The Price of Blood and Honor

by Elizabeth Willey

  “There’s little to tell. I was wakeful, and I had gone to the roof to be cooler in the moonlight and breeze. But no breeze was there, and I heard thunder. I looked to see if lightning played in the hills, as it does in the heat, and I saw instead the movement of the water, dark in the light of the moon. It gathered itself up from the riverbed and more surged in behind it, until it mountained up, rushing forward at the same time with a rumble that moved the house around me. I was in Voulouy’s house,” she explained. “I saw the waters rolling over the city, and it so horrified me I could make no sound. I desired to fly, but fear held me fast, and I saw the mighty wave pass down through the city, tearing away houses and riverside, and onward to Ollol’s and the sea. Behind the wave the waters were higher; they rolled over the banks and flowed over the city high and deep, and the rest of it surely Scudamor has told you, Lord Prospero.” She shook her head. “I would forget that hour, if I could,” she said.

  “It came all at once, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “There was but one wave.”

  “Yes, the single great one, and thenafter it was as when the river is high with rain or snow: much water, but not in a wall.”

  A single blow sweeping through, altering the place. Prospero nodded.

  Odile was watching, dark by the door. Prospero glanced at her and then at Cledie. “Thy account’s of some help to me, and I thank thee for thy words.”

  “A sorry gift to give you, Lord, to welcome you. I shall be here, or near, if you need further words of me.” She smiled slightly at him, ignoring Odile, and opened the door and left, her step quiet.

  Odile closed the door. “Who was that?”

  “An Argylline,” Prospero said, “that I met once, that knew my daughter well, she said.”

  “But your daughter did not mention her?”

  “Nay,” said Prospero, and poured wine for himself and drank it all in a swallow.

  Gaston brought Freia the promised books from Landuc when he led his army of Montgard on the long march home from their snowy bivouac. They were glad to return; they had suffered fewer casualties than anyone had expected and they had been paid well for not doing much, by their standards. Their packs were heavy and their pockets light; most had already spent part of their wages on exotic luxuries and on mundane goods more cheaply had in Landuc than Montgard.

  The Fireduke had his trusted Captain Jolly purchase the books, and by proxy thus also acquired a golden brooch, formed as a flowering and fruited apple-bough, and a new cloak of fine Ascolet wool for his niece. The brooch had caught the Prince’s eye in the window of a goldsmith, beside the shop of a swordsmith whom he patronized for daggers and knives.

  After sending Jolly after it, Gaston had felt odd about the gift. He had never given his sisters such trinkets or indeed any particular presents; the impulsive giving of lavish, inventive gifts had been one of Prospero’s habits, long ago before Panurgus banished him. However, he thought it would please Freia. She liked the castle garden, found the espaliered fruit trees there both fascinating and unnatural. The brooch was handsomely made; it looked well closing the cloak. So he pinned it on the green- and fawn-flecked brown wool, had his squire pack up the cloak, and determinedly thought no more of it.

  At the Palace, when he inquired offhandedly when his nephew Josquin would be wed, the Fireduke was given to understand that the bride was presumed dead.

  “Prospero said the sea had her, and he would leave it at that,” the Empress told her brother-in-law. They strolled along an exterior gallery, a pleasant place for late-winter perambulation with its southern exposure and for private conversation in any season.

  “And there shall be no tomb?” The omission was more than discourtesy or insult; it was blasphemy. The girl was Prospero’s own, Panurgus’s blood through him, entitled to a place near the Well though her body be lost to the sea.

  “That is all he said. He made no arrangements. Prince Gaston,” the Empress lowered her voice, “you did not meet this Countess Odile.…”

  “I did not.” Something Dewar had once said, and the way he had said it, about Odile came to Gaston’s mind, and his hands prickled. From Princess Evote, he had learned that Dewar had fled the Palace the night of his sister’s drowning, the same day Countess Odile had arrived. The events could be interpreted a dozen ways.

  “A gracious lady,” the Empress said, “but—different.”

  “A sorceress,” Gaston said.

