The White Spell (Nine Kingdoms #10)(36)
Slaidear was there as well, looking grave. She nodded respectfully to him, because she had to, but it was almost all she could do not to point out to him what an idiot he was. Again, why he was in charge of her uncle’s stables was something she had never understood. He spent most of his time trailing after her uncle, licking his boots. It earned him a very fine little house near the stables and definitely better food than the rest of them enjoyed, but she wasn’t sure it could possibly be worth the price he had to be paying in pride.
She looked at her uncle and made him a low bow. “I have come at your pleasure, Uncle.”
He was sitting behind a desk, the stable’s ledger open in front of him. He didn’t look angry, but Fuadain rarely looked angry. He simply wore a look of faint disapproval, as if everything around him just wasn’t quite right.
“I see there is an accounting of less grain in the buckets than I should have expected to see,” he said thoughtfully, trailing his finger along the page. He glanced at her. “Less.”
“I apologize, Uncle.”
“I’m not blaming you, of course,” he said, “but the grain is gone and I didn’t take it. You are the only other one with a key.”
That wasn’t true—Slaidear, for one, had a key to that tack room—but there was no point in arguing. She’d tried that for years but found it absolutely useless. There were times she wondered just what her uncle had been like as a child. Too coddled, perhaps, with everyone around him rushing forward to make certain he never had to suffer the consequences of his actions. The fault for anything was never his.
Slaidear remained silent, but that wasn’t unusual. She was the target, always.
“I will take the discrepancy out of your pay,” Fuadain stated slowly. “I have no choice.”
“Of course,” Léirsinn said.
“Do you have an issue with that, Léirsinn?” He closed the book with a snap that echoed off the paneled walls. “I provide you with food, a place to sleep, and a little occupation to keep you out of trouble. And now you’re arguing with me over a few coins?”
“I wasn’t arguing,” she said quickly.
“Perhaps you forget that I am housing your grandfather.”
“Your father,” she said before she thought better of it.
He lifted a single eyebrow. “And so he is, though I keep him here for you, my dear, that you might visit him from time to time. It would be a shame if something dire befell him.”
Worse than what has already? was almost out of her mouth before she could stop it. She bit the words back and forced herself to set aside all the things about the situation that didn’t make sense to her. Tosdach was Fuadain’s father and the rightful lord of Briàghde, or at least he would have been if he’d been able to move and speak. It made her wonder, also not for the first time, if her uncle might have had something to do with his father’s condition.
“I understand you were in town a pair of days ago,” Fuadain said, looking at her from under heavy eyelids. “An interesting place to go for your day of liberty.”
“I go to see if there are tidings of new horses that might be interesting to you, Uncle.”
Fuadain laughed shortly. “As if you would have any idea what a decent horse looks like. You’re dismissed. Slaidear, see her out.”
She nodded and waited for Slaidear to open the door for her. She nodded to him, because it didn’t serve her to be impolite, then hastened down the passageway. She managed to get herself around a corner before she had to stop, lean against a wall, and force herself to breathe slowly and evenly.
So her uncle had indeed been watching her, but obviously more extensively than she’d suspected. For all she knew, he’d also seen her acting daft by avoiding those damnable spots on the ground. Perhaps he was making a list of all her offenses, a list he would then use to have her taken away and locked up somewhere.
She suppressed the urge to run and continue to run until she felt safe. She had to at least pretend that nothing had changed. The last thing she could afford was to have fewer coins to hand off to Mistress Cailleach at the end of every week or find herself in a place where she couldn’t aid her grandfather.
She let out a shaking breath. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but she had gotten nothing more than she’d known in her heart she would get. She couldn’t afford to take her grandfather from Fuadain’s house and she couldn’t doom him to whatever fate he would suffer if she went to look for work elsewhere. Leaving him in Fuadain’s care was tantamount to turning him over to a madman. She was, as always, trapped. It was a pity those spots of shadow weren’t gates to some other world . . .
She waited for another quarter hour to make certain her uncle and his lackey would have forgotten about her before she pushed away from the wall and made her way from the manor through the kitchens, as usual. She didn’t breathe easily until she had left the house through a generally unused and very darkened doorway.
She supposed, looking back on that moment after she’d realized how close she’d come to walking into something foul in the shadowed garden, that it was a very good thing indeed that she had spent so much of her life avoiding notice. Notice was hard to avoid when one was in the middle of an arena, working a staggeringly valuable horse, but surprisingly easy in other places.