The Price of a Daughter
The Archduke's face was radiant as he stepped out of his wife's bedchamber. Naz, who had spent the whole night on the drawing-room sofa, looked as though he had aged ten years.
"Your Grace, how can you be smiling at a time like this? Look at my face. Look at it!"
He kept up the scolding all the way to the main house. The knights trailing behind them agreed, in the privacy of their own hearts, with violent enthusiasm.
"The only reason I'm still in one piece is that I'm a genius of a knight. Last night was honestly no joke!"
"Yes, I know. I'll give you leave."
"I don't need any of— Pardon? Leave? Ah, Your Grace, you might have said so sooner."
Naz brightened at once and broke into a grin. Then his face knotted again. The moment he remembered what he had to report, his head began to pound.
"If it's a headache, tell me after I've had a bath."
"How could it be anything else? You are quite literally glowing."
"Which is precisely why I mean to enjoy the feeling a little longer."
After his bath, Ilya took a simple breakfast in the office. The handsome face that had so long been creased between the brows now blazed in the morning sun, and looking upon that fresh countenance—every inch a man of twenty-five—Naz felt his chest tighten with something dangerously close to awe.
My lady, what magic did you work on him last night?
Naz looked down at the letter in his hand, and his expression collapsed all over again. The seal pressed into the fine paper only deepened his unease.
"Out with it. This looks like something from my dear father-in-law."
A priest crowned in blue. At the sight of the Mardus marquisate's seal, Ilya sneered.
Naz let out a sigh, then opened his mouth with care.
"The letter is from the heir. Odin Mardus."
"What does that one want?"
"He writes that Your Grace's marriage to my lady is void..."
Ilya drummed his fingers against the arm of the chair and growled.
"They truly do as they please. And?"
White to the lips, Naz went on.
"He says he will come in person... to take my lady away."
The office sank into a suffocating silence.
"He offers to pay compensation in grain or livestock, however much Your Grace desires, but the sum..."
"The Mardus bastards still haven't learned their place."
Ilya cut him off, as if there were no need to hear the rest.
"I had meant to rest today, and they've gone and made work of it. Has Sir Stas returned?"
"As it happens, he is waiting outside even now."
The door soon opened, and a knight came in. A genial, handsome man of middle years set a fist to his chest and bowed from the waist. Strikingly, an eyepatch covered his left eye.
"I completed my mission in the east and returned last night. May the radiance of the Black Eagle go with you."
"Half your face is gone. It must have been rough. You've done well."
The moment Stas took his seat, Ilya came straight to the point.
"Did you learn who Odin Mardus is meant to marry?"
He had not taken his wife's words lightly. The very next day he had summoned Stas and set him to the investigation.
"Marquis Vasili has one daughter. She was cast out along with her mother. The wife died, and only the daughter came back."
Ilya and Naz frowned as one.
Marquis Vasili was infamous for taking as his wives only young women from obscure houses. Without exception, none of them had lived past three years of marriage.
"And there is something that troubles me. He ceded several islands in the east to Marquis Mardus—at a pittance."
"Islands?"
"The east is thick with islands, so at first I thought little of it... but not long ago, copper turned up in a mine on one of them."
Copper was a mineral that minted money. Bullets and cannon were forged from it; in war, few things were more precious. The whole affair reeked of conspiracy.
"When, exactly?"
"A year ago. So it cannot be the price of this marriage."
"Doesn't that seem wrong to you? A year ago was when Marquis Mardus was picked clean by us. Where did he find the money to buy islands that were useless at the time?"
Ilya propped his chin on his hand and sank into thought. After a moment he flicked his eyes toward the fine sheet of paper lying on the table.
"Odin Mardus sent a thoroughly unpleasant letter."
Stas took up the letter and read it through, line by careful line. The eye left bare by the patch glinted, sharp. A moment later a dry laugh broke from him.
"Your Grace, everything I am about to say is strictly hypothetical."
"Speak."
Stas, adjutant to the knight-commander, was a strategist of renown even within the Black Forest Knights. Ilya and Naz straightened, ready to listen.
"Those islands Marquis Vasili handed over. They are not the price of Odin Mardus. They are the price of our lady."
The air in the office stirred.
"I don't recall divorcing my wife, Sir Stas."
