Chapter Twenty-Nine The Lady Washed Clean
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Lady Washed Clean
When the Iron Maid at last learned the dark secret of her birth, she did not take it well.
Time of Lies, ANONYMOUS
Emer stumbled through the Cauldron, past the debris of the procession, and the empty stalls of the Night Market.
A Valerius bastard! Everybody knew Valerius seed rarely took root.
When it did, more often than not the birth killed mother and child both.
Theirs was hungry, furious blood. Any woman expecting such offspring should rid herself of it immediately.
A duke’s by-blow or the spawn of another Valerius, it wouldn’t matter.
There could be no benefit to bearing such.
Especially not a daughter. Men gloried in sons.
A bastard son might be carried to a Valerius door and brought up a soldier to serve his legitimate kin, but nobody needed a daughter.
Emer rarely thought of her mother, presuming she had abandoned her at the edge of the abyss, but now the thought of her beat against her temples. Had Emer’s mother not known the father was Valerius, or hoped it was not so? Had she died screaming?
Few engaged in love affairs with a Valerius. Of those foolhardy few, even fewer survived long enough to bear a child.
“Lonely, miss?” slurred a man, lurching towards her. He went cross-eyed at the axe blade that suddenly appeared, hovering between his eyes. “Never mind. Have a nice walk by yourself! Helps you think, doesn’t it!”
Emer wished she could stop thinking about the likely circumstances of her birth.
Rape of an innocent or an unlucky harlot.
A birth ending in death, and a cursed, marked baby.
Where to put the brat, but on the edge of the abyss?
That was where you put unwanted babies, and nobody would have been more unwanted than she.
Emer had been told her foundling tale. A baby abandoned on the edge of the dread ravine, covered in her mother’s blood, just about to roll off the edge to her doom.
There the tale would have ended, on the same day it began, except Lady Katalin Domitia took pity on the child, picked Emer up and put her in the cradle with her own daughter.
Yet now Emer considered the tale in a new light, her own story made no sense.
What could motivate someone to act against their nature?
Emer knew the lady, had been brought up by her.
Lady Katalin was not the kind of woman to take pity on an orphan.
She wasn’t a kind woman at all. She would not have done it.
Unless she heard tell of a child with an interesting mark. A Domitian woman would know what the Valerius mark looked like. A Domitian woman wasted no tools put in her hand. Lady Katalin had picked up a child that she intended would prove useful to her in time.
And Lia had known what the mark meant, and kept it from her, as Lia had kept so many things from her. She revealed Emer’s secret when it was useful to her, not a moment before.
From first to last, Emer had been nothing but a tool in noble hands. They kept her close, but not because they cared for her.
From childhood the older servants praised Emer’s eye for detail, her skills proving useful with dress and hair. No loose thread on her lady’s gown or stray lock from her lady’s coiffure escaped Emer. But who could ever have imagined that the power of Valerius would make for a perfect lady’s maid?
The kitchen staff had taught Emer to use a cleaver and said she had a rare talent, the strength to part sinew at a blow.
You see things as I do, Key had told her, more than once, in a way that suggested a bond between them.
She thought he was trying to make friends and suggest they had a point of view in common.
She hadn’t known he meant it literally. See better, smell better, move faster, kill as easy as breathing.
That was why he always tried to be friends.
Key had noticed she had abilities different from other people, and thought it made her like him.
Was he right? Emer thought of the Emperor slaying his subject with a lightning strike. Was she a monster like him?
Did nobody truly know their own story? Key had known. Lia had known. Had everybody else known her truth, and laughed at the fool at its centre?
Without realizing it, Emer’s steps had led her along the edge of the abyss. Past the bustle of the Night Market and towards the Graves of the Unloved Dead, where she knew fresh dirt was heaped high on new graves tonight.
People who could not afford tombstones to keep their dead in the ground buried them in the Graves of the Unloved Dead. Hoping they might earn enough to buy a stone one day. Hoping their dead would not rise.
Sometimes hope failed.
Emer waited by the new graves. She watched hands soft with rot paw their way up to the surface, watched the ghouls rise with grave dirt in their hair. If Emer died, if her use was at an end, she would be put down in the dust with them. As uncared for as they.
Her axe fell as the ghoul rose.
All hurt, all betrayal, all memory was drowned in blood as she swung, and cut, and killed, and sobbed.
Through naked cunning, Lia spoiled the argument Emer intended to have.
