Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf #1)(40)

Bloodleaf was a ground-cover vine, but here it had coiled into the stones and climbed to the highest point of the tower. There was no door—?or if there was, it was impossible to find beneath the thick tangle of leaves. It must have been growing there for a very long time, because the new growth of the vine was laid over a brittle skeleton cage of long-dead shoots.

I picked my way to the ledge overlooking the fjord, where I experienced a familiar pricking on the back of my neck, starting at the nape and running down to the tops of my shoulders. The Harbinger was still facing the tower, staring up at the spire.

I took a step toward her. “What do you want from me? Why have you brought me here? How does Toris know you?” I gulped. “You used to show yourself only when someone was about to die. Is that still true? Is someone going to die?”

She was stock-still, save for the drag of her hair in an invisible wind, blowing in the opposite direction of the cold gust at my back.

“Aren?” I asked, trying her name aloud for the first time. She turned at the sound of it, and I had to stifle a scream.

It wasn’t the Harbinger at all but the spirit of another woman entirely, one whose visage was so bloodied and broken as to be rendered completely unrecognizable. She gave me a long, assessing stare, then shambled on oddly angled bones straight into the bloodleaf thicket and disappeared, as if she’d dissolved into the tower itself.





?16




“You should have seen it,” Kate said, laughing as we walked the bustling market district the next morning. “Nathaniel looked like a big startled bear, standing there staring at his empty hands, the fish lifted right out of his grasp and up into the trees above him.”

She’d invited me to come along while she delivered finished sewing commissions to customers closer to the center of the city, and had spent the entire early morning animatedly recounting the story of how she and Nathaniel met. Though I still felt shy around her, I was rapt. “That’s when you fell in love with him? When a little boy hooked his fish and pulled it up into a tree?”

“Well, not at that exact moment,” she replied amiably. “Nathaniel chased the thief back to his home, hollering the entire way. He was all set to box the boy’s ears, too, when he caught him, but that’s when he saw the family waiting for him; a mother was bedridden and sick, and there were two younger siblings who’d been without food for days. Needless to say, Nathaniel and I did not retrieve the stolen fish. It was cold beans for us that night.”

“So that was it, then. It was when he gave your dinner away.”

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Not then either, really. But after that, we stopped at that house every time we passed, leaving baskets full of fish on the doorstep. Also milk, cheese, bread . . . Nathaniel paid for all of it with his own wages. He did it for weeks, until the mother was well again and could go back into the village for work. And somewhere along the line, back and forth between my fiancé’s holdings and my family home, I fell in love with Nathaniel. My escort. My fiancé’s best worker, his ‘most valuable asset.’ I was the daughter of an Achlevan lord, and Nathaniel was the son of a traveling swordsmith. Our paths never should have crossed. But once I knew him, I wanted him, and I decided I’d do whatever was necessary to keep him. If that meant leaving my old life behind—?so be it. So one day, on my way to my fiancé’s, I asked him to take me to the nearest Empyrean sanctorium and marry me instead.” She smiled at the memory. “We just walked away from our old lives and never looked back. We came here, and Nathaniel started working with Zan while I took on mending and sewing projects to help us get by. And now this.” She smiled blissfully down at her round stomach. “This isn’t the life I imagined for myself as a little girl. It’s so much better.”

“How did your fiancé react?”

“With great relief, actually. I liked him very much—?it’s hard not to like him—?but there was never anything more than friendship between us. The union would have been a savvy one, in terms of position and property, but I’m afraid Dedrick would have found matrimony incredibly tedious. He enjoys conquest. Commitment? Not so much.” She laughed fondly. “We’re both better off. We exchanged a couple of letters after I left, and he said as much himself.”

“And you haven’t seen your family once since then?”

“Can’t say it’s much of a loss.” She played with the end of her braid as we walked. “The only one I miss is my mother. She and I were close.”

After Kate delivered her last project, we walked for a while among the spice vendors. Strings of garlic cloves and garlands of thyme and rosemary sprigs draped across their booths like necklaces on a fine lady. “It’s Petitioner’s Day,” Kate said. “The king gives audience to his people in public court once every month or so, hearing grievances, delivering sentences, conveying proclamations. We’ll have to hurry. Zan said to have you back by the midafternoon. That’ll be harder to do once the trials begin.”

We’d come to the main square, which was swarming with people. Several men were taking seats on the platform constructed at the foot of the immense castle steps. “Are those the lords?”

“Yes. See that short, round one in the purple brocade? That is Baron Ingram. And the one with the silver hair? Castillion. To his left is Ramos. Then there is Achebe. And over there is Lim, and—?” She stopped before naming the young man on the farthest end. He was blandly handsome, with a charming smile on his face.