The War Saint

Chapter 3 Locked In

"Cora. I have to go back."

The sun had slipped while neither of them was paying attention. Corin climbed off the bed and said it with his head down.

"Mm."

She pulled the quilt up over herself and lifted one hand, eyes still closed. A wave of the hand: go on, then. Go.

A moment later the yard gate knocked shut. Only then did she open her eyes, and lie there staring at the beams.

Lucian was a lecher — every soul in the prefecture knew that. But he was also a son of a great house, and a son of a great house has his pride. She had let a stable t****l have her body. Worse: by now the whole city knew she'd taken up with one.

A marquis's son does not carry a t****l's leavings into his own house and set them up as a concubine.

She had been bought young by a flesh-broker with an eye for the trade, and raised as a bred courtesan. Beaten when she sang badly. Beaten when she sang well and he was drunk. She had learned the lute and the board, the brush and the poem. She had learned to walk, and to pour, and to smile, and to pour again, and she had learned it well enough that Lord Lucian paid out her bond and took her out of that house.

The concubine's rooms at Ashvale Manor. A seat at the family table. Silk.

Gone in one afternoon.

And Lady Rowena. She was everything the whispers said, and a little more. Two fingers turned just so, and Coralie was dropped like a shoe worn through at the heel. Killing without ever bloodying the knife.

——

"I made it."

Corin came in at a run and slipped through the side gate a breath before the porter barred it, the sunset still smeared red on the rooftops.

He let the breath out. Then he put his head down, kept to the wall, and went straight to the stables.

Two horses were his to keep. A common one sold for ten silver marks; good bloodstock could not be bought at any price a man like him could name. And if a horse went wrong — a cough in the night, a thrown shoe, off its feed — the t****l who kept it took the whip. At worst he took the beating that ends in the yard at dusk, and nobody asked afterwards where he had gone.

Night feed is what puts flesh on a horse. So the night feed is the one that matters, and so the thralls who keep the horses sleep beside them.

The troughs were dry. Corin filled the manger, watered both animals, rubbed them down, and only then let himself sit.

Four hours yet before they'd need feeding again. He meant to steal a little sleep on the fodder heap. He was tired down to the bone.

"That's him!"

He was halfway to lying down when the shout came. Men were crossing the yard fast — a knot of them, boots loud on the cobbles, faces angry.

They were coming for him.

"Master Bram."

Corin knew the man at the front. Bram Crane, Lord Lucian's body-servant. He got up and went to meet him, quick, bowing twice.

A body-servant stood in the second order among the servants. Corin stood in the fourth. Between those two orders lies a lifetime.

But that was not the half of it. A body-servant stands at his master's elbow all day — near enough to take an order, near enough to whisper one back — and in a great house a king's valet outranks a baron. Bram could put a name into a lord's ear. Corin could put a name into a horse's.

And Bram was house-born, with a father in the Archive Tower and three generations of Cranes buried in the manor's ground. Corin had a bond-deed and a straw pallet.

"So you're Corin."

Bram looked him over once, and then spat in his face.

"Take a look at yourself. You stink of the stable. You think that's a thing that gets to stand behind a lord?"

"I—"

And then Corin understood. This was about yesterday. About being pulled out of the yard, out of turn, and given the honor of riding at Lord Lucian's back.

Of course. Being near the masters is the whole of a servant's fortune. It is the territory. It is why a man keeps his shoes clean and his chin shaved and his back straight. Nobody hands a slice of that to a stranger without an answer coming.

"Master Bram, there's a mistake. You weren't there, and the lord was in a hurry, so he just pointed at—"

"Shut your mouth."

Bram turned his head and jerked his chin at the men behind him.

"Break him."

They were drudges, most of them — men who never got within a door of a master, and spent their lives currying favor with men like Bram. They came at him in a pack and bore him down, and then the boots came down like rain, and every one of them hit harder than the last, because Bram was watching.

He could not fight them. He would not have dared. There were six or seven, and two of them were house guards — sworn Rank Nine, the bottom rung of the martial ladder, and even so, one of them could have put three of him on the ground without breathing hard.

So he did the only thing there was to do. He pulled his arms over his head, curled up small, and let them work.

"Enough."

Bram let it run a moment longer, then lifted a hand.

"Kill him and there's nobody to feed the horses, and then the master's business gets held up. He isn't worth the trouble of a corpse."

