Chapter 6
Chapter Six
In principle, Verna's plan to ignore Kalen was straightforward.
In practice, it required considerably more effort than she had anticipated.
The estate was not large enough to avoid her, and Kalen moved through it with territorial ease, appearing at odd hours in unexpected places.
Twice Verna turned a corridor corner to find her leaning against the wall in conversation with one of the guards, listening more than talking.
Once she came upon her in the olive grove at dusk, sitting on a low wall with one of the younger rescued girls, the child's hands moving in animation while Kalen listened with the focused patience she rarely extended to adults.
Verna had reversed course before she was seen and taken the long way around, which had added considerable time to a walk she had not intended to be long.
She stopped going to the amphitheatre. This, at least, was easy.
She had seen enough to understand what Kalen was capable of, and continuing to attend served no professional purpose.
She told Dara to report on the training's progress instead, and Dara reported without comment and with a carefully neutral expression that told Verna she had noticed more than she was saying.
She threw herself into the work of the estate, finding there was ample to keep her busy.
As well as accounts to review and the harvest to oversee, she received correspondence from the traders in Castine about the Trials logistics, and letters from two other houses who had quietly sent word that they shared her concerns about the emperor’s intentions.
And there were the four young women in the east wing, two of whom had tentatively begun learning the press house work and one of whom had asked, in a voice barely above a whisper, whether Verna might teach her to read.
There was enough to fill every daylight hour, and Verna didn’t think about Kalen except in bed where she thought about her constantly.
It was the ring that troubled her most. It had settled back to its coolness after that morning in the amphitheatre, sitting on her finger as it always had, silver and unremarkable. But she was acutely aware of it now.
She had inherited it from her mother, who had inherited it from hers, and it had always been understood in the family that it was old, and significant, and not to be given away or sold.
Beyond that, no one had ever said very much about it.
Her grandmother had called it a listener, which had seemed, at the time, like the kind of thing old women said about objects they were fond of.
She was beginning to wonder if her grandmother had been more literal than poetic.
But that was a puzzle for another season.
The harvest had arrived.
The first pressing was ceremonial. Verna had a modern crusher in the press house, a good machine that produced consistent results and had been worth every coin she’d paid for it.
But tradition was tradition, and her grandmother's grandmother had stomped these grapes by foot in the stone vat.
As had her grandmother, and her mother, and Verna continued to do it.
The vat was a long shallow trough cut from a single slab of pale stone, its surface worn smooth by generations of use and stained a deep, permanent purple that no amount of scrubbing ever quite lifted.
It sat in the open air on the upper terrace, shaded by a wooden pergola threaded through with old vines.
In the morning, when the light came in at an angle, the stone gleamed like the inside of a shell.
The women had been picking for a day. They came in from the rows with baskets loaded high, their arms stained to the elbow, their voices carrying across the terrace as they tipped the fruit into the vat.
The small dark variety was first, heavy with sugar, and skins nearly black.
The smell was that dense, fermenting sweetness that Verna had known since childhood, the smell of a good, rich harvest.
She put on an old working dress in undyed linen, loose enough to move in, and rolled up her sleeves. Then she reached down and gathered the hem of the dress, pulling it up and knotting it half-way up her thighs. She washed her feet at the bottom of the vat, then she stepped over the edge.
Six of the household women were already in, their skirts hitched up, their feet purple to the ankle.
They made room for her without ceremony as she stepped down into the cold mass of fruit.
It gave way beneath her feet in the way it always did, halfway between solid and liquid, the skins bursting softly underfoot with each step.
She had loved this since she was a child.
The cool slush against her feet, the way it connected her to every woman who had stood in this same stone trough in the centuries before her.
She began to move, falling into the rhythm the others had already established, a slow deliberate walk from one end of the vat to the other, turning, returning. The women talked around her, then someone began to sing and soon they all joined in.
The must deepened around her feet, the juice running dark and sweet between her toes. Her calves ached pleasantly by the time she reached the far end of the vat for the twelfth time and turned.
That was when she became aware of Kalen.
She was standing at the edge of the terrace, in the shade of the pergola, with her arms folded and her shoulder against one of the wooden uprights.
