She hoped it was an omen of a gentler year, but she couldn’t bring herself as far as belief. She walked north, Vincen at her side. He didn’t take her arm, but stood near enough to her that she could take his if she chose. It seemed the whole of their relationship, writ small. When she passed the turning that would have taken them to the boarding house, he didn’t so much as break stride.
Dawson Kalliam, once Baron of Osterling Fells and her husband of decades, had no grave. After his execution, the body had been taken to the Silver Bridge and cast into the Division like common trash. Somewhere, far below, his bones lay amid the water and chaos. Tradition set the penalty for retrieving him for a gentler burial to be death, and Clara felt sure it would be upheld. And so every few days she found herself walking out to the middle of the span to spend a moment with the high and open air that had swallowed the last of her husband.
Below her, the pigeons turned in their flock, gliding on the drafts and perching on the Division’s deep sides or the lower, lesser bridges that spanned the gap farther down. She closed her eyes and bowed her head as she’d seen her mother do before her own father’s ashes. It was what a woman did when she was remembering a man who had been her heart and was gone. It wasn’t the first death she’d mourned. She’d lost her own father, her own mother. A brother taken by fever when she’d been hardly more than a girl. She knew what to expect, and how terrible it would be. How terrible it always was. The knowledge took nothing from the pain, or if not nothing, surely not enough.
After a time, she took a kerchief from her sleeve, dabbed away the tears, and walked back to the edge of the span where Vincen was waiting. He knew why she came, and he would not cross with her. Most times, she let the small courtesy pass uncommented. Perhaps it was her growing despair or the aftermath of fear, but today she paused before him, tilted her head, and considered him.
Vincen Coe stood only just taller than she did, his darker eyes cast down only a degree to meet hers. His hair was the light brown of oak leaves in autumn. His jaw was perhaps a little too broad, his nose bent slightly from some long-healed break. This was her self-appointed protector, this huntsman trapped in the treeless paths of the city. He had stolen a kiss from her once, and it had tasted of blood. He’d sworn a kind of love for her, and she had dismissed it because it was ridiculous. And then she had sent him away, because perhaps it was growing less ridiculous.
And that odd, half-acknowledged attachment had saved her life again today.
“Why are you here?” she asked. The question had become something of a ritual between them, and his smile meant that he’d understood her. Why are you not off chasing some girl your own age? Why do you persist in wasting your own life in service to mine? How can I put so much trust in anything so clearly absurd?
“My lady,” he said, as he often did, “you saved me when I was lost, and I will follow you forever, if you let me.”
Clara shook her head impatiently, and Vincen smiled. A dark cart drawn by a black horse clattered by. A crow called out and another answered back, or else its echo. She took his arm, folding her own around it as an aunt might a favorite nephew.
“You are a child.”
“I’m older than Jorey.”
“Jorey is my son.”
“And wed.”
“So it’s not that you’re young, it’s that I’m old,” Clara said, laughing. “Lovely.”
“You’re more beautiful than most women half your age.”
After her mourning on the bridge, the flirtation was like a drink of sharp wine, cleansing and astringent with a thick aftertaste of guilt. Her husband wasn’t a full season dead. Her children were scattered to the winds, and her house was disgraced. Trading honeyed barbs with an infatuated young man, walking with her arm in his, was scandalous, low behavior, and a part of her soul cringed even as she did it. But another part swelled and stretched and unfurled.
Sometimes she felt she was two women at once. The grief-crippled widow who wept every night and forced a smile every morning was one,