Venture Unleashed (The Venture Books) (19 page)

Venture felt a surge of panic, but he kept his appearance calm. He looked her in the eyes—troubled eyes. “What are you saying?”

Mrs. Bright wrung her hands, then blurted, “She’s in love with you. I know it.”

Venture felt the color leave his face. “Not anymore,” he said quietly.

“It’s true, then? You’ve broken her heart?” Mrs. Bright let the dishtowel fall from her hand. She sank down onto the bench at the kitchen table.

“She’s broken mine.” He settled down across from her, relieving his injured foot.

She leaned forward and grasped his forearm. “It’s wrong of me to say it. I know it. What could ever come of the two of you? But isn’t there some way you can make it right?”

He blinked at her, not wanting to believe that Mrs. Bright had even given thought to such things. But of course, she knew and loved them both. Then Mrs. Bright’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes fixed on something—someone—in the doorway behind him.

“I heard the stories about all the fighters,” Jade said, “about the girls, about the way you fighters carry on with them, and for a long time I refused to believe it—that you were a part of it, anyway. How could the Venture I knew have anything to do with that? But a man is still a man, right? Especially when he’s far away from home and lonely and around other men who enjoy women as a pastime. I’m sure you just couldn’t help yourself.”

“Mrs. Bright, would you excuse us please?” Venture glared at Jade. How could she say such things in front of Mrs. Bright, who’d been like a mother to both of them?

Mrs. Bright nodded, rose, and hurried away, through the kitchen and out into the hall.

“Just like you couldn’t help yourself with Hunter?” Venture said after she was out of earshot.

“How can you speak to me like this?”

The time had come for him to make clear, both for Jade and for himself, that he was done trying to win her back. A courtship with Dell Rippley was one thing, but giving herself to a sleazy, stuck-up bastard like Hunter Longlake proved that her character either was no longer, or else never truly had been, the sort he could find acceptable.

“You’re not the girl I fell in love with. Whatever we had is over. You’re nothing to me now but my master’s daughter. And when I’m no longer a servant in this house, you’ll be nothing to me at all.”

Jade’s face, rather than lighting up with an angry fire, froze, horrorstricken at the finality of his words. Venture felt utterly sick. It was over—Jade and him—completely over.

PART THREE

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Spring’s First Month, 659 After the Founding

It was unusually warm for late in Spring’s First Month the evening they arrived at the place Dasher called—with a hint of longing—
Earthsong
. Dasher and Earnest, fearing for Venture’s safety, had insisted he make his excuses to Grant Fieldstone, and they’d packed him up and taken him to Mountain Center to spend the rest of the autumn and winter.

Now, it was a new year, and Venture had buried his fears under his desire to train for the Championship, coming up in just over three months. In an effort to protect him, they had cultivated the rumor that he’d been injured in practice and would have to wait another year to take his shot at the title, and Dasher had arranged for this stay at an estate in the country, where he assured Venture he could prepare uninterrupted.

The carriage wheels ground along the rough dirt road, further into the country. Venture had volunteered to drive this stretch. He’d never been here before, but he knew that this must be the place, for here was the answer to the question he’d been asking himself—
What sort of place is named Earthsong?
Here, even so early in the season, the land burst with promise.
 

Fields stretched for miles, row after row of berries. The farmland was bordered by grassy hills, and clusters of lush trees filled the spaces where one hill met another. Wild horses danced across those hilltops. Above all this Earthsong, the sunset was a banner of orange and red streaming across the lavender-blue, setting the clouds on fire.

In the distance was a stone mansion, and just ahead were stables and several barns, built of wood, not crooked and gray, but sure and straight and freshly painted.
 

“Dasher!” Venture pounded on the carriage wall with one fist, the reins tight in the other. “Dasher, I found it!”

The little window next to the driver’s seat bang-slid open and Dasher said, “Pull over! Let me have a look around.”

Dasher clambered out and Earnest stumbled after him, yawning and shaking his stiff limbs. Chance followed close behind.

“It’s been too long,” Dasher said.

“Whose land is this?” Earnest blinked at the setting sun. “It’s spectacular.”

