Chương 22: The Spat

Mistress Aveline kept them a quarter hour past the bell to lecture a Serrat cousin about wasted mana, so Elara came up the residence stair late, her sleeves still damp at the cuffs. Not that Elara was that attentive in class either. She had spent two lectures composing the rebuttal she should have made in Dorr's office in response to Rook's uppityness. What she came up with was excellent, but it was also a day too late. Seraphine was standing at her door when she arrived. Not alone.

A young man waited half a step behind her, blonde, perhaps two or three years older than Elara, in a good plain coat with a sword worn across the waist. He was handsome in the tidy fashion favoured by portrait painters. His coat fitted well across the shoulders. No scuffs marked his boots, though his sword hand bore the hard ridges of regular practice.

"There you are." Seraphine came forward with both hands out, warm as a hearth.

"I did knock, but your Nessa said you were at practicum, and I thought — well, we would simply wait. It is such a small errand. Elara, may I present Edric Rase." The name took a moment to find its place, and then it did: the lunch, some days ago, the list recited over cold pheasant. A minor lord's younger son. Formal sword instruction. In want of a household position until his elder brother married.

The reference had come through Lady Mera's uncle — the one who supplied part of the Academy's cellar, which Elara suspected was the reason for the connection. She had not agreed to meet him. She had not indicated the smallest interest in meeting him. Apparently, Seraphine had taken silence as permission to arrive with the man in question.

"Lady Elara." Edric bowed correctly.

"An honour. Lady Seraphine speaks very warmly of you."

"Does she," Elara said.

"Iron-rank," Seraphine said, as if continuing a conversation the two of them had been having all along.

"Three years with Lord Hessle's household guard, and the reference is glowing — I have read it myself. No debts, no scandals, no history at all, really, which is rather the point." Her smile turned confiding, sister to sister, and she drew Elara a step aside by the elbow, lowering her voice not quite far enough to exclude anyone.

"And I have thought about the money, because I know that is the true difficulty, whatever you told me at lunch. Mother has always been so stingy when it came to you. So. Let me do this one thing. One hundred and fifty crowns, from my own purse, settled on Master Rook the day the change is made." Elara heard the sum, and then she heard it again. One hundred and fifty crowns in gold.

The advance paid to Cal's company for her abduction — the three pouches sitting in an evidence chest somewhere under registry seal somewhere. Seraphine could have named a hundred. Fifty would have purchased horses, provisions, and months of decent lodging. Instead, she just had to poke the old wound.

"That must be the majority of your savings," Elara said, because it was true. Their family was comfortable, but not exactly wealthy if assessed on the standards of a Great house. It was unlikely for Seraphine to have anything more than two hundred, maybe three hundred (if she had been frugal for some time), Crowns to her name.

"It is nearly all of them." Seraphine let the admission sit, luminous with sacrifice.

"But think what it buys. He should be pensioned, handsomely so no one can say House Vey used the man and discarded him. His service is repaid beyond anything a Bronze could hope for. And the talk stops, Elara. That is worth my savings twice over." Her hand found Elara's wrist, light as a fallen leaf.

"You are grateful to him. Of course you are; he bled for you, and gratitude does you credit. But you share a residence with him. You pay his surety out of your own table. Gratitude worn so long, and so publicly, begins to look like something… less appropriate. I would spare you that. I would spare you that before Father hears it phrased less kindly." Heat climbed beneath Elara's collar.

She opened her mouth to refuse — she had the refusal composed, cool and correct, gratitude for the generosity, regret that it would not be needed — Cal came around the corner of the court. He was walking from the direction of the registry wing, his stride easy, and he checked for half a heartbeat when he saw the three of them arranged at her door. Surprise, possibly. With Cal it was always hard to tell.

His half-lidded gaze went over Seraphine, over Edric, over Edric's sword, and appeared to find nothing in any of it worth the effort of an expression.

"My lady," he said to Elara, with a short correct nod, and walked past all three of them to the door of his own room. He had not looked at Seraphine at all. He had barely glanced at Edric. Edric's colour came up.

"You might at least acknowledge your betters when you pass them, sirrah. If you were better bred you would know that a retainer greets a lady before he—" Cal's door shut. Not slammed. Simply shut, on the middle of the sentence, with a starkly dismissive finality. The silence afterward had texture. Edric stood with the rest of his rebuke still in his mouth and nowhere to put it. And Seraphine — Seraphine was staring at the shut door.

Not with anger, which Elara could have read, or with the bright social injury she deployed so well, which Elara could also have read. She simply stared, unblinking, her face swept clean of everything, and whatever moved behind it did not surface, and Elara found she would rather have seen anger. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. Then it was gone, folded away, and her sister was smiling again.

"Well," Seraphine said lightly.

"You have my offer. Think it over properly — the crowns will keep a few days." She gathered Edric with a glance.

"Ser Edric, come, I promised Lady Mera we would call. Elara. Sister." A brush of cheeks, orange blossom, gone. Elara stood alone at her own door for a moment, holding the memory of that unblinking stare, and could not decide what it meant.

Dinner was stew and yesterday's bread, laid out for four in the sitting room, and Nessa was ten minutes into the mage courts' newest scandal — one of the kitchen boys had supposed impregnated two laundry maids and was later revealed to have bedded a cook as well — when Cal set down his spoon.

"Nessa. Hold that thought." He looked across the table at Elara.

"I mean to resign. A few days from now." Nessa's mouth stayed open around her unfinished sentence. Elara did not move. The words arrived but would not resolve into sense. Resign? She sat with her spoon in her hand like a woman in a portrait.