At the coldness in Ilya's voice, Stas smiled. Watching the two of them, Naz felt his heart shrink.
"You have not. But you were going to, were you not? And... she is beautiful."
"Are you trying to tell me that my wife is young and pretty?"
Ilya's voice climbed a tone above its usual pitch. Talk that handled his wife like a piece of goods repelled him—not that he was in any position to object, when he himself was using her as a living sleeping draught.
"Your Grace, what I mean is this. Marquis Mardus has sold off, yet again, the daughter who was about to become a divorcée."
"To whom? The young lord of House Vasili?"
He had gnashed his teeth over divorcing her the moment he came home, and here he was asking what her next husband mattered.
"Would he yield a young, beautiful woman to his son? The seat of Marquis Vasili's fifth wife stands empty. That old man."
"Stas, what kind of nonsense is that! Do you have any idea how old that geezer is?"
Naz shot to his feet and shouted. The hand stabbing a finger toward Stas trembled.
"How pleasant the world would be if every man in it were like you, Commander."
Stas let out a long sigh, heavy with lament.
"Go on. Of everything I've heard since you got back, today is the most amusing."
The words were light. The deep blue of Ilya's eyes was not; they were full of killing intent.
"Ayatoll Mardus, that old man, will have reasoned thus. The moment Your Grace returned, you would cast my lady out."
The calculation itself had been sound. Had she not been part of a bargain, Ilya would have divorced her on the spot.
"What he failed to reckon was that Your Grace would not let his daughter go. No one could have expected that."
Stas winked with his one eye.
That is the look he wears right before he says something unhinged. A chill of foreboding crawled over Naz, and he shuddered.
"A woman who drove an ascetic war hero mad... and a woman who so nearly came into my hands... By now, his body would be burning for her."
"So that is why Odin Mardus means to honor the north with a visit of his own."
He remembered his wife offering her own blood, if only he would kill her father and her brother both. He had thought her nothing more than a softly raised princess. Damn it.
"Naz. Until Odin Mardus shows his face, not even a rat is to pass in or out of the Annex."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"Sir Stas. I have one more task for you. I will write a letter. Carry it to House Loren in the west."
"I will depart at once, Your Grace."
"Both of you. Out."
The face that was always cold was, today, cold past all habit.
Late at night, Evelynn sat alone in the chapel. A knight of her guard stood well back, watching the line of her shoulders.
A white veil over her hair, her hands folded as if in prayer, she let her closed eyes open a sliver.
Why won't it work?
She looked from her bare hand to the book beside her, and back again. It was an old thing, bound in black, with letters of gold.
Flowers and animals she could shape as naturally as breath. It was not form alone. Sound and touch she could render as vivid as the thing itself.
Even this isn't bad. I could scrape together a modest living.
But once she left this place—two women with no money, no power, and no house to stand behind them, and one small child.
I need real power. Not a little trick like this.
She shut her eyes hard once more. A dark-red flame leapt up and wound about her white hand, and then... She waited a long while. There was no heat of fire, no stench of burning flesh, no pain. She bit down on her lip.
Is it that I can't turn it on myself?
Just then a moth drifted down onto the seat beside her. She stared a long time at the fearless intruder, then closed her eyes and drew a roaring fire in her mind. Dark-red flame surged up and wrapped the frail wings, and then... A deep sigh broke from her.
I can't. Even a speck of a creature... It hasn't done anything wrong.
Ought she to look for some other subject? In that moment a man flashed through her mind—a great hulk of a man who had once kept to her father's side and now kept to her brother's. With him, she thought she could do it. Without so much as a twinge of guilt.
Evelynn wrapped both arms around her shaking body. She was frightened of herself, for thinking something so hideous and feeling nothing at all.
Ilya stood at the rear of the chapel, watching her. She seemed not to know that he had come in, nor that the guard knight had gone.
He went quietly and sat in the place behind her. Her narrow back kept flinching; he could not tell what she was about. She had been turning the pages, and perhaps she felt his gaze, for she turned her head.
"Oh—! Mmph!"
Ilya lifted a hand at once and clamped it over her mouth.
"First time seeing your husband's face?"
Even muffled, her lips seemed to pout against his palm, and it tickled. A short laugh escaped him.
"Promise you won't scream, and I'll let go."