In the House of Five Dragons
17. Foster Trust
“We are servants to the gods and their mother, Surma. We strive in the service of life and light, ever against our brothers and enemies, the sons and spawn of Saerus. Yet we must remember always to respect his dominion and those he has claimed.”
— From The Books of Surma and Saerus
Thainna stood awkwardly in front of Lord and Lady Mazrem, not quite sure what she was supposed to do next. Her knees seemed to be made of rapidly melting wax. She wanted to sit and catch her breath, but Rikard Mazrem and his wife occupied the only chairs.
They believed her. It was insanity to even think it, but they actually believed that Thainna was a foster. Rikard didn’t ask after any more details of their prior meeting. But why? He obviously hadn’t forgotten, and surely Captain Mazrem wondered what an educated priestess of Surma might have been doing in the Rows in the middle of the night, filthy and dressed in rags. But he didn’t ask. Instead, the great war hero was stuffing food into his mouth like a starving man.
Which he might well be. Lady Mazrem now ignored Thainna with a noblewoman’s easy obliviousness, leaving her free to examine Rikard Mazrem more closely. The VEIL captain was terribly thin, though a career of soldiering had muscled him well enough to hide the worst of it. But Thainna grew up in the slums of Dormaen and she knew starvation when she saw it. Sallow skin, the slight bulge to Rikard’s stomach, and the redness in his gums that meant he had not eaten fruit for a long time. He needed a shave, too. Carcaen men just couldn’t grow decent beards. They always ended up looking like drowned rats.
Rikard Mazrem was eating too fast. He dropped crumbs and bits of yellow egg on the front of his black saela. His wife watched out of the corner of her eye and did not look pleased. The smell of the food made Thainna’s mouth water, but Narissa’s advice was still fresh in her mind.
Thainna tried to speak, but little more than a terrified squeak escaped her dry lips. She cleared her throat and tried again.
“Captain Mazrem… sir? You shouldn’t eat so fast.”
Lady Mazrem gave a pretty, bell-like laugh. “So I’ve told him, but my husband has a will of iron and refuses to listen.”
Thainna chewed her lip and took a step toward Rikard. “Please, Captain Mazrem. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
He ignored her and kept eating. Things would be messy and unpleasant unless he stopped. Thainna hesitated, and then put her hand on Rikard’s wrist. He jerked back as though she had touched him with hot iron instead of nervous-weak fingers.
“You won’t take anything from me!” he cried.
He snatched back his plate and food flew into the air. Thainna staggered back and fell to one knee. Lady Mazrem sighed softly but did nothing else about her husband’s strange behavior.
Thainna straightened, but kept her distance this time. “I don’t want to take anything, Captain Mazrem. Eat all you want, but do it slowly, hae? Stop when it hurts.”
“When it hurts?” Rikard asked suspiciously. “No. It hurts when I don’t eat.”
“Because you’re hungry, sir. But it hurts if you eat too much, as well.”
Why was she explaining this as though to a child? No, even a child understood the difference between hunger and overeating. What was wrong with Captain Mazrem? Thainna was fairly sure she knew most of the stories and none of them ever mentioned him being simple-minded. He was injured… maybe a blow to the head? Or was he truly as unhinged as she had first thought at midnight in the Rows?
“Why?” Rikard asked Thainna. “Why does it hurt?”
Lady Mazrem watched in silence, politely sipping her morning cream.
“You… um… you haven’t eaten for a long time, Captain Mazrem. Your stomach is used to being small,” Thainna said. She cinched her hand into a fist to demonstrate. “If you put too much in before you’re ready, it will cramp and make you sick. You’ll throw up and then what’s the point of having eaten at all?”
Rikard twirled his fork in his fingers, staring at the piece of meat speared on the pronged tip, glistening with honey. He nodded and bit, chewing much more slowly this time. When he was done, he put the plate down on the table.
“Are you finished, my lord?” asked Laurael.
“Hae,” he answered thoughtfully. “For now.”
“Then why don’t you let Thainna take a look at your dressings?”
“Dressings?” He looked down at his egg-spattered clothes.
“The bandages that Hern’s templars applied when you were at the archouse.”
“Oh. Hae, then.”
In her terror, Thainna had nearly forgotten about the bag of bandages and medicine Narissa had given her. It came back to her in a rush that she could actually hear roaring in her ears. She had no idea how to tie a bandage.
This is insanity. I can’t do it, Thainna thought for the thousandth time. What am I doing here?
Rikard stood and stared at the buttons down the front of his saela. He prodded one with a questing finger, but could not seem to figure out what else to do with it. Someone else must have dressed him. Lady Mazrem went to her husband, unfastened the shirt for him and helped him shrug out of it. She folded and laid it across his chair.
