“How are you with a sword?” Daniel asked.
“Only fair,” Aisa admitted. Her slow progress at mastering a sword was a sore point.
“I went easy on you, girl, but not that easy, and I’m one of the best knifemen in the guild.” He considered her for a long moment. “Gifted with a blade, mediocre with a sword . . . you’re no Queen’s Guard, child. You’re an assassin. When you reach your full growth, you should quit this mausoleum and come talk to us.”
He touched the wound at his ribs, then raised a hand to the Mace, his fingers dabbled with blood.
“Thank you, Lord Regent. A good show.”
Aisa grabbed her armor and returned to her spot below the dais. Kibb winked as she went. Rebuckling her breastplate, she wiped blood across her front. After the meeting was done, the Mace would likely allow her to go and have Coryn doctor her arm, but not now, for she had asked for this fight. That was fair, but she was losing blood, and after a moment’s thought she looped the ripped lower half of her sleeve around her arm and cinched it tight.
“Our business here is done,” Christopher told the Mace. “We’ll return when the guild has an answer.”
“If the guild says aye, I can give you at least twenty Queen’s Guards to assist.”
“Refused. We want no amateurs involved.”
A murmur of displeasure went through the Guard, but the Millers had already turned and walked away.
Merritt chuckled. “I have no particular love for those three, Lord Regent, but they are good for your purpose. As for me, I stand ready to serve the Queen.”
He followed the other Caden toward the doors, and Aisa felt her muscles relax. Though she would not have admitted it to anyone, she was turning Daniel’s words over in her mind.
“That leaves Queenie, doesn’t it?” Arliss asked. He had remained at the table during the fight, which surprised Aisa; she would have thought that Arliss would be the first to collect bets. “What’s to be done?”
“We’re going to get her,” the Mace replied. “But she would kill me if I left the kingdom to fall apart behind us. Some triage is needed.”
Aisa felt a light touch on her arm, turned, and found Coryn examining her knife wounds.
“Ugly, m’girl, but not too deep. Get your sleeve out of the way and I’ll stitch these up.”
She tore the remaining fabric from her sleeve.
“That was a good fight you made of it, hellcat,” the Mace remarked. “But you allowed him to put you off balance.”
“I know it,” Aisa replied, gritting her teeth as Coryn began to disinfect her wounds. “He was faster than me.”
“The awkwardness of youth. It won’t last forever.”
Even another day seemed too long to Aisa. She felt herself caught in a terrible middle ground: too old to be a child, too young to be an adult. She longed to work as a grown-up, to perform a job and earn money, to be responsible for herself. She was learning to fight, but many of the Guard’s lessons were not taught but absorbed: how to conduct herself in public, how to think of the Guard before herself, and the Queen above all. These were lessons in maturity, and Aisa took them as such. Yet there were still times when she wanted to run to Maman, to lay her head against Maman’s shoulder and have Maman comfort her, just as she had when Aisa was a hunted child.
I can’t have it both ways.
Coryn’s needle pierced the flesh of her forearm, and she took a deep breath. No one in the Guard talked about these things, but she knew, somehow, that how one dealt with injury was just as important as how one performed in a fight. Looking for distraction, she asked, “What does cast out mean?”
“What?”
“Those Caden. You said they were cast out.”
“So they were, six years ago. They cost the guild a great profit and got thrown out as a result.”
“Ai!” Aisa yelped. Coryn’s needle had touched a nerve of some kind. “What did they do wrong?”
“There was a young noblewoman, Lady Cross. Lord Tare had an eye for her—and for her family lands as well—but Lady Cross had a secret engagement with a young man in the Almont, a poor tenant farmer, and she refused Lord Tare at every turn. So Lord Tare abducted her, took her to his castle on the southern end of the Reddick, and locked her in the tower. He swore that she would stay there until she agreed to marry him.”
“Marriage is stupid,” Aisa snapped, gritting her teeth as Coryn pulled the thread tight. “You’ll never catch me getting married.”
“Of course not,” the Mace replied with a chuckle. “But Lady Cross, not being a warrior, did want to marry, and she wanted to marry her young man. She sat in Lord Tare’s castle for two months and wouldn’t budge an inch. So then Lord Tare had the excellent idea of cutting off her food.”
“He starved her to get her to marry him?” Aisa grimaced. “Why didn’t she just marry him and run away?”