by David Drake
“You look very well, Aunt,” Loreilei replied.
“‘Aunt,’ is it?” Mahaut said. “You only call me that when you want something from me, Loreilei. And how are you, Frel?”
“Very well, Land-heiress,” the boy replied, using her formal First Family title. “Your grace, we come to ask you for some advice.”
“‘Your grace’ from you, Frel. Alaha Zentrum. All right, then,” said Mahaut.
Suddenly Loreilei reached out and took Mahaut’s hands in hers. “Oh, Mahaut, Frel and I are in love. We want to get married. He’s asked me.”
Mahaut didn’t say anything for a moment. “I see,” she finally said. “I would have thought he might ask your father and mother first.”
“You know what my father would have done if we had talked to him, especially if Frel had gone alone to see him.”
“But I want to, your grace,” said Frel earnestly. “That’s why we’ve come to see you. Could you put in a word?”
“Pave the way, you mean?”
“Yes, Land-heiress. Please.”
Loreilei’s father was Edgar’s brother, Hammond. He was the youngest of the Jacobson sons. He’d traveled all the way to Lindron to find a wife from a First Family, which he had in Loreilei’s mother, Adele, and to receive Zentrum’s blessing on the match. This was how things were supposed to be done among the Firsts. Mahaut had always considered that it was the fact that, as third brother, he would inherit very little that made Hammond such a stickler for society protocol. Position was his greatest possession. Yet she knew the marriage between Hammond and Adele had turned out to be a happy one, and Hammond, for all his stuffiness, had a good heart—unlike his brother, her own husband, Edgar. Edgar might seem to be a good-natured man, or at least an entertaining man, on the outside, but anyone who knew him well would soon conclude that there was little more than a void of petulance and malice on the interior.
“No, we couldn’t do it, Auntie,” Loreilei replied. “We talked about it, and we couldn’t do it.”
“Loreilei, child, have you even considered what this would do to your status?” Mahaut said.
“I don’t care about that,” Loreilei answered defiantly.
“Well, you ought to,” she said. “For Frel’s sake.”
“You married in from a military family, Aunt.”
If only you knew how much I regretted that moment of bad judgment, she thought.
“That’s true,” she said. “But there’s a difference. Do I have to tell you?”
“Because you were a woman marrying a Jacobson man?
“Yes, Loreilei, that’s what I mean,” she said. “But it isn’t just that.”
“She means that I’m a barbarian, I suppose,” Frel said, his face reddening in a blush—all except the scar upon his forehead, which now stood out lily white.
“No,” Mahaut replied. “Josiah Weldletter has formally adopted you, hasn’t he?”
“He has,” Frel said. “And I adopted him,” he added defiantly. “I’ve made him an honorary Remlap.”
Mahaut smiled. “And you did him an honor. He knows what that means to you.”
“Then why can’t we—”
“Because you’re both fifteen,” Mahaut said.
“I could get married at twelve!” said Loreilei.
“But you can’t receive a dowry until you’re sixteen,” Mahaut said patiently. “It’s right there in the Edicts for First Families.”
Perhaps you should listen better in Thursday school, niece. What else is there to do there? It’s not as if you can decide not to attend.
“Do you think my father wouldn’t—”
“Child, he can’t,” she said. She rose and reached out to take both their hands in hers. “I know how it feels. It seems like you’ll die if you have to wait, that you’ll explode like a rocket. You’ve probably been together by now?”
Loreilei’s skin coloring was too dark to show a blush, but her quick intake of breath told Mahaut all she needed to know. “Lots,” she said weakly.
“And you’re being careful?”
“Of course,” Frel said, a trace of indignation in his voice. “I get the best riverdak skins from the Delta. The apothecary in Hestinga stocks them special.”
“Perhaps more than I needed to know,” Mahaut continued.
“Yes, your grace.”
“But a marriage isn’t sleeping together. Bones and Blood, sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with that. You have to look out for each other. And you have to be able to look out for each other. Look, you love each other, don’t you?”
