~o0o~
House Caudon stood three streets from the Great Hub and the House of Speakers in the Vocarle district. The white stone edifice rose four highly ornamented stories; to Ellais’s eye, it resembled a towering wedding cake. She, with her mother one step behind her (to block all escape, Ellais thought) was shown to a drawing room by an elderly manservant, and within a minute the Cindiese do Caudon appeared in the doorway, one hand firmly clasped round the wrist of her daughter, Taigna. From the look of things, Ellais reflected, Taigna was no better pleased than she at the engagement.
The older women greeted each other with uncomplicated joy. The girls curtsied dully, neither meeting the other’s eye. When the two mothers fell to planning, their daughters were silent, until Madame do Morbegon, lips pursed, broke off a discussion of veils to rap Ellais on the wrist and exhort her to make some conversation with her betrothed.
“For heaven’s sake, you ought to be excited! This is the day you’ve waited for all your life; if you do not wish to be a part of planning it, at least say something to dear Taigna.”
Madame do Caudon nodded her head, made imposing by a beribboned cap of lace and black lilies that threatened to pitch forward into her lap. “Tainey, my dear, why not take your—take Ellais out to the conservatory and see if you can agree about flowers for your bridal posies. I think they should each carry the same, don’t you?” The Cindiese turned back to Deira do Morbegon, and the two mothers were lost in discussion at once. Taigna rose from her chair and led Ellais to the back of the house and the large, draughty conservatory.
Ellais examined a pot of scentless flowers.
“Well.” Taigna’s voice echoed.
“Well. Are you...happy?” Ellais asked.
“Happy?” For the first time, Taigna me Caudon met Ellais’s gaze straight on. So far from being pleased, she looked furious. “Happy! I have made it perfectly plain to my parents for years that I had no wish to marry, at least not until I had finished my schooling, and perhaps a year or two of study at the University in Hadsilon. Happy to be married at nineteen, without so much as a first degree to my name? Are you mad?”
Ellais gaped. “A first degree? You want to be a scholar?”
“I always have. Papa promised me that I needn’t think of marriage until I had at least that, and then your brother dies and suddenly Papa and your father are in a great hurry to marry us off, lest one of us die and stall their plans to unite our fortunes forever. Mama is saying I must stop attending classes, that it’s not suitable for an affianced woman. Well I never wanted to be affianced, and I—”
“You don’t mind it’s me?” Ellais broke in.
Taigna blinked. “Is there something wrong with you?”
Ellais stamped her foot so hard that her dark curls danced around her face. “You don’t mind that we are both women?”
Taigna considered. “I suppose you might be rather less...intrusive than a man. But Mama says once we’re wed I’ll have to give up studying, so it hardly matters, does it?”
“If you’re Cindiese, oughtn’t you to be able to do as you like?” Ellais asked. A flower, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, came off its stem in her hand.
“When I’m Cindiese—but Papa may live for years. All that time, I’d be falling behind in my work.”
Taigna was not Ellais’s idea of a scholar; until now, she had assumed that all such were elderly men with braided white beards and heavy black robes, wandering through the corridors of the university with abstracted airs, or scurrying about Meviel to tutor the children of great families. Her own schooling had been intended only to make her literate enough to read romances, of which she had consumed many, and numerate enough to keep a set of household books.
“What can we do?” Ellais asked.
Taigna blinked nearsightedly. “Do?”
Ellais looked about her for a chair, saw a wrought-iron loveseat, and dragged her betrothed to it. When they were seated knee to knee, she leaned forward conspiratorially. “You do not wish to marry me.”
Taigna shrugged. “I don’t want to marry at all. If I must, I suppose you’re—”
“I don’t wish to marry you!” Ellais whispered fiercely. “I want to have a regular sort of life, with a man and babies and everything I ever expected. I know better than to expect romance, but at the very least I want the possibility that I might—I might—” Words failed her.
Taigna frowned, her sandy brows drawing together. “What are we to do?”
