“Yes, him,” Clara said, silently regretting having mentioned him. Only she didn’t want it to seem as if she’d been hiding him if Jorey found out through some other channel, and now that he was back home it was so much more likely that he would, and damn it if she didn’t feel the beginning of a blush rising in her cheeks. “His cousin has a boarding house, and she’s been kind enough to give me a very pleasant room. Not the best neighborhood, but what is, these days?”
She pretended to catch an ember in her throat, coughing to explain the redness of her face. It wasn’t the first time she’d used the subterfuge, though the last time had certainly been a decade or more ago. Jorey called for a servant girl to bring a cup of water, and by the time Clara had drunk it down, she had her composure again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, seeming to apologize for the coughing fit but meaning something more diffuse.
“Are you feeling better?” Jorey asked, and she wasn’t certain what he meant by the question. She answered the simplest option.
“Yes, dear. Just breathed in something I oughtn’t.”
“I was hoping to see you,” Jorey said. “I’m looking at ways to bring the family back into favor.”
“I can’t imagine that will be easy.”
Jorey held up a hand, asking her to hear him out.
“Geder came to me,” he said. “He … apologized to me, in a way. I think despite everything he’d open to rehabilitating me within the court.”
“And would you be open to that?” Clara said, more tartly than she’d intended.
“If he’ll have me,” Jorey said. Sabiha took his hand as if she were comforting a child, but he took no notice. His voice had the light cadence of conversation, but his gaze grew distant. “Geder is Lord Regent. He’s the nearest thing we’ll have to a king until Aster comes of age, and that’s years from now. We’ve lost the holding and the mansions. Barriath’s gone. I’m living on the sufferance of my wife and her father, and you’re in a boarding house, living off the scraps from that. Geder doesn’t associate me with what Father did, even if everyone else does. He can put me in position to win a name back.”
“So you’d forgive him,” Clara said.
“No,” Jorey said, “but I don’t see that it matters. The world isn’t what it was a year ago. I have to take care of you and Sabiha. I want to wake up in a bed I own. I want Sabiha treated with respect. I want you invited to all the occasions that they’ve excluded you from. If I have to kneel down before a man I hate in order to do that, it’s a small price.”
He shrugged, and it was the motion he had always had. A gesture she had felt when he’d still been in the womb. Clara smiled and nodded, then turned her eyes to Sabiha. The dread in the girl’s expression was like looking to a mirror.
I don’t know how to help him either, she thought.
Might be a blessing,” Vincen Coe said.
“Odd sort of blessing,” she said and sipped at her beer.
The taproom went by the name Yellow House, and it stood at the edge of the Division just by the Silver Bridge. The sun had only just set, and the torches that lit the courtyard radiated heat without going so far as to warm her. But the drink was cheap and the soup wasn’t just water and hope, so it would do.
“Puts him in places to hear things,” Vincen said. “Even just having him in the Great Bear would be enough to fill one of your letters every day or two. What the debates were, and who was arguing which side. Might even come to a place he’d know orders before they were sent.”
“No. I don’t want him to be part of this. Not directly, anyway,” she said, leaning close to him and speaking softly. “If I find myself invited to tea or a sewing circle because of his place in the court, I won’t be so rude as to refuse. But I won’t use him without his knowledge, and I won’t have him know.”
“I can respect that,” Vincen said.
“And I’m not going to send the army’s orders to the enemy. I’m not a traitor.”
“If you say so, m’lady,” Vincen said.
At the edge of the yard, a traveling theater company had set up their stage. A round-faced girl and an older man lit a hundred candles in tin reflectors set all along the stage’s edge. Beyond them, the deeper dark of the Division, and then the torches and lanterns of the far side, as distant, it seemed, as stars.
She drank the yeasty, thick beer and wondered whether she might be a traitor. Geder Palliako was, after all, the crown. His failure and the failure of the empire were difficult threads to tease apart. She had risked her own life for King Simeon, and without regret. If anything, she felt herself more a patriot now, standing against the crown, than she had standing with it.