and looking in the torchlight like a servant waiting for his master. That gave Clara pause. Treating Vincen as if he were only what he had been before seemed somehow monstrous. And yet what option did she have? She could no more invite a lesser huntsman formerly in her husband’s service to sit at the table with Jorey and Vicarian than she could call Dawson back from the dead. She tried to imagine Vincen sitting in the drawing room with Jorey. Or worse, with Elisia. The familiarity with someone so clearly of a lower class would make her daughter’s eyes explode. She really was more Dawson’s child than her own. Nor would it be a kindness to Vincen to place him in a context in which the gulf between their stations was made obvious.
Sabiha was the one to see her safely to the door, to Vincen’s arm, as was appropriate after all for the lady of the household. She’d done the same a thousand times while Dawson sat in the drawing room with his dogs. Vincen stepped forward, bowing the way he would had he been only what he seemed. Clara had the sudden and powerful impulse to put the young man’s arm around her waist. Sabiha would certainly have been shocked, but she had also stepped outside what women were permitted, and shocked wasn’t the same as scandalized.
“Clara?” Sabiha said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes, dear, I am. Just lost in my own mind for a moment.”
Sabiha took her hands and smiled into her eyes. Clara smiled back from across a gulf as wide as the Division that only she knew was there. Then the moment passed, and Clara marched off resolutely into the dark streets of Camnipol, Vincen walking a pace behind and to the left, as a good servant would until they crossed the bridge and Clara brought him to her side. Even with his injuries and the time spent recuperating, Vincen’s arm was solid. Clara tried to remember when Dawson’s had been the same, but in truth, he hadn’t. Strong, yes. But Vincen was a degree shorter than Dawson had been, and the proportion of his arm different. Their two bodies couldn’t be mistaken. Vincen was unavoidably and utterly Vincen, and Dawson was gone past all recall. She had mourned him for a year, as best she could when she was mourning everything else and rejoicing in between.
It had been a year, and imperfect as it was, she had done the best she could. Her children were reestablishing themselves in the lives they’d chosen or forged or found.
All around them, the city was preparing for a bad winter. The men and women of noble blood knew that the food would be thin this season the way they knew a particular march, recognizing it by the first notes. The men and women in the streets of Camnipol would be the ones playing the instruments and singing the melodies. For Jorey and Sabiha and even Vicarian, it would be the difference between eating meat every day or only once a week. For Abatha and Vincen, for Aly and Mihal, it would be the difference between eating every day or every other. And as hard as winter would be, spring before the first crops came would be worse. It expressed itself in small ways: the timbre of the voices of begging children, the weariness and resignation in the shoulders of carters, the growing competition for day-old bread. Things she might have lived and died and never have known had only a very few things gone differently.
And instead, here she was, walking through the darkness with this peculiar, unlikely masculine animal at her side. They reached the far side of the Division, passed by the great yellow taproom with the same band of players she’d seen there before in the yard, declaiming to perhaps a dozen people.
“You know that I am entirely too old for you,” she said.
“You’ve said so, m’lady,” Vincen replied as he had before.
“You should find a woman your own age.”
“None of them are as lovely as you.”
She coughed out a laugh. “And I’ll wager you played with fire when you were a boy.”
“M’lady?”
At the mouth of an alleyway she paused, and he paused with her as she had known he would. She put her hand on his shoulder and, before he could grasp what was happening, shoved him into the wall. She felt the impact in the palms of her hands. She only had to bend