Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [10]
They turned the corner of the battlement, making toward the round tower containing the narrow, winding staircase that gave onto the inner garden. Ista cast one last glance out across the scraggly shrubs and stunted trees that crept up to the curtain wall of the castle. Up the path from the shallow ravine, a servant towed a donkey loaded with firewood, heading for the postern gate.
In her late mother’s flower garden, Ista slowed, resisting her attendant’s urgent hand upon her arm, and mulishly took to a bench in the still-bare rose arbor. “I am weary,” she announced. “I would rest here for a time. You may fetch me tea.”
She could watch her lady attendant turning over the risks in her mind, regarding her high charge untrustingly. Ista frowned coldly. The woman dropped a curtsey. “Yes, my lady. I’ll tell one of the maids. And I’ll be right back.”
I expect you will. Ista waited only till the woman had rounded the corner of the keep before she sprang to her feet and ran for the postern gate.
The guard was just letting the servant and his donkey through. Ista, head high, sailed out past them without turning round. Pretending not to hear the guard’s uncertain, “My lady . . .?” she walked briskly down the steepening path. Her trailing skirts and billowing black velvet vest-cloak snagged on weeds and brambles as she passed, like clutching hands trying to hold her back. Once out of sight among the first trees, her steps quickened to something close to a run. She had used to run down this path to the river, when she was a girl. Before she was anybody’s anything.
She was no girl now, she had to concede. She was winded and trembling by the time the river’s gleam shone through the vegetation. She turned and strode along the bank. The path still held its remembered course to the old footbridge, across the water, and up again to one of the main roads winding around the hill to—or from—the town of Valenda.
The road was muddy and pocked with hoofprints; perhaps her brother’s party had just passed on its way to his provincial seat of Taryoon. He had spent much of the past two weeks attempting to persuade her to accompany him there, promising her rooms and attendants in his palace, under his benign and protective eye, as though she had not rooms and attendants and prying eyes enough here. She turned in the opposite direction.
Court mourning and silk slippers were no garb for a country road. Her skirts swished around her legs as though she were trying to wade through high water. The mud sucked at her light shoes. The sun, climbing the sky, heated her velvet-clad back, and she broke into an unladylike sweat. She walked on, feeling increasingly uncomfortable and foolish. This was madness. This was just the sort of thing that got women locked up in towers with lack-witted attendants, and hadn’t she had enough of that for one lifetime? She hadn’t a change of clothes, a plan, any money, not so much as a copper vaida. She touched the jewels around her neck. There’s money. Yes, too much value—what country-town moneylender could match for them? They were not a resource; they were merely a target, bait for bandits.
The rumble of a cart drew her eyes upward from picking her way along the puddles. A farmer drove a stout cob, hauling a load of ripe manure for spreading on his fields. He turned his head to stare dumfounded at the apparition of her on his road. She returned him a regal nod—after all, what other kind could she offer? She nearly laughed out loud, but choked back the unseemly noise and walked on. Not looking back. Not daring to.
She walked for over an hour before her tiring legs, dragging the weight of her dress, stumbled at last to a halt. She was close to weeping from the frustration of it all. This isn’t working. I don’t know how to do this. I never had a chance to learn, and now I am too old.
Horses again, galloping, and a shout. It flashed across her mind that among the other things she had failed to provision herself