Page 49

One spring night in Aldeburke, a shepherd dog named Callie whelped a dozen puppies.

It was a surprise litter from an unknown sire, and Lord Hurrell had not been pleased, for it meant a year at least before he could get a proper litter from her, and he had ordered the pups drowned. But Julot hadn’t been so bad back then, and he and Ophele had conspired to hide them in the barn until they were old enough to be given away. They had actually turned out to be very good herders.

Watching the pageboys burst through the doors of the cookhouse, Ophele couldn’t help remembering the puppies, tumbling into the stableyard.

They drew up sharply as they approached, five boys of varying ages and levels of nobility. The older pages were too busy for lessons, but the four little ones came at the noon meal every day. Legeriot, who tended to lead the others, surprised her with a bow.

“Good afternoon, my lady,”

he said politely. He was an eleven year-old with some connections to Sir Huber’s family and had the cultured accent of the southern duchies. He promptly contradicted this refined heritage by smacking the closest boy on the back of the head and saying, “You’re s’posed to bow, remember?”

“Oh, right. My lady,”

said Gavrel, a big-headed blond boy of ten. It entertained Ophele no end to try to figure out what they had been learning recently, and who had been teaching it to them. Evidently, someone had been at them about their courtesies .

“Good afternoon, Your Grace.”

Eleven year-old Denin distinguished himself with a particularly elegant bow and extended a single perfect daisy to her.

“Oh, thank you very much,”

she said, surprised, and tucked it behind her ear. The boy swaggered over to his usual bench, eying the others with a superior expression.

“My lady.”

Valentin was the youngest, an adorable boy of eight that made Ophele want to pinch his cheeks and coo over him, behavior she was sure would have mortified him to his soul. He bobbed a bow, gave his fellows a glance that suggested he was being stuck all over by pins, and said loudly, “You look like a flower. Pretty. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,”

she said, biting her lip to control a fit of giggles. “Have you boys been talking to Sir Miche again?”

“Yes, my lady.”

Legeriot and Gavrel looked at her with amazement, as if she had just performed some feat of wizardry.

“He said a true knight makes ladies happy, and gives ’em flowers, and tells ’em they’re pretty even if they aren’t,”

Valentin explained, and yelped as someone kicked him under the table. “What? He did.”

“He also said not to tell ladies his secrets or they won’t work, halfwit,”

said Legeriot.

“And Her Grace does look like a flower,”

said Denin, who was clearly learning the lessons of his master well.

“Shouldn’t call each other names in front of a lady, neither,”

said Jacot, who had been watching these proceedings with lofty disdain. He was the oldest of her students, and except for his lack of education, might already have become a squire. He considered the younger boys beneath his notice unless they needed thrashing.

“You are all very gallant, and I liked it very much,”

Ophele said, entertained. “We’ll begin with reading today. Jacot, you’ll be teaching Valentin. Legeriot, Denin, and Gavrel, please read this poem, and when you’ve finished, we’ll talk about it together.”

Turning her book of poetry toward the three boys, Ophele took Denin’s mathematics text and began her own study, her quill scratching rapidly away.

When Remin had proposed this little school to her, she had thought it would be like teaching Jacot: basic reading and arithmetic, with a little etiquette on the side.

But these noble-born boys had already begun their education under actual tutors, along with history, dancing, and music.

Their texts filled in the gaps in her own learning, and she thought that having the boys teach each other worked very well; it made the lessons friendly and informal, and she was learning nearly as much as they were.

It was hard, though, to try to cement the ideas in her mind with so little time.

Sometimes she had to force herself to give Gavrel back his book on oratory; she needed to read that one so badly it was almost physically painful, and she took copious notes whenever she had an instant to spare.

But mathematics was an even greater challenge.

Ophele had raced far ahead in matters of geometry and astronomy but still had wide gaps in some of the most fundamental concepts, and she often sat and quietly worked equations by herself after the boys had left, inventing new problems for them to solve the next day.

Most of the boys’ work was military in nature, logistical problems like how to move a given number of men, horses, and wagons to a particular place at a particular time, with each group traveling at a different speed.

But it was fun, nevertheless.

