Scalp wounds, he thought, annoyed. Always so dramatic. All the epics about people being stabbed in the heart and “the blood gushing forth, as a river in full flood” should have been about being hit in the head.
Although it’s probably not as epic a tale of heroism if the noble knight makes a heroic last stand and the enemy just dings him behind the ear.
He sighed heavily, found a handkerchief, held it to his head, and went to go wake Wren and Marguerite.
“Sweet blithering gods!” Marguerite said, when she entered the common room. “What the hell happened?”
“Someone hit me over the head,” said Shane. He sounded almost tranquil about it. Seeing the bloodstained towels strewn about the table, Marguerite was not nearly so calm. It looked as if someone had butchered a hog in the middle of the room.
“What?”
“The head,” he repeated patiently. “Someone hit me on it. I’m fine,” he added.
Marguerite clutched her own head. “Who? Where? Why?”
“I don’t know, the outer corridor two floors down, and I don’t know.”
Wren, who had dipped a cloth in water and was dabbing the wound said, “It’s not that bad.
Scraped you all along the side, which is why it’s such a spectacular bleeder, but nothing that actually needs stitching up.”
Marguerite dropped into her own chair, appalled. “Start at the beginning,” she said. “Tell me the whole story.”
Unfortunately the whole story didn’t shed much light on the matter. Marguerite massaged her temples. “It’s not impossible that they were trying to mug you,” she said. “That sort of thing does happen occasionally, which is why there are court guards. But if they were trying to lift someone’s purse, why go after someone your size?”
Shane shrugged. “Some people think that big men must be slow.”
“Well, I think it’s safe to say that you disabused them of that notion.”
“Just bad luck?” asked Wren. “Or someone trying to take out your bodyguard?”
Marguerite shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. It could be either.” She mistrusted coincidence, but she also knew that her own fears were more likely to have her jumping at shadows and seeing conspiracies under every bush. They didn’t succeed. That’s the important thing. Shane is fine.
“Shall we report this to the guard, then?” asked Shane. Wren had managed to get the bleeding stopped and was wrapping a bandage around his skull.
“I suppose we’d better. Not that I expect them to be much help, but if something else happens, I don’t want to be left trying to explain why we didn’t report it.” She snatched up a cloak to cover the dressing gown that she had thrown on when she heard the commotion in the outer room. “Can you walk?”
Wren snorted. Shane looked vaguely offended. “I could jog the whole way in full plate, if you like.”
Marguerite rolled her eyes. “We’re not all paladins! Most of us would want to go to bed with brandy and sympathy after something like this!”
“Do we have any brandy?” Wren wondered.
“I’ll send a page for some.”
“And the sympathy?” Shane asked.
“I’ll send a page for that too.”
“I DO NOT KNOW how useful that was,” said Shane, as they left the offices of the guard commander an hour later.
“I do,” said Marguerite, “and the answer is ‘not very.’”
The guard commander had taken their report and made sympathetic noises, but that was as far as it went. His job was to break up drunken brawls and prevent outright murder, so he had promised to increase the patrols in that corridor, but unless they struck again, he clearly wasn’t hopeful about catching Shane’s assailants.
“I was really hoping he’d say something like “This is the third time this week!” Marguerite said glumly. “Then I’d know that it wasn’t targeted at you—and me—specifically.”
“Do you think that the Sail is behind it?”
“If it was targeted, then probably.” Marguerite scowled. “An attack like that means that they’ve
got enough manpower to risk losing three men if they got caught. Only nobles can make that work, particularly if they’re bringing along a load of younger relations. No, if another merchant was out to get me, they’d be trying to tamper with my samples or sabotaging my attempts to sell. No one but the big trade delegations can field enough staff to bring actual thugs.”
“Why would nobles be involved?”
“Normally they wouldn’t be, but the Red Sail could easily buy or blackmail someone to have jumped you. Their pockets are deep enough, and plenty of nobles are light in the purse and the morals.
But I’d honestly expect them to use their own people and not make such a sloppy job of it.”
“If I were not what I am,” said Shane, reaching up to touch the side of his head, “it might not have been a sloppy job at all.”
“Ah.” Marguerite considered this most of the way back to their rooms. “That doesn’t fill me with confidence.”
“No.” Shane straightened. “Still, I will be more careful about what corridors I use in the future.
And if this was something other than a random crime, it cost them a great deal more than it cost us.”
“There’s that,” said Marguerite. She bid the paladin goodnight and went to her bed. He was right.
They had come off lightly, and there was no permanent harm done.
But the question that ran in circles around her head, as she stared at the ceiling, was So how many men will they send next time?
TWENTY
WREN LOOKED around the great arched room and sighed straight from her toes. Another day of attempting to ingratiate herself with people who looked at her like something they’d scraped off their shoe. Joy.
I am a grown woman, she told herself. I am not sixteen and on the marriage mart to Father’s neighbors. I am an adult. I am on an assignment. I am playing a role.
Her eyes traveled across a coterie of younger women, all clad in elegant, figure-hugging gowns, with their hair styled into elaborate ringlets. Two of them were whispering to each other behind their fans, and although Wren knew that it was highly unlikely that they were talking about her, she still felt her stomach sink.
I am a grown woman. I do not care what these people think of me.
It didn’t help.
I could kill anyone in this room without breaking a sweat.
That helped a little. She glanced around to make sure that Shane was not actually in the room.
With the battle tide rendering all else equal, Shane’s superior strength would probably carry the day if the two of them fought. He was in one of the other rooms, though, keeping a watchful eye over Marguerite, so the statement stood. Yes. I could kill anyone in this room, unless one is secretly an assassin. And none of them know it.
…I just have no idea how to do my hair.
Wren wandered to a window and looked out. These ballrooms were halfway up the great fortress, so the view was an astonishing sweep of countryside, even if she couldn’t see the waterfall from here. With the glass pane between her and the open air, she did not feel the usual twinge that affected her in the presence of heights. It reminded her of being young and fearless, standing on the castle battlements able to see halfway to forever. If she stood on her toes, she could just make out the rooftops of the pottery works below, but for the most part, it was all fields and hedgerows, with long strips of woodland between them, stretching across gently rolling hillsides until they reached the mountains on the far side of the valley. Wren thought that it was amazing that the windows weren’t packed with people gaping at the view.