“Yes, very much, Aunt.”
“Then it won’t hurt to wait. Give it a year. Turn sixteen, both of you. Loreilei will be able to legally receive her dowry. What are you thinking of doing, Frel?”
“I don’t know,” the boy answered sheepishly. “I like civil engineering. My father’s friend Reidel might give me a start.”
“I’m familiar with Reidel,” Mahaut said. “And Colonel Dashian, who ought to know, says he’s the best.”
“So you see, we could make do if—”
“Frel, engineering is all about glyphs and numbers. You can’t do that kind of work without finishing school.”
Neither replied for a moment, and Mahaut was beginning to think she’d won her point.
Then Loreilei spoke up in a disappointed tone. “We thought you’d be on our side, Mahaut.”
“But I am, child. You know that.”
“You won’t breathe a word of this to Father or Mother?”
Do you know what you are asking me? Do you know how much such a promise might cost me? Of course not. You’re both fifteen.
“You have my word.”
“Good.”
“Loreilei, please don’t be angry.”
“I’m not,” said the girl. “Never at you.” She pulled Frel’s hand away from Mahaut’s. “Come on, let’s let my aunt get back to her archery practice. Thank you, Aunt.”
“Your Gracious Excellency, Land-heiress Jacobson,” Frel said with a formal bow. It was all Mahaut could do to keep from giggling at his seriousness.
The two of them took a few steps down the pathway through the courtyard flower garden. Loreilei turned among the desert sunflower, still in bloom thought it was late summer. She caught Mahaut’s eye and spoke in a firm and measured voice.
“I was a slave, you know,” she said. “Look at me. Look at this, Aunt.” She ran a finger along her scar. “I can never forget.”
Mahaut stood silent. She blinked a tear from her eye that had suddenly welled up.
Your being take a slave was my fault, she thought. I will never forget, either.
“It made me…different inside,” she said. “I won’t be told what to do. Not ever again. Because if I let anybody tell me what to do, it will all come back. I know it will. I can feel it.”
Mahaut took a step forward. “Loreilei, as long as I breathe, I will do everything I can to see that you are free.”
“We’ll be together,” her niece said. “You’ll see.”
She spun quickly, and the two left the courtyard.
Mahaut stood thinking a long time after they were gone. Then she turned and picked up her bow and arrow once again.
Everything could end badly, she thought. Best to be prepared.
She picked up her arrow and took the arrow from the quiver. These were Scout arrows she had brought in from Hestinga. She ran her thumb along the arrow’s fletching. Two notches.
Shorter range. More damage in the barbed metal point.
She nocked the arrow, pulled the string back with a practiced strength, took aim.
She let the arrow fly.
It entered the straw bale somewhere to the left of the bull’s-eye. Close enough to pierce a lung if not the heart.
2
Benjamin Jacobson didn’t fool himself. He might love his son, but he knew full well that he and his wife had given birth to a monster. Yet what Benjamin remembered, what he clung to, was th
at little boy of four or five who had seemed like any other child.
Benjamin had doted on him, made Edgar his heart’s darling, even, he had to admit, above his younger brother, Hammond, who suffered the misfortune of coming along in Edgar’s wake. Edgar’s older brother, Solon, Benjamin had to be harder on. Solon would be the inheritor of the Family’s interest. Benjamin could afford to pamper a second child, and he did. When Edgar began to have his fits of rage, Benjamin, at first, considered them amusing.
Then servants began to be hurt. A string of teaching masters began to resign. Then came Edgar’s teenage years, and Edgar discovered that he was rich and the world would indulge him in just about anything he cared to do. He began to look upon this indulgence as a right, and not, as Benjamin did, as earned by the hard work of keeping the grain flowing in a hungry land. But monster or not, Edgar was a Jacobson, and for Benjamin that was more important.
