Clutching her hands to her chest, Lyara pretended she didn’t notice how her heart pounded. Her father sat in an armchair behind her, reading the latest issue of Whispers in Brief and smoking his pipe, but she stood pressed against the railing of her home’s balcony, peering over the rooftops at the main street winding through Edras and toward Avtalyon.
She was a fool to fall for a soldier. She told herself that every night as she fell asleep, smiling like a giddy school girl. Soldiers courted danger, a soldier’s wife would be forced to do the same. Perhaps that was what she wanted.
Dradge had waited one day to call on her, and then only two days after that to call on her again. The third time he’d showed up at her door in his chain-mail and plate armor to bid a quick goodbye before heading back out on assignment.
Centaurs were raiding western villages. Centaurs. Lyara filled their month apart picking through her father’s basement library, studying the histories that’d been such a chore to read before. She’d sketched a few and painted one: a fearsome beast, eyes cold, flanks splattered in blood. Though proud of the work, she kept it hidden in the bottom drawer of the guest room dresser, where it wouldn’t catch her gaze unbidden.
“You’re not still printing these on my printers, are you?”
Lyara glanced back and found her father frowning as he held up the periodical folded open to the center, displaying a pointedly unflattering cartoon of King Hilderic lying fat and drunk on a bed made of the corpses of peasants.
Lyara snorted. She was rather proud of that one. “Adela introduced me to a man in the Outer Circle with an old machine. Takes us a lot longer and we can’t make as many, but it should keep you from being implicated in any of it. But we won’t get caught.”
Her father nodded, with a grunt, then unfolded the periodical to turn to the next page. If she remembered right, that was a crude limerick about guild taxes—Orvist’s narrowed eyes and wrinkled nose just about confirmed it.
“I don’t write much these days,” she said. “Really, the whole thing has taken off without me. I think it resonates with a lot of people. Gives them an outlet for their frustrations.”
Her father grunted again, and she knew he didn’t believe a word she said. “I hope you recognize your mother and I tried our best to keep your idle hands busy about something useful.”
Lyara smiled. “Are you saying my Whisper is not useful?”
“The intemperate who sows discord one day reaps it,” he said, quoting Epigram, “and the world will weep with him.”
“And tyranny finds the man who runs fastest from it,” she said, another line from Epigram. An easy quip, since the text was a collection of contrarian proverbs. “Maybe that silly thing is the best I can do.”
Orvist looked up at her with a smile, his manicured mustache and beard hiding most of his lips. “I suspect I’ll rue the day you finally realize that isn’t true.”
A cheer rose somewhere near the base of the hill and Lyara’s breath caught. The crowd in the street below parted to make way for the procession. Dozens of soldiers, all on horseback, paraded towards Avtalyon, their horses’ hooves clopping against the paving stones. She studied each face, looking for those green eyes.
The men were tired, dirty, their faces haggard. Still, they smiled, waving to folks they knew and even strangers. This was a victorious return, but not by much.
With a heavy sigh, Lyara’s father closed the periodical, leaving it on the side table, and rose from his chair to join her on the balcony. They watched the procession in silence, and Orvist gently draped his arm over her shoulder. The sweet scent of his pipe-smoke enveloped them both.
“Father, I’m alright.”
He simply nodded. “I know you are.”
At the end of the procession, cartmasters drove open-topped wagons filled with the wounded. The dead didn’t return; they were buried with honor in the ground they bled to defend. There were three carts in total. Some men sat on the edges, various limbs wrapped in bandages, smiling and waving with perhaps greater enthusiasm than the healthy riders. Others lay on beds of hay, still or writhing in pain.
Three riders rode among the wagons. The two on the ends reached for the man in the middle as he tried to stand in the stirrups to look at the houses above him. Lyara’s heart leapt in her chest, relief washing through her.
She waved, and after a moment Dradge noticed her. Was his leg broken? It was splinted and wrapped in bandages, the left stirrup extended to accommodate his straight knee. Grinning, he waved back, his eyes on her the entire time his attendants tried to get him to sit back down in the saddle.
Orvist squeezed her shoulders. “He’ll leave again. You know that. Are you willing to go through this, day after day?”
She stared at Dradge, his smile making her smile. “I might be.”
Orvist released her, nodding to himself. “So long as you know.”
Lyara patted the hand her father rested on the railing, then charged down the stairs to throw open the door and run out into the street. The crowd filled the town square and her accursed height left her staring at backs and shoulders. Fortunately, the folks before her moved aside to make way for three horses that broke from the procession.
Dradge’s two fellow soldiers dismounted first and rushed to catch both his horse and him as he struggled to dismount. These were not soldiers she recognized, both were older than Dradge—one looked older than her father—but they doted on him like he was King Hilderic himself.
“I’m alright,” Dradge grumbled, trying to fend the two men off, but they forced him to let them lower him to the ground. He winced as he tried to put weight on his splinted leg.
“Stop that,” the older soldier said, whacking Dradge over the shoulders with the crutch he pulled from beneath the stirrups.
“Let me,” Lyara said, slipping her shoulder under Dradge’s arm in place of the crutch. Maybe her height was good for something after all.
Dradge peered down at her, smiling as he pulled her close. He studied every curve of her face, as though it’d been decades since he’d last seen her. “You waited for me.”
“Just how many suitors do you think chase me in a month’s time?”
He shook his head. “Dozens?”
She laughed, cheeks flushing with heat. In truth there’d been one, a freckle-faced scholar from the Inner Circle she’d rejected outright. And even his offer was a rarity this past year. It seemed most eligible bachelors in Edras appreciated her curt wit and mischievous tendencies about as much as her parents did.
“You watch him, miss,” the old soldier said, handing her the crutch. “He’s not supposed to walk on that leg for four weeks at least.”
Dradge grunted in disagreement. “It’s a simple fracture. The bone never stuck through the skin. I’m fine.”
The other soldier scoffed. “A simple fracture in at least three places. Please try, ma’am. Maybe he’ll listen to you.”
Dradge muttered something under his breath, but Lyara looked up at him with a grin. “So, they’re saying you need a place to stay?”
His smile quickly returned, sheepish this time. “I can try and speak with my father. Or lodge at the barracks. But, I thought I might ask you first.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear those other options. I’m sure my parents will take you in, since you have nowhere else to go.”
The two other soldiers laughed, the older letting out a low whistle. “Oh, she’s a troublemaker too? Well, that could be the only chance anyone’s got at making him listen.”