Here the letters differed: for Luneté said nothing more to her Emperor; suggested to her husband the Baron of Ascolet that he might exert himself to be there for the infant’s presentation and naming; begged of the Empress her understanding for Luneté’s keeping the event secret until it had occurred and begged also any advice the Empress might care to send, particularly regarding the child’s status in the Imperial family; and of Lord Gonzalo of Valgalant Luneté requested that he might visit her, as he had promised to do, so that she might take counsel with him regarding this and other matters.
After sealing the letters, Luneté lay back in her bed with her hands on her newly-emptied stomach. Her breasts seemed to have become even larger and heavier, annoying her. She had gained flesh while carrying the child; she had no desire to run to flab and fat as some did on bearing. Now that it was done, she could eat like a woman instead of a sow and look like a woman again. “Laudine,” she said after a moment.
“My lady.” Laudine, seated beneath the window, looked up from her stitching on something small and white.
“I shall have some new clothes from the goods we brought from the City. Cut in the new fashion. A riding-habit laced like Lady Quarfall’s that her maid showed you; for I shall travel around Lys this autumn. I must see how Lys fares after such a bad year as this has been—though Otto claimed we have had the fairest weather of all the Empire, still it has been most foully wet, and I have perforce been neglecting Lys.”
“Yes, my lady,” said Laudine. “Will you require a new gown for the presentation at the Shrine?”
“No—yes. Yes. In Lys’s colors. Yes,” Luneté said. “I am quite sick of dragging around in sacks and draperies. Let the wet-nurse finish those things for the child and start on the new gowns at once.”
Through the winter, though Freia’s command of the language improved and her physical debilitation was replaced by wan and listless health, she remained withdrawn and nervous. Gaston spared her the social life of Montgard; at this season it consisted largely of banquets, dances, and weddings, with regular sleighing- and skating-parties for outdoor exercise. In order not to offend the Montgard burghers, nobles, and their wives, he had Freia dine with him in select company, at home, several times. The invitees’ sharp-eyed ladies saw for themselves that she was unwell, nearly an invalid, and exhortations to come dance or roister were superseded by tactful presents of preserves, fortifying cordials, and hothouse delicacies.
Freia found the summer fruit in midwinter astonishing and asked Gaston, with the first signs of liveliness he had seen in her, where it came from. He showed her, when they walked along the city walls, a glass-walled hothouse that might be glimpsed from there and, when they returned to his castle, drew a diagram of one upon her slate. He had no hothouse himself; to desire one had not occurred to him. For Gaston the seasons passed quickly enough that the presence or absence of strawberries or apricots was hardly noticeable. They went, they came again. If there were none, soon enough there would be.
“Didst thou not see the Palace hothouses in Landuc?” he asked her. She had said she’d had a garden, once, and Gaston had gradually discovered that if any subject had the power to engage Freia’s attention, gardening and plants did. He used this cautiously, conserving its strength, but truly in winter there were few chances to speak of gardens.
She shook her head, sniffing a strawberry. “A whole house made of glass,” she said.
“Aye, with vents and stoves, that in warm days it may be cooled and in cold seasons heated; for the sun’s strength is too little, in midwinter, to keep the tender plants alive. But perhaps thou hast used a bell in thy garden.”
She had not, and Gaston bade her fetch her cloak and took her to a gardeners’ outbuilding, where he showed her the glass bells. He took one outside, into the sun, and set it on a bench for some few minutes, then bade Freia put her ungloved hand beneath it.
“It is warm now.”
“Aye. Now mayst thou see that a seedling set thereunder in earliest warming of the year will be so warm, or warmer, by day, and by night warded from the coldest air. For the heat of the sun’s light is caught and held beneath the glass.”
“The seedling will be bigger and stronger than the others, much sooner. This is a very good device,” Freia decided.
“A hothouse doth the very same, but larger,” Gaston said.
Freia looked at the bell, nodding. “For many plants,” she said. “Always summer.” She held her hand under it again, feeling the focused sun. “It’s so cold here,” she said.
