Chapter 10 #2
Damona Osprey settled in a chair, accepting the welcome with only a nod. Their sets of Orha collected behind them, framing their mistress and master like a painting.
“Of course,” came Rexim’s smooth reply. “I only hope you’ll convey my warmest wishes and the salient points of our discussion today.
But first—” He tilted his head at Miss Haney, who hurried to the doors and disappeared through them.
A moment later, footmen trooped in, bearing silver trays crowded with china and teapots.
“Come on, then,” said Turnstone, leaning back on the couch. For a man so young, he was confident with his elders. “You know my father’s always been a hard-liner, whereas I’m more inclined to vote for you. So we’ll cancel each other out, unless you can help me persuade him.”
Rexim’s lip quirked. “Well, let me begin by—”
A scrape from the doorway made us all look around.
Miss Haney was back, her face pale as linen. Her thin lips opened and closed a few times. Rexim blinked once and narrowed his eyes. “Yes?” he said softly, with simmering anger.
“My lord,” she breathed, “you—you have another visitor. Visitors, I should say, as there are in fact two of them.”
Rexim froze. The siblings frowned. Catua stretched, trying to peer out of the tall windows. I looked, too—they offered a view of the inner ward—and saw guards bristling under the barbican’s arch.
“Your father?” Rexim said, flashing a glance at Turnstone.
The boy looked horrified. “Surely not—he was abed—”
Miss Haney hurried across the polished marble floor and bent to whisper in Rexim’s ear.
It was the first time I’d seen the Shearwater patriarch look anything less than supremely assured.
He flicked a glance at his offspring, then us Orha, and then at Osprey and Turnstone, hesitating.
His tension, the wound-tight stiffness of his shoulders, spoke of rage he was fighting to hide from his guests, while his darting gaze betrayed uncertainty.
Eventually he waved Miss Haney away. “Well,” he said, his voice now smooth, “send them in. No reason why they can’t join our party. ”
Miss Haney retreated, soles clacking on the floor, leaving silence as thick as a winter muffler.
“A pleasant surprise,” Rexim said through his teeth. “One I shan’t spoil.” He sat back and waited.
A moment later, the doors again opened, admitting, this time, only two individuals.
Though the younger towered over the older, I saw clear similarity in their features.
A father and a son, the older squat and heavy.
Sixty, perhaps—a little older than Rexim—but fit and strong looking despite his years.
He was pale, with reddish hair graying all over.
Plain looking—none of the regalness of the Shearwaters—but as his watery blue eyes raked over the room, I almost shrank away. There was something daunting about him.
And that was magnified tenfold in his son.
A bear of a man, surely six and a half feet, he had deep-black hair cascading to broad shoulders. I suspected his mother might be very beautiful indeed, as although he’d inherited some of his father’s unevenness, his features were arresting. He stared only at Rexim.
“Uirbrig,” Rexim said to the older man. I noted that, this time, he didn’t stand. “To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?”
Damona Osprey’s lips pursed in a tiny smile, while Turnstone’s mouth had dropped right open. Despite still reclining, Emment clenched his jaw, and Catua’s curiosity had turned to bare shock. Llir and Vercha exchanged a glance, their expressions unreadable, though Vercha had paled.
“My goodness,” the man called Uirbrig said, narrow lips quirking. “We didn’t realize you had guests.” He nodded an easy greeting at the siblings, at Osprey and Turnstone; he ignored us Orha.
“Did you not?” Rexim grated, shifting in his chair. “And how do you all do, down at Castle Crake?”
Beside me, Rhianne stiffened, a hitch in her breath.
Crake.
I forced my face to remain neutral.
“We are not quite where we would want to be,” said Crake with a slow smile. “But I think you know that. And yourselves?” He looked at the siblings again. “A handsome family, I’ve always thought so. We do miss your company out there on the mainland.”
A muscle twitched in Rexim’s cheek. Vercha’s eyes flicked to Crake’s hulking son, who studied her impassively, still as a statue.
“If things aren’t going the way you hoped with the vote,” said Catua, “that’s really your problem to try to solve, isn’t it?”
I felt a flash of admiration. Crake also seemed to appreciate the challenge. His eyes twinkled. “Getting right to it, are we? Very well.” He stepped forward, began a slow walk around the couches. The Orha on either side of me tensed.
“I’m here to ask you to stand down, Rexim. Be a good sport. For the benefit of the Queendom.”
I saw this register in Rexim’s eyes. Then he chuckled, glancing genially at his other guests.
“Forgive me, but the Queendom will hardly be best served with a…well, if you don’t mind my uncouth turn of phrase, a warmonger in the Chamber.
” He leaned back in his chair. “A man who once told me we should challenge Breova. Who wants to send nearly all Nenamor’s Orha to the front. ”
My eyes, along with everyone else’s, flashed to Crake.
“Quite right,” put in Turnstone, though he looked somewhat rattled. To Crake, he said, “I read your letter to Father. Are you really proposing to steal land from Breova? And fight them for it when they—understandably—retaliate?”
“They don’t need that land,” Uirbrig Crake said simply. “The Redback Mountains are desolate—just laconite mines. Breova don’t use much laconite anymore. Not since they started coddling their Orha.”
