Page 8 of The Summer War
After the song-spinner left them, no better off for his information, and she was sitting silently, Roric said abruptly, “We need to take over the estates.” When she looked at him in surprise, he said, “Father’s not doing any work anymore.
I can see the accounts are getting into a mess.
For now everyone’s still doing their work and paying their taxes, because they’re used to him watching, but soon they’ll notice that he isn’t.
Then everything will start to fall apart, and the king will find out, and he won’t be afraid of Father anymore.
We need to keep his reputation strong, and make sure we still have men and money, if we need them.
That’s all we can do for now, so we should do it.
You can always kill them all with sorcery if you have to,” he added.
It was good advice. Celia nodded.
Celia told Unter to bring things to them if Father didn’t do anything about them for a week, and he started bringing them almost everything.
Anything that Father would have done in person before, Roric went out and did himself, taking Unter along, pretending that he was being trained to run the estates and Father was having him observed every step of the way.
“Give bad orders once in a while, too,” Celia told him, “and then go back the next day and change it, acting sullen, as if Father’s overridden you. ” Roric nodded.
Celia also wrote letters to every high-ranking noblewoman in the kingdom who didn’t have a daughter or niece of her own to resent Gorthan passing over, and humbly told them that her mother had spoken of them as wise and kind, and asked them for their advice to a motherless girl who was being advanced to a station beyond anything she’d expected.
She got many replies, full of reams of bad and often contradictory advice—sometimes within the same letter—and to each one sent back effusive thanks and promises to follow the advice to the letter, and the small gift of a fine silk lace triangle embroidered by her own hand, the sort to be kept tucked into the top of a corset and unseen by others.
The Dowager Marchioness of Travinia, who lived at court and according to the song-spinners had a reputation as a poisonous harpy, wrote, Oh, I think you’ll do well enough on your own, little vixen, even if you do marry at sixteen.
Save me a good seat at the coronation; I’m an old woman and my sight isn’t what it used to be.
Celia wrote back, My father would be honored to be your escort, to thank her for the warning, slipped subtly into the letter: so the king didn’t mean to wait past sixteen, and the marchioness didn’t approve.
Celia didn’t much want to be married at sixteen herself, especially when Gorthan was so much older than her, but all in all she felt comforted.
That did make some sense of the king asking for her at twelve, if he’d done it meaning to seem more reasonable when he demanded her at sixteen, so he could get her at least a year or two sooner than Father might have wanted to hand her over.
She also got a letter from Gorthan himself.
It was too formal to tell her much about him, except that he was cautious, but at least there wasn’t anything awful in it, and there wasn’t anything suspiciously wonderful in it, either.
He just wrote that he and his father rejoiced with all Prosper that the gift of sorcery had flowered once again, surely the reward of her father’s courage and service to the kingdom.
He thanked her for being willing to trust him with her hand, and hoped she continued in good health and humor until they met, which would be a day of great happiness for him and the whole kingdom.
She did use a little sorcery on the letter, enough to be sure that there wasn’t an outright lie in it.
Of course all sorts of awful possibilities could still be lurking beneath those polite and careful words, but at least Gorthan wasn’t more resentful than glad about sorcery appearing in her father’s line, which she’d worried he would be, and he wasn’t wishing for her untimely death.
It eased her mind. If nothing else, it really did make too much sense for the king and Gorthan to want her to bear him a child.
They almost couldn’t want anything else.
The months slipped by quickly with the work that was now theirs.
She turned thirteen in the spring, and a few weeks later, summer rolled back over Prosper like a golden wave.
The Green Bridge appeared out of the river mists and the summer games began, and almost at once, song-spinners began to arrive at Castle Todholme to collect purses of silver for one story after another about the Knight of the Woven Blade, questing through the Summer Lands, none of which made Celia feel any better.
They were all true, she could feel their truth even without using magic to check, and every single one was about nothing but elaborate heroics.
Sir Argent had defeated a giant, three ettins, a pack of trolls; he’d rescued three different summerling ladies from terrible menaces; he’d climbed the Golden Mountain and defeated the serpent guardian to bring a cupful of water from the spring back to save an ailing summer lord who’d been poisoned by a lady that he’d spurned.
“Did Argent stay there?” Celia asked, unhappily, already knowing the answer even before the song-spinner said that he’d stayed only one more night at the summer lord’s castle before traveling on.
Summer stories had a rhythm and a pattern to them, and she knew in her belly exactly how that one should have ended: with the summer lord rising healed and radiant from his bed to catch the hand of the heroic knight who had saved him, and asking him to stay forever as his honored guest. Her curse had broken the story: Argent’s story that should have been.
She tried again to send word to him, but no song-spinner managed to find him.
The summer ended and the mists closed around the Green Bridge once more.
A whole year gone, since Argent had left, and Celia wept the morning when she heard the autumn walls going up.
In the sitting room that day, Roric gave her a blank sheet out of his papers, and she marked out all the weeks until the next summer, and crossed them off one after another as the year rolled past. The accounts and estate business came endlessly, but Celia and Roric told their way through them with more stories, and sometimes now Roric played the lute along.
On her fourteenth birthday she received another letter from Prince Gorthan, almost exactly the same as the first, with wishes for her health.
The next summer brought even more of the dreadful, grand stories, so many of them that Roric had to lower the prize money, and soon they didn’t even have to pay any at all.
Songs about the legendary Knight of the Woven Blade were sweeping around the kingdom and coming to Castle Todholme without any encouragement at all.
Listening to them, full of the ever-greater and ever-wilder heroics Argent kept performing, Celia felt sick to her stomach with tears; she was back on the library balcony, listening to what Father had done to Argent, only she had done it.
She had told Argent what he couldn’t have, and left him with only the sword to love, chasing after a hollow glory he didn’t want.
The last of her own resentment was long gone; by now it was only a distant memory of something stupid and childish she’d felt, that had made her do something horrible to her brother, which she regretted desperately.
“I have to go,” she said, low, at the end of that summer, watching the autumn wind blowing the rain into streaks like tears across the window of their sitting room.
“It’s never going to work, sending a trader to find him.
I’ll have to go to the Summer Lands myself.
Next summer,” she added. “Before I’m married. ”
She expected Roric to tell her not to be stupid.
It was stupid for her to go to the Summer Lands.
She was the daughter of Veris the Fox—an honored enemy, but the summerlings’ worst enemy all the same.
And aside from that, they would be fools not to see that a sorceress made Prosper dangerously strong, maybe even strong enough to invade them, in turn.
The summerlings had magic of their own, but their magic was all in beauty and craft—fine delicate tools next to the sledgehammer of sorcery.
And even if the summerlings didn’t do a thing to her, she could easily get lost or hurt all on her own.
Traveling alone in the Summer Lands was dangerous even for trained knights and experienced song-spinners, who were welcome guests.
She’d never traveled more than a month away from Castle Todholme, and then it had been with Father and a large escort of servants and guards.
She didn’t even like hunting or riding or long walks.
Chances were that she’d fall into a corpse-flower maw or stumble over an archodile or just start walking around in circles without realizing and die long before she ever found Argent.
But instead Roric was silent, and then he said, “I’ll go with you.
” She looked at him surprised. Argent hadn’t earned that from him.
Argent really hadn’t cared about Roric at all, even to play with him like a doll, or give him the least bit of attention.
And she knew that Roric was still resentful; he’d been running the estates for two years by then, with only her to help him, and Father still hadn’t formally named him the heir, or done anything to acknowledge his work at all.
But Roric said, “You can’t do it alone. I’ll go with you, and we’ll try. ”