“It belongs to Star of the Glen. One of his country estates. It’s promised to his son.”

“Of the Glen? The Crested family?” Earnest said.

“That’s them.”

“You know them?”
 

Cresteds. Blasted Cresteds. The sort of family who’d like to see me dead?
And all this richness, the sort of inheritance Jade might marry into. What a prospect that would be, compared to marrying him.

“They’re letting us stay with them?” Venture said. “Why would they do that?”

“The Glens aren’t here much. They prefer their newer estates. Their stewards are running the house and the farm. But I have permission to be here and to bring others to train if I like.”

“They’re patrons of yours, then?” Venture said.

Dasher nodded.

“What sort of Cresteds would let us train in their house, would support fighters like us at all?” Venture said.
 

“Most wouldn’t. Most see Uncrested fighters as a threat to them—a threat to their superiority, to the respect they get from everyone else for their skill as warriors. Whether they admit it to themselves or to anyone else, they’re afraid they’re actually not the best anymore.”

“Like the men who threatened me?”
 

“Probably.” Dasher gestured at the buildings ahead. “But not all Cresteds are the same.”

“It’s good of the Glens to let us train here,” Venture conceded. “Are you going to have me fighting the bulls and running after the wild horses, Dash?”

Anticipation glinted in Dasher’s eyes. “You’ll see.”

Venture climbed back up to the driver’s seat, determined to take them the rest the way. But Dasher took the reins and steered them directly to one of the barns. The nearer they got to it, the bigger he realized the barn was, but only once inside did he truly grasp its size—three times that of the Fieldstones’ biggest.

“I’ve never set foot in a barn so big,” Earnest said.

“This is where the berries are brought after they’re picked and packed into crates. They load them onto those wagons and take them to the surrounding towns to sell.”

“But how are we going to train in here?” Earnest asked, nudging the earthen floor with the toe of his boot.

Dasher grinned. “Upstairs.” He pointed to a set of bare wooden steps they’d failed to notice in the corner.

Once he reached the top of the wooden stairs Venture looked to his left and saw more heaps of berry crates and baskets piled on the second floor. To the right was a plain wooden wall, and in it, a simple door.

“Go ahead,” said Dasher, who had followed behind him.
 

At the threshold was a small space with a wooden rack for boots, and hooks above for clothes, and beyond that, mats. Sixty of them fitted perfectly against the walls. Venture smiled and reached for Chance. He pulled him into a sideways hug.

“It’s perfect, isn’t it?”

“Perfect, sir.”

Amid the barn smells of hay and manure, here was the smell of sweated-on canvas and old, woven straw. These mats were stained with the sweat of Crested men, men of a renowned warrior family. Boots off, Venture strode boldly across the mat and looked up at the elaborate, carefully painted emblem of the Glen family on the wall. A stallion, a sword, and a tree layered over other intertwined symbols, with such complexity that he could scarcely separate one from the other.

“I wonder what it would be like to fight one of them—one who’s not trying to kill me, I mean.”

“Not so different as you might think.”

Venture hadn’t expected an answer from Dasher. “Have you seen them fight?”

“I have. Right here.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“I’ve spent some time with them. It’s a long story.”

“Have you ever been on the mat with them?” Venture persisted.

“You know the Crested policy about fighting with or teaching others.”

“I know, but I wouldn’t have thought they’d let you watch, either.”

“No, I guess you wouldn’t,” Dasher said quietly, almost somberly. Then, brightening, he said, “Well, let’s get settled in the house and have something to eat. It’ll be pitch dark in here soon, and they’re expecting us. I sent a messenger ahead, and they’ve been watching our carriage come for miles, I’m sure.”

An ancient, low stone fence surrounded the yard in front of the house, which was much like the Fieldstones’ home, only larger. Two wings came off either end, so that it formed an incomplete square. Garden hedges formed the fourth wall of the square. Dasher promised them he would take them out to the back later to see the courtyard and gardens that filled its center.

