Page 32

In the dark hours before dawn, Remin jerked awake.

The cottage was still dim and sketched silhouettes of familiar shapes: the chair he was always knocking his knees against, the washstand at his feet, the bed a scant foot past his head.

His eyes flashed underneath it, checking the frame automatically for the shape of concealed weapons before he sat up, careful of the many breakable objects nearby.

Even if he had survived another night without anyone trying to murder him, living in such a small space meant he lived in constant, hunched terror of knocking things over.

It was early, but there would be no more sleep.

Yawning, he scrubbed his eyes with his palms, trying to drive out the dream still rattling in the back of his mind like an unquiet ghost.

His skin was slippery with sweat.

His dreams were starting to wear on him.

Rising, he went to scrub his face, then built a fire and put on a kettle of water to heat.

Soon, there would be an actual bathhouse with water piped from the river and constantly heated by furnaces.

Nore Ffloce’s eclectic background served them well; it would be a bathhouse in the luxurious Benkki Desa style, clean and practical, easily expanded when the time was right.

Already there were two teams of bathhouse workers on the way from Abharana, with a Madam Imari Sanai to manage the women’s half.

He was saving that as a surprise for Ophele.

There were a number of other gifts creaking their way to the valley in various wagons, some of which she knew about and others she did not, but it was sheer coincidence that they would arrive around her eighteenth birthday.

Remin deserved no credit for remembering it.

It was Miche who had wondered aloud if the Duchess had attained her majority yet, and that had been a nasty moment, when Remin realized it might have already passed.

He suspected that was another thing he would have heard about for the next fifty years, if he had forgotten her birthday.

Ophele didn’t so much as twitch as the teakettle whistled.

Remin washed, shaved, and dressed, foregoing his shirt and making do with a simple cotton jerkin that left his arms bare.

It was too hot for layers.

He couldn’t imagine how Ophele endured all the drapery that fashion decreed was required, and every day he sent an impatient inquiry to the Gellege Bridge, asking if there was news of the order of clothing from Mistress Courcy.

What did women wear elsewhere in the world? Imperial noblewomen mostly stayed indoors, so maybe it wasn’t such an inconvenience elsewhere in the Empire, but now that he had seen how impractical his wife’s clothes were, his opinion had turned resolutely against them.

Remin felt no obligation to abide by the foolish conventions of the Empire.

This was his valley.

They would wear what they liked.

Maybe he could find a tailor and some seamstresses who would appreciate a little creative freedom.

“Ophele.”

Kneeling next to the bed, he peeled the covers off and shook her.

“Wake up, wife, it’s morning.”

“Iss mornin…?”

Her eyes were still closed as she sat up.

“Would you rather stay and sleep?”

he asked, unable to resist teasing her when she was still mostly unconscious.

She was so pretty with her face all soft from sleep.

“I wanted you to go with me today, but if you’re too tired…”

“No, I want to go.”

Her eyes snapped open, and he repressed a smile.

“Here,”

he said, putting her hand around a cup of water, and as soon as she managed a sip, he stepped outside to let her wash and dress.

By the time he went to the cookhouse for breakfast and the stable for his horse, she should be ready to go.

And sure enough, she was waiting outside the cottage when he rode up, looking creditably awake.

“Where are we going?”

she asked eagerly, taking his hand to be lifted into the saddle.

She was dressed in a pale green gown with slashed sleeves and a curving neck that revealed the upper swells of her breasts.

The sweet scent of her soap wafted as Remin set her before him.

“We’ll have a look at the palisade first,”

he said gruffly, trying to ignore these temptations.

“Something’s been gnawing at the end near the ridgeline.

Then Auber wants to take a look at the land west of the wheat fields.

It’s all hilly forest, might be good for an orchard.”

“Apples?”

“And cherries, and whatever else we can get to grow.”

“Apples are my favorite.”

Ophele settled against him as they swung north, chewing on a breakfast biscuit.

“What about you?”

“Peaches.

There was an orchard at Rospalme, in Ereguil.”

It was peculiar how even this simple answer made him feel as if he were giving another tiny piece of himself into her keeping.

Remin twitched his shoulders and tried to ignore his unease.

Before her sun sickness, he had been accustomed to making a circuit of the valley in the morning, looking in on the various projects to see their progress with his own eyes.

