In the Company of Gentlemen Page 4
Then the Fall of Astandalas, and the withdrawal of the remaining troops home, and his second career as a hire-sword, guarding nervous travellers on their way.
He nodded. “There you go. I’ve got to get ready, I have to restock for tomorrow. Domina Black, thank you for that display; Colin, well done. I’ve bored the rest of you enough, but thank you for listening. It’s not a tale I tell often, as you hear from my nephew.”
And before any of them could register a response with him, he got up and went briskly to the marketplace and, eventually, the bar.
Three
Domina Black found him there that evening. He was holding off sleep well enough; after that story, he’d wanted beer more than ever but didn’t care so much for lying quiet.
He couldn’t think what had possessed him to tell the story, why he’d thought it’d make Colin feel better about his sound defeat. Perhaps it was just that he thought Colin needed to know it, before his admiration of his uncle got too strong and inevitably disappointed.
“You didn’t say you still had the scarf,” she said softly, dropping down next to him.
He found he was only half-surprised. He was running the silk over his fingers. The blue hadn’t faded, except for the discoloured splotches where his blood had stained it, and those were more brown than anything.
He stuffed it away hastily. “I was saying enough about myself, I didn’t need to come off as sentimental as well as a cad.”
“A dastard, I think you said.”
He grinned a little. “That’s what Fitzroy Angursell called me.”
“He had a way with words.”
Zorey went up to the bar, came back with strong ale for both of them. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said belatedly. “Do you prefer wine?”
“I’ve lived here long enough to accept ale.”
“If this was another age, I’d say you were from Ysthar. Or even further afield.”
She lifted her glass. “You have a good eye, soldier. Or is it ear?”
“Your accent is impeccable, though it sounds more Kingswood than Stoneybridge.”
“I studied at Kingswood,” she admitted. “And you?”
“Couldn’t afford to go as a young man, and later on never bothered. What brought you to Alinor? That must have been before the Fall.”
She nodded. Her face was a little shadowed; the tavern didn’t have much light, just from the fire and a few oil lanterns. Stoneybridge had embraced the modern aesthetic fiercely (unlike its rival Birckhall across the river, which was traditionalist), and tended to avoid practical magic. Zorey rather liked oil lamps, but he missed the werelights of the past that had made the roads safe and the towns interesting at night.
“I’d always been interested in the universities of Alinor. I found myself at loose ends, and I had a hankering to know what had happened to bring Artorin to the throne—so I went to Kingswood, and then since I didn’t have anything else I wanted to do, I kept on, and got the professorship here. And you? What happened after your defeat?”
He gave her the resume: and at the end of it she said, “Your nephew has been speaking of you with awe and love for months. He desperately wants you to accept him. He wants to work with you.”
“I don’t see why,” he growled. “I’ve told him, I’m no good influence. And why would he want my life? Scarred, weatherbeaten, no regular home, nothing but a seed fund and nothing to use it on. One day I tell myself I’ll settle down, but I don’t want a wife—all I really want is a salle to practice in, maybe a few students or old soldiers to drink with. What kind of life is that for a young lad with a fortune behind him?”
“A pretty good one, I’d think,” she said, “but then I spent my youth chasing after a dream of the truth as if it were a lover.”
“You never married?”
She grinned wryly again. “No. The one right man asked me with the first words he said to me, and I refused—and then he never asked again.”
Zorey couldn’t help himself. “He might have been shy.”
“That was not an obvious character trait.”
“Or fell out of interest?”
“He made sure I knew he’d slept with half the women of the Empire because I wouldn’t.”
“Or maybe his nerve failed him at the end?”
“I think that might be it, except that he disappeared and, rumour has it, was seduced by the Moon. I’m not sure I can compete with her.”
He swallowed dryly. “And you never asked him?”
“That was my mistake.” And she smiled at him, but not with that sort of invitation. He was disappointed, but what can you do? The conversation went on till midnight, and that was, he discovered, enough. In the morning Zorey faced his coming month’s journey with a much more sanguine attitude.
He encountered her returning from the salle as he led his riding and pack horses to the university, where he was to meet his next charge. She was warmly silent, a gift on a fine morning. Zorey felt she’d given him several gifts, and was feeling tender in himself as he tried to make sense of what, exactly, they were.
She gave one final one at the gate to her own building. One last wry smile, as if to say that one confidence deserved another, but this might backfire on her. He saw that, but the thought was pitched aside by her final words to him:
“If it makes you feel any better, Damian couldn’t move his arm for about a month and a half.”
