Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Verna slept in, something she rarely did.
Judging by the stream of sunlight through the window, the household would have been up for at least two hours, but she didn't care. She stretched slowly, feeling the pleasant ache in her body, and let herself think about the night.
Kalen had been an extraordinary lover. She had taken Verna apart with a patience and thoroughness that still made her skin warm to think about it.
She had no idea lovemaking could be like that.
With her hand over her heart, she thought about Kalen's mouth on her throat and her collarbone, then on her sex.
Want spread through her all over again. The memory of her own abandon was both thrilling and a little embarrassing.
She, who kept herself composed in every circumstance, had completely surrendered to her desires.
And then afterward she’d ached to do the same to Kalen. To tear down all her carefully constructed restraints and make her scream out her name as Verna had done.
She kept returning to that part, turning it over.
She had wanted nothing more than Kalen to stay with her in the bed until morning.
But when she had reached up to touch the scar on her face, Kalen had literally bolted.
She had made it abundantly clear she disliked how Verna had used her by saying bitterly, ‘You needn't fear your wedding night now.
You'll have no trouble satisfying a husband’.
Verna went cold.
Her wedding night.
Kalen had made it worse not better. Now she knew she could never go to bed with Thom; she’d have to think of a way to get out of the engagement without hurting him, but keeping their friendship intact.
She lay still, letting the memory of the night settle around her. Kalen's hands. Kalen's mouth. The complete and utter dissolution of years of careful composure.
She smiled and didn't try to stop herself.
Eventually she sat up, pushed her hair back, and reached for the gown over the chair beside the bed.
She held it up, remembering how Kalen had taken it off her.
From below came the sounds of the estate already deep into its morning.
She dressed without calling for her maid, moving a little slowly as muscles she rarely used ached from the night’s exertion.
When she picked up the hairbrush, the candles caught her eye.
She turned back to look at them. Four of them stood, one in each corner, their wicks dark and cold. She remembered placing them there the previous evening, lighting them before Kalen arrived. Then recalled the candlelight flicking across the ceiling as they made love.
What she didn’t remember was getting up to put them out.
She stood very still in the middle of the room.
When the memory arrived, her breath slowed. She had been lying in the bed, spent and drowsy, her limbs heavy with satisfaction. Kalen had already gone. The candles were still burning and she knew she should get up and put them out, but her body had refused to cooperate.
So, she had simply pointed at them.
One by one.
And the flames had gone out.
What the …?
Verna looked down at her hand. The ring sat on her finger as it always had, but it was unmistakably different now.
The weight was the same and the fit, but it was no longer silver.
It was the colour of old honey, of late afternoon sun on pale stone.
Pure gold, not gilded or tarnished. It had come from within the ring itself, as though a vein of it had risen to the surface overnight.
She turned it slowly on her finger, watching the light move through it.
Her grandmother had called it a listener.
Her mother had worn it without ceremony and said almost nothing about it.
After Verna inherited it, she presumed it was a piece of old jewellery that the family was fond of.
The kind of object that accumulated meaning through being a family heirloom.
The ring seemed to sense her scrutiny, because it pulsed warmly against her skin.
Verna pressed her fingertip against the metal and held it there.
She thought about the night, about the strange flare of light she had felt in the deepest moment of her pleasure, the sensation she had dismissed as the ordinary strangeness of a first climax.
Something coming home to roost, she’d thought at the time.
She looked at the nearest candle with its cold wick embedded in the pool of hardened wax. She raised one finger at it, feeling slightly ridiculous.
Nothing happened.
She was about to lower her hand when the ring warmed sharply. She held the feeling, let it move through her, and didn't try to direct it so much as allow it.
The wick caught alight. A small flame rose, steady in the still air of the room.
Verna stared at it. By all the gods, what was she?
She lowered her hand slowly and the flame continued to burn.
Forcing her eyes away from it, she considered what to do next. Eventually, she decided to be logical about it: to identify what she knew, what she didn't know, and the next practical step.
So, what did she know? The ring must be older than anyone in her family had understood.
It had done nothing like this in her mother's keeping, or her grandmother's that she knew of.
It had begun to be restless the moment Kalen arrived on the estate, and last night something had changed inside it, and apparently inside her.
And that was the extent of what she knew. The next practical step would be to do some research in the library.
Her great-grandmother had been a meticulous woman who recorded everything.
The family archive filled three shelves on the east wall of the library and Verna hadn’t bothered to visit it since her mother died.
Life had become too busy for historical research.
If there was anything about the ring, it would be there.
First, though, there was something else she had to do, something that was now apparent after last night.
She had to put off the wedding, or at least delay it until she got her feelings worked out.
She turned from the candle and went to her writing table to Thom's steward's letter that sat, face down, where she had placed it ten days ago.
After rereading it, she put it in her pocket, then donned her travelling cloak and went downstairs.
Dara was in the parlour when she came down. When she sighted the cloak, she didn’t comment, though by her expression she was dying to ask where she was going.
"I'm going to Thom's estate," Verna said, putting her out of her misery. "I'll be back before nightfall."