He had been ashamed to realize that she had never seen any of them before.

Until her illness, she had never gone anywhere but the cookhouse and the wall.

Today she would go with him.

It was cool enough in the morning that he thought it was safe to go out, and he found himself wondering what she would say.

She had been getting braver about speaking, and every time she dared to offer an opinion or started a conversation, it felt like a victory.

“We’re on the same latitude as Abharana, in Benkki Desa,”

she said thoughtfully.

“They grow peaches there.

And black plums and white cherries.”

“Did you memorize that book?”

he asked, amused.

Ophele had already trotted out tidbits from A Survey of the Nations of the Sea of Eskai several times, which included information on the major exports in the region.

“I liked how that sounded together, black plums and white cherries.

I tried to get Azelma to buy some, but she said they would never make it to Segoile, let alone Leinbruke.”

“Benkki Desa’s a long way away, isn’t it?”

Remin said thoughtfully.

“Eighteen hundred and forty miles by boat,”

she replied.

Remin looked down at her in surprise.

“How many miles over land?”

“3,472 to the border of Argence.”

Ophele looked up at him with her best solemn-owl face, as if everyone memorized mileage charts. “Why?”

“Black plums and white cherries might be considered luxuries, if they can’t be had outside Segoile,”

he said.

Her eyes lit up.

“We could grow them here and sell them?”

“I don’t see why not.

But I also know nothing of orchards.”

“Different trees need different soil, and they do something called grafting to put the branches of one tree on another, though I don’t know why.”

The words tumbled over each other in her excitement.

“At least they do with apples.

Didn’t Master Didion say we would have a small orchard by the house?”

“On the east slope, yes.

You want apples handy?”

“And peaches,”

she said, giving him a full, beautiful smile that made Remin feel as if the air had suddenly filled with wine.

“We’ll mention it to him,”

he managed, setting his heels to his horse and making her grab for his arm as the black beast sprang forward.

She was just full of surprises.

It looked like ghouls had been chewing on the west end of the palisade, judging by the shape of the bite marks, and after confirming that a six-foot stretch of wall would have to be replaced, Tounot rode with them to look at the prospective orchard site with Auber.

It felt a little ridiculous, once they got there.

Three knights sitting on their horses, looking at a hilly bit of forest, agreeing that sure, it looked as if fruit trees might grow there.

What did any of them know? Orchards were to farming what siegeworks were to swordsmanship: adjacent, not overlapping.

“We’ll have to send for someone to manage it,”

Auber said, nudging his bay forward into the trees.

“Though at some point you’re going to have to look at some short-term investments, Rem.

Everything we’re building isn’t going to turn a profit for a long time.

I don’t know much about orchard trees, but I know you won’t see a harvest for a while.

Trees take a long time to grow.”

“I have heard that,”

Tounot agreed gravely, as Ophele flushed pink.

An arborist they had consulted about the huge oak at the manor site had all but promised his firstborn child if they would preserve it until he could come see it personally.

Apparently, any oak thirty-five feet wide was likely to be very old indeed.

Ophele’s words had been making a circuit of the town ever since, to be trotted out whenever it was even vaguely appropriate.

“Maybe if you started with older trees?”

she offered hesitantly, as if she wasn’t sure whether they were making fun or not.

“Since Master Didion is bringing in older cherry trees and maples anyway…”

“Valleth’s paying,”

Remin said with a shrug and a great deal of internal satisfaction.

Valleth’s invasion had destroyed the valley, it seemed only fair that they should pay to restore it.

“I wonder if there’s anything left of the old orchards.

Do we have any old maps of the valley?”

“We’d have to send for copies,”

Tounot replied.

“Edemir wouldn’t have much use for maps a hundred years out of date.”

“There were old orchards?”

Ophele asked, looking intrigued.

“The valley was settled, before,”

Remin explained.

They had found the remains of many towns and burned-out cities over the course of the war, charnel offerings to Valleth’s Lord of Tales.

Even worse, Valleth hadn’t even done anything useful with all that dreadful magic.

Squandered, all of it, on the infighting between warlords.

“Someone said something about finding orchards…three years ago?”

Tounot remembered.

“When we were pushing into the mountain passes, going for the forts.”

“Victorin,”

Auber said.

“Victorin and his men found them.

Apples of the gods, he said, but then they were hungry at the time.”

