Page 6

The maids had not, in fact, packed a comb.

Hidden under the supply wagon, Ophele rummaged through her small bag of supplies, a pretty flower-patterned valise that might have been sufficient for a day trip in a carriage but was getting battered to bits in the wagon.

Already something had been broken—she suspected a mirror—and she was carefully picking the larger pieces out of the bag and taking stock of the surviving supplies.

It looked as if there were several changes of undergarments rolled into discreet little bundles of silk and lace, along with another of Lisabe’s old dresses, two pairs of stockings, a small packet of various medical herbs (considerably crushed), several bolsters of sanitary cotton, along with cosmetics, perfume, and three jeweled hair pins.

Someone had thought of hair pins, but not a brush or comb.

Muttering to herself, Ophele fished carefully through the case, hoping not to slice any fingers.

After riding all day yesterday and sleeping in the wagon, she felt unspeakably grungy and would have traded all three pins for a toothbrush.

One of the duke’s men had appeared with a basin of water while she was still rubbing the sleep from her eyes, but she felt too self-conscious to wash in front of so many strangers.

All she wanted to do was stay out of their way until it was time to leave.

“Princess?”

rumbled a deep voice, and a pair of long legs clad in thick breeches and leather riding boots stopped beside the wagon.

The duke’s face appeared, sun-bronzed and stubble-jawed, his shaggy black hair damp from his own ablutions.

“A mirror broke,”

she said nervously before he could ask.

The duke always made her feel like she was doing something she shouldn’t.

Plucking a curving shard of glass from the bag, she held it up as evidence.

“Let me see.”

He moved with animal grace as he crouched over her, reaching for the valise which contained multiple varieties of unmentionables.

She snatched it away.

“Oh, no, it’s all right,”

she said quickly.

“I’ll be careful, I—”

His black eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Give it here.”

Did he think she was going to try to stab him? Or grind up glass to put in his food? Ophele’s face reddened.

“There are…private things in it,”

she said, willing him to understand.

“It’s only—”

“Now,”

he snapped, his eyebrows lowering like thunderheads.

Clutching the bag, she wondered wildly whether she would actually fight him over this, maybe even run for it, though she couldn’t possibly win.

His huge hand grasped the bag and twisted it out of her arms.

This was mortifying.

Ophele looked at her feet as he rummaged, picking out more shards of the broken mirror, meticulously setting every object in the grass as if he were one of the Emperor’s tariff men performing an audit.

She couldn’t bear to look at his face, but she could tell the precise moment he realized what the little bundles of lace and silk were, and realized that he was openly displaying her breast bindings and underclothes to two score milling knights.

“I told you,”

she whispered, humiliated beyond all description.

“It was a mirror.

I didn’t even pack the bag.”

“That is true,”

he said stiffly.

And then, unbelievably, he went on removing the rest of the articles, all the way down to the bolsters of sanitary cotton, at which point she buried her face in her hands and wished she was dead.

His one concession to decency was that he covered her underthings with the spare dress.

She heard rather than saw him slip out from under the wagon, and he shook out the smaller pieces of glass into the coals of a nearby fire.

His boots returned, and he paused for a moment, then knelt back under the wagon and handed her the empty valise.

“We’ll be leaving soon,”

he said, without expression.

“Pack your things.

Don’t hide under the wagon again.

If it rolls, you might get hurt.”

She refused to acknowledge him.

She had never been so embarrassed in her life, and growing up with the Hurrells had given her an extensive reservoir of experience.

Biting her tongue, she looked down at her lap, furiously blinking back tears.

She would not let him see her cry.

That would be the final humiliation.

After a moment, he moved away without another word.

That man was going to be her husband.

In a few days, he was going to be doing worse than touching her underclothes.

Ophele had no concrete idea what went on between a man and a woman—the library at Aldeburke had little information on the subject—but she had overheard the maids gossiping often enough to have a vague notion.

She would die.

She would be the first person in recorded history to actually expire of mortification.

He was a brute, he was a cruel, callous, heartless bully and a mean man.

Snatching up her violated undergarments, she stuffed them into her bag, every jerk of her hands punctuating a growing list of adjectives.

Unfortunately, once she was packed, the only place she could go was back to that mean man.

At the front of the line of horses and men, the duke mounted his black warhorse and wordlessly held out a hand, a silent order to come, and lifted her in front of him.

