Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(26)
Back at the Boar’s Neck Inn, her guards are gathered in the courtyard yelling at Byrne, who is helplessly defending himself. “’Twas by her own orders I left her there!”
“It’s true,” she announces loudly. She can sense their attention turning to her, hear their surprised murmurs. “I specifically told Byrne to drop me off at a farm where I have distant family. I sent him home, figuring it would be less dangerous than returning in the dark.”
Isabelle can’t help but grin as the men fumble over themselves to either scold or apologize. She knows she must look ridiculous, with mud nearly up to her knees from the lengthy morning’s walk down the village lane to the tavern. But the walk rejuvenated her, brought her out of the murk of sadness and guilt and missing Gil. With a tall gnarled stick in her hand to use as a walking staff, and the spring sun bright on her cheeks and forehead, she’d felt more alive than she has in days.
In fact, she was reminded of something on this walk. Several things, really. One of which is the importance of having a plan.
Gil would have followed you anywhere.
No matter how he might reprimand or even resent her if he were here, she knows more than anything else that Gil would want her to go on. To prove everyone else in the world wrong.
To win.
As her guards scramble to give her further instruction, she holds up a hand. “Fetch me a lady’s maid,” she tells them. “At once.”
“But—”
“Have her prepare the finest dress she can find in my trunks.”
“But—”
“And obviously . . .” She smiles, nodding down toward her ripped and ragged clothes. “I will need a bath.”
A few hours later, Isbe steps out of her carriage wearing the fanciest, flounciest gown she could find on such short notice, follows the steep path up a hill, and raps on Lord Barnabé’s front door. During her walk, she had remembered that Binks lives within a short distance of Roul’s home—and that he trades in all kinds of things, but most of all luck, money, wine, and information.
As she waits for someone to answer, she recalls how she’d been scandalized that wagons full of Binks’s furniture were being carted off the last time she was here. Now the private road is silent, save for the stray, halting call of a mistle thrush.
So perhaps it is not surprising that Binks himself is the one to slide open the door’s viewing panel.
“You,” he says in a not-exactly-friendly tone. She’d recognize his high, pinched voice anywhere, and can’t help but picture him wearing a high, pinched ruffled collar to match.
She tries to control her annoyance with this nasty speck of vanity, this faerie who not only cheated her and Gilbert but whose tithe of luck led, however indirectly, to Gil’s fate. “Indeed, Lord Barnabé. That is the correct pronoun, though not the official title by which I prefer to be addressed.”
“Hmph,” Binks manages in response.
A silence follows, and Isbe can feel his suspicion through the thick, heavily bolted door. She imagines his eyes flicking between her and the royal carriage.
“Back for more stories, then?” he asks but immediately slams closed the panel’s metal grate before she can respond.
A moment later, he swings open the door itself with a whoosh and a creak.
Without waiting for an invitation, Isbe pushes past him into the airy foyer. “I take it your servants have fled.”
Binks bristles, causing some sort of large necklace—hideously gaudy, no doubt—to jangle about his neck. “Not all of them. My tailors are very loyal.”
“A shame your tailors won’t stoop to answering your door for you.”
“I—”
“Lord Binks, I’m not here to discuss the status of your household affairs.”
“What business have you—”
“Please, shall we make our way to your offices?” It is clearly not a question.
Binks doesn’t offer her a guiding arm, simply marches ahead, leaving her to follow merely by the clop of his too-high heels. Isbe’s not offended. Her anger plays into determination, even pleasure. She clutches the small satchel that carries her glass slipper, tied tightly to her belt, and savors the way her expensive gown swishes across the slick marble floors, sending a quiet message of status. She knows he knows: he is outranked and has no choice but to entertain her. She is the queen of Deluce—and what good is the title if she can’t use it to get her way now and then?
She sits down in his plush, silencing study, in the same chair Gilbert sat in to play heart of harts with Binks, a game that he lost because Binks marked the queen card. Resentment and disgust bubble up in her chest, and it’s all she can do not to launch into a thousand insults.
“I need some information,” she explains. “A census of the living fae, and in particular those who still possess large swathes of land and control.” She could swear she can hear him lift an eyebrow, and her hand moves again to the pouch at her waist, feeling for the slipper without thinking. “The palace library contains many histories of the fae, but no current census,” she adds.
And besides, she can’t very well read them. None of the servants can read them. William could, but she can’t ask him to do that, not when he’s at this very moment staging a battle outside of the hills of Nuage in southern Deluce.