She forced her eyes open. “Are the trader stalls open tonight?”
“They’ll be closed now. It’s late.” Deni stood, and held out a hand for her to take.
She accepted it and he hauled her to her feet.
“Go to bed, Avasu. You’re off duty tomorrow. Take the time to shop and buy yourself a new cloak. Spend a restful day walking slowly with the column. You took a bad blow to the head this morning. I don’t know how you’re still standing now.”
She was only fine because of her cloak. Because of its healing spells. She felt the loss of it again.
She gave a nod. “I’ll take your advice.”
He patted her back, and she walked away through the tents, and then stopped.
Should she speak to Luc before she disappeared into her tent?
She let her feet guide her to the General’s headquarters, and walked up to the guards at the entrance.
“Is the Commander in there with the general?”
“Yes.” The guard who answered had been on duty the night Luc had come to the Venyatux column, and she had come with him to speak with the general. He knew why she was asking.
“Tell him I asked after him, but I’m going to bed now.”
He flashed her a grin. “I will.”
She smiled back her thanks and walked away.
She wished she could lie down in his arms, like they had the night before, but there was more than just his friends between them now.
Her own magic sat in the way like an ungainly yakkuna.
And she didn’t have the concentration, or the strength, to argue about it now.
“Ava.”
The hissed whisper woke her, and then the exclamation of surprise as someone blundered into her tent.
Not someone.
Luc.
She dragged herself to the opening, found him clutching his shin. “You all right?”
He glared at her, then shook his head. “Can I come in?”
She nodded, holding the tent flap open for him so he could see where it was.
He crawled past her, and as there was only room to lie down in her small traveling tent, he stretched out, with his head on the blanket she rolled up to serve as a pillow.
With a sigh, she crawled after him, fitting herself against him in the darkness.
“You’re hard to find.” His murmur in her ear made her shiver.
“That’s the point.” She couldn’t resist nuzzling him back. “I know there’s someone here looking to hurt or abduct me. I couldn’t risk them catching me while I slept, but I needed to be able to actually sleep without fear. So I stitched an invisibility working into my tent.”
“The same thing you did this morning, on your cloak?”
She hesitated. This was the issue between them. But he was here. Talking to her about it. She needed to trust that.
She made herself relax. “Yes. Doing it for the tent helped me work it quickly and with confidence this morning. It worked better than I thought it would.”
“You don’t know how well something will work until you try it?” He seemed surprised.
She shrugged. “No one taught me, I’ve learned as I’ve gone along. This morning, I thought I’d have to cover myself completely in the cloak to be invisible, like I am in the tent. But neither you nor the Kassian scouts could see me, even when I was looking right at you, with my face exposed.”
Luc held himself still. “A Grimwaldian had that same working in their cloak when I was in the camps. They would watch us. I could sense them.”
She was silent, lifting a hand to run it down his arm in sympathy. “It wasn’t necessarily a Grimwaldian. It could have been a Kassian, or anyone. All they would need was the cloak.”
He sucked in a breath. “Something like that could be commissioned?”
She lifted her shoulders. “All I know is my mother was kidnapped twice in her life. Both times her abductor intended to force her to work spells into garments. The first time was before I was born, before she married my father, and the experience traumatised her for life. She refused to teach me the skills she’d learned from my grandmother, because she wanted to keep me safe by making me a poor target. And then I was abducted anyway. So she and my father came to rescue me, and she was taken again. And I think, to keep me alive, she did what she had spent her life dreading—working spells into fabric for an evil man.”
It was his turn to comfort her, his big hand running up and down her back. “How many of you are there who can do this?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m doing the workings right—if there even is a right way. My grandmother could do it, I know that. She was revered in Grimwalt because of it.”
“Her skill was known?” Luc asked.
“Her housekeeper told me that her pieces were sought after, but easy to identify. She worked only in black silk, and in a particular style. So while observers might not know what the working in the garment was, they knew it was a piece by her, and the wearer had some kind of protection.”
“The cloak we found wrapped around your mother’s body . . .” Luc spoke slowly, as if working something out.
She nodded. “That used to be covered in black silk embroidery. The Queen’s Herald must have thought the thread itself was magical, and forced her to unpick it to work whatever it was he wanted her to do.” It also had the effect of stripping away her mother’s own protections, working by working.
“So there could be other items, made by your mother under duress, that are in the hands of the Queen’s Herald?”
“There most definitely are. Although I would hope my mother would have worked some surprises into them, or made sure they had a short lifespan.”
“And he tried to make you do this, too?” There it was, the low, hot fury in his voice she’d heard earlier when the tent had burned.
“He tried. I refused at first, and then I agreed, and worked something very nasty into what he gave me. He only wore something I’d made for him once, and never again.”
“What did you do?” The rumble in her ear made her shiver.
“I worked in the suggestion that he stab himself.”
Luc went still. “Did it work?”
“He has a scar on his left side to this day.” She thought back to the incident. Her cousin screaming as he unsheathed his knife and stabbed himself, calling for his guards to pull his new coat off him.
Luc breathed out. “I’m surprised you’re still alive.”
“He hit me with his sword. That’s when I had to sew the skin above my eye. But he didn’t dare kill me. He was hoping to wear me down over time. It cost him relatively little to keep me alive. If I was dead, he had no chance of using me to benefit him.” She shrugged. “Then he must have kidnapped my mother. And then my being alive was how he forced her to work for him.”
The rage of knowing her mother had been in the dungeon below, while she walked around and around her small cell in the tower above, swept over her in a wave. She tried to push it down, but like the ocean, it would not be stopped.
She could hear herself keening, trying to cry as silently as possible.
She felt Luc’s hand, soothing her, rubbing her, as he crooned to her just like he had when she’d first discovered her mother’s body, and she was struck again that he seemed easy in the role.