"Oh. Shall I arrange for your carriage?"
"No, I’ll ride over. Send one of the girls to the barracks to inform the captain I want two guards to accompany me."
Dara nodded slowly. "It's about the wedding?"
"I'm not ending the engagement," Verna said, though she would have preferred not to answer. "I'm asking him to delay it."
Dara said nothing, but her expression spoke volumes.
"The Trials are in less than three weeks," Verna continued, hating she was trying to justify her decision. "It's not sensible to hold a ceremony now with everything in motion. I'll ask him to wait until after it’s over."
"That seems reasonable," Dara said, but her tone suggested otherwise.
Verna pursed her lips. "Say what you're thinking."
"I'm thinking," Dara said quietly, "you’re trying to end it."
"A delay isn't a refusal," Verna said a little too quickly, then added briskly, "Now, I must be off. Get that message to the captain."
By the time Verna’s chestnut mare was ready for the trip, the two guards arrived. They nodded, immediately disappearing into the stalls to saddle their horses. Verna mounted without further conversation and turned toward the gate, with the guards at her back.
As she rode out between the whispering trees, their silver leaves were still and silent as though even they were waiting to see what she would do.
She looked up when she reached the gate.
Kalen stood on the eastern parapet, arms folded, staring down at her.
The road from the estate descended the ridge in long curves, following the line of the cliff before it turned inland and flattened out through the coastal plain.
It was a solid road, the old Imperial stone laid a century ago, wide enough for two carriages to pass without trouble.
The surface was worn smooth in the centre where the traffic ran heaviest, and along both edges the paving was bordered by grass and creeping thyme.
The morning was clear, with a breeze off the sea that kept the heat from settling. Verna rode at an easy pace, her two guards a few lengths behind, and let the movement of the horse and the open air help her think.
After a mile, the road left the open fields and entered the village of Seth.
She was struck straightaway with the odour of smoke from the blacksmith’s forge, and musty animal hair from the stable. As they rode down the main street, she heard the rhythmic knock of a hammer on an anvil, a dog barking, and children's laughter.
Seth was old, the buildings were modest, built from the same pale limestone that everything on this coast was made from.
The roofs were terracotta tiles, their colour faded from deep rust to a warm dusty pink by years of salt air and sun.
Many of the walls had been whitewashed at some point and then again, layer over layer, so that the corners of the older buildings were rounded and soft.
The street was busy.
A woman in a rough linen apron outside the bakehouse slid flatbreads from a long-handled paddle onto a rack to cool.
The smell that came off them was enough to make Verna's stomach remind her she hadn’t eaten breakfast. She stopped to order a piece with cheese and sausage, that she ate as they moved on.
Two old men occupied a stone bench near the central fountain, which was fed by a pipe coming out of the mouth of a carved fish, green with age.
One of them raised a hand as she and her guards passed by.
She returned the wave, having ridden through Seth so many times over the years that the village people knew her well.
A flock of geese were being moved from one side of the road to the other by a young girl who wielded a long stick with no mercy.
The geese hissed loudly. Verna's mare flicked her ears and sidestepped, and she steadied her with a word and a hand, and waited while the girl got the last of them through the gap in the fence with a practised whack.
She looked up, caught Verna watching, and offered a gap-toothed grin without embarrassment.
At the far end of the village, set back slightly from the road, was the shrine of a goddess, and someone had placed fresh marigolds at her feet.
Verna slowed as she always did when she passed the shrine, for respect.
She had no particular devotion to this goddess, whose name had been lost along with her face, but she liked that someone still brought flowers.
The road left the village behind and opened again onto the coastal plain, and Verna let the mare find her rhythm on the flat stones.
She rode for another hour through the low hills where the grasses gave way to groves of olive and then, as the land began to rise toward the next ridge, to vineyards.
Not her own. These trellises were older, their posts darker with age, the vines growing in the slightly different style that the northern estates favoured, canes trained longer and lower to the ground.
She was on Lanath land now.
The gate came into view a short time later, set between two stone pillars topped with carved wheat sheaves, the old symbol of the Lanath family whose first wealth had come from grain before they planted the vines three generations back.
The ironwork was well maintained, painted black, the hinges heavy and clean of rust. A gatekeeper appeared from the small house beside it, recognised her immediately, and pulled the gate open with a bow.
She and her guards rode through into the estate.
It was different from her own. The pale stone of the house and terraced hillside were the same, but it had a view of rolling hills not the ocean.
Where her estate had a loose, layered feeling, Thom's was more orderly.
The paths were straighter, the plantings more symmetrical and the press house was newer, built ten years ago after a fire took the old one.
He produced a higher volume of wine, but not quite the same quality.
The land was well managed and the people who worked it were paid fairly.
Thom rode toward her from the direction of the upper vineyard, having apparently seen her from the ridge. He raised his hand as he approached, and she could see from the looseness of his seat that he was relaxed, unsuspecting and glad to see her.
Her stomach settled with a familiar weight of guilt.
She pulled up her mare and waited for him to reach her.