Battle has its own rhythm, Vàclav used to say, though he never said whether that rhythm was raucous or silent, violent or stale as the scratching of rats gnawing on bones. Maybe each battle had its own rhythm, he had meant. Maybe the rhythm, whatever the battle, was simply patience.
She had been patient, hadn’t she? A year’s ago July she’d ridden through the marshes. Every night was a battle between suffering the nibbling of neekers or else sweat through the soiled warmer clothes that were her only armour against the beekers, skeeters, and gnats.
She’d gritted her teeth against the frivolous rocking of the carriage through hilly Bree-land, biding her time until she was past the Trestlespan and the gorge that protected the fragile farmland from the hard north winds. Since she’d crossed it, though, there’d been no wind at all.
The leaves had fallen, sprouted, and dried again in the time since she’d claimed her familial estate, but the moss was evergreen. She’d been warned that there was no money in the north, but she hadn’t listened then. She knew how to make money. She’d clawed it from the rocks of more barren provinces and near-abandoned trade posts, swindled from swashbucklers and sued worthy estates. She knew once she set foot in the North Downs, on territorial land, on her land, things would change. She would make the North a place of profit again.
Things hadn’t changed.
She sat with her back against the stone, colder than the air around her as if it braced itself for winter. She called the room the conservatory—half in jest, half scorn. The wing was one of the first she’d hired men to work on, and they’d gotten through tearing down the rotted roof and cleaning the slate before the money ran out. Now the stone hall was open-air, clear except for a stone floor—her own fruitless garden. Her only furniture was a log pile and a hoard of brush. Pride would carry her a day or two into the first frost before she froze or sought the indignity of an inn or worse—a neighbor’s hospitality.
Patience, Václav used to say. Every tide turns.
Patience, Sabela reminded herself, arching her back to relieve the pressure in her arm and the cracks in her ribs from the fall in the quarry. She heard a rustle and opened her eyes, glaring at her brush hoard for whatever thief had come to steal the only treasure she had left.
A cat glared back, and for a moment Sabela considered how much fire she could spare tonight to roast a fresh mammal for dinner. But the grey tabby stood poised strangely, its paw in the air, not poised but bent backward, staring back at her.
She stared at it, then settled back against the moss-tapestried wall. “Alright,” she permitted, and with that or the closing of her eyes, she heard the three-footed patter of the cat hurrying off to find its own secluded space to nurse itself or to die.
“Patience,” she said aloud, naming the invalid tabby. “Fuck, I hate that name.” She grumbled and glared at the pile of brushwood, but the intruder was gone.
“Be that way…” she murmured, but as she opened the tin of soup that had been warm three days’ ago, she was glad for the moment that she had some secluded, secret company. That someone, at least, was watching her back.
