Page 57 of Untempered
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
THOMAS
“The South came to Barloc needing a loan. Barloc, in his kindness, agreed, offering them generous terms allowing them to pay back this debt in the form of metals they were well able to mine, over the course of generations. They accepted these terms, and an agreement was struck.” ~ The Fall of Wolfswail
“Ihear they fished another body out of the river,” Rose said to me, carrying over a refreshed pot of tea to our old table where I’d placed the documentation I’d been able to find, babe cradled in her other arm.
I wasn’t used to that table being surrounded by the Duke’s stone walls in a series of rooms that were mine now. It looked smaller here.
I took the babe from her, and she stretched out her back with a pleasant sigh. I watched from the corner of my eye as her plain dress tugged tight across her breasts. “They’re always fishing bodies out of the river.” I cooed down at my youngest, rocking him as he scrunched his face unhappily. “Aren’t they, Vincent?”
Rose made a noise of dissent around the mouthful of watery tea she’d taken from her own cup. She always drank the dregs. I told her not to. “Not like this,” she said, shaking her head, her mouth now empty. “’Twas all thin-skinned and black-veined, I hear.”
“The water isn’t kind to bodies,” I warned her. “And there’s no point putting stock in such talk.” I’d heard it, too, and ignored it. But it was easier for me, I supposed. My primary companionship was Chay and the few guardsmen who still spoke to me.
She settled herself, and I took the pot to top off her cup. The smell of her herbal mix and a little sweetness from the apple peel she always added filled the air with comforting, homey smells. But this place wasn’t comfortable or homey.
“Blueberries?” Rose asked, staring at the papers spread out before her on the table as I rocked Vincent.
“Blueberries,” I confirmed, seeing a flicker of movement from the corner of my eye. A Beatrice-sized lump was standing behind one of the tapestries on the wall. The trappings might’ve changed, but the girls hadn’t. “I do hope none of the little ones are still awake,” I said for their benefit. “They may miss out on an excellent morning meal if they sleep late.”
Rose’s brows arched, and a smile folded itself into the corner of her lips. “Oh, they wouldn’t dare,” she assured me, playing along. “We already have so much to catch up on. They know if they stay up late and sleep late, it’ll reflect badly on us all. Fetch me my new eyeglasses, Tom, so I can read this properly. And mayhap another candle.”
I went to fetch the glasses, giving Beatrice enough time to return to her bed, rocking Vincent as I shuffled along slowly.
The eyeglasses were nigh useless, having been given to us by the mage as a patronage gift after he realized I’d been knighted. They weren’t spelled to Rose’s eyes, and we didn’t know if we had the means to do so because information on Cammhinge, my holdings, was hard to come by. Wade hadn’t been overly interested in the day-to-day running of it, from what I could tell.
“What does this mean?” Rose asked, shuffling through the papers.
I looked at the columns and numbers, the headings and notes. “It’s information about profit. And cost.”
She gave a long-suffering sigh. “You don’t know either, do you?”
I didn’t like that she smiled at me the way she’d smiled earlier at Sandra, while the girl was trying to learn how to style her hair like landed women did—with ribbons woven into the plaits and coils of it atop her head.
There wasn’t anyone I could ask, was there? I could go to a merchant who’d take my coin, or to a noble who’d probably do the same.
“I’ve looked at it,” I disagreed, because I had. “The province makes money, there’s no two ways about it. But I think we won’t really be able to figure out how much, or whether this information is accurate unless we’re there.” And the mage was being cagey about how much I owed. No one had insisted he write it down when he attended Rose for Vincent’s birth. I’d started to suspect he’d taken the job only to get away from the keep, because there had been pressure from the nobility to attend either the Duke, or the Raider’s Ban lord.
I’d gone from being a scavenger to the fatted calf. At least I’d grown up a scavenger. I knew how to pick a carcass clean.
“But you’re tied up here,” she pointed out, quite sensibly.
“I am.” Vincent was calm, now, in my arms, his tiny fists balled up to his face, his hands wrapped to prevent scratches. “You could go, though. Take a carriage ride with the girls. Children. Spend the winter away from the frozen muck of the city.”
She frowned. “Alone?”
My heart ached at that small change in her expression, and I held Vincent closer against the sudden gust of icy wind. My logic was sound. I wasn’t making big decisions without thinking them through. It had nothing to do with the fact that there was yet another war against the South, and the Duke was marching on Wolfswail.
The candle didn’t flicker. It should’ve flickered, given how cold the wind was.
“You’d have Sandra’s help,” I reminded her.
But Rose was shaking her head. “No. No, I cannot do that to her, Tom.” Vincent fussed, and I turned my gaze on him, rocking him slowly, holding him tight, but not too tight. Never too tight. “She’s going to be expected to manage a fief or holding one day. She needs to be here, learning how to do that.”
The thought of returning every night to Sandra’s bright eyes and expectations made something inside of me wither. “I think we’d do better if she had some space from the lads expecting to fuck their way into our fortune,” I said bluntly, to end the conversation.
“You assume I can stop that from happening?” Rose asked me, those brows arching with such dignity it hurt me to behold it.
