The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [101]
“But it can’t be, can it?” she said. “I shall be with her, sir knight, from here on, I assure you. I will not be distracted. Nor will I sleep when she sleeps. If the only thing I can do is to scream once before I die, at least I will not die thinking myself an utter failure.”
Neil smiled. “That’s a fierce thing to say.”
“I am not fierce,” Austra said. “I am not much of anything, really—just a maidservant. I have no gentle birth, no parents, nothing to recommend me but her affection. I have forgotten myself and my station. I will not do it again.”
Neil put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t speak with shame of your birth,” he said. “My mother and father were steadholders, nothing more. There is no gentle blood in me, either, but I was born to good people, honorable people. No one can ask for better than that. And no one, no matter their birth, can ask for anything better than a loyal friend who loves them. You are fierce; I can see it in you. And you are a person of note, Austra. Hard wind and rain can wear down even a stone, and you have been in storm after storm. Yet here you are, still with us, worn but still ready to fight for what you love.
“Do not barter yourself away for nothing. The only shame comes in surrendering to despair. That’s something I know all too well.”
Austra smiled faintly. She had begun to cry again, but her face was steady. “I believe you do, Sir Neil,” she said. “Thank you for your kind words.”
He squeezed her shoulder and let his hand drop. He felt older again.
“I’ll be outside the door,” he said. “If you call, I’ll be here.”
“Thank you, Sir Neil.”
“And you, milady. And despite your vow, I urge you to sleep now. I will not, I promise you.”
Anne woke from a dream so incomprehensible as to be terrifying. She lay gasping, staring at the ceiling, trying to assure herself that the Black Marys she could not remember were the best kind.
As the nightbale faded, she gathered her surroundings. She was in the room she and her sisters had called “the cave” because it had no windows. It was also rather large and oddly shaped. She had never stayed in the room before, but they all had played in it when she was very young, pretending it was the lair of a Scaos where they might discover treasure, though only at great peril, of course.
Aunt Elyoner had moved her here, presumably, because she would be safer from another attempt at murder. She assumed that meant that there were no hidden passages to let her death in.
Austra lay back on a nearby couch, head turned up, mouth open, her scratchy almost snore a comfortingly normal sound. A few candles burned here and there, and a very low flame burned in the hearth.
Anne wondered for the first time why the room had so many couches and beds. Upon further reflection, she decided she did not really want to know what entertainment Elyoner would plan in a room with no windows.
“How do you feel, plum?” a faint voice asked.
Anne jumped slightly, turned her head, and sat up. She regarded Elyoner, who sat on a stool studying some cards that lay on a small table.
“My arm hurts,” Anne said. It did; it throbbed in time with her heartbeat beneath the tight bandages.
“I’ll have Elcien examine you in a little while. He assures me that when it heals, you will scarcely know it happened. Not like that nasty place on your leg. How did you get that?”
“An arrow,” Anne replied. “In Dunmrogh.”
“You’ve had quite the adventure, haven’t you?”
Anne coughed a weak laugh. “Enough to know that there’s no such thing as adventure.”
Elyoner smiled her mysterious little smile and dealt herself another card. “Of course there is, dove. Just as there is such a thing as a poem, an epic, a tragedy. It’s just that it doesn’t exist in real life. In real life we have terror, and problems, and sex. It’s when it gets told as a story that it becomes adventure.”
“That’s exactly what I meant,” Anne said. “I don’t think I will ever be able to read such stories again.”
“Perhaps not,” Elyoner replied. “But however things go, it shall be some time before you are even afforded the