Chapter 8
If this had been any other time in his life, Gavin could have taken the shock, absorbed it silently, and gone on to the next appointment of an overfull day. In every down moment, he would have chewed through the surprise. He would have lain it down for six or ten hours, not thinking about it at all. And then, passionless, he would pick up that shock late in the day and rationally decide what to do about it.
But in this gray hell, there was nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nothing else to think of. Little to see except the expectant face of Marissia, like a loyal hound expecting a beating.
Except not loyal.
Nor a hound.
“Not a slave?” Gavin asked. “You clipped your own ears? Who would do such a thing?”
“I was eighteen years old when I came to serve you,” Marissia said. “But I had been deeply in love with you for three years already. Though you’d never seen my face. From as early as I could remember, I’d heard tales from my friends, from my mother, and my grandmother. Everyone knew about the perfect Guile brothers.”
Gavin wondered sometimes if he’d been so stupid when he was young that he hadn’t seen how different his life was from everyone else’s. He and his brother had taken the affection and attention as their natural due, and his mother had muted people’s more exuberant gestures skillfully. In many ways, he’d had no idea that not everyone grew up as cherished as he did.
She went on. “I didn’t pay much attention to the False Prism’s War. It was so far away from Blood Forest. I knew there was some horrible girl who was to blame for everything, and that the fighting was awful. I thought you must be very brave. And then the war was over, settled in some distant land, and almost immediately, the Blood War started up again.”
“Tell me. Tell me everything. Give me it all.” Maybe he could regain his equilibrium if he didn’t have to speak for a while.
She still couldn’t meet his eye. “My experience of the war was almost anticlimactic. My family was wiped out by pieces, and each time, I was supposed to be at the places the raiders hit, and I simply… wasn’t. For me, it was like my family disappeared slowly, every time I turned my back. I never saw their bodies. I never felt the heat of the burning fields, or touched the broken gates. I never smelled the forbidden magic still steaming in the air. A cousin would bring in a confirmation: he’d seen the bodies himself, there would be no ransom, there was no mistaking my sister’s death, then my father’s, then later my mother’s. There was no false hope, but also never a chance to grieve. The land that had been taken from us was being held by enemies. There would be no visits to graves, no remembrance wreaths, no dirges or holy fires against Long Night.
“I was brought quietly to the Jaspers—and found out that after I’d left, my cousins had been killed, too. I decided I had been spared for a purpose. My grandmother Orea was more distraught than I’d ever seen her. And then you came back from Rath. You’d just ended the Blood War, which had been simmering for centuries. You simply ended it, with a fatal wave of your hand.
“I think my grandmother had been about to move against you, before that. But that changed her.
“She found a peace again. It was my idea, you know. Me becoming your room slave. One day, my grandmother spoke privately to your mother; Felia said you were dissatisfied with your current room slave, and she herself was unhappy because the woman was spying on you. So Orea asked your mother if she might procure a girl for her. She said she’d give you an excellent room slave as a gift to make up for past friction. I was eavesdropping, and as your mother gave her the description of what she wanted for you, I realized it fit me perfectly.”
“But to become a slave…” It was the greatest fear for every family in power. Losing a war didn’t mean becoming a tradesman: nobles were either at the top, or reduced to death or the most onerous servitude possible.
“I’d lost everything, Gavin. My family. Our fortune, which wasn’t large to begin with. The Pullawrs’ power had dwindled since Ulbear Rathcore died. My grandmother refused to use the power of her office to help us unfairly. Her integrity was the slow ruin of us. Your father had some grudge against Ulbear, and I think he orchestrated much of our downfall. The Seaborns had bled to seize our lands, so there was no way they were going to simply give them back to anyone, certainly not to an eighteen-year-old girl with no army or fortune.”
“The Seaborns?!”
“Yes. And yes, Brádach Seaborn did recognize me. He shouldn’t have. We’d never met. But he’d known my sister, and the resemblance was strong. Strong enough, apparently. I don’t know if he killed her himself, or if he merely allowed her murder. But I goaded him into hitting me. I knew your vengeance would be swift and terrible. I thought you loved me. It was the first and last time I manipulated you. I’m sorry. It was the only way I could see to get vengeance for my family. I had no idea how far things would go.”
Gavin had killed Brádach Seaborn for beating Marissia and put his head on a pike. The Seaborns had eventually sided with pirates to get vengeance on the Guiles for that. Almost all of them had ended up hanged, and their lands seized.
All from one slave’s lie.
Having known Marissia always as his own property, Gavin had trusted her to act in good faith, which to him had meant in his interests. After she’d passed his trials of her faithfulness against the White, Marissia had become, in Gavin’s view, an extension of his own will.
Instead her own secrets had led to lies, and lies to death.
It wasn’t as if she were the only one. He’d made his own choices, and the Seaborns had, too. What did it matter now?
“But Marissia, a slave?” He couldn’t get past that.
“My grandmother couldn’t intervene for me in the satrapies’ politics. Or wouldn’t. The White is supposed to be above politics, and things were so tenuous here. My prospects were limited. I’d been trained to run a large household, to manage slaves and servants, to see the proper protocols were observed, to check the books but not to keep them myself, to see that animals were properly tended but not to do the tending, to check that the cooks were performing well but not to cook myself: I knew a little of everything, but was master of nothing. I was useful as a chatelaine, but useless for all else.
“Of course, I was a fool for thinking that. One who can learn so much by eighteen can easily learn more. But I knew I would never have my dream. I would never be that high lady with six or eight children embracing her, which had been all I ever wanted. So I volunteered.
“I knew I had been saved for some great purpose, and what could be higher than serving the greatest Prism of all time, Gavin Guile? They told me that if you accepted me, I would be with you for years. Maybe many years, if I did well. It was almost a marriage, to a desperate foolish heart like mine.”
Indeed, anyone who married a Prism would know her marriage would likely last only seven years. Gavin had been with Marissia for more than ten.
“My grandmother was desperate, and I solved so many problems for her. But she never forgave herself for letting the blacksmith clip my ears. Because the moment he cut, our course was set.”
Here Gavin thought he’d tried the most insane gambit possible to save himself in the fallout of the civil war. He felt numb. Marissia. A Pullawr.
“It wasn’t a bad life,” she said.
“What?”