Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
THOMAS
Advisor had a meeting with High Magelord Gautier. Brief, but they shook hands before he left. Seems like an alliance is forming. Will report. —S to Man in the Mountain
La’Angi Keep
The heavy scroll felt unwieldy in my hands. “How many large paintings?” I asked, trying to make out my lady’s words on the parchment.
“Four,” Jeff said, puffing under the weight of one he was holding by himself.
I glanced at the one in his hands, with its fancy gilded frame bending in his thick paws. “Oi, Cameron, hurry up!” I dropped the scroll and caught the damned thing myself, stabilizing it, feeling sick.
“I had to piss,” Cameron complained, his lumbering walk turning into a tired jog as he approached. “I’m sorry, Tom.” Then, almost instantly, “Sir Thomas.”
“Fuck off with that,” I muttered, too tired for politeness. “If we break this shit, you know who they’ll come for, don’t you?”
“Why didn’t you get a little one?” Cameron complained.
“It’s medium,” Jeff snapped. “Going off the lady’s descriptions. Which’re smarter than you. Having an infected cock is only a problem if you don’t take it to the Healer, Cam.”
“The lady’s trying to source healers, real mage healers,” I put in. “She’ll be paying them a wage to treat everyone.”
“Really?” Cameron asked, pausing and making Jeff snarl as the painting creaked. “Truly?”
“Really truly, if she can pay them.” I waved a hand at the painting. “We’re missing another large.”
“Measure the pile of mediums,” Jeff recommended. “I probably miscounted. Can you imagine needing so much art?”
“It’s ugly, too,” Cameron agreed as they vanished into the treasury.
I went back to the cart repurposed to transport the heavy paintings and got out the knotted rope the lady had given me, re-measuring them until I found the last one incorrectly put in the medium pile when it was, going off our key, actually large.
“What else is it all being used for?” Cameron asked as he reappeared from the treasury, cheeks red and sweat drying under his arms. Hauling so much wealth had been more physically demanding than we’d expected.
Not like we’d had a lot of experience.
“What?” I asked, guiding him to the correct painting. “This one. Ship with three sails.”
“The money she’s taking,” he said, catching the painting as Jeff eased it out.
“To pay you,” I said, irritated.
“No, really,” he complained. “You said she’s paying mages? So, us folks can use them? Kinda like we’re all eating the rich jerks’ food, we’re going to use their mages?”
I regretted saying anything now. “There are no Healers about, but she’s trying to get some, yeah.” I was tired. I knew better than to open my trap when I was tired.
“What else?” he pressed, shuffling backwards and paying me far too much attention.
“I don’t know,” I snapped. “And neither does she.” That was truth. She knew there were problems, but she didn’t know how to solve them right now, so she was gathering the tools she was hoping she could use later.
“Chay said she’s thinking of re-doing the market squares,” bloody Cameron said, and I wandered over with them. “And the park. And also, the gardens, while it’s winter. The old community ones?”
Irritation scratched at me, low in my brain. Did he, just? “I haven’t heard.”
“Sir Chay,” Jeff reminded Cameron, on a grunt. “And he warned us it was all in the planning stages.”
“He said the plans were pretty far along,” Cameron shot back.
I watched as they eased the painting into the specially made rack. If Cameron had mis-stepped even a little I’d’ve bitten his head off. But he was smooth as butter. My irritation only increased.
“For the gardens,” Jeff countered.
“I’m not bad with stone, you know,” Cameron said, stretching out his back. “My old man, he was a mason. I wouldn’t mind helping re-cobble some streets, you know? Something different.” He was looking at me expectantly, as if I could confirm anything.
I couldn’t very well say Chay spends more time with her than I, now, could I? Not without everyone else getting as suspicious as I was.
“Ah, don’t feel bad, Tom,” Cameron said, slapping my back on the way out. “He’s a handsome knight with fancy heritage and a tourney title. Of course she tells him things she doesn’t tell the likes of us, right?”
The irritation in my veins started to simmer in earnest. If Rose and the girls were here, I’d just tell them I’d been with my girls.
Simple, neat, believable. “I’ve heard a lot,” I said, without even lying.
“I’m smarter than to pass it on. I shouldn’t have even told you about the mages.
What if she can’t get one and your cock drops off? ”
Cameron winced. “I’d need to find a new pastime, is what,” he said, on a sigh.
“I hear your pa was a mason,” Jeff put in, helpfully. “Mayhap you could make some statutes in memory of those lost in the plague. And your poor cock.”
“I could do that. Put a good, flared base on it,” Cameron mused, and Jeff laughed.
I ticked off the paintings they transported into the room, fighting against the anger that hadn’t abated with Cameron’s renewed focus on himself.
If this had been the first comment I’d fielded today about how close Chay was with our little lady, I wouldn’t have been tempted to strangle him.
The rest of the paintings stowed and accounted for, I signed off on the scroll, locked the damned room up and farewelled the two of them, going straight to the lady’s rooms. She had only a little time before she was due for her appearance in the mess, and there were plenty who needed her.
That I needed to add to that list didn’t thrill me, but I shouldered my shield, hefted my spear, and went to find her anyway.
I expected her to be pacing and practicing her speeches, the way she so often was. But only Isolde was in the common area, picking up a jug of cordial as if she had all the time in the world. Her blonde curls were perfectly in place, her pretty mouth unsmiling, her eyes flat as a siren.
“Problem?” Isolde asked me, her brows arching.
I hadn’t planned what I’d say. “Is the lady free for a moment?”
The older woman’s eyes flickered up and down my frame, as if measuring my worth.
“She’s on the top level.” She took the jug and led me up the stairs, through the middle level dedicated to the lady’s every day, to the stairs to the top, which hadn’t been used since Audrey’s mother’s furnishings had been brought down.