“I’d like to find those,”

Remin said slowly.

Victorin’s apples.

That would be a good thing to have to remember him by.

“Remind me, when we get back.

We’ll send out some inquiries.”

That was the first step to any new project in the valley, and they wandered among the low hills for a little while, speculating how long it would take to clear the forest, and how long it might take for fruit trees to be transported to the valley, particularly if they were coming from Benkki Desa.

Maybe he should see about acquiring some Benkki Desans to tend them.

“The caravan’s ready for your inspection, Rem,”

Tounot said as they were turning back toward Tresingale.

“If you want to take a look, it’s on the way.”

If Tounot had a fault, it was that he had a knack for saying the exact thing that Remin least wanted to be said.

“I’ll look later,”

he said shortly, trying to communicate with his eyes that this was not a subject he wanted to discuss in front of his wife.

“The blacksmiths have been arguing about it with the carpenters,”

Tounot went on, blissfully oblivious to these signals.

“They’re trying to get the weight down, but if it’s going to last all the way to Ferrede and keep the devils out, then it can’t be too—”

“Devils?”

Ophele echoed, looking up at Remin with a flicker of disquiet.

One night’s conversation had not allayed all her fears.

“It’s nothing you need to worry about,”

he said stiffly.

He still hadn’t decided whether to tell her about the expedition to Ferrede; he might not be going at all, and he was almost positive that even if he was, such purely military matters were no business of a noblewoman.

In any case, he knew she was still scared of the devils and he didn’t want to bring up the possibility that he might have to leave unless it was actually going to happen.

Remin was pretty sure that ship had just sailed.

No, Tounot had launched it and then fired flaming arrows into it.

“I’ll meet you there,”

he told Tounot and Auber, spurring his horse toward the gate and giving Tounot a glare that promised later reprisal.

Of course, Remin hadn’t the least idea what he was going to say, and he knew by now that if he didn’t say something, Ophele never would.

He used to think she was sulking when she did this, wielding her silence like a weapon to make him feel guilty.

He had never been able to abide such tricks.

But now he understood that Ophele didn’t sulk.

She just…retreated, he thought, frowning down at the top of her head.

Instantly and completely. He didn’t understand why, or what to do about it.

“I mean that I don’t want you worrying,”

he finally said as their cottage appeared ahead.

“Nothing’s been decided.”

She nodded without the least indication as to whether she would actually continue worrying, and Remin’s jaw tightened.

“We’ll talk about it later,”

he said, frustrated.

“Stop worrying about it, wife.

Don’t leave the cottage while it’s hot.”

He wanted her to say something, anything, but she only nodded again as he set her down beside the road in front of their cottage, and he left with the feeling of a job poorly done.

If only she would talk.

He couldn’t imagine what she was thinking, and he didn’t know what to say to make it right.

* * *

It wasn’t difficult to put it together.

In the cottage, Ophele sat down with a stack of papers the duke had set aside for her, figures that needed adding, letters that required responses.

There was so much work underway in the valley, no doubt including countless items she didn’t know about, but she understood perfectly well what Sir Tounot had been talking about.

The duke and his men must be trying to find a way to help the other villages in the valley.

What else would they need with a caravan, especially one built to withstand devils? And he hadn’t brought it up because he thought she would be scared if he left her alone at night again.

And she would be.

Ever since her sun sickness, he had been scrupulous about explaining things to her.

If he stood watch, it was always on the main road; he explained all the defenses from the gate onward, so she would understand how many men stood between her and danger.

He had even showed her exactly where he would be standing, and he was never gone all night anymore.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,”

he had told her, the first night that he went to stand watch.

And seeing him fully armored and massive, so tall he had to duck his head to keep his black hair from hitting the rafters, it did seem impossible that anything could stand against him.

“I’ve killed stranglers with my hands, wife.

None of the devils can bite through good steel.

Nothing can kill me.”

This was obviously not true; he was as mortal as anyone else.

But her father certainly hadn’t had much luck.

Neither had Valleth and all their mercenaries, or the three preceding years of devils.

And she had felt so foolish that he was going to such trouble to reassure her.

“I know,”

she had said.

“Nothing will hurt you,”

he said firmly, and then knelt down in front of her and gave her a shake.

“Look at me.