Neither had an answer for such a question. The two girls sat, knee-to-knee and dark head to light, considering, until a servant came to summon them back to the drawing room. When asked if they had agreed upon flowers for their bridal posies, Ellais suggested freesias at the same moment that Taigna asked for daisies, and the two mothers shook their heads and decreed roses and balm with ivy. Madame do Morbegon swept her daughter away with every assurance of kind wishes, echoed by the Condiese. Ellais parted from her betrothed with a look of despair.
~o0o~
Once the Writ of Exception had been granted and the engagement made public, neither Ellais nor Taigna could escape whispers or speculative nods when they went out. The girls paid formal calls, one upon the other, but their parents seemed determined to keep them from any sort of private conference, and neither girl wanted to commit to writing anything their mothers might take into their heads to read. As the day of the wedding drew near, Ellais me Morbegon spent hours making and rejecting plots to escape.
A fortnight before the wedding, she was invited to a musical evening with her father; Madame do Morbegon had no ear for music and pled a sick headache to stay home. Master zo Morbegon settled his daughter on a straight-backed chair next to Taigna me Caudon and vanished at once into the smoking room with the Cindon. As the rest of the company seemed happy to give both girls a wide berth and examine their relationship from afar, Ellais and Taigna had, for the first time in almost a month, the opportunity to speak as privately as one might against the din of a string quintet.
After courtesies had been exchanged, Ellais asked, “Have you any money?”
Taigna took up her beaded purse. “I have a little, I think—a few—”
“Not with you. At home. Have you any money?”
“Oh.” Taigna pursed her lips and considered. “Just enough for vails and pin money.”
“Have you any jewels you can sell?”
Taigna’s eyes opened wide. “Sell? But Mama would find out—”
Ellais shook her head. “Not if we run away.”
The cello hit a low, sustained note. “Run away?”
Ellais nodded. “I’ve already sent my maid out with some of my jewelry—I told her I needed it to give presents to the servants before I left home—and I have nearly five hundred senesti so far. That might last us, oh, a six-month if we are careful. If you have as much, that’s a year we could live before we needed to think of working.”
“Working? Where? And what? I don’t know how to—”
“You could tutor and I could—” she shrugged. “Sew, or wait at table, or...something. Not in Meviel, though. We’ll have to go somewhere else.”
“But how?”
“I know someone—”
Taigna raised an eyebrow. “A friend?”
“Not that sort of friend.” Ellais wrinkled her nose. “The stableman’s son. He’ll hire us a carriage, and we’ll go to Coustel, on the coast. And thence to Hadsilon, if you like, so you can study.”
For the first time in the weeks of their betrothal, Taigna’s brows went up instead of down. “Study?”
“It’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, but what will you do?”
“Not marry you.”
“As good as, if we’re traveling together,” Taigna said practically.
“We can travel as sisters.”
After a few moments’ serious thought, Taigna nodded. “There’s logic to it. If we can travel fast enough to avoid my father’s men; he’s s
ure to send someone.”
Ellais agreed. “Travel like the wind, and let it bear us across the sea to Hadsilon.”
When Master zo Morbegon returned to collect his daughter, he found the betrothed couple sitting quietly, attending to the music. He could be pardoned for believing, looking at the girls’ faces, that they grew daily more resigned to their marriage.
~o0o~
Four nights before the wedding, Ellais pled exhaustion brought on by the relentless demands of the dressmaker, and went early to bed. When Lilsa had finished fussing over her and left for the night, Ellais left off her die-away manner and hopped from the bed. She dressed in the plainest gown she owned, pulled a satchel from under the bed, and wrapped herself in a woolen cloak she had taken from a peg in the servants’ hall. Thus disguised, she went down to the mews.
The stableman’s son, true to a promise extracted from him earlier that day at the cost of five senesti, had a carriage and pair awaiting her. It was an old carriage with sprung upholstery and an unpleasant smell of cat piss, but it seemed sturdy, and the driver appeared sober. Within the hour, Taigna me Caudon had joined Ellais, and the carriage was rattling west toward the coast.