The steward, Jasper, greeted them on the front walk. While he was friendly and gracious, his wife, Pearl, the overseer of the housekeepers and cooks, was a reserved woman with a pointed little face and a dismal gray dress too large and too generous in coverage for her small figure and the warm weather. But the house, in perfect order, was proof of the pride she took in her work. The stone walls were as white and free of fingerprints as though the plaster had been applied fresh that morning.

Thick arched frames, hewn of sparkling silvery stone with swirls and flecks of white and black, formed the window and doorways. A larger stone frame formed the opening through which wide, carpeted stone steps sloped gently upward, to the second floor. The top of the arch widened, like a sort of silver hill above the portal, and in its center, white stone was inlaid in a pattern Venture knew well. The leather cord rubbed soothingly at the back of his neck as he tilted his head back to look at this pattern—the leather cord that he’d used to replace the black ribbon his mother’s little wooden emblem had once hung on.

“Sir,” he asked Jasper, “The symbol of the Faith of Atran—is it common in Crested homes?” He traced its pattern in the air with his finger.

“This is a very old house, over three hundred years. It’s adorned with the ancient symbol, one you’ll find in most of the crests of the great warrior families. So much has been added over the generations that it’s hardly visible in most crests now, eliminated altogether in some. The Atranians who first settled in Richland were shocked by the murder, the feuds, the hunger and cruelty and injustice here,” said Jasper, with a sympathetic glance at Chance. “We’d be shocked, I’m sure, to see what’s happening in Atran today.”

“I saw the symbol at Champions Center, laid into the floor,” Venture said, in an effort to steer the conversation away from the stuff of Chance’s nightmares.

“The main building of Champions Center was once a temple,” Dasher said.

“I thought so.”

Chance nodded almost imperceptibly. He whispered something in Atranian.

“What?” Venture asked softly. He put his hand on the side of Chance’s face and turned it toward his.

“Like home.” The sounds of the words barely passed his lips.

Venture pressed Chance’s face against his side and guided him away from the archway and into a sitting room.

“The table will be laid for you right away, sir,” Jasper said to Dasher. “Any wine while you wait?”

They were cared for so well by the staff that evening that Venture wondered how the master of the house himself could be treated much better. After they had eaten their fill, each of them was shown to his own room.

In a house this size there was no need for them to double up. It was strange to unpack alone. He was so used to fighting over who got which spot, to tripping over Earnest’s things and getting Dasher’s shirts mixed up with his. He wandered over to Earnest’s room. The door was open, and his friend was sprawled across the bed.

“Hey,” Earnest mumbled up at him.
 

The wine had been good. Venture had gotten a little tipsy, but Earnest was drunk.

“You doing all right?”
 

“Yup. You?” Earnest lifted his head and made an effort to focus his eyes on Venture. Had he been sober, the look would have been piercing.

Venture shrugged. Earnest had been trying to get him to talk about Jade, but Venture hadn’t said a word about her since his revelation on the jogging trail. Earnest knew him well enough to know that, as fired up as he’d been about trying to win Jade back, he would have done something. He knew something had happened.

Earnest sighed, giving up and letting his head plop back down onto the pillows. “Never been so comfortable,” Earnest slurred, “except for with that girl called Rain—remember her, the one with the silky hands . . . aah. Let’s stay here forever.”

Venture was fairly certain Rain was the girl whose shoes Earnest had thrown up on after the Championship last year. He must have forgotten that part. Earnest was showing every sign that he was just about out for the night, so Venture left.

He’d barely shut the door to his own room when Chance came knocking at it.

“I stay with you?”

Venture didn’t miss the hauntedness that had returned to Chance’s eyes. The kid would probably be tossing all night with bad dreams.

“Of course. You stay with me.”

As he followed Dash out the barn door the next morning, Venture noticed a pair of bright little eyes peeping at them from outside. “Hey,” he greeted the eyes. He crouched down with one knee on the crushed hay and dirt of the barn floor.

“Summer, Drake, say hello to my friends, Mr. Delving, Mr. Goodview, and Chance.”
 

Two children crept forward. “Father says we’re to call you Mr. Starson,” the little girl, Summer, said timidly, almost questioningly.