Chapter 11

Rhea’s POV

The noise had kept me awake.

After dark, more horses came through the gate than the household had room for. Torches moved along the top of the wall, and men shouted for boys to take the bridles.

Tessa went down for water at some hour of the night and came back saying there was a party from the court — that the north wing had been opened, that the kitchen had been told to find bread for thirty more people than they had expected, and that the servants were already complaining about it.

By morning their banner hung out over the outer wall.

I could see the corner of it from my bed, and past it the backs of unfamiliar horses standing where the household's horses usually stood.

By midafternoon, the yard was full.

Through the shutters came the sound of them still: hooves on packed dirt, a man calling out orders in a clipped voice, the scrape and thud of something heavy being shifted toward the east gate.

Tessa was folding the dried laundry at the foot of her bed.

She looked up when I slid the blade home and pressed the sheath against my hip to check how it sat.

"He let you carry that into his study?" she asked.

"He let me into the training yard." I stood and rolled my shoulder until the strap settled into place. "Yesterday I said I'd be there and I couldn't get up off the bed. Today I'm going."

I turned to the window and looked at myself in the cloudy glass, and pulled my collar straight, and then walked out.

When I arrived at the yard, six men stood about it with their hands behind their backs while a clerk went through a crate and wrote in a book.

The blades had been taken from the rack against the wall and stacked under sacking.

Owen was there with his arms folded, and he told me the captain hadn't been down since before midday, that the deputy had run the drill and cut it short at that.

Then he nodded at the men by the crate.

"Court's party," he said. "Came in last night with the whole train. Here to inspect the recovered arms themselves and put their own seal on the ledger, so the story goes. That's why the blades are under sacking — nothing gets touched while the man's got his book open."

He shifted his weight. "There are others with them who aren't from court. Gentry. Guests, they're calling it."

Then he glanced at the knife on my hip.

"Captain's in his study," he said. "But I wouldn't count on him having time."

I stood in the gateway with my hand resting on the grip and looked at the worn patch of dirt by the post.

Nobody had swept it. The wind had swept loose sand over it in long, shallow lines, and the whole yard smelled of the delegation's horses instead of ours.

I went up the stairs.

The study door was shut.

The guard on the left told me the captain had been with the delegation since early in the day and that he couldn't say when the captain would be free.

I told him I'd wait for the next rotation.

He moved a step and a half closer to his post and stayed there.

He seemed to be watching the corridor, and me along with it.

I leaned against the opposite wall and settled in to wait.

The knife pressed into the muscle of my right hip whenever I shifted my weight, so after a while I brought it round to the front, and then found that worse and pushed it back behind me.

The corridor was high and cool, quiet, though I could not relax.

A woman went past with a basin. Two men went past with a banded crate between them that they carried as though it were full of eggs.

The shadow from the far window stretched across the floor, growing longer and thinner until it faded altogether.

Somewhere down the passage a lamp was lit, and the smell of oil drifted toward me.

By the second change of guards I had counted the men twice.

By the third change I had stopped counting and started hearing my own breathing against the stone.

An old servant slowed on his way past and stopped, his expression cautious.

"The captain won't see anyone today," he said, not unkindly. "Not with the whole delegation in the house."

I stayed where I was, and then I pushed off the wall.

My left leg had gone numb below the knee. I put my hand flat against the stone and waited until I could feel it again, then started back toward the west wing.

I took the side corridor. It ran behind the east wing, past the gallery, where the door stood half open as the evening lamps were lit.

I was already past it when I heard a name clearly through the gap.

Fenwick.

There were five or six of them inside, all talking over one another.

Woodsmoke drifted through the gap and mingled with the smell of lamp oil in the corridor.

Past the hinge I could see a dark coat, the end of a table, a cup set down on it.

Candlelight on good clothes, and easy, quiet laughter.

"Celia, the Fenwick girl, and after all this time one does wonder what the delay was."

The rest of it went under a general murmur and somebody's short, pleased laugh.

Past the dark coat, across the whole width of the room, I could see Adrian standing with three men near the far window, a cup held loosely at his side.

One of the three put a question to him.

He looked down at the cup, and then he said, loudly enough for his voice to carry across the room, "That matter is one for my father and the Fenwick house."

Somebody near the door laughed again, warmer this time. "Well. A Blackwood has to have a mistress of the house sooner or later."

I looked down at my hip. The knife was there, my fingers above the grip, close enough to feel the cold metal of the pommel, and I didn't remember putting them there.

Then I dropped my arm and went back up the corridor the way I had come.

It was colder out there than I'd expected.

The room had gone grey.

Torches were going up in the outer yard, and the first of them threw a moving bar of light across the ceiling that shifted whenever the wind got at it.

I pulled the knife out of the sheath and turned it once and hung it from the nail above the headboard.

Tessa looked at the wall, and then at me.

"Do noble houses have to marry into other noble houses," I asked, "for a contract like that to hold?"

She put her needle down. "Why?"

"Because I want to know who ends up holding the paper." I went to the shelf where we kept the jug. "And whether they can call it off. If one house stops being worth much to the other."

"My aunt had a written betrothal agreement," she said. "Witness and seal and her name written in. Then the man's father died owing money, and it was called off before the season was over, and nobody took the agreement to court. It was just understood."

She picked her needle back up. "That's a smith's family. A house with a name does it the same way and only writes it down twice."

"So the paper doesn't hold them."

"The paper's for the day it suits them." She drew the thread through.

The jug was empty when I lifted it, and I stood holding it a moment before I set it down again.

The knock came a short while after — two quick raps, businesslike.

I got to the door first and opened it the width of my hand.

A young man of the household staff stood in the passage with a lamp in one hand and his other arm folded across his middle, holding his cuff.

The captain sent his apologies, he said. The delegation had kept him all afternoon, and he had failed to send word about our appointment. He wanted to know whether I would come another day.

I looked at him. He waited, patient.

"Another time," I said.

He nodded, said he would let the captain know, and went off down the passage with the lamp throwing his shadow up the wall ahead of him.

I shut the door as his footsteps receded, then turned and looked at the knife hanging from the nail above the bed.