The Price of Blood and Honor

by Elizabeth Willey

  “I see. She’s not used to bluster, Josquin, or even to jesting. Prospero has kept her—secluded.”

  “And the poor little tortoise tucked in her head and is waiting for the lightning to hit.”

  “Do be serious.”

  “I am. All right. I will talk to her. I will pretend she is somebody I want to know and call on her and talk to her. For your sake, not hers.”

  “Thank you, Jos. It is good of you to try. I know the whole prospect of this is—most repugnant.”

  The Prince scowled and thwacked a few more yew branches with his stick. “It’s novel that someone sees my side of it. I’m not looking forward to it at all. The very thought of—disgusting. This is generally counted a pose or a character flaw. What a pity my foundling brother did not wait to wed; he’d suit the task far better than I, if one may judge by his performance in Chenay.”

  Dewar nodded, touched his cousin’s shoulder and then squeezed it and let his hand fall. “I know. It’s a shame you’re getting shoved into this—it’s worse for you, although the traditional thing is to pity the girl. I think she’d be quite happy with you. It just requires a little—conciliation on your part for her sake.”

  “For our sake not hers, I have a suggestion.”

  “Go on?”

  “Weren’t we supposed to try fencing?”

  Dewar looked from his bird’s nest to his cousin, who was watching him with a nakedly hopeful, anxious expression, and Josquin colored slightly.

  “Yes,” Dewar said. “Let’s do that now.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. I’ll tell Freia you’ll call on her tomorrow. In the morning.”

  “If only she were chatty, like Viola. I delight in talking to Viola. She always has a nice rancid bit of gossip about someone or other, fresh from their servants.”

  Dewar laughed and set the bird’s nest in the hedge. He tucked his arm through Josquin’s, and they set off through the shrubbery toward the armory.

  Josquin was at his breakfast, reading a letter which he folded up and put away in his pocket, when Dewar came in. “Hello, cousin.”

  Dewar paused in the doorway, surveyed the breakfast-table and the Prince Heir in his dressing-gown still. “H’lo. I think we had better practice our fencing before breakfast, sir.” He crossed the room, seated himself uninvited.

  “I am inclined to agree, sir, but breakfast is served so damnably early in the day—”

  “Early?” repeated Dewar, pausing in mid-reach for a pot of coffee. The clock’s hands stood at half the fourth hour.

  “Early,” repeated Josquin haughtily.

  They regarded one another. Dewar lifted an eyebrow. “Fine. When, then?”

  “You mean regularly. I suppose I could manage before breakfast if you asked nicely.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “Nicely.”

  “If you’d rather work up a sweat on a full stomach, all weighed down—”

  “That is not nicely.”

  Dewar shrugged and flicked him a quick, brilliant glance.

  “I capitulate,” Josquin said, flushing hotly for a split second. “Before breakfast. Every day, if you like.”

  “Sorcerers do not ask nicely,” Dewar said. He grinned briefly over the cup and then drank. Josquin, he thought, was asking for it, daring him, and if his sister weren’t betrothed to the Prince Dewar would be on him now. O ye Powers of Road and Stone, don’t leave him with this man alone.… What was it Oren used to say, about how people who fall in love reinvent it? Five or six things he’d reinvent—later. Later. Later. Dewar looked up from his cup, having disciplined his expression and body, and said, “I spoke with her last night, and she said she would be in all morning. I don’t believe she actually goes out.”

  “Not on such a day as this, I hope. It will snow later and it’s damned cold. Prospero’s curse, they’re calling the weather, have you heard it? I must induce the Emperor to send me to Madana. Perhaps on my wedding-journey.” Josquin made a face and buttered a roll. “Try that green jam, it’s some new thing Evote brought in,” he added diffidently.

  Dewar obligingly smeared some on a piece of bread and ate it; they breakfasted in a taut, charged silence no small talk could penetrate.

  “Let us go a-visiting,” Josquin said finally, as the clock struck the fourth hour.

  Dewar nodded and stood; he followed Josquin out of the room and then walked beside him as they went through the Palace corridors to Freia’s apartments. Dewar tapped at the door and opened it, and they went in.