He looked down at Corin on the ground. Sniffed.

"Know your place. You're a stable t****l. That's not a thing a man climbs out of. Let me catch you near the masters again and I'll peel the skin off you myself."

He waved the others along, and they went, laughing, boots ringing across the yard.

It was a while before Corin got up.

Everything hurt. Ribs, wrists, one eye swelling shut, blood in his mouth tasting of copper. But nothing was broken, and when he ran his tongue along his teeth they were all still there. They had been careful — in the way men are careful with a thing they plan to use again.

He had no coin for medicine. He hauled cold water up from the trough and washed the dirt out of the cuts, one at a time, hissing through his teeth.

Then he crawled onto the fodder and slept like a dead man.

——

The next day he dragged himself through it. Mucked out the stalls, hauled the water, worked the curry comb with a hand that did not want to close.

The other thralls watched him and smiled their small smiles.

Serves him right, their faces said. Who does he think he is? Thought he could show his face to a lord. Look at him now.

At midday he laid out a full feed and fresh water, and then left Ashvale Manor for Sweetwater Lane.

Leave granted by Lady Rowena. He did not dare not to go.

And standing orders from Lord Lucian besides: learn how to please a woman.

"How did you get like this?"

Coralie had the door open, and then she had one look at him, and her mouth went flat.

"Fell," Corin said, to the floor.

"Did you fall onto somebody's fists?"

She turned away and came back with a jar of medicine, and made him sit.

Her fingertips went to his face first, dabbing the salve on with more gentleness than he had been touched in his life. Then she reached for the hem of his shirt. Corin's hands came up to hold it down, and she swatted them away without a word, and he let go.

"You think a servant's life is soft?" She worked the salve along his ribs, into the dark bloom of the bruise. "In a house like that there are a hundred ways to be ruined, and not one of them written down anywhere. You're a stable t****l. Yesterday you rode out behind the young lord. What did you think that was — an honor?"

Her fingers were warm where the rest of him hurt.

"An honor you lifted off the table of every man in Lord Lucian's service. Were they going to smile and bow to you for it? A beating is the least of what you had coming. The very least."

Corin looked up at her.

She had guessed the whole of it. Every blow. And she said it as though she had been standing there watching.

"It isn't only tigers that eat men," Coralie said. "Men eat men too. And they're worse at it. A tiger leaves the bones behind. A man picks you clean, and then sells the bones."

"I know."

He did know. His father had been eaten down to the bones by men, and there hadn't even been a grave at the end of it — only a river.

"A tiger that won't eat starves. A man who won't eat never climbs. So if you want to go up in this world, little brother, then you had better get hungry."

She had leaned in close to say it. Her voice had gone low, and the smell of her — powder, and something warm underneath the powder — came to rest on his face with her breath.

Corin shivered. Under the ribs, under the bruises, lower down — it itched.

He was still working out what to do with his hands when they found a place to rest — low, at the front of her skirt, through the silk. He pulled them back as if the cloth had been a stove.

Then he stopped.

There had been something hard under it.

Coralie flinched back two steps, color coming up her throat, and looked at him with heat in her eyes — anger and shame both, and no door out of either.

"Do you want to know what that is?"

He had not asked. She answered anyway, and her hands went to the ribbon at her waist as if she were daring herself.

The skirt came open.

Corin forgot the pain in his ribs. He stood there with the salve still wet on his face and could not make a sound.

Two triangular plates of copper, worked smooth as mirrors, hinged and buckled at the hips like the front half of a pair of short breeches. Closed, and set against her body so tightly that the metal had left the print of itself in the soft skin above and below.

"You've never seen one."

She smiled when she said it. It was a good performance, and it lasted about as long as a candle guttering. Then the tears came anyway, sliding down without a sound, and she did not bother to wipe them.

"Lord Lucian sent a man round last night to lock it on me. He said — if he can't have it, nobody else will."

"Locked..."

Corin came back to himself. He looked again, closer, and there it was.

Of course. There was a keyhole. A small dark mouth of one, set right there in the middle of the plate.

Which meant there was a key.

Which meant the chastity belt came off.

He was still staring at it, turning over what that could mean for him, when she spoke again. She had stepped back in close. Her eyes were wet, and soft, and fixed on him like two pools of spring water.

"Sweet boy."

"Would you help me take something back from Lucian?"