Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

Placida frowned, staring at nothing, and put his hand over hers before she could draw the blade. “No,” he said. “Temper, my love. Think. Attis is cold-blooded, not stupid. Raucus would take his head off.” He paused, and allowed, “Or you might.”

“Thank you,” Lady Placida said, stiffly.

“Or I suppose I might,” he mused, taking his hand from hers and drumming his fingers on the baldric of the greatsword. He narrowed his eyes in thought. “Which… could be what the enemy had in mind. Especially now that we know Octavian is on his way.”

“Sow division among us? Could these creatures understand us that well?” Lady Placida asked. Some of the anger seemed to ease out of her.

“Invidia could,” Placida pointed out.

“I should have called her out years ago,” Lady Placida said, scowling.

Lord Placida harrumphed, uncomfortably. “It wouldn’t have been very lady-like of either of you.”

“There’s no way to know what’s happened yet,” Amara said, cutting across them. “And no, Lady Placida, I don’t know what’s going on. I was hoping you would.”

“The pickets must have seen an approaching force,” Placida said confidently. “Our forces are already moving to man the outer palisades. That’s the only thing that would have raised this much racket from the Legion captains.”

“I thought they were more than a week away,” Amara said.

“If it’s any consolation, Countess, so did I,” Lady Placida said. She glanced at the command tent again as more trumpet signals came drifting on the wind, clearly torn. “Our Legions are in the center of the defenses. We must be there to stand with them, Countess.”

Amara nodded. Crafters with the power of the Placidas would be integral components of any battle plan. There was no one to substitute for them. “I’ll keep you informed as to what I find.”

“Do,” Lady Placida said. She put a hand on Amara’s shoulder and squeezed. “As soon as I’m free, I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

Amara managed not to wince. It might have been a measure of how much pressure Lady Placida was under that she had misjudged the fury-enhanced strength of her own fingers.

Placida took his wife’s arm and gestured toward the command tent. “We’ll find out whatever we can from Attis. Dear?” The two of them nodded to Amara and Veradis and strode toward the command tent, passing a squad of heavily armed legionares .

“Should we go, too?” Veradis asked.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have permission to be inside command,” Amara said. “Something about being considered Gaius Sextus’s personal assassin, I suppose.” Indeed, the legionares on duty outside the tent were watching Amara closely. “And I doubt that you have permission, either.”

“No. I’m supposed to be remaining here as a civilian watercrafter when the Legions enter battle.” She frowned at the guards, and said, “If we wait here doing nothing, it may be hours before anyone can be sent to Lady Isana’s aid.”

“That’s true.”

Veradis frowned more severely. “I suppose we might go in anyway.” She eyed the guards. “They seem like perfectly decent soldiers to me, though. I’m not sure I could do it without injuring them, and they haven’t earned that. And I dislike the notion of creating work for some poor healer.”

Amara’s imagination treated her to the image of what havoc might result from a strongly talented young Citizen determined to bypass a group of stubbornly resistant guards, outside a much larger group of High Lords with a good many reasons to be nervous. She shuddered. “No. I’m sure we can find an alternative.”

The curtain to the command tent opened, and a small, slender figure emerged, innocuous among the armored forms crowding the night. The sandy-haired young man slipped into the shadows and walked away calmly, effectively invisible amidst the bustle of the stirring camp.

“There,” Amara said. “There’s our option.” She dodged a pair of Phrygian Lords and pursued the unobtrusive young man.

Two steps before she reached him, he turned, blinking, his expression mild, even anxious to please. Amara, however, recognized the subtle centering of his balance and took note of the fact that she couldn’t see one of his hands, which was quite likely touching the hilt of a dagger concealed beneath his rather loose and travel-worn coat.

“Ah,” Amara said, spreading her hands at her sides, to show them empty. “Sir Ehren.”

The young man blinked up at her, his gaze flicking over her, then over Veradis, who came hurrying up behind her. “Ah. Countess Calderon. Lady Veradis. Good evening, ladies. How may I serve you?”

Amara reflected that it had quite probably been Sir Ehren, who was serving as one of Aquitaine’s primary intelligence agents, who had both added her to the no-admittance list around Lord Aquitaine and managed to see to it that she received a copy of the list, a pride-preserving courtesy that had prevented an unpleasant scene. She liked Ehren, though in the wake of Gaius Sextus’s death, she was uncertain of where his loyalties ultimately lay—but as a classmate of Octavian’s, she judged it unlikely that he would have mild, passive inclinations about the succession, regardless of whom he decided to support.

“Well,” Amara said. “That’s a more complicated question than it would at first seem.”

Sir Ehren arched an eyebrow. “Ah?”

“Gaius Isana has been abducted,” Amara said, and watched the young man’s reaction very closely.

Ehren had been trained to school his reactions, just as she had. He had also been trained to falsify them. She knew the signs to look for, which would mark a reaction as genuine or false. He would, of course, know that she knew it, and could potentially modify his response to take advantage of the fact—but she judged that it would take someone with more experience in life than Sir Ehren currently possessed to deceive both her own trained eyes and ears and the watercrafting senses of someone as skilled as Veradis. Particularly if she clubbed him over the head with the news rather than taking a more subtle approach.

Sir Ehren’s reaction was a complete non reaction. He simply stared at her for a moment. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “She’s been… bloody crows .” The voice that emerged from the young man was a great deal more strident—and frustrated—than she would have expected to accompany his face and bearing. “Abducted. Of course she has been. Because obviously there isn’t enough going wrong tonight.” He glared at her. He had a rather effective glare, Amara thought, despite the muddy hazel color of his eyes and the fact that he stood nearly half a foot shorter than she did and was thus compelled to glare up at her. She had to make a conscious effort not to take a step back. Veradis did step back from him. “And I suppose,” he said, “you want me to help.”

Amara faced the young man mildly. “You… do seem to be having that sort of evening, Sir Ehren.”

“Crows,” he said wearily. The word betrayed a wealth of exhaustion. He hid it well, but Amara could see the signs of strain on his young face. If he’d been any older, she suspected, the past weeks would have aged him ten years. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. The change in the young man was nearly magical. His expression became mild again, his posture diffident, nearly servile. “I’m not sure how you could trust anything I did to help you, Countess.”

“She couldn’t,” Veradis said quietly, and took a step closer to the young man, extending her hand. “But I could.”

Ehren eyed Veradis. A skilled watercrafter’s ability to sense the truth in another, when it was freely shared, was the bane of all manner of deceptive enterprise—and if trusted too casually, was a wellspring of fresh deceptions in its own right. As someone who had spent years becoming skilled in that particular expertise, he probably regarded it with almost as much distrust and wariness as Amara did.