42.

Eavesdropping

Days passed and we slept next to each other at night.

I believe we both avoided the room.

If I wanted to read, I walked up to the highest landing on the stairwell and sat in the turret.

Or I spent evenings in the dormitory.

He rose early, as he had pledged, before I woke.

He took his baths at night and came into our bed smelling of soap and that scent of man I had inhaled on the back of his horse in Nyossa.

We spoke little, but were polite.

Sometimes, I would look up from dining with the other women or earth temple staff and thought I found his eyes on me, from where he ate with the Procurers, but I could never quite catch his gaze.

He spent his days testing all the young men who were auditioning to be the twentieth Procurer.

The training yards were on stretches of a plateau of lower bluff rock that sat between the city and the keep, most of them covered in a layer of clayish mud.

Also on this plateau were a granary, the liveries and other armies’ barracks in buildings erected up against the keep’s walls.

Dozens of stairwells led from the keep to the plateau and down to the city.

One could exit almost any part of the bluffs and use these stairs, the temples of air and sea, the Shark’s Keep and the temples of earth and fire.

Two large dirt ramps led from the top of the bluffs to the liveries and down to the city for the ease of horses.

It was on one of these we had entered the city as captives.

The cavalry also kept a second stables down in Pikestully.

One of the narrow windows in Mother Earth’s temple’s antechamber was cut low enough into the rock for me to see down to the plateau.

The day after Alric’s return, I peered outside and noticed the training yards were directly below our temple.

Hundreds of men in civilian clothing and the rest of the Procurers in their Tintarian black lined the low wall that surrounded the clay yard.

My husband, stripped of his armor, only in his boots, breeches and that shortsleeved black tunic, was in the center, fist-fighting a man half his age and much larger than he.

And he was winning.

He weaved and evaded again and again, the younger man wearing out and when his movements slowed, Alric jabbed out and caught the man on the chin and down he went.

A roar went up from both the contenders and the Procurers.

Alric pulled the young man up from the clay mud and shook his hand.

“That’s my fuckin’ brother,”

called Thatcher from his seat on the wall, hands clapping.

“Still swings a hard right over forty, lads! Think you’ve a chance now?”

Perch was sitting next to Thatcher, laughing and called out words I could not hear.

Alric’s head swiveled towards them and he must have said something disciplinary.

Both men tilted their heads upwards.

I realized they could see me through the window.

Alric turned and looked up at me, hands on his hips.

A younger Edie would have been flustered and pulled away from the window.

But I held his gaze for a moment.

I gave him a half smile and turned back to the property tax documents Hazel had given me to decipher for her.

Though I was once a professional scribe, it was tedious and I was surely not focused now.

That night I pilfered some linens, oils and soap from the women’s baths and washed my hair in Gareth’s hidden bath.

I craved privacy.

It had been another day of civil service in the antechamber.

My hair needed washing and every time I went to the women’s baths on my own, without any of the other women, the Lady Vinia always seemed to be lounging there and watched me.

Or would approach me, nude and without embarrassment, and ask how my new citizenship went.

Her questions were innocuous and feigned a casual interest, but she seemed to need to know all she could of me.

Catrin told me she did the same to her and always steered her inquiries to Catrin’s knowledge of me.

Catrin was becoming a true friend, much like Quinn and River, and she reported all of this.

I wanted to ask Hazel or Zinnia if they knew why this beautiful noblewoman wanted to know me.

I washed my hair and soaked in the little bath, sitting on the step afterward, wringing it out and combing it.

I had acquired, from Zinnia, a much better comb than the tin one I now used as a bookmark.

Rubbing the lavender through my hair, I heard the rumble of men’s voices through the left wall, but I paid it no mind until I recognized Thatcher’s.

I got out of the bath and put my ear to that wall.

“Your lady wife saw you deck that big fisherman.

You should try your luck tonight.”

I could barely hear Alric’s reply, but it sounded like, “please.

I beg of you.”

“She be a comely woman, Alric,”

said a voice I did not know.

“There are worse punishments.

King could have killed you.

Or made you marry someone hideous.

But that Eccleston woman—”

“Can we bathe? I am a man in want of a bath,”

Alric asked.

“He is cleaning himself up so he can swive later on,”

Perch added.

I had gathered there were four of them, but a fifth unknown voice said “I agree.

There are worse things.

And her figure would make any man think improper thoughts.

Even your captain.”

“Especially our captain,”

Thatcher chimed in.

“Alric loves bosoms.

I myself prefer—”

“You prefer Helena,”

Perch cut him off.

“We know.

Her hair is like midnight and her ass is like a siren’s serenade.

On and on.

It’s like you’ve never seen a woman before.”

“Can’t help myself, lads.

I think I’m in love,”

Thatcher proclaimed, on the edge of another of his boisterous laughs.

A splash of water hitting flesh sounded.

Perch said, “Get a hold of yourself, man.”

I found myself warming more and more towards Thatcher.

Perhaps, in the future, there was a chance for Helena to find some semblance of happiness in Tintar.

I chided myself on not bringing him up to her anymore.

She would have to decide for herself whether or not her betrothed could be more than the twisted outcome of a political abduction gone wrong.