The Price of Blood and Honor

by Elizabeth Willey

  “All that was forbidden by that judge. He said Papa couldn’t give me anything.”

  “Nay, dowry’s not the same as the land-titles bestowed on thee, with which Prospero sought to protect himself.”

  “If it’s mine, it can’t be the Emperor’s.”

  “In Landuc all cometh of the Well and belongeth to the Well, and the Emperor is the Well,” said Gaston. “And the tithe doth confirm that, dost understand?”

  “But—” and Freia stopped herself again and sat a few minutes thinking. Gaston did not interrupt her. “So this tithe, it must be given to the Emperor,” she said slowly, “because he made Prospero give him everything he had. That’s their agreement.”

  “ ’Tis bound to the land: whoever holdeth the land, must pay the tithe. And it must be tendered quarterly, unless the Emperor grants some special boon.”

  “The time is different here. There. Where they are. I can feel it.”

  Gaston nodded. “So did I suppose to Avril, and it pleaseth him ill. For Prospero slipped away, e’en as thy brother did, ere the Emperor or anyone learnt where his lair lieth. I’m not asking thee!” he interjected, seeing her begin to protest.

  Freia bit her lip.

  “ ’Tis now a matter of great enquiry by the Emperor, with rich reward to the one who telleth him where Prospero’s hid. Panurgus our father would never have need done such a thing, but the Emperor hath not our father’s mastery of the Well.”

  “Papa didn’t like him,” Freia said.

  “Panurgus. Aye. Nor was Panurgus easy with Prospero, and meseems now that ’twas the sorcerers’ rivalry that overrode the father’s affinity for his blood and the son’s respect for his sire. The King won in the end, by banishing thy father, yet he was deep-grieved to do it and it sped his death on him. An ’a had not fought Prospero, rather embraced him as thy father hath his son, Landuc must wear another face today. Such controversies can only work to our diminishment,” he said, half to himself, and rose and began to pace, thinking about the matter for the thousandth time. “Such rivalries the Well fans in us, an we let it rule our tempers,” the Fireduke went on in the same tone. “Aye, thy father and Fulgens, there’s another.”

  “Fulgens?” Freia asked, confused.

  “Aye, in sooth; for Prospero was master of the King’s navy for centuries ’fore Fulgens,” Gaston said. “And some still think he was the better, for he knew the currents and watercourses as well as doth Fulgens, and could whistle up wind i’ the deadest calm, for all winds were his. No vessel e’er was lost in storm, in Prospero’s day. But that is gone by; Panurgus dubbed Fulgens Admiral of the Fleet when he banished thy father.”

  Gaston stopped pacing. He stood at one of the narrow windows looking down into the long courtyard, where twenty-four of his men were shooting at wands and hay bales set up in front of the earthen fortress he had replaced with this building of stone. Freia sidled up beside him.

  “May I have one of those?” she asked timidly.

  “Why, thou couldst not pull it, lass. ’Tis a man’s thing, not a maid’s.”

  Freia watched the men, chewing her lip.

  “Uncle,” she asked, “why do you keep an army when you say you prefer peace? Who would attack you?”

  His mind seized the second question first. “Lindfluss,” he said, “I defeated an hundred years ago and threw down their prince, and some there among his descendants resent the deed yet; Logreia hath a young and ambitious queen, much heedful of Montgard since her accession. Or Cazador, whose four sons fight ’mongst themselves and who seeks some outlet for their belligerence, hath sought to make quarrels ’tween us. To have peace, one must be ready for war. We have peace now because they know that I’d answer swift and hard any raid or slight.”

  Freia frowned, watching the men fire two dozen arrows each, swift and hard as Gaston said, and the arrows buried themselves in hay or passed through it to stick in the stubbly hillside. Longbows, not crossbows; in Argylle she had had one shorter than those, but they looked much the same. The last bow she had used had been the crossbow Ottaviano had taken from her, but that was just for hunting. “It seems to me,” she said slowly, picking her way through her thoughts as she spoke, “that it all starts when someone … when someone decides … it’s going to happen … that someone’s going to attack him and he gets weapons. And then even if nobody was going to do that, the others all arm themselves because now they’re afraid of him …”

  “Well—” Gaston started, smiling.

