Isobel

by Chloe Garner

  “Whatever you do,” he said, “decide quickly. Things are going to change, soon.”

  “How?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “Some of that will depend on you,” he answered, then left.

  She spent several days at the king’s residence, just sitting with Aistin, quiet. Aistin didn’t say anything, for the first two days, but he hugged her when she arrived and when she left. The people from town and the surrounding areas came, in twos and threes, to pay their respects to the king and his remaining son. There was no body to burn, but they planned a ceremony, anyway. They burned a pyre at the sanctuary, laying it with Laukas’ clothes, the sail from his fishing boat, and the meat from his oxen, and the overseeing priest prayed. Aistin took her hand and held it tight in his, his face pale. She waited.

  The next afternoon as they sat in the main room of the king’s palace, Aistin drew breath.

  “I will be king,” he said.

  “Yes,” Andie answered.

  “They’re all looking to me to find a way,” he said.

  “Yes,” Andie said.

  “I don’t know how,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. He looked at her with a sharp anger.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’ll learn. You have to, so you will. I believe that, and so do they.”

  He looked away.

  “This isn’t what you were expecting, when you left your home in the land of summer,” he said.

  “No,” she said, sucking on her lip. “No, it wasn’t. But I’m here now.”

  “You sold amber to the trader,” Aistin said. She nodded. She’d been waiting for this. If anyone was going to take it personally, it would be him.

  “Why?” he asked.

  There were so many answers, most of them defensive. She’d searched out the words, but now they seemed to come slowly.

  “Laukas and I spoke once,” she said and paused. “About Elbing. And how he believed in justice.”

  Aistin nodded, the lifeline of a reference to his brother clear on his face.

  “I asked him what he thought the basis of civilization was, and he said bread. And I told him that you would have said belief.”

  Aistin nodded again, leaning forward in his chair.

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head.

  “I disagree.”

  “What do you think it is?” Aistin asked. She knit her brow and frowned.

  “Money.”

  He sat back.

  “So you would turn the stones that are sacred to our goddess into simple gold?” he asked.

  “Gold,” she said, “which then turns into horses, oxen, weapons, food. Timber for ships. Leather for armor and for clothes. Goats and pigs for food and milk. We’re spread too thin, here,” she said. “Men roam far and wide to farm and to hunt. It’s too easy for the hairy men to strike a few men, or for the sea raiders to take a few boats. If we make ourselves more dense, need less land and less sea to feed ourselves, and have better weapons and armor to defend ourselves, they can’t take us as easily. If our men weren’t out all year hunting and farming, but rather trained to fight, they could drive back the raiders, both on land and at sea. So I’m going to get the money that it takes to make us safer.”

  He looked at her for a long time, stunned.

  “You’ve never said us before,” he said after a long silence. She dropped her chin, surprised, then looked back up at him.

  “Isn’t that what you want?” she asked, trying to make him speak for a moment while she adapted to what it meant. This was home, now.

  “Of course, but… I…” He hesitated again. “I didn’t know.”

  She kissed him.

  It was a decision made and executed in the same moment. She had no idea what she was doing.

  He did.

  He grabbed hold of her like a drowning man, standing and pulling her against him, and then she couldn’t tell if she was getting enough air or not. He took a deep breath and let her mouth drop, rolling his forehead to rest against hers. He swallowed.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  “Ask me,” she said.

  “Ask you what?” he asked.

  “Ask me to marry you,” she said. He paused, his brow creased.

  “Okay,” he said. “Andromeda, will you marry me?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes.”

  He kissed her again.

  They were married under a flaming arbor at the harvest. Rafa tied their hands together, Isobel took Andie’s blindfold off, and the king placed a crown of oak branches on Aistin’s head. Galinda moved Andie’s small collection of possessions into the king’s residence, and they spent several weeks learning to be husband and wife before he started his next turn at the sanctuary. She visited him daily, and took frequent trips to see Isobel. The small kingdom pulled itself together from its losses, and the winter passed in sometimes-lonely isolation. Aistin was gone through the winter and partway into the dry season. Galinda kept her good company, but Andie missed sharing a home with Isobel. She did not get sick this season, and attributed it to the tiny life keeping her warm from inside her womb.

  Aistin returned in time for spring. He did his best to oversee planting, but the woodmen came unfrozen with the thaw and returned to their raids. Rafa led the military men, spending many hours at the table with Aistin and the king, talking strategy and tactics. It was clear to Andie how deeply Aistin missed his brothers, now, though she wouldn’t have guessed at a deep bond between them, before. There had been conflict, but the three men had been close in the odd, unspoken way of men.

  In the late spring, a trader came.

  He asked for Andromeda.

  In Greek.

  Galinda brought the man before Andie and Aistin and stood back as a crowd of staff assembled to watch. Never before in their collective memory had two traders come in the same year, and only a few could remember a merchant other than Saul.

  “I give you greetings,” Andie said, shifting. Her body was foreign to her, and nothing was comfortable, though no one could tell, looking at her, that she carried Aistin’s heir.