  “Must have stepped out after all,” Dewar said, glancing around. The rooms were cold, as always; long-dead ashes and cinders lay in the fireplace.

  Josquin nodded and paced, arms folded. He stopped before a small niche in the wall which contained a chipped bust of glowering Panurgus. “Damn it, Dewar. The more I think about it the less I like it.”

  “Tell your father.”

  “Hah. I have done so. I am informed that I do not have a choice. I really feel as if I’m getting a rotten bargain in this. She’s utterly plain, common as dirt and stupid as wood; she can’t carry on a conversation and she’s socially inept; she’s clumsy and awkward; and the truth is she’s not very bright. Utterly unsuited to me or my position or even to her own as your father’s daughter. Look at her clothes! Mother had her own seamstress and maids make them and she still doesn’t dress properly. She can’t carry herself; she slouches and shrinks. Imagine her in Madana! I shall be a laughing-stock. I certainly did tell my father, and he agrees with every point; she’s a fool and a nuisance to boot, he said, and I’m marrying her. I believe he is getting me back for not liking women. He’s hit on the most offensive creature he could find. I’d sooner have wed Miranda of Valgalant; she was an idiot in her politics, but she knew how to dress, walk, and talk.” Josquin was pacing, his words fast and angry, back and forth before a small dark console table on which an arrangement of fading flowers dropped pale petals.

  Dewar, taken aback by the passion with which Josquin rejected his sister, listened. “There is truth in everything you say,” he admitted. “It is all quite true. She has no beauty, no fire, and her manners are coarse. Had I never known a woman in my life, I could have wished up a better sister than she, with all her earthy failings. But there she is. We all, and you especially, must make the best of her. She’s molded ill, but she could be shaped by an apt hand; she’s clay, not diamond, unformed, unhardened yet. There’s advantage in that too.”

  Josquin glared at him from the other end of the table. “I’d rather turn hand to making the best of you. I cannot believe you’re related; it’s some monstrous jest of your father’s. There are rumors, you know. Perhaps I’ll alter the contracts, by your leave: I’ll take her if I can have you too.”

  Dewar laughed, to cover the flush of desire quick-kindled, and after a moment Josquin laughed also, throwing up his hands. He turned and plucked at the wilted flowers, showering more petals on the table, and Dewar joined him, but on the other side, across the wan lilies and withered hothouse roses.

  “Josquin, may I ask a personal question?”

  “Of course. The whole business is a personal outrage. No reason not to.”

  “No offense is meant but: have you ever—”

  “No. I don’t like women.” Josquin glared at him again, his eyes icy. “My august and dignified father,” he added coldly, “has recommended that I forgo my usual pursuits and hunt me out some pleasant brothel, for tutelage ere I’m to perform in contract.” He snorted, shook his head, and laughed bitterly. “At least in a brothel I can find what pleases me; and their manners are less peasantish. Am I a Prince, and I must wed with dirt-common trash?”

  Dewar laughed too, amused by Josquin’s puffed-up pride. “Tasteless bastard. Indeed, Freia is wooden-headed and common as dirt, mortal clay to the core and sticks for bones, but console yourself—though her blood is mixed, she’s compounded of rare earths, already broken to your ease, and, if you put your back to it, fruitfully plou
ghed and sown.”

  Josquin halted, staring at him, a rose crumbling in his fingers. “Indeed? A commoner bastard and no virgin? Then I need not wed her—”

  Dewar waved a hand dismissingly with an uncomfortable feeling he had said too much: far too much, and a wiser and cooler head than Josquin’s would have heard too much. “She’s Prospero’s blood. Prospero was a sorcerer, and is still a Prince; if he says she’s his daughter, then that’s what she is. She bears Prospero’s blood as well as—the other.”

  The Prince frowned. “Damn. It might be grounds to dissolve the agreement: although a peasant mother is easier to dismiss from ancestry than a Prince.”

  “Think no more of it; it is a quirk of—construction, and truly it is too late to cancel the wedding. Only cultivate her, and she’ll study to please you.”

