Freia had no talent for needlework. Prospero had never taught her more than simple knitting and a straight seam, and that had sufficed to construct such clothing as she bothered herself to make: for, lacking sisterly examples of vanity and covetousness to prompt her, and Prospero being mostly indifferent to her appearance, her clothing was functional and served no grander social purpose than to conform with her father’s standards of modesty. She had not touched a needle in Montgard; the maids of the house sewed, and a maid brought her some gown or other to put on each day. The ladies of Montgard appeared to Freia to be stitching spider-silk on scraps of fog—whitework was all the fashion then—with invisible stitches. Several of the ladies, and the mischievously unhelpful gentleman beside her, set at once to remedy her ignorance, and Freia was endowed uncomfortably with some spider-silk (that would tangle, no matter how careful she was, and then it became dingy from her fingers) and a scrap of fog (that soon lay limp and unresisting, resigned to mutilation) of her own.
The tall young gentleman beside her on the bench leaned over to examine the fate of the doomed embroidery, offering observations on the music being played or encouragement and critical remarks at nearly every stitch she took. Meeting little response to these forays, he took up another subject: herself. He asked her if she liked the mountains, if she had seen this or that outlook or view, did she find the park at Montjoie agreeable, if she would be long there, if she liked her uncle, if the house in the city was as richly furnished as they said, if she knew this one or that one who lived here or there, if she cared for another one at all. Freia drew away from him, edging toward the very end of the seat, her head down, staring at the wretched shred of fabric in her hands; she whispered a few yeses and noes at first in reply to his prattle and then answered nothing, finding the probing unanswerable. When she gave no answers for most of the questions he began asking others, closer to the bone. When had she come to Montgard, was it really only last winter, where had she lived, and with whom, how old was she, where was she from, was her father yet living, was the Prince her guardian.… Under cover of the songs, all insouciantly suggestive or throbbing with lovelorn lamentation, his questions bore at her.
“Whatever are you about there, my dear brother?” Lady Ofwiede interrupted the young man, after singing a parting-song and finding his voice an unsuitable burden. “Have a care, Heiko, you shall compromise the maid if you will flirt with her before us all.”
“That’s true,” said Heiko, who was become annoyed, “we ought to leave and flirt privately; I might have better success. Or perhaps I shall go flirt with the fountain; it would have more to say.”
“The essence of flirtation is conversation,” said Lady Ofwiede, laughing at his consternation. “If the maid says nothing, your flirtation is a failure, Heiko dear. Or do her eyes speak?”
The young man leaned closer still to Freia, pushing his face in her averted look. Freia jerked back, away from his breath, his heat.
“They are lowered with proper modesty,” said Heiko. “I suppose some would consider that a recommendation.” A few of the young men laughed loudly, among the mock-protests of several ladies.
“Dear girl, it is most incorrect to sit among us saying nothing,” said Lady Ofwiede. “Perhaps His Eminence has neglected the social arts—it would be like him, I fear his mind is too much on higher things. Come, converse with Heiko! It is a great honor that he should sit talking only to you, you know.”
The whole company laughed at this, and Freia shuddered before the noise. She felt Heiko beside her, threateningly near; the area was thick with voices and bodies; she was trapped. Her heart began to hammer in her breast. The blood seemed to have left her hands to become numb and ice-cold; she was hardly able to breathe.
“Good Lady Ofwiede,” said an older woman, “this seems rather a dull pastime; let me sing next, instead.”
“No, no,” insisted Lady Ofwiede, standing and walking gracefully across the lawn to stand over Freia and her brother, “conversation is a noble art, and it is a seemly one for us all to practice. Now, Heiko, put your question to the maid.”
“Why, sister! But I have not spoken to her uncle yet,” said Heiko, prompting more shouts of laughter.
Freia was rigid, still.
“All right: pretty maid, tell me all about yourself,” said Heiko, surly at his sister’s badgering.
“Now you must answer,” Lady Ofwiede commanded.
The hammering heart in Freia’s chest became erratic: it skipped, fluttered, and then raced faster. A boiling heat began to rise in her body.
