The glint became a gleam. “I suspect you’ll find out.” And then she was gone in a swirl of vestments, while Marguerite stared after her, wondering what on earth she was talking about.
The first leg of their journey was deeply uneventful. They took the road by slow stages for the riders who were not accustomed to time on horseback. Marguerite felt her nerves slowly settle. The Red Sail’s attempts to murder her had mostly occurred in places where they were already established. While it would be simple enough for someone to lie in wait with a crossbow, it would require them to know which road she was taking or to stake out every possible road. Marguerite was quite certain that she simply wasn’t worth that kind of effort. She was a loose end, not an active target.
Being a loose end is quite unsettling enough, thank you very much.
Wren was cheerful and chatty and Beartongue had been right—she really didn’t complain. Even when she was slapping about in the saddle with her teeth gritted and lines of pain around her eyes, she didn’t ask for stops. Marguerite found herself calling for an early halt out of pure sympathy.
Truth was, she was grateful for the frequent stops herself. While she often worked with the mounted nobility, riding out for a few hours of flirtation was rather different than day after day on horseback. She was not exactly sore, but she was certainly very stiff.
Though not as stiff as some people I could name. Her eyes drifted to the tall blonde man beside
her.
Shane was courteous, answered her questions politely, and volunteered nothing. Marguerite’s attempts to draw him into conversation failed utterly. He was from a town southeast of the Dowager’s capital. Had he grown up there? No. Had he been back? No. Did he miss it? No. Was the landscape similar? Yes, but the trees were different. Whenever she left a silence and waited for him to fill it, he allowed the silence to grow.
He didn’t laugh at her jokes. (She didn’t take it personally because he didn’t laugh at anyone else’s jokes either, and their groom, Foster, made quite a good one about a chicken.) He watched everything and said nothing unless spoken to.
She didn’t think that he was unintelligent. It seemed more like he was paying very close attention to the world and filing it all away somewhere behind those ice-colored eyes and simply had nothing to say.
For many people, this might have made him unreadable, but Marguerite had made her life’s work out of reading people, and the day that she couldn’t read a silence was the day that she retired and took up goat farming. The key was usually the eyelids. People say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but windows don’t actually have expressions. But you can sure tell a lot by how someone closes the blinds. The little twitchy muscles in the lower lid, the fine lines at the outer edge, the startled blink—those were the tells that she watched for.
Sadly, it was extremely difficult to watch someone’s eyelids when you were both on horseback, on different horses, facing the same direction.
I’ll figure it out. I’ve got a week, and we won’t be riding all the time. And in the meantime, I can just ask Wren.
The first night on the road, she bespoke two rooms, one for Wren and herself, one for Shane and Foster. “Forgive me,” she said to Wren. “I was hoping to have you in the same room at night, in case someone comes through the window, but I realize that might be awkward with you and Shane. Are you two…ah…?”
The other woman looked blank. Marguerite made explanatory hand gestures.
“Oh. Saint’s balls, no. He’s like an older brother. They’re all like older brothers. All six of them.
Including Judith.”
“Having that many older brothers sounds exhausting.”
Wren put her head in her hands. “You have no idea.”
Marguerite smiled. At least one of the paladins was easy to read. “I’ll have a tray sent up,” she said. “I’m guessing you would rather not brave the stairs down again.”
“I can if I have to,” said Wren, who could not currently stand without her legs trembling.
“Yes, but you don’t have to.”
“It’s no trouble.”
If Marguerite had not been familiar with berserkers, she would have been worried that she might
end up guarding her bodyguard. Absent a full-blown berserk fit, though… She decided to try diplomacy. “Actually, I wanted to get a tray for myself, so if you don’t mind eating with me? Rooms full of strangers are a little…ah…dicey at the moment.”
“Oh, that’s different. By all means.”
“Won’t be a moment,” Marguerite assured her. “Let me just check on the boys.”
She checked to make certain the hallway was empty, then hurried to the stairs down. The taproom was bustling, which was a relief. It was surprisingly easy to murder people in a crowded room, but not when you had a paladin with you.
“How is Wren?” asked Shane, the first question that he had asked directly all day.
“Sore,” said Marguerite, joining the two men at the table. “She tells me it’s been years since she was on a horse, and that was an elderly pony.”
Foster nodded, wiping foam from his ale from his upper lip. “Doesn’t matter how fine a shape you’re in,” he said sympathetically. “All the wrong muscles used in all the wrong ways on a horse.”
Shane nodded. Marguerite rubbed her sore thighs surreptitiously under the table. “We’ll take it easy on the road to the river,” she said. “There’s no point in hurting ourselves for an extra day or two.
Everyone arrives fashionably late to the court anyway.” And the longer the patron is there, the more chance that they’ll let something slip that we can pick up from someone else later. Like most spycraft, Marguerite was happy to let someone else do the work for her whenever possible.
Shane nodded again. Marguerite thought about trying to engage him in conversation, decided that it had been a long enough day already, ordered two trays, and went to go eat with Wren.
SIX
“SO HOW DID you wind up a paladin?” Marguerite asked two days later, when Wren was comfortable enough that she wasn’t clinging to the saddle horn with an expression of impending doom. (Her horse ignored this. Her horse had, so far, ignored everything that did not involve food or Foster.) Wren’s lips twisted. “You mean, how does someone who looks like me become a paladin?”
“As a fellow member of the society of chunky women, I trust you’ll take that in the spirit that it’s offered.”
Wren gave her a frankly skeptical look. “Except that you’re gorgeous.”
“No, I just dress well and have large breasts. It’s not the same.” She looked Wren over. The other woman was less an hourglass than a muscular apple. “I won’t lie, your shape isn’t the easiest to work with, but a good tailor could do work that will astound you.”
“It would still be me inside the clothes,” said Wren, gesturing to her relative lack of endowments.
“Well, yes. Attitude is very important.”
“Exactly. And you carry yourself like you’re gorgeous.” Wren shook her head. “I don’t know how.”