She tried to shift toward the front of the saddle, sitting stiffly upright to touch him as little as possible.

They moved out.

He spoke to his men, but never to her.

She didn’t want him to talk to her, anyway.

She wanted nothing to do with him.

There was nothing to look at but the rutted road and naked forest, and boredom slumped side by side with her resentment, a sore trial for a girl who had always had books for companions.

The knowledge that marriage to a man who hated her waited at the end of this dreary road oppressed her.

“I had to be sure, Princess,”

he said abruptly, after they had been riding in silence for at least a year.

She said nothing.

Even the word princess was loaded with his scorn.

In one breath he was both condemning her for being the Emperor’s daughter and ridiculing her for doing it badly.

It wasn’t her fault she had no dresses of her own, or that he hadn’t given her time to gather the things she needed to look less like a beggar’s brat.

All she could do was try to bear it with dignity, and he wasn’t even allowing her that.

“Don’t sulk.”

“I am not sulking,”

she said, her voice giving a traitorous quiver.

She was too miserable even to be afraid of him.

“I am humiliated.”

He was silent for a moment.

“That was not my intention.”

That was not an apology.

Lady Hurrell had been punctilious about the proper parts of an apology.

That had not included either an admission of error or an expression of remorse.

They rode in frigid silence until the noon meal, where he gave her a chunk of bread and cheese and told her to stay near his horse but absolutely not to touch it.

When she took his hand to be lifted back in the saddle later, the worst of her anger and embarrassment had faded; Ophele had never been able to sustain a grudge.

But she was desperately unhappy, and looking at a future that seemed so bleak as to hardly be worth living.

Was it always going to be like this?

It seemed impossible that it would be any other way.

He was treating her like his horse, feeding her and bedding her down for the night, watching constantly to make sure she didn’t wander off.

She supposed she was lucky he hadn’t tied her to a picket.

But there was no chance of escape.

The woods were still bare and her shoes were so big, she would have fallen flat on her face before she made it off the road.

No, there was no way she could run away, and miserable though she was, she knew more than anything that she did not want to die.

How had her mother endured it? Lady Rache Pavot had never married.

She had become the Empress’s lady-in-waiting when she was seventeen, and then become pregnant with the Emperor’s child, an event that precipitated the Conspiracy.

Had her mother chosen to lie with the Emperor? It was impossible to square the loving, gentle woman she remembered with something so ugly and tawdry, not to mention the bitter betrayal of the Empress she had served.

But perhaps that was why her mother had told her time and again: the only person you can control is you.

They would arrive in Celderline tomorrow.

And she hadn’t bathed or brushed her teeth in two days and while her second dress lacked the slept-in wrinkles of the first, it was even more tatty and ill-fitting.

She could see it in the duke’s eyes when he dragged her into the saddle the next morning, a slap of disapproval that made her face burn.

She spent the morning anxiously dragging her fingers through her tangled hair, craning her neck toward the horizon.

She had never been to a city.

She had never seen a city.

Her mother had been exiled to Aldeburke before she was born, and Ophele had only seen a few pictures of cities in books.

She didn’t realize the strange black clouds on the horizon belonged to the city until they connected to chimneys, and at last she saw the vague shadows of distant rooftops, unmistakably manmade in their angular lines.

“Is that it?”

she asked, her fingers clutching the edge of the saddle.

“Yes.”

Her heart gave a tremendous thud.

“Are we getting married today?”

“Tomorrow.”

It felt like a nest of serpents had taken up residence in her belly.

She could have cried.

Could have pleaded with him to reconsider the virtues of Lisabe.

She could have tried to flee when they stopped for lunch, forced him to drag her down the aisle to the altar and wailed her protest at the top of her lungs.

She could make all of this as unpleasant and humiliating for him as it had been for her.

It would please her father tremendously, if he heard about it.

But in her heart, she was not the Emperor’s daughter.

She was the daughter of Rache Pavot, who had accepted her fate with grace.

The city drew steadily nearer.

There wasn’t much to see but the high city wall and the rooftops beyond, taller than any building she had ever seen before.

Around them, the duke’s knights shouted and shook out their cloaks, black lined with silver fur, and produced that ominous black standard with the bridge and crossed swords.

Distantly, she could hear shouting.

“Why are there so many people?”

she asked, squinting at the crowds lining the road ahead, and the duke cursed under his breath.

