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Em’s eyelashes fluttered. Aric touched her cheek, under the healing red line, not caring about the smudge of red on his hand. “Em?”
Em opened her eyes, said, “Ow,” and closed them again.
“Em,” Aric begged.
“I imagine,” Caris said, exhausted, mud-sticky, “she’ll need someplace to recover. My wagon. Both of you.” Even now she managed to make that a command.
“I can walk,” Em attempted. Because her eyes were closed, and she hadn’t moved a muscle, no one believed that.
“I’ve got you,” Aric said, and carried her tenderly, so tenderly, over to the mostly unscathed wagon, and shelter. The world would be softer. And he’d demand some answers.
Those answers in fact came more easily than he expected. Warmed up, wrapped in blankets, he glared at Caris. Emrys, a bird-light wounded weight in his arms, in the fanciest wagon, looked at their employer more kindly. Aric did not agree.
“Yes…that was why I wanted the two of you.” Lady Caris accepted honey wine when Aric poured—he did know about magicians and overuse of power—but turned the cup around in her hands, gazing into the sweetened pool of it. Her eyes held the tiredness of exertion and admission at once, raw and open. “For this. Or not precisely this.”
“Don’t think I’m happy about it.” Aric sat back down with his other half, balancing wine and Caris’s expensively gilded spiced gingerbread. “Em, sit up for a minute? Eat this? Lean on me.”
“I’m not even sure what that is.” Em regarded spices and saffron with the skepticism of someone who’d not encountered sticky gingerbread before, but took a piece, with the practicality of weariness. And then those wide grey eyes got bigger. “I like it.”
Emrys had curled up in a worn-out heap of fairy-muscles atop a heap of spare cushions and rich blankets; the wagon, fabric-swathed, did its best for elegance despite being at heart a wooden conveyance, and one recently flung across a river. It wasn’t large, though it did have blankets and a small bench-seat. Caris had, either by habit or arrogance, taken that.
Aric did not mind sitting on wood planks and stray rugs. He did mind that Em’s face looked too white, every movement suggesting internal bleeding. “What else can I do?”
Em leaned against him. “Just give me a minute or two. And more sugar.” The edges of those ears, the tip of that head, were less human: brought into sharp relief by strain. Em added, to Caris, “You wanted me. And Aric, because you don’t get me without him. Because you knew someone would force you to use your magic, and you knew you could tell everyone the Shadow had done it, not you. I was your shield.”
Caris met Em’s eyes, and flinched as if being seen; but she did not look away. “Clearly that failed.”
“Clearly.” Em sounded amused, if dryly so. “Who would be attempting to interfere with your trade route?”
“My first question,” Aric demanded, “is why you didn’t tell us. Up front.”
“Would you have taken the job if I had?”
All three of them knew that answer; Aric scowled at her. “We’re not your pawns.”
“No.” Caris looked over at Em again. “You knew what I was hiding. You’ve guessed why. And you saved my life. You could have dropped me from the bridge.”
Em twitched a shoulder, the ghost of a shrug. “I know about living with a secret.”
“A secret.” Caris held that word like a jewel, tasted it, turned it over. In loose amber robes, hair down and showing threads of silver amid the gilt, she was less a statue than a very human woman, perhaps eight or ten years older than Aric. “Are you badly hurt? Do you need…more sweets, or another blanket? There’s willow-bark or peppermint tea…”
Em waved a hand that direction. “I’ll be fine. Are you?”
Caris’s smile came quick and bright and unexpectedly real, a bolt of sun inside the wagon. “I feel the way I did after my first all-day ride from Rockhallow to Sudgarth, fourteen hours in a saddle…of course you did most of the work. Please say I can offer you a headache remedy.”
“Back to Em’s question,” Aric said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice. Answer us.”
Caris had a sip of wine. “His name’s Drefan. He was my father’s assistant, at one point. I don’t have proof that this was him—how would we prove that?—but I know he threatened to ruin me. He was not, shall we say, particularly pleased that I inherited the trade, and not him; he attempted to set himself up as a rival in wool and linen, unsuccessfully.” Her tone took that whole miniature drama and briskly brushed it aside, a lady dusting unpleasantness off her hands.
“So he’d have reason to hate you,” Aric said. “And he’d know the route you’d be likely to take, this time of year.”
“Of course he also wanted to marry me. But I’ve never wanted to marry anyone. Father understood.” For a moment that memory was in her eyes as well: a father who’d been sympathetic, when his daughter had no desire for a spouse or partner. A father who’d loved her, and left her his accomplishments, vast wealth and a trading empire.
Emrys was back to being quiet. Aric wasn’t sure whether that was tiredness, wistfulness about fathers, pure contemplation, or simply the Shadow picking up their more usual negotiating-with-employers rhythm.
He made sure Em drank more honeyed wine. Hovering. Trying not to hover. “Second question. What is he? A sorcerer, half-human, something like that?”
“No,” Caris and Em said, simultaneously; they looked at each other in the wake of it. Em’s smile flickered into existence; Caris smiled too, more hesitantly, and said, “No. At least, not when I knew him. Entirely human.”