  “You are the woman Andromeda?” the man asked.

  “I am. Who are you?” she answered. The man gave his name, a combination of foreign syllables that glided formlessly over her. He bowed and she nodded.

  “And why have you come to us?”

  He stood and put his hands behind his back, one foot forward, with a flair she had seen from Saul dozens of times.

  “I bring marvelous goods for you to peruse, a great quantity of them, as I heard rumor of the wealth of this region.”

  It was flattery, quite simple. The king’s palace was smaller than her father’s house, and the population went about in work clothes. There was no upper class to speak of, and the king’s house was only remarkable in the kingdom for its size.

  “And where have you heard these things?” she asked. His eyes sparkled at her, somewhere between acknowledging she was in on the joke and enjoying the opportunity for show. Somewhere in there was a trader’s greed, but it had brought him, and she was grateful.

  “Oh, your fame is widespread. A land where they burn gemstones to keep warm in the winter,” he said. “A great many of us have searched, and the gods have smiled on me that I come to your courts.”

  Courts. She nearly snorted a laugh.

  “What does he say?” Aistin asked.

  “A great many pointless things,” she said. “He’s here to trade.”

  She toyed with the idea of making the man participate in a religious ceremony, or make some other idiotic indication that he was loyal to them, as so many chieftains had expected of Saul, but it would have only been for her amusement. And she needed to make the man very wealthy.

  Wealthy to the point that he would never be able to hide it.

  “Lay the table for dinner,” she said to Aistin. “Only what we would have had, anyway.”

  “But we
have a guest,” he said. “I won’t shame my household by being miserly.”

  She looked at the trader, with his well-crafted traveling clothes and his smooth smile, and for a moment she missed the road.

  “He believes we are poor and uneducated,” she said. Aistin shifted in his chair and grimaced.

  “How wrong would you say he is?” he asked.

  “Not much,” she answered. “But we have what he wants. What everyone wants. Let him start a rumor that we are sheep waiting to be fleeced, and the merchants will come beating down our doors to buy our amber. Once they’ve come this far, with the goods that we have the wherewithal to buy, they will not want to go home empty-handed. Next year, darling. Next year, I will make them pay for underestimating us.”

  “But we need weapons now,” Aistin said. Andie motioned to Galinda and the woman who ran the house, giving them brief instructions to prepare dinner.

  “Oh, I’ll buy everything he has to sell,” Andie said, turning to face Aistin so he could see the smile in her eyes. “I’ll just overpay. Handsomely. We want every trader with a pair of mules to set out toward us. And when they start leaving paths through our woods as they come and go, then they will find that bargaining me with me will cost them dearly. When there’s another merchant coming next week…” she shrugged, barely able to contain her grin. “I can command whatever price I choose.”

  “I don’t like you speaking of the goddess’ amber like that,” he said.

  “She sends it to our shores. I’m going to use it to protect the people who are loyal to her,” Andie said. “I’m going to grow a great nation out of them.”

  Aistin sat back in his chair.

  “Remind me not to go to war with you,” he said. She dropped her head, turning to face the trader again.

  “I certainly will,” she said in Sambian. She raised her head. “Invite him to dinner.”

  Aistin hesitated, then did so.

  “My husband the prince invites you to a meal,” she said. The trader grinned broadly and nodded.

  “He is most kind. We can talk business over our dinners.”

  She smiled.

  “Of course.”

  The trade was under-stocked in weapons, but she bought what he had, paying nearly ten times what they were worth, in the end. Aistin was impressed at how few stones it took to buy the man’s entire stock. Andie bade her time, eager for the rumors and the onslaught of men in search of the glowing-honey stones. Saul returned and left, staying with Isobel and Rafa. He said that the stones she had sent him with had drawn attention, and rued the fact that he would not have the trade route to himself much longer.

  “Won’t they trade with the hairy men as well?” Aistin asked one evening.

  “Of course,” Andie said, helping herself to another portion of meat. Her appetite was growing, and her feet were a memory.

  “We should forbid it,” Aistin said.

  “Doesn’t matter, as long as we have all the money,” she answered.

  Half a dozen men lost their lives over the course of the summer. Aistin anguished, standing with the farmers and bearing their gossip as best he could, feeling inadequate.

  Andie’s son was born in a maelstrom of sweat and pain and confusion, in the early fall. Isobel was there.

  They named the boy Elbing.

  Three weeks after giving birth, Andie’s cabin fever boiled over.

  “I don’t care,” she said to Galinda. “I don’t. Find a way.”

  “You aren’t allowed to ride, and you can’t walk,” the woman said, taking Elbing from Andie to change him. Andie was nursing him herself. She was only parted from him while one or the other of them slept.

  “I’m going out,” Andie said. “I want to go see Isobel.”

  Galinda sighed, hefting Elbing up onto her shoulder and bouncing him. The boy burbled softly into her hair.

  “There is a way,” Galinda said. “But if Aistin asks how you found out about it…”

  “One of the women in town told me,” Andie said. “Do it.”