  “Well. They are never less than—different,” the Empress agreed. She changed the subject. “Jos is gone out to Madana.”

  “Aye, Admiral Bolete sailed with him aboard, Viola told me.” Viola had emphasized that the Prince Heir had incurred Imperial disfavor for neglecting to inform his father before leaving.

  “Yes. So much has happened in just the few days you were gone. That poor foolish girl. Perhaps it is just as well. I do not know what we were supposed to do for her, Marshal, that was not done—”

  “The failure,” Gaston said, stopping at the red balustrade and gazing across at the bulk of the New South Wing of the Palace, “was ours, not hers.” Absently, he studied the ornately carved pediment, the high, elegant windows of the ballroom, the patterned terraces, the gilded flames that adorned the roof. He had never liked the overwrought, unbalanced effect of the decorations on adornments on embellishments; Panurgus had erected it for Queen Anemone. Against the dingy snow, the building glared.

  The Empress said nothing.

  “We, all of us,” said Gaston, turning from the Palace and looking at the Empress instead—altogether a pleasanter sight—“are answerable for all, from her abduction onward; for any could have, had he chosen, exerted him for her benefit. What you’ve said is of a piece with the rest of’t: that all that could be done for her, was done; ’twas not. She was not protected. She was ill-treated; I’ve heard her mocked, then and now. She presented us no demands nor benefits of association, and we offered her naught because there was naught to be got from her. We of the Well pride ourselves on our power to shape the world to our requirements. All becomes what we would make it, and her we made nothing.”

  “You are very harsh on us,” the Empress said stiffly.

  “I include myself,” Gaston said. “Do you truly believe you did all needful?” He thought of Freia in the Palace: absent from meals, ignored by the servants, rudderless in her father’s stormy wake. He had not noticed either. She had been hungry, a Prince’s daughter in the Emperor’s Palace, and cold, a stone’s throw from the Well, and he had not noticed, nor had anyone else. It ought to be a scandal.

  “Obviously, you believe I did not. I admit the possibility of a lapse, although I made many attempts to bring her out. She was a sullen child; her own father said so.”

  “Perhaps bringing-out was not needed,” Gaston said. “I fault you not, Your Majesty. You’ve lived all your days in Court. ’Twere unreasonable to expect you to be other than what that life hath made you.”

  “Prince Gaston, I do not know which I find more aggravating: your arrogance or your condescension,” the Empress said. “You censure us for lacking something, and then say that we cannot but lack—”

  “Perhaps I should not include you, then,” Gaston said, “and limit my judgement to my siblings and peers.”

  “There you are again. There is not another man in Landuc as lofty as you, Fireduke.”

  He looked down at her; he was taller than she by the length of his forearm. “I hope that is not so, Your Majesty,” he said. Nothing would come of it, he thought; there was no reason to find fault now.

  Glencora stared up at him, perplexed as to what her response should be. Gaston held her gaze a moment, his attention elsewhere, and then, counter to protocol, began walking along the marble once more, leaving the Empress to lag a few steps.

  Gaston dined only once at the Palace, and he observed then that the Emperor was in a perpetual foul temper and that almost everyone was out of favor, including himself. Late winter storms were taking a h
eavy toll on the fleet and the countryside; diplomatic problems from every quarter of the wind were keeping Pallgrave and Baron Broul at one another’s throats with conflicting counsel and solutions; Josquin had gone to Madana without craving permission, which the Emperor would have been minded to deny; and, despite the subjugation of Prospero, the Well’s fire remained withdrawn and the coming New Year looked to be colder and wetter than usual. After Gaston dined with him, the Emperor desired the Prince Marshal to remain in Landuc. The Prince Marshal excused himself with a reference to the cost of maintaining the Montgard levies away from home, for so long, at such steep wages, and inquired whether Prince Herne were deemed in any way inadequate. Prince Herne, at the same table and in earshot, glowered. The Emperor ceded the point ungraciously, seeing that Gaston meant to leave and desiring to avoid both the indignity of losing an argument and the necessity of appeasing Prince Herne.

