Chapter Three #2
“They sounded the drums,” she prompted without looking up, waiting for our report.
“The prince and his army arrived,” I said.
Now she lifted her head, staring at us with shock in her eyes. I guess she hadn’t known he was coming. She poked the needle into the fabric to save her place, pushed the frame away, and gave us her entire attention. “The new prince?”
“So it seems,” I said. “He came in through the eastern market with four carriages and a lot of soldiers. Silver tiger on a black banner.”
“The carriages were attacked by assassins when they entered the gates,” Wren said.
Now her finely sculpted eyebrows shot up. “Assassins?”
“Nearly a dozen,” Wren said. “Fox warned the guards, got a thanks for it afterward.”
“You saved the new Western Prince?” There was speculation in the question; she was probably already calculating how she might get coin out of it.
“The assassins included a human possessed by an Anima.” The Lady knew I could see Anima but didn’t care to dirty herself or her manor with peasant magic.
“That’s not possible,” she said in the same tone she might have used if I’d announced that pigs flew above the carriages.
“The prince’s guards seemed to believe it,” Wren said. “Rill didn’t.”
“You can’t assassinate a prince with ghosts and incantations,” she said, but this time she sounded a little less certain. “Did the prince offer a reward?”
“His guards didn’t offer coin,” Wren said, “and he didn’t leave his carriage.”
“The assassins were caught?”
“Two died in the fight. The others got away.”
“Well. At least the garrison was doing its job.”
“They didn’t,” Wren said. “They watched from the wall.”
She blinked and stared, apparently dumbfounded by the strategy. “They watched an attack on a Gated prince?”
“And then complained afterward. Rill said they weren’t bodyguards for the Lys’Careths.”
“Oh, he cannot be that brainless. I’ll send a message tomorrow.” She believed herself one of the brightest political minds in the stronghold. “And given he’s alive because of your intervention, it’s only right he offer a reward. I’ll request it.”
The important work done—milking every coin and scrap of information from us—she pulled the frame toward herself again.
She looked at her needlework, picking at a mote of dust that threatened the bar of the canvas.
“Tomorrow, you’ll have the morning to yourselves, but there may be work to be done at midday. Be here on time.”
Because she knew we had no choice but to obey, we were dismissed.
We walked across the courtyard to the small building where the servants slept; Wren and I shared a small room and the narrow bed at one end.
The bed—a lumpy ticking mattress stretched over a rope frame—wasn’t large either, and it still filled most of the space.
Wren was a kicker, and the room barely kept out the wind in winter.
But it was better than sleeping on the plank floor, or huddled in the portico of a shrine to one of the gods.
“Maybe the Lady will let you work here for a while,” she said as we peeled off our worn leather boots.
I let my boots drop heavily onto the floor—it wasn’t like they could get more scuffed—and looked at her. “You want to punish me for saving the prince by locking me up?”
“I want to keep you alive.”
There were a chipped bowl and pitcher on the only other bit of furniture in the room—a small table with a wobbly leg. We were broken castoffs, so we got the broken castoffs.
I sat down on the bed. “You know what they’ll be talking about in the market tomorrow?
The price of radishes and the new prince.
They won’t remember me. And the soldiers won’t, either.
” They would be focused on protecting the prince or finding the practitioner.
And since strongholders and royals didn’t mingle, or at least not strongholders like us, we wouldn’t cross paths again.
I let the disappointment slide over me, then glanced at her. She sat on the bed, her gaze vacant, her brow furrowed.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Wren wasn’t the type to worry.
I remembered almost nothing from before my arrival at the Lady’s manor.
I had no memories of my mother. Only a few images of my father, the things he’d tried to teach me after he got sick and before he was too far gone.
But I remembered with perfect clarity Wren stomping into the Lady’s manor for the first time, two months after I’d arrived.
We’d both been ten years old, and she was the fiercest person I’d ever seen.
She didn’t speak to me for the first three days.
But on the fourth, when I’d fallen out of the pangan tree behind our building, she’d been the one to help me up.
We’d named each other Fox and Wren that day; we couldn’t go back to the lives we had before, and the Lady only called us “Girl.” What came before didn’t matter.
We would start a new life together, and we would help each other survive.
A few years later, we met Luna and became our own kind of family.
She scratched her arm absently. “I don’t like it.”
Ignoring Wren’s honed instincts would be dumb. We both had our skills, and listening to her was one of mine. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Wasn’t your dad into tapestries of fate?” She crossed her arms. “Maybe one of those threads was snipped.”
“More than one. The stronghold became less safe in the time it took those carriages to roll inside.”
“Fucking Lys’Careths.”
“We just get up,” I said, “and we keep going.” That’s what she’d said to me when she’d pulled me up off the ground, and we’d repeated those words a thousand times since then.
When she’d tried to run away but had been hauled back by a garrison soldier with a new black eye.
When I’d tried to run away but was ratted out by one of the Lady’s personal servants.
We’d said them during broken bones and illness and misery, and nights spent wishing we’d been born into better luck.
I reached out and squeezed her hand.
She squeezed back. A little too hard.
“Ow,” I said. “Careful with the thief’s hands.”
“You be careful,” she said, and I knew she’d be okay.
Sometime in the night I felt Wren shift and rise, then move to the window. Servants didn’t rate glass, and the shutter was open for the breeze; the two of us packed together in the tiny room created a lot of heat.
She stared into the darkness, eyes alert and body tense. Her right hand was at her side, and I knew she’d slipped her small knife into her palm, just in case. I also knew better than to speak; she needed to watch and listen. But my heart knocked against my chest like a war drum.
After a moment, she pulled the shutters closed and flipped over the small wooden peg that kept them in place.
“What?” I asked quietly as she walked back to the bed in perfect silence.
“I felt like someone was watching. I didn’t see anything, but I’ll feel better with the window closed.”
I nodded. “We’ll check the grounds tomorrow in the light.”
For a long time, I stared at the ceiling and listened, wondering who might be waiting in the shadows.