“The season changeth, lass. ’Tis not forever winter. In sixteen days, or twenty, thou’lt see the gardeners placing these in certain beds, to encourage the plants there: and the true spring is never long after that.”
Spring thaw came as promised and expected. Gaston took Freia walking outside the city walls and let her find the first astels clustered at the bases of trees, and when the astels were succeeded by gaudier, later flowers and foliage he put her on horseback and removed with her from the town to the mountainside, to his compact manor-house Montjoie, where snow still lay in the violet shadows.
The journey took ten days; they rode slowly, on a scenic route winding upward along the sides of the mountains, both to spare Freia’s strength and so that the baggage and household servants would arrive before them. Freia halted her uncle again and again to ask about this flower or that bird or what animal had crossed their path or even what a stone was called. He answered what he could. Her face brightened with interest; her eyes closed and her cheeks reddened as she snuffed the warm damp valley wind pushing spring higher. Gaston showed her plants she had studied in the herbal, and Freia proved to have learned more than he had thought in her tenacious silence. She sometimes did not recognize the real plant, because the drawings had been unlifelike, but always remembered names, characteristics, uses.
For her uncle, it was like watching someone wake after a quarter-year’s sleep. Freia did not liven to the extent of laughing or smiling, but she softened and was less melancholy and detached. Gaston felt unburdened; her continued depression had worried him. He reckoned that her poor health might have been worsened by the unnaturally long winter she had lived in—most of Landuc’s, then all of Montgard’s.
On their last night on the road, they halted at an inn on the shoulder of Montjoie itself which commanded a view of the mountains, the valley, and the sky above, all resplendent with color as the sun set. Freia watched the spectacle, wrapped in the cloak Gaston had brought her fastened with the apple-bough brooch. He stood with her at the edge of a pasture occupied by the landlord’s cattle, his hands behind him, watching the last molten-gold tracery around the edges of the clouds tarnish and darken away. The first stars of the evening pricked out among the dusky clouds before either of them moved to go in. Freia looked up at Gaston and smiled, shyly but brilliant in the twilight, and Gaston was so astonished by the alteration that he stared at her dumbly for a second before responding with the warmest, most heartfelt smile he had ever found in himself.
“Now it’s summer,” Freia said.
Within five days of the sending of Luneté’s letter, the Baron of Ascolet had returned to Champlys by roundabout but speedy way of several Leys and a brief stint on the Road. He arrived at the city gate just before closing and spurred his horse to hurry through the narrow, crowded streets to the castle. The whole town was decorated; banners and buntings hung from the houses across the narrow streets or down in fluttering falls of color; flower-boxes adorned even the attic windows, and fresh paint was everywhere. Had he missed the presentation? He hadn’t misread his Ephemeris, had he?
His horse staggered to a halt under the castle’s portcullis, where Otto dismounted and handed him to a groom. Empty trestle-tables were ranked in the front courtyard: so he hadn’t missed the day. They’d feast here till midnight and after when the baby—his baby—Cambia received her name at the Shrine. Otto went less hastily into the castle, running his hands over his hair and straighte
ning his clothes as he climbed to the solar.
Luneté was there, standing on a stool with three women kneeling around her; they were doing things to the hem of her dress. A minstrel, decently out of sight behind a carved screen, was playing sprightly dance tunes, but the music stopped and all stared at Otto as he paused in the doorway.
“You’re just in time,” Luneté said, looking over her shoulder.
Otto smiled. “Did you think I’d miss this?” And then, realizing he had indeed missed the great event—having reckoned that the baby wouldn’t arrive for another twenty days or so—he went on, stepping over a maid’s feet and taking Luneté’s hand, “I’m surprised to see you up.” He kissed the hand.
“I’m very well, thank you, my lord. No, don’t—you’ll spoil the hem—perhaps you should go bathe, dear. I can tell you’ve had a, ahem, strenuous journey.”
Rebuffed, Otto backed away. “Where’s baby?”
“With her wet-nurse,” said Luneté patiently, straightening and squaring her shoulders. The maids resumed pinning.
