The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin) (35 page)

In the long, subterranean struggles between the women of the court, she held her own. Someone else might have a more fashionable tailor or hairdresser in any given season, lured away by promises and bribes, but Clara’s was always perfectly respectable, and they didn’t leave her in times of difficulty. As compared with some who thought training servants meant alternating between throwing fits and showering them with praise. She couldn’t count the number of ladies of the court who, one time and another, had managed to throw their own houses and lives into chaos by losing the service of their more competent staff.

And running a household, she supposed, was not so unlike running an empire.

As the long days of summer began to grow short again, she found herself invited to more informal gatherings. Women who had pretended not to know her began smiling or nodding to her when she walked through the more affluent streets of the city. Few went so far as to speak, but some did. The gossip around her shifted from the balls and feasts at the season’s opening, and turned toward the preparations for its end. Clara smiled and laughed and wished people the best in ways that made it clear she didn’t care for them. She fell into the patterns of the woman she’d been for most of her life, and it felt like wearing a mask at a street carnival.

Behind it, she was cataloging everything she heard. Of Geder Palliako’s inner court, Daskellin was far and away the best political mind. His daughter, who had been putting herself in compromising situations with Palliako before he’d been named Lord Regent, had fallen back into propriety. So perhaps Daskellin had gained a better insight into the kind of man Palliako was. Emming was a blowhard who played the gadfly on trivial matters and followed anyone more powerful than he was when the issue had weight. Mecilli was an honest man with a reputation for caution and tradition that most reminded Clara of Dawson. The two would have been friends, except that Mecilli had spoken out against dueling and Dawson had decided the man was a coward. Noyel Flor wasn’t dim, but he was the third generation of his family to be Protector of Sevenpol, and in everything he considered what was best for his city first and the empire as a whole after. Lord Skestinin commanded the fleet, which made him valuable to Geder, but he was also family, now that Jorey and Sabiha were married.

And, of course, there was Ternigan.

The Lord Marshal was an excellent strategist and had more experience commanding in the field than anyone else at court, and perhaps because of his habit of strategic thought, he’d placed himself on the winning side of almost every conflict in a generation. By being the man of talent, he made himself someone to be won over. Someone to be wooed.

And so he also made himself vulnerable.

For Geder to fall from power, he had to be alienated from the best minds in the empire and surrounded instead with charming idiots and the pleasantly incompetent. Knowing what she did of Geder’s temper and distrust, she thought the exercise might not be that difficult. At least not with low-hanging fruit like Bassim Ternigan.

The temptation was to rush. To hurry. To create some crisis out of the whole cloth. The wiser choice was to wait and listen until the world in all its incomprehensible complexity presented her an opportunity, and then to be ready for it. She stayed at court as much as she could, maintained what friendships she had, and tried to keep her private role gathering information as loyal traitor separate from being her sons’ mother.

It was not always possible.

“Having a permanent port on the Inner Sea will change everything,” Vicarian said around a mouthful of roast pork. “There’s rumor that Palliako’s going to send Lord Skestinin there.”

“Well, Father hasn’t mentioned anything to me,” Sabiha said. She was looking better, Clara thought. Brighter about the eyes, easier with her smile. She wasn’t a pretty girl exactly, and all the more interesting for that. “All he’s said is that wintering in Nus will be much more pleasant than Estinport.”

“May just be a rumor,” Jorey said.

“Likely that,” Vicarian agreed. “Honestly, I thought the court was the breeding ground for unfounded guesses spoken as fact, but it’s nothing compared to the seminary. I think it’s because we’re supposed to spend so much time praying that we all get bored.”

“Don’t be impious, dear,” Clara said without any real heat in her voice. “And don’t speak with your mouth full.”

“Yes, Mother,” Vicarian said. With his mouth full.