“What’s your name?” asked Heiko, when Freia said nothing.
“Say your name now,” said Lady Ofwiede. “It cannot be a secret, child!”
“Where do you come from?” asked Heiko, folding his arms and letting his annoyance show openly, no longer veiled with flirtatious courtesy.
“To that you should reply with your birthplace,” Lady Ofwiede said. “Don’t sit dumb as a stone, dear. Speak.”
“What’s your father’s name? Where lie his estates?” asked Heiko, throwing his hands in the air and looking round at the others for support in his exasperation.
The gesture flashed past Freia, and the paralysis that had seized her since the start of the inquisition left. She struck at Heiko with the hand that still clutched the dingy embroidery, rising to her feet and roaring “No!” with a voice of rage such as she had never used before in her life.
Heiko, whom she had punched in the eye, rocked backward, and Freia shoved him and the bench over as he shouted “Hey!”
Lady Ofwiede was crying out something shrilly, and two or three others had risen to catch hold of Freia. But they stopped: Freia had turned on Lady Ofwiede, fixing her with such a look of hatred and anger that Lady Ofwiede was struck dumb and motionless by the sight.
Freia was quivering with fury, and with fear, and with consciousness of her own utter impotence here. She could not set on the woman and the man both; some part of her mind was conscious of Prince Gaston, of her being in his power and these being somehow favored by him. She had no words in Tallamont or any language she knew to express her loathing and hate. Her heart beat once. They weren’t setting on her; she could flee.
“I never want to see or hear you again,” Freia whispered, the loudest she could speak with her throat nearly closed from emotion, and she ran, jostling she knew not whom, lifting her skirts and sprinting away from the place.
She ran, and she was sick once, violently, on a pile of clippings and twigs some gardener had collected, and then she ran again, hampered by the hated stiff, laced-up dress, away from the house and the garden and the barns, with a stitch in her side in no time for she had not run in ever so long now, uphill along a dusty lane with stone walls and low trees to either side, between fields of green corn and staked vegetable-vines and other things she did not see for running so hard, past people working in the fields, past a boy with two donkeys with empty baskets, her plaited hair untying and unbraiding and knotting as it bounced, as she ran and ran.
She could not run very far. The dress, the heat, and her own body limited her. There was an open woodland a half-hour’s walk up the mountainside from the house, and in half that time Freia was there, leaving the road and cutting across a pasture. She staggered. She caught at the trees to support herself as she crashed through the undergrowth, entering the wood. Her side hurt as if a hole had torn in it. Her mouth tasted foul. She pulled sweet-flavored leaves off a low bush growing on the verge and chewed them, spat, chewed more, spat again, and took the tinge of vomit from her tongue.
Her head pounded synchronously with her side. Freia stumbled over every irregularity on the ground, sticks, rocks, and roots, and blundered her way to a small stream. The road bridged it a stone’s throw away, but she didn’t know that; the stream curved and the trees and bushes were thick. Freia pushed her hot face in the water and drank, then, gasping, rubbing her side, sat by the stream and leaned against a tree-trunk among a pile of ferns.
Something had happened. That man’s questions. Like being in Landuc again, a prisoner. Like being tied and watched, while Otto asked questions and questions, while the sorceress Neyphile asked questions and questions. Her breath roughened. Questions. Startling her, her eyes filled with water and she began to weep, long slow voiceless gasps for air and hot tears. Questions. The man, leaning over her. Golias, and Ottaviano asking questions.
“No,” whispered Freia to the water. “No, no. No.” Questions. She closed her eyes, opened them, wiped her face on her sweat-soaked sleeve, then fiddled with the front-lacing on her bodice and untied it, loosening the outer gown to air her smock and the wilted underbodice. Cooler, better. She pushed the memory of questions away from her thoughts, but it would not go.
