Froi of the Exiles

  “What would you have done today, Fa?” Lucian whispered, because sometimes he truly felt his father on this mountain slope. “About Orly and especially the lads? Would you have backhanded them with their talk of rape and women? Or are they just lads being lads?”

  Lucian tied up his horse at Tesadora’s campsite, where a large tent was pitched between a thicket of trees. If not for the branches, those in the caves would be able to see where Tesadora and her girls slept at night. It made him furious just to think of what the men could do by merely crossing the stream.

  He reached the stream and could see the Charynites up in their caves looking down at him suspiciously or lining up to have their details recorded by Tesadora’s girls. Farther along, Phaedra of Alonso was bent over in what looked like a vegetable patch and was speaking to a man and a woman.

  “Tell them not to plant their seeds, Phaedra,” Lucian barked out. “They’re not here to stay, so there’s no need for scattering them.”

  Phaedra and the couple stood up for a moment, and he watched as Phaedra spoke to them. They crouched back down again. Cursing, Lucian crossed the stream, knee-deep in water. When he reached them, Phaedra stood there, cowering as usual.

  “Luci-en, this is Cora and her brother Kasabian.”

  Cora and Kasabian seemed the same age as his father had been when he died.

  “Lucian,” he corrected with irritation.

  Cora gave Phaedra a shove, and Phaedra retrieved a piece of parchment from her sleeve and passed it to Lucian with a trembling hand. He read it, shaking his head.

  “You want grain? Why, when we give you bread?”

  “We’d like to make our own bread, Lu-cion … ​cien … ​shen.” She turned away miserably, and the woman nudged her again. “Yours is strange and round. Ours is flat. And if we could grow our own herbs to make pastes, we’d be most appreciative. Your food is making us ill. All those turnips.”

  “It’s fine for a Mont,” he said. “And how many times do I have to say no planting!” he snapped as he watched a number of others squat at the vegetable garden that looked a ridiculous mess anyway. These people knew nothing.

  “They’re not planting,” Phaedra said. “We had set up a number of vegetable patches along this stretch, but …”

  She stopped a moment.

  “But what, Phaedra?” he said. “Speak. It’s as though I’m talking to an idiot!”

  The man, Kasabian, spoke quietly. Just one word.

  “What did you say to me?” Lucian asked, stepping forward and towering over him.

  “What I said was, ‘Enough,’ ” Kasabian said quietly. “Enough.”

  With a withering look, Lucian made sure the man knew who had won this round. He walked away, toward Tesadora and the girls. While two of their companions recorded the names of those standing in line, Tesadora and Japhra beckoned the people to where they could be checked for illness. The Chary nites were cautious and looked frightened.

  Lucian held out his hand for the Charynite chronicle of names and particulars. He counted two hundred and forty-four people so far, and knew that each day more would arrive, looking haggard and weary, not a smile among them. Most had found a cave and kept to themselves, including Rafuel of Sebastabol’s men.

  “Does he look suspicious to you?” Lucian asked Tesadora, who was quietly studying the weathered face of an old man who stood before her. Tesadora was said to know the symptoms of almost any ailment by looking in someone’s eyes and at their tongue.

  “Well, I’m not sure what suspicious looks like,” she said bluntly. “Sometimes when you come down the mountain and stand behind those trees, you look suspicious.”

  “Are you aware these people can almost look into your campsite, Tesadora?” he said. “From up there.” He pointed to their caves.

  “Almost,” she murmured, looking closely into the man’s eyes. “But not quite. It’s why I chose that particular tree to pitch our tent under at the beginning of summer, so —”

  “So you don’t trust them, after all,” he said, feeling slightly victorious that the stubborn Tesadora was admitting it to him.

  She pointed to her mouth and poked out her tongue, and the man in front of her did as she instructed.

  “So I wouldn’t have to hear you or Perri or Trevanion or anyone else tell me that these people can see into my campsite.” She looked at him. “And still you stand here and waste my time.”

  “What about Rafuel’s men?”