Nothing can kill me, and I won’t let anything anywhere near you.”

He had said those words before, but never like that.

And looking into his black eyes, she had believed him.

Ophele knew what she should say.

She had read the words in countless books.

She should bid him to go and do his duty, and be careful, and tell him she would take care of his home while he was away.

That was what a proper noblewoman did.

Dipping her quill in an ink pot, Ophele bent over the first page, adding the first column with her eyes.

Sir Edemir had come to the cottage a few days ago to give her a few math problems and let her do them in her head, and had looked so surprised that she wondered uncomfortably whether she had done something strange.

Her reward was more accounts to manage, but at least she didn’t have to show her work anymore.

If she could do that, maybe she could do this.

She heard him coming even before he knocked on the door, some time before supper.

“Wife?”

“Yes,”

she said, sitting up very straight.

He kicked the dust off his boots before he ducked through the low door, his face set in its customary frowning lines.

“You’ve been working?”

he asked, sitting down at the table beside her.

Ophele nodded, suddenly anxious.

“What have you been working on? No, tell me,”

he said, when she moved to hand him the stack of papers.

“I want to hear you talk.”

“Orders for the kitchen,”

she said, looking up at him and wondering what this was about.

“And medicines, for Genon? And I answered some of the letters we talked about yesterday.

From the weavers and dyers.

And the man who wanted to know about mining.

And a few others.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes? There were a lot of orders for the kitchen,”

she said, apologetic.

“No, I’m sure you did plenty of work,”

he said dryly, looking at the stack by her elbow.

“But I want you to tell me about all of it.

I want you to get used to talking to me.”

He was wearing his stubborn face again.

“Oh.”

Her eyes flicked up to his, surprised.

“Oh.

Well, I also answered a few more letters, people asking if they could come live here, and I told them what you said about not letting anyone else come until next year…”

The duke listened patiently as she explained the other letters she had written, and then they looked through the food orders for the kitchen, speculating about what earthly use Master Wen might have for a bushel of dried persimmons.

Though she felt embarrassed that he was going to such trouble, she knew better than to resist; he would sit at the table all night if that was what it took to make her talk.

He was so stubborn.

And thinking that, for some reason she had to look down to hide a smile.

“So let me tell you about the caravan,”

he said when she was done, and described what she had already deduced about trying to get a team of men and horses to Ferrede.

“The hard part is the horses,”

he explained.

“We can hardly put them in the wagon, so we have to come up with something to protect them overnight that they can haul.

The carpenters are calling it a mobile palisade.

But if it’s too heavy, we need more horses to pull it, which means the palisade needs to be bigger to protect them, which means more horses…”

He spread his hands and Ophele nodded.

It was an interesting problem.

“But we have to go help Ferrede, and the other villages,”

he went on.

“I guess you’ve figured that out.

I didn’t tell you because I still don’t know who will actually go, or when.

I didn’t want you worrying about it in the meantime.”

“I’ll be all right,”

she made herself say.

But this time his frown was a real frown.

“Stop saying you’re fine when you aren’t,”

he said sternly.

“It makes it hard for me to tell what to do.

Tell me what you’re thinking, not what you think I want to hear.”

“I’m thinking that they’re your people.

My people,”

she said, which was still an incredibly bizarre thought, but was nonetheless true.

“Because I’m the Duchess of Andelin.

Ferrede, Meinhem, Raida, Isigne, and Selgin.

Is that all of them?”

“Nandre.

And Raida is fine, they’re by the border wall.”

“Nandre,”

she repeated, giving him her own version of a stubborn face.

“I didn’t think about what might be happening to them, all this time.

But they don’t have knights, do they? Or soldiers.”

“No, they don’t,”

he agreed.

“And they swore to obey you as their lord.

They swore to the stars.”

“Yes.”

“Then you have to go.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,”

he replied slowly.

“I was thinking about it.

It bothered me, even before.

I swore to protect the people of Tresingale, and I thought I was doing my duty, standing guard for them.

But I only swore the protection of my body to you.

Not the protection of someone else’s body. I thought it was the same thing as long as you were safe, but Juste would disagree, I expect.”

“But you said I’m safe,”

she said, refusing to be diverted even with such tempting intellectual fodder.

“You don’t sleep when the devils are about,”

he said bluntly.

“You’re always awake when I come back.”

She flushed.

