“The Seventh Order,” she said to Vaelin as they halted before the causeway. “Not a legend after all. But, I suppose you’ve known that a while.”
“Yes.” His face was sombre, not quite so fatigued as it had been recently, but still he seemed to have aged much in a few days. “Though there was something I should have known, but didn’t.”
“Brother Caenis?”
He nodded and changed the subject. “What will you do with the names Marken gives you?”
“Hunt them down and subject them to trial. If they are proved to be Sons, I’ll hang them.”
“My Lady Governess favours harsh justice.”
“They plotted the death of my uncle, with the full contrivance of the church that has compelled the people of this fief to servile respect for centuries. They conspired with foul creatures of the Dark to subject me to a lifetime of abuse before sending me after you in the hope I would die. And let’s not forget their attempt to kill our queen. Must I go on?”
He studied her face for a moment and she felt the harshness of her expression soften under the scrutiny. “I’m sorry for everything that happened to you here, Reva. If I had had any inkling . . .”
“I know.” She forced a smile. “Join us tonight. Veliss found a new cook, though we can offer only two courses, and no wine.”
“I can’t. There is much to do.” He glanced back at the camp where soldiers were busy packing gear and supplies in preparation for tomorrow’s march and the commencement of what was fast becoming known as the Queen’s Crusade.
“She wanted me to ask,” he said, turning back, “how many men you will send with us.”
“I’ll not be sending any. I’ll be leading them, the full House Guard plus five hundred archers.”
“Reva, you have done enough . . .”
Arken’s slack, lifeless face, the sword in his back . . . The archers flailing in the river as the arrows lashed down . . . Uncle Sentes dying on the cathedral steps . . . “No,” she said. “No I haven’t.”
? ? ?
Veliss came to her somewhere past midnight. They had reverted to keeping separate rooms in the aftermath of the siege, more at the Lady Counsellor’s insistence than hers. Their numerous indiscretions might have been overlooked in the storm of daily battle, but the city had begun to resume a strange normality now the corpses and the worst of the rubble had been cleared away, and the cathedral reopened.
“Are you sure you want to meet them alone?” Veliss asked. They lay side by side, covered in a faint sheen of sweat, Reva enjoying the feel of the Lady Counsellor’s unbound hair clinging to her skin.
“They need to know I speak with my own mind,” she replied. “Given what I have to tell them.”
“They won’t like it . . .”
“I should hope so.” She pulled Veliss closer, pressing a kiss to her lips to forestall further discussion.
“Lady Alornis,” Veliss said, a while later. “You care for her.”
“She is a friend to me, like her brother.”
“No more than that?”
“Jealous, Honoured Counsellor?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to see me jealous.” She raised herself up, hugging her knees. “I was always going to leave, you know. When the war was done, if your uncle had lived. Take the gold he offered and go. Never cared about all the names they called me, or the Reader’s sneering condescension. But I was getting tired of it all, the lies and the intrigue. Even for a former spy, it can grow wearisome.”
Reva reached out to stroke her naked back. “And now?”
“Now I can’t imagine being anywhere else.” Reva felt her tense in anticipation of her next words. “The Queen’s Crusade . . .”
“Is my crusade. And not a topic for discussion.”
“Do you think she would be so welcoming if she knew your true nature? If she knew about us?”
“Unless it proved an impediment to liberating this Realm, I doubt she would care one whit.” She recalled her first meeting with the queen, the fierce intelligence shining through the seared mask of her face, and the implacable determination, the singularity of purpose Reva recognised from infrequent youthful glances at her own reflection. But I was sent in search of a myth, she thought. Her quarry is all too real, and I doubt she’ll be satisfied with however many we find at Varinshold. “In truth,” she confessed to Veliss, “that woman scares me more than the Volarians ever did.”
“Then why follow her?”
“Because he does. He tells me this is necessary. I once failed to heed his words, I’ll not make the same mistake again.”
“He’s just a man,” Veliss murmured, although Reva could hear the uncertainty in her voice. The tale was on every set of lips, Cumbraelins as enraptured by it as all the others, flying far and wide with every telling. One man, cutting his way through an army to save a city, and living to tell the tale.