The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [60]
The idea of blood-drinking demons creeping through tombs was troubling indeed, and Savedra still wondered what knowledge of them Varis was hiding. After a quiet inquiry around Phoenix House, she’d learned that he’d been distracted lately, underslept and much more subdued than usual. It might be nothing but one of his countless affairs, but the confluence of events sent unease worming through her gut. Between family intrigues and machinations at court, she had learned to trust that sensation.
She concentrated on the blur of cards, and wondered if she could read the future from them the way some fortunetellers claimed to.
Ashlin pushed the curtain aside and tugged the window open. The cold draft pricked gooseflesh on Savedra’s limbs, and cut through the scent of oiled mail and leather and warm flesh that she hardly noticed anymore. She caught a glimpse of low grey sky and hills dark with winter-brown oaks; soon the road would rise into the pine and juniper forests that skirted the mountains. When the carriage was unpleasantly cold the princess shut the window again and leaned back against her seat, blowing her tousled fringe out of her eyes.
“Should I leave my hair this way?” she asked, brushing at the dye-dulled strands.
“No,” Savedra answered immediately, lifting the latch that held the narrow plank table to the wall. Hinges creaked as it lowered. “It’s hideous. You have beautiful hair. What you ought to do is grow it out.”
“All it does is tangle and get in my eyes.”
Savedra lifted a hand to her own wild hair, bound up for travel and still frizzing free of its pins. “I have no sympathy. Anyway, you have maids to style it for you.”
Ashlin frowned. “No one’s brushed my hair for me since my mother died.”
“Let Nikos do it—he spent long enough learning to brush mine.”
The princess’s frown twisted sideways. “Probably not. I might let you, though. I trust you around me with knives, after all, so why not combs?”
“Combs don’t attract attention,” Savedra said automatically, slapping cards onto the table, “and are just as easy to poison.” One of the first attempts on her life had been a gift of poisoned combs. She was careful now to buy her own, and never from the same shop.
Ashlin’s eyebrows climbed. “Is it safe to be trapped in a carriage with you?”
“Probably not. It’s a good thing you have a sword.” She collected her hand and winked over the cards. “Your move, Your Highness.”
They stopped that night at a crossroads inn to eat and change horses and catch a few hours of sleep, rising before dawn to continue. The lieutenant Cahal took Ashlin’s place in the carriage the next day, a dark-haired Celanoran who had come to Erisín with the betrothal party three years ago. Half the ostensible mercenaries riding with the coach were the princess’s own guard, and the other half Captain Denaris’s handpicked soldiers. The lieutenant was hawk-eyed and quiet, and a cutthroat tarock player. Savedra might have to pawn her pearls soon.
“Am I being careless with her?” Savedra asked while Cahal shuffled. She’d tried to keep her worries to herself, but the soldier’s calm and obvious loyalty invited confidences.
Cards blurred from hand to hand before he answered. “I’ve ridden with the princess since she was sixteen,” he said at last. “When she was younger, no one could have been more careless with her health than she was. That’s most of why she isn’t heir—too much like her mother.”
Savedra had asked once why Ashlin, the firstborn, wasn’t Crown Princess of Celanor; the princess had said only that a crown suited her younger brother better.
“Did you know the queen?”
He shook his head. “I was too young. She spent little time in the castle by the time I was training there. But I saw her sometimes—bright and fierce and beautiful. A wildling warrior of the old Clans.