Page 19 of Untempered
I had no defensive anger, though, just an aching hollowness as my head filled with the shouts of the crowd and the sounds of the competition. Resisting the urge to glance and check if my father’s attention was on me, I turned instead to Luca.
He glanced at me, his smile small and a little concerned. “Are you well?” he asked softly.
For a moment, I wasn’t surrounded by the crowd. I was back in his keep, eleven years old, alone, and terrified. And he was kneeling before me, offering his bleeding hand.
My mouth went dry at the memory. I hadn’t asked him for a Blood Oath. I’d only heard them whispered about when I was that age. Terrible, unbreakable things full of old magic that no one understood anymore, and only the King and his General could employ.
“Audrey?” he asked, his gray eyes like heavy clouds. “Should I fetch us a cool drink?”
He’d committed treason by swearing a Blood Oath to a scared child that night.
I wouldn’t have trusted any less, and somehow, he’d known that.
“No.” I tried to smile and failed, so I glanced away, wishing I could tuck my hand into his. “Memories took me,” I admitted quietly, knowing the words should be safe enough to share with him.
He asked nothing more, just rested his hand on mine. His sweetness made that lump in my throat burn again.
He’d come to meet me, that day, and, in the face of my fear, offered me a lifetime of magically reinforced loyalty, punishable by death. He’d given me a small string of weighted coins to hold—to anchor me to this realm when I felt I might just spin away. And then he’d left and demanded our wedding be postponed. Somehow, he’d made it happen. And for that, I was eternally in his debt.
Even if Isolde did want to hang him from a tree with his own guts as a noose most of the time. And I’d be lying if I said the thought hadn’t appealed to me occasionally, too.
Luca cocked his head and, seeing his attention was on his friend, I offered, “Fran’s form isn’t the best.” I injected just enough surprise into my tone that Luca took it with a worried frown, as if Fran wasn’t a limp-wristed fop.
“No,” he mused. “It isn’t.”
One of my father’s bannermen came up to us and bowed deeply to me, angling himself so the display could also have been toward my father.
“I will win this tourney for you, my lady!”
Low odds of that. “Good luck, lord Gregory,” I said with a nod, turning back to Luca. “There’s a good turnout this year from the west, isn’t there?”
He murmured his agreement, picking up his end of the small talk while Gregory left. He didn’t get offended when it petered out once the man was gone. And when Mikus strode out to meet Henry, he squeezed my hand beneath the cover of my skirt as I felt my heart start to race.
I drew in a deep breath, my thoughts with Henry’s wife, Fiona, and the opportunities their mage academy would bring.
“Luca,” my father called, as Mikus attacked in a flurry of violence that instantly overwhelmed Henry.
“Coming, your grace,” Luca replied mildly, squeezing my hand once more as he stood, hiding the affection with his body. “He’ll be okay,” he murmured.
I used to love Luca’s sweet lies.
Sometimes, I still did.
CHAPTERFIVE
AUDREY
“The Wife is the mother to us all. She makes the world a softer, more welcoming place. As did the Mother, so should we, her daughters, blessed with softness and welcome, share our gifts.”~Etiquette in Arcanloc
Ihad one memory of Fiona and my mother sitting in Mother’s drawing room, sipping mulled cider. It was just a moment, frozen in time, with no context attached, but it felt peaceful. Fiona had been young. Was she nervous? Had it been before she’d married Henry, or when she was pregnant? I didn’t know. But something in me saidshe’s good.
I wasn’t in the habit of following every instinct, but I liked to know what was happening around me. Fiona had trained as a Magework Healer—no small expense for such a backwater fief—and had attempted to set up a school to train others away from the central mage wing of the palace. She’d petitioned the King no fewer than four times, making four separate trips across the country to do so.
To stop her, they’d put a hugely expensive hurdle between her and the ability to train others—a purpose-built mage academy.
Beneath me, Henry stumbled back from Mikus, his feet somehow finding the one uneven patch of ground on the beaten area. My heart ached for him. But it was also kind of sweet, that he signed up to be humiliated at best, just for the chance to help Fiona with her dream.
The chair beside me seemed unusually empty.
