Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [61]
"Jehane!" Her father, already closeted with Luc and Joscelin, laying his plans for the search, turned to give her a look of reproach. "Be courteous."
She merely smiled, rose and stooped to kiss his cheek before turning back to me. "They'll be at it for hours. Shall I show you to your quarters? You look as though you wouldn't mind a rest before dinner. With your permission, Mother," she added.
"By all means." The Lady Ges, abstracted, gestured with one hand, counting on the other. "I'll be busy till nightfall trying to figure out how the larder's to provision this undertaking."
I followed Jehane through the rambling corridors of Verreuil to the rooms in which Joscelin and I had stayed before when we visited, clean and airy, with massive timbers supporting the ceiling and a window that looked out onto the mountains. It held, touchingly, some few items of Joscelin's childhood—a Caerdicci primer with a cracked binding, a book of verse by the warrior-poet Martin Leger, a child's miniature hunting-horn. Jehane lingered, picking up the horn and examining it.
"I gave this to him," she murmured. "For his ninth birthday. I had to beg the money from Luc to do it. I knew he'd only have a year to use it, before he was sent to the Cassilines. Does he speak of his time there?”
I sat down on the bed. "Not often."
"I missed him the most, I think." Jehane set down the horn. "Ma-hieu was too young, and Luc . . . Luc never said it, but I think he was glad it wasn't him. You know Father was furious that Joscelin broke his vows for you? It nearly killed him, when he learned Joscelin had been convicted in absentia for the murder of your lord Delaunay. He didn't believe it, but it nearly killed him all the same."
Joscelin and I had been enslaved in Skaldia when that had happened, betrayed by Melisande Shahrizai, though no one could have known it. It had been the logical conclusion, I suppose, when Anafiel Delaunay and his apprentice Alcuin were found slain in their home, while Delaunay's anguissette and her Cassiline guard had vanished. I remember how it grieved Joscelin, on the eve of battle, to think his father might have believed it. "I guessed as much," I said. "But he never said it to my face. He was always courteous."
"Courteous." She pulled a wry look. "Yes. Father is that. Well, he had the sense to realize that fate will out in the end, after Troyes-le-Mont. Mother was glad, though. She always mourned losing her middle son to the Cassilines." Jehane cocked her head at me. "You do love him, don't you?"
"Yes." I nodded. "More than I can say."
"Good." She dusted her hands, then wiped them on her skirt. "Keep him safe, will you?" She gave a self-conscious laugh. "It sounds foolish, I know. He with a sword at his back and daggers at his belt, knowing more ways to use them than I can count, and you . . . well. But he was my younger brother, once, and he's given his heart into your hands."
"I understand, my lady."
Jehane left, then, and I lay down on the bed. She was right, I was weary; more weary than I had known. Of a surety, travel takes its toll, but this was a weariness of the soul more than the body. The crofter's revelation had dealt me a blow. In all my careful efforts to unravel the mystery of Imriel's disappearance, it had never occurred to me that it could prove out to be a senseless crime. It was the last, the very last, thing I had expected; that anyone might have expected. All my wits, all my second-guessing and plotting, went to naught. Now it fell to Millard Verreuil and his compatriots to search out the truth by might of numbers and main force. If I was relieved to be free of the burden of responsibility—and I was—still, it left me feeling bereft and directionless, and very, very tired.
So thinking, I drifted into sleep and did not wake until someoneshook me. I opened my eyes to find slanting gold rays of sunset filling the room and Joscelin seated on the edge of the bed, smiling down at me.
"You're not going to sleep through dinner, are you?" he asked. "I wouldn't blame you if you did—it's seven kinds of mayhem