“Which one? You hadn’t decided who it would be,” Otto persisted.
“Vita,” said Luneté. “Cambia is with her at the mill.”
“At the mill? Not here?” He looked around, realizing that he saw no cradle, no infant’s attendants, none of the white-frothed lace stuff that had been erupting everywhere for the past months.
“Of course, at the mill,” Luneté replied. “Vita will bring her tomorrow for the procession, don’t fear. It’s all arranged. Do have a bath, Otto.”
Ottaviano opened his mouth and closed it. He bowed to his wife’s back and left the solar, where the music began to play again as he shut the door.
Not everything in Argylle was lost to the sudden flood. Some crops of fruit and later-ripening barley still remained to be harvested, and Prospero and Scudamor calculated soberly that on lean rations they could all survive the winter. Prospero went to the cove where his three remaining ships huddled out of reach of the sea and dubbed them fishing-boats. The necessary modifications took many days. When at last the boats ventured forth, the fish they brought back were not numerous; the fishermen were inexperienced with prey and tackle both.
The sun shone, though, and the weather stayed hot and clear—too hot and too clear. A great hot dry wind blew steadily for six days, and at the end of them the standing barley was so much straw, and Prospero could hold a stalk and rattle kernel in husk. The soil of the cleared lands became dry, too, and blew around in stinging dust-devils. A hailstorm followed the heat and laid flat the grain as well as punishing the fruit still ripening, and what was not battered from the bough was hard and sour. The banks of the river eroded and the fields gullied and rutted.
That winter they lived on meager fish and game, though the game was not so numerous as it had been and many folk disliked to eat meat—a peculiarity Prospero had hitherto respected, but now found over-nice. He sent hunting expeditions out to take the best-furred animals from the wood, and when he had a shipload tanned and ready he voyaged on an ice-rimed ship and found, after much uncertain wandering on the unstable outer Roads, a place far from Landuc in Pheyarcet where he could trade the skins for seed-grain.
Spring came but reluctantly—if it came at all. The scant snow melted too quickly in a rapid flash of late-coming hot weather, and the runoff crumbled away the riverbanks and more deeply gullied and stripped the fields’ topsoil. But Prospero distributed the seed and it was planted, and it sprouted and withered in the heat without rain. Blossoms faded on the trees and fell, fruitless, and the river’s fish were elusive. The weather was wrong, and the earth was barren.
“Damn her selfishness,” Prospero whispered to himself every day as the place grew dry and deathly around him. People slipped away from the city, faring in small parties into the wilderness to hunt-and-gather a living there, and golden Cledie disappeared with such a band. Prospero had seen her in company many times over the winter, never alone though he had sought subtly to contrive it; she had always been courteous but cool to him: as if he had wronged her, but he knew he had not, and he thought she must blame him for Freia’s death.
He had said nothing of how Freia had died. Let it be known to have happened, he thought, and that sufficed; that she killed herself was evil and ill-omened.
And that she had killed herself had cursed the land he had bestowed on her when the Emperor had forced him to renounce it. He thought of Panurgus’s death, poisoning the Well and wounding Pheyarcet, and wondered how long Argylle could continue without its Spring’s sustenance. The Argyllines scraped and scrabbled and starved onward, through another winter, and Prospero felt the Spring’s pulse weakly when he put his hand over it.
Once again he journeyed away and bought seed and once again they planted and again drought killed what rot did not. The summer was harrowed with windstorms and lightnings that sent fires racing through the tinder-dry forest, and the river was choked with fallen trees and drowned animals that had taken refuge from the flame. The water smelled foul, and nobody dared to drink it or swim in it. The cleared lands deteriorated further; they were little more than gravel now, the good earth gone, and the trees at the edges of the clearings began to die back, blighted. What the weather failed to provide, Prospero thought to get from the wells he’d had the Argyllines sink, but those dried one by one as they drew on them to irrigate the fields.
