Honor-Bound [ Lore of Penrua: Book III ]

43

"So you came back with information." In the moment, Uachi could hardly bring himself to care: there was sausage in the basket, and several pears. A bit firm, but he hadn't had fruit for so long. His jaw twinged and his mouth began to water. He set aside a portion of food for Ealin, wrapping it in the cloth that had covered the basket. Then he snatched a pear for himself. After a couple of hasty bites of fruit, he settled more comfortably onto the grass, no longer quite so irritated with his companion. "Tell me."

"Let's eat first." Diarmán took a pear too and, ridiculously, he tapped the rounded part of the fruit against Uachi's, a playful toast.

So they did. Neither of them was eager to be conservative with their good fortune, but they didn't know what was to come on their journey, and the awful thing about a tight belly is that it tends to return. They had a pear and a roll each, and they divided half of the sausage between the cats, leaving the rest for another day. Uachi was worried about Uarria; he knew that Farra could fend for herself with wild game, but how much of a shadowcat's hunting ability was born into it and how much was learned? And how much could be passed on to a human girl via magic?

Besides that, the thought of Uarria stalking prey and eating it raw made him cringe.

Uachi tended to the fire as Diarmán packed the remnants of their new rations away. Then they settled down again, the bottle of wine between them. Uachi could tell that Diarmán was enjoying the drama of the evening, and now that he had a good meal in him, he was willing to let it spin out. Maybe coaxing some intelligence out of a kitchen maid with his charms had given Diarmán back a little of the power that Coratse had so deftly swiped from him earlier in the day.

"I've put it off long enough," Diarmán said at last. He sighed, took a swallow of wine, and then passed it to Uachi rather roughly, by bumping the fist that held the bottle right against Uachi's chest. "You were right. Bloody manál."

Hope thrilled through Uachi as he accepted the bottle. "So he took them for a reason."

"'Swhat it seems to be. She told me that the princesses were sent with your runaway prince's wife as ladies-in-waiting. I said it sounded odd, two princesses serving her, because isn't she a princess, too? 'No,' she said. 'She's an empress, don't you know anything?'"

Uachi snorted in derision. "Empress."

"So I changed tack. What an honor that would be, I said, serving an empress. Being so near to the emperor and all the goings-on. And she told me that she would think so, too, but her friend, who is the queen's chambermaid, has reason to know that the queen is not happy at all about the arrangement. Spends every night weeping, she told me, for her girls. Evenna and Halla. Wears their hair in a locket pinned to her dress every single day."

"Mm." Uachi remembered the dark-haired queen, a vision of opulence in sumptuous cloth but adorned only with two pieces of jewelry: the crown of her station and the brooch pinned to her breast. Feeling more and more certain, Uachi told himself to slow down, to think through the few facts they knew with caution before leaping to any conclusions. He swigged the wine and passed it back to Diarmán. It was good, very good, but he had to make sure not to drink too much. One of them would need to have his wits about him through the night, and it did not look promising that Diarmán would volunteer, judging by the gleam in his eye and the flush in his cheeks. "A woman might cry for a thousand reasons."

"True enough, but Coratse isn't just a woman. She's got ice in place of a heart. Ice and stones and..." Diarmán narrowed his eyes, taking a sip of wine. "And cherry pips."

"She certainly seems to be eager to curry favor with Koren. She's declared her loyalties to him in no uncertain terms."

"Right. And one would think that it would be a coveted opportunity, placing a daughter or two with the imperial court. Doesn't Who's-It have a son?"