  “… and then, of course, when they all have swords, they have to fight, because they’ve gone to so much trouble for it,” Freia said.

  “Wouldst ban swords, sticks, stones even from the hand of man?” he asked her.

  Freia shot him a quick irked look. “It’s that first bit that’s the problem, isn’t it?” she said. “When someone assumes that there must be a fight and that he must kill people to win it.”

  “Well, lass,” he said, pleased by the argument from her (old though it was to him), “never have I seen a place where men lived in perfect amity, where never hand was lifted in violence, where never was anger nor dispute. Men quarrel; men have always quarreled, everywhere in every world I have known. They may wish to live in peace, but their wills clash and their desires cannot all be satisfied, and to forestall such a fight it hath worked best to my advantage to be always the victor in wars and in peacetime disputes. And this is done by being strong enough to either push battle from the other’s thoughts, and so to win, or to win the battle he demands. I do not strike where there is no threat to me, yet if threatened I’ll not permit me nor my holdings to be impugned.”

  His niece shook her head. “We didn’t used to quarrel,” she said, sad now. “Nobody did. The only fighting anyone ever did was Prospero’s fighting against you.”

  Gaston smiled a little. “Truly? Then isn’t a very paradise, a place of peace hitherto unknown, and thy father were wiser, perhaps—” He stopped himself from saying never to have gone there, and instead said, “—never to have left it.”

  “That’s what I said,” Freia said. “That’s what I said, when he started it all.”

  The Baron of Ascolet was crawling about on his elbows and knees in front of the miller’s kitchen fire, a long grey woollen sock on each hand. The socks were yapping and barking, pursuing a roundly diapered infant in circles on the smooth slate floor. The kitchen cat had retreated flat-eared to the top of the dresser, and the miller’s red-faced wife was wheezing with laughter at her washtub in the yard outside the door.

  The hound-hands leapt and seized the squealing baby. Otto made loud devouring sounds as he tickled her in his lap. “Cambia crunchy munchy juicy! Ahhh, all gone, no more baby … wait … what’s this? It’s Cambia!” Cambia crowed triumphantly, having won the war a half-year since by losing all the battles, and tried to stand up; she got halfway before sitting down emphatically again in Otto’s crossed legs. “Where’s baby’s other sock thing got to, I wonder,” Otto asked her, kissing one bare-toed foot.

  Cambia blinked lilac-blue eyes at him and grabbed his nose.

  “Ouch.” Nobly obliging, the Baron of Ascolet made a duck-like honking sound. “Cambia, don’t you ever get upset?” he asked her as she half-stood and fell again, this time forward on her hands.

  “She don’t,” said the miller’s wife, Vita. “I never saw such an easy baby, Your Lordship, such a sweet-natured thing. Never a tear. My own two were such yellers I thought I’d be deaf by ’em, and she never much as peeps. Hardly natural, it is, I’d swear oath she smiled from the day she was born.”

  “Is she Daddy’s sweet little thing, then?” Otto asked Cambia, and expounded for several minutes on her sweetness, her beauty, and other good traits. “That’s why I spend so much time with you, lambkin,” he told her. “If you bit and scratched, why, we’d send you out to pasture with the goats.”

  Cambia sighed. She was falling asleep, draped over Otto’s thigh. In the firelight, her hair was reddish, like Luneté’
s; wet, it was much darker, downy curls in abundance peeking out of her cap. She did have bad traits—she had already shown herself to be stubborn and persistent, difficult to dissuade of any idea—but when her will wasn’t crossed, she was so genial that it was impossible to be cross with her.

  Otto picked the baby up and laid her belly-down in her cradle on the Ascolet lambs’-fleeces he had brought for her. He tucked the covers over her and transferred a kiss to her ear with his fingertip, then stood. “Did the Countess come yesterday?” he asked Vita, pulling on his gauntlets in the doorway, fastening his cloak.

  “No, my lord,” said Vita, thumping diapers. Her breath steamed over the cauldron of white cloth.

  “Ah. Thought she might; she was heading this way. See you tomorrow, if the snow holds back.”

  Spring again brought new vitality to Freia, drawing her more strongly than before; as the days began to lengthen she couldn’t stay still. She stretched and stirred herself a little further each day, riding out alone along the Mont or into the foothills. When they travelled to Montjoie, she was ever eager and impatient, ever hurrying, walking in the evenings after they had stopped, tiring herself to exhaustion before she slept every night, rising at birdsong.

