Chapter 71: The Boy Mother Wants
The mud of Redhook Market did not care about the Imperial Court of Arathoria, but Cassia moved through it as though the sludge ought to apologize for touching her boots.
She navigated the slick, frozen ruts of the thoroughfare with immaculate, terrifying precision, her velvet-lined cloak snapping in the biting wind. Walking exactly half a pace behind her, balancing an absurd stack of brown-paper parcels awkwardly against his good arm, was Callis. His left shoulder, freshly freed from Elowen’s sling but still tight with stitches, ached under the uneven weight. He wore his old, finely tailored linen shirt and a high-collared coat that offered no real insulation against the Green March, deliberately leaving Yselle’s scarred cuirass with its hidden high-carbon plates locked in his trunk at the tavern. He lacked his heavy boar-sword.
He felt naked, freezing, and utterly humiliated.
"Your shoulders are too square, Callis," Cassia murmured, her voice carrying a brittle, commanding edge designed to slice through the ambient noise of the market. "And stop scanning the rooftops. You look like a paranoid militiaman. Drop your chin. You are a pampered disappointment who requires his older sister to navigate a fish market. Act like it."
Callis ground his teeth together, the muscles in his jaw feathering. He forced himself to exhale, consciously unlocking the rigid, defensive vanguard stance he had bled into the mud to learn. He let his shoulders slump forward. He softened his gaze, adopting the wide-eyed, slightly skittish expression of a boy who found the smell of rendered fat and raw iron offensive.
"Is he still there?" Callis whispered, his aristocratic vowels sounding thin and reedy as he deliberately stumbled over a frozen wagon rut.
"Mother sent one of Father’s old Hounds. He has been tracking us since we left the apothecary lane," Cassia replied, stopping before a stall displaying cheap bone needles. She picked one up with a disgusted sneer. "He is currently standing in the shadows between the tannery and the cooper’s shed. We must convince him you are exactly the boy Mother wants you to be: soft, reliant, and thoroughly managed."
She dropped the needle back onto the counter. "He does not need to believe you are harmless forever. Only long enough to seal the first dispatch."
Callis swallowed his pride. He knew the arithmetic of the performance. If the Hound reported back to the Capital that Callis Vale had morphed into a hardened, lethal mercenary capable of walking out of a Stalker kill-box through cold observation and nerve, Mother would send soldiers, healers, priests, and chains wrapped in velvet to retrieve him as a political threat. If the Hound reported that Callis was a broken, cowed runaway hiding behind his sister’s skirts, the Capital would write him off as a pathetic non-entity.
A heavy, mud-splattered drover hauling a crate of rock salt shoved blindly past them, his shoulder slamming hard into Callis’s chest.
Every instinct forged in the trenches screamed at Callis to plant his boots, drop his center of gravity, and check the man’s momentum with a brutal elbow. Instead, Callis forced his muscles to yield. He let the impact knock him backward, stumbling awkwardly into a wooden post and dropping one of the wrapped parcels into the slush.
"Watch where you're stepping, you clumsy ox!" Cassia snapped at the drover, her voice ringing with high-born entitlement. She turned her withering glare immediately onto her brother. "Honestly, Callis, you are utterly useless. Pick that up before the damp ruins the silk."
Callis knelt in the freezing mud, his bare hand shaking as he retrieved the soiled parcel. "I'm sorry, Cassia," he stammered, pitching his voice loud enough to echo toward the tannery. "It is just so incredibly cold out here, and the crowds are—"
"I do not wish to hear your whining," Cassia interrupted smoothly, snatching his coin purse from his belt with a sharp, demeaning yank. "You clearly cannot even be trusted to handle the silver without fumbling it into the gutter."
Thirty feet away, standing near a butcher’s rail loaded with fresh venison, Mara Vell went perfectly still.
The tavern owner held a heavy iron cleaver in one hand, negotiating her morning supply orders, but her dark eyes were locked entirely on the spectacle unfolding in the center of the lane. She watched Cassia berate her brother in front of the market hands. She watched Callis—the man who had held the line against the Elderforest, the man whose heavy, dominant weight grounded her entire household—kneel in the mud like a whipped dog.
