And she would have taken the little slights and tight smiles a thousand times over rather than endure the women like Erryn Meer who had distanced herself from Clara and now greeted her like the previous year had never happened. Hypocrisy was the marrow of court life and always had been. In truth, very little had changed, except her. And she, more even than her peers, was aware at every turn that she no longer fit.
The image that came to her time and again in the early days of the season was a pot-bound plant removed from its bindings and placed in a wider soil where roots could spread as they had not before. Only now she was being pushed back into that old, too-small container, and she would not fit. She was not any longer the woman she had been. She missed her husband with an ache that she thought would never entirely fade, but she would also have been hard-pressed to welcome him back, should God and angels lift him restored from the depths of the Division. Like the old stories of men taken to magical lands who could never entirely return, Clara had stepped into a wider, more violent, less certain world. She had the taste of it now, and she would never again be so tamed as she had been.
And so it became an easy thing to plot her escape.
To Enga Tilliaken, she said that she had an ailing friend in Osterling Fells and was thinking of retiring from the court for the season to oversee the cunning men as they tried to heal her. To Lady Daskellin she hinted broadly that her residence in the Skestinin manor was not entirely to Lady Skestinin’s liking. At the garden tea, she praised Geder for his kindness to her family. At the spring bowling competition, she confessed to missing Dawson and Barriath and her cousin Phelia who had been wife to Feldin Maas back when the conspiracy against the throne had been thought to spring from Asterilhold. She laid the ground for any number of stories to explain her retreat and a dozen false trails to suggest where she had gone and why. All except the truth. That, she told only to Sabiha, and even then, not all.
Dawson had spoken of the art of war many times, and she had listened with half an ear. She had heard him speak of the people that follow the army to war: robbers of the dead, prostitutes, workmen too old, slow, or infirm to wield a sword but able to do small service for the soldiery at a small price. He had told her more than once that the well-being of an army could be judged by the character of its hangers-on like judging the health of a dog by the quality of its coat. Often, he’d said, the followers and small people knew things about the army that the generals did not.
The army was once again on the march. She intended to follow it quietly, at distance, and in disguise. She would blend in with the followers and learn what there was to be learned. And if she could, frustrate the campaign without destroying the man who led it. When she had been trapped in the court like a fly in sap, the idea had seemed plausible. On the road with Vincen at her side, the rashness of the errand stood out, though not enough to make her turn back.
The room was small, and the thatch above them ticked with the rain and a variety of black beetles she had previously been unfamiliar with. The smell of the mud and beer and weather almost forgave the reek of the night pot. Vincen lay in the bed beside her, snoring slightly. Both of them still wore all the day’s clothes as proof against the cold, but she could still feel the warmth of his body. She was weary beyond expectation. Her back ached and her legs as well. Sleep, however, eluded her. A thousand different worries assailed her: How would she find the army, and how would she avoid being recognized, and what would happen if she were? How could the wars of Geder Palliako and his spider priests be separated from those of Antea when the same men fought the same battles for each? How much longer could she keep the grief of seeing her middle boy consumed by the goddess at bay, and what was she going to do when that dam burst?
But along with all of it was a sense of lightness that confused her at first. It wasn’t simply that court was oppressive and she was no longer there. The boarding house in Camnipol had been a hundred times more pleasant than traveling, and she hadn’t even joined the army yet. She had been outside court for the better part of a year, and had been miserable and frightened through most of it.
The difference was that she had been cast out before, where now she had stepped away. After Dawson’s death, she had been hollowed out. Now if anything she felt too large for the world she’d lived in. The campaign would be dangerous, brutal, and exhausting, but it was what she had chosen. If she died on the road—and God knew there was enough chance of that in a war—she would die on her own terms, serving her kingdom better than Enga Tilliaken or a thousand more like her would ever conceive. She would not have expected the difference to matter greatly, and yet it did.
Vincen grunted and curled his arm under his head like a pillow. She knew it more by feel than sight. The only illumination in the room was what leaked in around the poorly hung door and the occasional flash of lightning. Clara closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep, but to no avail. And so instead, she rolled to the edge of the little bed and stood. Vincen would want her to stay in the room. They were far from Camnipol, but there would be couriers running between the throne and the army. And even that aside, the fact that the keep had taken their money did not guarantee that everyone in the place was benign.
Clara slipped the door open carefully. The hinge was a length of hard leather, and it creaked when it moved. Vincen did not wake. She pulled the door to behind her and went down the short hall to the common room. A Southling boy not more than ten years old was sweeping the floor with a rude little broom. A table of men, some Firstblood and others Kurtadam, played a card game in the corner. Clara went to sit by the fire grate.
“Help you, dear?”
The Jasuru woman loomed up out of the shadows. Clara had always heard it said that the Jasuru were bred by the dragons as soldiers. Black-mouthed, pointed teeth, scales across their bodies as a permanent light armor. But no race was ever only the thing it was intended for, not any more than a woman was only what she was told to be. Clara drew herself up and smiled.
“Trouble sleeping,” she said.
“Ah. Could bring you a cup of rum if you’d care for it.”
“Trade down to wine, if you’ve got it,” Clara said, trying to speak the way she imagined Abitha Coe speaking. Vincen’s comment about sounding as though she belonged in a ballroom might only have been teasing, but there was some truth in it. If her aristocratic past showed in her words, the keep gave no sign.
“Something to ease you down, but not so much you can’t wake come morning,” the Jasuru said with a broad wink. “You’re a wise woman, you.”
“Wouldn’t go that far,” Clara said, but the keep was already stepping to the back room. The Southling boy glanced over to her, smiled shyly, and went back to his chore. The men at the table reached some critical point in their game, groaning and chortling together, and then one of them began reshuffling the cards. When the keep returned, with an earthenware cup of wine, Clara took it with a nod that she hoped was companionable. She didn’t want to treat this woman as a servant, and for more reasons than one. The wine had a bite at the front, but it finished well. Dawson would have called it cheap and common, and he would have been right. He would have meant that there was no solace or pleasure to be found in it, and that would have been wrong.