The Price of Blood and Honor

by Elizabeth Willey

  He knew something of how Golias and Neyphile had treated her, having himself seen the surgeon Gernan salve the girl’s galled wrists and ankles and treat her bruises, burns, and fractures. How Lady Ofwiede and Landsman Hinrick had managed to achieve anything resembling it in the company of a dozen others without laying a hand on Freia was an uncomfortable mystery. So as Gaston led Freia back to the manor-house (a side door, she was so dishevelled that he would not have her seen, and on the way he gave Gram the dog over to a groom) he repeated her answers to himself. Lady Menillan had given him an accurate-sounding report on the afternoon’s proceedings, and Gaston had concluded that Freia had been offended in quite a different way: at the condescension shown her, perhaps, or the impertinence. But it seemed that was not at all Freia’s objection. Questions, the girl had said. They wouldn’t stop. And then she’d pleaded with him not to lie to her! Questions. Like Ottaviano, like Neyphile, like people in Landuc—

  Unseen by his household or guests, Prince Gaston guided Freia up a back-side stairway that was usually used for domestic task-work. He touched her shoulder (sacred Well, she winced and he snatched his hand back) and told her to change her dress, wash up, he’d have supper sent up to her. Freia, avoiding his eyes, slunk into her rooms. She closed the door quietly. Gaston went on through the dark-panelled narrow hallway to his office, where he rang for a footman and ordered food for his niece. Then he sat at his writing-desk, poured a tumbler of clear, pepper-flavored distillate, and gave himself half-an-hour by the one-handed clock in the corner to consider the problem.

  People in Landuc. Ottaviano had questioned Freia. Yes. Neyphile, Golias, Ottaviano, the Emperor, others in Landuc had all put Freia questions, constantly: about Prospero, herself, his plans, his whereabouts. She could not bear such questioning, not yet, perhaps never.

  Landsman Hinrick had certainly been rude to Freia, and Gaston had already decided that he must reprimand the nobleman and his sister. Yet he had promised Freia she wouldn’t see them again and he couldn’t very well demand that the child confine herself to her rooms until their twelve-day visit was ended. She’d think herself a prisoner. Now he must ask them, which must mean their sister’s husband and the husband’s brother too, to leave the house, which some would call discourtesy surpassing that shown Freia. Had it been directly done to him, Gaston would have acted differently, but evidently Freia was ill-prepared to bear rough treatment, even simple teasing.

  It perplexed Gaston and it disappointed him. He had thought her nearly mended. She seemed well. She had put on flesh and her lackluster look had brightened. She talked sensibly enough of healing-herbs and gardening with anyone who’d listen, or who’d tell her more: the gardeners, field workers, and old wives of the estate were bemused by her eagerness and attention.

  Were Freia a man, Gaston thought ruefully, his task would be as easy as administering a short, firmly worded lecture on good manners, cowardice, and stoicism. He knew the girl had bottom; he had seen her out-face Avril privately when he questioned her, taunt him publicly (though perhaps she did not know how insulting she had been, in Court), and although she was mad to try to kill herself, that took a kind of courage too. She had overcome physical abuse that would have snapped many men—indeed would have killed many. He couldn’t very well tell her to put her chin up and stiffen her backbone; she would have done, already, if she could. Something else was needed.

  Freia sat in an armchair drawn up to a round table on which her supper had been laid. The food was untouched. Three candles stood on the table, and others around the room, their flames steady and still. Her hair had been untangled, her dress removed, her muddy shoes tched over by Helma, whose duty it was to look after such things. When the supper had come, Freia had told the maid in a whisper that no, she would need nothing more, and now she waited, ignoring a baked trout stuffed with crumbs and herbs, a brace of partridges roasted golden-brown, warm bread in a damask napkin, a cress salad, a little dish of haricots and bacon, and a bowl of berries with soft custard. Freia bit her fingernails instead.

  All the candle-flames bowed as Prince Gaston tapped at the half-open door between her sitting-room and her bedchamber, where she sat. “Freia, dost wake yet?”

  Freia stopped biting her nails and looked up, dread-filled. He came in, shut the door, and brought another chair to sit beside her. Freia huddled into herself, looking at nothing, arms crossed, her right hand holding her left cheek.

