“You could tell me what happened,” Geder said.
Aster shrugged. It was a tight, constrained gesture.
“I could guess,” Geder said gently. “I mean, if you’d rather. Ah. Let’s see. You were at the Prisoner’s Span, and discovered that one of the people in the cages was actually Sanna Daskellin put in by mistake. You were going to have this Shoat person lower you down, but he dropped you and you hit your eye on the corner of the cage.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” Aster said.
“I’m not making fun of you. I’m being ridiculous so that maybe you’ll smile.”
Aster didn’t smile. A tear tracked down from his uninjured eye, silver against his cheek.
“You could tell me,” Geder said again. “I won’t laugh at you.”
Aster was silent for a long moment, motionless as a mouse before a snake. When he spoke, his voice was steady and calm. “He said some things that made me angry, so I hit him. Only I didn’t do it very well.”
“Things about you?”
Aster shook his head.
“Things about your father?”
Aster shook his head.
“Things about me?”
Aster didn’t move, but his gaze shifted up to Geder for a moment before looking down again. Geder shook his head. In another situation, hearing that the boys of the court were mocking him behind his back would have stung and angered him, but Aster’s pain was so raw and immediate, Geder didn’t have to struggle to put himself aside.
“People will always poke fun at their betters,” he said. “It’s a rule, like rain goes down from the sky instead of up toward it. Or thunder comes after lightning, not before. It’s just people.”
“I know,” Aster said. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. You’re going to be king soon, and when you have to hand down justice and portion out lands and make treaties with other kingdoms, they can’t think you’re going to fly off and punch someone just because they’ve said unkind words about you.”
“I know,” Aster said, a sob in his voice. “I didn’t mean to fail you.”
“Fail me? You can’t fail me. I’m the Lord Regent. You’re the prince. I’m the only one who can fail here,” Geder said. Aster nodded, but didn’t look up. “Did you win the fight?”
“No.”
“Ah. Well. You could challenge him to a duel, if you wanted to. Settle it on the field of honor.”
“Do I have to?”
“No. But I thought you might want to. It’s the sort of thing noblemen do sometimes. Not that I have. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a fight that I won.” Aster looked up, confused. Geder nodded. “The first time I went into battle, I caught a bolt in the leg, passed out, and missed half the fighting. It’s true.”
“You faced Feldin Maas.”
“Clara Kalliam’s guard faced Feldin Maas. I ran for the hills with his letters and hoped no one would catch me. Some men fight, some think, some paint or make poems or win women’s hearts. We are what we are. Knowing what our strengths are and what our weaknesses are and making do with them is all any of us have.”
“Is that what you do?”
“I try,” Geder said, and for an instant, sharp as a blade under his fingernail, he was in the empty banker’s compound in Suddapal where Cithrin had once been, and then gone. He closed his eyes against the pain of it and coughed out a rough laugh. “I don’t always do very well.”
“He’s stronger than me,” Aster said. “On the dueling yard? He’s got better reach. If I challenged him I’d only lose.”
“You know, the idea of dueling is that righteousness gives you strength. The combat isn’t just who’s the strongest. It’s who has the truth on his side.”
“That’s lovely,” Aster said, and his voice was almost his usual again, “but I don’t think truth outmatches having a better reach.”
“Probably not,” Geder said.
Far off in the city, a man shouted something, the words blurred by distance. A woman’s voice shouted back. Geder looked up at the goddess’s banner shifting in the breeze and the clouds and stars beyond it. He lay back, bending his knees.
“You’re getting dirt in your hair,” Aster said.
“I’ll wash it back out,” Geder said. “You know… it occurs to me. Not that I’d make the argument myself, but it occurs to me that striking the crown prince of Antea could, in some situations, be considered treason.”
Aster’s good eye went wide.
“I’m not saying it was,” Geder said. “Only that some people might take it that way. If they didn’t have all the information. Or had very strict ideas. And we do have the royal guard. We could just have them wander over to the street outside Shoat’s compound. They wouldn’t have to go in or speak to anyone if we didn’t want them to. They could just go… be there. For a night or two.”
It was a relief and a pleasure to see Aster’s smile.
Clara
The day of the ambush began with light rains. Her son’s army had reached the river the day before, and the trees that grew around the long, slow water seemed to speak in soft voices full of sharp consonants as the raindrops hit the leaves. Clara sat by her tent, smoking her pipe, listening to the noise of the soldiers breaking camp, and watching the faint light of dawn grow stronger. The smell of wet earth and smoke made the air rich and thick as perfume. Her simple breakfast—boiled eggs and coffee—tasted better for being eaten here.
The distance between herself and the soldiers was a social fiction, and like all social fictions terribly important. Traveling in disguise behind the army was a thing of scandal, but it could be explained away as the eccentricity of an older woman who had, after all, been through so much in recent years. It was little reflection on Jorey that his mother was odd. Had she then been incorporated into the army, though, it would have been his eccentricity, and a thousand times harder to overlook. So instead, her tent stood a little way off, had its own cookfire and her own servant, because Vincen was still playing that role where there were so many people about to see if he played some other. And so she was not with the army, but rather accompanied by it. She and Jorey pretended they were in two separate journeys that happened, as if by happy coincidence, to overlap for a time.
And perhaps that was true. Perhaps that was the metaphor for being a mother to a son. It left her feeling soft and calm and only a little melancholy to think so.
“It’s raining,” Vincen said, appearing from the scrub with a pan of river water.
“It is.”
“You’re getting damp.”
“Not very much so,” she said. “And besides, my alternative is to huddle in a tent as if a little water would melt me. I’m too old for that kind of pretense.”
“Not too old for the pretense of being old,” he said.
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“It seems to me you’ve given yourself a great deal of freedom in how you live your life,” Vincen said, “and you keep claiming it’s because you’re old. For one thing, you really aren’t that old. And for another, there are any number of women in court who die after long lives without ever doing half the things you have.”
“It is rude, you know, to dissect a woman’s story of herself before lunch.”
“The only thing wrong with it is the way it makes you seem less,” Vincen said, hanging the pan over her little hissing fire to boil away the impurities. “You aren’t yourself because you’re old. You’re just Clara.”
“I don’t know who taught you how to flatter, but they did a brilliant job,” she said.
“I’m still learning,” Vincen said. And a moment later, “You might want to go talk with Jorey today. I heard he had a visitor. A merchant from Sara-sur-Mar’s been in the Lord Marshal’s tent for the better part of the morning.”