“He is not my friend, and next to nothing.”
“Do you have any guesses as to who he might be?”
“No. You’re obsessing about him.”
“I know him from somewhere,” Reynald said. “I can’t place it, but my memory tells me to be wary. Why was he at the market, where the body was displayed, with his face covered?”
“You also had your face covered.”
“I was escorting you, and I didn’t want to attract attention. Your clothes and hair don’t communicate the right level of wealth. You can’t afford me, Maggie, and that discrepancy would draw the eye. People would come to the wrong conclusions.”
By Rellas’s standards, my usual dress put me somewhere in the lower nobility. Reynald didn’t read as a lower-nobility bodyguard. Gort fit the bill—an aging mercenary who had decided to take a cushier job. Will and Lute would pass as well, skilled and dangerous, but too young to have developed a reputation.
But Reynald was well known. If people saw one of the top swordsmen in the kingdom guarding a woman who clearly couldn’t afford to hire him, they would conclude that I was paying him in other ways.
“Thank you for protecting my honor.” And I’d just said that with a straight face.
“Don’t mention it. The man from the Garden. Tell me about him.”
I recounted the meeting in the Garden.
“A lord,” Gort said when I finished.
Reynald nodded, his face grim. “What does he look like without the coif?”
“Very handsome,” I said.
Gort and Reynald shared a look.
“What kind of handsome?” Gort asked.
“Beautiful. Like the kind of face that makes you stop and stare. He has these captivating eyes, light hazel, like golden amber. They almost glow. Long eyelashes, too.”
Reynald rubbed his face.
“I’m not helping, am I?”
“No.”
“Sorry.”
“No matter,” he said. “He will appear again and when he does, he will tell me everything I want to know.”
“He didn’t seem scared of you,” I reminded him.
The demon from the basement gave me a narrow smile. There was no humor in it. “And that will be his undoing.”
CHAPTER20
PLANTER18
The morning sun spilled into the courtyard, warming up the laundry benches. I squinted at the sunshine.
Gort sat on the other side of the bench, twisting a thick wire into some sort of object. Occasionally he squished it with a pair of tongs, then twisted again. Across from us, Kaiden sat cross-legged on the wall around the wine tree, messing with another lock.
In the center of the courtyard, Reynald and the Magnar brothers clashed. All three wore padded gambesons, formfitting quilted jackets shielding their torsos and arms. Will’s gambeson was blue, Lute’s pale green, and Reynald was in dark, charcoal gray.
Both Will and Lute towered over the blademaster by about four inches and the quilted gambesons made them seem even larger. Both were remarkably strong and fast. Both were younger and had the training and experience of professional mercenaries. At twenty-one and nineteen, they were seasoned veterans, who identified weaknesses and zeroed in on them like hungry wolves.
