Sasha refrained from retorting with difficulty. “She slept in here last night?”
Alythia nodded.
“She's housetrained?”
“No. I cleaned it up.” With no grimace, or sense of great horror. Another amazement. “I think I'll try and teach her though.”
Sasha shook her head. “You can't do it, Lyth. That's a full-blood wolf, they just don't train. And even if she were a dog, she might be too old now anyway…I mean, look how big she is. Five months! I'm amazed she hasn't started tearing things apart just for fun-they do that, you know. You're not the first Lenay to try and domesticate wolves, it's never worked. Even half-breeds are hard.”
“Aye, well maybe I'll surprise you,” Alythia said shortly.
Sasha shook her head. “It's not about you, Alythia, it's about the wolf.”
“Of course it's about me,” Alythia snapped. “It's always been about me. You never liked me, you've never missed a chance to attack or humiliate me, you gleefully ruined my wedding send-off from Baen-Tar! Well, are you happy now? I'm a widow, at twenty-two summers. Does it please you?”
“I didn't come in here to fight, Alythia,” Sasha said coldly. “You can fly off into your selfish fantasies all you like, but believe it or not, I've had problems of my own to attend to. I've been trying my best not to think about you at all, and generally, I've been succeeding.”
“Fine,” said Alythia, her lip trembling. “Just fine. You can go now.”
“No,” Sasha said firmly. “I can't go. I live here, a guest of the Velos. Now you do too. It's not right that we bring our private arguments under their roof. They're proud people and they deserve our respect.”
“I just watched my husband and his family butchered before my eyes!” Alythia's wide eyes were incredulous. There was a horror there, of depth and substance previously unknown to the most glamorous princess of Lenayin. “You're telling me to just forget it!”
“I…damn, Alythia, I never said that!” Sasha held up her hands helplessly. “Why do you always confuse everything, always turn it into an attack on me? On something I did wrong, on something I should have done differently…”
“I don't care a pile of shit about you!” Alythia screamed. “Get out of this room! NOW!”
Tashyna lurched backward, frightened, ears suddenly back and snarling in Sasha's direction. Sasha sat very still. Alythia sat on the edge of the bed, breathing frantically, agony etched wide-eyed on her face. Pain seemed to claw at her throat, constricting it, making the tendons stand out. Sasha had never seen Alythia like this. Alythia's tantrums and tempers were nearly as famous as Sasha's own, but they were always of the minor kind-something someone had said to her, something someone had or had not done, a wine cup spilt, a thread frayed, a mess left uncleaned. Now her eyes had witnessed a horror so great, it seemed she was unable to even sob.
For the first time, it occurred to Sasha what the past night must have been like for Alythia. Shut in this room, sleepless, with only the wolf for company. Reliving the horror in the dark, over and over. She had that look, sleepless and stretched thin, her hair a mess, her nerves jangling. One remark could set her off. Much like the frightened wolf, snarling at everyone, insensible to considerations of friend and foe.
“Alythia,” Sasha said quietly, “you're scaring the wolf. Please don't. I don't want to get eaten.”
Alythia looked across at the wolf. Immediately Tashyna stopped growling and whined. She lay flat on the bed, grovelling. Sasha blinked in amazement. Alythia recovered her breathing, slowly. Hands rigid like claws began fidgeting in her lap.
“She thinks you're angry at her,” Sasha observed. “They feel your emotions. Don't give them an emotion you don't want them to have.”
“I know that,” Alythia muttered. She held out a hand. Tashyna licked it, then crawled into Alythia's lap and began to lick her chin. Alythia hugged her, and held tight while Tashyna squirmed. There were tears in her eyes. Utterly unexpected, Sasha found that there were tears in her eyes too. Two lost, frightened souls. Somehow, they were perfect for each other.
Sasha took a deep breath and tried again. “You know that the little Halmady girl is alive?”
Alythia nodded, face half buried in Tashyna's thick fur. “Elra. How is she?”
“Well. Errollyn cares for her. There's no more room in this house, so she's several houses down, the Giana Family. They're good people.”
“I heard she was burnt.” Hoarsely.
“Only a little. Errollyn thinks she'll be fine.”
“I saw a maid burn alive. In your Nasi-Keth attack. They threw things that burned. She screamed for a long time. I started running just to get away from the screams.”
“I'm sorry,” said Sasha. “Kessligh told me what he did. He doesn't have enough people, Lyth. He had to use burning bottles, otherwise you'd all be prisoners of Patachi Steiner.”
“You weren't there.”
No, Sasha nearly said, I was almost drowning in the harbour off Besendi Promontory, hauling the holiest Verenthane artefact. But she didn't.
“Lyth…look,” she began instead, “we're not really talking here, are we.” She said it as a statement, not a question. Alythia stared blankly at the base of a wall, somewhere to Sasha's side. Tashyna settled into her lap-the front half that could fit, at least-rested a wolfish muzzle on Alythia's knee, her eyes warily on Sasha. “We're just talking at each other, not to each other. We have too much history. But all that history belongs in another place, in another time. It doesn't do anyone any good here, certainly not either of us, not Tashyna, and sure as shit not all the poor folk here who'll have to put up with our bickering.