Though she had known that he might arrive at some point, her middle son’s arrival in Camnipol had been a pleasant surprise. It had occasioned dinners at Lord Skestinin’s manor three nights in a row with the family and a few close friends. Elisia had even come with her child, Corl, but without her husband. Seeing her daughter and grandson had been joyful in a way that Clara hadn’t expected, but even as she cooed over the boy, her other self was noting that dining with Jorey and Sabiha wasn’t too shameful for Elisia’s delicate social sensibilities any longer. It would be interesting to see if the effect outlasted Vicarian’s visit. If so, it would hardly have been a year before Dawson’s treason was being forgotten. Only, no. Not forgotten. Ascribed to someone else. The attempt on Geder’s life and the plot against Simeon and Aster were both hidden assaults by a vast and shadowed Timzinae conspiracy now, and in the process, the truth of the matter was forgotten. It was eerie to watch it happen, but it was also to Jorey’s benefit, so while she could see the rank injustice of it, she couldn’t think it entirely evil.

“I’m not sure you can accuse him of impiety, Mother,” Elisia said. “It’s his newfound piety that brought him, after all.”

“My piety’s not newfound,” Vicarian said. “It’s my appreciation for what it’s going to take to get a placement worth having. Everyone with any power at all is tripping over their toes to study under Minister Basrahip.”

“Is his cult that important?” Clara said. “Why, it seems only yesterday everyone was laughing down their sleeves at it.”

“It’s nearly the only important sect in the kingdom now,” Vicarian said. “Temples are going up in Kaltfel, Asinport, Nus. Now Inentai and Suddapal. And everyone’s assuming Kiaria, once Ternigan’s burned it clean enough for civilized habitation. All of them are dedicated to the spider goddess. Anyone who’s keeping strictly to the old rites won’t be placed there. And there’s talk of converting the temple in Kavinpol. This is the first time Minister Basrahip has taken on initiates from outside wherever he was out in the Keshet. Everyone put in for it.”

“But you got lucky,” Jorey said.

Vicarian grinned, and Clara could see for a moment the boy he’d been at six years old. “May have called in a couple favors for it.”

It was what she had hoped for, of course. After Dawson’s death, she had done everything she could to see that her children were safe, that they had the chance to reinvent themselves in Palliako’s court. She had only lost Barriath, and that to exile rather than death. And yet she sat in the dining hall with the richest dinner she’d enjoyed in months, the windows all opened, and the evening breeze setting the candles to flutter and snap, and her pleasure was tainted by doubt. She felt she was helping her boys scramble up a tree as she cut it down. But that was simplistic. If Palliako fell and a new Lord Regent took his place, the court would still be made from the same people. Rearranged by the rupture, perhaps, as they had been before and would be again.

Still, she could wish that Vicarian had saved his favors for a better occasion.

After the last of the meal was finished, Elisia made her farewells and went off, Corl and his nurse trailing along behind with her guardsmen. Clara wasn’t sure when walking with guards had become normal for members of court, but it was now. Then they sat together in Lord Skestinin’s narrow drawing room. The taste of Jorey’s tobacco reminded her what real leaf was like. She was in real danger of becoming used to the cheap-ground that sold in the alley mouths near the Prisoner’s Span. They joked and played at tiles and cards. Except that Dawson and Barriath weren’t there, it was a perfect evening, and it passed too quickly into night.

When, at last, Clara prepared to make her own farewells, Jorey took her discreetly aside.

“I haven’t been keeping you up with everything,” he said. “I didn’t want to raise hopes if I wasn’t sure. But from the last letters I’ve had, I think Lord Skestinin is going to back me at court. Between his word and Geder still seeming to like me, I think I’ll be able to take on the management of some of his lands while he’s with the navy.”

“That’s lovely, dear,” Clara said, tears jumping to her eyes. “I’m so glad for you. And Sabiha too. She’s … I’m so glad you married her. She seems simply perfect. And by that I mean strong, because strong is so important in a woman’s life, even if no one particularly says it.” She was babbling, words flowing without her knowing what they would be or if she meant them.

Jorey took her hand and pressed something into it. A small cloth purse of the sort she usually took her allowance from him in.

“It comes with a slightly better income,” he said. “Sabiha and I talked about it, and we wanted you to have part too.”

“Oh, I can’t,” Clara said, her fingers curling around the coins. Clutching them. “Really, you mustn’t.”

“I must, Mother. And I will.”

It didn’t help stop the tears. She kissed Jorey’s cheek and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“You are very good to me,” she murmured. “You have been very, very good.”

“I turned you out,” he said.