  Galinda arranged for a pair of handsome, well-matched geldings from the stable and laid poles across their backs, making a sling for Andie between them.

  “They could crush you,” Galinda said as Andie made the awkward climb into the contraption.

  “I have sharp elbows,” Andie replied.

  “Or drop you,” came the follow-up. Andie peered over the pole behind her head. It was a long way down, on the huge Sambian horses.

  “I’ll be fine,” Andie said. “Give him to me.”

  She would have to work out a better solution for the weeks to come, but for now, she was content. The fresh, bracing air was like being reborn, after too many weeks in the house. Elbing curled up against her chest and went to sleep.

  They went down into the village, and the people there came out to watch as she went by.

  “Hail to the amber queen,” someone called.

  “The amber queen!” someone echoed. It picked up as she went along, and a pair of men came to take the heads of the two geldings, leading her far into the woods toward Isobel’s before letting her go and returning to whatever she had interrupted. Galinda beamed.

  The geldings made an easy pace to the clearing in front of Isobel’s home.

  Andie sat up.

  “Galinda?” she asked.

  “I see it,” Galinda murmured.

  The house was gone.

  All that was left where the grand structure had stood was a tumble of rock like they had recently shed down the mountain. It was no accident. It was if no one had ever lived there. Only the yard stood as testament that someone had domesticated this tiny section of the forest, and Andie knew the wilderness would reclaim the space quickly.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Galinda said. “It’s like…”

  There was a quiet shock of recognition in her voice. Andie heard it.

  “What is it like?”

  “It’s like how she came,” Galinda said. “How they came. One day, they say, she was just here. Before I was born.”

  “Who are they?” Andie asked. Galinda shook her head.

  “I never knew.”

  They stood and looked for a long time, and then, as the sun dipped below the increasingly-leafless canopy, they turned back. They reached the king’s palace near dusk, and a young man ran to claim the geldings.

  “Queen Andromeda,” he said. She wasn’t happy with it; they had all started calling her queen after she gave birth.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “They left a horse for you,” he said.

  “Who did?” she asked, wrestling her way out of the sling with some futility. Galinda came to take Elbing to help free up Andie’s arms. She sat on the front pole until one of the stablemen came and helped her down.

  “She said you needed a winter horse,” the man said, turning. Andie put her hands over her mouth as another young man led Iovanna out of the stable. She coughed a single sob into her palms.

  “She’s gone,” she whispered. “Isobel is gone.”

  Abigail

  They heard the screams, in the little camp, and came running. Cassiona had warned them that they were too close to the town, and that there was bound to be trouble if they stayed, but the fishing was good and the local women had money in their pockets. They’d stayed.

  Abigail, of the central Mara, betrothed of Jerome, daughter of Cassiona, was screaming.

  It wasn’t that she was in danger. She could handle herself, if the need arose, but this was worse than danger.

  The town boys, all of them bigger than she, had surprised her. They’d pushed her around for a bit, for the fun of it, and that had been fine. It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. The problem was when Titch got involved.

  The little puppy had only been weaned a few months before. He had no idea how long his legs were, or what to do when someone made him angry. No one had ever made him angry before. He’d gone
galloping into the midst of them, ferocious in his own soft, fuzzy way, and they’d turned on him. Abigail had marks on her wrists and forearms from the sticks they’d broken off the trees, and that was fine. Welts healed; even broken bones didn’t last forever. Titch’s first cry of pain, though, as he whirled and snapped at the boys, was more than she could bear. She charged in after him, but one of the boys had knocked her onto the ground. Another, seeing how much it upset her, motioned to a friend to hold her down.

  And they proceeded to beat her dog.

  She screamed.

  The puppy whimpered and then wailed as they refused to let him go, splitting open his soft puppy flesh with their switches and their hands and their feet. Abigail struggled, kicking and biting and clawing, and she got free a couple of times, but there were just too many of them, and they were too big. She was built for escape, not rescue.

  And then a women emerged from the trees like a storm, throwing the boys to the side one after another.

  “Go to,” she shouted. “Get.”

  The last of the boys stood his ground as his friends scrambled away. Titch had bolted for the trees at the first opportunity, but Abigail could still hear him crying, somewhere not far away. He hadn’t abandoned her.

  “I’m gonna tell my daddy,” the boy said, his fists planted on his hips. The tall, dark-haired woman stared at him for a moment.

  “He’s welcome to come discuss it with me,” she answered. The boy spat on the ground and muttered something. Abigail didn’t have to recognize the word to recognize the tone. It was a dirty accusation. She launched herself at him, balled fists and angry teeth. The woman caught her.

  “Go home, Andrews,” she said. “Before I turn her treatment back on you.”

  The boy spat again and kicked at the ground for a second, then turned and ran. The woman knelt and Abigail squirmed, wishing she wouldn’t get her pretty black hair on the ground.

  “Let me look at you,” the woman said.

  “Not so bad,” Abigail said, wiping her sleeve across her nose. The fabric came back bloody. She looked after Titch, where he’d gone quiet.