About the only thing Edgar had ever done to his credit was to marry the DeArmanville girl. She had proved herself time and again an asset to the family. She had an eye for figures, and she had become the manager of the household just by demonstrating her sheer competence at juggling tradesmen, servants, and family members. He had to admit she did so as well as his deceased wife ever had, probably better. The servants respected Mahaut. The grandchildren adored her. And even though she had the odd hobby of organizing that cursed women’s auxiliary in Hestinga, it usually only took her away from Lilleheim two or three days of the month. Lately, there had even been signs that she was giving up on this nonsense, in any case.
After she’d gotten the house in order, he’d discovered her eye for business. His business—the getting and selling of grain. Now she managed the household from an office at the granary. It was a secondary occupation that she seemed to handle with ease. At the granary, she’d moved from bookkeeper to advisor to decision maker. He’d put her in charge of House Jacobson Shipping. When it came to shipment sizes, the juggling of current and future orders against supply, timing when to sell, when to hold, Mahaut made the call.
He was beginning to suspect that she was not only better than his dear wife at running the house, she might be better than him at running the conglomerate of businesses up and down the River that was House Jacobson. He might have resented her if she were not so loyal.
In any case, she was an asset he had come to depend on.
There was one thing about Mahaut that greatly disappointed Benjamin, however. It was not that she had fallen in love with another man, the Dashian boy. Who could possibly blame her? It was not even that she had slept with the other man, and done so repeatedly. After her terrible wound, having children was out of the question. There would be no little Jacobson who did not look at all like his father.
What he could not forgive Mahaut for was that, with all her skills and cleverness, she had not taken Edgar in hand. She had not brought him around and made him behave as he should toward her and toward all of the family. More than anything else, he had approved the match in the hopes that she would do just that. She was a Regular, an army lieutenant’s daughter, after all. She’d grown up whacking at people with swords. Surely she ought to be able to bend a man like Edgar, essentially weak in spirit, to her will. Even put some backbone into him.
But she had not. Oh, once he beat her, she had made sure that the next time he tried that he would have to get the servants to hold her down or else she would kill him. Edgar had believed her. Benjamin had hoped that this might be the beginning of his son’s taming. But that was not to be.
Whatever love, whatever regard Mahaut had felt for Edgar had died early. She’d come to an unspoken agreement with her husband. He would be allowed to do as he wished, to live the life that he lived before he met her—it would be a good life on Jacobson barter chits. Now Edgar spent most of his time in the whorehouses of Garangipore, or gambling with the other First Family boys—most of that crowd now ten years younger than him—in the taverns of Hestinga.
All that Mahaut wanted in exchange was to be able to write love letters. That’s all she could do. The other man, the son of the district military commander, had taken himself to Lindron, to the Guardians Academy. Benjamin had to further admit that, even when Mahaut and her lover had been together, Mahaut had been discreet. She had looked after the Jacobson name.
But every time he saw a servant go out with a letter to deliver to the couriers of Hestinga, every time he saw a similar papyrus scroll come in and be delivered to Mahaut, it dug a little into his—well, not his soul. He’d long since given up believing in that foolishness.
His pride.
He knew that Edgar didn’t have any pride, but he, Benjamin, did.
If only she would take Edgar in hand, he thought as he walked home from his office at the granary. If only she would this time.
He’d heard that Edgar was back. Edgar had tried to come in unobserved, traveling off-road on his dont and coming down the uninhabited northeastern hill outside of the village. Uninhabited, but not unworked. There were bones to be scattered there—bones that could be made into soap. The fact that they were the bones of Redlanders made no difference. The Blaskoye were animals, not men. Nef the Soapman had been out collecting, and had seen Edgar descending the hill. Nef had reported this at the granary, as he should.
Nothing that happened in Lilleheim escaped Benjamin Jacobson’s attention. Nothing that mattered.
3
“He’ll be here in a moment, my dear,” said Benjamin to Mahaut. “I don’t know what he has got himself into this time, but he appears to be injured, at least that’s the reports I’ve heard.”
