“I wanted to find something that would make Mom proud of me. Something I could excel at,” she told him. “But some part of me thought that if I was out there performing, if everyone knew my name, I might reach my father or his family. They might recognize me. They’d hear my music and want to come find me. Know me.” She let out a deep breath. “It’s stupid, I know.”
Up ahead, the tsar had slowed to greet Winifred and Jenkins near yet another of the palace’s elaborate doors. Their voices carried down the hall, punctuated by polite laughter.
Just as Winifred turned to make her way over to them, Henry looked away, thumbing at his eye. When he looked back at her, nearly stricken, she wasn’t sure what to do, other than tighten her hold on his arm.
They were still feeling around each other’s edges. Trying to learn the same étude, each trial bringing them closer and closer to learning the skills of caring for the other.
“I heard you, Etta,” he said softly. “I heard you.”
THE MAN IN THE DARKNESS stepped closer, his footsteps muffled by nearby insects and a cloud of disturbed birds launching into the night sky.
“That’s quite far enough,” Nicholas said, raising the sword so that its tip rested at the man’s throat.
His eyes bulged at the implicit threat, but he did as he was told. Nicholas took careful stock of him. He was stooped at the shoulders, like a man who’d spent his life out in the fields, toiling over a plow. His red tunic was threadbare, nearly as weathered as the deep-set wrinkles in his ragged, dark skin. All of this was offset by a shock of white hair; his thick beard and brows looked as though they’d been left out to gather frost.
“What business do you have here, travelers?” the man demanded. “How did you find us?”
What Nicholas could see of the man’s legs looked thin, almost knobby-kneed, and that general unsteadiness likely accounted for his slight limp and his reliance on a tall walking stick.
“My name is Nicholas Carter,” he said. “We’ve come to trade information, nothing more.”
“No, child, all you’ve done is bring the Shadows, disturb our peace,” he said hoarsely, his gaze darting around the courtyard, as if expecting to find someone else there.
There was that word again, Shadows, and always whispered, as if to avoid summoning them.
Sophia snorted at the word peace. “It’s not about Ironwood. We want a true trade—we have information we could share, but we’ve also got food”—she held up her sack of elephant feed—“food we’d be willing to part with for answers to a few questions that would stay between us. Which one are you, Remus or Fitzhugh?”
“Remus.” The old man muttered something else to himself, one hand rubbing the other as he looped the bow over his shoulder. His gaze drifted away, his breath coming in quick, urgent bursts.
“Sir? Time is of the essence in this matter,” Nicholas tried. The man leaped back as if struck.
“All right, yes, come with me,” he said, voice strained. “Yes, follow me. Quickly now. It will be all right.”
“We’ll see about that,” Sophia said, and her words leeched the rest of the color from the man’s face.
His senses were piqued, his attention snared and drawn back toward the stables. Voices were rising, and the sound of the elephants’ cries had ceased altogether. It seemed their diversion had run its course.
“It is lucky you survived,” the man told them as they moved through the night, “but far luckier indeed that you did not cause a change to the timeline with that elephant stunt.”
Fair point. Nicholas knew that his luck was bound to run out, but having received so little of it in his life, he was willing to push on to find its limits. Still, he couldn’t release the last few tremors of doubt as he followed the man’s unsteady steps any more than he could take his eyes from him. It was unfair, perhaps, given that the man had saved them when he could just as easily have left them to die on the attacker’s blade, but he couldn’t change his nature in a night.
“Ease up and unclench, will you?” Sophia muttered, taking notice. “He’s ancient. And he’ll have a pot to boil whatever it is we just stole from the elephants.”
“You’re thinking with your stomach, not with your head,” he sniped back quietly.
“Didn’t you catch what he said about the Shadows?” she whispered. “He knows who they are—”
Remus spun around, his voice low. “For the love of Christ, do you want someone to hear you speaking another language and assume you’ve snuck in? I won’t be saving you then, believe you me!”
Nicholas and Sophia kept their mouths shut. A good thing, because as they rounded onto the next street, Nicholas had to take a generous step back to avoid crossing into the path of several women heading the opposite way, toward the homes they had passed, where candles were lit and waiting for them. The ladies’ dresses were longer and somehow more elegantly draped than the simple tunics of the men, their gauzy hems swirling around their sandaled feet. One nodded as Nicholas passed her, with dark hair shorn shorter than even Sophia’s.
“Lice?” Sophia asked Remus cautiously, once they were clear of the street and onto a far smaller and quieter one.
He shook his head. “They cut their hair to give to the soldiers for their bows. Do you know nothing, child?”
Sophia made an insolent face behind his back.