  Her restlessness continued in Montjoie, where she rode or walked out on long day-trips, so that soon she was burnt from the strong mountain sun, hard from exercise. There were no house-parties this year. She collected unfamiliar plants, bringing them back to be identified and to have their uses explained. Gaston wondered whether she would return, some days when she was out before sunrise; but he thought she would tell him if she meant to leave for good, and she said no word of leaving, only of the mountains and the wild lonely places she had been.

  Freia had, with a stinging fear of discovery, been doing more than wandering. She had happened on a boy shooting with a longbow in a meadow, and she had bartered for it and his arrows. She had traded him a brooch—not the apple-brooch, she’d refused him that—a silver one, and a good knife Gaston had given her, and a belt with a silver buckle. It was outrageous, she knew; she had kept upping the ante and prayed as she did that nobody would notice the loss of the three costly (she thought) items, which she had considered as being lent to her. Any metal was precious in Argylle, and her ideas of purchase and exchange were naive, inexperienced, and anxious.

  But she had to have the bow, and when she had it she cached it in a hollow log in the wood wrapped in a hide she was supposed to have had made into heavy riding boots—another purloinment that weighed heavily on her. Three or four days of practice instead of riding, and she had the feel of the bow in her arm again; a few more days and another knife to replace that she had traded away, and she was making her own arrows, tipping them with chipped quartz and fletching them with feathers from birds she had netted. She didn’t think beyond the summer season; she carried the bow under her cloak and took it to out-of-the-way places and, once and then again and again and again, when she was out late past meals, she would hunt the long-footed mountain hares and the nodding, fat stone-hens and feed herself.

  She didn’t know why she wanted to do it, but she did it. She loved the stalking-games, the tension and release of shooting, splitting wands and putting arrows through marmots’ eyes. It was not as good as being at home; she dared not run too far, too wild, but it satisfied some piece of her that missed the great dark forests that surrounded Argylle and were its threshold and its heart at once.

  On a day which had passed the cusp from late summer to early autumn, she set out for her cache-place after breakfast. The previous night a man had arrived to see Prince Gaston; thus her uncle’s planned ride with her had been postponed. Freia rode out alone and went to her bow-log. From there, bow beneath cloak as concealed as it could be, she went to a meadow called the Hareground. The meadow was long and pan-shaped, and Freia had used the slender arm of it between the trees for her practice.

  She knew they would be leaving Montjoie soon. The season was turning, yellowed leaves and grasses already gilding the colder slopes. She hadn’t thought about that time, deliberately; she would have to get her bow into the house somehow and hide it. Sneak out at night? Hide it in a barn? She didn’t know. She wouldn’t be able to bring it with her; that was clear. Gaston didn’t approve of women with weapons; he didn’t think she could pull a bow at all, and he had said so when she’d asked for one last winter. She had expected him to say that, but it had disappointed her nonetheless. Prospero had told her that Landuc people didn’t approve of ladies hunting as she did; sometimes he would scold her for it, saying Lady Miranda would never be seen blood-spattered in a short tunic, skinning a wood-elk—but they did need meat, and he could not forever be forsaking his studies to ramble with her.

  It seemed to her that the ladies of Landuc, Lady Miranda too, must have dull lives.

  Freia picketed her horse in the lower part of the meadow and walked to the upper end. She strung the bow, nocked an arrow, and stood waiting for a hare, a hen, or a marmot, not moving a muscle.

  The marmots had learnt wisdom under siege. They ducked into their burrows at the first approach of the horse and stayed out of sight now as Freia held still. Arm extended, bow ready, she waited.

  Below her, out of sight beyond the dark fringes of the trees, her horse snorted and blew very loudly. A marmot’s nose flicked back down its burrow. A hawk passed overhead, hunting also. Freia waited. A bird screamed rawly in one of the trees. A hare, moving from tuft to tuft of grass, emerged from the undergrowth around the meadow on her left and lolloped cautiously across. Freia didn’t move.

  The sun had moved across the downslope lane of trees to her right, so that the panhandle of yellow grass was darkening.