“Do you want to do this somewhere more private?” Thainna asked nervously.
“My husband’s injuries are hardly a source of shame,” said Lady Mazrem.
Thainna shrugged. She doubted anyone who wasn’t on Mazrem pay could see, anyway. The Mazrem estate was huge. Even with a lens, it would take a sharp-eyed neighbor to catch a glimpse of anything interesting. Of course, there was probably nothing to hide, as far as either Lord or Lady Mazrem were concerned. These were war wounds, honorably won. It wasn’t like anything was going to fall out when she removed the bandages…
I hope.
Thainna inspected the swathes of blood-crusted cloth wound all along Rikard’s neck and chest. The bandages definitely needed changing. There were other cuts, too, mostly along his arms and shoulders. Most of these had the scaly, pink-edged look of wounds on the mend, but several had recently torn open and darkened with dried blood.
Thainna circled to look at Rikard’s back and found much the same. She touched one of the ragged slices as gently as she could. Captain Mazrem tensed under her fingers. The skin was cool, not fevered-hot. That was good, wasn’t it?
“What happened? I thought the templars took care of these. How did they start bleeding again?”
“There was an… altercation,” Lady Mazrem answered. “My husband was bold in the face of a certain confusion.”
“I hit Nikas,” Rikard said rather sullenly. “He wanted to take me back.”
Thainna had no idea who Nikas was, but she figured that she had better clean Rikard up. Like any sane person, she was nervous around blood, especially that of a VEIL knight.
“I… I need to get some water and a towel to clean these,” said Thainna.
Lady Mazrem called for a servant and one appeared in a doorway. “Get the foster hot water and washing cloths.”
“I can get them myself, if you can just tell me where,” Thainna said.
“A foster’s time is much more valuable than that,” Lady Mazrem told her as the servant hurried off.
Thainna wasn’t at all comfortable with being served. She had two good feet — with brand-new sandals — and hands to do it herself, but couldn’t bring herself to say so to the commanding Lady Mazrem.
What would I say, exactly? Hae, it’s worth my time? You both scare me badly and I’d really like to get away from all of this…?
But instead, Thainna picked at the knots of Captain Mazrem’s bandages. He held perfectly still, rigidly tensed as though ready to grab her. Like a statue about to spring to lethal life. More than a little unnerved, Thainna unwound the bandages until the blood clotted in them made it impossible to keep going. She searched through the supplies Narissa had given her until she found a small knife. Thainna slipped it out of the leather sleeve and bit her lip in concentration as she carefully sliced away the rest of Rikard’s red-stained bandages.
Don’t cut him!
The servant returned with a bowl of steaming water. Two more followed, one with a stack of towels. The other set out a stand for the basin. Thainna thanked them and began her work. When she had cleaned up the blood and painstakingly picked away the final threads of old bandages, the water was stained red. Rikard’s cuts were oozing again.
The nervously waiting servants gathered up the discarded bandages and rushed them off to be burned. Thainna took the canister of salve from her satchel and peeled away the wax seal with her thumbnail.
“Will the Alterra be confused by all of the blood?” she asked.
“No,” said Rikard.
“Why not?”
“A ship of stone sails in sorrows.”
Thainna waited, but that was all of the information that he offered.
He really is mad.
Thainna found a pair of white lambskin gloves at the bottom of Narissa’s supplies and pulled them on before rubbing the sharp-smelling medicine into Captain Mazrem’s wounds. She was careful around the one in his side. Someone — probably the templars that Lady Mazrem mentioned — had stitched it tightly shut with fine black thread, but it had been a wide, deep cut and Rikard’s skin was pulled taut over it.
Thainna rubbed salve into the angry, reddened skin as much as she dared, then wound it up under bandages again. It wasn’t much different than wrapping her feet, she decided.
“Are there any other uh… injuries?” Thainna asked, motioning at Rikard’s black pants.
If there were any other injuries, she could not see them and Narissa hadn’t exactly given her a catalog of the man’s wounds. Lady Mazrem pursed her painted lips a little tighter and Rikard nodded. He rolled up one of his pant legs to display a long, shallow set of scratches in his calf. These hadn’t bled recently, so Thainna just rubbed them with the medicine Narissa had given her and then pulled off her gloves, wrapping them in a towel.
“That’s all,” she announced. “You can dress again.”
With his wife’s help, Captain Mazrem replaced his saela and buttoned the collar up under his chin. She brushed the remains of his breakfast from his chest and retied his tail of dark, straight hair.