Emer stormed up the narrow dark stairs of Forge Strike’s narrow, dark house, intent on having it out, and found Lady Lia Felice bare as the day she was born. Lia was taking a bath.
The battered old tin bath was kept in the forge.
Emer had seen it, but none of them had used it before.
Emer had used the basin many times, running the sponge briskly over her body while still wearing a chemise with unlaced stays, and glancing furtively over her shoulder at a sleeping Lia.
Scared Lia would see, as if Emer had never let Lia take off that same chemise. Scared, without knowing why.
They slept in the same bed, in the lawless Cauldron where all things were permitted, but they never touched. Too many resentments and untold secrets lay between them.
More secrets than Emer had ever suspected, it seemed.
Emer had assumed Lia washed in the same way Emer did, but perhaps not. Perhaps Forge carried the bath up to Lia’s room every morning when Emer was at the market, brought hot water up the stairs and tenderly saw to her every need.
There was a piece of slippery pink soap held between her lady’s fingers, gliding over the length of her arm, leaving a trace of foam along the damp line of collarbone.
Emer swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry.
“You’re back,” said Lia. “I’m so glad.”
Beads of water became crystal and pearl against her fair skin. Glimmering beneath the surface of the water, glimpsed as both shape and shadow, was the slight, lovely curve of her breasts.
“I realize you are annoyed with me,” Lia continued in the softest voice. “If I had told you what you were, and what I intended to do, you would not have come with me.”
“I might have. We will never know, will we? Because you didn’t tell me!”
“It was a risk I couldn’t take. Please tell me you understand.”
Emer understood very well. Lia had no faith in her.
Long ago in a tower room as the shadows fell at evening, Emer had knelt by Lia’s bath and carefully washed her lady’s hair clean, then slid her hand between her lady’s thighs, serving her well.
She could not help but wonder if this lamplit glimmering moment was an offering to cool her anger, or to make Emer ready to be of service in other ways. Whatever her lady might need.
Emer knelt, but she did not pick up the sponge nor pour the scented oils. She met Lia’s blue eyes instead, the sweetest eyes in the world.
“You are very beautiful, my lady,” Emer said steadily. “It is not enough.”
She went downstairs, hoping Forge would be at her work.
Instead, Forge was at the kitchen basin, washing her cup and plate from a late dinner, the table already cleared.
When Emer met Forge’s sharp dark eyes, she remembered the smith had been watching her on that platform too. Forge knew everything.
Emer went to the table, sat and folded her hands primly before her. “I don’t care to hear any opinions on what you think I should do with Valerius strength.”
Forge shrugged. “Wasn’t going to offer any.”
Emer didn’t believe her. “I’ve seen you ply your tools deftly enough in the forge. I am no tool. No matter what you or she may think.”
“And I’ve seen you walking through the Night Market,” said Forge.
“A lady’s maid with fine, soft hands, neat as a new pin, book learned and prim and proper, but nobody cheats you.
You can tell which fruits and vegetables are still sound at a glance, and when the butcher fails to give you enough meat. ”
Yes, Emer had keen eyes because apparently she had Valerius blood, which made you swift and strong and possessed of murderous fury.
Being angry was terrifying now, but Emer couldn’t stop herself. “I fail to see why you’re talking about my ability to choose fresh vegetables!”
“You’re smart. You make wise choices. If life was a market, you should get to make your selections.”
“Ah yes,” said Emer bitterly. From among her great wealth of options. Whatever selection she made, she feared she could not afford.
“Do you know why I let you two in, that first night?”
Because of Lia’s upturned face in the lamplight, and the past between them of taverns and long nights, skills and secrets Emer knew nothing of. “Well enough.”
“Even when you were clearly very lost, you were fighting to protect someone. You were determined. I thought you were brave.”
It was kind of Forge to say so, Emer supposed.
She stared bitterly down at the bare table before her.
She was utterly unprepared for the blacksmith’s light step before her, or the callused hands that cupped her face, as though Emer was something precious and finely made. Somehow the kiss still came as a shock.
Forge’s mouth was firm and warm. When Emer’s hands came tentatively up, she grasped the carved muscle of Forge’s arms, as solid and more reassuring than the hilt of an axe. Emer held on and pressed in with sudden ferocious desperation. Forge stepped back too soon.
The ghost of heat on her lips lingering like a promise, Emer found herself speechless, gazing up into dark eyes and possibilities undreamed of.
“Know this, Emer Valerius, if that is who you decide to be,” said Forge Strike. “You do have choices.”