A brown hand wrapped around an open water bottle entered her vision. Oama had brought her mount up close to Sandry’s. “It’s all right,” she told the girl quietly. “It’s just water with a bit of lemon for cleaning out the mouth.”
Sandry drank and returned the bottle with a shaky smile.
“Was it bad?” Oama asked softly.
Sandry nodded.
“We reap what we sow,” murmured the duke. He had finished his conversation with the sergeant. “It sounds cold,” he told Oama and Sandry, “but Jamar Rokat sent enough people into the next world before their rightful time that he must have known someone might grant him the same.” The duke patted Sandry’s arm. “Ready to go?”
She nodded.
The moment they clattered into the inner courtyard of Duke’s Citadel, the seneschal, Baron Erdogun fer Baigh, walked briskly out of the duke’s residence and down the steps. He was a whippet-lean man with light brown skin and brown eyes set under a cliff of forehead. Above that he was as bald as an egg; what little black hair remained on the sides of his head was cropped painfully short.
He was fussy, precise, and arrogant, but he was devoted to Vedris, which countered his flaws as far as Sandry was concerned.
“Your grace, I had begun to worry if some accident had befallen you,” he said, bowing. He hovered as Vedris dismounted, but like Sandry, he had learned not to help.
“We would have sent word of an accident, Erdo,” replied the duke. “There was a problem, of course. Jamar Rokat was murdered this morning.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” the baron said crisply. He fell in half a step behind the duke as Vedris began to climb the residence steps.
“I need to return to the fishing village this afternoon,” Sandry told Oama and Kwaben. “Meet me here at three?”
They bowed to her from the saddle and took the reins of her mare. Sandry ran to catch up with the duke and Baron Erdogun. The baron was saying, “and your plans; for the remainder of the morning?”
The duke sighed. “I believe I will lie down until lunch.”
Two weeks before, when he was allowed to leave his quarters and go downstairs, they had set up a couch for him in one of the parlors opening into the entrance hall. It said a good deal for how tired he was that he simply walked into the ground floor parlor and shut the door.
Erdogun turned on Sandry, his hands on his hips. “He just happened to stop by a murder?” he asked tardy.
“There was nothing I could do about that,” Sandry informed him. “You know how he is.”
Erdogun sighed and rubbed his bald crown. “The mail’s arrived,” he said. It wasn’t his nature to apologize for being sharp, as Sandry had already found. “I honestly don’t know what to tell Lord Frantsen anymore.”
Sandry didn’t like the duke’s ambitious oldest son. They had met in the past, and since the duke’s heart at tack the tone of Frantsen’s letters had grown arrogantas if he had already inherited. “Tell him and that grasping wife of his that Uncle cut them from his will.”
The parlor door opened. “Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind,” the duke said quietly. The door closed again.
“Wonderful,” Erdogun muttered and stalked down the hall to the large workroom from which he oversaw affairs at Duke’s Citadel.
Sandry followed him wearily. She missed her old life, before she had found herself watching the health of a man who didn’t want to be fussed over and dealing with a hundred retainers, each more prickly than the last.
She thought dreamily of Discipline cottage at Winding Circle. By this time her teacher Lark would be at her loom, at work on her newest creation. She even envied Pasco: by now he must be sauntering through the marketplace with his friends, without a care in the world.
“Pasco!” The padded end of a baton thumped the side of his head firmly enough to make him stagger. “Scorch it all, boy, pay attention! Knowing the baton might save your silly skull in a dark alley one day!” Exasperated with her youngest child, Zahra Acalon pushed a lock of dark, wavy hair out of her face. She was a tall woman in her late thirties, handsome rather than pretty, with strong black brows, dark eyes, and a wide, decided mouth. Sweat glued her cotton shirt to her back. Impatiently she twitched the cloth away from her chest, flapping it slightly to cool her skin. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times,”
“Daydreams will be my death,” he said along with her. “Sorry, Mama.”
“Pasco got thu-umped, Pasco got thu-umped,” sang his cousin Rehana wickedly.
Five of the residents of House Acalon who were Pasco’s age or a little older had gathered in the courtyard. There his mother Zahra taught them the Provost’s Guards’ traditional weaponsstaff, baton, weighted chainand hand-to-hand combat.
“I’ll thump you, Reha,” Pasco muttered out of the side of his mouth.
A baton tapped him under the chin. “Learn to keep from being thumped yourself, before you deal out knocks of your own,” his mother advised. “And the rest of you, you aren’t doing so well that you can torment him.”
Fast as a snake, she whirled and swung overhand at Reha. The girl blocked her strike with her baton, almost as quick as Zahra herself. With her attention on that de scending baton, Reha did not see Zahra reach out with a booted leg and hook the girl’s feet from under her. Down Reha went, still remembering to keep her own baton between her and any attack from overhead.