***15

Leah accompanies Jeno to the dining hall that evening then goes to take her seat with the five. She and Jeno spend supper not looking at each other, only talking with those right next to them.

Samson reaches over to touch the opal pin at one point, and Leah’s stomach churns.

Distracted but disciplined all through supper, she joins the five for yet another debriefing. She is feeling bitter about this taking time away from Jeno, and nervous yet thrilled to face the Auzzos with this secret. She realises she understands why Jeno gave her the flower.

Leah settles into the large room, sitting between Meredith and Vivitha, squished into the middle of the five.

“Borderland farms have reported an unusual quiet,” the Lord says, to open the meeting. “Seffon may be withdrawing to plan something; our scouts reported that the forest between the border and Seffon’s fortress is empty, and the gates are always closed.”

“How close did the scouts actually get?” Iris asks.

“The forest border,” Lady Valerid says, passing the report to them.

Leah catches a glance at it as it goes by; a quick scrawl reports numbers of guards on the wall, repairs being done to the building within, and an X marks the location of the keep relative to Valerin city and the paths the scouts took on their way to and from.

“This silence is a bad sign. Protecting the border may not be enough. It is wearing on everyone’s nerves to be waiting; we should plan another assault,” Duke Auzzo says, eyes passing over them all.

And again the Auzzos lead the push for an aggressive solution, Leah thinks with some acidity. “We should wait until another ‘assassin’ is sent, and capture them alive to interrogate. We don’t have nearly enough information.” Both the Auzzos and Valerids seem surprised that Leah is the first to respond.

 Meredith immediately nods, backing her up. “I agree. Our initial scouting mission was too brief, and any extra information could be the difference between life and death for one of the five.”

All present pointedly do not look at Leah, but she feels the weight of their thoughts nonetheless.

The Valerids seem intrigued. “They are coming more frequently; we are probably due for one quite soon. If we could fill in some of the blanks…” the Lord says, fingers steepled.

Duchess Auzzo shrugs and turns to the Lord. “It is a strong point, and I would support it as well if I did not feel that perhaps their concern was more for themselves than for their given task.”

Meredith raises an eyebrow and purses her lips, but otherwise keeps her temper. “We are here to protect Valerin from whatever Seffon is planning. That is our given task. Running out to get killed is not good business, Duchess.”

“You logic is sound, but your emotions may be clouding you,” the Duchess says stiffly.

“May they?” Meredith says evenly.

“We simply worry that you are delaying the inevitable, out of fear for Miss Talesh’s mental well-being,” the Duke says, arms spread wide in an almost apologetic gesture. “Our daughter has faith in her recovery, but from what we have seen, we don’t.”

Iris gets defensive, and starts listing the various ways Leah has shown improvement since returning, while Vivitha starts vouching for Leah’s state. Both talk over each other for a few seconds, then settle down under a hard stare from Meredith and the Lord.

“Miss Talesh has been acting out-of-sorts since she was brought back, and has not fully recovered well enough to know even basic manners or cultural norms,” the Duchess says.

“Well you know, cultural sensitivity goes both ways,” Iris says in a low voice that nonetheless carries.

“We will resume this some other time,” the Lady cuts in quickly, laying her hand over her husband’s. “Nothing good can be achieved with this much tension in the air. Tomorrow may bring us something new; another report from the scouts, or perhaps another attempted assault. We will defer our decision until then.” The Valerids glare disapprovingly at Meredith, who in turn glares at her team, hot with indignation.

The bulk of the team leaves rather quickly after that, while Meredith remains behind to try to salvage the situation. Leah splits away from the others, unnoticed; they are too busy grumbling about nosy foreigners who don’t understand how things work on the mainland.

She walks back through the kitchens, and sees Kimry cleaning. She waits in the shadows until she is noticed. Kimry sees, and cleans faster.

In ten minutes, Leah’s injured pride has settled, and Kimry has joined her. They walk through the rose gardens together, Kimry bringing along a half-empty bottle of wine left over from the high table. The leaves of the rose vines are out, but no buds yet. They pass the bottle back and forth, talking about the day, and Leah’s returning memories.

“I can’t help but be concerned for your safety, when you have to keep riding off against infiltrators and assassins. The sooner you put an end to the whole Seffon thing, the better.” Kimry suddenly grins and leans closer against Leah. “Perhaps, with a big enough success, you could ask the Valerids for a boon. You could ask to stay on as Jeno’s guard, and that way you could stay near me.”

Leah swallows discomfort and guilt, aware that this is almost the same thing Jeno has suggested before. Kimry settles down against her, and starts brainstorming ways they could conspire to see each other again, if the five must all leave when their contract is over. Leah tries to be reassuring, and come up with her own suggestions, as the bottle slowly empties. They remain hidden in the brown garden for around two hours, until the alcohol is done and has worn off almost entirely.