  A rustle; a whinny from the horse. The hawk folded her wings. A hare bounded into view from the lower, larger meadow downslope and froze silhouetted against a tuft of grass. Freia aimed and shot. The hare tumbled up, over, twitching, red-spraying, the arrow driven through the skull. Freia lowered her bow, smiling faintly, pleased. She trotted forward to claim the prey from the hawk.

  The hawk dropped just out of sight beyond the trees, though; she’d gotten her own dinner, Freia thought, and came out of the lane of trees, glancing down at the hawk and her horse—

  And Gaston. There on Solario, who whinnied as he saw her, sat her uncle.

  She froze, guilt-struck.

  “A fine shot,” he said.

  Freia stood, faintly sick with dread. What would he do?

  “Well, pick it up, lass,” Gaston said. “ ’Tis thine.” He dismounted. Freia went to the dead hare. An eye shot. She favored them because they killed at once, and she took pride in the accuracy required. She drew the arrow out and pulled grass, cleaning the blood-drenched shaft.

  Gaston was coming; he was there. She didn’t look at him as he lifted the soft limp body by the ears.

  “An excellent shot,” he said, allowing admiration to show in his voice.

  “Thank you,” Freia said in an undertone, scrubbing at the arrow. It was one she had made, red-fletched, stone-pointed. Gaston was looking at it as she worked, from arrow to skin-bag quiver to hare to the bow now leaning on her shoulder.

  “Would you like some?” she asked, not knowing what else to say.

  “Aye, indeed. He’s a fat pretty fellow, far better than yon stripling Gina’s got.”

  Gina was the hawk, Gaston’s hawk that had brought down a marmot and was mantling it now with her wings, glaring about. Freia glanced at Gina and then at Gaston.

  “I’ve picnic goods with me,” Gaston said, “but he’ll be a welcome betterment of bread-and-cheese.” Freia pushed her hair back and looked at him face-on, hard and as closely as the difference in their heights allowed. Wasn’t he angry?

  Gaston could see the apprehension in her eyes; though he was injured at her duplicitous reticence in hiding the bow and her expertise, he wanted to know why. “Lass,” he said, “mayst practice on the butts, an thou wouldst.”

  “Thank you,” she
said again, watching him.

  “Wherefore the secrecy, Freia?” he asked bluntly. “Hast no need of shame, of hiding.”

  “I asked you—” Freia began, and stopped at the expression on his face.

  Stricken by memory, Gaston was embarrassed; he had recalled the incident already on seeing her with the bow, and now he understood. She had asked for a bow, and he had brushed the request aside. “Ah,” he interrupted her. “My foolish word made thee covert.”

  Freia looked down. Prospero would have been angry at such disobedience. Gaston’s calm, she suspected, preceded a storm. She waited.

  Gaston reached for her hand that held the arrow, turned it palm-up. Calluses and scrapes marked it. He released her hand but took the arrow from her, examined the point.

  No storm broke. “I should have thought ere I spoke,” the Fireduke said slowly. “Indeed, should have thought better ere now. I heard tales of how thou fought’st at Perendlac. Th’art no novice with that weapon, nor with others. Aye?”

  “I didn’t like hurting people. And I only use the bow,” Freia said low-voiced.

  “Hast little need of other. Freia.” He put his hand on her shoulder, touched her chin so that she looked at him warily. “Forgive me for ill-grounded reason. Let me never damp thy joy in aught. An it please thee, shoot, walk, aye speak as freely as thou wilt. I would not bound thee.”

  20

  THE LINENS WERE CLAMMY WITH SWEAT. His own voice still rang in the air. Dewar pushed the bedclothes away from him and lay panting, staring at the rain-spattered window across the room. He strained his ear for noises; only the rain and his own life-sounds were there. Waking in confusion, he had been certain someone was in the room with him, that Freia was beside him, that he lay in some waste place with her as they had when they were searching for Prospero.

  It had been a night of long and vivid dreams about her. He had grown accustomed to them; she had been the dominant figure in his night-thoughts since he had left Landuc. He dreamt of others from time to time, or of nothing at all, but nearly every night Freia would pass wraithlike through his dreams, usually silent, and his dream-self would pursue her and be lost in grottoes of inexpressible thought until he woke, wanting her.