Chapter 14

They began to feel the bite of the missing supplies on the third day.

Angharad had measured her portions from the start, planning for four days’ worth of meals. Formal registration with the duelling circuit had exempted her from ever having to attend isikole, the mandatory four-year schooling, but Mother had seen to it she received some of the training nonetheless. She had not enjoyed the lessons then but now she saw the use what she’d learned going out into the countryside: how to make a fire, skin an animal and ration her food. Her portions remained the same, but those who had not been as prudent paid for it. Isabel’s maids, in particular the redhead, ate little but crumbs for breakfast. That would not do.

Angharad cut her meal in half, then in half again, and wordlessly gave a quarter to each.

“Thank you,” Beatris sincerely said, bowing her head.

“It is very kind of you,” Briceida added.

The sheer gratitude on their faces made her uncomfortable. She snuck a look at Isabel, who was chatting with the Cerdan brothers as she ate her own meal. It would not have been proper for the mistress to suffer on the behalf of careless servants, it was true, but the dark-haired beauty should have kept a closer eye on her maids in the first place. Though neither Brun nor Song were anything of the sort to her, Angharad had inquired as to their own meals the previous day. Brun had been most amused by her concern, informing her he’d eaten worse in smaller plates, while Song’s rationing had been even more strict than her own.

Neither of the Cerdan brothers seemed to be running out of food, even though they had been eating larger meals than anyone else. Even Master Cozme, whose plate was usually not much larger than Angharad’s.

“Ah, infanzones,” Brun smiled, looking at them. “Not a breed of men prone to wastefulness, it must be said: they’ve already spent poor Gascon’s life and now they eat his food.”

“Supplies are supplies,” Song pragmatically replied. “It is the extravagance that irks me.”

Angharad could not quite say why it was wrong for the Augusto and Remund Cerdan to eat the rations of the valet one of them had murdered, but it was. It did not matter that the food was theirs, or that the man who might have had a claim to it had passed. It was wrong. She stewed on that for the rest of breakfast. After all were done, Song brought up the notion that since food was beginning to run out all should pitch in their provisions for a common stash that would be rationed out fairly between everyone.

“A Tianxi proposing theft from her betters,” Remund Cerdan sneered. “How very surprising.”

“No doubt she’ll expect us to vote on it,” his older brother laughed.

“We already share the lantern oil,” Brun pointed out. “It is only going a step further.”

The decision had been made unanimously when it became clear they were running out of oil. They had lost four lanterns fighting off the lupines so only three were left, but the greater loss had been the skins full of oil. Now there was so little left they had killed two lanterns and let only the vanguard of their group carry one that was lit, lest they run the risk of running out before they even left the High Road. Having only the light of the stars to walk by would have been dangerous enough, but the prospect of Gloam disease was even more fearful than that.

“It is always only a step further, boy,” Augusto lectured, “until we kneel with our necks on the chopping block.”

Angharad frowned at them.

“There has been no talk of violence or taking from anyone, only an offer to contribute to a common good,” she said.

“It is not for nobles to fill the world’s empty bellies,” Remund dismissed. “We will run out of loaves long before we run out of beggars: the commons must take responsibility for themselves.”

The Pereduri did not hide her disgust. Did Remund Cerdan not understand what being a noble was? All men had a trade, a vocation under the Sleeping God, and to be born a noble was to learn the trade of leadership, the burden of command. To then let your own go hungry was a fundamental failure of that duty. More disappointingly, the Cerdans were not alone in their opinion.

“My handmaids are free to join such an arrangement if they wish,” Isabel said, “but I will not. I will see to my affairs without needing the help of others.”

The offer was the nail in the coffin of Song’s proposal, for now neither she nor Brun were inclined to continue the plan. The maids had nothing to contribute to the pot, meaning in practice they would be fed at the expense of those who filled it. Angharad understood she had no right to expect the two of them to take food off their plates for strangers, but for all that everyone had their good and proper reasons the result was still that two of their company would go hungry. The selfishness of it all was cloying. She rose brusquely to her feet, anger caught in her throat.

“It is not much,” Angharad stiffly told the maids, “but I will share again at supper what I did for this meal.”

The three of them would go hungry, but hunger passed. Dishonour would not. Isabel smiled at her but Angharad’s answering gaze was cool as she went to grab her back. Sometimes people were less than you had thought them to be.

—

After they resumed the march it was not entirely a surprise when Isabel joined her at the back. Angharad was yet under oath, she could not have approached the other herself. With Song and Beatris walking in front of them while Augusto and Remund Cerdan took the vanguard far ahead, they even had a modicum of privacy.

