Soul of the Fire (Sword of Truth 5)

He’d made it clear it wasn’t really a question. “Yes, sir.”

“If you ever again think of telling anyone the Minister raped you, you’ll be sorry. Saying such a lie is treason. Got that? Treason. The penalty for treason is death. When they find your body, no one will even be able to recognize you. Do you understand, bitch? They’ll find your tongue nailed to a tree.

“It’s a lie that the Minister raped you. A filthy treasonous lie. You ever say such a thing again, and you’ll be made to suffer before you die.”

“Yes sir,” she sobbed. “I’ll never lie again. I’m sorry. Please, forgive me? I’ll never lie again, I swear.”

“You were putting it out there for the Minister, offering yourself. But the Minister is a better man than to have an affair with you—or anyone. He turned you down. He refused you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nothing improper happened. Got that? The Minister never did nothing improper with you, or anyone.”

“Yes, sir.” She whined in a long sob, her head hanging.

Fitch pulled her handkerchief from her sleeve. He dabbed it at her eyes. He could tell in the dim light that her face paint, what with the throwing up and crying, was a shambles.

“Stop crying, now. You’re making a mess of your face. You better go back to your room and fix yourself up before you go back to the feast.”

She sniffled, trying to stop the tears. “I can’t go back to the feast, now. My dress is spoiled. I can’t go back.”

“You can, and you will. Fix your face and put on another dress. You’re going to go back. There will be someone watching, to see if you go back, to see if you got the message. If you ever slip again, you’ll be swallowing the steel of his sword.”

Her eyes widened with fright. “Who—”

“That’s not important. It don’t matter none to you. The only thing that matters is that you got the message and understand what will happen if you ever again tell your filthy lies.”

She nodded. “I understand.”

“Sir,” Fitch said. Her brow twitched. “I understand, sir!”

She pressed back against Morley. “I understand, sir. Yes, sir, I truly understand.”

“Good,” Fitch said.

She glanced down at herself. Her lower lip trembled. Tears ran down her cheeks.

“Please, sir, may I fix my dress?”

“When I’m done talking.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve been out for a walk. You didn’t talk to no one. Do you understand? No one. From now on, you just keep your mouth shut about the Minister, or when you open it the next time, you’ll find a sword going down your throat. Got all that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, then.” Fitch gestured. “Go ahead and pull up your dress.”

Morley leered over her shoulder as she stuffed herself back in the dress. Fitch didn’t think covering herself with the dress, as low as it was, showed much less, but he surely enjoyed standing there watching her do it. He never thought he’d see such a thing. Especially an Ander woman doing such a thing.

The way she straightened with a gasp, Morley must have done something behind her, up under her dress. Fitch surely wanted to do something, too, but remembered Dalton Campbell.

Fitch grabbed Claudine Winthrop’s arm and pulled her ahead a couple of steps. “You be on your way, now.”

She snatched a quick glance at Morley, then looked back at Fitch. “Yes, sir. Thank you.” She dipped a hasty curtsy. “Thank you, sir.”

Without further word, she clutched her skirts in her fists, rushed down the steps, and ran off across the lawn into the night.

“Why’d you send her off?” Morley asked. He put a hand on his hip. “We could have had a time with her. She’d of had to do anything we wanted. And after a look at what she had, I wanted.”

Fitch leaned toward his disgruntled friend. “Because Master Campbell never told us we could do anything like that, that’s why. We was helping Master Campbell, that’s all. No more.”

Morley made a sour face. “I guess.” He looked off toward the woodpile. “We still got a lot of drinking to do.”

Fitch thought about the look of fear on Claudine Winthrop’s face. He thought about her crying and sobbing. He knew Haken women cried, of course, but Fitch had never before even imagined an Ander woman crying. He didn’t know why not, but he never had.

The Minister was Ander, so Fitch guessed he couldn’t really do wrong. She must have asked for it with her low-cut dress and the way she acted toward him. Fitch had seen the way a lot of women acted toward him. Like they would rejoice if he had them.

He remembered Beata sitting on the floor crying. He thought about the look of misery on Beata’s face, up there, when the Minister threw her out after he’d finished with her.

Fitch thought about the way she’d clouted him.

It was all too much for him to figure out. Fitch wanted nothing more right then than to drink himself into a stupor.

“You’re right. Let’s go have ourselves a drink. We’ve a lot to celebrate. Tonight, we became important men.”

With an arm over each other’s shoulders, they headed for their bottle.

20

“Well, isn’t that something,” Teresa whispered.

Dalton followed her gaze to see Claudine Winthrop haltingly work her way among the roomful of milling people. She was wearing a dress he had seen before when he worked in the city, an older dress of modest design. It was not the dress she had worn earlier in the evening. He suspected that beneath the mask of rosy powder, her face was ashen. Mistrust would now color her vision.

People from the city of Fairfield, their eyes filled with wonder, gazed at their surroundings, trying to drink it all in so they might tell their friends every detail of their grand evening at the Minister of Culture’s estate. It was a high honor to be invited to the estate, and they wished to overlook no detail. Details were important when vaunting one’s self.

Patches of intricate marquetry flooring showed between each of the richly colored rare carpets placed at even intervals the length of the room. There was no missing the luxuriously thick feel underfoot. Dalton guessed that thousands of yards of the finest material had to have gone into the draperies swagged before the file of tall windows on each side of the room, all constructed with complex ornamental tracery to hold colored glass. Here and there a woman would, between thumb and finger, test the cloth’s high-count weave. The edges of the azure and golden-wheat-colored fabric were embellished with multicolored tassels as big as his fist. Men marveled at the fluted stone columns rising to hold the massive, cut-stone corbel along the length of the side walls at the base of the gathering hall’s barrel ceiling. A panoply of curved mahogany frames and panels, looking like the ends of elaborately cut voussoirs, overspread the arched barrel ceiling.