Silence fell for a few minutes; Yseult felt a bit amused at how the two made up for lost time, and restricted herself a little, passing over most of the red meat. Even if her time as an oblate was fading, it wasn’t quite over yet, and the Rule of the Sisters called for moderation. Yseult poured them all more wine, red this time, and sliced the tart and handed round the honeysweetened cream.
“You’ve heard all about us, Lady Yseult,” Shawonda said.
“Please, let’s be Yseult and Shawonda and Janie in private? You know, you’re actually princesses, so I should be the one who goes after. I’m just a baron’s daughter. Sister, now.”
“We are?” Janie said. “Princesses? Really and truly?”
Her sister looked at her. “Remember what Mathilda said back when they came to our place? I thought she was joking but now I think she really meant it. But don’t start calling yourself a princess, Janie. It might cause trouble, people at home wouldn’t like it.”
She looked at Yseult. “But we don’t know what happened with you, just that the CUT… got at… your mother the way they did at. .. Martin. Would you tell us? It… it would make us feel less alone.”
“Like we’re part of an army, not just people something bad happened to,” Janie said.
She’s no fool. Neither of them are, Yseult thought as she sipped her wine. Maybe I should. We do have this in common. And… not to be cynical, but they are princesses. I like them, and it certainly can’t hurt to be friends. You need friends in this world. Friends, and strong allies. And you can’t have friends unless you’re prepared to be one yourself.
“Well, my mother was arrested, when the Lady Regent found out what she’d done,” Yseult began slowly. “Everyone suspected Huon and me, too.”
“That must have been awful,” Shawonda said
“Were you locked up in a dungeon?” Janie said, with the ghoulishness of her age.
“Not quite! What happened was-” CASTLE TODENANGST, CROWN DEMESNE WILLAMETTE VALLEY NEAR NEWBURG (FORMERLY WESTERN OREGON) PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION SEPTEMBER 27, CHANGE YEAR 23/2021 AD
Her quarters at Todenangst were not quite a cell. There was a room that was small and whitewashed within and furnished with a plain bed with equally plain but adequate sheets and blankets, a small cupboard and a commode. There was a Spartan sitting room next to it, with a table and chairs and an etagere. The place smelled of soap and wax and, very slightly, of concrete still curing after all these years; a maid came through and cleaned thoroughly every day.
There was no need for her do to anything menial, no derogeance, but it was very bleak.
She rose each morning when the sun came through the high slit windows, dressed in her riding habit, waited for the door to open and was escorted by an unspeaking squire with an equally taciturn middle-aged duenna to the stables and rode for two hours, in a walled tilt-yard of the Protector’s Guard, under instruction and ward of the Master of the Stables, Sir Henri Gallardo.
Castle Todenangst was more than a castle; you could have lost Castle Gervais in it a dozen times over. It was a palace and a city in itself, the inner keep here alone a vast labyrinthine complex of towers and courtyards, little hidden gardens and terraces, armories and barracks, offices and halls and galleries, archives and libraries and chapels and quirking passageways. Some of it was bleakly plain like her rooms; some parts she traversed were stunningly beautiful and decorated with things new-made by the Protectorate’s most skilled artists or plundered from half a continent. All of it had a faint air of menace that might be her imagination. After days she still felt she’d be hopelessly lost if she took one wrong turn, and almost grateful for the constant escort.
Sometimes late at night she thought of its building, twenty thousand men laboring through five years of hunger and brutal toil just for the main framework, some leaving their bones in its mass concrete bulk and most in the nearby graves. From the bed, if she stood, she could see the Black Tower glittering with the crystal inclusions in its dark granite sheathing. That had been the Lord Protector’s lair, and of him men still spoke with awe and dreadful fear.
After riding she went to confession-brief ones, where every day was the same-and Mass in an astonishing Lady Chapel that was like being inside a jewel, sitting between her guards of the day. Then the guards escorted her to the sitting room and a late breakfast, plain but adequate. After that she was free until her lessons and the escort to the baths where she was always the only occupant.
Free, she thought as she paced, after a time that seemed to stretch out forever and flick by in instants, both at the same time.
Free to do absolutely anything I can do in these two rooms! Free to pound my head on the walls!
Her books, brought from Gervais, she placed beside her bed; she arranged a little prie-dieu in her sitting room and spent hours trying to pray. A lute was brought at her request, and she was allowed to borrow, through Virgilia, any book she wanted out of the Todenangst libraries. That was one good thing, because they seemed to have all the books in the world. Virgilia gave her lessons from three to seven. The very first day the older woman told her bluntly that there were eavesdroppers, and her skin crawled at the thought that eyes might be on her at any moment of the day or night, and how the whole castle might be honeycombed by secret passages. The Spider had designed it, after all.
After that she kept her mind strictly on her lessons when Virgilia was there.
Each day she came back to the bare little room and tried to focus on a short list of tasks. She worked at making the hours pass by assigning to each one a different task. For the most part, she paced; unable to focus on any one task as raw worry gnawed at her balance.
