Clara
Clara rode through the early evening rain, her pipe turned mouth-down to keep the droplets from drowning the tobacco. The lands of the Free Cities struck her as much like the cities themselves, varying from one valley to the next. The plains of southern Antea were only a day behind them now, and already she felt as if she’d ridden through three different worlds. This present landscape was made of low, rolling hills covered with a grey-green grass that seemed to collect the gloom from the clouds. The dragon’s road, permanent as it was, had outlasted the hills that had once supported it. Now it undulated toward the horizon, rising here into the air like a bridge and there disappearing for a space beneath the ground. It reminded her of nothing so much as the image of a sea serpent arching through waves.
Orsen lay a day and a half a day ahead, perched on its lone mountain. She planned to turn aside before she reached it, leaving the dragon’s road for the more changeable paths of mere humanity. The army, her sons at its head, would be marching for Bellin and the pass through the mountains. It was her hope and intention to meet it there or else between the city at the mouth of the pass and the fields of Birancour.
Her mount was a three-year-old gelding the color of wheat, and the hunting tent—a tiny affair that rose no more than two feet from the ground when employed—was folded across its back. She did not regret that she would not be spending yet another night in it, breathing air heated by her own breath and fighting to make the unkind ground do for a mattress. Vincen Coe rode beside her. In Camnipol, where she had been Lady Kalliam and he a huntsman of no particular rank, he would have ridden behind her. She preferred him where he was.
The question that remained as they trekked across the damp, grey hills toward the flickering torches of the wayhouse was who precisely he should be.
“Not husband,” she said. “Son. It’s simply more plausible.”
“To who?”
“To everyone,” Clara said. “A woman of my age simply isn’t married to a man like you. Even if they accepted the tale, it would stand out. I prefer not to be memorable.”
“I think you underestimate the world, my lady.”
“Do you, now?”
“If you believe we’re the strangest thing in it? Yes.”
“You are my son, I am your mother. We are making our way to Maccia to take up residence with my sister now that your father is dead.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“You’re laughing at me. I can hear it in your voice.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“And don’t call me my lady. You’ll give the game away.”
“Yes, Mother,” Vincen said. As if in answer, Clara’s gelding sighed.
The sun, shrouded by clouds, did not set. The world only grew darker by degrees. The constant patter of rain was broken by the rumble of distant thunder. Her hands and hips ached, and when they drew into the wayhouse’s yard and the grooms splashed out through the mud to take their horses, she mostly felt pleased that the day was done, and that there would be a warm room and a bowl of something to eat.
The house itself was low and dark, the thatch roof black with the damp. The smell of beer and roasted peppers washed over her as she ducked through the doorway.
“Let me do the talking,” Vincen murmured. “You can’t help sounding like you belong in a ballroom.”
Clara nodded and clamped her lips tight around the stem of her pipe. The common room was low-ceilinged and smoky. The keeper was a broad-shouldered Jasuru woman with a scar across her cheek that complicated her bronze-green scales.
“Evening, friends,” the keep said, baring her pointed teeth in a smile that managed to be warm and welcoming. “Hard weather for riding.”
“Seen worse,” Vincen said. “The wife and I need a room for the night, if you have any.”
“Silver if you don’t mind sharing. Two if you’re looking for privacy.”
“Two it is,” Vincen said, putting an arm around Clara’s shoulder. “And perhaps a bowl of something to eat? Whatever you’ve got back there smells wonderful.”
“You’re kind to say it,” the keep replied, waving at the blackwood table. “Take a seat, and I’ll bring your bowls and beers. At two silver, you’re already paying for it.”
Clara lowered herself to the bench, her back and knees creaking. Vincen sat at her side, scooped up her hand, and laced his finger with hers.
“You are a terrible man,” Clara said softly.
“You are a beautiful woman,” he replied. “And your accent is fine.”
Jorey and Vicarian had left before the court season had the chance to begin. They’d shared a carriage drawn by a team twice as large as the carriage required. Jorey was in haste, rushing to do what needed to be done and have it over. She’d watched it clatter away down the street, turning to the south when it could and vanishing from sight. Sabiha, standing beside her, had wept quietly as much from exhaustion as sorrow. The baby was taking more and more of the girl’s reserves, and Clara had taken Sabiha’s hand in her own, thinking to offer her strength. As if a few fingers laced together could do that.
Over the following days, her suspicion that there was indeed a way to leave the court behind began to take root. And more than a way, a need. All her schemes among the lower classes of the city had rested on finding men and women loyal to her, who would lie for her. Now she saw that her armor was made of paste and paper, and the urge to flee the city before she could be found out grew with every day. And still, despite all her growing plans and unspoken analysis, the arrival of the high families was a shock.
The year before, Clara had watched from the gutters as the carriages arrived. Even those who had caught sight of her had pretended not to. The year before that, she had been Baroness of Osterling Fells and her husband one of the great names of the empire. This time, the powerful families of the court arrived in Camnipol already buzzing with scandal and confusion. Lord Ternigan had been exposed as a traitor. Ernst Mecelli had also been implicated, but the Lord Regent had either determined his innocence or reached some accommodation for amnesty. In any case, both men were gone: one dead, the other touring the captured cities of the previous year’s campaign. And in their place, taking command of the army as his father once had, Jorey Kalliam, husband of the somewhat tainted Sabiha Skestinin, son of the traitor Dawson Kalliam, and best friend of the Lord Regent. Clara, being a woman and so apparently having no identity of her own, was neither the baroness she had been nor the fallen woman she’d become. She was both Dawson’s widow and Jorey’s mother, and with every renewed acquaintance, she saw the wariness echoed again.
To her surprise, the women who had most supported her in her year of social exile seemed the most unnerved by her rehabilitation. Lady Enga Tilliaken, who had invited Clara to garden tea but not into her home, who had given Clara a cast-off dress, who had by most measures been Clara’s greatest supporter, went white about the lips when they met at Lady Essian’s formal luncheon the day after the opening of the season. Ogene Faskellan, a distant cousin of Clara’s and one of the first to share little meals with her at a discreet bakery where they were unlikely to be seen, was brittle and polite. Even young Merian Caot, fully a woman now but with enough of the adolescent in her to treasure scandal and upheaval, was cool to her. At first it had all taken Clara aback, but soon she felt that she understood.
Fallen, she been what each of these women needed. She had filled a role in the stories they told themselves about who and what they were. Enga Tilliaken wanted to believe she was a generous soul, and Clara had been the opportunity for her pride to feed itself by condescending to accept a disgraced woman’s company. For Ogene Faskellan, Clara had been a safe sort of shame. A secret and a whiff of brimstone that could safely enliven an uninspiring marriage and constrained life. Merian Caot had wanted a way to argue that she was not tied by the same social bonds as the rest of them. Taking tea with Clara had been an act of rebellion for her at an age when rebellion—or in truth only the appearance of rebellion—was part of the subtle mourning that came with womanhood in the court of the Severed Throne. And so, for all of them, Clara had failed. Tilliaken could no longer take her clandestine joy in looking down on Clara, Faskellan found no drama in her company. And for the young Caot girl, the older woman who had shown some ray of hope that court life might not be entirely constrained had instead stepped back into line. None of it had been about who Clara truly was, and so neither was it now. And still, it left her sour.