and she broke into an unladylike sweat. She walked on, feeling increasingly uncomfortable and foolish. This was madness. This was just the sort of thing that got women locked up in towers with lack-witted attendants, and hadn’t she had enough of that for one lifetime? She hadn’t a change of clothes, a plan, any money, not so much as a copper vaida. She touched the jewels around her neck. There’s money. Yes, too much value—what country-town moneylender could match for them? They were not a resource; they were merely a target, bait for bandits.
The rumble of a cart drew her eyes upward from picking her way along the puddles. A farmer drove a stout cob, hauling a load of ripe manure for spreading on his fields. He turned his head to stare dumfounded at the apparition of her on his road. She returned him a regal nod—after all, what other kind could she offer? She nearly laughed out loud, but choked back the unseemly noise and walked on. Not looking back. Not daring to.
She walked for over an hour before her tiring legs, dragging the weight of her dress, stumbled at last to a halt. She was close to weeping from the frustration of it all. This isn’t working. I don’t know how to do this. I never had a chance to learn, and now I am too old.
Horses again, galloping, and a shout. It flashed across her mind that among the other things she had failed to provision herself with was a weapon, even so much as a belt knife, to defend herself from assault. She pictured herself matched against a swordsman, any swordsman, with any weapon she could possibly pick up and swing, and snorted. It made a short scene, hardly likely to be worth the bother.
She glanced back over her shoulder and sighed. Ser dy Ferrej and a groom pounded down the road in her wake, the mud splashing from their horses’ hooves. She was not, she thought, quite fool enough or mad enough to wish for bandits instead. Maybe that was the trouble; maybe she just wasn’t crazed enough. True derangement stopped at no boundaries. Mad enough to wish for what she was not mad enough to grasp—now there was a singularly useless lunacy.
Guilt twinged in her heart at the sight of dy Ferrej’s red, terrified, perspiring face as he drew up by her side. “Royina!” he cried. “My lady, what are you doing out here?” He almost tumbled from his saddle, to grasp her hands and stare into her face.
“I grew weary of the sorrows of the castle. I decided to take a walk in the spring sunshine to solace myself.”
“My lady, you have come over five miles! This road is quite unfit for you—”
Yes, and I am quite unfit for it.
“No attendants, no guards—five gods, consider your station and your safety! Consider my gray hairs! You have stood them on end with this start.”
“I do apologize to your gray hairs,” said Ista, with a little real contrition. “They do not deserve the toil of me, nor does the remainder of you either, good dy Ferrej. I just . . . wanted to take a walk.”
“Tell me next time, and I will arrange—”
“By myself.”
“You are the dowager royina of all Chalion,” stated dy Ferrej firmly. “You are Royina Iselle’s own mother, for the five gods’ sake. You cannot go skipping off down the road like a country wench.”
Ista sighed at the thought of being a skipping country wench, and not tragic Ista anymore. Though she did not doubt country wenches had their tragedies, too, and much less poetic sympathy for them than did royinas. But there was nothing to be gained by arguing with him in the middle of the road. He made the groom give up his horse, and she acquiesced to being loaded aboard it. The skirts of this dress were not split for riding, and they bunched uncomfortably around her legs as she felt for the stirrups. Ista frowned again as the groom took the reins from her and made to lead her mount.
Dy Ferrej leaned across his saddle bow to grasp her hand, in consolation for the tears standing in her eyes. “I know,” he murmured kindly. “Your lady mother’s death is a great loss for us all.”
I finished weeping for her weeks ago, dy Ferrej. She had sworn once to neither weep nor pray ever again, but she had forsworn herself on both oaths in those last dreadful