“Miche,”

he said, like an oath, and quickly rearranged her in his lap.

“Turn this way,”

he ordered, before she could protest.

“Both legs over my right thigh. Good.”

With a flick of his hands, his heavy cloak fell over her, concealing everything but her face.

One massive arm slid around her waist to press her firmly against his chest as he spurred his horse to the front of the column, managing the reins with one hand.

It was just like the final bookplate in a romance she had once read, except his only reason for doing it was to conceal his bride’s house slippers and ragged dress.

Her long hair, unbound and unwashed, flapped loose to whip around them romantically and made the duke’s horse very uncomfortable.

For all the evil tales about Remin Grimjaw, the Duke of Andelin was of higher nobility than most people would see in a lifetime, and a war hero to boot.

His knights were a glorious sight with their shining armor and fluttering banners, and there were actual showers of petals as they approached the gates of the city.

Flocks of children scampered ahead of them and formed a shouting mob behind, and Ophele was stunned by the sea of faces, more people than she had imagined there could be in the whole world, clustered ten deep by the side of the road.

A blond knight was waiting for them at the gates of the city, mounted and armored and bearing the duke’s black banner.

“Your Grace!”

He shouted, flinging out his arms in welcome.

His voice boomed even over the noise of the crowd.

“All of Celderline is waiting to greet you!”

The gates yawned ahead of them, the spikes of the portcullis bared like fangs, and Ophele prepared herself to be brave.

* * *

Miche had outdone himself, arranging all this with barely a day’s head start.

It wasn’t the first time Remin had received such a welcome.

The triumphal progress through the capital of Segoile had lasted three hours, and for the first few months after Valleth surrendered, it seemed like all the roads before him were strewn with flowers.

It had been strange and humbling, and almost made him feel like an imposter, even though he knew he had really done all the things they said he had done.

He accepted the shouts of the people of Celderline with the same stern, expressionless face with which he had received the war cries of the army of Valleth, holding his warhorse back to a dignified walk.

Before and behind him, his knights paused to accept flowers from ladies, nudged their horses into a dancing trot, or lifted their banners and sang along with the crowd, each according to his own inclinations.

They, too, had faced far more hostile crowds than this.

Belatedly, he remembered that the girl in his lap had not.

The Exile Princess had never seen a crowd of any description, and she was pressed so tightly against him, he could feel her heart knocking against his ribs like it was trying to climb in and hide.

“Don’t be afraid,”

he said, bending his head so his mouth was beside her ear.

“They don’t mean any harm.”

She looked up at him, her eyes enormous.

She had a small scar at the outer edge of one delicate eyebrow.

Under his cloak, her hand was clutching the hem of his jerkin, and his arm tightened around her automatically, even as his back prickled at the remembered stab of a knife.

Fortunately, it wasn’t far to the inn.

Fifteen minutes was a satisfactory progress for everyone; it gave the townspeople a bit of excitement on an otherwise ordinary day, without disrupting the business of the city too badly.

Following Miche, they wound through a large market square and then up a narrower avenue to a hilltop in the middle of town, passing through wide gates into the stable yard of a palatial inn.

The innkeeper was already waiting, bowing low and declaring himself ecstatic to have the opportunity to serve so renowned a hero.

“Tell your lads to be careful of the horses,”

Remin replied, acknowledging the courtesy with a jerk of his chin.

Swinging out of his saddle, he landed with a thud, doing his best to keep the princess concealed under his cloak.

“They’re trained for war.

Feed and water them but leave the grooming to my men.

You have a room for the princess?”

“The Prin—Your Highness!”

the innkeeper exclaimed, prostrating himself on the cobblestones when he spotted the girl in Remin’s arms.

“Sacred Daughter of the Stars! Yes, of course, we are deeply…deeply honored!”

“Rise,”

Remin said, gesturing.

“She needs maids.

And a bath.

And whatever else ladies require.”

“I will ask my wife to personally attend her,”

the man replied, presenting a sturdy woman with an astonishing white bonnet.

She too prostrated herself.

“Delaide Goel, if it please Your Grace.

Blessed Highness, I will consider myself honored the rest of my days.”

“Thank you.”

Setting the princess down, Remin transferred his cloak to her shoulders, tugging the hood over her tangled curls.

“Stay with Mistress Goel, Princess.

You’ll be fine. Auber.”