She was fully clothed today, in plain training breeches and a loose tunic, her hair tied back, and she was watching Verna with an expression that Verna didn’t recognize.
Not the arrogance of that morning, but attentive, as though she was trying to understand something.
Verna glanced away.
She kept her chin level and her movements unhurried as she walked the length of the vat and turned again. She was aware of how she must appear: her dress knotted above her knees, her feet and calves stained purple, her hair beginning to escape its pins in the warmth of the late morning.
She didn’t look at the pergola.
The women around her laughed at something. Verna joined the sound without having heard the joke, on instinct, and walked the length of the vat again.
Kalen didn’t move from the post.
Verna had spent the better part of ten days constructing her composure and she wasn’t going to let it be dismantled by the woman leaning against a piece of wood. She was on her own estate, in her own vat, doing work her family had done for two hundred years. She refused to be unsettled.
She kept walking, the must up to her shins now, cool and thick. The smell of it was intoxicating.
One of the women, Patrice, who had escaped to the estate three years ago from a violent marriage, leaned toward her. "Your champion's watching," she said with the matter-of-fact way she had of reporting everything she saw.
"I see her," Verna said.
"She’s a warrior goddess," said Patrice with a sigh.
Verna raised an eyebrow. "I thought you liked men."
Patrice let out a husky laugh. "Not necessarily."
Verna felt a niggle of annoyance and despite every intention, looked up.
Kalen was still there. When their eyes met, Kalen didn't look away. She simply held her gaze, the arrogance of the amphitheatre replaced by something Verna found, if she were honest, considerably more difficult to manage.
Something that appeared, from this distance, very like appreciation.
Not the look people gave her when they assessed her wealth, but something more uncomplicated than that. The look of a woman who found what she was looking at to be worth looking at, and saw no particular reason to conceal it.
Verna held the gaze for two full seconds.
Then she looked away, squared her shoulders, and went back to work with the intensity of a woman who had a great deal to do.
Around her feet, the must ran dark and sweet, and the old stone held the warmth of the sun, and the women moved and talked and laughed, and the grapes gave up everything in the long stone trough.
Verna did not look at the pergola again.
She was almost successful. When the last of the ceremonial pressing was done, Verna climbed out of the vat and accepted a cloth from one of the women to wipe her hands.
Her feet and calves were stained deep purple to the knee, her dress was damp at the hem, and her hair had given up entirely on its pins.
She felt, despite everything, the quiet satisfaction of a tradition honoured.
She wrapped the cloth around her shoulders and walked along the terrace toward the steps that led up to the house.
Kalen was still at the pergola.
She hadn’t moved in the better part of two hours, which was, Verna reflected, a considerable feat of patience for a woman who had told her plainly that she didn't like waiting.
She stood with her arms loosely folded, her back against the upright, in the posture of someone entirely comfortable in their own skin. As Verna approached, she straightened.
Verna didn’t slow her pace.
She walked past her, close enough that she caught the faint scent of cedar and clean linen, and kept her eyes forward, her expression neutral, and said nothing.
Kalen didn’t speak either.
But as Verna passed, she heard a low, barely audible sound that might have been a quiet puff of amusement, and she set her jaw and told herself she had not heard it.
The bathhouse on the lower terrace was, at this hour, empty.
Verna had timed it deliberately. She went to her private room at the far end, the one with the small window that looked out over the cliff edge to the sea, and she stripped off the damp dress and stood in the cool of the stone room for a long moment with her eyes closed.
The warm water helped. It always did. She lowered herself into the deep bath that one of the maids had prepared before the pressing, and lay still. She stared at the ceiling and listened to the water, trying not to think about Kalen.
By the time she had dressed again in a clean gown of deep blue linen and pinned her hair back into some semblance of order, she had her emotions under control.
Once she climbed the terrace steps back to the main house, her composure was restored and her afternoon already planned: read the correspondence from Castine, visit the new girls at the east wing, and pay the accounts.
She reached the top of the steps and nearly walked into Dara, who was coming the other way with the look of someone carrying news.
"My lady," Dara said. "Lord Lanath has arrived. He's in the courtyard."