The King's Blood(21)

“Mother,” Jorey said, “I’ve had formal introduction to Sabiha. I’m going to ask Father’s permission tomorrow.”

Clara felt her eyebrows bolt toward her hairline and her gaze flickered over the girl. Even sitting and with the covering of the wide-cut cloak, she wouldn’t be able to hide a belly. Especially not for a second child, and with the amount of time it would have taken to send for a formal letter, receive it, and return from Osterling Fells to Camnipol, pregnancy simply didn’t seem plausible. Sabiha swallowed, her expression utterly empty. Everyone present knew the calculations Clara had just made. Everyone expected them.

“That seems sudden,” Clara said. “Engagements can run a season or two these days.”

“I don’t mind waiting,” the girl said.

The pain in Jorey’s expression was vivid and fresh and angry. This wasn’t the girl’s idea, then. It was her son’s. He wanted to give her the season. He wanted her to go to the dances and feasts and fireshows as Sabiha Kalliam, and not Lord Skestinin’s disgraced daughter. Marrying into House Kalliam—and especially doing it now with the family’s star on the rise—would change the story people told about her. And changing that changed who she was.

It was as profound a gift as a young man could offer the woman he loved.

“Jorey, dear,” she said, “weren’t you saying that Bynal followed horses? I’m sure he’d be interested in the bay mare that your father brought from the holding.”

“I don’t… That’s to say…” Jorey pressed his lips together until the color was all driven out from them. “Yes, Mother.” When the boys had gone, Clara sat across from the girl. She had a good face, but worn. It wasn’t only that she’d borne a child, though God knew that could change a woman’s body in ways the midwife never mentioned. It was sorrow. And shame. They’d been ground into the girl’s skin like soot. Of course they had.

“Lady Kalliam,” the girl said. The pause lasted five heart-beats. Six. Tears were welling in the girl’s eyes, and Clara felt them answering in her own. She blinked them back. Empathy was well and good in its time, but that wasn’t this.

“Don’t ever be grateful to him,” Clara said.

Sabiha looked up, confused. A tear escaped, tracing silver down the girl’s cheek.

“My lady?”

“Jorey. If you love him and he loves you, then God knows nothing’s going to stop the pair of you. But you mustn’t be grateful to him. It will poison everything if you are.”

Sabiha shook her head, another tear coming free but the last one. Her eyes were drying.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

Clara shook her head. She couldn’t find the words that would explain it. How to explain the difference between a marriage grown from love—more than love, from complicity—and one that was unequal from the start. She had seen too many women married from ambition, and she had seen where they ended. She didn’t want her boy married to one of them. But the girl was a girl. Even if she’d suffered hard times, she could no more understand what Clara was saying than a songbird could swim.

“Sabiha, dear,” Clara said. “Does he make you laugh?”

Clara couldn’t see the memory behind the girl’s eyes, but she saw that it was there. The shape of Sabiha’s eyes changed and brightened, her lips grew a degree fuller as she forgot to press them thin. Clara knew the answer before the girl nodded.

“All right, then,” Clara said. “I’m going to need more time, though. Jorey’s father is loyal as a hound, but change bothers him. I’ll need… a week. Can you and Jorey wait that long before asking permission?”

“If we have to, we can do anything.”

Clara rose, bent, and kissed the girl gently on the top of her head.

“Spoken like a Kalliam,” she said. “Go find them, then. Tell Jorey what I said.”

“You don’t want to talk to him?”

“Not now,” Clara said, her heart sinking.

She watched as the girl rose and left. There was happiness and relief in the way the girl walked, in the angle of her shoulders. She radiated. It wouldn’t last because nothing ever did, but it was good to see it all the same. Something bright moved at the corner of Clara’s vision, calling attention to itself. A sprig of lilac had bloomed, a dozen tiny flowers bright in the sun. It felt like an omen.

How odd, Clara thought, that speaking to this girl would be the thing that clarified the other task she had to do.

There was little call for huntsmen in Camnipol. Guards, yes. Servants, yes. The sort of personal servant who might take on extra duties or serve at the whim of a nobleman or his wife. She found Vincen Coe in the servants’ wing among the small corridors and tiny rooms that divided the architecture of the great from that of the low. He was a young man, hardly older than Jorey, with wide eyes and a body well accustomed to hardship and work. She had saved him once when her husband’s pique had nearly ended his service. He had saved her once when Feldin Maas would have cut her down. He rose when he caught sight of her, and she pushed away the memory of his lips against hers and the taste of blood. It had been a single stolen kiss, and he’d been bled nearly white when he’d presumed. Since then there had been no talk of it. Not even acknowledgment that it had happened. Nothing.