  “They can’t see into my campsite either.”

  “I mean, have they come out yet?” he said, quickly losing his patience.

  “No, and I’m not climbing up to them. If you want to know anything, speak to your little bride. She’s quite the popular one in this camp. If she was any more cheerful, she’d make us all ill.”

  Tesadora turned her attention back to the old man before her.

  “Give him a blanket, Japhra,” she said quietly. Japhra placed a blanket around the man’s shoulders, and he walked away.

  “Do you give everyone a blanket?” Lucian asked, watching as Japhra had to almost drag the next woman to Tesadora.

  “Just those who are dying,” Japhra said when it was obvious that Tesadora had already dismissed him.

  Lucian was livid. “If he’s contagious, he can’t stay in the valley,” he hissed.

  Tesadora’s stare was hard. “The only thing contagious around here at the moment, Lucian, is fear and ignorance. The Chary n ites are afflicted with one and the Monts with the other.”

  She waved him away with irritation. He added her to the list. What would his father have done about Tesadora in the valley? Would he have ordered her back to where she belonged, in the Forest of Lumatere? Would he have spoken to Perri and said, “Take care of your woman; she shouldn’t be down here among these strange people”?

  “It’s getting dark,” Lucian said to Tesadora. “Finish up what you are doing here and meet me on our side of the stream.”

  He walked away. “Phaedra!” he barked. Still the idiot girl stood with the brother and sister at the mess of a vegetable patch. She looked up, and Lucian pointed to the other side of the stream. “Now.”

  Phaedra stood, brushed the dirt from her hands and dress, and walked toward him. Kasabian followed, and Lucian stared at him with irritation.

  “Mont,” the man called out. “Can we ask?”

  “No,” Lucian said. “No grain. We hardly have enough for ourselves. I can’t promise you anything.”

  The man shook his head.

  “No, lad —”

  “And I’m not a lad,” Lucian snarled. “I’m the leader of the Monts.”

  Kasabian took a moment to think and then nodded. “Then you are just the person I need to speak to. As the leader of your people, could you please ask your lads to refrain from stomping through our vegetable patches?”

  Lucian looked over Phaedra’s shoulder to where a woman joined the sister, Cora, and bent beside her to work.

  Kasabian’s eyes were stony. “And could you ask your lads to refrain from relieving themselves in the stream? It’s your stream, I know, but it is also a stream used by our women. We mean no disrespect because it is probably not an insult to do so in front of your Lumateran women, but to have men relieve themselves in front of a Charynite woman is an insult for us. Your lads frighten our women, Mont leader. All I ask is that you speak to them.”

  The man’s voice was soft, much in the way of Rafuel’s. Maybe it was a weapon to speak in such a way. All his life, Lucian had never heard his father raise his voice. He didn’t have to.

  And because Lucian was shamed, he walked away.

  Chapter 9

  Froi spent the morning with the kitchen staff, who were a chatty lot. They were accepting of his presence among them, and he enjoyed their company, perched on a stool, watching.

  “If you weren’t a last born, you’d be one of us,” a pretty girl with a wicked chuckle told him. She grabbed one of his cheeks with two fingers. “Nothing s
pecial about this face, eh?”

  “Face don’t need to be special,” another joked. “What’s between his legs has to work its magic.”

  There was more laughing as they kneaded the dough and hammered at the cheese. Two of the servants walked in with a side of salty bacon on their shoulders.

  “The king must be the most grateful man in the world to have such food served to him,” Froi said. He had been in the palace for three days and was no closer to working out where the king was hidden.

  “Oh, we don’t cook for the king,” the pretty girl said, popping a piece of pork on Froi’s plate. He was enjoying not having to share his food with anyone and wolfed it down hungrily.

  “He has his man for that,” an older woman said, “and I thank the gods every night of my life, I do. Imagine if something got into his food. Bad enough that we were almost blamed for what happened to Princess Useless.”

  “Someone tried to poison her?” Froi asked.