Had her uncle meant that to happen? Why had he sent her away? She hadn’t expected that; she’d begun to follow him out of the room where he had received his guests, and he had bidden her softly to go with the others. Had he planned that they would ask questions, though he did not? The man was like Ottaviano, watching and talking and pushing at her. Like Dewar, too; Dewar had prodded at her, but then he had stopped. Ottaviano had not stopped. Nor had Neyphile. Then Golias’s questions and violence. The questions, the same questions, again and again and again, and Golias. That woman didn’t look anything like Neyphile, but she was like her, so like her that Freia feared and abhorred her as much as she did Neyphile. She didn’t think she had ever met anyone before who was so like someone else. Gaston had said the people here weren’t like the people in Landuc. He had said she wasn’t a prisoner. He had lied. They were the same, the same people, the same questions.
Freia lay back in the ferns. She was away from them now. She was safe here. Her head thumped; her side ached when she breathed. She closed her eyes and tried to push aside all that had happened that day. Forcefully, she slowed her panting, calmed her pulse. The brook gurgled to itself thoughtfully. It was nearly like home.
The lowing of cattle and clanking of bells woke her some little while later, breaking a dream in which the brook’s bubbling had turned into a voice that had talked and talked in her own language, the language of Argylle, but said nothing she could keep on waking. The aches in her head and her side had gone. Freia lifted herself on an elbow in her crushed bed of ferns and looked around, disoriented: then she placed herself, and remembered. Where were the cows? She realized she could not be far from the road, along which animals were driven from one pasture to another, and she held very still until the noises of the cattle’s passage had stopped.
The sun was tilting through the trees, cooled from the white-hot of midday to a softer amber color. Freia splashed more water on her face and observed, a little distance down the brook’s meandering bank, that there appeared to be strawberries growing on its flood-steepened slope. On investigation, she found they were indeed fingertip-sized ripe strawberries, and she began picking and eating them, thinking of nothing but their sweetness melting in her mouth, her fingers busy and efficient as she browsed her way downstream. There was no next moment; there was no previous moment; there were berries, water, and the trees.
While she gathered berries, the sun’s hue deepened and the woods began to darken. Freia collected a last handful and sat back on her heels. For the first time, she considered what to do. Without a weapon—without even a knife—she doubted her ability to forage. There were a great many people hereabouts, but they never seemed to go into the forests, and Freia supposed that she could live there as she would at home. Her clothing was utterly impractical. She knew she was physically soft, and she dispassionately doubted her endurance; merely running here had winded her. But memory pressed her: the woman, like Neyphile; the man, like Ottaviano, like Golias. She shuddered. She would not go back.
A dog barked no great distance away: chasing round the animals in a pasture, she guessed. Then there came crashing noises. The dog was in the wood.
Freia almost disliked dogs, which there were none of in Argylle. Gaston’s dogs were all working dogs—war-dogs, hunting-dogs—heavy-jawed and hot-eyed, trained to obedience and, to her mind, parasitic. To have an animal kill on order, as the dogs did here, fouled the animal, to her thinking. The dog bashed about, making a strangled yelp-sound. It was quite near. Freia tensed. She rose to her feet swiftly, still cupping the strawberries in her palm, and her pulse quickened. Sticks, rocks—nothing big lay handy, and she seized a half-broken dead branch and snapped it off; it might do to keep the dog away. Flee, or fight?
The dog made another strangled yelp, and Freia stiffened, still undecided; and as she braced herself to receive the dog, it burst into sight among the ferns and trees. And behind the dog was her uncle, Prince Gaston: the dog was leashed and muzzled. Doubtless the noisy passage had been more his than the animal’s.
Gaston jerked the dog in and bade it sit as soon as he saw Freia. It obeyed, whining, panting. Freia fancied that she could smell it where she stood. She neither spoke nor moved, waiting.
“I knew not thou hadst left the house until we sat to dine,” Gaston said. “Tell me what befell, to drive thee forth.” His voice was neutral, without the undertone of storm she expected. Freia hesitated, unsure. “Some account have I had,” he said, “but to none shall I lay full truth but thine.”
Freia looked at the pulsing, breathing dog.
“I knew not how to find thee otherwise,” said Gaston. “Though Jan did say he saw thee running hither, as I crossed the field but now.” He waited, and urged her again. “Speak, lass. Tell me what’s passed.”
