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The Gramiren troops might be locked in a tower at the Bocburg, but there were still plenty of sympathizers around town. And more than that, there was the great mass of people—nobles and commoners both—who remembered the dark days of the siege and had no desire to make the same mistake twice. As the weeks went by, and winter gave way to spring, it became clearer and clearer to Elwyn that the duke was one of the few people in Leornian who had any desire to help her brother.
She spent much of her time running from parties to salons, and from suppers to formal teas, trying to convince the local nobles to give their duke—and their king—their full support again. It was slow going, though, and sometimes she felt as if she was making no progress at all.
One rainy day, for example, she visited Baron Taggart, who had been a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to her father. She might have expected, therefore, that he would be eager to help. But he wasn’t.
Over a glass of wine amid the ferns in his conservatory, he told her, “I don’t want to be the first person to volunteer. Everyone knows Broderick and Muriel are getting more and more paranoid with every passing year. They’d love an excuse to lop off a few heads.”
“But the duke is going to provide troops,” she pointed out.
“True, but he’s the duke, isn’t he? Getting rid of a duke is a lot different from,” he shrugged, “getting rid of a mere baron.”
But she kept up a steady schedule of these visits, because the alternative was sitting idle in the Bocburg and thinking about how she was letting her brother down.
When she was very lucky, she had a few hours to sneak off with Hildred and forget everything. And sometimes, she even had the opportunity to meet up with old friends simply for the joy of conversation, with no ulterior motive of winning their sympathy, because they already sympathized and were doing everything they could.
Two days before the Equinox, for example, she met up with Lady Gwenevir Ahearn and Lady Bianca Henderson for lunch at a little tavern near the southern gate. Lady Gwenevir was one of the duke’s daughters. She had been one of Queen Rohesia’s last ladies-in-waiting before the usurper had taken over. She had also been a bit silly and prone to drinking more than was good for her. But she was married now and seemed a much more sensible sort of girl than she had been at court.
As for Lady Bianca, she was Elwyn’s old governess. They had been at Atherton for years together and then had taken a Grand Tour of the Empire. There had been a nasty break in their relationship, though, after Elwyn’s father had died. Bianca had warned Elwyn that she was in danger, and had tried to encourage her to escape while she still could. Then Bianca had left without her, and Elwyn had been furious at what she saw as a betrayal. Later, during the siege, they had started speaking again. But they would probably never be quite as close as they once had been.
They all talked about clothes and the theater and books for an hour over tea and chicken potpies, and not once did anyone say the name “Broderick Gramiren” or talk about levies of troops or supply routes. It was glorious fun, but at the end of it, Elwyn had to leave and head back to the Bocburg alone.
She took a shortcut through the university, pausing now and again to admire the old, ivy-covered lecture halls and the statues of great scholars of the past. The school gardeners were planting bulbs outside the chapel, and students lounged about the courtyards, arguing and laughing about books.
Elwyn thought of her brother, who had always wanted to go to Atherton, but had been denied that opportunity by a cruel trick of fate. “I hope he’s managed to see the school, at least,” she thought. “He would like it.”
Past the Rhetoric lecture hall, she turned and looked back up the street, and happened to notice a figure in a blue tartan cloak loitering outside one of the dormitories. “Waiting for her lover?” she wondered, grinning. Or was she a laundry girl delivering clean shirts? Elwyn decided she preferred the former explanation.
Two blocks later, though, when she passed the examination hall, she looked up the street toward the Cathedral Square, and she spotted someone in that exact same tartan cloak. “Odd,” she thought. “Is that a popular pattern this year?”
Another block, and there was that same cloak a third time, in the shadow under the arched passage between two lecture halls. “That’s not a coincidence,” said Elwyn, and she quickened her steps. She turned up a small alley, opened a door at random, and found herself in the dormitory of the seminary.
“Pardon me, young lady!” said a man in a black clerical habit. “You seem to have taken a wrong turn.”
He tried to block her way, but she lowered her shoulder, pushed past him, and broke into a run. She raced through the halls, up stairs and down, passing open doors where men were standing around in their dressing gowns or shirtless. Cries of, “Was that a girl?” and “Who let her in here?” followed her.
