Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses) (12 page)

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Authors: Sharon Shinn

BOOK: Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses)
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Within a couple of hours, their luggage had been transferred into the small room, and both women had bathed and changed. Kirra went off to try to find Katlin Dormer’s mother, while Senneth tracked down the men, who were having a beer in the tavern adjoining the inn.
“I think you’re supposed to be a wolfhound,” Senneth said, seating herself next to Donnal.
He grinned. Tayse looked up, interested. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Since they’re keeping us down in the stables.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Senneth said. “But I think we’re safe enough inside the hotel. There are locks, and I’ve got weapons.”
“And you’ll have me,” Donnal said.
“What news so far?” she asked. She eyed their beer with some longing but asked the waiter for wine when he approached. Bad enough to be fraternizing with guardsmen, but she couldn’t be seen sucking down ale in the common taproom.
“City’s as full as it can hold,” Tayse said. “Some wedding or something tomorrow night, and gentry spilling out of every inn in town.”
Senneth nodded. “Unless I miss my guess, Kirra’s about to get us invited to it,” she said. “This answers better than her other ideas.”
“So you’ll go, too, dressed as—what? Her lady in waiting?”
Senneth made as much of a mock curtsey as she could while sitting in a bar booth, a wineglass in hand. “Her cousin Sindra, thank you very much. I’m poor but respectable, and I’m grateful for every gift and kind word my rich relations bestow upon me.”
“I hate the gentry,” Justin remarked.
“There’s a bit of news for us,” she retorted.
“Do you have to change your face for these people?” Cammon asked.
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t think so. No one will be paying attention to me. I’ll just wear an expression of hopeful degradation, and they’ll all stare right past me.”
Donnal snorted and then started laughing. “I’ve seen these people,” he said to the others. “That’s exactly the way they look.”
“Existing without any pride,” Tayse said. “What a terrible way to live.”
“There are worse ways,” she said quietly. She sipped at her wine and refused to let herself think of those ways.
 
 
SHE spent most of the rest of the afternoon wandering through Forten City, shopping. To her surprise, Tayse insisted on accompanying her, though he let the other men go off on their own pursuits. She didn’t actually mind knowing he was two paces behind her as she walked through the crowded streets. Forten City was a curious mix of the aristocratic and the wretched, with rows of fashionable shops only two streets over from grim little shacks that housed alehouses, prostitute quarters, and families of the very poor. Sailors strutted up and down the streets, looking for love or trouble, and the whole parade of life went by in the central district: noblemen, merchants, farmers, soldiers, laundresses, cooks, whores. No young woman walked out unaccompanied.
Though I am hardly a young woman,
Senneth thought and tried not to smile.
She had decided she would buy a length of handmade lace to give to the Dormer bride; Katlin could lay it across her table or hang it from a window or ball it up and put it in the back of her closet. Senneth didn’t care. But it was a reasonable gift, and it didn’t have to match anything in the bride’s trousseau.
Still, she went first to sweet shops and shoe shops and dress shops, just to see if she could overhear any useful conversation. For most of the day, no. Everyone seemed concerned with the weather, which was frigid, the new taxes, which were unreasonable, and the wedding, which was apparently going to be the highlight of the social season.
“Though she’s not a very pretty girl, you know,” one matron observed to another as they picked through silks in the fabric shop. “I’m surprised she’s done as well as Edwin Seiles.”
“I’m surprised anyone would take her at all!” the second woman exclaimed. “After those things that were being said about her last year—”
“No, you’re confused, that was her sister,” the first woman interrupted. “This one isn’t a mystic. She’s perfectly normal.”
Senneth pulled out another bolt of lace and examined its pattern against the sample she already had in her hand.
“Oh! Well, then! Because I kept wondering—I mean, how
could
they marry off a girl like that? But if this one’s not tainted, it’s just fine then. Oh, I like that blue.”
“But it’s too thin, don’t you think? For this cold weather?”
“Keep it for spring, that’s my advice. What happened to her? That other girl?”
“The mystic? I don’t know. I haven’t heard a word about her in—I guess it’s six or seven months now. Probably shipped off to relatives in Helven or Kianlever. You know how these things go.”
“I know how they
should
go,” the second woman said with emphasis. “People are too soft, that’s what I say.”
“Their own daughter,” the first woman said gently. “You can’t expect them to—I wouldn’t, I know. I’d find a way to keep her safe.”
The second woman leaned closer as if to whisper, though the pitch of her voice scarcely changed. “Mystics are born to those who consort with mystics,” she said. “Those who have a magical child—well, they’d best look to their own bloodlines, that’s what I say. If my daughter-in-law produced a child like that, I’d know she played my son false. And I would have no hesitation in turning both her and her child out of the house.”
Senneth laid down both pieces of lace and headed straight for the shop door. Tayse was leaning against the wall, hands hooked in his belt, eyes ceaselessly watching the restless crowd.
“All done?” he asked, and then noticed her hands were empty. “I thought you were going to buy some lace.”
“I’ve decided to get her a clock instead,” Senneth said, and turned down the street to a watchmaker’s shop that she had passed before.
 
