Free Sword by Amy Bai

yet told of your midnight adventure with a certain wellborn wife at the city towers, and surely you don't think I've forgotten. I feel fairly safe from your verse for the nonce, Devin Corwynall. And you have been sighted courting no less than half a dozen farmgirls this last year: shall I be aunt, I wonder, to any by-blows ere I return?
    I look forward to hearing the list of offenses you have committed, by-blows or no. They are not a quiet folk I live with, but no one here has your bent for mayhem, and I find, oddly, that I was accustomed to a certain amount of turmoil.
    Place a bet in my name on Her Highness cursing in hall. The sheep will be in summer pasturage, and Lainey is too wily to step near wells or I'd have drowned her long since.
    —I don't miss you either, you cross-eyed village idiot.
     
    Kyali
    * * *
    Kyali flattened the parchment against a gust and looked up at the hazy clouds. It was possible, barely, to imagine the sea, but not the weathered stone of Caerwyssis castle, which she had only seen twice in her entire life.
    Devin's face, his wry grin and the wicked light in his eye, came far easier. Taireasa she rarely allowed herself to picture; it hurt too much.
    The soldier eyed her sidelong as she penned the letter, a half-rotted log serving for a writing desk and a crow's pinion for a quill—it had to look bizarre, but the man seemed not to notice. He was a regular, a face known to her, but his name escaped her. She searched for it in vain, wanting a warmer address for the courier who had brought her this gift. Every season or so, a man from the Third Battalion arrived; she had no doubt her father was well-informed on her progress. She wondered what they told him.
    "Seal it when you reach the villages," she suggested finally, giving up on the name, and rolled the parchment. He took it with a bow, somber and watchful, not much older than she.
    "Regards from your father, lady," he murmured.
    "Give mine to him," she said dryly. "How stands the border? The capital? Is there other gossip of note that doesn't involve my brother?"
    He gave a flicker of a smile—Devin was beloved by the troops, among whom his misadventures were legend—but his eyes were grave. "Quiet, lady," the guard (Ranan, his name was. Hah!) said after a pause. Under her stare, he blinked once and rubbed an amulet about his neck—a mother's gift to a soldier, a luck-piece. The gesture told her what he didn't and a sinking feeling filled her belly. "An odd quiet," he added then, seeing that she had seen. "But not so a man could put a finger on it. The countryside's uneasy. The border's well manned, m'lady, on both sides; nothing's come through but the barons, and they don't stop for nothing."
    He meant it as reassurance. She took it otherwise, putting it with Devin's scant news of their father, and kept the worry from her face with effort. "Thank you, Ranan," Kyali said, and saw, out of the corner of her eye as she turned back to the cloud-hazed view, the look of the fieldhands in his sober blue eyes. "Stay a night if you wish—the Darachim will find you room, I am sure."
    "I ought to get back, m'lady. The general, he wanted haste. He's hungry for news of you, if I could say."
    It made her smile, and made her throat ache. "A meal at least, then."
    "Aye, lady," he agreed, and bowed at the edge of her vision. She kept her face turned toward the sky, not wanting to see that look again. When he had gone, she turned toward the trees, to wait for Arlen and the next lesson in an endless progression.
    The wood had never seemed more peaceful, the peace never more fragile.
    * * *
    Taireasa watched her hands. Fine-boned, they were perfect by court standards, but for the fact that they constantly wound themselves into any nearby cloth, wrinkling the tailor’s masterpieces and drawing the avid attention of every lord, lady, pageboy, maid, and guard. All surely believed they could read the fortunes of the ruling House in the nervous twist of royal