“I will be sharing half my meals with them as well, Angharad,” the infanzona quietly told her. “But it would have served no good to shame the brothers before everyone.”

She studied Isabel from the corner of her eye, wondering if she was being appeased. No, she decided. Isabel was not scheming, only too prone to playing the peacemaker even when the other side was undeserving of compromise. It was a flaw born of kindness, not something baser.

“Speaking for your own is your responsibility,” she finally said. “Your maids deserve better than silence.”

Irritation flashed in the infanzona’s green eyes.

“They might,” Isabel sharply replied, “but I imagine they yet prefer being on speaking terms with the man whose contract is the sole way for us to get down from this aqueduct.”

Angharad had not considered that, she would admit, but duty was duty.

“It is a matter of honour,” she said. “Nobles have obligations, Isabel.”

“There is honour in keeping everyone breathing,” the infanzona retorted “And that means keeping the brothers happy. Do you not understand that every time one of them has the watch they could simply leave us?”

Isabel swallowed, obviously distressed.

“Angharad, they could take the food and the lanterns and go,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Just like that, leaving us stranded. And why wouldn’t they? You swore to kill one of them and Song’s map has lost its use. There is only one reason for them to stay.”

The woman they were both courting, Isabel did not need to say, and Angharad felt her anger ebb away. It would have been a fine thing to say that she’d been convinced by the soundness of the argument, and it genuinely was sound! Open contempt from the woman they were courting might well drive the brothers away just as Isabel feared. But the truth was that the tremor in Isabel’s voice and the fear on her face did more to convince Angharad to let go of her indignation than all the rest. Who was she to cast blame, when she had not even noticed the burden laying on the infanzona’s shoulders?

“It will be all right,” she quietly said, laying gentle a hand on the Isabel’s wrist. “Only one more day to the end of the High Road, and then they will have no power over us.”

She let out a long breath, leaning into Angharad’s shoulder.

“I am tired,” she admitted. “And afraid. None of it has gone the way I thought it would.”

“My uncle told me it would be a hard journey,” Angharad said, “but it has been trying in different ways than I had expected.”

“So it has,” Isabel snorted, pushing back a curl. “To think we could be at risk of Gloam disease in this day and age.”

“We will not be for some time,” Angharad absent-mindedly replied.

Curious green eyes turned on her.

“You know of the process?”

“My mother was a sea captain,” she replied. “Few know the terror of that disease better than sailors.”

Particularly those who sailed the Straying Sea, which unlike the Trebian had no light shined down on it from firmament. Only the royal house’s great triumph, the Serpentine Roads, dared to cut through that once-unbroken darkness.

“It takes seven days entirely without Glare or a month with less than two hours a day exposed for the disease to take,” Angharad continued. “So long as we keep eating our meals under lantern light and keeping watch with the same, we are not at risk.”

“I have heard Malani studied the disease more deeply than any other,” Isabel hesitantly said. “That they have measured what it does to men.”

“The basics are common knowledge back home,” she admitted.

Clearing her throat, she pitched her voice higher.

“Seven dead and one alive, the last in dark to thrive,” Angharad sang.

All children of the Isles were taught the nursery rhyme. Malani scholars had found that out of ten men who contracted Gloam disease, the results cut towards an average: seven would die, two turn darkling and one survive. Mother had always said that the hollowing was more common than that, however, and that sometimes those headed for death could be saved if they were bathed in direct Glare for long enough – the burning light that straight fell from the cracks in firmament, not the gentler glow of Antediluvian devices. Isabel shivered against her.

“What a dreadful verse,” Isabel murmured, “but I suppose it lays out the endings plain.”

“It is meant to be sobering,” Angharad said, slipping her arm into the other woman’s and squeezing it. “That way children remember to stay out of the Gloam, especially in the countryside.”

Malan and its sister-islands, Peredur and Uthukile, were not under a part of firmament where the Antediluvians had built wonders. It was only a great pit of Glare that made the islands habitable, and that light was not as sophisticated as that of lands with older blessings. Between the shadows cast by the lay of the land and the Challenger – that great wandering machine high up in the sky – cutting through the light, there was no end of nooks and crannies where a careless soul might find a bad end.

“It is not natural to stay out of the light for too long,” Isabel agreed. “It presses against the soul of all those not estranged from the Circle Perpetual.”

“We have been weathering it fine for now, I would say,” Angharad replied.

Isabel prettily smiled, then leaned close. For a golden, terrifying heartbeat Angharad thought she was about to be kissed but instead the infanzona tugged her coat into place.

“There, that’s better,” Isabel said, smirking in a way that told she knew exactly what she’d just done.

Angharad cleared her throat. She had not blushed, at least.

