“The rabbit strangles?” she asked, a little taken aback by the matter-of-fact way he described it all.
“Or breaks its neck. Either way, you have a rabbit, and you don’t have to hunt for it. Most poachers work that way. It’s easy enough for even a woman to do. That’s why I thought you were a poacher.” There was amusement in his voice. “Most of the women I catch poaching generally try to buy me off with favors.”
“And you let them?” She tried her best to keep any accusation out of her voice, but she couldn’t help the resentment that crept in.
“Depends on how hungry they look.” Now he turned to look at her. “This is my duty, you know. I am supposed to keep poachers from hunting the woods bare to preserve the game for the landowner. As it happened, you are a skinny enough wench I thought you might need the meat. I don’t take anything they aren’t perfectly willing to part with. The law allows me to whip them, toss them in Sebastian’s dungeon for a few weeks, turn them in to the Sheriff of the nearest city or use my own discretion. Depending on the Sheriff, they might get put in the stocks, thrown in gaol, get a branding on the face for rabbits or lose a hand for a deer.” He turned his attention back to the horse and the trail. “Generally I don’t actually catch the poacher, I only find the snares.”
She was shocked into silence by the litany of punishments. She’d had no idea…
“How often do you turn poachers in to the Sheriff?” she asked, finally.
“Never,” came the laconic reply. “It’s almost half a day’s ride to the city, and longer than that to walk, since I sure as hell would not be putting a poacher on a horse. It’s too much trouble. Sebastian’s dungeon is not an option. Easier to just to give them a couple stripes and scare them off, or use my — discretion.”
“I see.” She was torn. If the law was that harsh, shouldn’t it be changed? And how was he excused for taking advantage of women who were desperate and hungry enough to take the risk of poaching? But if the law presented a worse punishment, was he doing them a favor by allowing them to negotiate with the only thing they had to trade?
“Take this fellow — I know him by his knots. He’s been setting snares here for six years, and all I ever see are the snares.” He chuckled. “I have to admire him for his cleverness and stealth, even while I despise him for stealing from the landowner.”
Put that way… her thoughts were a tangle. Things had seemed so black-and-white before!
“It’s really no different from someone stealing a sheep, or robbing apples from an orchard,” Eric went on. “This forest belongs to someone. So do the things in it. If it were wilderness and unclaimed, that would be different, but it’s not. We even allow people to collect windfall wood, nuts, berries and mushrooms, and there are damn few landowners who will do that. There are places where the penalty for picking up a few sticks for your fire is the same as taking a hare.”
“Oh” was all she managed to say.
“Heh. Not so cut-and-dried anymore, is it?” he asked, turning to look at her again, a sardonic eyebrow raised. “I’m not a good man, Mademoiselle Beauchamps. I don’t pretend to be. But I don’t take a hot iron and press it into a man’s forehead because I find him with a dead rabbit.”
They continued on in silence for a while. Eric stopped several more times, bringing back handfuls of wire, and twice, a dead rabbit, which he stowed in a larger saddlebag. The mule behaved beautifully.
By now Bella was completely lost. If she hadn’t had their trail to follow back, she was sure she would never have been able to get out of the woods on her own. Finally, Eric looked up at the sun again and grunted. “Time to turn around,” he said. “We’ve covered a lot of ground, as much as I could have alone. You and that beast are both steady. If you promise not to try to go haring back to the city, you can ride out alone any day you like as long as you keep to the road. I don’t suppose you’d want to come out with me again.”
“Looking for snares?” she asked. “It was…interesting. I learned a great deal that I didn’t expect to.”
“Which is a polite way of saying no?” There was something underneath the irony. She couldn’t tell what it was.
“Which is a polite way of saying ‘when I get an astride saddle,’” she found herself saying. “I felt as if I was going to fall off more than once, and if you are going to cover rougher ground than this was, or at a faster pace, I don’t want to try and keep up on this thing.”
He turned to look at her with a face full of astonishment, and laughed. “Well, Mademoiselle Beauchamps, you do surprise me! I can see why Sebastian finds you interesting!”
Sebastian finds me interesting? “Isabella,” she corrected. “We are going to be thrown together for the next three months, so I do not see a point in being formal.”
“Isabella, then.” He looked up at the sky. “If we press on at a good pace, we should be well in time for supper.”
Sapphire fussed over her until she changed into one of the new gowns and allowed the Spirit Elemental to put her hair up. Eric had given the rabbits to one of the other Elementals with instructions to put them in the pantry, and she was already planning what to do with them.
