Page 30 of A Trade of Blood

“How are you here, Fotia?” I asked. “How did you come to be in this place, out of all the Empire?”

She sighed deeply and drank. “Honestly, I…I don’t quite know. We were in Daretana, scraping by. Using most of the money you sent to pay down Father’s debts. The rest we used for food. Got very used to lentils. And Grandmother aged, and got sicker, and we needed help there.”

“It wasn’t enough, then?” I said. “All I sent you—that wasn’tenough?”

“Not with an aging woman, a dying man, and three growing girls. Especially Karatho and Ithipia, who were still quite young then.”

I looked away, dismayed. How wretched, how futile it all was: I’d sold away decades of my life, and had still come up short.

“So we needed money,” Fotia continued, “as we always did. But Daretana changed in the years you were away.The golden safety brought by the Legion,as the imperial declarations so love to say. A horse breeder bought up the farm down the road from us. Raised mounts for the Legion and the work at the sea walls. One day, for a lark, I joined the farmer in breaking his steeds.”

“Breaking…?”

“Taming them. Teaching them to forget their wildness, learning how to be ridden. It’s not a natural thing for them. The breeder needed the help and even taught me how to do the same for destriers. The breeder was a man of some renown. One day, a customer came to view his offerings, as she had heard his specimens were beyond compare.”

“Velona Armenta?”

“The very same. Head of the whole clan. She happened to see me riding. Said she liked the look of me. Said every mount looked better for having me on it. And then she asked if I would come with her if she bought the lot of them. That was two years ago. I didn’t know then that she was…she was suffering and might have wished for company.”

I did the math, and realized: two years ago would have been when Velona’s daughter, Sagma Armenta, had hanged herself. The second of the three deaths.

“So…she was buying…a replacem—”

“No,” said Fotia quickly. “I wasnotthat. Sagma was a very proper gentrygirl. I think Velona just…wanted a new face about. She liked to watch me ride. And I became one of her drovers.”

“You are…adroverfor theArmentas?”

“No.” She stuck her nose in the air. “I am atopdrover for the Armentas.”

“Wielding a lance in the field? Ushering urhosi cattle about?”

“And uglier things besides.” She grinned, and there was a touch of wildness to it. “It’s a mad life, being a drover. I sleep under roofs very rarely. Often I camp afield with the herds—and the midges and the beetles and the boars. But it’s a better life than the one I had. Than the onewehad, I suppose, in Daretana. All penned in together.”

There was a somber pause. We each sipped our sackwine, unable to think of anything to say after that.

“They’ve moved, you know,” she said lightly. “With my money and yours, we got them out of the Outer Rim and into the third ring here.”

“You did?” I said, startled. “We did?”

“Yes. Little town called Rimula, about a day’s ride from here. Grandmother has a servant to keep her well. Ithipia and Karatho can afford real dresses.” She paused. “Hardest bit was leaving Mother behind.”

I put my cup down. I had not thought of that in a very long time: the grave in the wood, and the little granite headstone, and the clutch of peya-lilies that somehow always bloomed in that place.

“Do you remember what Mother looked like, Din?” Fotia asked. “I don’t. All I had was that stone in the wood, and little more. Still, it was…very difficult to leave that place to the fates. But I suppose all is left to the fates, in the end.”

It took me a moment to recover from that particular blow. “How you’ve grown,” I said softly.

“Is dread the same as maturity?”

I filled my glass. “In the Empire, perhaps.”

—

We spoke ofmany things then: on how she’d met Ippeas (“I beat him in a riding competition. It wasn’t until well afterward that he admitted the reason he’d lost was because he’d kept staring at me…”), her relationship to the Armentas (“They treat me as if I’m somewhere between favored servant and—strangely—forgotten distant relation”), and our own grandmother (“She’s just become more of herself as she’s aged, and wishes to speak only of her own virtues, her own victories, and how no one else could ever compare”).

She then asked me of my life. My answers were grudging and monosyllabic. I told her my work was fine and tolerable, and did not mention severed heads, or gutted girls, or my service in Talagray, when the horror had emerged from the seas and all the sky was filled with bombard smoke.

“Your words are polite,” said Fotia, “but there’s more behind your eyes, brother.”