  The Fireduke bought his niece the cloak and the brooch and hastened back to Montgard as swiftly as his men could march along the Road.

  Freia tended toward solitariness. Her habits were silence, introspection or a kind of glazed emptiness that was neither inward nor outward, quick tense movements, and dislike of attention; she would sit in reverie for an hour together, right hand cradling left cheek. Her uncle understood enough of human nature to guess that whether or not they had been in her character before she came to Landuc, in Landuc these things had become ingrained as part of her desire not to be there, and now, as the snows of winter flew through Montgard, they were in danger of setting permanently and shaping her forever into a ghost.

  With the excuse of teaching her the language of Montgard, he was able to make her talk to him each day, or to read aloud as they sat before a fire while the wind outside drove bad weather down the valley to pasture. He had thought of getting her another tutor, but she was shy of strangers, barely speaking to even the household servants whom she saw every day. It would not do to force her; he supposed she would open in her own season. Besides, Gaston took pleasure in teaching her to make letters with a pen, to read the different scripts used around the area, and to compose in the forms adhered to for correspondence.

  Mistress Witham did not quite approve of a woman being taught reading and writing, but Gaston’s niece was exceptional and the housekeeper kept her mutters belowstairs, where Captain Jolly heard them and repeated them with amusement to the Prince. Curiously, there were (in Jolly’s hearing anyway) no debates on how the Prince, who had never shown family to Montgard in all the years he had lived there, had suddenly acquired a niece. Gaston had feared a little that the appellation might be made a synonym for “concubine,” but this never happened. Freia’s physical frailty and timidity were noted, Jolly reported, and it was generally taken that Gaston had removed her from some unfit guardian who had ill-used her.

  Gaston never mentioned the truth of the matter, and the fragments of it known to the men who had been in Landuc were sufficient to pad out the story and make Freia a figure of deferential interest and mysteriously romantic provenance. The Prince’s reticence, moreover, forestalled direct inquiry, and there it rested: his niece lived with him in the castle and watched the garden fill with snow when she was not bent over her letters or reading slowly from books or her slate to her attentive uncle.

  Freia learned quickly; she heard words once and remembered them, and her ear distinguished between the accents of Gaston’s servants, Montgard’s merchants, and the knights and landsmen who came to the house. Gaston praised her aptitude when he realized how far she had gone by midwinter.

  “It’s nothing but parrotry,” she said, shrugging, making little marks with her chalk. “Surely anyone can learn fast when it’s all he hears.”

  “Most take longer.”

  Freia began to say something, and stopped herself and lowered her head instead. The sunlight falling from the solar’s small-paned windows sparked in her hair. She wore it in two beribboned braids, the local style for unwed maids. It made her look very young.

  “I’ve a new book for thee,” Gaston said, changing the subject and taking the book from the drawer beside him. “ ’Tis from Sir Blanont’s library. I recalled he had it and borrowed it.” As he spoke, he capped the ink-bottles and put his pen aside. Freia watched him set the book on the cleared desk: a thick red-leather-bound manuscript, triply clasped. Gaston unfastened the clasps and gently opened the book.

  “Flowers?” Freia said.

  “An excellent herbal, with another book bound in on husbandry and farming. But this first hath many plants. ’Tis a famous work, by the bye; I’ve Bonlest’s own copy at Montjoie,” Gaston added, and told her about the surgeon Bonlest who had made the book two centuries before at the Prince’s commissioning, an herbal of all the plants in Montgard and nearby.

  “Papa had books about flowers,” Freia said, the light in her face fading. “He used to let me look at them. I liked them. They were pretty books. From all the worlds, he said, and they told all about all the plants. He burnt them with his other ones. But they weren’t sorcery. He burnt all the books.”

  Gaston paused; he could think of nothing to reply to this. “ ’Tis arranged seasonally,” he said, passing over black close-written text of dubious medical value. “Here, the plants of spring. Hm, ’tis not so fair-made as mine. This is an astel.”

  “Astel,” Freia said, softly, experimentally.

  “That’s also a maid’s name.”

  She nodded and wrote the word down on her slate. Astel.