When she went down to supper, both Eric and Sebastian were already there and already eating. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. Eric shrugged; Sebastian looked apologetic.
“I skipped dinner and Eric was as ravenous as a winter-starved bear,” Sebastian said. “I didn’t think you would mind.”
“You are the master here,” she reminded him. “You are the one who sets the rules.”
Eric snorted, but said nothing.
“It sounds as if that mule Eric found is perfect for you,” Sebastian continued, as the servant set down the first course in front of her.
“I think it’s safe enough for you to go harass the beast and see if she’ll bear your presence,” Eric put in. “Then you can go riding with the girl. Do you good to get your nose out of a book.”
Sebastian made a face, but did not look displeased. “You sound like Father.”
“And this is a surprise, why?” Eric countered. Sebastian looked away.
Eric quickly finished eating and shoved away from the table. “I have a lot of territory to cover tomorrow,” he said. “The earlier I start the better. I was glad to see you aren’t some sort of hothouse flower, Isabella.”
“My stepmother would say I am more like a weed,” she responded in the same spirit. “Good night, Eric.”
Sebastian listened to this exchange with astonishment. “You two are getting along, then?” he asked, tentatively, when Eric was gone.
“Let’s just say there seems to be a truce,” she replied.
He smiled. “Well, then, it’s good news all around today. The Godmother has made arrangements so that you can write to your father and get letters in return.” He reached under the table and brought up a little carved wooden box, just about the right size to hold a folded and sealed letter. “It was on condition that he wouldn’t reveal anything about this, of course. But it seemed heartless to keep both of you so unhappy when something so small would help.”
She took the box in both hands, and found that those hands were shaking. “I — don’t know what to say — ”
“I know this still doesn’t change the fact that — well, we don’t know what is going to happen to you, and won’t be sure for more than two months. You’ve only been here a fortnight. But — ” he shrugged helplessly “ — I think this will make you a little happier. Or him less worried, which will make you a little happier. I hope.”
“I think you are absolutely right,” she replied. She opened the box. It was empty, and would hold no more than a few sheets of paper. “How does it work?”
“He has the same sort of box. If either of you puts a letter in yours, it will turn up in the other one. You can only use it once a day. That’s how it works. I don’t know why it works. It might use Spirit or Air Elementals, or something else entirely. I didn’t go poking around at it.” He
grimaced. “It’s not a good idea to pry too deeply into Godmotherly magic. It tends to bite. It doesn’t like being meddled with.”
“I can imagine. Has Father got his box yet?” she asked, excitement filling her. Finally! She had so much to ask him, to tell him —
“I’ve no idea, but I am sure that the mirror will show you,” Sebastian pointed out. And when she hesitated, he waved a hand at her. “Go on, you might as well go. You are just going to sit there quivering, wanting to see, if you don’t.”
She scarcely waited for him to finish speaking before she ran off with the box. Literally ran. The need to finally talk to her father was a terrible ache in her, a literal, physical ache.
She reached her suite and ran to the table, uncovering the mirror with trembling hands. The mirror seemed to respond to her urgency, clearing immediately and showing her father at his desk, a box identical to hers sitting in front of him. He was staring at it with a strained look, as if he was torn between hoping it was what he had been told, and afraid that it was some terrible hoax.
She tore open the drawer of the desk in a frenzy, getting out paper; she practically spilled the ink in her haste to dip her pen and start the letter, and she didn’t even think about what she was going to say. She just poured it all out onto the page, page after page, how sorry she was that she was causing him all this trouble and grief, how much she apologized for putting herself in this situation, how she missed him, how she was watching him in her mirror, what the Godmother had told her, what Sebastian had told her, that she was all right so far —
It wasn’t terribly coherent, and it was spotted with ink blotches and a few tears when she had finished everything that would fit into the box. She folded the pages — written on both sides — and put them inside, closing the lid and holding her breath.
In the mirror, her father’s box suddenly glowed, a soft yellow light.
He started, and wrenched it open.
He pulled out the pages — which, so far as she could tell, were hers! — and began reading them, racing through them the first time, then reading them more slowly a second time, and then going over them practically word by word the third time. His face was streaked with tears before he was through — as was hers — but he was smiling, as well.
He looked up — and the mirror view moved so that he was looking straight at her — and blew a kiss into the air, as he used to do when she was very small and he was going off to the warehouse for the day.
Only then did he take pen to paper himself, and slowly, carefully, as was so very typical of him, begin his reply.