Auber nodded and trailed after the women into the inn.

He was an unobtrusive sort with light brown hair and unremarkable features, and he had made an art of being overlooked.

With the girl off his hands, Remin went about the rest of his work with good will.

His company occupied the entire third floor of the inn, luxurious accommodation in a part of the city renowned for their mineral baths.

His own room was as opulent as anything he had seen in Segoile, with stained glass windows and a deep balcony that overlooked the river and the market on the other side.

It would have been an outrageous expense under any other circumstances, but sometimes spending money was as good as flexing muscle.

Before supper, he and Edemir were ensconced at a worktable to deal with piles of correspondence, everything from invitations to balls that had already happened to reports of troop movements on the border with Valleth.

Remin did not fear another war.

Yet.

The wounds of the last were too recent, and he had harrowed every last Eagle Knight out of his valley, inflicting staggering losses that would take Valleth a generation to recover.

With Hara Vos pressing from their east and certain other measures from Remin to compel their obedience, it would be decades before they needed another lesson.

But Remin was hardly going to leave his borders undefended, and he planned to break the remaining units of his army into small local militias, lightly armed and mounted to respond quickly to reports of banditry and the like.

There were many other reports, less dire but all urgent in their own way.

Some of it was good news; while he was in the capital, Remin had made the acquaintance of an earl from Leinbruke and persuaded him to part with a few head of his prized breeding rams, renowned for the quality of their wool.

A dozen of them had arrived and were being duly coddled on some good grazing east of Tresingale.

All reports of Tresingale were of absorbing interest.

It might be a few dozen huts on a muddy lane right now, but one day it would be a beautiful city, the seat of his duchy.

It had everything: access to the Brede on two sides, rolling hillsides to the east for grazing, and acres of flat, rich farmland to the north, left fallow for nearly a century.

In spring, work would begin on the network of roads that would connect Tresingale to the rest of the Empire.

He could have happily spent whole days planning his new city, if Miche hadn’t insisted on interrupting every half hour with some question about the wedding.

The ceremony had taken on undreamed levels of complexity, and Remin seriously doubted fifty sovereigns had stretched so far as a choir, but long experience with Miche had taught him sometimes it was better not to look too close.

“Your Grace, the tailor is here,”

said the irrepressible man, sticking his head through the door.

“What for?”

“To measure Your Grace for Your Grace’s wedding clothes.”

“I don’t remember putting that on my list of requirements.”

Miche stepped into the room.

“With respect, Your Grace, you smell like a horse’s ass.

And you look like you’ve been sleeping on the side of the road for a month.”

Edemir glanced at him with pity.

“He’s not wrong, Rem.”

With the exception of their sojourn at Aldeburke, he had been sleeping by the side of the road for the last month.

Sighing, Remin allowed himself to be measured for a new doublet and jerkin, stubbornly refused breeches in any color but black, and then submitted to the ministrations of a barber while Edemir read off more reports and noted down Remin’s orders.

But the jeweler was the last straw.

“I told you to take care of it, Miche,”

he flared.

“I don’t give a fuck whether you stick a sapphire or a lump of coal on my brooch.

Don’t bother me about it again.”

He was silent at dinner, an excellent meal with hearty joints of beef and pork, thick crusty bread, and platters of turnips, beans, potatoes, and a variety of green things.

It was pleasant to be clean, and clean-shaven, after so many weeks in the saddle, and his men were loud and boisterous.

Seated at a long table beside a massive stone fireplace, the innkeeper rolled in cask after cask of excellent wine and ale, and their laughter rang to the ceiling.

Ordinarily, he would have been roaring and singing and exchanging insults right along with them.

But tonight, for some reason he felt as if he were standing on the edge of a precipice, the same feeling he had had the night before the charge on the Gresein, and the day before he went to accept the surrender of Valleth.

His men glanced at him, glanced at each other, and poured more wine into his cup.

“Your health, my lord,”

said Justenin, knocking his cup into Remin’s.

“We’ll return to the Andelin in time for the spring planting.”

“Sir Juste is eager to meet his sheep,”

said Bram knowingly.

Justenin had taken charge of His Grace’s livestock.

“Think you’ll find a bride of your own?”

“Better than the woolly sort of prostitutes you favor, Bram,”

Justenin replied placidly, to a round of laughter.

It was late when Remin finally stumbled out onto the balcony, breathing in huge draughts of the freezing air.