After their reading, Ophele presented a geometry test to them, a map of a city and surrounding hills that the boys instantly dubbed Barnabe Town, after the squire that had charge of them in the mornings.

One of the problems in Denin’s geometry text had used a trebuchet as an example, calculating trajectory and distance by the weight of the projectile and the length of the trebuchet’s arm, as well as the distance of the siege machine itself from the city.

Ophele had taken this problem and run with it.

The boys seemed very excited to reduce Barnabe Town to rubble.

Though it was a bit advanced for Jacot and Valentin’s arithmetic skills, Jacot quickly got a feel for the basics, and everyone could participate in moving the marker for the trebuchet around the map and aiming for particular targets within the city, which ranged from the keep to Barnabe himself and—with particular spite—even Barnabe’s chickens in the coops behind the stables.

“Why his chickens?”

Ophele wanted to know.

“So Barnabe doesn’t get any eggs,”

Denin said darkly, and Gavrel and Legeriot nodded their agreement.

Although Ophele was sure no lady in the world needed to know how to place trebuchets, teaching gave her a reasonable excuse to ask for intermediate-level books from Sir Edemir and sneak in books on finance and economics on the side. The boys would need to be able to convert currencies too, wouldn’t they? And she often heard Sir Tounot and Sir Bram grumbling about the tediousness of managing everyone’s pay. If she could only get these books, then she was sure she could learn the things she needed to know to manage Remin’s household. She still had time. There wasn’t even a house yet.

“You do a thing thoroughly,”

Sir Edemir said over supper, when she explained the types of books she wanted. “But we won’t need to trouble you much longer, my lady. Soon enough the squires will be back at their regular work, and we have a tutor on his way from the Tower.”

“I don’t mind teaching them,”

Ophele said, trying to hide her disappointment. “But even if it’s the squires or the tutor teaching them, won’t they still need the more advanced texts?”

Maybe she could read the books quickly, before Edemir gave them to the boys.

“That is true,”

the knight said, slicing neatly into his roasted venison. Utensils had arrived in the valley, at least for the high table, and Edemir used them with fascinating precision. “But if you don’t mind my saying so, it’s important to balance interrogation and didacticism, my lady. If you try to teach them too many subjects, they won’t make progress in any of them.”

He and Justenin had begun discussing the learning theory of the Tower with her at increasing length lately, particularly the balance between interrogation and didactic learning: the need to let the boys ask questions, and more importantly, want to ask questions, without straying too far from the subject at hand.

This was one of her particular weaknesses, Ophele knew.

Having grown up in a library, she was used to being able to indulge every question she had, and unanswered questions tickled mercilessly at her mind, an itch begging to be scratched.

“Maybe we don’t need books for some things,”

she admitted. The words felt blasphemous. “But I wish I had some references. Denin wanted to know the maximum distance of a trebuchet with different projectiles where he could still destroy the keep, but none of the books say what the minimum weight of a projectile should be.”

“Wind’s an issue if they’re too light,”

said Sir Bram, who always surprised her with his participation in these discussions. He was the oldest of Remin’s knights, lean-faced and scarred and thoroughly intimidating, but he was surprisingly intellectual, for all his rough demeanor.

“Oh, we didn’t talk about wind,”

she said, making a mental note. “Are there equations for that? The book didn’t say anything.”

“What under the stars are you teaching them, wife?”

Remin asked, amused. And a few minutes later, Ophele found herself explaining the problem to the Knights of the Brede over a replica of Barnabe Town made of fruit and cups. They argued about trebuchet placement in almost the exact same withering tones as their pages, even down to calling each other halfwits.

“You don’t need to work equations?”

Ophele whispered to Remin, who had taken one look at the town and placed a single trebuchet in position to knock out all six towers and the gatehouse.

“After a while, you get a feel for it,”

he replied, as if it hadn’t taken everyone else ten minutes to mathematically prove that he had picked the perfect position. Ophele eyed him curiously. Was this the sort of thing that made people call him a genius?

“I’ll see about your books, my lady,”

said Edemir, who was looking at Remin with some chagrin. “Even if there isn’t much time for study now, there will be in future, and there will be more pageboys too, soon enough. Where did you find this exercise? I don’t remember it from any of my texts.”

