her arms. Two of her boys.
“So,” she said. “You’ve studied the cult of the spider goddess. Has she made you pious at last?”
“You know,” Vicarian said, taking her arms in a way uncomfortably similar to Vincen, “I think it actually may have.”
He led Clara down the corridor toward the drawing room. The servants scurried around them like mice.
“A pious priest,” Jorey said. “That’s a miracle to begin with.”
“No,” Vicarian said, his voice becoming serious. “No, really. There was nothing I learned in any of the studying I did before this that compares. The goddess isn’t just a set of stories we’ve gathered up and decided to guide our lives by. She’s real.”
“I would have said thinking God was real was obligatory for a priest,” Clara said, stepping into the room. The dust covers had been removed and a fire set in the grate. Vicarian shook his head.
“You would, wouldn’t you? But the seminary isn’t like that. We talk and we read and we pray, but it’s corrupt. It’s all empty and corrupt, because you only have to say that you believe. With the goddess, it’s not like that at all. It’s … hard sometimes. But she opened the world for me.”
Clara smiled and nodded.
I’ve lost him too, she thought.
Geder
Until he was set to travel across Elassae with three hundred sword-and-bows as his personal guard, Geder hadn’t understood how exhausted his men had become. They pulled themselves up in the morning, thin-faced and ash-skinned. They broke down camp, loaded the carts, and moved across the fields and hills where no dragon’s road led. Even the mounted men seemed to sag down in the saddles. They looked to Geder like the spirits of the dead that were supposed to ride with his armies. The short days and cold weather meant stopping to make camp when it hardly seemed past midday, and then long nights in his tent. Geder was torn between the tugging impatience to be with Cithrin in Suddapal and a horrified sympathy for the men, brought to this sad state by Ternigan’s mismanagement.