Page 70 of Magick and Lead
Rohree half expected to find the cottage they sought burned to ash or desecrated with black paint. But no, it stood just as Clua had described it, a quaint place with a thatched roof and walls of mud and stone and a lovely door painted the pale green of mint leaves. A pen lay near the house where a dozen cute, inquisitive sheep and a pair of goats wandered about—putting Rohree at ease.
Then, the door opened.
A man stood there, tall, dark-skinned, and muscular—stout as a barrel. His wife was pale, tall, and slender. The two children peeping out from among their parents’ legs were a mishmash of both their features, creamy brown skin, and curly blond hair. All were smiling.
And all were clad in gray.
“Clua! What a surprise!” the woman said. She hurried forward and embraced the dwarf, then turned her attention to Rohree. “And with a sprite friend, I see. You’re lucky you caught us. We were just heading to the town square for the festival.”
“This is Rohree,” Clua said. “She served the princess—now Queen—Essaphine.”
The man’s smile faltered. “I’ll bet you were glad to escape from that den of vipers,” he said.
Rohree’s mind flashed back to the witch’s inhuman smile. Her long fingernails… and the box.Thatwas a den of vipers.
“I’m… so grateful to Clua for rescuing me,” she said, choosing her words carefully.
The woman—Ayal—nodded knowingly. “These are dark times. It makes hospitality more important than ever. Come. The festivities will be going on tomorrow, too. They can wait.”
“Aww!” the children complained in unison.
“They canwait,” Ayal repeated, this time as a rebuke. She smiled at Rohree again, pulling the door wide and inviting them in with a gesture.
“We just ate dinner, but there’s plenty left. And stay the night, unless your business calls you onward,” the man, Mik, said.
Something was calling Rohree onward, but it wasn’t business. It was the memory of the last village they’d stopped at. That, and a sense of foreboding that hung over her like the flutter of bat wings. And yet, her weariness was so overwhelming that she wasn’t sure she could take another step. And she knew Clua’s pack was as empty of food as her own grumbling belly. Clua gave her a glance and a nod, then entered the home. With a sigh of resignation, Rohree followed—and the door banged shut behind them.
Rohree and Clua were bid to sit at a low table while Ayal dished up a dinner of stew, bread, and goat cheese. The boys galloped around, engaged in a game of trying to pull each other’s hair, but their father silenced them with a single barked command,and they came to the table and sat sullenly. Rohree noticed the shadow of a bruise around one of the boys’ eyes—a shiner in the last stages of healing. She’d known plenty of roughhousing brothers in her day. She’d even had one of her own.
But her poor Gregohree had been sent off to the Front four years ago. The letters had stopped coming shortly thereafter…
The aroma of the stew drew her from her reverie, and she brought the spoon to her lips.
“Mmm,” she moaned. The food was every bit as good as Clua had promised it would be, and she ate with such rapturous abandon she was hardly aware of the conversation going on around her.
Mik was talking about his brother, Clua’s former master. According to a letter he’d received, Bootham had joined one of the crews working to rebuild Issastar until his forge could be rebuilt.
“Those damned necromancers from across the sea. What they did to that fair city…” Mik shook his head.
“And what’s worse is Queen Synaeda let them do it,” Ayal added.
At those words, the blissful stupor that food and rest had lulled Rohree into faded. She blinked, as if waking up.
“You don’t mean that the attack was the queen’s fault?” she asked.
The husband and wife both looked at her. “Not entirely,” Mik said, rubbing his chin. “From what I understand, the princess was also to blame. And all those dragon riders. All those years they had to end the war, and all they cared about was maintaining their own power and their old traditions. If we hadn’t had the prelate and his good Brothers to rally the nobles, who knows what would have happened.”
“Necromancer tanks would probably be rolling over our bones,” Ayal said grimly.
“But…” Rohree started to speak, but Clua grabbed her hand beneath the table and squeezed.
Hard as it was to sit there and listen to someone speak ill of Essa, Rohree took the message and went silent. But she didn’t let go of Clua’s hand. As her heart beat faster, a feeling of panic and dread rising in her, she felt the hand was the only thing keeping her from slipping off a precipice into madness.
“But you knew the Princess Essaphine,” Ayal was saying. “You must have seen it firsthand. How she betrayed us to the enemies across the sea. They say she was more concerned with bedding men than with defending the kingdom.”
“Before she treacherously killed her own cousin,” Mik put in.
“And her mother was no better,” Ayal added. “Shecared more for her dragons and her fancy balls than her own people. Folks in Admar have glittering gowns and twenty-story high palaces to live in. Meanwhile, here we are living in the muck with these damned goats and sheep.”