“That’s still no reason to—” Turnstone blustered, then shook his head.
“But look. Like Shearwater said, isn’t it also true you want to funnel more Orha into Annig’s armies, and your own, and Regent Shrike’s?
What about our sets? All the Orha in the mills?
Who’s going to till the fields, clear the mines?
Steer the ships and power the smithies? Who’s going to protect coastal towns from the gales? ”
“It would be temporary,” Crake countered, “until we had the land we need. Mudmouths and Sparkmouths to the front lines out west. Floodmouths and Gustmouths to the navies down south.”
I glanced to my right and caught Mawre’s gaze. Her eyes had widened behind her spectacles. Tigo and Rhianne exchanged a fleeting, somber look. Even the Orha behind Osprey and Turnstone at last seemed to show some emotion on their faces.
“Would you prefer Regent Finch’s reforms?
” said Brigantess Osprey to Turnstone. She sat there, cool and still as a lake.
“Raising the age Orha go to the Institutions to twelve, with only six years of training? Then giving them more choice over their placements? And a day off a week?” She gave a light laugh.
“Of course not,” said Turnstone, his cheeks turning rose. “But—”
“Look,” said Rexim, leaning forward in his chair. “Whichever of us is elected will have the deciding hand—in Shrike’s ambitions as well as Finch’s wild schemes. Understand me: I’m no warmonger, nor a radical. You can trust me to keep all these preposterous ideas out of the Chamber.”
He turned to Crake, who was still pacing slowly. “I’m sorry, my friend. But your journey here was wasted if you really hoped to persuade me to step down.”
“I told you this was useless,” came a flat murmur from the son.
Ignoring him, Crake said to Rexim, “Well, I thought I’d ask.
” Oddly, he seemed, if anything, cheerier, nearly bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“I thank you. You couldn’t have made your position clearer.
Now, I hope you will not turn us away without luncheon, otherwise our trip really will have been wasted. ”
With reluctance, the guests were led through to a parlor, where pastries and sundries soon appeared. I pictured Cook toiling away over the stove, given barely any notice, cursing the Crake name.
Guards had now appeared and flanked Rexim tightly, while Tigo, Rhianne, Mawre, and I were covertly directed to stand behind the family.
Under my breath, audible only to Rhianne, I murmured, “Crake didn’t bring any Orha with him.”
As the visitors engaged in stilted conversation, Rhianne side-eyed me and replied in a whisper, “The son’s a Mudmouth. His father’s general. Iovawn Crake. The only Orha among the Hundred.”
I looked at the younger Crake in shock. Of course, laconite always hummed in our presence, so I hadn’t been able to tell he was Orha. Rhianne must have heard the family discuss it.
My eyes traveled over him. An Orha among the Hundred. I’d never even heard of such a thing. The Hundred despised us, considered us below them, no matter how many pretty words they couched it in, like Vercha’s after the dinner two nights ago.
“Too powerful, too valuable, to be left to their own devices.”
Now I realized it must be possible for our kind to be born into the highest echelons of society. Zennia, after all, had been a wealthy merchant’s daughter. Why not the Hundred? We could pop up anywhere.
“They accept him because his father does,” Rhianne added, turning her head to hide her murmur. “Because he’s the only one. It’s like his niche.”
And, I thought, a man with such power—both political and elemental—must be feared, too.
His towering figure was silhouetted against the window, removed from the others, watching them dispassionately.
Vercha approached him, a cinnamon tart in her hand.
She said something, and his eyes slid slowly toward her.
He replied—something short that made Vercha smirk—and they entered into an inaudible conversation.
Soon Cook stopped sending tidbits from the kitchens, and Rexim cleared his throat, letting the conversation die away. Uirbrig Crake brushed the crumbs from his hands and inclined his head to Brigant Shearwater and his children.
“I’m very grateful for the courtesy of your hall,” he said, sweeping a disquieting look over us. “I’m sorry we couldn’t come to an agreement.”
Turnstone’s eyes flicked from Rexim to Crake. Both he and Brigantess Osprey seemed as eager to leave as Rexim was to be rid of his guests.
“As am I,” Rexim said, flashing eyes at his guards. They moved toward the Crakes, preparing to escort them. “I shall see you out to the gatehouse myself.”
“Let me,” said Vercha, who was already near the door.
Rexim’s face betrayed a flicker of relief as his eldest daughter strode out behind the visitors.
Llir, scrubbing a hand through his tan hair, joined Catua at the window to watch them leave. Emment sat down heavily, a goblet in his hand. “Gods,” he said to his father, “what was that all about?”
Rexim’s sideburns were damp with sweat. He opened his mouth, then seemed to remember we Orha were there. “You,” he snapped at us. “Out. Now.”
As I returned to my chores, I passed Vercha in a hallway. Her eyes were narrowed and her face was pinched in thought.
A man who wants to send all our Orha to the front.
I shivered, remembering Crake’s dangerous smile, the flat stare of his battle-hardened son.
As much as I disliked—almost despised—Rexim Shearwater, after today I was beginning to suspect that the Brigant of Bower Island might be the lesser of two evils.