Page 48 of Paladin's Faith

“I do not know how useful that was,” said Shane, as they left the offices of the guard commander an hour later.

“I do,” said Marguerite, “and the answer is ‘not very.’”

The guard commander had taken their report and made sympathetic noises, but that was as far as it went. His job was to break up drunken brawls and prevent outright murder, so he had promised to increase the patrols in that corridor, but unless they struck again, he clearly wasn’t hopeful about catching Shane’s assailants.

“I was really hoping he’d say something like “This is the third time this week!” Marguerite said glumly. “Then I’d know that it wasn’t targeted at you—and me—specifically.”

“Do you think that the Sail is behind it?”

“If it was targeted, then probably.” Marguerite scowled. “An attack like that means that they’ve got enough manpower to risk losing three men if they got caught. Only nobles can make that work, particularly if they’re bringing along a load of younger relations. No, if another merchant was out to get me, they’d be trying to tamper with my samples or sabotaging my attempts to sell. No one but the big trade delegations can field enough staff to bring actual thugs.”

“Why would nobles be involved?”

“Normally they wouldn’t be, but the Red Sail could easily buy or blackmail someone to have jumped you. Their pockets are deep enough, and plenty of nobles are light in the purse and the morals. But I’d honestly expect them to use their own people and not make such a sloppy job of it.”

“If I were not what I am,” said Shane, reaching up to touch the side of his head, “it might not have been a sloppy job at all.”

“Ah.” Marguerite considered this most of the way back to their rooms. “That doesn’t fill me with confidence.”

“No.” Shane straightened. “Still, I will be more careful about what corridors I use in the future. And if this was something other than a random crime, it cost them a great deal more than it cost us.”

“There’s that,” said Marguerite. She bid the paladin goodnight and went to her bed. He was right. They had come off lightly, and there was no permanent harm done.

But the question that ran in circles around her head, as she stared at the ceiling, was So how many men will they send next time?

TWENTY

Wren looked around the great arched room and sighed straight from her toes. Another day of attempting to ingratiate herself with people who looked at her like something they’d scraped off their shoe. Joy.

I am a grown woman, she told herself. I am not sixteen and on the marriage mart to Father’s neighbors. I am an adult. I am on an assignment. I am playing a role.

Her eyes traveled across a coterie of younger women, all clad in elegant, figure-hugging gowns, with their hair styled into elaborate ringlets. Two of them were whispering to each other behind their fans, and although Wren knew that it was highly unlikely that they were talking about her, she still felt her stomach sink.

I am a grown woman. I do not care what these people think of me.

It didn’t help.

I could kill anyone in this room without breaking a sweat.

That helped a little. She glanced around to make sure that Shane was not actually in the room. With the battle tide rendering all else equal, Shane’s superior strength would probably carry the day if the two of them fought. He was in one of the other rooms, though, keeping a watchful eye over Marguerite, so the statement stood. Yes. I could kill anyone in this room, unless one is secretly an assassin. And none of them know it.

…I just have no idea how to do my hair.

Wren wandered to a window and looked out. These ballrooms were halfway up the great fortress, so the view was an astonishing sweep of countryside, even if she couldn’t see the waterfall from here. With the glass pane between her and the open air, she did not feel the usual twinge that affected her in the presence of heights. It reminded her of being young and fearless, standing on the castle battlements able to see halfway to forever. If she stood on her toes, she could just make out the rooftops of the pottery works below, but for the most part, it was all fields and hedgerows, with long strips of woodland between them, stretching across gently rolling hillsides until they reached the mountains on the far side of the valley. Wren thought that it was amazing that the windows weren’t packed with people gaping at the view.

Still, they’ve probably seen it a hundred times. Probably admiring views is unfashionable. Wren turned away from the window and ran her eye over the crowd, looking for anyone that she was even remotely acquainted with.

No one. Bah. Well, what about secret assassins? Surely there must be a couple in the Court of Smoke. I saw one fellow yesterday who was dressed as one of those chevaliers, but if he didn’t know his way around a garrote, I’ll eat my fan.

She tapped the fan in question on her wrist. It was made of vellum held between two carved wood sticks, meant to be folded and unfolded with an elegant flick of the wrist. Wren didn’t know if her flick qualified as elegant, but she could deploy the fan with enough precision to kill flies, which she was secretly rather pleased with.

There was supposedly a whole language to fan signals and where you carried it and how you fluttered it and where your gaze went while so fluttering. Wren had no idea how you learned that language. Her fan had bluntly pointed wooden handles and she was fairly certain that if she held it right, she could jam the closed fan into someone’s eye socket with enough force to break through to the brain.

She looked around for potential targets, but if there were any assassins in the room, they were hiding it well. Everyone here moved like…well, like fashionable women in uncomfortable shoes. Small steps, constrained by the hems of the gowns. A sway in the walk carefully calculated to be attractive but not pronounced enough to be scandalous. Wren was doing her best to imitate that walk, and was pretty confident that she had the shoe part down, although the sway was probably a lost cause.

She ambled to the refreshment table. The bowl of wine had fruit floating in it to sweeten the taste, and had been watered down heavily enough that alcohol was a distant memory. Wren would have had to drink her own bodyweight in the insipid stuff to become inebriated. Lady Coregator carried a flask with her and liberally topped up her drinks. Lady Coregator was extremely intelligent. Wren hoped that she would finish her morning ride soon and come up to the court. Then she could talk to someone, or at least stand on the outskirts of the conversation, listening and smiling pleasantly, without anyone looking at her and wondering what she was doing there.

She had just filled a cup with watered wine when something struck her shoulder from behind. Wren spun, started to drop into a crouch—when you were short, coming up from underneath was usually your best bet—saw a sea-green gown and the tall, giggling woman inside it, and had to devote most of her concentration to not slamming her elbow into the woman’s solar plexus and following up with a fist to the jaw.

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