Taigna spent the first several hours in the throes of motion sickness made worse by the smell of the carriage, but finally fell sleep. Ellais, too excited to doze, went over her plans. They had between them a little more than fifteen hundred senesti, and that would not last them forever. Taigna would be a scholar, and earn her way teaching; but what could she do? All Ellais’s skills were those of a nicely raised young woman: embroidery and china painting and the recitation of epic poetry. As the carriage thumped along, she realized she didn’t even know how to make a bed properly. You tucked the sheets in somehow, but how to make them smooth, as they were in her mother’s house?
She fell asleep musing that elopements were easier in novels, and woke to the sound of voices. The carriage had stopped; could they be in Coustel already? A peek from behind the leathern curtain showed her that it was still night. The driver had come down from his seat and was talking with a man whose face was shadowed from the moonlight by a broad hat brim. A few coins changed hands and the driver walked away. The other man began to unhitch the horses from her carriage.
Ellais wanted to leap from the carriage and chase her driver. She had paid him good money, and now someone else was bribing him! And this other man, who was he? Caution kept her silent, which was good, for a moment later another man joined the first and helped unhitch the second horse.
“Whozzit zis time?” the newcomer asked.
“Coupla wommin, Tadde says,” the first one answered. “Probly got jewels and gold and—”
“And theys wommin,” the first one agreed. “Tie ’em horses up and less see what we got.”
Ellais looked around her for a weapon but found none. Taigna, asleep on the opposite seat, snored softly. The handle to the door rattled and Ellais acted without plan. She pushed the door outward, knocking the man off balance, and jumped out of the carriage, scolding as she came.
“Put our horses back immediately! What do you think you’re doing? If my—my sister and I don’t reach Coustel by morning. there will be immense trouble!”
The man stepped back a pace, evidently taken aback by Ellais’s excellent impersonation of her mother in the servant’s hall. She hoped that he might turn and run, but after a moment he grinned wide and grabbed her wrist to pull her to him.
“’is one got a temper,” he called to his mate.
“I certainly have, and if you don’t take your hands off me immedi—” Ellais was silenced by a backhanded slap.
“I say ‘is one got a temper,” he repeated. “Ai, Pol, I say—”
At the same moment that Ellais looked back at the carriage two things happened: Taigna, awake at last, began to scream, and the second highwayman lurched backward across the clearing. The first highwayman released Ellais’s wrist. His mate rose unsteadily to his feet and pointed into the shadows. A second later a third man—tall, wearing a hat which shadowed his face in the moonlight—stepped forward. He had a staff in his hands.
Taigna kept screaming.
Ellais’s assailant grinned, drew a long knife, and stepped forward to meet the new man. She knew too little about fighting to entirely follow what she saw, but she could say afterward that the new man had blocked the highwayman’s blow with one end of his staff before he swung the other end into the man’s gut. The highwayman bent double with an “oof.” The second highwayman had scarpered off with the carriage horses before his mate hit the ground. Their rescuer paused to deal the first man a knock to the head, then stepped forward to bow to Ellais.
“Good evening.” His eyes were dark, his smile polite. “I trust you are unharmed?”
Ellais was disconcerted by such manners here, now. Their rescuer did not sound like a courtier of the Hub, but neither did he sound like a ruffian from the Dedenor. Had she been asked, she would have said he was a gentleman farmer or a prosperous physician.
The man turned toward the carriage where Taigna, blinking, pale, and no longer screaming, peered into the moonlight.
“And down you come.” He lifted Taigna down from the carriage and set her beside Ellais. “I do wonder at your parents letting you travel through the countryside at night, all unprotected.”
Ellais opened her mouth to spin a story about a family emergency, but at the same moment Taigna vomited.
Their rescuer, looking down at the flow which had spattered his boots, grimaced. “An effective weapon in the short term, perhaps, but ultimately not compelling.”
He picked Taigna up, stepped over the mess she had made, and sat her on the side of the road.