“Of course you did, dear,” she said, and for a moment, her new self spoke. The woman she was still becoming. “I will always be complicit in what your father did. It’s part of who I am now. Your distance from me was necessary, and it still is. You did right.”

“Still—”

“No, dear. No
still
. No
if only
. What your father did and what I do can’t be part of what you are. Not any longer. Don’t be ashamed of that. If I’d had more strength and wisdom, I’d have gone on my own.”

Jorey looked at his hands.

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” he said. “But thank you for saying it.”

Vincen Coe waited at door to the street, chatting with the door slave and looking in the torchlight like a servant waiting for his master. That gave Clara pause. Treating Vincen as if he were only what he had been before seemed somehow monstrous. And yet what option did she have? She could no more invite a lesser huntsman formerly in her husband’s service to sit at the table with Jorey and Vicarian than she could call Dawson back from the dead. She tried to imagine Vincen sitting in the drawing room with Jorey. Or worse, with Elisia. The familiarity with someone so clearly of a lower class would make her daughter’s eyes explode. She really was more Dawson’s child than her own. Nor would it be a kindness to Vincen to place him in a context in which the gulf between their stations was made obvious.

Sabiha was the one to see her safely to the door, to Vincen’s arm, as was appropriate after all for the lady of the household. She’d done the same a thousand times while Dawson sat in the drawing room with his dogs. Vincen stepped forward, bowing the way he would had he been only what he seemed. Clara had the sudden and powerful impulse to put the young man’s arm around her waist. Sabiha would certainly have been shocked, but she had also stepped outside what women were permitted, and shocked wasn’t the same as scandalized.

“Clara?” Sabiha said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yes, dear, I am. Just lost in my own mind for a moment.”

Sabiha took her hands and smiled into her eyes. Clara smiled back from across a gulf as wide as the Division that only she knew was there. Then the moment passed, and Clara marched off resolutely into the dark streets of Camnipol, Vincen walking a pace behind and to the left, as a good servant would until they crossed the bridge and Clara brought him to her side. Even with his injuries and the time spent recuperating, Vincen’s arm was solid. Clara tried to remember when Dawson’s had been the same, but in truth, he hadn’t. Strong, yes. But Vincen was a degree shorter than Dawson had been, and the proportion of his arm different. Their two bodies couldn’t be mistaken. Vincen was unavoidably and utterly Vincen, and Dawson was gone past all recall. She had mourned him for a year, as best she could when she was mourning everything else and rejoicing in between.

It had been a year, and imperfect as it was, she had done the best she could. Her children were reestablishing themselves in the lives they’d chosen or forged or found.

All around them, the city was preparing for a bad winter. The men and women of noble blood knew that the food would be thin this season the way they knew a particular march, recognizing it by the first notes. The men and women in the streets of Camnipol would be the ones playing the instruments and singing the melodies. For Jorey and Sabiha and even Vicarian, it would be the difference between eating meat every day or only once a week. For Abatha and Vincen, for Aly and Mihal, it would be the difference between eating every day or every other. And as hard as winter would be, spring before the first crops came would be worse. It expressed itself in small ways: the timbre of the voices of begging children, the weariness and resignation in the shoulders of carters, the growing competition for day-old bread. Things she might have lived and died and never have known had only a very few things gone differently.

And instead, here she was, walking through the darkness with this peculiar, unlikely masculine animal at her side. They reached the far side of the Division, passed by the great yellow taproom with the same band of players she’d seen there before in the yard, declaiming to perhaps a dozen people.

“You know that I am entirely too old for you,” she said.

“You’ve said so, m’lady,” Vincen replied as he had before.

“You should find a woman your own age.”

“None of them are as lovely as you.”

She coughed out a laugh. “And I’ll wager you played with fire when you were a boy.”

“M’lady?”

At the mouth of an alleyway she paused, and he paused with her as she had known he would. She put her hand on his shoulder and, before he could grasp what was happening, shoved him into the wall. She felt the impact in the palms of her hands. She only had to bend her neck up a little to reach his lips, and she kept the pressure constant, pinning him in place like a flower pressed in a book. Her mouth opened his, and she bruised him. For a moment, he was too shocked, and then he wasn’t. When she stepped back, he staggered.