  “ ‘She bloometh in the snow,’” Gaston read in an undertone, “ ‘and the root is of good nourishment ere much foliage appeareth.…’ Do thou read. ’Tis ill-written and some words will be new, but practice is good for thee.”

  Freia peered at the text and began reading haltingly. Gaston listened and corrected her sometimes, praised her as often, and helped her discern the words.

  Page by page, spring went in review before them in the thin warmth of the midwinter sun.

  17

  THERE ARE FEW CHOICES OPEN TO a person believed dead, no matter how powerful or insignificant one is. All of them sum to one of two ends: to continue as dead, cut off from those living, be they loathed or beloved, who are familiar with one’s countenance and manner; or to reveal the optimistic or embarrassing error, either as soon as the error is apparent or later at one’s leisure, perhaps after other business more conveniently accomplished dead than alive is brought to fruition. Allowing oneself the luxury of attending one’s own funeral and revealing oneself there is stressful for loved ones and enemies alike; the latter may seize the moment and attempt to rectify one’s condition to conform with popular report. On one’s reappearance, no matter when it occurs, one’s friends assume the uncomfortable onus of having to return small keepsakes from among one’s belongings and are burdened further by uncertainty as to whether their eulogies or jeremiads on one’s departed, now revenant, character will find their way to one’s ear.

  If one is believed dead as a result of a suicide attempt, the situation becomes more complex, because one has clearly, if ineptly, expressed a preference for a state, and one has not quite succeeded in attaining it. This is why it is best not to leave a note.

  If one’s suicide attempt was, rather than a cri de coeur for succor in one’s darkest straits, a determined and wholehearted act of sincere self-hatred, one is faced, on failure of the suicide, with all one’s former problems again, as well as with the difficulty of being supposed dead.

  Some are enlightened by their near-death ventures and go on to accomplish feats hitherto beyond their abilities; others are weighed by a further sense of failure and incompetence. Some of the latter make sure of success and have another go at death, and others lose their taste for death as well as for life and endure in a state partaking of both.

  The Fireduke’s niece was burdened, in her continued life, by a feeling that she was not allowed to try death again. She had done her best and had distinctly felt certain that she had perished, yet so
mehow she had not, and now the life that animated her felt borrowed and ill-fitting, remote from her own desires. She had been kept among the living by heroic and selfless efforts by someone whom she did not entirely trust and for whom she felt neither liking nor disliking. She did not know how it was that Gaston had found her and revived her, but he had done so, with the kindest intentions. She was now obligated by the generosity shown her. Like the food she had been served at the Emperor’s table, it was not at all to her taste, yet taste she must, and chew, and swallow, and digest the stuff and live on it, no matter how it stuck in her throat and roiled in her bowels.

  Unpalatable though the thought of it may be, the most un-welcome of viands or the most unwanted of lives may, by dint of great effort, be made more attractive to the reluctant recipient when a knowledgeable and benevolent hand seasons either.

  Thus Prince Gaston chivvied Freia gently, coaxed her with outings and books, and tried to teach her draughts. She was very bad at draughts, but better at other stormy-day games, and he allowed her full liberty to ride and roam. He improved her seat on horseback and presented her with a gentle white-socked mare and maps and directions, trying to assure her that she was no prisoner. He taught her the use of his Map of Pheyarcet and its companion Ephemeris and let her pore through them trying to find her home, but she found nothing that seemed right and nowhere she wanted to go.

  The Countess of Lys, on the morning after her lying-in, dictated three letters to her clerk. The first was to the Baron of Ascolet, who had ridden to Ascolet some sixteen days previously to go round the wool-markets and see his people after waiting out most of the pregnancy within an arm’s length of his wife. The second was to the Emperor Avril, and the third was to Lord Gonzalo of Valgalant.

  In the afternoon she composed an additional letter to the Empress Glencora, and all the letters were much the same. The Countess of Lys had been lightened of a healthy girl-child, on the night of the New Harvesters’ Moon. The girl would be presented at the Shrine of Stars in Champlys and named Cambia on the next suitable naming-day.