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.
"I did," she said, hurling the last of her stones, this one farther than the others. "A detachment of the guard arrested me. I was tried in the Aeropagus, if you can call it a trial, and within two days I was in Crete Sulace, sentenced to live out my natural life there."
"It could have been worse. Had you not been a foreign emissary they would have had you drawn and quartered."
"Small comfort," she said.
She looked at Mauritane, her eyes searching him. "You're a queer one," she said. "Not much like the other Seelie I've met."
"Yes," he said, looking back. "And you see where it's gotten me."
They stood there, silently, for a long moment. Mauritane felt a sudden, unexpected desire to reach out for her and draw her close to him.
"It's getting light," she said, finally breaking the spell that was of an older kind of magic than is taught in universities. "We should be on our way."
Silverdun was stirring, not yet awake. The others were still asleep, huddled beneath the thick cloaks they'd purchased in Hawthorne. Streak stood tied near the tiny stream, nodding and chuffing at Mauritane urgently.
Mauritane took a handful of oats from a saddlebag and held them beneath the horse's nose. Streak's thick tongue darted expertly and took the entire handful in a swallow.
"Many thanks, master. Oats are delicious."
"You're welcome." Mauritane patted the horse's neck.
"Master, a man came to me last night. He put his forelegs in my saddlebag. It was not you, master. His smell was not yours."
Mauritane stopped cold. "Was it one of the men traveling with me?"
"Master, there are many smells. I do not know them all. It was not the female smell."
Mauritane looked at the two bags on Streak's left side, casting a glance at the camp, where no one had yet to rise. He quickly inventoried their contents. Everything was in place: fish hooks, whetstone, flint, and silver. The extra dagger remained in its sheath.
He crossed in front of the horse to the right side, realizing there was only one thing he had that the others did not, only one thing worth taking. He opened the front leather pouch and counted his message sprite jars. One of them was missing.
Quietly, Mauritane circled the camp, searching for the empty jar. He whispered an old finding spell his mother had taught him, a little rhyming cantrip in Elvish that would have made him chuckle under other circumstances. After a few moments he felt a slight tug that drew him across the stream and down a steep slope to one of the strange rock formations, this one vaguely shaped like a woman's body, her arms stretched above her. At the foot of the formation was the missing sprite jar, its lid lying on the ground near it, the sprite long gone, its message and recipient unknown. Mauritane collected the jar and screwed on the lid, placing it in the pocket of his cloak.
He made his way back to camp to find Silverdun awake and washing his face in the stream. "Where did you get off to?" he said, stretching and groaning from a night's sleep on cold ground.
Mauritane looked up and saw Raieve still perched above the camp, her face like chiseled stone.
"Just getting some air," said Mauritane.