Chapter 9 #2
“Taming them. Teaching them to forget their wildness, learning how to be ridden. It’s not a natural thing for them.
The breeder needed the help and even taught me how to do the same for destriers.
The breeder was a man of some renown. One day, a customer came to view his offerings, as she had heard his specimens were beyond compare. ”
“Velona Armenta?”
“The very same. Head of the whole clan. She happened to see me riding. Said she liked the look of me. Said every mount looked better for having me on it. And then she asked if I would come with her if she bought the lot of them. That was two years ago. I didn’t know then that she was…
she was suffering and might have wished for company. ”
I did the math, and realized: two years ago would have been when Velona’s daughter, Sagma Armenta, had hanged herself. The second of the three deaths.
“So…she was buying…a replacem—”
“No,” said Fotia quickly. “I was not that. Sagma was a very proper gentrygirl. I think Velona just…wanted a new face about. She liked to watch me ride. And I became one of her drovers.”
“You are…a drover for the Armentas?”
“No.” She stuck her nose in the air. “I am a top drover for the Armentas.”
“Wielding a lance in the field? Ushering urhosi cattle about?”
“And uglier things besides.” She grinned, and there was a touch of wildness to it.
“It’s a mad life, being a drover. I sleep under roofs very rarely.
Often I camp afield with the herds—and the midges and the beetles and the boars.
But it’s a better life than the one I had.
Than the one we had, I suppose, in Daretana. All penned in together.”
There was a somber pause. We each sipped our sackwine, unable to think of anything to say after that.
“They’ve moved, you know,” she said lightly. “With my money and yours, we got them out of the Outer Rim and into the third ring here.”
“You did?” I said, startled. “We did?”
“Yes. Little town called Rimula, about a day’s ride from here. Grandmother has a servant to keep her well. Ithipia and Karatho can afford real dresses.” She paused. “Hardest bit was leaving Mother behind.”
I put my cup down. I had not thought of that in a very long time: the grave in the wood, and the little granite headstone, and the clutch of peya-lilies that somehow always bloomed in that place.
“Do you remember what Mother looked like, Din?” Fotia asked. “I don’t. All I had was that stone in the wood, and little more. Still, it was…very difficult to leave that place to the fates. But I suppose all is left to the fates, in the end.”
It took me a moment to recover from that particular blow. “How you’ve grown,” I said softly.
“Is dread the same as maturity?”
I filled my glass. “In the Empire, perhaps.”
—
We spoke of many things then: on how she’d met Ippeas (“I beat him in a riding competition. It wasn’t until well afterward that he admitted the reason he’d lost was because he’d kept staring at me…
”), her relationship to the Armentas (“They treat me as if I’m somewhere between favored servant and—strangely—forgotten distant relation”), and our own grandmother (“She’s just become more of herself as she’s aged, and wishes to speak only of her own virtues, her own victories, and how no one else could ever compare”).
She then asked me of my life. My answers were grudging and monosyllabic. I told her my work was fine and tolerable, and did not mention severed heads, or gutted girls, or my service in Talagray, when the horror had emerged from the seas and all the sky was filled with bombard smoke.
“Your words are polite,” said Fotia, “but there’s more behind your eyes, brother.”
“My work is an ugly thing,” I said quietly as I sipped my wine.
“I see that now. Will it be ugly here as well, with Castus?”
“It is already, Fo.”
She sighed. “This isn’t how I’d wish to meet you, brother! Emerging from the rainy shadows, here to hang my friend. By hell…will you hang him, Din?”
“The evidence is not at all in his favor,” I said. “But that’s what I wished to speak to you about—you and your Ippeas. Because Castus’s motivations are very…strange to us. We are working to understand them.”
She was watching me very closely. “Very strange, you say?”
“Yes.” I blinked—the sackwine was weighing on me heavily now—and tried to think of how to say neither too much nor too little.
“In that we can’t figure out what they were at all.
I wanted to speak to Velona Armenta to ask her about her son—and the misfortunes of her other children.
There is…ah, more to understand here. It’s a mad thing to ask, but—can you help me meet her, Fo? ”
Fotia leaned in slowly, eyes fixed on me. She did not speak for a long time.
“What?” I said.
“I can’t believe it,” she said softly.
“Can’t believe…”
“You don’t think he did it,” she said. “Do you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t say it,” said Fotia. “But I can smell it on you. For one thing, if you had been talking to Trikao, then I know he’d have told you he’d let you do no such thing.
Very few speak to Velona now, and he’s protective of her—especially when it comes to the deaths of her children.