  “Lass,” Gaston said presently, “that Landsman Hinrick will be gone on the morrow, and his kin. He bore himself with unseemly discourtesy toward thee, and thus toward me, and carried himself far other than a guest ought. I have told him so, and he shall leave.” A brief interview had secured this. Landsman Hinrick had sought to dispute the matter, and Prince Gaston had asked Lady Ofwiede if he spoke falsehood in his reasons, and the lady, cowed and embarrassed, had murmured that there was surely a misunderstanding, but that it would be best not to argue with their host.

  “You’re angry,” Freia whispered then.

  “Nay! Wherefore?”

  “Helma says you want to marry her.”

  “That is false rumor. I am not marrying anybody,” Gaston said, more annoyed by this in-house gossip than he would have thought he could be.

  She seemed not to have heard him. “If I could go home, I would. I don’t know where it is. But I will go away.”

  “I will not hear of thee going thus,” said Gaston, “driven by an ill-mannered lout who is naught to me.”

  Freia said nothing, and Gaston was sure he had not said enough, or not the right word. He sorted again through the broken threads of their conversation in the wood.

  “I fear thou thinkest thyself a prisoner yet, but I cannot hold thee here: though I say, I would not have thee leave, ’tis not to say, thou mayst not leave. Th’art my guest, unfettered.” He contemplated a crime and decided for it. “Wouldst thou have me bring thee covert to the Well? For then couldst thou travel on the Roads, everywhere in Pheyarcet as thou list, and seek thy father and thy home.”

  “The Well?”

  He nodded.

  “But nobody can go there. Papa said so. He said the Well is weak.”

  “ ’Tis forbidden, but such a ban may be evaded; indeed, I know’t hath been done. The Well’s as it ever was—I’ve no doubt the Fire burns quick as afore, properly invited.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to find home,” Freia said, her shoulders slumping. “Dewar couldn’t even find it when he wanted to. He had to make a sorcery for it.”

  This was news to Gaston, and disheartening news at that. “Well—”

  “If it is forbidden and the Emperor found me, wouldn’t he be angry?”

  “Aye.”

  “He’d lock me up again, or make me marry the Prince, or kill me,” Freia said. “Prospero said the Emperor kills people he doesn’t like. He might kill you.”

  “Nay, I think ’tis unlikely.”

  Freia thought about it; Gaston could see her becoming occupied with the problem, nearly against her will, her face reflecting each idea: fear, pain, resignation. Gaston waited. “It burns people up,” she said.

  “Only the unfit, the pretender, the false. Th’art of Panurgus’s blood. Hast nothing to fear.”

  Freia shook her head. “No.”

  Gaston nodded, accepting her word. “An thou shouldst change thy thinking, lass, do thou but tell me, and we shall go.”

  She looked at him for the first time and shook her head again.

  “I’ll not hold thee to it,” he promised her, smiling a little. It was early for her to be refusing the Well. He looked at the dishes, lifted a cover to see the meal untouched. There was little profit in entertaining proposals of adventure on an empty stomach. “Do thou eat, lass.”

  Freia looked at the glaze-eyed fish, which Gaston had uncovered, and she looked from the table to Gaston, who was leaving.

  “Uncle Gaston.”

  He halted, hand on the door, and half-turned.

  “You a
ren’t angry?” she asked in a whisper.

  Gaston shook his head slowly, lowering his hand from the door as he regarded Freia, still hunched in her chair. “Wherefore would I be angry?” he asked.

  She said nothing, but her look was apprehensive. Her fingers touched her cheek again, commemorating past pain.

  “Thy running to the wood,” Gaston said, and Freia shrank inward, “that was no crime, Freia.” He left the door and went to her chair. There was something he almost understood: something that almost made sense to him. Gaston sat down beside Freia again. “Wherefore would I be angry?”

  “Papa used to be angry when I ran away,” whispered Freia.

  He nodded, slowly and deliberately still. Prospero. “I am not Prospero,” he said.

  An expression of perplexity began to wrinkle Freia’s forehead.

  “Didst thou run away from Prospero often?” Gaston asked, in a soft friendly voice.

