A Throne for Sisters

“And because you can’t find any records in a destroyed city, you’ll denounce me?” she asked. “Why, Angelica, if I’d known you would be so jealous, I would have introduced myself sooner.”

“I am not jealous,” Angelica snapped back, but Sophia could feel it rising from her thoughts like smoke. “I just want to protect Prince Sebastian from gold-digging adventuresses.”

He’s mine!

The strength of that made Sophia take a step back. “Well, that’s very kind of you,” she said. “I’ll be sure to mention it to him when he gets back. I’m sure he needs protecting from the kind of person who would, for example, try to poison him to trick him into bed.”

Angelica reddened at that, and even she couldn’t make that look good.

“I’ll find out who you are,” she promised. “I’ll destroy you. I’ll leave you selling yourself on a street corner.”

Sophia forced herself to stalk from the library, even if it was a place where she’d been planning to spend the rest of the day.

It was all she could do not to shake while she walked out.

Trouble, she sensed, was coming – and these palace walls no longer felt so safe.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Kate couldn’t ever remember feeling as though she was a part of a family. No, that wasn’t true, because she had her sister, and that connection was like a constant comfort at the back of her mind. She had vague images and flashes of things before the orphanage, too. A smiling face looking down at her. A room where everything had seemed much larger than a child’s tiny form.

She’d never had this though: just sitting around a table with a family eating stew and bread, feeling as though she fit in with the rest of the people there. Thomas and Will were laughing. Even Winifred seemed happier than she’d been when Kate had arrived, but that was only to be expected. She’d come as a thief; she stayed as someone who could help around the forge.

It probably helped that Will was there too. His presence seemed to make everything better, relaxing his mother and making his father happy that he was safe. Kate just liked to watch him, and thinking that made her glance away in embarrassment.

“Are you going to be home for long?” his mother asked.

Kate saw Will shake his head.

“You know it doesn’t work like that, Mother,” he said. “The free companies don’t sit around for long. The wars over the Knife-Water are getting worse. Havvers fell to the Disestablishers and the True Empire contingents one after another. Lord Marl’s company was paid to put down an uprising in the Serralt Valley, and found that they’d formed a bandit company to rob everyone they could.”

“It sounds dangerous,” Winifred said, and Kate could hear the concern in her voice. Kate couldn’t blame her. She wanted to protect her son.

Kate wanted to hear more about the excitement of being a soldier.

“What’s it like, being part of one of the companies?” Kate asked. “Is it different from being a regular soldier?”

Will shrugged.

“It’s not so different. There are only so many ways an army can work,” Will said. He sounded a little like he was trying to convince himself. “Although the kingdom’s standing army isn’t that large anyway. It has always just relied on the loyalty of the company commanders, and the ability to buy their services.”

That didn’t sound like too good an arrangement to Kate.

“What happens if someone offers more?” she asked.

Thomas answered that one. “Then you get half your army switching sides in the middle of a conflict, but the dowager’s ancestors were always able to outbid their enemies, and it’s better than what happened in the civil wars.”

“With a big central army slaughtering the people,” Will said. “I don’t think that the Assembly of Nobles would allow that anymore, although Prince Rupert has built up the army a little.”

Kate saw Winifred shake her head.

“Enough talk about wars, and violence, and killing,” she said. “It doesn’t make me feel safe to know that soon you’re going to be going back out to all that cruelty, Will.”

“It’s safe enough, Mother,” he said, reaching out to take her hand. “Most of war is waiting around. The companies avoid one another where they can, and Lord Cranston is always cautious about where he commits his men.”

Kate wasn’t entirely happy about that. “I was hoping for tales of adventure.”

“I’m not sure if I have many of those,” Will replied. He obviously saw her face fall. “But I have a few. I’ll tell you them some time when Mother isn’t going to be worried by them.”

“I worry every time you go off to fight,” Winifred said.

They kept eating, and all Kate wanted to do was find excuses to ask Will more about his life. Strangely, he seemed just as interested in her.

“So, you’ve only been helping my father around the forge for a day?” he asked.

Kate nodded. “I… showed up last night.”

“She’s a thief,” Winifred corrected. “Was going to rob us of everything we had.”

Kate sat very still as the other woman said that. She could see that Will’s mother still didn’t entirely like her, and she guessed that it had a lot to do with the way she’d shown up at the forge. She couldn’t help feeling, though, that it might have something to do with other things: with the talent she had, and with the mark of the indentured on her calf.

“Not everything,” Thomas said, obviously picking up on Kate’s discomfort. “And she’s been a hard worker since, Winifred.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Kate could see enough of the woman’s thoughts to know that it wasn’t dislike so much as mistrust. She wasn’t sure what Kate was going to do next, and it didn’t help that Winifred didn’t trust those with her gifts as much as her husband did. Kate pulled back, not wanting to pry where she wasn’t wanted.

“This sounds like too interesting a story to ignore,” Will said. “Kate, you’re going to have to tell me more of it. Maybe… we could go into the city later, together?”

Even without pushing at Winifred’s thoughts, Kate could pick up her shock at that.

“Will, I don’t think that’s – ”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” Thomas said. “The two of you should go out together.”

Right then, there was nothing that Kate wanted more.

***

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as just leaving the forge behind. Kate still had to show Thomas her work on the sword, making small adjustments as he suggested that the tang would need to be thicker with metal, and the taper on the edge less square.

Then there were the chores that Winifred suddenly found for her, from cleaning up in the courtyard to peeling vegetables in the house. It seemed obvious to Kate what she was trying to do: trying to take up so much time that she wouldn’t be able to go off into the city with her son.

Kate got around it by slipping off when she wasn’t watching, although Thomas was. He nodded in what seemed like permission. That was good, because Kate didn’t want to risk upsetting him.

Will was waiting for her in the courtyard, and Kate could see the excitement written in every line of him there.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked. “Did you want to wash up first, or – ”