The King's Blood(153)

“I do,” Clara said. “I feel him myself.”

“Until the court forgets, at least a little, having you with us taints us more than it protects you.”

“I will go,” Clara said. “If there’s room at the holding, I can… exile myself, I suppose.”

“We were thinking that we could pay for a boarding house,” Sabiha said. “Something that wasn’t in my father’s name. Something to give us a little distance in the eyes of the court.”

Not even that much? Clara wanted to say. Can’t you give me that one small thing? Must it be an anonymous grave of a room, in among people she’d never known?

“I can see why that would be wise,” she said. “I’ll gather my things.”

“No, please,” Sabiha said. “I’ll have them brought. You shouldn’t have to.”

“None of us should have to,” Clara said, patting the girl’s shoulder. “But we live in a world of necessities. Don’t bother yourself. I understand. I should go now.”

“No, please,” Sabiha said. “We’ll have someone go with you to find the right place. And we’ll bear the price of it.”

Clara’s smile almost felt real. She took her hands out from the girl’s grasp and stood. She kissed Sabiha and Jorey both, each of them on the forehead, and took herself back out. There was no staying now. No sitting in the kitchen and discussing what sort of boarding house might be right for the widow of a famed traitor and enemy of the throne.

By renouncing Dawson, they were supposed to have gained something. Protected it. Kept it. And perhaps they had. Perhaps if Jorey hadn’t said what he’d said, Clara would have even less than she did now. But she could hardly imagine it. She felt like the queen of nothing.

She walked without knowing where she was walking to. Her feet ached terribly, but she ignored the pain. Once, she’d ridden through the city as the small people in the street made way for her, and she’d thought nothing of it. Now she found that she was moving aside to let carts of meat or turnips pass. She was avoiding the eyes of the men and women she passed.

When the great arcing span of the Autumn Bridge rose up before her, she began across it, but at the midway point, she stopped. It wasn’t even that she intended to, it was only there that she was when her resolve finally broke. Leaning against the great beams and looking down over the abyss of the Division, she felt something like peace come over her. Not peace, not really, but something like it. The world looked almost beautiful at this distance. The Kingspire. The walls of the city. The clouds scudding quickly overhead, caught in some unthinkably high wind that she herself could not feel.

She considered how little it would take to step over the edge. Not that she intended to. Self-slaughter was too easy, in its way. But it did have its appeal. She’d never been religious, but neither had she refused the priestly stories of life and justice on the farther side of death. Perhaps Dawson was there waiting for her.

But not yet. Vicarian’s position wasn’t assured, even now. And Barriath… poor Barriath, turned out of the house by his own brother. He needed her still. And Jorey would. Even Sabiha might. And how terrible would it be for the girl to have sent her husband’s mother out, only to have her leap off a bridge. The poor thing would never recover.

No. Another day, she would. Later, when all her children were taken care of and no one would feel responsible for a decision that was utterly her own. Then she could come, dressed perhaps in bridal array, and take one last brief dance with Dawson. She was weeping now. She didn’t know how long she had been. Days. Weeks. All her life, it seemed. All those years of content had been an illusion. A thin line that she had walked over an abyss. Without a home to go to, without a friend to rely on, she was reduced to the aspect of a madwoman wailing on the bridge, and she found the role fit well enough.

“My lady,” a man’s voice said, like warm flannel on a cold night. “No.”

She turned, surprised. Some part of her that still cared about such things reached to straighten her hair and tug her dress into its best drape. The rest of her, the vast majority, collapsed in a hilarity of relief and embarrassment and an amused kind of dread that was much more pleasant than the sincere one she’d been inhabiting.

“Coe,” she said, laughing and crying. “Oh, not this too.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. His expression was so sincere. So open and concerned and young.

“This isn’t the way, my lady. Come with me.”

“I wasn’t going to jump. I wasn’t. I mean not now, not with so much to do. There’s the boys, you see. And my daughter, my new one, you won’t have met her. She’s a dear child, but troubled. Troubled. And to go now, to leave now with everything in such a state.” She had trouble with the words because the sobbing was so hard now that there was very little room for them. “I couldn’t leave it all like this, so broken and so empty. Oh God. What have we done? How? How did I come to this?”