Six more years of drought and death marched after those first two. The world was twisted, a source of death instead of life; the Spring was gone. Though they cleared more and more land to replace the destroyed fields, the weather would give no quarter nor even hope. Once-rolling hills were become steep and forbidding. Thickets of tough brambles sprang up at the edges of the forest, making the work of clearing more difficult, and the fields sprouted little thorn-studded weeds that stung the hands. Even smiling Scudamor went hunched, gaunt and silent, about his duties; Utrachet hunted and brought Prospero bleak tales from the forest highlands—animals starved or vanished, birds unheard, streams and springs dried or filthy. There was always famine; it seemed that they had not eaten for twenty years, and the few children who were born were sickly and died.
Prospero began to believe that Dewar was hiding in Argylle, working to destroy him. Odile pointed out that the Spring would attract Dewar and that he must inevitably attempt to overthrow Prospero to gain control.
“He is a sorcerer,” she said, “and power, gained by any means, is all his desire. He hath cozened much from thee already, as he did from me; he will not stop with less than all thou hast, my love.”
18
AT MONTJOIE FREIA FOUND HERSELF MORE in company than she had been in the city of Montgard. There were many manor-houses like Gaston’s on the mountainsides; guests passed to and fro among them, and the households themselves would visit back and forth freely, riding or driving in coaches, picnicking and dining in groups. The custom was for ladies to gather in a garden, occupied with a dainty piece of needlework, sometimes with music and instruments, and to amuse themselves with gossip, stories, and songs through the afternoon. Often gentlemen were included in these parties as well; sometimes the gentlemen spent the day in other business deemed better suited to their sex, and sometimes the gentlemen just stayed home. Prince Gaston was careful to attend his neighbors’ fêtes occasionally, but not so often as he was invited; it was understood that the work of government commanded his time. Once in a great while he would host such a party himself, usually with an underlying political bent. And as he had in his reign so improved Montgard, which had in their ancestors’ days been an isolated town bickering cyclically with its neighbors over water-rights and tariffs and which now ruled the whole of the mountain region, traded with the great states of the south and east, and weighed much in the considerations of the rulers of the world, the prosperous, proud folk of Montgard were inclined to leave him to his treaties, fortifications, reservoirs, and diplomacies.
When the beautiful and vivacious Lady Ofwiede persuaded the
Prince to make a meeting with a handful of eminent Montgard landsmen the occasion for a summer pleasure-party, Gaston passively consented, allowing Lady Ofwiede to arrange everything as it pleased her. It was simpler, to his thinking, and perhaps also more agreeable, to let the party be planned and its guests entertained by another’s wit while he pursued strategy and ore elsewhere in the house.
Freia had not been to such a gathering before. Gaston had kept her from them, having little time for such things himself and considering that her health would not stand the heat and trooping about. She found herself dizzied by the three dozen bright-clothed strangers when they arrived. She could not remember their names, and after they changed their clothing she could not distinguish them at all. The women flashed gold and gems; they wore little mitts half-covering their hands, and their breasts stood high over tight-laced waists. Freia’s gowns were not so brilliantly colored, nor so highly tailored. The men wore patterned skin-tight leggings and snug hip-skimming tunics with heavy gold-trimmed belts; it was a fashion Gaston did not bother to follow too closely in his own wardrobe. They all laughed and talked, voices ringing in rooms and halls usually empty and still, and Freia stayed fast at Gaston’s elbow as he greeted and spoke with them, a word or two to each; but now he instructed her with a word and a nod to go with the richly-dressed, high-coiffed ladies and the loud-voiced young men who hovered around them, and Freia went, bewildered but trusting him. The company proceeded to an arbor-shaded corner of Montjoie’s small garden, in order of rank, each lady paired by one of the young men, the whole party trailed by servants with workbaskets, refreshments, musical instruments, and whatever else had been deemed necessary. The benches, each big enough for two, were arranged; a quiet competition for certain places was settled with subtle looks and gestures by the young men; and everyone sat down and began to pass the afternoon pleasantly, with songs, stories, and embroidery of the most delicate sort.
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 30