“Do you feel well enough for a walk, my lord?” Lady Mazrem asked.
Rikard seemed to think about that for a moment and nodded
“Good. Things have changed a great deal since you left and I’d like to show you. Thank you for your time, Thainna. Go inside and ask for Bastil. He’ll give you a room. Are you hungry? And some breakfast, then. Check over my husband again after dinner.”
Thainna offered her very best — but still very clumsy — curtsy. Lady Mazrem took Rikard’s arm and led him away across the manicured lawn, toward a large, domed white building. When they were gone, more servants appeared from the porch doors to clear away the remains of Lord and Lady Mazrem’s meal. Thainna gathered up her supplies.
“Where can I find Bastil?” she asked one of the girls collecting plates.
“In his office, at the servants’ house.”
“Where is that?”
“Just across that lawn there. When you get inside, go down the hall until you reach the first crossing, and then turn right. Bastil’s office is at the end there. Knock before you go in. Bastil will yell at you if you don’t.”
“Thank you,” said Thainna.
She pulled the strap of the sack over her shoulder and made her way across the indicated lawn. The servants’ quarters were in a long, low building with dozens of small round windows. Inside, Thainna made her way down a hall tiled in blue and lined along both sides by doors. Most of these were closed, but those that were not opened on small, neat bedrooms. Some were larger than others, containing more than one bed. In one room, a pair of small children wrestled while an old woman smiled and mended a torn black tabba.
At the first intersection of hallways, Thainna turned right. At the end of the hall stood another door, this one closed tightly. She rapped her knuckles on it and waited.
“Come in,” answered a muffled voice.
A serious-looking older Carcaen man sat behind a desk inside, sorting through papers and waxed writing boards. His head jerked up at Thainna with a surprised look, as though he had entirely forgotten that he had just told her to come in.
“Who in hell are you?” he asked.
“Thainna Vahn. I’m a foster.”
“I’m not blind, girl. I can see that. What are you doing here? Did someone call for you?”
“General Hern and Mana Narissa sent me to care for Captain Mazrem,” Thainna explained in a rush. “I… I’m sure there’s a record of it somewhere.”
Bastil picked through the half-ordered mess on his desk until he found a folded letter with a dark blue Moon Court seal. He opened it, read over the contents a couple of times, sighed and dropped it back into the heap.
“Thinny, you said?”
“Thainna.”
“I’m Bastil, steward of this house. Since you’re talking to me, I suppose you need a place to stay. For how long?”
“I’m not really sure. It depends upon how long it takes Captain Mazrem to heal.”
“Well then.”
Bastil stood and went to a map on the wall that seemed to be of the building they were in. The steward frowned.
“I can’t bunk a foster with the other help,” he said. “They will never leave you alone. One of the private rooms, then. Liselle left a few weeks back and her room is free. It doesn’t have much of a view, but will that suffice?”
Bastil’s tone suggested that any other accommodations he might be able to rustle up — at considerable personal sacrifice — would be much worse. Thainna barely kept herself from laughing. Not much of a view? Did he think Thainna cared, that she would make some sort of a fuss? Her own room, with a roof and a real bed!
“That will be fine,” she assured the steward.
Bastil nodded and headed for the door, gesturing for Thainna to follow. He led her back the way she had come, then up another corridor lined in rooms. At a small open doorway, Bastil stopped and motioned Thainna inside. The chamber was tiny, only a little larger than Thain’s cell at the fostral. But it was clean and for the moment, it was hers.
Thainna plopped down on the edge of the bed. It wasn’t lavish, but the pallet was stuffed with something softer than reeds and the blanket had no holes. She set the sack down next to the bed and stood on tiptoes to look out the single window. Not much of a view proved to be the back of another building.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
“The storehouse. There’s a bathhouse next to it that you can use and I suggest that you do so frequently,” said Bastil frankly. “Lady Mazrem does not abide dirty servants.”
He turned to leave, but Thainna had one more question.
“Lady Mazrem said I should… that I could ask you for something to eat?”
Bastil glanced back to Thainna.
“You haven’t eaten? Down the hall and turn two rights,” he said. “That’s the servants’ kitchen. Go there and speak to Arliss. She’ll take care of it.”
Thainna jumped up and embraced the sour-faced old steward. A real bed, a real room, real food, real clothes… It was too much to take in at once. Tears filled Thainna’s eyes, pure gratitude leaking down her cheeks.
“Thank you!” she cried.
Bastil gingerly extricated himself from Thainna’s arms and inspected his tabba for any tearstains. Finding several, he rolled his eyes.
“Hae, you’re quite welcome,” he sighed.