“It appears your horses are gone and you are several hours ride from the city—I assume you are come from there? There’s a town some five miles that way—” the man gestured ahead on the road, “but perhaps you’d prefer to go back—”
“No!” Ellais and Taigna spoke with one voice. Ellais continued, “If we can only reach somewhere where we can hire an honest carriage.”
“Ah. That might be another ten or twelve miles ahead.”
Ellais raised her chin with resolve. “There is a moon. We shall walk.”
The man shook his head. “Ten miles in the dark, in city shoes?”
“If we must.” Ellais reached her hand to Taigna to help her to her feet. “Come, we’ll start walking.”
Taigna stopped. “Our boxes!”
Ellais shook her head. “We shall have to send back for them.”
“But my books! At least let me bring the most important.”
“Books?” their rescuer said. He sounded amused.
“Books!” Ellais was not amused in the least. “Taigna, do you want to carry a bag full of books ten or twelve miles?” But Taigna had already clambered onto the carriage and was unstrapping her satchel.
“Take this!” She tossed a thick tome down to Ellais. “And this one. And—”
The man caught the third book. “Philosophical Reflections Upon the Virtue of Familial Gems, with Particular Investigation into the History of Luck,” he read. “Well thumbed, too. It goes against the grain to permit two scholars to walk alone in the middle of the night. Permit me to escort you until you find a place that will hire you a carriage.”
“Thank you, sir,” Taigna said. “I am Taigna me Caudon, and this is—”
“I am her sister,” Ellais said quickly. She glared at Taigna.
The man bowed. “Vaun ha Tesne, honored to make your acquaintance.”
The three, each carrying one of Taigna me Caudon’s books, started down the road.
Ellais had been too optimistic about her shoes. In less than a mile, the soles of her “walking boots” had developed holes, and there was a growing blister on the inside of her left heel. Taigna began to limp sometime in the second mile. Vaun ha Tesne said nothing. Finally, when they had been walking for over an hour, Ellais sat by the side of the road and unlaced her boots
. “Better I walk barefoot.”
“There’s a shepherd’s cot a little way up that path,” Vaun ha Tesne said. “You might sleep in the darkest part of the night—see, the moon is setting—and start fresh in the morning.”
“We can’t,” Ellais murmured.
“We must,” Taigna returned. “Beside, who would think to look for us in a shepherd’s cottage? Ellais, my feet hurt.”
Ellais turned back to their companion. “How is it you know so much about this road and shepherd’s cots on it?”
“My family’s property is a few miles in that direction. Another thirty or forty feet ahead, past that shrub—aha, there is the cot.” Vaun ha Tesne held the lower branches of the shrub to permit the women to pass. “My horse came up lame a mile or two before I found you, so I was already resigned to walking,”
The cot was a small, square stone structure, mossy on the north side, with no sign of recent habitation by shepherd or sheep. Inside, it was unfurnished and chilly, but the reed roof appeared sturdy and there was room to lie on the packed earth. Taigna sat down at once, stretched out on the floor with her books piled at her head, and fell asleep.
“I’ll stay out here,” Vaun ha Tesne said. “Watch for badgers and highwaymen and such.”
Ellais nodded. She had not been sleepy until the possibility of sleep presented itself; now she was exhausted. “Thank you. I’m sorry I have been so suspicious. It’s only—”
“Two women traveling alone.” Ha Tesne nodded. “Sleep. I’ll watch.”
Ellais took only a moment to wrap her cloak around her, curl up next to her betrothed, and fall soundly asleep.
~o0o~
When she woke, the morning sky was milky white. Ellais stepped out of the cot and almost stumbled over Vaun ha Tesne, who sat with his back against the wall, breathing rhythmically. She noted creeping roses on the side of the cottage—that had not been visible in the moonlight—and a low stone fence on one side of the path.
“So what is it you and your friend are fleeing?” His voice was quiet and gentle. “If you tell me, I might be able to help you.”
“I cannot see how,” Ellais said. But she turned back to face him.
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