Daniel Abraham - The Tyrant's Law

“He’s a boy,” Clara said, chuckling. “He eats his own weight when he isn’t fasting, gets everywhere he ought not be, and thinks it hilarious to smear mud on people’s legs.”

Sabiha’s cheeks flushed and she nodded. For a man of the court, an illegitimate child might be an annoyance or even an opportunity to boast. Lords had been known to take their bastards as squires or put them into the more lucrative sorts of trade. It was one of many little asymmetries between the sexes.

“And you?” Clara asked. “I haven’t seen you since you left for the season.”

Sabiha lifted her eyebrows and looked down.

“Jorey thought it important that we attend the hunt,” she said. “My father agreed. It was … I don’t know. It was long, tiring, humiliating, and hard. Jorey does what he can to take the worst of it on himself, but it wore on him. He didn’t sleep well, and I don’t know whether the feasts we weren’t welcome to chafed more than the ones he attended.”

“Poor boy,” Clara said, fitting a river of melancholy into the two words. Jorey was her youngest son, and in some ways the one of her children the world had been cruelest with. Vicarian was safely in the church. Barriath, before he left, had been in battles, but only at sea and never particularly vicious ones at that. Jorey had helped to slaughter a city, and the ghosts of it walked behind him. The guilt had driven him to marry Sabiha in hopes of cleansing her name, and instead of raising her up, he had made her position in the court less tenable. Clara thought her son’s spine was made of pure enough metal to stand the strain. She hoped so.

“Some days were better,” Sabiha said.

“And you?” Clara asked, drawing her pipe from her pouch and filling the bowl with a pinch of cheap tobacco. “God alone knows this can’t have been easy for you either.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Sabiha said, her smile thin and oddly cruel. She took a twig from the fire and offered Clara the ember for her pipe. “I’m used to people pointing at me and whispering down their sleeves. I suppose I’m glad it’s not my past their amusing themselves with. It hasn’t left me with a deeper love of the court in general, though.”

“I imagine not,” Clara said, and drew the smoke into her lungs.

The pause was not entirely comfortable. Sabiha moved her head in one direction and then the other, testing out words without speaking them. Clara waited, knowing well how such things took their own time. The young woman’s hands relaxed just before she spoke.

“I don’t know how to help him.”

“Mother!” Jorey said, pushing through the door. His smile looked almost genuine. Clara rose into his arms. Regret that he hadn’t waited just a few minutes more was washed away by the scent of his hair and the strength in his arms around her. Her little boy had grown to a man, but she would always see him as infant sitting up by himself for the first time, an expression of wordless triumph on his dough-soft face. Holding him, she was neither the widow of a traitor she had been nor the half-formed woman she was becoming, but only the mother of her child. It was enough.

The moment passed and he pulled away.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said.

“And also you, dear,” Clara said. “Sabiha’s been telling me that the hunt was as much a masculine bore as ever, and I was acting as though I missed it.”

“I didn’t think you ever went,” Jorey said, sitting at his wife’s side. Clara took her own seat, gesturing with her pipe.

“It seemed polite to pretend,” she said. Jorey laughed, and Sabiha looked for a moment surprised before she smiled herself. “I’m sorry to say that I’ve come begging.”

“Of course,” Jorey said. “I’m sorry we didn’t leave you better provisioned. But—”

“I have been quite content with what I’ve had,” Clara said. And then, with a bit of effort to keep her tone light, “One of your father’s huntsmen has taken me a bit under his wing. Vincen Coe.”

“Father’s private man?” Jorey said. “The one who always went with him when he was intriguing against Feldin Maas?”

“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.”