The sting of it felt good on his hot cheeks.

“I wouldn’t advise any more wine,”

said a voice from the darkness, and he turned to find Miche lounging on the stone railing against the side of the inn, holding a wineskin in one hand and a cup in the other.

Miche always counseled against the vices in which he was indulging.

“I wasn’t planning to.”

He wasn’t drunk, but Remin was unpleasantly hot, and flapped the neck of his loose white shirt.

“I just wanted some air.

Why aren’t you inside?”

“The same reason, more or less.

I was quite busy today, on behalf of my liege.”

“How did you get the whole city to turn out?”

Remin wanted to know.

“I figured out the rest, but you could hardly have bribed half of Celderline to show up.”

“I bought minstrels.”

Miche smirked.

“When Huber wasn’t looking.

A few rounds of The Battle of the Brede and The Lady’s Courting-Song and they were lining the streets.

It puts a nice finish on the war, doesn’t it? And then His Grace married a princess and lived happily ever after.”

“It’s not like that.”

For some reason, hearing that made him angry.

As if all of it, all those years of blood and dirt and misery had just been the lead-up to an hour in the temple of Celderline.

“It was our land.

The Andelin was part of the Empire for almost a thousand years.

When Valleth invaded, the people—”

“Didn’t give a shit.”

Miche poured himself more wine.

“Neither do you, Your Grace.

It’s a rich land, but if the Emperor hadn’t destroyed your House—”

“Miche.”

“If you had grown up a proper nobleman’s son, the Andelin Valley would still belong to Valleth and you wouldn’t care,”

Miche said stubbornly.

“I’m not judging, Rem.

It’s also true that they attacked us, and you likely would have been sent with all the other blue-blooded sons to lead an army and drive them out, one day.

But that’s not what we were fighting for.

We were fighting because the Emperor took everything from you, and we had to go through the Andelin Valley to take it back.”

Remin didn’t want to hear that.

It was easier to bear if he thought the dead men of the Andelin had given their lives in service of the Empire, not himself.

“Give me a cup.”

“No.

You’re getting married tomorrow; you can’t be nursing a hangover.”

The other man noisily drained his cup, because that was the sort of bastard he was.

“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to marry the daughter of a man you hate.”

“You know my reasons.”

“Yes.”

Miche’s breath curled up white as he sighed.

“But I was thinking.

That’s not good enough, Rem.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not what they’d want.”

There was only one they among the Knights of the Brede.

Even with the wine warming his veins and mazing his mind, Remin could see their faces as clearly as if he had spoken to them at supper.

Rasiphe, Bon, Ludovin, Clement and Victorin.

Rasiphe had died at the Gresein Bridge.

Bon died of poison meant for Remin; Ludovin had been captured as a spy and fed to the Lord of Tales.

Clement and Victorin had died together holding a narrow place in the Berlawe Mountains, slowing the arrival of enemy reinforcements. Victorin had taken twenty-six stab wounds before he succumbed.

“I was thinking,”

Miche repeated doggedly, “that they’d want the Duke of Andelin in new clothes for his wedding.

They’d want to see you in a temple with a crowd of people smiling for you, and a pretty girl in silk next to you, with flowers in her hair.

And they’d want you to be happy together, Rem.

I know who she is.

But she seems like a nice girl.

Give her a chance. Give both of you a chance.”

Remin was silent for so long that Miche finally relented and poured him half a cup of wine, setting it beside his hand with a click of metal on stone.

“Why me,”

Remin said finally, looking over the dark river.

“Why should I have all that?”

“Well one of us should,”

Miche drawled.

Remin gave a bark of laughter, shaking his head as he looked up at the sky.

The stars in the vault of heaven looked down upon them, each one offering its own gate to paradise, reached only through great struggle and suffering.

Victorin would surely be there.

“And another thing,”

Miche added.

“Tomorrow night.”

“What about it?”

“Get her wet and take it slow,”

Miche advised, and made Remin choke on his wine.

“No one’s going to be witnessing the consummation.

Make sure she’s relaxed and enjoying it, don’t just jam it in.”

“Miche.”

“The Knights of the Brede have a reputation to uphold,”

the knight said sternly, jabbing a finger at his lord.

“It will be a tricky business for an unproven knight, but you’ve always been good at improvising.

Let me tell you about that seamstress in Merelde…”