Yet you persist. You wouldn’t bother if it was some cursory questioning you needed to do.
You expect to find something important from her. ”
“Yes, but I—”
“But more so,” she said, her wild smile returning, “I know you, brother. Remember when that fox had kits in the woodpile behind our house? And you stumped around claiming you knew a great secret, because you’d seen them playing, and wouldn’t tell us where?”
“I didn’t do that. Did I?”
“You have the same stiffness to your back! The same silly, smug face! It looks like you’re sucking on a talint coin. Does this act actually work on people?”
I looked her in the eye. “Can you help me speak to Velona Armenta, Fo?”
“That depends. Do you think doing this will help Castus?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not? And don’t say you can’t t—”
“I can’t tell you that, either.”
“Bastard. Utter bastard.”
“There are dangerous things at work here, Fo,” I said.
“You think I don’t know that?” she shot back. “I’ve lived in halls of grief for the past two years. I was there for Gevma’s funeral. And I’ve seen what Velona Armenta has done to herself.”
“What do you mean, done to herself?”
She hesitated. Then she looked over my shoulder and her expression grew grave. She burped, hiccupped, muttered, “Oh, fuck, here we go,” and wobbily stood.
I did the same, not comprehending her worry—and then I realized I was fairly drunk. I turned about, squinting in the rain—suddenly it was very hard to make sense of the glimmering nightscape of the churning streets—and saw that another rider was arriving, atop another destrier.
The man was clad in the yellow embossed leather armor of the Armentas, though his was of very fine make.
As he leapt down from his destrier and pulled his helm from his head, I saw he was a Tala man—not as tall as I but more broadly built—with a wide face, thick beard, and a constellation of tiny scars across one cheek and down the left side of his neck.
A cheerful blunt instrument of a fellow, I thought, though at the moment I did not sense any malice from him.
Yet from his build, his beard, the way he carried himself: this was clearly the son of Trikao Armenta.
His gaze fell upon Fotia, and his expression changed to one torn between relief and exasperation. He shook his head, advanced, and said, “Fo, what do you mean riding off like that, especially on a night like…”
He paused as he saw me. Then he blinked at me for a moment, took in my uniform, then peered at my face and glanced back and forth between me and Fotia. “I…what?” he said.
Fotia pointed at me with a finger, and said with a noticeable slur, “ ’s my brother. Din.”
—
There were many poor ways to meet one’s potential future sibling-by-law, yet as I stood blinking in the rain, I couldn’t imagine a worse way than doing so when you are drunk and he is utterly unprepared—especially when the man in question is of gentry stock and you are currently investigating his cousin for murder.
I fumbled in my memories for how to manage this situation and found nothing. Slaughter and combat were easy things compared to this deathly awkwardness.
“Fotia…” said Ippeas Armenta slowly. “Ahh. Are you drunk?”
“No,” said Fotia. She swayed slightly on her feet. “Well, no, not quite. Or yes.”
I sighed. “Why don’t we all sit down?”
Over the next rambling, freewheeling ten minutes or so, Fotia and I struggled to explain to Ippeas my appearance here in Lacanthim. It suddenly all felt very petty: with death and war stalking this place, how could family squabbles ever hope to matter?
“So,” Ippeas said slowly at the end of it. “You, Signum Kol…” He paused, as if testing out the name of his potential brother-by-law. “…are here to try and keep my family and the Buravs from going to war.”
“That’s one of my duties, true.”
“It’s surely the most difficult of them…And, you are here to try to determine Castus’s guilt. Though, to hear the chatter, his guilt is very obvious…?”
“But he doesn’t think it was him, Ip,” said Fotia. “He thinks he’s innocent.”
“I did not say that,” I said quickly.
Though I cringed internally: Ip?
“How can he be innocent?” said Ippeas, looking to me. “I mean—didn’t he run out of the room all bloodied?”
“I did not say he was innocent,” I said. “But I also can’t explain what he did. I’d like to hear your and Fotia’s stories of Castus’s movements and behaviors in the days before, to try to explain it.” I shot a glance at Fotia. “If you’re capable of giving them.”
Ippeas blinked miserably. In that gesture I caught a flash of his father, so deeply forlorn that it was woven into his every movement. “What we know…Well. Have you told him, Fo?”
“I’ve told him nothing,” said Fotia, “and not that, not yet.”
“Told me…?” I said.
Ippeas sighed. “Of his dalliance.”
“Ah. You knew about Castus and Zansay,” I said.