  She looked down, then back at him; she shook her head and then nodded, frowning now a little, as if concentrating. “After the people were there, I didn’t like them and he was always busy with them,” she said, “so I would go away, and he would be angry with me.”

  After the people were there, thought Gaston, and he guessed aloud, “At first thou and thy father lived alone.”

  “On the island,” Freia said.

  “I see,” Gaston said. “Then later, there were people.”

  “I didn’t like them.”

  “Why?” He suspected he knew, if she had been reared in such isolation.

  “They were too many,” she said. “We didn’t need them.”

  He nodded once. “Hadst not met folk before?”

  “Papa has books—had books with pictures of many people. They all looked alike,” Freia said.

  They regarded one another.

  “Perhaps ’twere easier for thee to take them one by one,” suggested Gaston.

  “When I met one of them, just one, in the forest, that was better,” Freia said. “I didn’t like them all at once, but she was different.”

  He nodded again, once.

  “Papa was angry with me for not liking them,” Freia said.

  “I am not angry with thee for disliking people,” said Gaston. “ ’Tis all too true, that most are difficult to like. And ’tis difficult to like many people met all at once. One alone is better.”

  Freia nodded. “I know,” she said, “I noticed that, that when I talk to only Scudamor, or only Utrachet, or, or,” and her voice faltered, “or only Dewar, then it’s not so … frightening.”

  And so ’twas until she came to Landuc, thought Gaston, and must face a world of faces, and no way to hide from them. “Thou needest not go into company here in Montgard again,” he told her. “An it give thee no pleasure, I cannot require it of thee. But even here, some folk are good to know, one by one.”

  “Not—not him—”

  “Landsman Hinrick has shown otherwise, I am in concord with thee.”

  “The people in Argylle are not like that ever. Not like the Landuc people.”

  “Yet thou didst flee them.”

  Freia looked down at her hands. “I wouldn’t now,” she said. “They, they never—they always want to be kind. Prospero made them do bad things, cutting down all the trees and going to war, but they never do bad things, themselves.”

  Gaston saw a tear glitter, falling on her hands, and he pitied her. Prospero had badly served her, rearing her in isolation so that the only person she was sure of was himself. Parted from him, she had done her best in a confusing world: but the evil she had met taught her too well and too soon to retreat at any cost. “There are many cruel folk in the world, child,” he said, “and many unkind, and many who care naught for naught. But still there are some as tender toward their fellows as toward themselves, even in Landuc.”

  “I don’t understand how to know. The good people look just like the bad.”

  “Alas, child, this knowledge cometh only with labor: from intercourse with all manner of men, wilt thou learn to discern one from another, and to treasure the good scattered among them.”

  “Some people are good and bad both,” said Freia.

  “Aye, ’tis so.”

  “Dewar did things that were good, and then he did horrible things.…” She looked at Gaston imploringly. Could he explain this?

  Gaston rubbed his chin and thought, and at last said, “Dewar is a mixed man and sorcerer, that desireth to be both; his man’s heart prompts him to do good, but the sorcerer’s habits of mind inspire him … not to evil, perhaps, but to do what must harm others, whilst it serveth some intent of his own. I deem he hath not the character of the man who is cruel by design, rather giving pain thoughtlessly.”

  “That man,” Freia said, “meant to hurt me …”

  “I fear ’twas so.”

  “… and Dewar did not,” she concluded, half to herself, and Gaston nodded his agreement. Her brows were knit together as she concentrated, thinking about this new insight—and then she shook her head, as if banishing some idea, and said, looking up at Gaston suddenly, “You are very kind to me.”

  “I do but wish to see thee well and strong,” said Gaston. “And hence, would have thee eat thy supper.”

  For a moment longer she gazed at him, and then Freia nodded, uncoiled herself and set her feet on the floor, and took up the knife and fork to eat.

  Gaston bid her good-night and rose and left her, and he went slowly down the hallway, to go to his guests and complete the night’s social tasks. But as he went, he revolved again and again in his thoughts a sentence Freia had said: The people in Argylle are not like that ever.

  Argylle. Prospero’s hidden center, from which he had attacked Landuc, to which Gaston was certain he had now retreated, had a name.