Benjamin sighed and handed his dust jacket, the covering he wore when inspecting the silos, to a servant. He went to sit down in a chair in the large common room of the compound. Another servant emerged from the alcoves and began to fan him with a reed frond.
Mahaut poured a cup of wine out of the clay decanter on a nearby table and brought it over to Benjamin. He accepted it gratefully and took a sip.
Mahaut hated to see her father-in-law like this. She was so used to him being in command, so used to his stern but usually fair judgment. To see him sad and at wit’s end pained her heart.
“Whatever it is we will get it tended to, Pater,” she replied. She poured herself a stiff cup of wine as well. She was going to need it.
Four servants brought Edgar in on a flat board. He was conscious, and he smiled weakly as he was brought before his father. “I seem to have had a small hunting accident,” he said.
Mahaut shook her head in exasperation. Edgar had probably practiced this line over and over again to tell to his father as a kind of joke. Knowing him, the thought of his father’s annoyed reaction to those lame words was probably what had sustained him on the long ride to Lilleheim.
“You don’t hunt,” said Benjamin.
“Yes, I do, and in this kind of hunting my prey fired back at me,” Edgar said. He attempted a chuckle, but it only came out as a gagging sound.
It seemed that the two facetious statements he’d managed to get out had exhausted all of the man’s reserves. He fell unconscious on the wooden plank that served as a stretcher.
“We found him out in the yard fallen off his animal,” said the stableman, Bronson, who looked after the family’s personal donts and oversaw a breeding program. “He was lying on his back with one foot still caught in a stirrup. He was holding that arm and moaning.”
Mahaut looked down at her husband. Someone had wrapped a linen bandage around the upper part of Edgar’s left arm. The bandage was now soaked through with blood and hung partially open. A portion of the arm just below the shoulder showed through. It was torn and bloody. The arm looked as if a large chunk of muscle had been blasted off. Mahaut had seen bullet wounds before, and that’s what this clearly was.
“Take him to our rooms,” Mahaut said. “Don’t touch the wound. I will gather some things and come to tend him in a moment.”
The servants carried Edgar away. Benjamin
caught Mahaut’s eye. “You will take care of him, won’t you, my dear?”
“Of course, Pater,” she said.
“Will you use the new technique that the soldier taught to you? I was very skeptical of it at first, but it worked. I like anything that works. And since you’ve been treating the servants’ cuts and bruises, we have much fewer sick days.”
“I think whoever bound Edgar’s wound before knew nothing of infection, but we will clean the wound, sterilize what we can, and maybe that will be enough for him to keep the arm.”
Benjamin blanched at this statement from Mahaut. She didn’t fully understand why pain for Edgar caused pain in Benjamin, but she admired that in her father-in-law. It was too bad Edgar didn’t merit it.
She went to the room with boiled bandages, and her own hands thoroughly cleaned. She had the servants take off Edgar’s jacket and shirt, telling them to be careful not to touch the wound in the process. Then she knelt next to him and got to work.
Edgar had passed out exhausted, and even when she picked through the wound, searching for any stray fragments of lead or shattered bone, his only response was a grunt. She cleaned the surface around the wound as carefully as she could with lye soap. Then she took out her boiled needle and thread and began to stitch the wound back together. This did awaken Edgar, and he attempted to twist away, but Mahaut had beforehand instructed the servants to hold him down. They did so, and Edgar was too weak to resist. She continued with her stitches until she closed the wound as well as she could with what skin and muscle she could catch for an edge. She bandaged her work with sterilized cloth.
The servants let Edgar go. He sat up quickly and took a swing at Mahaut with his good hand. She had expected something like this and easily blocked it.
Never again, she thought. You lay a hand on me, you pay.
She reached down and put her fingers around his neck. She pressed. Hard.
For a moment. Edgar stared up at her in terror. Was she going to choke him to death now? Mahaut smiled and said, “Not yet, my husband.” She lowered her hands to his shoulders and pulled him up. “Get some pillows behind him,” she said to the servants. “Prop him up.”