She couldn’t bear to look up at him and see the relief in his face, so she continued to study her cup, struggling to breathe, wondering if he might have spoken and she’d not heard him for the thunderous rush in her ears.
The silence was even more awkward now. Just when she thought she could bear it no more, he spoke. “I’m sorry, my lady. I didn’t—” He cleared his throat, then said more evenly, “It was never my intent to make you uncomfortable.”
He paused, as if waiting for her to speak. When she didn’t, he set his cup on the tray between them and said softly, “Well, as you say, I have much to do this morning. If I may have your leave?”
“Of course.” She forced herself to look up at him and smile, desperate that he not see how deeply his easy acquiescence had hurt her.
The Inn of the Gilded Ram stood at the corner of River and Cantor Streets south of the palace at Fannath Rill. A well-known and respectable establishment, it offered good food, good ale, and a clean, well-ordered environment. A huge stone hearth and multiple levels sporting candle- or kelistarlit nooks where clients could dine in relative anonymity gave it its distinctive character. So did the cadre of musicians that performed evenings for the inn’s customers, mostly well-to-do riverboat traders and their local merchant counterparts, meeting over dinner or mugs of ale to negotiate their deals or exchange the latest gossip.
Fortunately their gossip, unlike that at the palace, dealt more with how the river was flowing through the Silver Cataracts these days, where the price of wool was likely to head that summer, and of course news of the ongoing war to the south. The inn’s patrons were only idly interested in the pregnancy of the deposed queen of Kiriath and could care less about the controversy regarding the child’s patrimony.
Tonight the place roiled with tales of the recent Esurhite offensive to take the island of Torneki. Lying several leagues off Chesedh’s southeastern coast, it was home to some of the richest men and finest villas in all the known world. It was also a key port for the Chesedhan navy, and thus of strategic importance in defending Peregris and the vulnerable mouth of the Ankrill. Maddie’s brother, Leyton, had been defending it against repeated Esurhite assaults for months.
Maddie had heard a bit of this up at the palace earlier that day, most of it smothered by the other juicier gossip surrounding her pregnancy and damped by a cultural more that insisted Chesedhan noblewomen were too delicate to endure hearing the details of war and too stupid to comprehend the politics behind it. Here at the inn, ironically, that same belief manifested in a looseness of the tongue before the table maids, as if they weren’t even there. With no concern whatever for female sensitivities, the men exchanged gory details of stories that might not even be true. It was the entire reason she had taken up her charade her as a serving girl.
As she set the first of four plates of seared catfish onto the polished oak table, the men seated there were already deep in conversation on that very topic.
Inevitably she finished doling out plates before she’d heard all she wanted to, and had to move on to the adjoining table, where the six men seated there sent her off to the kitchen for tankards of ale and, afterward, slices of bullock with plump dough puddings. When she returned with those, she noted that Trap Meridon, whom she’d been expecting, had come in while she was in the kitchen and had settled himself in a corner booth not far from where she stood. Once she’d set out her current order, she went back to the kitchen, drew a tankard of cider, and returned to his table. He was lounging back against the booth wall, watching the diners at the tables in the lower level, and when she set the tankard before him, he looked up at her.
Weariness etched his freckled face and darkened his brown eyes.
“Alone tonight?” she asked, surprised and disappointed, for she’d expected him to bring Carissa.
“For now,” he said, grimly. “Hamilton will be joining me later.”
“Hamilton?” She frowned. “Did you even ask her?”
“Aye, ” he said shortly. “She didn’t want to leave Conal.” But from the pain that flared across his face, she guessed there was more to it than that, and knew better than to probe further. Bad enough she’d goaded him as hard as she had into asking. . . .
Usually she twitted him by inquiring if he’d like the mutton stew, though she knew very well he loathed it. Tonight she only asked if it would be the usual, and when he said yes, she headed back to the kitchen for the bullock and an extra helping of the puddings he always ordered.
It seemed the day hadn’t been any easier for him than it had been for her. His expression had brought back memories of the hideous breakfast she’d started her morning with. Her brother’s wife, Crown Princess Ronesca, had certainly possessed an ulterior motive for her invitation, starting in on all of the things she found wrong with the First Daughter from the moment they’d sat down. Maddie’s lack of religious propriety and dedication, her failure to cultivate the proper people socially, her ongoing weakness in continuing to mourn a husband who was dead and gone were becoming inexcusable. Brutally, Ronesca had informed her that Abramm was not coming back and six months of grieving was quite enough time to get over his loss.