“It’s not as bad as being out there with no guards at all,”

she said, her ears pink.

The people of the valley shouldn’t have to suffer because she was a coward.

“Why do they scare you so much?”

he wanted to know.

“If you explain it to me, maybe there’s something we can do about it.

Is it just the noises?”

It was the noises, but Ophele thought that wasn’t all.

And he was asking so directly, and had been so patient, she thought she owed it to him to at least try.

“Where do they come from?”

she began, her fingers twisting together.

“The devils.”

“Vallethi sorcerers.”

“I know that, but from where,”

she said, voicing one of the many questions she had asked herself so many times.

It felt good to say it out loud.

“Are they from the underworld? Or somewhere else in this world? Or somewhere in Valleth?”

“We don’t know,”

he admitted.

“Why do they go away in the winter?”

His lips twisted.

He was an intelligent man, he likely already knew where she was going.

“We don’t know.”

“Why are there more this year than there were last year?”

“No idea.”

He looked at her expectantly.

“Then how do you know there won’t be more tonight than there were last night?”

she asked softly.

“A lot more, maybe.

Too many.”

“I can’t know.

But we’ve planned for it,”

he said, to her surprise.

“You have?”

“Of course.

The Vallethi army showed up in places we didn’t expect, and often with more people than we expected.

Though I can’t send out scouts against the devils,”

he said, in a tone that let her know he was treating her question seriously.

“Huber brought it up.

He’s always the one with the questions that keep me up at night.

But after that last expedition outside the walls, we made plans, just in case we were ever overrun.”

Ophele’s expression very clearly said, do go on.

“We’ve drilled organized retreats from three main areas.

Here, let me have your quill, I’ll show you,”

he said, reaching for a blank piece of paper.

“Here’s the palisade.

It only admits stranglers, but that’s still a vulnerability.

Then here, northeast, is the gap between the palisade and the wall, and the gap between the north and south sections of the wall.”

The quill slashed briskly between his large brown fingers.

“There are barricades here, mostly for the wolves…”

In a few minutes he had sketched out the defenses for the town, then showed her how it folded inward, and how the masons would be evacuated to the unfinished barracks while the people in town would be moved to the cookhouse and storehouse.

As Yvain and Dol had said, she herself would go to the storehouse, but in Ophele’s mind it had been a chaos of screaming men and devils running in all directions, not this well-ordered retreat.

“It wouldn’t be fun,”

he said, looking down at the finished diagram, with its many arrows and dotted lines.

“And we could likely tighten this up, there’s a hill here that would slow down the retreat, another barricade would buy them more time…anyway,”

he said, returning his attention to her.

“We can’t prepare for everything, but we have prepared for this.

You’re not likely to wake up one night with a mob of devils surrounding the cottage.”

“I was more worried about the storehouse,”

she confessed.

“I thought—it sounds silly, but I thought of Yvain and Dol taking me there and locking me inside, and then in the morning I would come out and find I was the only person left.”

Her voice faded as she spoke her worst fear, and the duke’s stern face softened.

“I guess that would scare anyone,”

he said, and hesitated only a second before he covered both her hands with his.

“But I’d say that’s very, very unlikely, wife.”

It wasn’t magic.

Her heart didn’t pound any less frantically later that night, when he went out to guard the road and she heard a strangler cackling in the distance.

But when she went to sit by the fire, thinking she would read, she found that he had left the plans for retreat in the center of the table, with all the buildings in town neatly labeled and the path from the cottage to the storehouse marked.

And in the storehouse, he had added two figures, labeled in his slashing, jagged script: Ophele. Remin.

She didn’t hear him come in that night.

She was already asleep.

A few days later, she plucked up her courage to ask him whether or not a decision had been made about the caravan.

“Well, I won’t be going,”

he said.

His face was as austere as ever, but she was learning to see the humor in his eyes.

“Remember how I told you they were trying to figure out how to keep the size of the caravan down, to compensate for the palisade?”

She nodded.

“They succeeded.”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“I won’t be going, and neither will Jinmin.

Can you guess why?”

She thought about it, and it actually startled a laugh out of her.

“Nooo…”

she said, looking up at him with wide eyes.

“You can’t fit?”

“They’d have to grease me up to get me in there,”

he said, and gave her something very close to a smile as she burst into giggles.