Kimry hides the empty bottle deep in the branches of a nearby forsythia. Leah kisses her goodbye, and they sneak off back to their rooms.

On her way back, Leah remembers her initial reaction to finding out that Other-Leah had strung along two women in secret, and being disgusted by the sort of person who would do that. I’ve fallen very easily into that behaviour, and I’m not quite sure how to go forward. To be fair, this world I’m in now is under a lot of stress, and both of these women seek me out far more often than I seek them. They seem to need the comfort of someone ‘strong’ to hold on to.

It tickles her fancy a bit, to be someone strong and supportive. A stark change from the usual, but it’s all in how they see me…I’m not that strong here, other than physically. I’m afraid of what may happen too, and having someone to sit with and drink wine, or fix their hair and press a flower…that can be very centring.

In her room, she finds Jeno asleep on her bed, hugging the pillow. She pries the pillow away and carries the girl to her proper room, surprised by how light she feels in her arms with this different, more muscular body. Jeno does not wake.

Leah sleeps fitfully, paranoid about where her life is heading, and the inevitable approach of the date when the five will have to mount another assault on Seffon – with Leah only able to fight when she’s not thinking about it, and having next to no skill of her own. She keeps her dagger on the desk, and an ear trained on Jeno’s room, in case the girl wakes or someone tries to approach her. She mourns, briefly, as she fades into sleep, that there is no-one protecting Kimry and the others in the servants’ quarters.

She wakes up every few hours, thinking she hears footfalls, but it is only someone passing by the hallway outside. Around an hour before sunrise, when the air is still biting and the sky is only just starting to lighten, she decides to start getting dressed for practice, to work on things alone and unobserved. Or maybe with Iris, if she’s training stable-hands this morning as well. She’s probably out there anyway, beating out the frustrations from last night. I wouldn’t be surprised if Meredith were, too. God, the way she looked at us. She plays over the debriefing in her mind. We really do run our mouths too much for our own good. That one was provoked, though. The Auzzos don’t trust my recovery. Great.

As she is lacing up the leather vest, the knots coming naturally to her now, she hears a knock on the door, loud enough to wake someone sleeping but not hard. She checks one last time on Jeno, then goes to open the door.

The Duke stands outside, expression unreadable, and as Leah opens the door wider to step out and talk she notices two Valerid guards behind him. Her face freezes in uncertainty, and she looks to the Duke for an explanation. Speak of the Devil…

“Good morning,” she says, trying to maintain an air of innocence and curiosity about the whole situation, but feeling her heart pounding in her throat.

The Duke nods a fraction, and responds somewhat coolly. “Good morning, Miss Talesh. Would you mind…” He gestures to the hall.

“Would I mind what?” Leah plays for time, purposely not looking back towards the closed door to Jeno’s room, wondering if she hears this.

“Miss Talesh, please step out and follow me.” A few seconds pass. “We need to talk to you about a missive found on the assassins sent by Seffon.”

Leah feels a simultaneous rush of relief and fear; relief that this isn’t apparently about Jeno or Kimry, or about the night before, and fear at the existence of another missive. Why didn’t I hear the horns blow? Or was that what kept waking me up in the night, and I just never quite heard them clearly enough to tell? Did I miss a fight?

Still maintaining an air of confusion and innocence, she goes out into the hall. The Duke begins walking forward, and the two guards form a wall behind her. She sees that a third has been posted outside Jeno’s room, and he is staring straight ahead, paying no attention to the scene a metre away.

As the walk continues, Leah slowly adjusts her pace so that she is walking nearly beside Duke Auzzo, protocol be damned. She turns her head to look up at him, and he avoids her gaze.

“I don’t quite understand which missive you mean, sir.” She says it as casually as she can. “When was it received?”

“Last night.”

“Oh?”

The Duke does not respond or look at her. She takes this as a bad sign.

The path takes them to the smaller debriefing room – Lord Valerid’s office. Leah realises this partway there, and relaxes a bit. It’s likely that there will be at least one Valerid there, and that as my original employers they will make at least a nominal effort to defend me if this turns sour. Right?

Inside the room, she accidentally lets out a sigh of relief. Meredith is in one of the chairs, and Kain is standing off to the side, eyes downcast. Lord Valerid is present, as well as one man in the Auzzo family’s colours. His armour is fine, and looks cumbersome but solid. A scar runs along his hairline from midpoint to his left, cutting through his short black beard and ending at a missing earlobe.

“What is this exactly?” She says in a low voice to Meredith, purposely not a whisper. Meredith does not answer, only continues to flip her whetstone over and over against the corner of the desk.

