28. Sage

CHAPTER 28

Sage

I ate the half sandwich, then peeled and ate my orange. The first four men left the outbuilding and returned to the barracks, while Kit and his team picked up their riding gear, headed into the stables, and returned to the bailey a few minutes later with their horses saddled and ready to go.

Payne swung up into his saddle with the powerful grace only a fae could have, gave me a wave as the others mounted, then all three of them rode out of the bailey.

I finished my orange, shoved the peels into my pocket — I'd add them to the manure pile when I had a chance — and crossed the bailey to the stables.

The castle's bell rang twice just as I was stepping inside the large, dusty building filled with the pungent, musty scent of hay and horse and urine and shit. A middle-aged human with a sword at his hip, a robust figure, and thinning hair looked up from whatever he'd been doing a few stalls down and frowned at me.

"So, you're the novice," he said, his tone dry.

Swell. Another admirer.

Another man, about my age — my real age of almost twenty, not the age I was pretending to be — hurried through the stable doors and stopped beside me. He too was armed, and he gave me a quick glance before turning his attention to the middle-aged man.

"I'm the stablemaster, Kasen," the middle-aged man said. "Today you're mine until the fourth bell and then for half of the shift after the eighth bell. Have you mucked out a stall before?"

"I haven't," I admitted. No point in claiming to know something when I didn't since I wasn't here to impress anyone.

"He's a noble," the new guy snickered. "Probably hasn't had a hard day of work in his life."

Which wasn't at all true. I'd spent a lot of time hauling water up stairs for Edred and his new wife's baths among other things, but I'd never been given stable work.

In fact, shortly after my mother had died, Edred had stopped my riding lessons, and I could only assume it was an effort to limit my knowledge of horses so it would be harder for me to run away.

"Well, he's not a noble anymore," Kasen said. "Owun, get him started while I start moving the horses to the pasture. Once you've gotten him going, help me with the rest."

Owun gave a tight nod and headed to an area with shovels, brooms, wheelbarrows, buckets, rags, brushes, and a larger version of the pump and basin in my room. He put a shovel into one of the wheelbarrows and wheeled it down the wide aisle between the stalls.

I followed him as dozens of sets of large dark eyes followed us. Horses huffed and whickered and shifted and stomped. Some didn't seem to notice us, while others stretched their heads over the doors, looking for attention. Owun ignored all of them and stopped at a stall that didn't have a horse in it and swung open the door.

"Shovel everything into the wheelbarrow." He held the shovel out to me. "The manure pile is outside the Tower, so when the wheelbarrow is full, follow me or Kasen out the pasture gate and we'll point you in the right direction. Repeat until all the stalls have been shoveled out."

"Got it." I didn't know if there was more to it. At some point we'd have to lay fresh hay, but I wasn't sure if there were anymore steps between shoveling out the spoiled hay and adding the clean stuff, but I was sure Owun would tell me when the time came.

I took the shovel and got to work, trying to ignore the pain in my chest every time I moved, while Owun and Kasen came and went, leading a couple horses at a time out the stable door. The wheelbarrow quickly filled, and I wheeled it to the stable's entrance where Kasen led two horses and me across the bailey and out a narrow archway in the thick outer wall near that building that I had no idea what it was.

Beyond the wall lay a rocky, jagged gray landscape swathed in mist. It reminded me a bit of the wastelands at the edge of Herstind March with scraggly trees and tough weeds, but here was sharper and more dangerous looking.

Ahead lay a field of dark green grass that didn't fit with the rest of the barren landscape where some of the horses were already grazing, and to my right was a squat building with smoke curling from half a dozen chimneys and dozens of empty laundry lines nearby waiting for the day's clean wet laundry.

Beyond that was an enormous area for weapons training. Men were stretching and warming up, while others had already started practice bouts or had lined up in front of archery targets. They laughed and jostled and called to each other with a familiarity and joy I hadn't expected of the Black Guard, sending an unexpected pang of jealousy through me.

They had a comradery I couldn't let myself have with them and one I'd never had with anyone except Sawyer. Lord Quill had been right when he'd said that Sawyer was going to gain three hundred brothers. I was sure that like all families not everyone got along, but I could tell from looking at the men on the practice grounds that many of them did. They needed to rely on each other to stay alive and they couldn't completely do that without first building trust between them.

Which was why using the ring after dark and endangering the lives of whoever had come to save me pissed off most of the men I'd met. I'd proven just by showing up that I couldn't be trusted not to get them into a situation that put them in danger.