“The boys like it better when it’s a real problem, instead of just numbers…”

Ophele skirted the question nervously, wondering if she had done something wrong, coming up with her own exercises. In her mind, if they expected her to teach, it was because she was supposed to know how, and she couldn’t admit she had never had a tutor of her own. She could just imagine the looks on their faces, if they ever realized how ignorant their lady was. She had sworn to make them proud to serve her.

“That would have been my preference, when I was a boy,”

Sir Justenin said, smoothing the conversation over. “The brothers taught us geometry with the stars, but we would have much preferred trebuchets.”

“There was a book on celestial geometry in Aldeburke.”

Ophele accepted this offering gratefully. “I liked it. The same equations that measure spiral galaxies can measure the spirals on a snail shell.”

They really worked, too. She had tried it on one of the snails in Azelma’s kitchen garden .

“Was it The Sacred Angles of the Stars?”

“Yes,”

she said, surprised.

“That’s an advanced text.”

His pale blue eyes were placid and unreadable. “I’m surprised your tutor chose it.”

“I found it in the library.”

Ophele looked away. This was a true statement, though it did not correct his assumption, and she felt uncertain all over again. Was it a book she ought not have read? Sir Justenin was so shrewd, sometimes she felt like he was helping her, and sometimes she felt instinctively that he was laying out bait.

“It was philosophically interesting. Calculating the paths between stars. Not so different from this,”

he said, gesturing to the cups and fruit of Barnabe Town. “A path between points. A map between heavens.”

As a conversational lure, this was irresistible. Ophele eyed him for only a moment before she pounced, though she was aware of the contrast between the lively trebuchet discussion and the far more selective circle that quickly drove away everyone but Sir Edemir, Sir Justenin, and Sir Bram. Sir Miche tipped her a wink before he slid toward the other end of the table.

“I hope it’s not too boring,”

she told Remin as they walked home together in the moonlight. Her mother would have rebuked her for so exclusive a conversation, better reserved for a private salon. And tonight, Ophele felt uncertain about everything. “When we talk about geometry, and the stars.”

“Sometimes it is,”

he said bluntly, but he took her hand and laid it on his own. “It pleases me that you enjoy it, wife. I’m sorry I’m not much of a scholar.”

“I’m not either,”

she said, subdued. The truth was a weight. What would he do, if she turned to him and told him that she really didn’t know anything? He wouldn’t hate her for it, would he? “I want to learn,”

she said instead. “I don’t know what I think about any of it. I just repeat the things I read.”

“I don’t know what I think, either.”

Remin’s dark head tilted back, looking at the vastness overhead, a night sky so clear that the whole river of galaxies streamed above them, with all the clouds of their currents. “We had clerics in my army. Brothers who treated the wounded and burned the dead. But they never had much to do with me. Usually, they only spoke to Juste. ”

“We never had a cleric in Aldeburke,”

Ophele said tentatively, a tiny beginning of the truth. It was so hard because she didn’t know what was normal, whether this was outrageous or completely unremarkable.

“That doesn’t surprise me, somehow.”

He always looked stern. In the dark, she couldn’t tell if he looked more stern. For a long time, they looked into the sky in silence, and even with Remin standing beside her, Ophele felt adrift on the shores of those galaxies, unmoored among the unfathomable stars.

* * *

The Duke of Andelin had no mercy for buttons.

Otherwise, he was perfect. Ophele’s opinion of her husband had shifted somewhat, and now she was firmly convinced that everything before had been a regrettable misunderstanding, and really he was the most amazing man ever to walk the earth. But it had dawned on her, the other day when they were doing laundry, that Remin was terribly hard on clothing. They had just ruined her fifth chemise and Remin was silent and…well, she wouldn’t say a man that big was sulking.

“Maybe the silk is plant-based, instead of animal-based,”

she offered hesitantly as they pulled her clothing down from the lines inside the cottage. The Duchess of Andelin’s undergarments could hardly be hung out to dry by the roadside. “Maybe that’s why it doesn’t like that soap.”

“There’s different kinds of silk?”