She was even worse with regard to the pregnancy, faulting Maddie for not having come to her the moment she’d known of it so they “could have dealt with it efficiently and discreetly.” When Maddie had reacted with heated outrage to the crown princess’s suggestion of using her physician’s special potion to take care of the thing, Ronesca had only shaken her head in exasperation.
“Madeleine, where is your brain? You must know you’ll have to remarry if you have any hope of living the sort of life to which you are entitled. I was hoping it would be within a year of your bereavement—we could use the opportunity to strengthen the power and influence of the royal house. And your father’s treasury cannot withstand much longer the drain you and your retinue are putting on—”
“Me and my retinue?” Maddie had burst out incredulously. “I have ten people, Your Highness. Are you telling me I have to pay rent? In my own father’s house? Fine . . . Or I can find my own residence if you prefer. But I will not be remarrying anytime soon, let alone within the year. And I will
not
be getting rid of my child!”
She’d left on a high hand, so angry she was shaking. For a while she’d stormed about the palace in a fury. She was the First Daughter! How dare Ronesca speak to her like that! How dare she suggest such things as she’d suggested! The woman was not even of royal blood, nor were her precious sons, offspring not of Leyton Donavan but of her first husband, the count of a minor noble house.
Ronesca was, however, born of the House of Harvadan, one of the oldest of the Chesedhan lines, and it was that fact that finally drained off Maddie’s anger into uneasiness. Maddie might have supporters in the palace on account of her royal blood, but Harvadan had power in its own right. As well as a longstanding antipathy to all things Kiriathan. A legitimate child of Maddie’s—as time would reveal this one to be—would trump any claim Ronesca or her two sons made upon the throne.
What if she decided to take matters into her own hands? A potion could easily be slipped into someone’s food or drink to do its work before anyone realized it was there. The pregnancy would be terminated with no one to blame. The thought so spooked Maddie, she ate nothing in the palace all afternoon and had taken her evening meal at the inn just after she’d arrived.
When she returned from the kitchen to set Trap’s food before him, he gestured at the empty stools before the hearth on the lower floor. “Where’re Kyra and her boys tonight?”
“Entertaining in the back room. Some ‘esteemed gentleman’ who’s fled his villa on Torneki is holding court there. His men came in this afternoon to set things up. They’ve erected a tent in the big dining hall, and he’s brought at least sixteen attendants. The cook staff is all aflutter, and, of course, Serr Penchott is quite pleased to entertain a man of such wealth and nobility. . . .” She trailed off, watching as a glistening brown staffid crawled over the table’s far edge and slithered toward Trap’s plate.
He killed it without even looking, his Light-thread sending it into convulsions a handspan from his plate as he asked, “Does he have a name, this gentleman?”
“I get the impression he didn’t give it.” Maddie pulled the folded rag she used to clean up spills from her waistband and wiped up the spawn as if it were no more than the foam off a tankard of ale. “Everyone just calls him ‘our esteemed guest’ or ‘the gentleman from the south.”’
“What’s he look like?”
“I don’t know. Mace and Lindie are taking the shift.”
“What?!” Trap leaned back to regard her with raised brows. “Snoop that you are, I’d have thought you’d be first in line for that duty.”
“I would’ve, but I got here too late—thanks, I might add, to a certain someone who insisted I wait for my ‘cousin’ to walk me over here!” That had been Lieutenant Whartel, one of her personal guard.
Trap shook his head and sliced into his bullock. “You take your ability to fool people far too seriously, and your safety not seriously enough, my lady.”
She frowned at him for the deliberate slip in his mode of address. “And you take everything in the world too seriously, sir.” She jerked up her chin. “Anyway, when there’s a party like that, it’s difficult to argue the other girls out of the kind of coin they’re likely to receive. Let alone the notoriety that’ll come from serving our esteemed but very mysterious guest.”
“Mysterious indeed. I wonder what he’s hiding.”
“Maybe he’d just like to travel relatively unnoticed—having just been driven from his home and all.”
