She walked for most of the morning, stopping at half a dozen houses, and hoping without reason to hope that by her presence she could force the world to open a place for her boys.
When, near midday, she returned, feet aching, to Lord Skestinin’s house, the fight was already under way again.
“I’m a sailor,” Barriath shouted. “I could drink three times that and be more sober than you are waking up.”
She was accustomed to the sound of fraternal battle, but the voice Jorey spoke in now was low and cold and unfamiliar.
“You’ve disrespected my wife in her own home,” Jorey said. “You have to leave.”
Clara walked through the hall, her spine straight. Not here too. She could stand to fight the world, if she had to. She would endure the pain of waking alone in her unfamiliar bed with the echoes of her husband’s death still in her ears, but she couldn’t do it all here too. There had to be one place—one—where she could rest and draw strength. If it wasn’t her family, she didn’t know where it could be.
“I’m not staying,” Barriath said as she stepped into the room. “Wouldn’t do it on a bet. But take it clear, I’m not the one looking down on Sabiha. She’s your wife and so she’s my sister, and it’s her fairweather friends you’re talking to. Not me.”
Both her boys turned to her.
“What,” Clara said. The exhaustion in her voice weighted the word so heavily that it was all she could manage. “What?”
Jorey looked to his brother, then down. When he spoke, his jaw was set forward. It was something Dawson had done too. Clara wondered whether it was the boy imitating the man, or if there was something in the blood that would have made Kalliam men do that even if they’d never met.
“Sabiha arranged a garden party,” Jorey said. “A half dozen of her old friends. Some that had stayed by her even through the… last scandal. They all sent regrets.”
“And he’s blaming me,” Barriath said. “I wasn’t rude. I didn’t track these girls down and tell them to turn their backs on Sabiha.”
“You didn’t need to,” Jorey said. “Everyone knows we’re here.”
“We’re not,” Barriath said. “You are, but I’m elsewhere. I’m sorry, Mother.”
She wanted to ask where he was going. How she would reach him. All the thousand questions that would have let her keep some semblance of family together. But she was too tired, her mind too scattered. He brushed past her as he walked out the door, and she felt like the motion of his passing could have knocked her over. Jorey hadn’t moved. His face was pale and pained. Sabiha had appeared at his elbow.
“Mother, this isn’t going to work.”
“It will,” she said. “It’s only hard now, but it will work. Barriath is in mourning. We all are. You have to treat him gently.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “You said that you wanted me to be to Sabiha what Father was to you.”
“That’s right. I want that.”
“Father put you ahead of everyone. Everything. If you’d asked him to, he would have done anything. There was no limit.”
“That’s true, I think,” she said, but Jorey was shaking his head. Tears flowed down his cheeks the way they hadn’t since he was a child. Not even on the terrible day when Geder had killed her husband.
“I can’t do this,” he said, and then again, more softly. “I can’t.”
“I will,” Sabiha said, and put a hand on Clara’s shoulder. “Please. Come sit with me for a moment, my lady.”
Clara let herself be led to a window seat. Sabiha sat beside her, holding her hand. The girl looked thinner. And not just in her face and body. For a time just after the wedding, there had been joy in her. A hopefulness born of seeing the changes that her new reputation brought. That was gone now, and Clara knew why. She knew, almost, what Sabiha was steeling herself to say. The words that had defeated Jorey.
“We love you,” Sabiha said, “and we will always be your family, but you need to leave this house.”
It was strange. Clara actually felt the words cut into her. It was a physical sensation at the neck and heart.
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s hard enough for Jorey alone,” Sabiha said, her fingers pressing Clara’s hand. “But everyone saw him when he renounced Lord Kalliam. They’re willing to give him a chance. Well, some of them are. But you didn’t speak. Bar riath didn’t. And truly, even if you had, my lady, no one can see you without seeing your husband too. You were too much the same thing, and even with him gone, you carry him with. You see that, don’t you? You understand?”