At last, she found another door, and she burst through it and into a busy thoroughfare, filled with carts and carriages. This was Martin Street, she realized quickly. She was at the edge of the campus now. She turned right, fading into the crowds in the great Cathedral Square. Every hundred feet or so, she turned and looked over her shoulder, but she didn’t see the blue cloak again, and she wondered if she had imagined it.
She didn’t mention it to Rada or Sir Walter or Hildred, either. They would have worried that she was being followed. Or possibly that she was going mad. “I will just have to be more careful,” she thought.
She stopped going on social calls alone. If Rada was busy (she was constantly practicing her archery and swordsmanship with her husband), then Elwyn took Hildred. And if Hildred was busy (she had her own set of school friends she wanted to visit), then Elwyn got either Aldwin Dryhten or her cousin, Baron Edgar Colwinn, to go with her.
On the Equinox, there was a great festival in the Cathedral Square. First there was a parade of soldiers, which received a notably lackluster response from the crowd. After that, however, there were players and jugglers and dance contests and hundreds of booths selling everything from mulled wine to grilled eel on a stick. Elwyn, Rada, Walter, and Hildred went out in a group with both Aldwin and Edgar. But of course, Rada and Walter eventually went off together, and then Hildred wanted to go watch a jester tell jokes, which Elwyn had no interest in seeing, so Aldwin took her to the show. And that left Elwyn with her cousin Edgar.
They got cider at one booth and sat in a little beer garden under strings of tiny glass lamps. “You and Hildred seem awfully close,” Edgar said.
Elwyn felt the blush flood her cheeks, and she cursed herself for it. “I...um, well, she’s a very nice girl.”
“Yes. Do you know if her parents have any firm ideas about her marriage prospects?”
That was a bit startling. Edgar was a widower, and Elwyn hadn’t known he was thinking of marrying again. “I’m not sure what her parents have planned. You’d have to speak to them.”
Edgar smiled. “You know what’s funny? I’ve visited people all over this city with you, and except when you’re trying to sell someone on the alliance, you never once mention Andras Byrne.”
She thought about it and was embarrassed to realize he was right. If she really was in love with Andras, she would be talking about him constantly. But sometimes she went a whole day at a time without even thinking of him. “I’m a very private person,” she said. “I don’t talk about my love life.”
“No, you don’t,” chuckled Edgar. “It’s just that, well...I suppose I’d better say this, or I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I’d had the balls to do it. If you didn’t want to marry Andras, you could always marry me.”
She turned and gaped at him. “No, Edgar, I couldn’t.” His face flushed, and she tried to soften the blow retroactively. “It’s not that I don’t like you, obviously. But it’s more complicated than what I want.”
There was also the fact that she wasn’t attracted to him at all, but there was no point in mentioning that.
“Of course,” he said sadly. “Forget I said anything, then.”
She hoped everything would be alright between them, but the next day, when she sent him a message asking if he wanted to go visiting around town with her, he wrote back to say he was busy. And he was busy the day after that, too. She worried she had hurt his feelings. Worse, she realized that he had been helping her because he was attracted to her, not because he had any desire to go to war for the Sigor cause.
That evening, she told Rada about Edgar’s abrupt proposal. Rada didn’t seem surprised at all. “I would guess that half the men who have shown any interest in Edwin’s cause are doing it to win favor with you,” she said.
“That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows I’m betrothed to Andras.”
Rada’s eyebrow went up. “I don’t think most of them have any interest in marriage. Maybe we should go back to Keneburg, Elwyn.”
Sir Walter echoed her suggestion when they asked him for his opinion. “The duke wants to help, and for now, that might be all we can ask for. Later on, once Duchess Flora’s army has won a few victories, then people will feel a little more bold about joining the cause.”
Hildred refused to give up, though. “We’ve got to stay here until the duke has an army ready to march,” she said.
“What if that takes a year?” asked Rada. “What if it never happens?”
“Then we’ll wait,” said Hildred. She glanced at Elwyn and winked. “It’s not like we don’t have things to do in the meantime.”