Chapter 188 Growing Feelings

Ruth changed back into her torn clothes and came once more to confess her fault.

She still had not taken in what her lord meant — took it that he only meant to blame her for letting the fourth lord of the Odenheims put her into a courtesan's borrowed dress.

Leon could only have Linn take her down. She had come to the Baron's house but lately; before that, on the mountain, she had never been of the Frost Ravens — and the bar set for her was the sterner one.

But the rule was laid, and laid it must be held to.

Linn recited to her, once again, the Charges Inviolable that bound the Baron's own attendants — every clause of reward and penalty in them. The Charges of the Baron's house were no written thing; it was Linn and Lyle and their like who took turns reciting them aloud for the newcomers' ears.

It was not that Ruth did not know them. Only — a girl of her little experience, under just such a prod as the fourth lord had given her, had let her wits scatter for that one moment.

"Enough. Go with Lyle and take your penalty." Linn had laid out the stakes of it all once more, and seeing her head still bent, said so:

"We were beaten small, the same as you. Think on it — your father, and all those Frost Ravens who watched you grow: their trade is ours, the trade where one slip and the head comes off."

Lyle, at the side, pointed at the floor and made it good: "Not one head. Hundreds of heads — every last one of them rolling and rolling to your feet."

Ruth's eyes dropped to her own feet; in her mind's eye the blood-slick heads lay all a-roll there, and at last the fright broke her into tears.

"For my own head's sake, these five strokes will get no soft hand of mine." Lyle pulled the door open and went out.

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Someone in the Baron's house took the whip that night, and hid under the quilt weeping it out in secret — while through her mind, all the while, kept flickering the fourth lord's warm, equivocal glance.

The fourth lord himself, however, had clean forgotten the whole business. By now his one and only thought was the chamberlain who would soon come bearing the King's warrant to his door.

On the last day of the ninth month, the Odenheim house saw the warrant-bearing chamberlain arrive at last. Brendan received the warrant in the great hall with all proper gravity — and, under the boundless astonishment in his mother's eyes and his sister's, followed the chamberlain off to the Regent's palace to report for his post.

Lora did not wait for her fourth brother to come home. She wrote her third brother on the instant, and carried it to the relay post and sent it express.

A hundred leagues between the two capitals — even under the General's mansion's own seal, the letter would run two days getting there. Her guess was that this business of her fourth brother's was news even to her third brother and her father.

Leon too had Channing's word brought to him.

Of this he had known nothing. By rights Augustus von Klein, or Hugh Horn, should have had wind of it before anyone — yet their side had heard never a whisper, while the other had gone straight to the issuing of a warrant and an appointment.

Which could mean one thing only: the list was Voss's own making, the drafting of the warrant Voss's own hand — and whether the King himself ever looked at it was another matter.

But whoever's hand it came from, a King's warrant it remained; and even Stephen could not bid his son defy it.

"Ruthie — do you see now why the tongue must not run loose? Brendan Odenheim has gone in by Voss's road. When Voss helps a man, there's a price down the road — the only question is when, and what he'll ask of his man to pay."

Ruth stood struck dumb at the news too. She had taken it that every soul breathing was like their own folk — sick to death of chamberlains, hating them to the bone. And here was the Odenheim house's fourth lord, gone over to the greatest chamberlain at court.

Thank heaven she had given out only the bare shape of it that day, and the fourth lord had not pressed her further — else the fault would have been past her shouldering.

"You've taken your penalty; the rest I'll find a way to smooth over. Let there be no next time."

And Leon knew it: this Brendan Odenheim was past all trusting now.