“We're both very stubborn people, and we can both be very difficult. I think I've grown up a little, I'll be the first to admit I can be a pain in the neck sometimes. But…I don't know, can't we just draw a line under everything that's been written in our history to this point, and start something new? That old history is getting pretty stale.”
“I tried to help Gregan,” Alythia said faintly. Her eyes remained fixed on the wall, but she was seeing only her memories. “I had a sword, but I hadn't any clue how to use it. There were so many soldiers. They had a…a big ram of some kind. They knocked the main gate down. There were hundreds of them. Gregan organised a defence of the main floor, and then the upper storeys when they fell, but…but they climbed through the windows when the stairs were blocked. They were prepared, I think. Some had ropes.
“A lot of Halmady men were killed. I saw them falling. The lead Steiner men had shields, they'd…they'd attack the Halmady soldiers, and press them, and…and I don't think they could handle the shields. Gregan grabbed my arm at the end, tried to run me to the main hall stairs, and fight through with a small guard. But the stairs were blocked. They stabbed Gregan eight or nine times before he died. He was brave. He screamed, but he fought too. He took two Steiners down. I screamed at them for mercy, that he was valuable, that there could be ransom. They didn't listen. They just kept…stabbing. He bled so much.”
There was a chill on Sasha's skin, at odds with the warmth of the morning sun through the shutters. Alythia's stare was vacant, her voice thin, trembling. Remembering all. Sasha had seen horrors, death and bloodshed…but she had not watched someone she loved butchered before her eyes. For all her youthful ignorance, Sasha had always been certain that she was far wiser in the ways of the world than Alythia. Now, for the first time, she was not so sure.
“The guards were all killed,” Alythia continued, softly. “They just…murdered them, even once they'd stopped fighting. I…I tried to fight them, but one just knocked the sword from my hand. They dragged me downstairs. I saw maids being raped. I thought they would rape me too, but a senior man claimed me for a prize. On the patio, I saw little Tristi. They'd killed him.” Alythia's voice finally broke, a strangled sob. “He was just a little boy, but they killed him. I couldn't see Elra. I thought they'd killed her too.”
Heirs, Sasha thought, past the lump in her throat. Girls could not inherit. Boys could. Patachi Steiner had wanted the Halmady name erased. It seemed he'd succeeded.
“I don't know where Tashyna was. She must have hidden and followed me later.” Her eyes met Sasha's, struggling for composure. “Gregan wasn't a wonderful husband for most of our marriage. But he died like one. All my life, I wished for the day I was wed to a dashing, handsome man like him. Two months I was married, and in much of that time he ignored me. Only at the end, when I finally won him back, he was killed. Some fairytale.”
“I'm so sorry, Lyth,” Sasha said quietly. “I don't know what to say.”
Alythia sniffed and wiped at her eyes. She stroked Tashyna's head. “Well, I still have Tashyna,” she said, attempting lightness.
“Elra will need you, once she's woken,” Sasha added. “Errollyn's made her sleep for now, he says she'll heal faster that way. But she'll need a familiar face when she wakes.”
Alythia nodded. “I'll be there. Can you help look after Tashyna? She's not good with most company, and Elra's scared of her. I thought…I thought if anyone could help me look after a wolf, it'd be you.”
Sasha blinked in astonishment. A compliment. Of sorts. It was the first she could remember in…well, ever. “Of course,” she said. “Of course I will.”
“There were rumours that you'd met with Marya,” said Alythia with a dark, level gaze. “Did you?”
Sasha nodded. “She stuck me in the back of the neck with a needle. I should have seen it. We're now her second family, Lyth. Steiner are her first. The ones that matter.”
“I'm going to kill her,” Alythia said in a low voice. “If I ever get close enough again, I'm going to slit her throat.” Sasha had heard Alythia offer threats before, usually in high temper at the top of her lungs. This was the first time she believed Alythia really meant it.
Sasha didn't reply. She didn't hate Marya like that, despite what had happened. Marya was who she was-a good mother, a devoted wife, the perfect woman of the household in Lenayin or Petrodor. Alythia might have seen death, but she'd never killed. Killing enemies was hard enough. Killing sisters…dear spirits. She didn't want to think it. Marya had been the other great friend of her childhood, besides Krystoff. One did not banish such memories easily. And Krystoff's spirit would never forgive her. Nor her mother's. Nor all her other, still living siblings. Everyone loved Marya. Or had done, before the sides were chosen.
Tashyna squirmed in discomfort and tried to lick Alythia's face Sasha noticed that the water bowl by the bed was empty. “Here,” she volunteered, “I'll get her some more water.”
When she returned to Alythia's room, she placed the bowl on the floor. Tashyna waited until Sasha was sitting once more, then jumped from the bed and drank thirstily.
“Look,” said Sasha, as the idea formed, “she'll need some exercise, I don't imagine she got much in Halmady.”