  “Why, then, I’ll please to plough and sow both sides of her genealogy, noble and common, for noble issue and commoner pleasure.” He snorted disdainfully. “Why the fuss over Golias then? Prospero swore she was untouched; am I to settle for gleanings? ’Twas no more than clod-breaking, and if she’s already well-harrowed—”

  Dewar nervously picked petals from a lily, hastening its end. “Don’t be too crude, Jos. It was worse.”

  “Sorry. I suppose. The only benefit I see in the whole sordid business is that I’ll have an excuse to see you.” Josquin’s voice lowered, and he fixed Dewar with a hot look. “Never mind this fencing. We should dine or sup sometime. Tonight. And this time you’re not leaving so quickly afterward.”

  Oh, well, thought Dewar, and he began to smile, pleased with Josquin’s interest and relieved to have gotten Josquin away from the subject of Freia. Why not? It wouldn’t hurt anyone. It would clear the air. It would be good for both of them—possibly even better than good. “We should. Tonight, then. Yes.”

  At the other end of the room, behind a sofa by the empty hearth, there came a rustle of moving fabric. Both men whirled to see Freia rising from the high-backed sofa, swaying a little.

  Her eyes rested a moment on Josquin, and then she gazed at Dewar, her lips parted, her brows drawn together and her eyes pinched in an expression of pure pain and incomprehension and shock.

  She was there? thought Dewar, the blood draining from his cheeks. He could not look away from the betrayal, the broken trust and shattered feelings in his sister’s face, could not lower his eyes, felt his own face falling into astonished embarrassment and then guilty, self-conscious unease.

  Josquin, beside him, was silent and motionless.

  A full minute passed among them, all agony, no respite.

  Freia’s mouth moved, and in a tiny, whispery voice, she said, “You—woke me, excuse me,” and she bolted to the door and ran out, her hands rising and half-covering her face as she went.

  “Freia!” Dewar cried, and he took half a step after her, but could not make his feet go on.

  The door banged shut.

  He closed his eyes and tried to breathe.

  “Eavesdropping,” Josquin said hoarsely.

  Dewar looked at him, shook his head. “No. No. I— She must have been asleep. She said.” His ears roared. He felt as if he stood beside, outside himself; he feared he would vomit. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked numbly to the door and went out.

  Where would she have gone?

  To Prospero? Could he get there in time to explain— Explain? What was there to explain?

  He had said crude and unkind things about Freia to Josquin. He had gone along with Josquin’s catty, vindictive, resentful assassination of his sister; he had said nothing in her defense; he had betrayed her for a cheap joke. He had spilled to Josquin the essence of a tale that Prospero had never intended to be heard by anyone—perhaps not even by Freia.

  Dewar stopped, shaking his head, holding it; he found he was outside his own rooms, his hand on the door. He halted and turned, spurred by a sudden terror of the enormity of what he had done.

  If Josquin were to tell another what Dewar had said about Freia, more and more would hear of it quickly until the whole of the Empire knew: a commoner, dirt-common, not even a virgin. And Prospero would be wroth, justly, and Dewar was no longer enough of a sorcerer not to care.

  He hurried back through the halls; Josquin had left Freia’s rooms, a footman had seen him going toward the conservatories. Princess Evote was often to be found there. Dewar’s legs loped at an ungentlemanly gait and bore him down, around, along, to the tinkling fountain in the forecourt of the glass-walled paradise. He inquired of the footman outside; yes, the Prince Heir had gone in.

  The air was thick and humid, scented green and earthy. Gravel rattled as Dewar walked along the paths, listening for voices. He wondered of a sudden if Freia had ever been here, if she knew about the marvellous year-round summer in the Palace. She would like it, he thought. He ducked under a broad green leaf as big as a card-table and saw Josquin.

  The Prince Heir was just sitting down beside a four-tiered fountain of shells and fat-finned fish. Neither man spoke as Dewar sat next to him, facing him.

  Josquin’s face was set in the polite-nothing expression he usually wore around the Palace. Dewar studied him for a moment and then Summoned the Well, growing instantly hotter in the steamy air.

  “Josquin,” he said, putting the Well in the words, “I do lay upon thee geas, that thou shalt say nothing to anyone of what hath passed between us today, no word of our conversation, nor of its end.”