Remin’s voice was flat, but he was trying to sound interested.

“Yes, some kinds are made by insects, and some are plant fiber. Like lotus silk from Bhumi. Maybe one is more brittle than the other, or breaks down when you get it wet? Like spiderwebs,”

she said thoughtfully. “Did you ever notice, some spiderwebs will collect morning dew, but others fall apart when they get wet?”

“I had not.”

But he glanced down at her, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Did you make a study of spiderwebs, little owl?”

“I always had to watch out for them in Aldeburke. I hate walking into them,”

she said with a shudder. “I would be walking through the trees and if I wasn’t careful there would be a sticky web in my face and I didn’t know where the spider was. Yuck.”

That made him smile, and she smiled back, pleased .

“Have you ever heard of alternative methods for cleaning silk?”

“No,”

she said, her brow furrowing. “Maybe steaming? The maids sometimes steamed clothes in Aldeburke, but I don’t know how. Or why. I wish we had books. What happened to your jerkin?”

“What?”

He looked over as she held up the offending article, pointing to a button dangling by the thinnest of threads. “Oh, put that aside. I’ll do something about it.”

Remin’s ravages were not limited to her chemises, though to be fair, he had tried to be gentle with the latest casualty. He had no regard whatsoever for rips, stains, or loose buttons on his own clothing, and even as Ophele’s wardrobe had improved over the months since her arrival in the valley, his had steadily deteriorated.

Was this her responsibility? It was, wasn’t it? All the other knights had squires and pages that looked after such things, but Remin had neither, and showed no interest in acquiring any. Now that she was looking, she noticed the jerkin he was wearing had a huge tear in the back. Ever since he and his knights had begun training at the barracks every afternoon, his clothes had been taking a beating. And he was the Duke of Andelin, and the handsomest man ever born. He shouldn’t be going about in rags.

“I can fix it,”

she said, fighting down nervousness at the prospect. She was determined to be a proper wife for him, even if she had never threaded a needle in her life. How hard could it be to sew a button? “But…do you have a needle and thread? Sir Bram gave me a thimble, but I don’t have anything else…”

If she was honest, she wasn’t sure what to do with the thimble. Remin looked at her for a moment and then pulled her into his lap, wrapping his arms around her.

“I’m sure Guian has needlebooks and such,”

he said. “I made you leave your own things behind in Aldeburke, didn’t I? I’m sorry. Do you want to send for them?”

“No, it’s all right,”

she said, guiltily aware that he must think she had a fine kit like most noblewomen, with shears with gilded roses on the handles, like Lisabe’s, or the beautiful heartwood box that held Lady Hurrell’s embroidery silk. “It just needs a needle and thread, I think. ”

“Duchess Ereguil has some of my mother’s things, now that I think of it.”

Remin kissed the top of her head. “She said she was holding them for my wife. I’ll send for them.”

Well, she would have to learn to sew now.

The next day, before she was supposed to tutor Jacot in the cookhouse, Ophele hurried over to Sir Edemir’s offices in the storehouse. Lord Edemir of Trecht, really; second son to the Count of Trecht, but both he and Sir Tounot preferred to style themselves as knights.

“My lady?”

he asked as she appeared in the doorway.

“Sir Edemir.”

Ophele bobbed her head nervously. She felt she knew him a little better, now that he and Sir Justenin had begun lingering over tales of the Tower and its theories of learning at supper, and making her wish there had been hours, days even, for such talk. But here, he might as well have had LORD TRECHT inscribed upon his noble brow. “I…I was wondering…”

His force of secretaries had expanded from two to eight, and all of them were staring at her.

“If…if I wanted books for myself, could I have them?”

She made herself say, reddening and hating it. She was sure that Remin’s wife could ask for whatever she wanted, and she could just imagine how Lady Hurrell would say it, with all the icy command of an empress. It only made her feel foolish by comparison.

“Of course.”

Sir Edemir took her elbow to nudge her into the hallway and shut the office door behind him, closing away all those staring eyes. “But why wouldn’t you just ask Rem, my lady?”

“I want it to be a surprise. Could you keep it a secret?”

“What books would you like?”