  19

  GASTON TOOK FREIA TO THE FOOT of a glacier before they left Montjoie at summer’s end, and its cold breath followed them down the valley to the high-walled castle-watched city. Freia walked the ice-fringed walls with her uncle, knitted an elaborate jacket and gloves and bonnet under Mistress Witham’s tutelage, and puzzled through antique manuscripts in Gaston’s solar. She liked Gaston’s kind silence; unlike Prospero, he never demanded account of her time or her reading. The days grew brief, and she dozed in the short afternoons’ colorless light, rousing to eat a small supper, then sleeping again.

  Gaston watched her with covert interest in the unconscious slowdown after her restless summer. His brother Herne was like that, sluggish and irritable in winter, unbounded in activity in warmer months. Herne would act in winter, were he forced to it by circumstance, but he hated it—and Prospero had surely taken that into account when he had planned his war. Freia, curled napping on a divan with her yarn and needles fallen to the floor, resembled her forester uncle more than she would have liked to know. She stirred and looked up at Gaston as he fed the fire.

  “I’ve been here for a year,” she said.

  “Aye,” he agreed, and sat on the footstool beside the divan. “Mayst go, an thou wouldst, lass; I’d not keep thee ’gainst thy will, nor guide thee where thou wouldst liever not go. I did offer thee the Well before, and ’twas no mayfly gift, but hath outlived the summer and awaits thee yet. Say but the word, and I’ll help thee go, an thou wouldst leave.” He waited, watching her face.

  “Where?” she said sadly, and she put her head down again and pulled the lap-robe up near her face, concealing it. “I am sorry, I am a nuisance.”

  “Nay. ’Tis pleasant to have thee here. Art unhappy?”

  “I don’t know,” Freia said in a small voice after considering the question.

  Gaston nodded. “I did not think thee happy, but I hoped thee not unhappy. ’Tis not thy home, I know. ’Tis strange to thee. Yet th’art full welcome here.” He thought about it more, and tried, “Is aught lacking, lass? Hast only to ask and I shall provide it. Art at full liberty to come and go as thou wouldst, an thou wouldst.” A half-year ago, Gaston had decided not to pursue
the scrap of information Freia had let fall. He desired that she should trust him, that she should not see him as another of the enemies who had hurt her so; in the long run, Landuc would gain most, he thought, if some foundation for friendship and confidence were laid between Prospero’s excluded family and the Palace. The realm and the Emperor would best be served, deemed Gaston, by his protecting Prospero’s daughter now. So he had set aside that name that he had heard her say, and stayed in Montgard, and Freia did not seem to have noticed her own slip; she was as careful after as before.

  Freia shook her head. “I don’t know where, and it’s not in your book,” she said, and emerged a little from the lap-robe again, eye-to-eye with Gaston, who leaned on the head of the divan. “Have you heard anything about Prospero?” she asked.

  She had never asked before. “Naught, lass. Nary a word. The Emperor’s hot thereat; by the terms of the treaty there’s a tithe due him each quarter-day, and payment of war-reparation, and none hath come all these three quarters that hath passed in Landuc. ’Tis said by some, he’s fled to Phesaotois, but I misdoubt it.”

  “A tithe?” Freia asked.

  “A tax,” explained Gaston. She nodded, but her expression was still perplexed, and he went on, “A tithe’s a portion of the produce of the land, to be given to the Emperor, as the Well’s representative, returned to him as it is provided by the Well to the landholder. ’Tis money, gold or silver.”

  “But—” Freia stopped herself, understanding altering her perplexity to alarm.

  “Now Prospero holdeth yet some few lands of the Emperor,” Gaston said, “that were to pass to thee on thy marriage, which hath not been performed.”

  “I thought he gave it all up,” Freia protested.

  “So hath ’a done, but he bargained with th’ Emperor to bestow some scant holding upon thee: a dowry, to be thine alone, should Josquin die. The terms of the wedding-contract forbid that thou shouldst inherit anything of Josquin, but dowry’s different: ’tis the woman’s own, come what may, to support her. Thus did those lands—I misremember what they were—remain nominally in Prospero’s hands: ’twas intended that it be for little time.”