  “You’d think that if someone was going to try, they’d get it right,” another muttered.

  It wasn’t that Froi found it strange that someone would try to kill the princess, but that the servants spoke about it so openly, without fear of retribution.

  “Do you ever see the king?” he asked, wiping his plate clean with a piece of flatbread.

  “Saw him last day of weeping. He doesn’t come down to the main hall no more. They say he’s mistrustful of just about everyone. Except Bestiano.”

  Froi closed his eyes a moment, wanting to get the image of Bestiano in the princess’s chamber out of his head. Suddenly the food he had consumed churned in his stomach.

  “You’re pale, lad,” the older woman said, pushing him along to make room for the grain sacks.

  He waved off her concern. “Does no one here refer to it as her birthday?” he asked.

  They all stopped working a moment to look at him.

  “It was the day we wept,” the cook said coldly. “Don’t know how you feel about it in the provinces, but here in the Citavita, it’s the day of weeping.”

  Birthdays were the greatest of celebrations in Lumatere. Froi would know. He had never had one, but everyone else drove him insane with suggestions about what to buy the queen or Finnikin or Lord August. He knew that here in Charyn, the day of weeping had some other kind of political importance, however.

  The portcullis had been raised more than once that day, to let in a parade of livestock and wooden casks containing the best wine in the region. The pretty servant girl explained that the provincari visited each year for the day of weeping, and the king wanted them to be impressed by what the Citavita had to offer the week after next.

  “Always thought it would be over by the time she came of age,” the cook said quietly. “Work that magic between your legs, lad, or there’ll be no Charyn to speak of one day.”

  On his way back up the tower to his chamber, Froi found Gargarin stooped on the narrow stairwell, his body pressed against the wall. When Gargarin heard his footsteps, he stumbled to his feet, sweat bathing his brow. Only then did Froi notice the blood seeping through his shirt.

  “Who did this to you?” Froi demanded, trying to hold him upright in the narrow space. “Was it Bestiano?”

  He kept a step above Gargarin to accommodate them both. When they reached the second level, Froi placed his head under the man’s shoulders and walked him up to their room. Once inside, Gargarin hobbled to his bed, trying to shuffle through the contents of his pack with one hand while the other held the wound. “It’s nothing. A scratch,” Gargarin said, his voice weak.

  Froi ignored him and forced Gargarin to sit. Slowly Froi peeled the shirt from where the source of the wound seemed to be. He looked up at Gargarin in disbelief. “You don’t seem the type to provoke dagger attacks.”

  Gargarin fumbled through the items in the pack, but Froi pushed aside his hands and reached for a piece of flannel. He went to the water pitcher, dampened the rag, and began to clean the wound.

  “Something tells me you’ve done this before, Olivier of Sebastabol.”

  “Who, me?” Froi murmured, trying to see how deep the wound was. Gargarin flinched.

  “Get up,” Froi ordered. Gargarin obeyed. He was in too much pain not to. Froi removed the sheet from the bed and tore strips from it. He ordered Gargarin to sit and began to wind it around his midriff.

  “It’s not so deep,” Froi said.

  Gargarin didn’t respond.

  Froi waited for an explanation, but there was none.

  “Tell me who did this,” Froi said.

  As though nothing had occurred, Gargarin shuffled to the desk and sat down. He untied the ribbon around his manuscript and bent his head to study the pages.

  A dismissal. Froi walked to the desk and sat on Gargarin’s work, refusing to move.

  “What?” Gargarin snapped after a moment.

  “You have a wound,” Froi said. “Is it such a common occurrence that someone attempted to murder you?”

  “Someone’s always attempting to murder someone in Charyn,” Gargarin muttered. “And if you don’t get off my sketches, you’ll be next.”

  Froi stood and retrieved Gargarin’s pages, but instead of handing them back, he studied them.

  “You draw ditches?” he asked.

  He read the word Alonso at the top. The sketch showed meadows sprouting ducts of water in different directions.