  As Dewar began to speak, Josquin turned to look at him, and the geas fell on him unhindered and potent. Josquin shook his head and blinked, then glared at Dewar from a princely face.

  “I will not marry her,” he said in a voice that rang hard like Avril’s.

  “No,” Dewar said, seeing in an instant what he must do, “you shall not.”

  They regarded one another for a single tense moment more, and even in that moment Dewar felt himself wanting the other, the heat moving in his body and pushing him toward Josquin, who was leaning away with the beginnings of fear in his look now. Dewar stood and left the conservatory as hastily as he had entered, a gust of wet warm air flowing into the cooler dry hall with him.

  He would go to Freia and offer to return her to Argylle. That was the thing to do. He would make her happy by taking her home again; she would not have to marry Josquin if she didn’t return to Landuc; he would make up for what he had said; and he would annoy Prospero, but only a little, Dewar thought, because he couldn’t imagine that Prospero really wished Freia to be bound to a man who loathed her. Prospero’s oath required that he say and do things that he could not support in his heart. Surely this marriage was one of them.

  Freia’s rooms were just as he had left them—empty. He waited a few minutes, trying to suppress his foreboding, but when she did not appear, he had to admit to himself that she was not going to be back immediately. Slowly, Dewar returned to his apartment and sat down heavily in a window seat with his back to a cold pane of glass, and his apprehension blossomed to occupy all his thought.

  She had certainly run to Prospero; she had nowhere else to go. Prospero would be very angry if she had heard—everything, or even a fragment of it. He would be here shortly. Dewar breathed in and out, slowly, feeling ill, a cold dreadweight of iron in the pit of his gut. In his mind, his own voice and Josquin’s echoed, drawling, bantering, the undercurrent of sex purling and rippling in every word. And then he saw Freia’s expression again, and remembered Freia sitting with her head on her knees crying quietly when she was ill and in pain, and remembered that he had promised to help her once, and he saw that he had behaved like a cad for the sake of nothing.

  For she wasn’t unattractive or stupid or graceless; he knew that, for he had seen her in better days, before she had been taken prisoner and battered in body and soul. She was frightened and lonely and homesick, here against her will; he knew that, for she had told him. He hadn’t helped. He’d been busy exercising his charm in a mating dance with Josquin. She’d been attacked by her r
avager Golias in Landuc Palace itself, and nobody had quite believed, none of her urbane and witty aunts and uncles, that she hadn’t brought it on herself. Bawdy jests from earthy Herne, double entendres from gossipy Viola. Prospero’s hurricane anger and Golias gutted, silencing the jesters.

  It didn’t matter, he thought, what she looked like or how she was made or whether she were really human—and she was, oh, she was. She had trusted him with herself, and he had spit on her. That was what it came down to. Her trust and his sneering superiority.

  Nothing happened.

  Dewar drew his knees up and sat on the window seat for several hours, and nothing happened. He loathed himself, his egotism and crudeness, his cruelty and his selfishness, and he wished desperately that Prospero would come and break the storm.

  No storm broke; no hand slammed back the door preceding a voice of denunciation and excoriation; no knock or Summoning came. He sat in dread and shame waiting for damnation, and damnation had other work, elsewhere. Prickling foreboding made him sweat and tense, and nothing followed from it.

  Dewar did not realize he had passed the whole day thus until the door did open. He jumped, paling, and saw a valet bringing clothing he had sent to be cleaned. Serenely aloof, the man took it to the dressing-room and disappeared; he returned, departed, without a word.

  Shaken by this indication that the world was continuing on after such a blow to its stability, Dewar stood up stiffly. He washed and dressed to dine, thinking, as he did, that Prospero had decided to wait. Probably Freia’s misery was such that he was looking after her, comforting her and perhaps informing the Emperor that the marriage was off.

  The dinner hour was struck. Dewar walked slowly there, not hungry. His father did not join the party at table; the Empress said something to Princess Viola, who asked, about him being engaged.

  Dewar sat across from Josquin, usually a delightful situation. He did not dare look at his cousin save once, and his cousin at that moment was looking fixedly at his plate.