"What?"

"I've thought it through," Cal went on, in a reasonable tone.

"I'm a needless cost to you. The surety. The review. The talk. Every week I stand behind your chair, I hand your sister a fresh argument, and the Academy another reason to wonder about your judgement. Once I'm gone, the registry returns the hundred marks — I confirmed it with Dorr, that's where I'd been this afternoon. You'd be able to hire someone else without my complications. The questions stop, and your allowance is your own again." He tore a piece of bread, entirely calm.

"I plan on trading Voss and Harl's gear in Asterbridge — the blades and the whetstone will fetch enough for two fast horses and a few supplies. Then i'd south, hard, for Corvane, and take a ship from there to somewhere in the New World with no Guild hall and no reason to have heard of me. Whoever backed the tollhouse won't cross an ocean for a Bronze who inconvenienced them. Probably." After a contemplative pause.

"Hopefully." Mirelle was nodding. Slowly, uncertain, but nodding. Nessa's gaze went from face to face, confused. And Elara sat very still. He had been in the court this afternoon. He had come around that corner from the registry — from Dorr, by his own account — but after that? How long had he been near? The offer had been made at her own door, in Seraphine's carrying almost-whisper. One hundred and fifty crowns. A sum that would set a common man up for life.

She had watched him refuse her own severance in the infirmary, weeks ago, but this was different, wasn't it: he had refused it when leaving was uncertain and meant running poor. Now he had a plan and her sister had priced the alternative. The man she had just begun to rely on had seen this and found that leaving was sensible after all, the moment it paid, and there was some guarantee he might get away with it.

The fuzzy warmth she had been carrying since the salon — the thing that rose in her chest whenever she remembered him turning from Seraphine on that balcony, remembered what he had said, whom he had said it for — went hollow all at once. The hollowness filled with cold.

"When did you decide this?" she said. Her voice came out flat and small.

"Today. Mostly. I've been thinking about it all for a while."

"Today." She set the spoon down with a click.

"This afternoon. After you passed us at the door." Cal paused with the bread halfway to his mouth.

"After I — yes? I'd come from the registry."

"Did you hear us." It was not a question by the time it left her.

"Seraphine. Her offer. Answer me plainly; did you stand around that corner and listen, and is that what you are collecting, Master Rook, when you ride south. Her hundred and fifty crowns." She watched the words land, and watched them fail to register. Cal's brow drew down, confused; he looked at Mirelle, as if Mirelle might translate, and got nothing, and looked back.

"I don't know anything about a hundred and fifty crowns," he said slowly.

"I heard nothing. I saw your sister, a sword in a nice coat, and you, and I wanted my room. What offer?" … He was not lying. Elara wasn't entirely sure, but this was the most confused she had ever seen him. Perhaps she had misjudged. The accusation died in her hands, and shame flickered up in its place. She reached for calm and had nearly gathered it. But underneath the collapsed accusation the fact of it was still there, untouched. No conspiracy. No bribe. He simply wished to go.

He had sat down to dinner and announced it, with his reasons in a tidy row, every one of them about her — her purse, her reputation, her judgement — and not one of them put to her as a question. The cold came back, firmer than before.

"So there is no offer, and no gold, and you are leaving anyway," she said.

"You have decided that I am better off. You have decided what my surety means, and what the talk means, and what I can bear, and what I should want. You have decided all of it." Her hands were folded in her lap where no one could see them.

"At no point in these calculations of yours did it occur to you to ask me for my input on the matter."

"I didn't need to ask." A thread of something ran into his voice at last. Anger. Thin, but there, the first she had ever heard in it.

"I know why you took me on. Pity. It was kind, and I am forever grateful, which is why I want the best for you. You deserve someone who wouldn't—""Deserve." The word came out of her like something breaking off.

"Do you know how many people have told me what I deserve? My whole life, Master Rook, there has been a procession of them, and every one of them delivered the verdict while removing something I wanted. My parents. My siblings. My—" She caught it. Even now, even white with anger, the old training held the door.

"You are simply the latest, and you do not get to be. If you wish to go, then go. But you will stand there and say I am choosing to leave. You will not dress abandonment up as a favour and hand it to me like a gift." The room had gone absolutely still. Mirelle sat with her hands flat on the table, poised on the edge of intervening and visibly finding no place to put a word. Nessa had shrunk against the sideboard. Cal looked at her for a long moment.

Whatever was behind the look, the surface gave it up no better than it ever did. Then he stood, unhurried, the chair scraping back.

"I need some air," he said quietly. He took his coat off the peg and went out. The outer door closed on the sound of the evening bell. Nobody moved. Then Nessa made a small noise, dropped her cloth on the sideboard, and went after him at a run — Nessa, who a month ago had wanted him thrown to the city watch — and the door banged a second time, and Elara sat looking at his unfinished stew.

"My lady." Mirelle came around the table. Her hand settled between Elara's shoulders, light and warm. Perhaps she could have called him back. She could have crossed the room, stopped him from leaving. She could have apologised for the word abandonment. She could have asked him to sit down and explain when leaving had first become easier than remaining. When it finally occurred to her, it was too late. She didn't want him to go. She had only meant to keep him; was that too much to ask?

Quietly, she felt distinctly that she had only driven him further away. The hollow in her chest had grown while she was not attending to it. It sat under her ribs, wide and strange, and it did not feel like anger any longer, and she could not have said what it did feel like"… Elara," Mirelle said hesitantly.

"You're crying."

"I'm fine," she lied. Elara rose before she could hug her.

"I'm going to bed."