He stared at her. “What?”
“After your bout. And he thought that if you’d known one more dirty trick, one worse one, you would have had him. Have a nice journey!”
He stared after her departing flutter of black robes. It didn’t occur to him to doubt her words: not after all those ghostly suspicions, which yet hadn’t added up to that.
HE MET HIS NEXT SCHOLAR, an elderly man inclined to fuss about cloud formations—that apparently being his area of special study—and automatically set up the arrangements, led them out of town, got them on their way, all without really paying any attention. She was one of the sisters Avramapul—Pali, surely—surely—
Halfway through the day’s ride, as he stopped to rub down the horses at a roadside well, he realised what she’d done.
Not only shown him Colin’s soul, in all its adolescent sulkiness and glory; not only somehow got him to admit the story he’d been holding in for decades, never quite sure how to deal with it; not only that. She’d shown him himself, to her eyes.
She had told him who she was. On Alinor that was still a capital offence: the Red Company were still officially outlaws, terrorists, to be turned in and hanged for the good of the state.
The dastardliest man in the empire ever to cross swords with Damian Raskae—maybe he was still that, though surely Damian Raskae must have met worse men in his day, in all his adventures with the Company and out of it.
A hire-sword, a social nothing, black sheep of his family—certainly she realised that. He’d told her outright.
But she’d seen someone to be trusted.
He rode the familiar, safe roads to Harktree listening to mild academic burbling about clouds and other meteorological phenomena, letting the sound wash over him, wondering whether that bit of land up past Tinor was still available, where they had mild summers and glorious autumns and real snow in the winter.
He fought off two companies of roving soldiers without difficulty, using Mbangelele and Vikthorn and all sorts of other moves whose names he was one of the few to know. He only had to use one dirty trick; which won him an extra gold wheatear when the old Scholar paid him, as he was circuitously informed.
He wasn’t surprised, returning to Stoneybridge, to hear that Domina Black had gone off on sabbatical somewhere. He heard it from Colin, who was finishing his term, and came to his inn the night he arrived, wearing an outfit of more normal cut but even stranger colours than the last, purple and orange and blue taffety.
Towards the end of supper Zorey finally made up his mind. He said: “Colin, lad, I’ve been thinking of heading up north to Arshlingby to see about buying some land this summer. Would you like to come with me? There won’t be much opportunity for wearing a fancy codpiece, I’m afraid.”
Colin said: “I told mother I wasn’t going home ages ago, uncle.”
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Did you love In the Company of Gentlemen? Then you should read Stargazy Pie by Victoria Goddard!
Magic is out of fashion.Good manners never are.Jemis Greenwing returned from university with a broken heart, a bad cold, and no prospects beyond a problematic inheritance and a job at the local bookstore.Ragnor Bella is a placid little market town on the road to nowhere, where Jemis' family affairs have always been the main source of gossip. Having missed his stepfather's funeral, he is determined to keep his head down.Unfortunately for his reputation, though fortunately for several other people, he falls quickly under the temptation of resuming the friendship of Mr. Dart of Dartington, Squire-in-training and beloved local daredevil. Mr. Dart is delighted to have Jemis' company for what will be, he assures him, a very small adventure.Jemis expected the cut direct. The secret societies, criminal gangs, and illegal cult to the old gods--to say nothing of the mermaid--come as a complete surprise.Book One of Greenwing & Dart, fantasies of manners—and mischief.
Read more at Victoria Goddard’s site.
Also by Victoria Goddard
Greenwing & Dart
Stargazy Pie
Stone Speaks to Stone
Bee Sting Cake
Whiskeyjack
Blackcurrant Fool
Love-in-a-Mist
Plum Duff
The Sisters Avramapul
The Bride of the Blue Wind
The Warrior of the Third Veil
Standalone
In the Company of Gentlemen
The Hands of the Emperor
Not Far From the Tree
Till Human Voices Wake Us
The Connoisseur
In the Realms of Gold: Five Tales of Ysthar
The Return of Fitzroy Angursell
Petty Treasons
The Tower at the Edge of the World
Watch for more at Victoria Goddard’s site.
About the Author
Victoria Goddard is a fantasy novelist, gardener, and occasional academic. She has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto, has walked down the length of England, and is currently a writer, cheesemonger, and gardener in the Canadian Maritimes. Along with cheese, books, and flowers she also loves dogs, tea, and languages.
Read more at Victoria Goddard’s site.
Victoria Goddard, In the Company of Gentlemen
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