Leaving Vincen behind had been among the most difficult things she had ever done. Even after the wound had been cleaned and the bleeding slowed to a sickening crimson seep, the worst had not come. The cunning men moved on, tending to those among the army’s wounded whom their skills could aid to health or else with their passage into darkness, leaving Clara to sit at his cot. His skin had taken on a waxen look that made her think of meat at a butcher’s shop. In his fever, he kicked away the thin blankets and then, minutes later, gathered them back to himself.
She sat with him because she could think of nothing else to do. Somewhere in the camp, Jorey and his knights were measuring the cost of the ambush and its effect on their plans. She should have been there, gleaning what she could if not farther afield, acting on what she already knew, and yet it all seemed impossible. Vincen slept in a fever and woke in it, and the two states seemed nearly the same. Near sundown, he raved for the better part of an hour about the need to find a lost dog before the hunt began, and then fell into a sleep so profound that Clara had to watch the rise and fall of his chest to assure herself that it was only sleep.
What would the men think of her attentions to a man who was, after all, merely a servant in her house? What would her boys make of it? She didn’t care. She only dampened the cloth again, soothed Vincen’s wounded body as best she could, and waited.
Near dawn, the fever seemed to lose its grip. The blankness left his eyes and reason returned. The terrible pressure in Clara’s breast and throat eased and she felt the black exhaustion she’d spent the night ignoring.
“My lady,” Vincen said, with a weary smile. “I’m afraid I may not manage that errand for you after all.”
“I think you may be forgiven this time,” Clara said. “You have an excellent excuse.”
“Thank you for your indulgence,” he said, then sighed and made as if to rise. Clara put a restraining hand on his shoulder, and the weight of it alone pressed him back to the creaking canvas.
“You’re not to move,” she said. “Not until the fever passes.”
“The warning—”
“The warning be damned,” Clara said gently. “Callon Cane and his agents have to know they’re in danger. There’s an army outside their city. It isn’t as though we were being subtle.”
Vincen Coe frowned. “He doesn’t know we have a way in. They’ll kill him,” he said.
“People die. I can’t save all of them,” she said, and tears welled in her eyes. She felt no sorrow to match them, they simply came and she suffered their presence as if they were unexpected and unwelcome guests. “This one time, I think we can leave the enemy to their own devices.”
Vincen’s expression clouded, pale lips pressing together. She felt his disapproval, and her answer was rage.
“No,” she said before he could speak. “No, I won’t have it. We aren’t responsible for the world and everything in it. Not every tragedy is our fault. Not every loss.”
“We’ve come this far so that we—”
“Could do what we can,” Clara snapped. “We came so that we could try, but there are constraints. There are limits.”
“And have we reached them?” Vincen asked.
If she hadn’t been so terribly tired, she would not have sobbed. Truly, staying up all night waiting for a young lover to die before one’s eyes was better done at twenty. It took too much energy.
“You cannot go,” she said. “And there is no one else that I trust.”
“And if they kill him because we didn’t warn him?” Vincen said. “If the word spreads that Palliako slaughtered him after all, can you live knowing that there was something else you could have done and didn’t? Can your son bear it? Because say you both can, and I’ll go back to sleep.”
Outside the little tent, a horse snorted. The cool morning breeze stirred the wet oilskin walls, shifting the shadows on Vincen’s face as if he were an image on a banner. Could she live knowing there was something she could have done, and that she hadn’t?
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“Take the warning,” Vincen said.
“Me?” Clara said, and laughed.
“Who else?” Vincen asked.
“What makes you think I could manage that?”
“You’re a predator, my lady,” Vincen said, and closed his eyes with a sigh. “You can manage anything.”
“You’re young and romantic,” she said, making the words harsh and their harshness an endearment. Vincen smiled.
She could take any horse in the camp. The army wouldn’t be moving before tomorrow, she was certain of that, and the city wasn’t that far away. Getting access to Jorey’s tent would be simple enough, she was his mother, and the tale of gutting the Birancouri soldier had made her more of the army’s pet. It could be done. She could do it. And so, of course, she had to.
She said something soft and obscene. Vincen smiled.
“Sometimes doing the least necessary is still a heroic work,” he said.
“When I said I didn’t want to outlive another lover, this isn’t what I meant.”
“You won’t die,” he said, the words growing slushy with sleep. “You’ll never die.”
Everyone dies, she thought. All of us. And usually, damn you, for things less important than this.
For a long, anxious hour, Clara combed the stretch of wood, sometimes certain that she’d come to the wrong place, sometimes that the story had been a fabrication from the start, and always consumed by the fear that she would overlook the secret way. That Geder would overcome another of his enemies because she had not prevented it.
When at last she found the entrance, it was with a sense of profound relief. There, in the depths of a grey-green bush, a slightly deeper darkness. Now that she saw to look for it, a uniformity of the forest litter that spoke of being swept to look as if it were undisturbed. The thin rain tapped against the leaves and trickled down the back of her neck as she looked for a place to tie her mount. It seemed cruel to leave the poor animal out in the cold, but it wasn’t as if they’d put a stable next to a smuggler’s cave. She made do with a dark hollow where the canopy of trees almost stopped the wetness, and looped the reins in a branch.
“I’m sorry,” she said, petting the gelding’s gentle face. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
She pushed through the brush, twigs cracking against her. The darkness resolved into a sloping passage so narrow that her shoulders brushed both sides. Worn stone steps led down into the earth, and she followed them, her boots slipping a little against the dampness and grime. When the last of the raindrops had stopped, she paused to light a stub of candle. The smuggler’s passage made tombs look welcoming. Streaks of slime clung to the stonework, and the walls tilted in against each other, as if on the verge of collapse. Her passage through it seemed to take hours. There was no marker to show when she passed beneath the walls of Sara-sur-Mar, when she moved from the wilderness into the city. Her little underworld was circumscribed by a single candle’s light, and there might as well have been nothing outside it.
The smell of sewage was the first sure sign that she’d reached the habitation of humans. The stink of it was profound and powerful, and it grew with every passing yard she walked. The passage widened, and the stones became brick—old and weathered and alive with cockroaches. The secret passage opened into the vaulted arch of a great sewer. The rank water shone black in the candlelight, and dead things floated in it.
She followed a stone quay along the side of the wall until it turned away, up toward the light and the streets of the besieged city. She lit her pipe from the last of the candle’s wick and threw the last thumb’s width of wax to the gutter. If wouldn’t have been enough to get her back anyway. She’d need to find a lantern. Assuming the man she was seeking out didn’t kill her for her troubles.