“Books on sewing, please.”

Ophele was so relieved, she didn’t notice that he had made no promises. “His Grace just got some things for me from Mr. Guian, and I would like to practice, and I wanted to see what’s…in fashion. If anything’s changed. In sewing.”

It was a plausible lie told very poorly; Lady Hurrell had received periodicals on embroidery. Fortunately, Remin’s knights knew that she was a terrible speaker and expected her to be clumsy. And even if the books he got were a little advanced for a beginner, surely she could still learn from them .

“I see,”

Sir Edemir said, his broad, stolid face softening. “Is it for Rem’s birthday? I think I can get books for you in time.”

Oh, stars.

“Yes,”

she said, through numb lips. “I heard his birthday was soon. What was the date, exactly?”

“November twenty-third.”

“His twenty-fifth birthday.”

Ophele nodded as if she had known the whole time. “We ought to have a feast, oughtn’t we? And gifts? And pudding. Oh, I’ll have to talk to Master Wen, after everything he did for my birthday…”

“If you want to make him something, just tell me what you need,”

said the knight, looking at her with mingled amusement and sympathy. “You want to sew something for him?”

“Oh. Um, yes.”

Her eyes slid sideways. “Maybe some silk? White? And silk thread. Mr. Guian only has cotton in his store. Oh, and Remin needs more clothes. I don’t suppose someone has his measurements?”

With every word she was floundering deeper into the quagmire; the situation had spiraled wildly out of her control. It was September now, she had less than three months until his birthday. And now she had to make something for him. Could she learn to sew by then? What clothes did men wear? What was appropriate for a gift? He had a few nice jerkins and doublets that he set aside for special occasions, when he had to be the Duke of Andelin, but other than the fact that he had something called a doublet and something called a jerkin, she knew absolutely nothing about what he needed.

And after he had worked so hard to learn about her, too.

Ophele spent the next few days sneaking off whenever Remin’s back was turned to speak to Mr. Hengest, Mr. Guian, Sir Miche, and Master Wen, who pitched an absolute fit when asked to produce another pudding.

“It’s not for me!”

Ophele cried, backing toward the kitchen door. “It’s His Grace’s birthday! In November! He likes hazelnut, I asked!”

“Do ye realize how many people are in this bleeding camp now?”

the cook demanded, his butcher knife descending in huge, unerring arcs. It was amazing how he could neatly dismember a buck without even looking at it. “And you’d have me take hours of me precious time for a single blasted pudding? ”

“I’ll help,”

she offered. “I can peel potatoes, or turn the spit, or anything else you need, if you show me—”

“You’re a duchess!”

he roared. “The Duchess of Andelin turning a spit? It’d be the shame of me life, I won’t have it, I tell ye!”

“Then…I won’t shame you!”

she exclaimed, trying desperately to apply some logic in this kitchen of madness. “If you make pudding, I’ll…I’ll be a proper duchess! I’ll stop calling you Master Wen! So…there!”

She didn’t know what she was saying. She just felt that somehow, when placed between his deeply-held prejudice against dessert and his strict notions about what behavior was acceptable in a duchess, somehow the solution to the equation was pudding. She didn’t understand his arithmetic, but she was learning to apply it.

“Ye go to Edemir.”

Master Wen…Wen pointed his butcher knife at her. Blood dripped off the blade. “Ye go yourself and ye ask for your blasted hazelnuts! And vanilla beans! And sugar! And a dozen chickens because now we need eggs!”

“I will!”

she shouted back. Her heart was thumping wildly. “And I want clotted cream! For the hazelnut pudding!”

“Then get me some bloody cinnamon!”

“I don’t like cinnamon!”

“Well then, we’ll leave it off your slice, Your Majesty.”

Wen dragged the words out in such soaring, epic sarcasm that Ophele thought her grandchildren would still feel the sting. “And may ye have the pleasure of it because it will be me final pudding, so you’ll have it and be damned!”

“I will not, because it will be delicious!”

she shouted, fully in the spirit of the thing now, and even slammed the kitchen door on the way out.

Outside, Ophele collapsed into giggles, covering her mouth with both hands. She had never yelled at anyone before in her life.