“Sit,” Lord Valerid says, and Leah does so with a respectful nod.

“Sir?” she begins hesitantly, then looks at a scroll case lying on the desk. “Is this the scroll? Where was it found?”

The Lord looks to Kain, who nods.

“In your rooms, Miss Talesh,” the Duke says. Leah’s face goes slack, but no more. Her heart is pounding.

The Lord gestures to the man in armour, who takes the scroll and unrolls it. He reads it aloud, though one eye seems blurred by a cataract. Leah tries to estimate his age, but cannot.

“Miss Djalaa came to us last night, not ten minutes after our meeting…ended, so abruptly,” the Lord says, with the smooth charming voice of someone talking to a crowd of voters, or donors, or sponsors; formal, yet not particularly invested in the listeners as people, rather than as providers of something. “She went to your rooms to borrow something – without your permission, yes, because you had disappeared shortly after you left this room. Instead, she found a scroll case, with a broken seal of the so-called King of Jun, and containing a missive written in Old West Volsti. She returned and reported this to me right away. Your fellow warrior Miss Havren was still here, clearing the air after that…rough moment, earlier.”

Leah’s eyes flit to Meredith, who is watching her carefully, but not angrily.

The Lord continues. “The tone differs from his previous attempts at extortion or posturing; it represents an interesting change in his approach, though it is unlikely to indicate a change of heart, given that he still claims his stolen title. It was not immediately clear what this missive’s existence meant, nor its presence among your belongings. Miss Havren argued that you should be given a chance to explain yourself, but you could not be found. Your weapons and mare were still in the stable, so we knew you hadn’t fled, but it was too late to continue a search and we agreed that it would perhaps be best that we let you rest, wherever you were, and merely keep watch on your mount to make sure you didn’t slip off during the night. After all, you have been through quite a bit of trauma in the past two weeks.”

Leah waits for him to continue. “Very…considerate, of you, to let me rest.” She doesn’t have to try to sound confused.

“We also needed to wait for the good captain to come ashore,” the Lord continues with a nod to the armoured man. “To have the advice of someone else fluent in Old West Volsti, and moreover capable of determining the provenance of this stray, unaccounted-for missive. We did give our man Wellen time enough to try and sort you out, but, it seems – ” The Lord holds his hand out, and the captain hands the missive back, “ – that he must have let something slip by unnoticed.”

The Lord’s eyes go to a place over Leah’s shoulder, beside the door. She turns to look, and sees Wellen standing, looking much like Kain; eyes down, face sombre.

The Lord watches her for a few seconds more, then turns fully to Kain. “You may leave.”

Kain, looking exhausted both physically and emotionally, bows quickly and darts away without another word.

“You as well,” the Lord continues, this time to the two guards. He hesitates over Meredith. “Miss Havren, we would appreciate your remaining, if you are willing. I know how things are in Volst, and if you don’t feel you have the mental fortitude to watch – ”

“I will remain,” Meredith says firmly. Leah picks up on her brief flash of anger at the suggestion that she might not be intellectually strong enough, but is more distracted by the last word.

“Watch?” she asks, and everyone ignores her.

The Lord considers the missive, looking over it a few times though not fluent in the language. A few seconds of silence pass, then are broken by the Lord saying, “Begin.”

The captain takes off his leather and metal glove with one smooth motion, and lays his bare right hand over the back of Leah’s neck. Immediately she feels herself slump over in the chair, the candles around the room flickering and going very dim, mere embers on the wicks. A glow starts to spread along golden lines on the captain’s armour, and she finds herself unable to move any of her limbs.

The Lord looks up, his face a mask of curiosity and innocence, and Leah feels she is being parodied. “Interesting.”

Leah can just barely see Meredith out of the corner of her eye; she seems frozen in fear, but insistent on seeing this through, whatever it is. Wellen is hidden from view, but Leah knows he is still present.

“What is your name?” the Lord begins.

“Leah.” The words come from her throat, but her lungs don’t move.

“Where are you from?”

“Les Laurentides.”

The words and pronunciation startle those present, and Lord Valerid tries again.

“What country do you come from?”

“Canada.”

The Lord looks up at the captain, and Leah can hear him reply from behind her. “No lies, but she may be bending the truth.”

Lord Valerid nods. “Harder.”

The lights dim further, and the armour glows brighter, but Leah notices that the others don’t seem hindered by the darkness.

“What is your name?”

“Leah Louise Armande.”

“Where are you from?”

“Joinsburg, Quebec, Canada.”

He sits back. “Very interesting. Hm! Very interesting.” He taps a finger against the desk. Meredith’s hand has frozen around the whetstone, the knuckles tensed.

“Harder.”