Kasen pointed me to the manure pile, which lay down a narrow path and past the practice area. Beyond it I could see the top of the fae ring, easily three or four hundred yards away, and another, wider path leading away from the pile toward the ring.

I dumped my load then headed back to the stables to repeat the process, shoveling, wheeling, returning. The stables were large, so I tried to pace myself, but the ache in my chest continued to grow and I knew that it was going to be difficult to move, let alone breathe, before my first shift in the stables was even done.

After probably about two hours of shoveling, Owun handed me a bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush and pointed me to the first stall I'd cleaned out.

"Give it a good scrub," he said with a satisfied gleam in his eyes, but the gleam vanished when I went into the first stall and got to work scrubbing the stone floor without complaint.

I fought back my own satisfied gleam, knowing I disappointed him by not reacting like a spoiled nobleman. Complaining only drew attention to myself and hopefully, by not saying anything and just doing my job, everyone would forget about me. I'd just be an unmemorable new member of the Guard, nothing more.

Which really wasn't that different from the life I'd left. Sure, I'd been a nobleman's daughter, but I'd always had to do what I was told and with Edred that had been scrubbing floors and hauling water and doing laundry with the other servants. Why pay for a servant when you had someone who could do it for free? It didn't matter that Herstind Keep's servants weren't paid very well. They'd still been paid. I hadn't been.

I suppose there'd been hope that my life would have gotten easier once Edred had finally shipped me off to a husband. But there'd been no guarantee of that, and I suspected anyone Edred liked as a husband for me had a similar disposition and wouldn't have treated me any better. And really, even if he treated me better, he still wouldn't have been able to give me what I wanted: the chance to be my own person and to have the skill to protect the people I cared about.

Except that wasn't all I wanted.

A whisper of achy need warmed my core despite the fact that my nose was far too close to a sticky pool of horse piss and my chest hurt.

I wanted to be desired and loved. I didn't want to be with a man to make Edred or any other man happy. I wanted to be with a man to make me happy and have a man desire me for me. That was what my dream had really been about. Even if I hadn't looked like me, I still knew that was what it had been about.

I scrubbed my way to the stall door, my thoughts wandering back to the dream and how that man had worked magic with his mouth. I'd never felt anything like that before and had no idea how I'd managed to dream about it.

"Hey," a lilting masculine voice said, startling me from my daydreaming.

I glanced out the stall door to see another gorgeous fae with flawless dark skin standing a few stalls down cooing to a white and gray dappled horse that the stablemaster and Owun had strangely left in his stall.

"How's he looking?" another, just as beautiful fae with long light brown hair, asked, heading to another horse that had also been left behind.

"Flint did a good job. Can hardly tell that hound got him across the nose three nights ago," the other fae replied and stepped into the stall and started saddling the horse.

I turned my attention back to the final few feet of stall floor left to scrub. They hadn't noticed me and maybe if I kept my head down, they wouldn't. I didn't want a repeat of the snide comments or even the dirty looks that I'd gotten in the great hall.

"So," the first fae said, "did you go to the Garden last night? I heard there was a new arrival."

Hunh, new arrival? That sounded familiar. Wasn't that what the men in my dream had called me? What a funny coincidence that these fae would use the same words the fae in my dream had.

"I didn't see her," the other fae replied, "but my cousin did. Said she had all her marks and stunning dark red hair."

My thoughts tripped on that. I couldn't have heard that right. I'd had dark red hair in my dream, too. What were the odds that they'd not only mention a new arrival but one with the same hair color?

"Red hair?" the first fae said. "Then she's definitely new. There isn't an unmated woman with red hair right now. This could be your chance."

"I doubt it."

"Why not?" the first fae asked. "You have magic. You won't know unless you try."

"I barely have magic," the other fae replied. "But Wells, Crane, and Pike found her first and Rider sent them packing."

"Rider scared away the most eligible bachelors in the Garden? He hasn't done that…"

"He's only ever done that for his sister."

A chill swept through me. The Lord Commander actually had a sister. And they knew that he'd told those men to go away.

"If he's finally decided to put himself in the running for a mate, I'm not going anywhere near her," the second fae said. "He's more powerful than me and I bet he'll be worse than Blaze who almost killed two of Lark's suitors until the Goddess bonded him to her."

"Of course, none of those suitors turned out to be her other mates," the first fae replied, "so his instincts were right on that."

"Still not going to court this new woman until I know that Rider isn't going to rip out my throat."

My thoughts spun. How could they have possibly known what I'd dreamed last night?