Freia watched the dog pant as she said, “You said it’s not like Landuc and it is.”
“How so?” Gaston prompted her.
The wood was becoming blue and dim. “What they say, how they are. Just like Landuc. Just like them.” She could not hear the bitterness in her voice, but Gaston did.
“What did they say?”
Freia felt the boiling feeling begin to simmer again. “That, that Ottaviano, that Neyphile,” she said. “You said they aren’t like that here and they are. Just like them. Questions. Questions and, and they won’t stop.”
“They shall go,” said Gaston.
“He wouldn’t go away. They wouldn’t stop.”
“They shall leave Montjoie tomorrow,” he said. “Which woman was it, Freia?”
“The one like Neyphile,” Freia said. How could he not know what she meant? Hadn’t he controlled them, their questions?
Gaston hesitated, then said a name, another, another, and Freia stopped him. “That one.”
“Lady Ofwiede.”
“She’s just like Neyphile,” Freia said, trembling. “Maybe she is. Maybe she came here.”
Gaston said slowly, “Nay, she’s not Neyphile. I’ve known her many years, indeed since she was a babe. She is not Neyphile, lass, though mayhap she hath some of her ways.”
“She talks like her,” Freia whispered.
“ ’Tis long since I’ve met Neyphile,” Gaston said, “and I do believe thee, that there’s a semblance I cannot see. Thou wouldst not say so lightly. The man who pressed thee, was it not her brother, Landsman Hinrick?”
Light had gone from the wood, leaving thick dusk.
“Come. Let us go to supper,” Gaston suggested, after a short silence.
Freia didn’t move. She couldn’t run away. He would follow her with the dog. Anyway, she was unready to support herself. But Golias’s shadow lay over the house; Lady Ofwiede had become entangled with the sorceress Neyphile in Freia’s mind, and she could not willingly go near them. “He’s there,” Freia whispered, half to herself. She wanted to go home, a very sudden, painfully deep desire to be safe and far away.
“Thou needst not see him again,” Gaston assured her. “He shall go. No harm shall come to thee, Freia, upon my honor.”
Freia was stone-still. Gaston had promised her that before. But he had sent her off to the garden with that man, and the others, the Neyphile-creature. But he promised to send them away. He might b
e like Otto, like Golias, after all. But she couldn’t escape him; she had met her limits today, and they were frighteningly near. She sensed he wasn’t going to let her stay here, alone; he would insist on her returning to the house, walling her in. He said she would be safe. Could she believe it? “Please don’t be lying,” she begged him, her voice quavering.
“I promise thee, Freia, I shall send away both Landsman Hinrick and Lady Ofwiede on the morrow. I promise thee, thou shalt not see them nor speak with them again. Doth my word suffice thee?” Was that firm, sharp note in his voice anger?
Freia made a small, frightened sound, which Gaston took for consent.
“Come then, lass, along to thy supper,” said Gaston, and he said something to the dog and started forward. Freia stood like a post until he touched her arm in the grey darkness. “ ’Twill be easier to follow the stream to the lane, than to beat the bushes by night,” he said. “Come, lass.”
Freia let him take her elbow and steer her before him. She still had her strawberries in her hand, warm now and damp with her sweat; she dropped them into the leaves and ferns. The dog panted hot breaths at her thighs, snorting from time to time. Gaston ducked under branches and stepped in the brook once, a sliding splash followed by a sigh. Freia turned away from the brook and pushed out of the undergrowth a few steps above the ford, where the brook flowed shallow and wide and the ground was marshy, even in summer. Gaston stepped from stone to stone—there was moonlight enough to see by—and came to her where she waited, passive with an air of despair.
“Come, come this way,” he said, and guided her along the road toward his house.
Gaston’s interview with his niece at nightfall in the wood had startled him, more for its incoherence than for anything said. He had expected a more vigorous accusation, a vengeful female tale of insult and offense, and instead Freia had flinched from him and said, in a voice that had disarmed him with its hollowness and fear, that they were like Ottaviano and Golias and Neyphile.
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 31