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“Perhaps.” Alain did not try to dislodge her, although the others came swarming to scold at her and tug at her. “Perhaps best not to,” he said, which made them all regard him in surprise.
“What do you mean?” Aunt Bel asked.
Julien was flushed, looking ashamed, and Agnes rolled her eyes in disgust.
“She doesn’t thrive,” said Alain. “She’s like a tree growing all twisted, and not straight. Let me take her with me as far as Lavas Holding.”
“Who will care for her?” demanded Agnes. “Who would show kindness to a creature as unlikable as she is?”
“They’d as like turn her out with the chickens as keep her in the house,” said Stancy. “Poor mite.” She looked at Julien, who only ducked his head. “If you’d speak up for her more, Jul, and scold her when she’s deserved it, then she might not be what she is.”
“No! I won’t let you leave!” Blanche shrieked, too caught up in her tantrum to listen.
“I can see that she is taken care of.”
“I don’t like it,” said Aunt Bel. “Lavas Holding hasn’t enough to take in young folk for their year of service, the chatelaine said so herself. I won’t have it said I turned out my own grandchild and sent her to scratch with the chickens.”
“Do you trust me, Aunt Bel?”
“Well, truly, lad, I do.”
“Let me see what can be made of her in fresh soil.” That they none of them liked the child made them too ashamed to agree. “Blanche! Hush!”
She quieted, but kept her arms locked around his waist. Tears streaked her dirty face as she looked first up at him and then at the others.
Aunt Bel looked at each member of her family in turn, but they only frowned or shrugged. “Very well, Alain. It may be for the best.”
“What for the best?” muttered Blanche, with a distrusting sniff.
“You will come with me as far as Lavas Holding,” he said to her, “as long as you behave and do exactly as I say. Which you will.”
The words stunned her. She stuck her thumb in her mouth and frowned around it.
“But she’s no clothing, nothing. I’ll not send a pauper—!”
“It will be well, Aunt Bel. Best we go now, and let it be swift. The chatelaine is packing up.”
They wept, as did he. Blanche did not weep, not even when her father kissed her, not even when Agnes gave her the fine blue cloak off her own back that had been part of her wedding clothes.
It was hardest for Alain to let go of Henri, and in the end it was Henri who broke their embrace and set a hand on Alain’s shoulder to look him in the eye. “Go on, then, Son. You’ll do what’s right.” He brushed a finger over the blemish. “Do not forget us.”
“You are always with me, Father.”
Alain kissed him one last time. He slung his pack over his back and, with Blanche clutching his left hand, he followed Chatelaine Dhuoda and her skeletal retinue out of Osna village and back into the world beyond.
2
AT first, Anna wasn’t sure what noise had startled her out of sleep. Blessing breathed beside her, as still as a mouse and all curled up with head practically touching bent knees. There was a servingwoman called Julia, a spy of the queen’s, who slept on a pallet laid over the closed trap, but her soft snoring kept on steadily. Then the scuff sounded again, and after that a single rap of wood against stone.
Anna raised up on one elbow to see Lady Elene leaning out the window, looking ready to throw herself to her death. Anna heaved herself up and stumbled over to her, stubbing a toe on the bench, cursing.
“Look!” said Elene. As Anna moved up beside her, Elena’s hair brushed her skin, a feather’s touch, and Anna shivered and gulped down a sob for thinking so abruptly of Thiemo and Matto, whose hair might have brushed her in such a way.
“What lies off there?” Elene pointed. “See those lights?”
From this vantage, in daylight, one might gaze south over countryside falling away into rolling hills. Not a single candle burned in Novomo. The town was as dark as the Pit. Closer at hand, Anna inhaled the strong scent of piss from that spot along the curve of the tower where the soldiers commonly relieved themselves.
But distantly, like a show of lightning along an approaching storm front, she saw a shower of sparks and an arc of light so radiant that her breath caught as she stared.
