Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THOMAS
Warriors are first in, and last out.
—Matri’sion lesson
26th Day of Spring’s Son Moon,
Age of the Locways, Year 272
La’Angi Keep
Knocks on the door after the night’s meal rarely boded well. I eased my grumpy, tired Beatie into Rose’s arms. The transition sparked new energy in the girl’s overtired body. She wiggled insistently.
“Papa,” she moaned. “Papa.”
Knowing it would change to cries for her mother the moment I scooped her up, I scowled and pointed, silently, in the direction of her bed. She sniffed, but at least fell silent, better to avoid waking her siblings.
My bones ached as I shouldered the shield I’d left beside the door, holding the protection with one hand as I opened it up to see who’d summoned me so late.
It was just Kaelson, torch in hand.
“I need to go,” I told Rose, pitching my words to minimize disruption.
“But—” she cut off the protest, burying her face in Beatie’s hair.
“Say goodnight, you bastard,” muttered Kaelson. “There’s no rush.”
I closed the door and returned to the girls who hadn’t got to the bed stage of the bedtime routine. “I’m sorry,” I told them, ignoring the way my knee ground against itself and the pain that speared up my leg. I was lucky to have lived long enough to wear it out.
It was that knee that always hit the stone first when I knelt to my girls.
“It’s okay,” Rose said, glancing toward the door. “You can—”
“It’s Kaelson,” I sighed. She’d know what that meant. Long hours, important work, something he’d trust to me over everyone else. Pressure. But also, that I’d have someone good by my side.
Like I had today.
“Oh.” Her lips wobbled and pressed together. “We’d better go curl up, Beatie. Papa might be a little while.”
“No,” she whined.
“I’ll come and tuck you in, soon as I’m back,” I promised her, then smoothed away her hair to press a kiss to her crown, the way she’d always demanded. “You be a good girl, now, and rest so you can come with me tomorrow to find a fancy milliner. You need new hats.”
“I don’t want new hats.”
“What if they have ribbons?” I asked.
“No.”
“Just go, Tom,” Rose said, and, seeing the girl start to wail, I withdrew. Sometimes less was more.
Beatie’s wails were in my head as I grabbed my cloak and my spear—my new spear—and juggled my shield. I eased out of the door as quickly as I could, finding Kaelson leaning against the wall, staring off into the distance.
“Bad night?” he asked, sympathetically.
“Got Beatie too tired,” I explained, juggling my gear to get the cloak on against the bite of cold that crept off the bay and lingered in the quiet passages this late in the day. “She’ll be fine.” If he’d been a half-hour later…but it was what it was. “What’s happening?”
“Let’s walk.”
I fell in beside him, grateful that his pace wasn’t as brisk as usual. He led us away from the lady’s tower, toward the garden.
Following Kaelson was something I’d done without thinking for a long time. I was glad I’d had the privilege.
“I’m glad it was you, today,” I told him, in case he needed to hear it. “Sorry for you, but glad for me and mine.”
“Yours are mine,” he told me. “I was just following the lady’s bidding. She’s lucky. And clever.”
“A good combination.”
“An excellent one,” he agreed.
We settled into silence again, walking through empty corridors without lit torches. He found his way better than I did through the catacombs of the northern part of the keep, taking us out through a small servant’s door into a quiet part of the garden all greens and shadows.
I shifted my grip on my spear but followed along where he led us.
Toward the sea wall we went. The clouds sat low, and the light was poor.
Along that wall there were no torches. We should’ve had the watch out, of course, but we’d long since had to give up on should and focus on must. For now, we were surviving.
There were people filtering in every day, in twos and threes, or a few family groups that had travelled alongside one another.
Need for order, or at least symbols of order, was increasing.
Kaelson looked up the stone steps to the top of the sea wall and sighed. “I’d planned on going up there.”
The steps weren’t in wonderful order. This part of the gardens was half wild. Some of the steps had sunk, others lifted. It’d hold, of course, but it’d take a bit of navigating.
Kaelson stuck the torch in the ground and eased himself down with a sigh. He adjusted where his sword sat, not to make it easy to draw but for comfort.
Taking his cues, I set down my shield to wrap my cloak closer, leaning against the stone to take some pressure off my bad leg.
“Those cutthroats who escaped today,” he said. “We tracked them down. All of them.”
He said it as if it was bad news, so I waited for the rest.
