Chapter 166 Backing

The twelfth of the eighth month: Lora saw the column of her father and brothers as far as the Wayfarer's Pavilion outside the walls.

The Count looked down at his daughter, torn between loathness to part and the need to send her back:

"In October you come of age — and I'll be off in Thornford, no attending your presentation for me. But never you fear: your father's gift will come, and come full measure..."

Lora pushed out her lips and pressed her face to her father's breastplate: "Do you think it's the gift I care for? It's not setting eyes on my father I mind."

The Count stood in his armor — and through the cold layer upon layer of iron plates he felt the warmth of his daughter's body against his chest. Old Odenheim had never in his life faced such a deployment: for one breath he did not know where to put his hands and feet, and his defenses all but gave way:

A whole lifetime's toil and sweat — worth it.

Father and brothers seen off, the Young Lady Odenheim rode home in her carriage under the escort of Corin, Shawn, and Norton.

"Corin, Norton — you two head back. I'm going to browse the doll shop a while." Lora spoke through the window panel.

Today had been for seeing her father out of the city — and before her father's face she could only ride the carriage shut fast on all four sides. Norton grinned:

"I've been shut in two months. Only just back from East Manor, and I mean to browse too."

If Norton was going, Corin was not going home either, naturally — he had come all this way to Lohenheim without one proper stroll through the streets himself.

Lora, blind to the world outside, discovered only on stepping down that not one of them had gone back — and she could only laugh, halfway to tears, and lead her gang of great hulking men off to browse the wooden-doll shop.

They were just crossing over when several young ladies came running out, faces gone white with fright.

"What's happened?" Lora looked all round — no sign of Faye's carriage. She gathered her skirts to go in — but Corin's long stride carried him ahead of her, into the shop one step before her.

CRACK!

Something came flying at the doorway. Corin's hand went up and took it: the wooden coin-rack off the counter, the gridded block they stack copper in for counting. A thing of edges and corners, that — come down on a head, and wouldn't the head blossom?

The man standing before the counter laughed:

"There — you see? Smash it into somebody and get hauled to the shire court: your backside blossoms, and the shire court still judges you back to me. What's all that trouble buying you?"

Corin knew the face. He had seen this man before, there by the Heyford Bridge: Eustace Yule, the former owner of the Dawnfolk bondmaid Garnet.

The Odenheims had scared him off that time with the royal envoy, Augustus von Klein. But the gristle of it had never gone down his throat. He had gone quietly to the Windsors' Carl — a man who had lost his shirt to him at the cockfights — and got a bill of transfer written out; then he had only to wait for the Odenheim men to leave Lohenheim.

He had it all worked out: the Dawnfolk bondmaid was not with the Young Lady Odenheim at all — she was with that Black Eagle woman who spoke the Dawnfolk tongue. And that pair of Black Eagle siblings seemed to have no backer in the world but the Odenheims — and a little money of their own, no more.

The Count was still the Count, aye — but he was long gone, and long in coming back. So long as a man did not touch the Odenheims themselves, any other dog or cat about town...

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"Me, go with you? Dream on! That day you said it out of your own mouth, before the royal envoy — that there was nothing between you and me!"

Garnet's Empire tongue ran fluent — a thread of accent in it, maybe, but every word of her meaning standing clear.

"Said it myself? My lifetime is full of things I've said myself — which one? Which affair? I can't remember. Bite me! If you've the stuff, go fetch the royal envoy back to witness for you. Failing that, you will come along to the shire court and be entered on the slave rolls.

You! Dawnfolk woman! You are Eustace Yule's slave!"

Eustace Yule finished it off word by deliberate word, saw Garnet standing struck dumb, stepped in, and reached out a hand to touch her face. She slipped the hand — and her palm cracked across his cheek.

He clutched his smarting face; rage and shame boiled over together, and his hand flew out: "Smash this shop, and bring her away to me!" A moment of waiting — and nothing moved behind him. Eustace Yule twisted round and swore:

"Are you all deaf? Smash this shop for this young lord... this shop... shop..."

"This shop, shop, is not yours to smash just because you wish it — and this person, person, is not yours to carry off just because you wish it. young Master Yule."

Lora came forward, hands clasped behind her back, smiling like a cat in cream. Corin and the rest, coming in, had quietly put young Master Yule's four men out of business.

There is nothing like stepping out with a crowd of bodyguards — the kind, mind you, that can actually fight.

"My father is out of the Eastern Capital, so you take the Odenheim house for empty? What you said that day before the royal envoy — heard by more than me alone. Carry it to the shire court if you like: I would wager you come away without your woman, and with a round of the birch thrown in."

"You — you! Young Lady Odenheim — don't you go leaning on your numbers—"

Lora laughed him down before the sentence was out: "I am leaning on my numbers, and what of it? You tried to snatch a free woman first — carry it to any court you please, the right sits on my side."

The first thing done on their return to Lohenheim had been to enter the Horn siblings and Garnet on the city's household registers. Felix was away, true — but it was no great matter for the doing.

The more souls registered in Lohenheim, the more taxes came in. The Horn siblings had soon bought property and opened a shop; a merchant's tax ran one part in thirty of takings — and the shire court could only wish their business loud and long.

Eustace Yule, seeing the Odenheim side many and strong, gave his sleeve one fling and hated his way out of the shop.

Only then did Faye and her brother come running, late with the news.

"Mistress Horn — it is Garnet who has stirred up this trouble... If the young lady had not come, the shop would be smashed to sticks." Garnet's face was all anxiety: "My fear is he will come back again. Even if it is only lolling about the shop and playing the rogue — what woman will dare set foot in it then?"

The fear was not idle. A shop built for women's trade — safety was its first law.

For now, the only answer was the Black Eagle watchmen keeping a hard guard about the shop. Lora could think of nothing better, and rode home to Goodspring Quarter in a brown study the whole way.

Passing the gate of the Princess's mansion, she spied all at once a carriage she knew.

"I reckoned you owed the city your return an hour ago. Where did you run off and play? All that worry, wasted."

With none left in the Odenheim mansion but Brendan and the women, Leon could hardly go calling as freely as before. Lora, frowning, gave him the whole of what had passed at the doll shop:

"If he means to loll in the shop every day playing the rogue — and his offense is not big enough to have him punished — then what? Shall I have Corin and his men find a sack, bag his head, and give him one sound thrashing?"

Leon laughed, and asked, low: "Is everyone in your homeland as lawless as all this?"

"Hey! I'm here consulting your venerable wisdom, aren't I?"

"Forgot, have you? I told you once: his father holds the post of Master of the King's Ceremonies."

"That's right — you said it: the rites of the four seasons, the praying for rain, for sun, for the locusts to hurry off and fly away... and the King's crowning, the wedding of a Queen...

I have it! A Master of the King's Ceremonies is a man who must speak with God — he cannot stand a stain on his son. You are brilliant. Impeach the father for not governing his son, and the father will come galloping home with the whip in his hand!"

"The scheme is every word yours — the cleverness is yours too. A trifle like this is yours to settle." Leon watched, smiling, the delight dancing all over Lora's face.

That business of the smashed royal-gift vase that Eustace Yule had once hung on Garnet — that had hung on this same fact: a Master of the King's Ceremonies looks to hold no great power, but he is the court's very model of ceremony, a man who cannot put one foot wrong.

A pity the son would keep heaping trouble on him. As if one thrashing settled anything?

The letter to Augustus von Klein, too, Lora wrote out herself, with her swan quill.

Only — as it went into the envelope, Leon, while Lora's eye was elsewhere, turned the folded sheet and set two words quietly on its back:

Dismiss.