The Grass King’s Concubine by Kari Sperring Read Free Book Online

obey and to uphold the way things were. It was not his place to question. But late at night he sometimes wondered where the honor was in what he did.
    The City Guard was not supposed to think about honor. That was for the elite units who served in the Silver City. On the whole, the City Guard dealt only with the poor, the powerless, the unimportant. Escort duties were the exception. Though most of the important civic officers and merchants had their own armed and trained bodyguards and visiting nobles were usually attended by a unit of the elite Silver City Regiment, the Guard occasionally found themselves called upon to shepherd visiting country gentry or merchants from other cities. From the moment he received the orders to escort a Silver City lord and his niece to the oldest temples and a business, Jehan suspected a problem. Either this lord had offended someone better born or more influential than he, or he had something to hide. Presenting himself at the Silver Road Gate on a bright autumn morning, Jehan was alert for trouble.
    The lord hid himself away in an old-fashioned dark carriage, conveying his directions via the coachman on the box. The crest painted on the carriage doors was small, marked with a single bar. His name, according to Jehan’s orders, was Monsieur Pèlerin des Puiz, which rang faintbells in Jehan’s memory, though he could not recall anything specific. A recent elevation to the nobility, most probably, and lifted thence by money, not blood. Jehan’s small troop cleared the way through the crowded streets, ignoring the hoots and insults of hawkers and apprentices. The lord kept his window shutters down as the small cavalcade rattled and pushed its way toward the Temple of the Flame, on the edge of the jewelers’ district.
    That was one of the quieter parts of the city. Its artisans, by and large, made enough to get by and guarded places in their workshops jealously. As the press and mill that surrounded the gate subsided, a hand tugged up one of the shutters on the carriage, and a face looked out. Sandy skin and dark eyes: steppe blood there, more evidence of the mercantile origins of the family. Jehan’s own hands, resting on the neck of his mare, were two shades darker. The face—it was a young woman, presumably the niece—looked about eagerly, drinking in shop fronts and vendors, workers under their awnings and apprentices hurrying on errands. Someone spoke to her from within; she pulled her head back in, then reemerged with a veil drawn over her face. Country gentry, then, little different from his own family.
    Except, of course, for degrees of wealth and depth of blood. Jehan’s elder brother would have insisted on both of those. Four years in the Brass City had convinced Jehan that wealth was the only difference that really counted. That was the opinion of the Flame priests, too, judging by the way they hastened out of their precincts to greet the visitors. The lord and his niece, trailed by a disapproving maid, were whisked inside by the head priest. Handing the reins of his horse to the senior of his men, Jehan followed them as they made their tour of court and hearth, shrine and hall and visitors’ rooms. The head priest talked; the lord listened and made measured, conventional responses. Several times the niece looked as though she had something to add; each time, her uncle looked at her, and she subsided. As they left—having made a significant donation—she looked back over hershoulder at the hearth, and something in her expression spoke of disappointment or regret. It was much the same at the next temple and the next. She was searching for something, this girl, searching and not finding it. Well, if she was religious, she would learn soon enough that in the two cities the gods neither listened nor cared.
    Their last stop was at a mill on the left bank of the river. Jehan expected the women to remain in the carriage after it parked in the forecourt: Such places were men’s