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“As do their riders.”
Miriam Aula smiled, and it was all bone-white teeth against deep black skin. “And do I measure up to your scrutiny?”
“We both know the real question,” Clare answered, “is do I measure up to yours?”
Miriam tilted her head in what could have been acknowledgment and nudged her mount down one of the palace’s many riding paths. The acreage on this side, between the inner and outer walls, was all carefully curated, and the bay picked her way delicately down a trail that, though Clare hadn’t the faintest idea what the signpost for it read, she assumed was something like Butterfly Trail, given the painted insects dotting the sign. Not that she expected to see any of the pretty fliers at this time of year.
“You know, I was very much like you once.” Miriam stroked her hand absently against the bay’s neck, the mare’s head lowering fractionally under what was obviously a familiar touch.
Clare waited for the woman to elaborate. The phrase did not, to Clare’s mind, mean much of anything at all. It was natural for people to see themselves in others, and easy enough for a smart person to know that saying as much made most people feel as if they had been approved of in some way. In the end, what might or might not be useful to Clare was what self-reflection the woman saw in her.
“Did you know that Marquin Delaun—Marquin Arrendon, now—hails from my province?”
“I did not.”
“Our paths never crossed in Taella, but here at court we have become allies. And friends, of a sort. Here, where I have none of my own people with me, he is a comfort.”
Clare wondered why the proconsul had none of her people here. The bringing of them, she was certain, was not prohibited by the king’s requirements.
“Do you know what they call him here? What they whisper behind his and Lord Verol’s backs?”
“Yes.” A simple answer, no curiosity or anger, though Clare felt both, and it caused Miriam to look up sharply.
“It is how the court thinks of Taellans, you know. As barbarians.”
“Why?” A question as simple as her previous answer had been, and Clare could tell it grated on the woman a little. But in the end, the proconsul chose to be indulgent.
“When Alaric came for our province, his soldiers outnumbered our warriors ten to one. By the time he finally took my kingdom we had narrowed that difference to five to one.” Miriam flashed Clare a grin. “We terrify them, Miss Brighton. And they are horrified that our women fight alongside the men.”
“Did you?”
Miriam’s face shuttered. “I wanted to. But I was fifteen at the time, and my parents refused to allow it.” Her voice deepened with old rage and sorrow. “Alaric slit their throats in front of me, and then he told me I had a choice. He could do the same to every one of my people, or I could swear fealty to Veralna and take up the mantle of proconsul.”
“You saved your people.”
Miriam’s fingers tightened into a fist in her horse’s mane. “I enslaved them to a monster. And they allowed it because their new Majiin told them to.”
“You were fifteen,” Clare pointed out.
“Indeed. Has telling yourself the age you were when you did something ever helped you to sleep at night?”
“No. Why are you telling me this?”
The proconsul sighed. “For one, because it seems one talks more than one means to around you. As for the other….it has been a long time since Verol took an apprentice.” Meaning, in those words, but easily missed if one didn’t know what they referred to. “I want you to know that our king is the true barbarian, the true butcher. Now that the world is his, he wants to make a new image of himself.
“He wants us to think of him as some benevolent unifier. He wants us to appreciate what he’s done, as if now that the bloodshed is over we ought to be grateful. He wants to be loved. I want you to remember that no matter how eloquently he speaks or how he talks of peace and prosperity, his throne is soaked in the blood of my people and every other province in this land. I want you to remember that however tame a jackal may look, it always bites in the end.”
Clare mulled it over before asking, cautiously, “And why do you feel I should be the recipient of this…information?”
“Because you’re Verol’s apprentice.” The implication was all too clear. So this was why Miriam had invited her to ride, then.
Fingers of ice wrapped around Clare’s spine. Miriam might have had no fear of talking of the king so openly, but Clare had not forgotten in whose forest they rode, and the last statement could not go unaddressed.
“I don’t know what that should have to do with anything. I could be any mage’s apprentice, and only ended up Verol’s by chance. And my master serves the king.”
Clare only smiled brilliantly in response to the narrowing of Miriam’s gaze, and in the end the proconsul only murmured, “So he does.”
They rode in cautious silence for a time after that, and becoming lost in the scenery was no difficult task. It must have taken the careful attentions of dozens of unseen gardeners to craft the nature around her, nature that looked so beautifully wild it could only be meticulously ordered. True wildness had its ugly sides, like everything in life. There were patches in the wilderness that were snarled knots, where the flowers that the butterflies flitted to and from were half-dead or dying, and whole swathes where the flowers were too unimportant to bother naming at all.
