Esmond nodded. “Then if my lords will permit, my brother and I will withdraw, to make our preparations. The Strikers will be ready to sail within three days.”
“My Lightning Band within a week,” Adrian said. “I will need time to modify some equipment and gather others.”
* * *
“You gave her what?” Esmond laughed, cracking a nut in his palm.
“Well, it was what she wanted,” Adrian said defensively.
“Flowers, a hare, jewels—but you gave her a sword?”
“Well, the one she had wasn’t really very good quality,” Adrian explained.
He was tired; they both were, with the load of work they’d been doing. A light meal stood between their couches on a low table: cured fish, olives, oil, bread for dipping, watered wine. The room was plain whitewash with a pattern of leaves in blue around the upper edges, and a door gave out onto a garden full of lilacs. It might almost have been in Solinga, even the smell of the sea was familiar, if it weren’t for a subtle wrongness in the noises, an undersmell of strange spices and rank lushness to the familiar reek of a port. Another table at the end of the room was littered with wax-covered board diptychs, scrolls, and scraps of reed-paper, models.
Esmond pulled a piece off a long loaf of bread. “Well,” he said, with malice aforethought and a brother’s cruelty, “it was a good enough sword to gut Lord Sawtre very effectively. If you finally had to take up with a woman regularly, and with a Confed woman, you at least picked one with some unusual talents.” He laughed. “At least she’s not Audsley’s wife—or Justiciar Demansk’s daughter.”
His brother might not be a Scholar of the Grove, with an ageless machine and an ancient general’s ghost at the back of his mind, but he was an Emerald and no fool—which was to say, a keen observer.
“Wait a minute!” Esmond said, half-rising. “Shit among the Shades, she is Demansk’s daughter—the one captured by pirates.”
“Shut up!” Adrian barked.
Shocked, Esmond fell silent for a moment. Adrian rarely spoke roughly; this time he fought for a visible instant to control his temper, something rare enough to make his brother’s eyes go wide.
“You will not speak of that again,” he said coldly.
“But why?” Esmond said.
“Because I don’t want her to think I’m using her as some sort of angle against her father—which I’m not, by the way, and won’t be.”
Esmond’s blue eyes blinked in bewilderment. “But why, brother if—oh, no. Don’t tell me you’ve been scratched by one of Gellerix’s cats and caught a fever!”
That was the slang term for being hit by love; any sensible Emerald regarded it as a form of infectious madness sent by the gods to plague mankind with suffering—the divinities could be remarkably petty and cruel, sometimes.
Adrian looked down and toyed with a dried fig. “That’s one way to put it. You might also say that I like and respect her,” he snapped.
“Adrian, my brother, please—think.” Esmond stopped for a moment, and snorted. “Here I am, stealing your lines, like an actor . . . but really, think, brother. At least there’s no question of marr—oh, Gellerix!” he broke off at Adrian’s expression.
“Esmond, have you any conception of how dull most women’s conversation is?” he snapped. “How dull most women are? It’s not their fault, the gods know, most of them shut up all the time and uneducated, but—”
He stopped at Esmond’s expression of bafflement. Your Nanya was like a trembling dove, he thought with kindly exasperation. And the gods know, the Wodep in your soul would make that seem the sum of all womanhood to you. Me, I’m differently made, my brother.
“She’s—”
A dangerous glance passed between them, and an unspoken message: You don’t call her used goods and I won’t say anything about Nanya, that’s about it, Adrian thought.
“Adrian,” Esmond said slowly. “Demansk’s daughter is going to be a Confed—not just by origins, she’ll have been brought up on their old stories, walked past the death masks of Demansks who were Justiciars and Speakers back to when Vanbert was a mud-and-wattle village. How do you think she’s going to feel when she finds out you’re fighting to bring the Confederacy of Vanbert to the ground?”