“Generally folk who desire not to be noticed don’t travel with sixteen attendants and set up their tents in the dining halls of middle-class inns. He must be Sorian, though, if he’s got a tent, so I suppose you wouldn’t be able to understand their talk anyway.”
She sniffed. “With all the news breaking in here, I’m quite happy where I am, thank you.”
Movement at the corner of her eye drew her attention to one of the diners down the row from her, lifting his empty mug at her and wagging his bushy brows. “I’ve got to go.”
In the kitchen Mace and Lindie were arguing over who would bring the platter of bullock kabobs and rice balls, and who would bring the mulled wine. Lindie looked unusually distressed—pale, sweating, and dark around the eyes. Perhaps she was coming down with something. Maddie considered offering to take her place but, recalling what she’d just said to Trap, decided she’d rather hear the latest on the battle at the front. Besides, they were nearly done. As the two went off with platter and tray, she ladled mutton stew into a bowl, balanced a rasher of bread atop it, refilled the tankards from the bushy-browed man’s table, and carried it all out into the common room.
She had just delivered the stew and was stopping to hand out the refilled ale mugs when the front door burst open. Three men in heavy greatcoats blew in on a gale of cold wind that ignited shouts of protest from the diners even as the newcomers recaptured the door and slammed it safely shut.
Moments later, the leader among them was recognized as a barge captain just arrived with a load of wounded soldiers from the front, and the place convulsed with excitement. He was ushered immediately to the lower floor, where table and chairs were shoved into the place normally reserved for the musicians, and there he held forth with his news.
“Now, I can’t say any of this for sure, since they all had different tales, but the gist is, Crown Prince Leyton is said to have had some sort of talisman that he claimed would clear away the mist so our cannon could fire.”
As his words penetrated, Maddie’s heart seized. A talisman to drive away the mists?
“He planned to draw the enemy in around Torneki, then use the talisman to drive off the mist while our gunships, waiting hidden on the Chesedhan side of the isle, came round to blast them all to pieces.”
Just like on the Gull Islands
. As the captain continued with the details, her eyes went inexorably to Trap, who watched the man white-faced and tightlipped. It had been two years since Leyton visited them in Springerlan. . . .
No! I cannot believe that. I will not believe it. Not until I hear it from his lips. . . .
Whatever Leyton had, it hadn’t worked. The mist hadn’t cleared, and the Esurhite galley commanders, apparently understanding the plan themselves, had slipped around the island and brought their vessels in close under the hulls of the waiting gunships before the Chesedhans even knew what was happening. Southlanders had swarmed like termites across the decks, leaving the Islanders to beat back the horde they themselves had invited in. Leyton and his men had been cut off. Hadrich had taken one of his own galleys to the island to rescue him. And had been wounded in the effort—though not seriously, according to the barge captain.
“Molly!” Her employer’s voice hissed into her awareness, her assumed name registering belatedly. “Stop yer gawking and get into the kitchen! They need ye there.”
She almost told him to mind his own business and leave her be, but she caught herself and hurried to the kitchen. Lindie now slumped on the bench beside the back door, glassy-eyed and shivering even as she insisted she was fine—she just needed a minute to rest.
“We don’t have a minute!” Hulet, head of the serving staff, cried. When she still refused to move, he cursed her vigorously for her weakness, then the esteemed gentleman for his bad timing, and finally the kitchen itself, just because. Then he ordered Maddie to take the sick girl’s place.
Irritation washed over her, and again she nearly refused.
“When you’ve delivered the trays,” Hulet said, “don’t forget to refill the wine glasses. Mace is already in there.” He turned away and spoke to another. “They’ll be wanting their coffee soon. How are you coming with that?”
Sighing, Maddie balanced the tray of stuffed dates on one hand, the platter of honeyed pastries on the other, and set off. The esteemed gentleman was set up in the Nobility Room, on the far side of the Gilded Ram’s inner courtyard. The servants’ entrance was at the back. Balancing her trays, she shouldered the door open and stepped into deep darkness, the air warm and heavy with incense. For a moment she could hardly breathe, for it pressed about her like thick cotton and resisted her attempts to drag it into her lungs. As the door swung shut behind her she felt as if she were falling down a well. Then the air rushed into her lungs and the feeling passed, as did the darkness. With her eyes adjusted, she saw the room was merely dimly lit.