The King's Blood(142)

“You have always been very kind to me, Lady Kalliam,” Issandrian said. “Even when your husband was hoping for my death. I have very little influence anymore, but what I have is yours.”

“Thank you,” Clara said.

After the first, the rest were easy, or if not easy at least inevitable. If she could go begging to Curtin Issandrian, surely her cousin Erryn Meer would be simple to appeal to. And the women she’d had for needlecraft demonstrations, and the poetry group that Lady Emming had arranged, and so on through the city and through the court and through her day.

She was no stranger to these sorts of little informal audiences, but she’d always been on the other side. Offering sympathy with cookies and support without promises. The form was familiar. The only change was the role she played and the stakes she played for.

Elisia, thankfully, had already shed the Kalliam name. Safe in the bosom of Annerin, she could still be seen in court and her position was secure. Vicarian was less secure, but still better than he might have been. He’d been out of Camnipol for the trouble. He hadn’t served in the field. His loyalty was to God and the priesthood of the kingdom. He would have to renounce Dawson, but as long as he did, he should be safe.

Barriath and Jorey were in the greatest danger, and so she concentrated her work there, doggedly calling on everyone she knew, everyone she could think of who might still accept her socially. Anyone to whom she had once been known. She used all those past moments of grace and unnecessary kindness as a tool now. And like any untested tool, sometimes it would work as she hoped. Other times it would fail under strain. She might never know which was which. Nor did it matter, so long as her children were safe.

She stopped at the beginning of evening meals when she could no longer politely intrude uninvited and found a small baker’s shop that sold yesterday’s rolls with sausages and black mustard and beer. She reached for her pipe again and put it away cursing under her breath. She would have to find a way to afford a bit of tobacco. And for that matter, a bit of food. And whatever shelter she could manage after Lord Skestinin’s hospitality came to its inevitable end. One didn’t take in the wife of a traitor indefinitely. If Barriath became commander of the fleet or Jorey won a war in the field, she might remake herself as the mother of a respectable man. But for the future that she could imagine, she was doomed to be her husband’s wife.

For a few minutes, sitting at the little stall with its splintering wooden tables and unsteady chairs, she let herself stop smiling. She was lost now, and emptied in a way she hadn’t ever imagined she would be. Her marriage, her family, the small and peaceable intrigues of the court, and Dawson with his archaic love of duty and his blindness to the inconsistencies of his application of it. Those had been her life since she’d left her own mother’s house. She hadn’t built that life, but rather grown in it.

Now she felt like a flower plant that had been dug up gently and washed in water. She wasn’t injured precisely, but her pale roots were all exposed. If she couldn’t find soil, that would be enough to kill her. She knew it like she knew the sun would rise and the autumn would come.

And the center of it all was the powerful absence of Dawson Kalliam. The man who had loved her better than he had understood her. The constant in her life. She could still remember what he had looked like the first night she’d kissed him. The way he’d hidden his fear behind chivalry and she’d wrapped hers in modesty until she was more than half certain neither of them would do anything, and they would sit in that garden, aching for each other until the earth itself grew old. He’d been young and handsome. The best friend of Prince Simeon. And who had she been? The girl that his father had chosen for him. The marriage arranged before either of them had had the chance to refuse it.

She wondered if there might have been something that she could have done that would have changed his course. She wanted there to have been something. If all this disaster was her fault, at least she would have had some control. But it was a fantasy. There was no dinner party or distracting conversation that would have reconciled Dawson to being ruled by Geder Palliako’s priests. Stones would fly like birds first.

It had been inescapable. And even if there had been something, it was gone now. She sighed and took a bite of the sausage. Too much gristle and oregano, but otherwise perfectly acceptable, and the black mustard hid an abundance of sins. She wept quietly while she finished her little meal and beer, then gathered herself, regained her smile, and returned to the world. She was heartbroken, and she would be for a very long time, but she needn’t be ineffective.