She watched and waited, hands clenching a handkerchief that she had somehow gotten hold of, as he wrote. Like her, page after page; like her, on both sides. Finally, he finished, folded his missive carefully, kissed it and put it in the box.
Her box glowed. She snatched it open.
She went through three more handkerchiefs, crying, as she read it. Certain things stood out more than others.
There was, of course, more, much more. There was a great deal of reassurance that she had not done anything wrong. A wry reminder that things would be entirely different if she had disobeyed him, but she had had his express permission to visit Granny whenever she wished, and that she had made her way home after darkness had fallen several times that he knew of. That she did not need forgiveness, since she had done nothing wrong.
It was everything she had hoped to hear, and had feared she never would —
It was everything she needed to hear.
And finally, the admonition that he wanted to hear what her day was like, every day, no matter how trivial it seemed, and that he would tell her the same.
And then a final postscript, after the salutation Your loving father.
She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
So she did both.
Sapphire had insisted that she have a long hot bath before she went to sleep. The Elemental even snatched away her nightgown and pushed her toward the bathing room. When she woke in the morning, she realized why. Her legs hurt.
Of course they hurt, she scolded herself. You’ve never spent that long in a saddle before. An hour or two at most, nothing like that entire afternoon, and in the cold, as well!
She really didn’t want to move, but she knew that the only way to get her legs to stop hurting as much was to get up and start stretching. In fact, it hurt so much that she suddenly realized that her wounded foot had healed much, much faster than she had expected it would and had not been bothering her for days.
Was that a good sign, or a bad one?
She forced herself out of bed, now full of the urgent need to get to her mirror and try to speak with the Godmother. Sapphire was right there with some of the liniment that she had made yesterday, and it helped tremendously, enough so that she could lean down, and despite Sapphire trying to prevent her from doing so, she undid the bandages on the bitten foot and examined it critically.
To her intense relief, the bite marks were still there. Healing, but not unnaturally fast. So why didn’t it hurt?
Except — the moment she took the bandages off, it started to.
What on earth —
She examined the bandages closely, swatting away Sapphire’s invisible hands as she tried to reclaim them. Were there marks on them?
She narrowed her eyes and let them unfocus a little, because the marks were so faint otherwise that if she stared too hard they all but disappeared. There were marks on them. And they looked like letters and figures, the same sort of things that were written within the circles on the floor of Sebastian’s workroom.
“Are these bandages magic?” she demanded of Sapphire, allowing her to reclaim them at last.
Sapphire didn’t answer until she had gotten the foot rewrapped — and the pain vanished again. Only then did she pick up the slate to reply. “Yes,” she wrote. “Duk.”
“And they were supposed to keep my foot from hurting?” Well, at least now she wouldn’t have to bother the Godmother.
“Yes.”
She sighed, and wished she could ask him for more, to wrap her legs in…but no. He had already told her that magic was difficult and expensive in that way. She wondered just what the bandages had cost him in effort.
“Well, all I can say is that I am grateful to him. And I am glad I made this liniment smell as pleasant as I did.” With a suppressed groan, she got out of bed and this time allowed Sapphire to help her dress.
She was feeling more herself at the end of a productive morning in the stillroom, with several things on Sebastian’s list completed, and more of the remedies most households needed restocked. She was still moving a little stiffly, though, as she went down to dinner, and found the Duke and Eric both there. Eric was, as she was coming to expect, almost finished with his meal. He didn’t seem to eat, so much as inhale, and she didn’t think she had ever seen one man put away as much food into so lean a frame in her life.
Sebastian looked alarmed at her stiffness, but Eric took it in and chuckled. “Riding astride would have been easier,” he said. “You put twice the strain on yourself with that unnatural position.”
“Oh, I know,” she replied with a grimace. “Every muscle told me about it this morning, and I actually did have a hot soak before I went to bed.”
Sebastian looked blankly at the two of them for a moment, then blinked and looked relieved. “Oh, you’re saddle sore! I’m sorry — ”
“It will work out. But, Eric, I would really rather not accompany you on an all-afternoon trek again until I’ve worked my way up to it.” She gave him a glare. “And you knew very well I was going to be hurting, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t even know you were going to make it past the gates,” he replied. “When you did, I didn’t know if you would make it as far as the game trail. Then when you did, well, I had work to do. A little soreness won’t kill you.”
“I am greatly tempted to throw something at you,” she said, crossly, but sat down instead and appli
ed herself to her dinner.
“In that case, I’ll get back to work in case you change your mind and hurl a plate at me.” He smirked at her, then got up and left the table and the room.
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