"Lady Thessa. Legitimately one of the most boring human beings alive. Her husband has a mistress in the lower ward. Good morning, Thessa!" Blair's voice pitched into something bright and sugary.
Thessa nodded stiffly and kept walking.
Guinevere glanced sideways at her. "You're terrible."
"I'm an accurate bitch. There's a difference."
Two noblewomen passed them in the opposite direction, arms linked, wearing gowns the color of deep wine. Both of them shot a dirty look and gave Guinevere a once over.
"Lady Veyra attempted to mount Maddox at the Spring Tithe two years ago. He shut her down so fast her dignity is still on the floor of that ballroom. Three of her friends watched and all told her it was foreplay."
"And the sister?"
"Couldn't tell you. Has the personality of a wet napkin and backbone of a whiskey-dick. Her opinions match whomever she's speaking to. Next."
Guinevere blinked.
Blair shrugged. "Sue me. These women have spent the last decade making sure I knew I was too loud and too unmarried. All of them constantly throw themselves at my brother."
Something warm and entirely unwelcome loosened in Guinevere's chest. Not at the last part, but she wasn't ready to examine that yet.
"For what it's worth," Guinevere said quietly, "I know exactly what that's like."
Blair glanced at her. The grin softened into something more real. "Obviously." She paused, then sighed. "I wasn't going to like you, by the way. I planned on being distant and mildly hostile for at least a week, on principle. My brother asked me to sit with a strange woman in his bed this morning, which is a sentence I have waited my entire adult life to hear, and I was fully prepared to resent you for it."
"And?"
"And it's too late. I already like you, which is deeply inconvenient for my whole hostile routine. Congratulations, we're friends now. It's binding. There's no exit clause."
Guinevere felt her mouth actually curve. A small one. Real.
They moved down the gallery together, past more stares. It was nothing she wasn't used to. If anything, the Drakencrest stares felt less sharp than the Lunaris ones. Curiosity instead of contempt.
Blair steered her toward a side corridor that bypassed the main courtyard. "Come on. We're taking the forest path. The main road down the mountain takes an hour on foot and I am not spending an hour watching you trudge."
"Is it safe?"
"Drakencrest forest?" Blair snorted. "It's the most heavily warded stretch of old growth on the continent. Yes, it's safe."
✦✦✦
The forest path started at a discreet gate on the western side of the Keep. The ground was carpeted in needles and the kind of deep silence that only existed in very old woods.
"So the dressmaker I'm taking you to is named Ysolt and she is a tyrant, but she's my tyrant, and she will take one look at you and lose her mind. She'll cry actually."
"Please don't let a stranger cry on me today."
"No promises. Also, we are getting you boots. Proper ones. That pair you're wearing is fine for walking but they'll fall apart in a hard rain."
"Noted."
"And I'm buying you a cloak. My brother is going to want to wrap you in his colors the moment he gets back from the raid and I would like you to have at least one garment he didn't pick out first."
"You're very thorough."
"I have been waiting my entire life to have a sister to dress up." Blair paused, then grinned. "My brother is not cooperative with that. You are a gift and I intend to enjoy you."
Guinevere huffed a laugh for the first time in over a week.
Then she stopped walking.
Guinevere's head tilted slightly and her hand came up in front of Blair's chest, stopping her midstep.
"What?" Blair whispered.
"Something's wrong."
The smell hit her a second later. Copper. Ash. Underneath both, a rotten scent she had no name for that made her wolf growl in her mind.
A man's voice echoed through the trees, barking orders.
"Search and secure! Move!"
Guinevere grabbed Blair's wrist, pulling her in between two large pines. Then crouching down in the ferns.
A figure stepped onto the path, fifty feet from where they just were. He was robed in black, and his face was hidden under a cowl. The air around him moved wrong, bending the light in thin threads that made Guinevere's eyes water to look at directly.
Magic like this was rumored to be on this side of the world, but most wolves considered it a myth. She stood corrected.
The mage lifted a hand, and said something in a language Guinevere did not recognize. The air grew colder around them in a way that had nothing to do with the morning.
He turned his head. For a second, his eyes swept across the trees Guinevere and Blair were hiding behind, but he turned away, vanishing into the treeline in the opposite direction.
More soldiers appeared. They fanned out along the path, cutting into the treeline to sweep the forest in a tight grid.
One of their eyes locked on the pines Guinevere and Blair were hiding between.
"Two down in the ferns." His voice carried across the slope. "Come out. Slow. Hands where I can see them."
Guinevere's wolf snarled low in her chest. She did not let it reach her face.
She stepped out from behind the fallen tree first, hands raised, putting her body between Blair and the soldier. Blair followed a half-step behind, and Guinevere caught her arm before she could move past her.
"Please, sir. We're just servants," Guinevere said, voice calm. "We were running an errand for Lady Thessa when we heard the screams. We don't know anything."
The soldier squinted at them. His gaze moved over Guinevere's suit, over Blair's, over the quality of the fabric and the obvious gold in Blair's eyes.
"Servants," he repeated flatly.
"Yes, my lord."
He laughed once. It was not a nice sound.
"Dragon-blooded servants with eyes like hers and skin like yours. Try again."
"She's telling the truth. We're nobodies," Blair said quickly. Her voice had dropped an octave into something smaller and more frightened than Guinevere would have guessed the real Blair was capable of. "Please. Lady Thessa is expecting us in twenty minutes and we're already running late."
The soldier's mouth curved. He turned to the man beside him and jerked his chin.
"Rough them up. The mage said if we find high-blood women we bring them back. If they're nobodies, they can handle a little convincing."
Guinevere's wolf lunged up inside her.
A second soldier stepped forward fast, boot already rising, and Guinevere saw exactly where his knee was aiming. She twisted her body at the last possible second to take it at an angle that would save her spleen. It was the best she could do on legs that were still shaking from the fever.
The knee slammed into her ribs. Hard.
Air was knocked from her lungs and her vision went white at the edges. She heard Blair shout her name from what sounded like a very long distance away.
She hunched over, falling onto her side in the pine needles gasping for air.
One rib, minimum. Probably two.
When she looked up, she saw that soldier standing over her with a smile on his face.