Django Wexler - The Shadow Throne

“My palace,” Jane said, spreading her hands. “Do you like it?”

“I spent two years living in a tent,” Winter said, closing the door behind her. “Just sleeping indoors feels like a luxury to me.” She hesitated. “Nobody’s going to-”

“Sit with a glass pressed against the door? Don’t worry.”

Winter relaxed a little. “How long have you been here?”

“Just over a year,” Jane said. “It seems like longer.”

“You’ve certainly made yourself comfortable.”

“I’m good at that.” Jane winked, and went to a small cupboard standing on its own beside the big table. She withdrew a corked bottle and two slightly dusty glasses and waggled them suggestively at Winter. “Drink?”

Winter nodded. While Jane poured, she went to the window and twitched the curtain aside. Summer’s late evening sun was just setting, staining the muddy, sooty streets of the Docks with a pattern of red and black. Candles and torches burned here and there, but not many. The view was to the north, and Jane’s building was taller than those around it, and so Winter could see all the way to the river and beyond. The Island was a blaze of light in the distance, like an enormous ship.

Jane stepped up behind her, quietly, and pressed a glass into her hand. Winter sipped without looking, and was pleasantly surprised. Of course, any Vordanai wine would taste good next to that Khandarai stuff. She made a face at the memory.

“No good?” Jane sipped from her own glass. “Not the best vintage, I’ll grant you, but-”

“It’s fine.” Winter turned. “I have to ask. What are you doing here? Where did all these people come from? How do you manage to feed them all?”

“It is a bit odd, when I come to think about it.” Jane turned her glass back and forth, staring at it. Winter noted, absently, that much of the swearing had dropped out of her vocabulary now that they were alone. “It’s. . like yours. A long story.”

“I think we have time,” Winter said.

“I suppose so.” Jane took a deep breath. “Most of the girls are from Mrs. Wilmore’s, like us.”

“What?”

“I went back, after I ran away from Ganhide,” Jane said. “I had to hide for a while, until they gave up looking for me, and I sort of got to thinking. I’d got away, all right, but there were all those girls still there, and the same thing was just going to happen to them-they’d be married off to the first brute of a farmer who came asking.”

“So you went back.”

“I went back.”

“And staged an. . escape?” There had to be three hundred people in the building. Winter tried to imagine them all sneaking out of Mrs. Wilmore’s, one at a time, hiding from the proctors and the mistresses. .

“In a way,” Jane said. She scratched the back of her head and reddened slightly. “More like a revolution, actually.”

“A revolution? But how did you keep from getting caught?”

“I didn’t.” Jane swallowed the rest of her drink with sudden decision. “When I first got there, I was hiding in the hedges and so forth, but the more I watched the more I thought. . why bother? I mean, you were there. It’s not as though Mrs. Wilmore had a fucking battalion of guards on the premises.”

“But. .”

“I know.” Jane shook her head. “When I first went back, I was so frightened. I spent days trying to figure out how to get in without the proctors seeing me. It all went to shit when I tried it, of course. I practically walked into one after five minutes. I was ready to run for it, and she was shouting, and suddenly I thought-she’s nothing! Just a little girl with a sash! She probably wasn’t fifteen, a little stick of a thing. I just pushed her out of the way and kept going.”

“Didn’t she fetch the mistresses?”

“Of course. But by that time I had a little while to talk to the girls in the dorms. So on one side there were five old women with willow switches, and on the other a couple of hundred angry girls.” Jane grinned. “They took one look at us and locked themselves in their offices.”

Winter couldn’t help laughing. It was true, when you thought about it that way. Mrs. Wilmore’s moral authority had always been so overpowering she’d seemed like a deity from antiquity, living on a mountaintop somewhere and dispensing favor or thunderbolts according to her whims. But, of course, she was human like anyone else. Just a bitter old woman. Even at Winter’s distant remove, it was a tremendously liberating thought.

“And you just walked out,” Winter said.

Jane nodded. “We just walked out. I told the girls I would take care of anyone who wanted to come with me. Some of them stayed behind, some of them just bolted and disappeared, and the rest. .” She waved a hand at the building below them.

This must have been after Bobby escaped. The corporal had been closemouthed about her time in Mrs. Wilmore’s institution, but she surely would have mentioned this .

“You had all this ready for them?” Winter said.

“What? Oh no. God, it was fucking awful for a while. We spent a week sleeping in the swamps past the Bottoms, staying up half the night with torches and cudgels to keep the thieves and rapers away. I had no idea what I was doing. All this came later.”

Winter laughed again. That was Jane all over-do something bold, brilliant, beautiful, and have absolutely no idea how to handle the consequences. Dive in first and worry about how deep the water is later. She drained her own glass, looking around for the bottle, and it was a moment before she realized Jane had gone silent.

“Jane?”

She was staring at her hands, rolling the empty glass from one to the other. A single crimson droplet spiraled round and round just short of the rim, never quite escaping.

“Sorry,” Winter said. “I shouldn’t have laughed. It must have been terrible.”

“What? Oh.” Jane shook her head. “It’s all right. It is pretty fucking funny, when you think about it. I was just-running, from one thing to the next, trying to stay one step ahead of the Armsmen and the thieves and just plain starvation. With a couple of hundred people suddenly looking to me to keep them safe and figure out where their next meal was coming from.”

Winter winced in sympathy. Her thoughts went back to her first mission with the Seventh Company, d’Vries’ idiot scout, and the sudden crashing realization that everything had descended on her shoulders. Screams and powder smoke, the crash of muskets and thrashing, terrified horses. .

“I nearly left them,” Jane said, very quietly. “In the swamp. I was standing guard, and I thought, I could just leave . Then none of this would be my problem anymore.”

“You didn’t, though.”

“I wanted to. I wanted to, so badly. Or else to just wander out into the bog, get lost, step in some sinkhole, and just let it swallow me. It didn’t seem worth it.”

There was a long silence. Jane turned the glass round and round. Tentatively-it had been a long time since she’d touched another human being of her own free will-Winter extended a hand and let it rest on Jane’s shoulder.

“You did it, though. You won.” Winter patted her in a way she hoped was reassuring. “You beat Ganhide, and Mrs. Wilmore, and all the rest. I mean, look at this place!”

“You don’t understand,” Jane said. “I didn’t-I thought-”

She swallowed hard. Winter, uncertain, said nothing.

“I wasn’t looking to start a revolution at Mrs. Wilmore’s,” Jane said. “Not really. I was looking for you .”

Oh. Winter blinked.

“Every day, after I ran away from Ganhide, I thought about you stuck in that place and. . what they would do to you, eventually. I had to go back. But it took so long-I needed to hide, and then. .”