“They’re dead. Close as I can figure, to the last man. Thirty-one of them. Strewn from Big Wig hill to the docks to one just inside the Outer Eastern gate.”
A chill went up my spine. “How?”
“Arrows, mostly. A few stabbed, but mostly arrows.”
For a moment I could feel the horse between my knees, the women racing ahead, moving like they were just another part of the beast. Bows in their hands.
Audrey had been shaken.
There was only one person who could’ve done that.
Still… “Did their own people get them?” I asked.
Kaelson looked at me reproachfully.
He knew.
I blew out a breath, sinking down. He’d known since the looters were massacred. It changed nothing.
With a sigh, he withdrew a knife from behind his hip. The sheath was plain.
My heart started to sink, a slow fall as I reached out one hand, incapable of doing anything else.
The compassion in his eyes as he waited for my joints to grind into motion, for my aching fingers to curl around it, almost undid me.
His own hands had signs of his age. The grip around the sheath showed knuckles that were larger than they’d once been, skin hanging the way it hadn’t when we were young. Somehow, time had just vanished.
Yet, we still earned our keep. More than.
The sheath was warm from his body. I drew the knife out a short distance. Just far enough to see the silver blade within.
Not steel. Silver.
“She’s not a worg.” I slid it home.
“You don’t have to break your oath,” he told me. “I know you’re loyal to the lady. So am I. But we both know who they’re loyal to. I want you to have it. Just in case. I figured, any closer, she might hear us.”
My heart kept on sinking.
“She doesn’t wear silver,” I reminded him, hoping I could avoid revealing secrets that weren’t mine.
“Where we can see it. She’d be daft to. The Duke would spot her leagues away.”
“When the worgs attacked—”
“Warring factions.”
I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder. “She isn’t a worg, Kael. I promise.”
As he studied my expression, I felt sick at the realization of how worried he’d been and for how long. He’d never asked me, though. He’d never put me between my oath and my family.
“She’s Matri’sion,” I said, the words coming all too easily.
From the way he drew a sharp breath in, I realized the thought had never occurred to him. It probably wouldn’t have occurred to me, either, if Chay hadn’t been so blunt with it.
“The Duke can’t know,” Kaelson said, the words a prayer. “He can never know.”
“How can we avoid it, with the way she keeps sticking her neck out so publicly?” I asked, bitterness creeping into the words. “Come on. No one’s hearing anything. Let’s get back inside.”
“The Wife’s tits, Tom, she’s fucking Matri’sion?”
I tossed the knife back to him. “Where’d you get that?”
“Saved my life north of Wolfswail,” he said, the words so breathless, so quick, I couldn’t not believe him. Instantly, I saw him struggling to regain what he’d let slip. “It’s a good knife. They’re slippery, Southerners. One got too close.”
He’d been toe to toe with a worg, and I’d never heard of it.
“It’s okay.” I offered him a hand up, levering him from the step. “’Tis a night for secrets.”
“You know I’m good with ’em,” he muttered. “And…I know you are, too.”
I just nodded. As I walked, I kicked my heart around between my feet. The cold crept between the threads of my cloak and up under the hem. I braced against it.
“The lady almost stabbed me in the chest earlier. Never thought it’d be the heir’s hand on the blade that killed me, let me say. Made me feel quite off-balance. Even after watching her practice her footwork while she was distracted. She’s getting good.”
I glanced at the keep crouching below us, its arms thrown out to snatch up the lower parts of the cliff to hold in its stony grasp. “Chay’s been teaching her.”
“Chay?” he demanded, coming to an abrupt halt that hurt my knee to replicate. “Not Isolde?”
“Both,” I admitted.
“Chay? After we put the fear of the Son into him?”
“Pretty sure. He’s keeping his hands to himself, at least.”
Kaelson muttered something I opted not to hear. Then, louder, “Why teach yourself to be a soldier when we need a general?”
I couldn’t admit that I’d never thought to ask that. “She’s a lady.”
“Too late for that, isn’t it?” he asked me. “But we can still steer her true, Tom.” He blew out a hard breath. “Matri’sion. By the Son’s unwashed ballsack, Tom. Matri’sion?”
“Careful,” I warned, working not to peer into the shadows around us. “She’s not a worg, but she may as well be.”
“I think I’d prefer it if she was,” he said, tossing the silver knife from one hand to the other. “I know how to take them down.”
I wasn’t going to be the one to explain to Kaelson that Isolde wasn’t someone we’d ever need to take down—she was here to stay.