  He stopped himself from commenting. He couldn’t let on to Gargarin that Olivier of Sebastabol knew anything about the land, even though Froi was a farmer at heart. More important, he didn’t want to have anything in common with this man, except for the chamber they shared.

  Froi flicked through the rest. “Is that a garderobe for the palace? You don’t think the king’s eighteen advisers are happy enough shitting into the gravina?”

  Gargarin laughed. It was short but sincere. “There has to be a better way in the Citavita than throwing sewage out on the street to be swept down into the gravina,” he said.

  Froi made himself comfortable on Gargarin’s desk. He handed over a sketch of a wheel in water.

  “Explain that to me,” Froi said.

  While Gargarin of Abroi was speaking of capturing rain and of waterwheels, he didn’t seem so distant. He was smart; Froi could see that. Although Finnikin and Isaboe and Sir Topher and even Celie of the Flatlands were among the smartest people he had ever met, Gargarin was different. He knew little of other languages and failed in charm. But from the conversations Froi had listened to at dinner, he could see that Gargarin knew the land and the law, and he knew Charyn’s history and the agreements between provinces. What Froi had first believed to be a sense of superiority, he had come to understand was awkwardness. Gargarin of Abroi did not like people. He trusted no one and preferred to keep his own company. Regardless, Froi had witnessed those who wanted to gain Gargarin’s attention in the great hall and had seen that Bestiano was threatened by this crippled, broken man.

  He watched the pencil in Gargarin’s twisted grip as the man went back to his scribbling.

  “Going to see the princess,” Froi said when it was clear their talking was over for the day.

  Despite wanting to avoid a repetition of the night before, there was a part of Froi that was desperate to see how she was faring. It wasn’t that he cared about her, but he cared that the heinous scene he had witnessed that morning with Bestiano had been prompted by his actions.

  “Do you have an aversion to using doors?” Gargarin muttered as Froi went out to the balconette.

  “I have an aversion to Bestiano knowing exactly when I pull down my pants and pull out my —”

  “Enough said.”

  It was quiet in her room. At first he believed it to be empty, but then he heard the breathing. A moment later, he felt an arm around his neck and a dagger to his throat from behind.

  “That’s the best you can do?” he scoffed. “Point the tip of a dagger under my chin?”

  “We thought you were a
n assassin,” she said in the strange indignant voice. He was relieved. He had little time for Quintana when she was in her cold savage mood.

  “We?” he looked around.

  She pointed to herself.

  “And that’s how you protect yourself from an assassin?” he demanded, removing the dagger from her hand. “If you really want to be successful, you give yourself five seconds to kill a man. In one second,” he said, positioning her before him with her hands on both his shoulders, “you place a knee between the intruder’s legs, and with great speed and force you make sure that he is left … ​legless.”

  “Legless?”

  “In so much pain, Princess, that he can hardly hold himself upright.”

  “Second,” he said, placing the dagger in her hand, “you plunge it into the side of his body and twist. Right about here.”

  “And then,” he said, guiding her hand that held the dagger, “to make sure he’s dead, you take it from one ear to the other across the throat and you press hard and make sure he’s bleeding.”

  She was contemplating what he said. He could see that from the concentration on her face.

  “Think you can do that?” he asked.

  For a moment she didn’t respond, and then she asked, “Is this part of the plan, Olivier?” There was excitement in her voice.

  “I don’t know what plan you’re talking about,” he said.

  She looked disappointed for a moment and then nodded with determination.

  “You’ll have to creep in again,” she said. “But not straight-away. The reginita needs to be surprised.”

  “Oh, she’s here, is she?” he mocked.

  He left the room, climbed onto the wrought-iron trellis, leaped onto his balconette, and returned to where Gargarin was still at his desk.

  “It would probably be a good idea if you lay down a while,” Froi said. “From what I’ve heard of dagger wounds, the loss of blood catches up with you.”

  Gargarin ignored him. Froi was becoming used to it.

  A short while later, Froi quietly leaped back onto the princess’s balconette and crept inside.