A surge of hot, violent fury spiked in Mara’s chest. Her grip tightened around the handle of the cleaver until her knuckles turned white. She hated the Spymaster for the public degradation. She hated watching the fierce, territorial Vanguard swallow his hard-earned strength down to play the coward.
But Mara was a creature of the frontier, and she possessed a survivor’s terrifying intuition.
She caught the subtle, micro-flicker of Cassia’s eyes toward the shadows of the tannery roof. She saw the rigid, vibrating tension buried beneath Callis's slumped posture. Mara understood the tactic instantly. They were playing a role for a watcher.
Cassia turned gracefully, leading Callis directly toward the butcher's rail where Mara stood.
"This meat is appallingly substandard," Cassia announced to the air, eyeing the venison with aristocratic disgust. "Callis, tell this woman we require premium cuts, not road-salvage. Though I doubt you have the spine to negotiate a proper price."
Callis stood beside his sister, his shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed firmly on his ruined, muddy boots. He did not meet Mara’s gaze. He looked small. Defeated.
Mara’s heart ached at the sheer humiliation radiating from him, but she knew her part. If she showed him an ounce of the profound, domestic devotion she harbored for him, the watcher in the shadows would instantly realize the boy possessed local power. She had to help them hide him.
"Tell your boy to keep his soft hands off my rail, my lady," Mara sneered, adopting a flat, dismissive hostility that burned her tongue to speak. "He looks like he’d faint if the venison twitched."
Callis flinched, playing the wounded aristocrat perfectly. "I am fine," he muttered weakly, shrinking back behind Cassia’s velvet cloak.
"Clearly, he is not," Cassia sighed, dripping with theatrical disappointment as she handed Mara a silver coin. "He has been a burden since the day he arrived. Wrap the meat. I must get him indoors before he starts weeping from the frost."
Mara shoved the wrapped venison into Callis’s chest with deliberate, unnecessary force. Callis fumbled the heavy package, nearly dropping it again before clutching it awkwardly against his good arm.
Cassia turned on her heel, her skirts sweeping over the frozen ruts as she marched back toward the upper wards. Callis trudged miserably after her, burdened by the parcels, the picture of a thoroughly broken, subservient younger brother.
High on the slanted roof of the tannery, a cloaked figure shifted in the shadows. The Hound of Arathoria watched the boy retreat. The tracker jotted a single, dismissive line onto a piece of vellum, holstered his spyglass, and melted away into the grey mist, convinced the Capital had absolutely nothing to fear from the Vale heir.
Callis and Cassia rounded the corner near the Ash Forge, stepping into the temporary shelter of a narrow, soot-stained alleyway.
Callis’s jaw locked. He began to straighten his spine, adrenaline flooding his system as he moved to dump the packages onto a crate.
"Not yet," Cassia murmured, her voice barely a breath.
Callis froze instantly. He remained hunched, his shoulders bowed, his hands shaking around the paper parcels.
Above them, a crow shifted on the slate roofline. A faint, distant scrape of a boot sounded against tile.
Then, silence.
Cassia let out a long, elegant exhale. "Now."
The illusion shattered.
Callis’s spine snapped completely straight. The slumped, defeated posture vanished in a heartbeat, replaced by the towering, broad-shouldered menace of a seasoned Vanguard. His chest heaved as he dumped the ridiculous stack of silk parcels onto the nearby wooden crate, his hands curling into tight fists.
Cassia offered a deeply satisfied smirk, reaching out to affectionately pat his cheek. "A flawless performance, little brother. The Hound is gone. He will report to Mother that you are safely domesticated under my heel."
Callis ground his teeth together, the humiliation still burning hot in his blood. "If you ever make me drop a parcel in the mud again, Cassia, I will throw you into the settling pond."
Before Cassia could formulate a sharp retort, a slow, rhythmic crunch of heavy boots on frost echoed from the mouth of the alley.
Rhett Hollow leaned casually against the brickwork. The veteran tracker held a bruised green apple in one hand and his steel-tipped spear in the other. He took a loud, wet bite of the fruit, his pale eyes dancing with a profound, merciless amusement as he looked at Callis’s fine, mud-splattered linen shirt.
Rhett chewed slowly, swallowing the apple before pointing the core directly at his patrol partner.
"What in the frozen hell was that?"