“Thank you,” she got out.

“It is nothing,” she airily replied. “If you must thank me for anything, let it be for this: we are not all taking to the dark as well you think. Your helper Brun, for example.”

“He is not a helper,” the Pereduri said, “but a companion.”

“A companion who does all you ask him to and keeps the same foes,” Isabel drily replied. “But call him a companion if you like – the reluctance is part of your charm, I think.”

Angharad was not sure whether she was flattered or insulted, but either way she pushed through.

“Brun has been well enough,” she finally said. “Why do you believe otherwise?”

“He puts on a good show when we have meals, or when he is paired with someone else,” Isabel conceded. “Even when he speaks with dear Briceida. Yet the moment he is not, a black mood takes him.”

Angharad’s brows rose in surprise.

“Not a speck of emotion on his face,” Isabel continued, “and he grows restless. Always reaching for that hatchet of his while the eye wanders.”

“I had no notion,” she admitted.

“I doubt he would take well to an attempt to comfort,” the infanzona noted. “Men rarely do, from a woman whose skirts they are not trying to slide under. I mention it only so you might keep an eye on him.”

“I will,” Angharad swore.

Brun had been good and kind, she would not repay these things by letting the Gloam have him. While the eponymous sickness was some of the worst of what the dark held in store, it was hardly the only illness born of it. Most of them were of the mind: it was not rare for men to go mad, in pieces or all at once, for the lack of light.

“Good,” Isabel smiled. “You are one of the pillars of this company, after all. It would not do for you to act otherwise.”

“You overestimate my influence,” Angharad dismissed.

“Do I?” the green-eyed beauty said. “Around you gathers the capacity for much violence, Angharad. Two fine fighters and then yourself. There is a reason I believe the brothers would flee, not attempt to fight you for the reins of power.”

“Even if that were true,” she said, “what has it helped? I agreed with Song, this morning, that we should share the food. It did no good.”

“I usually find, when I am refused, that I simply did not ask the right way,” Isabel said.

Angharad shot the infanzona an amused look. Yes, she did not find it all that difficult to believe that few would refuse her much of anything. Only the amusement faded when she found Isabel meeting her gaze squarely, a look almost unkind in them. No, Angharad thought, not unkind. It was the same she had seen on some of the tutors Mother arranged for, men and women who’d agreed to meet to Angharad only out of courtesy for the reputation of the famed Captain Tredegar. She’d had to prove she was worth their time, their lessons.

She had been tested then and she was being tested now.

Wrenching her gaze away, she kept her eyes peeled ahead. She had not asked the right way, according to Isabel, but she could not see the Cerdans agreeing to anything she proposed. She had struck a bargain with Remund and he had become friendlier in the shallowest of manners since, but that did not make them of one mind. Cozme Aflor was unlikely to intercede on her behalf either, and Isabel had made it clear she could not afford to openly pick a side. There was a saying in Peredur, that a man’s name had two halves: his deepest regret and his heart’s desire. To know either was to own half his name, to know both was to have him bound as tightly as any spirit.

So what was it the Cerdan brothers wanted, that she could use it against them?

They wanted to inherit, badly enough to strike deals with enemies to rid themselves of their rival. Badly enough that Master Cozme was here as much to protect them from one another as the trials themselves. Only Angharad had already made bargains using that desire, and to use a lever too much was to break it. Could she muster Song and Brun to try to force the notion? Perhaps, but there was no guarantee it would work – more likely the confrontation would drive the infanzones away in the night. It could not come from her, Angharad decided. She was the enemy, even to the Cerdan she had made alliance with.

The silence lingered between she and Isabel, enough to unsettle her, but the infanzona waited without a word or a trace of boredom on her face. Quietly expectant, and so Angharad forced her mind down furrows she had already dug. If not from her, then from who? Isabel had dismissed Brun as being her helper, and though she was wrong in this the brothers might share that opinion. That barred either he or Song from being an answer. That left only the maids and Isabel, for the brothers were unlikely to willingly get food off their plate on behalf of people they largely disliked and held in contempt. Did they even like anyone of their company save Isabel?

And there Angharad stilled, for the brother did indeed like Isabel. Perhaps even loved her, though she had her doubts. One of the reasons the Cerdan brothers were so ardently courting Isabel Ruesta was the wealth of the infanzona’s house, which making ties to would surely see the earner rise above his brother to inherit their family’s title. It was a shade of the heart’s desire, half the name seized by a different grip, and the openings were all there weren’t they? Angharad carefully put the pieces together in her mind. Isabel’s maids had been given permission to join the ‘arrangement’ of shared food, and Isabel was going to share part of her meal with them.

All that needed doing was to nudge the events a little further along.

