Midwinter

The next day dawned gray and cold, smelling of dissipating smoke and old ice. Mauritane rose at the first dim light and climbed the embankment to the bluff where Raieve kept watch. She sat perfectly still, staring into the distance beyond the River Ebe. In the growing light the valley was barren and inhospitable, gray and white slopes marked with evergreen stands and the bizarre rock formations that sprang irrationally from the otherwise even ground. Far beneath them the river seemed frozen in time, its green ice dull and somber.

Mauritane sat next to her and looked out over the valley, following her gaze. "You fight well," he said, for lack of anything better.

Raieve turned her head slowly and eyed him sharply. Years in the sun had dusted freckles over the bridge of her nose and drawn thin lines from the corners of her crystalline blue eyes. Her hair moved in the morning breeze, wanting to take flight but refraining.

"For a woman?" she countered, eyebrow cocked, daring him.

Mauritane shrugged. "A dead man isn't any less dead if it was a woman who ran him through," he said.

Raieve thought this over, then laughed out loud, a short husky laugh. "True," she said.

"How many women, then, do you have in the Royal Guard?" she asked.

"None."

There was the eyebrow again. "Aha. Why not?"

"None have applied. It's considered unladylike."

Raieve gestured to herself with mock courtliness. "Am I not the very picture of a noble lady?"

Mauritane grinned, the first time he could remember doing so in months. "Would you want to be?"

Raieve leaned in toward him but kept her eyes fixed on the valley below. "I do not think you are a man who has much truck with noble ladies."

Mauritane winced. His wife the Lady Anne-a noble lady if ever there was one-waited for him back in the City Emerald while he sat flirting with a woman he barely knew. It was wrong.

He stood, clapping his hands together against the cold. Raieve stood as well, sensing something amiss but saying nothing.

"How did you come to be at Crete Sulace?" Mauritane asked, regarding her with what he hoped was a professional distance.

"You read my file, certainly," she said, glaring. "You know why."

"Reports contain facts, not motivations. I know what you did, but I don't know why you did it."

Raieve picked up a handful of rocks and hurled one over the edge of the bluff. "I was chosen by my clan as an emissary to your government. In the wake of the Unseelie invasion, the Concordat crumbled, leaving the clans to fend for themselves. Many of the clans were left with nothing after the war and turned to raiding for survival. Others have taken advantage of the chaos to settle old grievances."

She hurled another stone, watching it fall before she continued. "The Heavy Sky Clan wishes to reform the Concordat, but without weapons and battle thaumatics we don't stand much of a chance. We believed," she paused to chuckle ruefully, "that the Seelie government would see the value in supporting a unified Avalon. Trade between the two worlds has slowed to a trickle, and more than one Fae merchant has been slaughtered within a day's ride of the Gates."

"Did you speak to the Fae ambassador at Tiripali?"

Raieve laughed. "Oh, yes. In one of his rare moments of sobriety. He intimated that the Seelie government did not take sides in foreign disputes but that I was free to discuss the matter with the Foreign Office in the City Emerald. But only after taking any number of bribes.

"The Travel Office, however, refuses to take Avalona currency as payment; they require their fee in gold. I sold a portion of my ancestral lands in order to raise the money.

"In the City Emerald I waited for three weeks for an appointment with an Assistant Minister of the Foreign Office, a conniving bastard named Olifen. That appointment required even further bribes."

Mauritane sighed. "I knew Olifen, though not very well. He is a political appointee, a nephew of some lord or another. A nobleman's son dallying in governance. A fool."

"You don't seem to think much of noblemen."

"Not the incompetent ones. What transpired between you and Olifen?"

"He sympathized. He made a show of raising money for arms and claimed to have contacted the Seelie Army for the loan of a detachment of battle mages. Then one evening he invited me to his private apartments. There was a bright red dress laid out, a bottle of rose wine. He told me that all would be arranged, but that I-how did he put it-might "show my gratitude" first."

"And you refused."

Raieve bristled. "Of course! Politely, at first, with all the decorum I could muster. I was the emissary of my people. Lives were at stake. For a moment I even considered it. Given a bit more time to consider his proposal I might even have accepted it. But he forced himself on me and I… reacted."

"You slit his throat," said Mauritane, without emotion.