The irritation had turned to anger. But not at the lady. She didn’t know.
My bad knee burned, and I tried to sift through what I could possibly say to her. You need to give me the same updates you give Chay. That wouldn’t do it.
Easier to beat some sense into him.
The way he’d reached out and put his hand over hers, just before midday after she’d had a run-in with one of the local bigwigs? Where anyone could’ve passed by and seen it?
My head was pounding as the top chamber came into view.
It was a damned miracle my heart didn’t stop when I saw them.
Standing beside one another, they both held a naked sword in their hands. They both practiced a three-move string. They both wore pants. They both had sweat-damp patches between their shoulder blades and beneath their arms.
The edges of my vision went gray.
“Three more,” Chay said to Isolde.
The pounding in my head warped his words, added laughter in.
I remembered the minstrel at the tavern Rose and I had gone to when we only had Sandra.
The roast venison and well-salted gravy that had congealed as the watch stormed the inn’s common room, grabbing the minstrel who’d been singing about the Duchess’s love for the horse-lord, and not the Duke.
I didn’t even think to avert my eyes, so furious was I.
How—how—was that boy’s Blood Oath not melting the flesh off his bones? With the amount of harm he was doing, how was he alive?
“Oh,” the lady said, seeing me. Color flooded her cheeks and finally I was able to yank my eyes away from her clearly defined form. “Hello, Thomas. Is everything well?”
My gaze had settled on Chay, who was sliding that sword casually back into its sheath, as if they did this every day.
And they did. It clicked into place, the times they’d go missing. I thought they’d been stealing kisses for hours every morning and afternoon.
They’d been training?
“She didn’t want to ask you to split your loyalty,” Chay said, swiping some sweat off his face with the roll of a shoulder. “That’s why she came to me.”
I remembered, suddenly, Sandy coming up to me, no more than eight. “I think I want to marry Julius when I’m older, papa. Will that be permitted?”
Julius, who was closer to fifty than he was to eight. Julius, who was known for providing treats he couldn’t afford to the children. Julius, who somehow everyone adored.
I’d refused. Father’s right. And, more, I’d forbade her from lingering with Julius. I couldn’t control what others let their children do, and I couldn’t deal with the man myself. I could stop my girls from being hurt by the predator.
But the lady hadn’t come to me.
“So, you taught her sloppy shield work,” I said, the words popping out before I could stop them.
“What else, son?” All of the other millions of imperfect things the man did flooded my brain, each as inconsequential as the next, adding up to a damning pile of bullshit that’d get anyone else kicked out of the guard for life.
Not this man, though. He was stuck here, and seemed intent to do as much damage as he could in every way I’d never even considered possible.
“It is sloppy,” Isolde drawled. “Drink, Audrey. You need it.”
“I’ll be back in a moment,” Chay murmured, sending the lady a reassuring look as if I was some crazy old man who just needed some well-cooked stew and a nap.
“How do you think the Duke will react to all of this?” I demanded, waving a hand toward the city. “And then to add to our crimes? He once killed a man for sneezing near the Duchess.” My voice shook.
“Best the next Duchess know how to defend herself, then,” Chay said mildly, bending to grab his shield.
The drum of my own heartbeat drowned out everything. I remembered the pallor of one of the servants who’d spoken to a man who’d cleaned this tower after the massacre of her mother and attendants. I remembered the silence of the Duchess’s funeral, broken not even by shuffling steps or sniffling.
“Draw your sword,” I told Chay.
He said something. The gray at the edge of my vision had become swirling snow.
“No,” I said, and the word was soft. I couldn’t see past Sandy’s crestfallen expression. I know you like Julius. “No, you can’t teach what you don’t know, boy. Draw.”
His eyes had narrowed a little, his chin angled upright. Oh, I’d got him in the pride, all right. The young idiot didn’t know the Duke owned that, too.
He was speaking again, shaking his head. But he took the steel from the lady’s hand and swung it to acclimatize to the difference.
He was reassuring her.
I didn’t even lower my shield.
A step back and the butt of my spear swung up, hitting him in the sword-hand without the noise of breaking bones I craved. He didn’t drop it, and he didn’t stagger back.
Damn him for that, too. I wasn’t giving him a moment of credit. One more move. One more move. And his shield was knocked aside. The butt of my spear hit him, hard, in the thigh.
He’d be down, if I wanted him down.
The pounding in my head increased, because I did want him to go down. So help me, I wanted him down and bleeding.
Better him than her.
He just stood there, wide-open, shield hanging off one arm and sword tip on the ground. “Point proven,” he said, as if I wasn’t moments away from gutting him. “So, you teach her shield work.”
It wasn’t about the shield. I clawed for words to express the well of dread I did my best to ignore, as did we all who’d managed to survive this long in La’Angi. “D’you know what happens to weak links?” I demanded. The words sounded far away, half-lost beneath the scream of the storm.
“I will not be a weak link,” the lady said, indignation in her words.
“You will,” I disagreed, the fury draining from me like a bucket being upended.
She looked at me with big brown eyes, full of the impotent rage of youth.
“My lady…you will,” I repeated gently, hating that it had to be me who brought to them this news, hating that I knew beneath that rage was mountains of hurt that’d never, ever crumble.
I didn’t bother looking at Chay. Useless with a shield, but good with a sword.
His link wasn’t the sturdiest, but to do this to her?
To give her false hope and curse her, all at once?
“I’m sorry, my lady.” I bowed, aching with grief.
Eventually I’d mourn them. I was always mourning the truth they were trying to escape.
You couldn’t survive in La’Angi if you held on to fantasies.