“Have you considered,” Angharad said, “giving your entire meals to your maids?”

Surprise flicked across the other woman’s face, a flash of it followed by Isabel breathing in sharply and releasing a little laugh.

“Oh,” she said. “That is clever.”

It was the Pereduri’s turn to start.

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“You were not leading me towards such a solution?” she slowly asked.

“Not at all, darling,” Isabel chuckled. “There were other ways, but I really should not be surprised this is what you thought of.”

She shook her head with wry amusement.

“It is all very Malani, yes? The lady gives away her meals to her servants, noble in deed, and naturally when she ends up without anything the lords courting her will fight for the privilege of providing. Gallantry all around, with just a hint of the mercenary sensibilities lying beneath.”

The last sentence she spoke with open approval, which had Angharad grimacing. Not, however, disagreeing. That was the ugly truth of the words exact, the one her father had made sure to teach her: if you cleaved only to the letter of honour, honour had a way of ending up being what was most advantageous to you. No matter how callous or cruel. When the Father of Devils appeared in the Great Tales, the King of Hell never spoke a single lie or broke a single oath. It made Lucifer no less dangerous: a single whisper from him had been enough to turn Issay the Great, first and finest king of Malan, into a bloodthirsty tyrant.

She was broken out of her ruminations by Isabel laying a head against her shoulder.

“You are prone to brooding, Angharad,” she said. “We will have to fix that.”

“How ambitious of you,” she drawled back, “when we will only have so long together. Until the end of the second trial is not so long, my lady.”

“Oh, my life will not end after the Trial of Ruins,” Isabel flirted back. “It is why I want to take it in the first place, darling.”

She flicked a meaningful glance ahead.

“With such an achievement to my name, my parents will allow me greater latitude to choose who I may tie myself to,” Isabel said.

“A cause worth fighting for,” Angharad replied, only half jesting.

“I thought you might say that,” Isabel Ruesta smiled, green eyes warm with promise.

—

There was only so long the two of them could nestle against one another at the back of the company without being seen, so when lunch grew close they reluctantly parted ways. Perhaps it was for the best, Angharad thought, for if she’d felt Isabel’s lips whispering against her ear or her neck one more time she might have ended up doing something very unwise. And by the knowing look Song gave her when they sat down for the meal, they had not gone entirely unseen after all. Angharad was in too good a mood to feel all that chided, which seemed to amuse the Tianxi.

She was careful not to pay too much attention while the trick she had agreed on with Isabel unfolded, the maids with their full plates offering to contribute to a joint stash of food while their lady sat smiling at them without a speck of food to show for. Augusto was the first to offer his meal, Remund looking like he was about to curse when his older brother beat him to it. Isabel offered to take only half from each, ever the peacemaker, and the pair spent more time glaring at each other than noticing anything else. Master Cozme caught her eye, cocking an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged innocently.

The man chuckled, stroking his moustache, and tipped what would have been his hat at her.

Angharad smiled back but kept her attention on the arrangements for the food. There was precious little bargaining, the two maids aware they were being welcomed into the pact from a position of weakness, and it was elected that Song would see to the rationing itself. It was to begin with supper and end with arrival at the second trial. The maids remained close to them as they ate, the most Angharad had seen of them since the journey began, and it became clear that in Isabel’s absence the two did not bother to hide their common dislike. Briceida, the well-mannered redhead, kept fiddling with a small ivory trinket: it was a needle with a sculpted head, too large for sewing and so likely meant for keeping hair in place.

“It is quite pretty,” Brun complimented. “A gift from your family?”

“From poor old Gascon, in truth,” Briceida replied, preening at the compliment. “He won it gambling during our first night on the island and gave it to me the following day.”

“How kind of him,” Beatris drily said. “Entirely unprompted, I’m sure.”

A poisonous glare was turned on her.

“We cannot all earn precious stones from rats, I suppose,” Briceida smilingly replied. “Whatever did you do for it, dear Beatris? I can only hope you weren’t taken advantage of.”

“Going through my affairs again, I see,” Beatris coldly replied. “And to think I am the one from the Murk.”

Angharad cleared her throat, interrupting them before the bickering could get out of hand.

“A lovely needle indeed,” she said. “Do you intend to use it with your hair, Briceida?”

The maids sheathed their claws when the conversation turned, Brun offering her a grateful look for the intervention. The rest of the meal was spent on idle conversation, and before long they were on the march again. Tempting as it was to try to sneak another moment with Isabel in the dark, Angharad resisted the urge to try and walked with Song near the middle of their column instead. Before they could even begin to converse the entire company ground to a halt when Master Cozme let out a shout from the front.