 
THE wedding was an exercise in humiliation, or would have been if Senneth had been even remotely interested in the goodwill of the lesser gentry gathered to attend. The ceremony itself was brief and dull, but the reception that followed was ostentatiously lavish. She estimated that two hundred people had been crowded into a room meant to comfortably hold about half that number. The heat was intense—Senneth herself never minded the heat, but she saw more than one young woman stagger and almost faint—and the odors of perfume and sweat did not blend well with the scents of food and wine.
There was what seemed to Senneth a desperate air of gaiety, as if all these second-tier noblemen and their scheming wives were pretending to be at an elegant ball at one of the Twelve Houses. The women had dressed in remarkably fine gowns; the men wore velvet and exquisitely tanned leather. What interested Senneth was that very few of them wore diamonds or rubies or traditional jewels. Nearly everyone—from the women with their bracelets and earrings to the men with their rings and cravat pins—wore moonstones as the accessories of choice. This was particularly true for the young women whose plunging necklines and oversized pendants were meant to mimic the ball gowns of Twelfth House serramarra. The dowdy Sindra, with no pretensions to wealth or status, wore a comfortably high-necked gown and no ornament but her gold necklace, but Erin Sohta had sashayed out in a dress with daring décolletage.
“Mind your housemark,” Senneth had noted as they were dressing for the event.
Kirra had lifted her pendant, which she had not bothered to alter in her own transformation. Erin Sohta would undoubtedly wear rubies in her role as Danalustrous vassal, and who in this crowd would recognize this exact piece of jewelry? Where it had lain against her skin there was only unblemished flesh. “Erin Sohta doesn’t have a housemark,” she retorted. “I wanted one less thing to worry about.”
To Senneth, it seemed like Kirra was not worrying about a thing. As soon as the simple marriage ceremony was over, Kirra had joined the noblest of the circles available in this company and began laughing and flirting. Senneth herself slipped unobtrusively through the room, snagging a glass of wine here, a bit of cheese there, trying to listen to strangers’ conversations, trying to read the mood of the city.
Taxes, weather, and weddings. This particular group didn’t seem concerned with anything else.
After a couple of hours, she gave up for a bit and took a seat in an unoccupied chair in a poorly lit corner of the room. She had replaced her wine with water and continued to watch and listen to the crowd, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be the one to garner any information this evening. If they learned anything on this outing, it would be through Kirra.
A shadow crossed her face, and then a body fell into place in the seat beside hers. She looked over in surprise at a handsome middle-aged man who wore a Fortunalt pearl in his neckcloth and a moonstone the size of a walnut on his right hand.
“I hate these affairs, don’t you?” he asked in a pleasant voice. He smelled of ale and onions; he had obviously partaken fairly liberally of his host’s hospitality.
She permitted herself the small smile of a woman who didn’t smile often. “I don’t go to that many,” she said. “It’s been years—” She broke off and shook her head.
“Ah, well, a chance for the wealthy to show off their wealth and the beautiful to show off their beauty,” he said. “There are fewer events designed for the kind to show off their kindness and the good of heart to show off their generosity.”
“My cousin Erin is kind to me every day,” Senneth said in a small voice. Inside she was thinking,
What is going on here? Why is he speaking to me?
His clothes were very fine, and his skin was very good. This man was no second son, no hanger-on lordling. Not Twelfth House, because no one here was, but in the upper tiers of the Thirteenth.
His eyes scanned the crowd, picking out Kirra instantly. “Erin Sohta? Is your cousin? Yes, a charming woman. She did not mention her companion’s name, though.”
“I’m Sindra,” she said primly.
He stretched his legs out before him with the air of a man relaxing after hard labor. “Hello, Sindra, I’m Coren Bauler,” he said.
She knew the family name, high in the ranks of Fortunalt vassals, but she smiled tightly as if it meant nothing to her.
“How long do you stay in Forten City?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. My cousin determines our travel,” she said.
“But you’re staying here? In this inn?”
Was he hoping for an assignation with her? she wondered. He was a good-looking man, though his brown hair was streaked with gray and his face was lined with a few more years than Senneth had accumulated. Shy, bitter, lonely woman who never experienced any frivolity—yes, he might think someone like that would welcome some illicit overtures.
She could not decide if she should try to turn that idea to her advantage or go running from the room right now.
“Yes—this very inn,” she said. “It’s quite nice, I think.”
“The rooms are small.”
“Oh, I don’t mind that.”
He smiled at her. “Indeed, you seem like the kind of woman who puts up with much without complaining.”
She allowed her smile to brighten, then cast her eyes down. “And what might you complain about, Coren Bauler?” she asked shyly. “All I’ve heard the other men talk about tonight is winter and taxes.”
“Winter’s not something we can do much about, but taxes—well, those have been a burden lately,” he said thoughtfully. “Rayson Fortunalt thinks he has to increase his standing army by half, and he thinks he can only afford it by stealing gold from the coffers of his loyal houses.” He shrugged. “Maybe so. But I think he could dig a little deeper into his own stores before looting from his lords.”
She didn’t really have to feign alarm. “Increase his army!” she exclaimed. “Why? Is it so dangerous here in Forten City? I admit, Erin and I have traveled with a very small escort of guards—”
Coren laughed. “Oh, all the southern Houses are recruiting,” he said carelessly. “To hear Halchon Gisseltess talk, civil war is not so very far off—but he’s a man prone to exaggeration, and he loves a good fight besides.” He broke off. “Not that you could be interested in such talk.”
More interested than you know,
she thought grimly, while giving a small laugh. “Oh—I just don’t understand such things very well,” she said. “Erin tells me I should pay more attention.”
“No—pretty girl like you should be paying attention to gowns and jewels and balls and men,” he said, pulling his feet in and sitting up straighter in his chair. He smiled at her appraisingly.
She put a hand to the high collar of her dress and tried to force a blush. “I’m hardly a pretty girl,” she said, not even sure which of the two words to emphasize. By the Bright Mother’s eyes, he was not even attempting to be subtle about this.
“Pretty enough to me,” he said. “Would you like to dance?”
Red hot hell!
she thought. It had not even occurred to her such a possibility might arise. “I’m—I’m not very good,” she said, looking down again. “I don’t get many opportunities—you know—”

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