Odard, she thought. Where is he now, out in the barbarian lands? Huon… is he still a page at Mollala? Mother… Fen House… people whisper about it. Better than the dungeons, but… and will I ever leave here? What happens if I start to scream at the walls?
She paced four quick steps one way and the seven at right angles, over and over as noon crept to one and Virgilia arrived to distract her. The fourth day as she sat and picked up a new piece of embroidery she’d started in hopes of focusing her attention once again, the door opened and Huon walked in.
The fine linen cloth with the pattern of yellow roses growing on it went flying as she sprang up. For one long second she stared at him and then they rushed together. Strong arms went around her and his tears fell on her shoulder. They swayed together, laughing and crying.
Huon had been a good three inches shorter than she when he left to go be Lord Chaka’s page. Now he stood just slightly taller, and he even smelled different; clean, but with an overtone of smoke and leather and horse, and his hands were rougher with callus. When their spate of tears had passed she found herself sitting in the little window seat, still in his arms.
“Tell me,” he said urgently, his rough voice breaking into a boyish treble. “Tell me what happened and how?”
“But I don’t know!” she exclaimed, sliding her eyes towards the door and the wall she suspected of a spy hole.
Huon shook his head impatiently.
“Don’t worry about them eavesdropping on us, Yseult. The Spider knows much more than we, and we cannot hurt ourselves any worse than Mama has already done. Our only hope is truth and mercy.”
“Then… you know.”
“Lord Chaka told me. What did you learn?”
“Goodwife Romarec said Mama and Uncle helped the men who came last year to Sutterdown and endangered the Princess.”
“Tried to kill everyone in that building including the Princess. And including Odard. He fought for her… fought beside her, and killed several of them at the risk of his life. I think that’s why we were left alone for as long as we were. Mother was getting a second chance that he bought us with the sword and his blood. And look what she did with it!”
His voice had changed too, deeper and rougher, and there was a different look in his eyes. They said he looked more like their father than anyon
e else in the family, and suddenly she believed it. Her father had been a hard man; never unkind to her, and she remembered him affectionate with her mother, but a very hard man in very hard times. People had been frightened of him; commoners never talked much about him in her presence. The Lord Protector had used him like a dagger held up the sleeve.
“But before she could tell me any more, Sir Garrick arrived and took over the castle,” Yseult said.
“Start at the beginning, then, Ysi. You and I are all of House Liu left here and we have only each other. You must tell me everything or I won’t know what to do or say.”
Yseult searched her brother’s eyes. He was the only one of them to get ones of their father’s dark blue, but with their mother’s open lids.
He’s only a boy! she thought, with a stab of remorse. I should.. .
She spoke aloud. “You’re my little brother! I should be protecting you!”
Huon laughed suddenly. “And if we had a kitchen or a solar, you’d be bustling around doing all the womanly things, taking baskets to the poor and supervising the weaving and getting the winter supplies done and the herbs put up and the accounts balanced. And doing it right!”
“Listen to the bearded knight!” she said gaily, then hugged him again. “Oh, this is good. I thought I’d go crazy… how have you been, over there in Mollala?”
Enthusiasm glowed from him; he was still only thirteen. “It’s great! Lord Chaka and the knights and their squires are strict, but they’re fun too, and the other pages are mostly good guys. I thumped a couple and a couple thumped me and we all know where we stand.”
Boys are weird sometimes, she thought, not for the first time. He went on:
“We train really hard and study, but there’s lots of hunting, they’re right on the edge of the Cascades there you know, and I’ve got a horse of my own and I’ve started again with the lance. And Lord Mollala says I’ve got a good seat and eye!”
“It does sound like fun,” Yseult said enviously.
She should have been a lady-in-waiting; for a year or more now. Learning skill and courtesy and the ways of another great house, with a kindly noblewoman to oversee her, and parties and hawking and some carefully chaperoned flirting, and seeing new places and people and making friends among the girls who’d be close to her all her life and link the families together the way page service and being a squire did the boys.
Huon grinned at her obvious thought: “And if we were under siege you’d be counting chickens and eggs and firing those deadly little darts of yours at the invaders.”
Yseult suddenly smiled. “I’m even better than Alex with the crossbow! Oh!”
“Alex? Vinton? He came back? I heard, but nothing definite.”
“I think so…” Yseult thought carefully and then told Huon everything.
It took some time, but she didn’t mind. I want the Spider… the Lady Regent… to know the truth! The truth is I didn’t know anything about treason! Neither did Huon!
It might not make all that much difference. The law spread guilt for treason throughout the kin. More than an hour later Huon said, very softly:
“Par le bon Dieu!”
Yseult nodded, letting her head fall back onto his shoulder. In the keyhole opening of the neck of his shirt she could see the little medal of St. Valentine Huon had always worn. There was another medal next to it.
“What’s that?” she asked.
Huon looked down and fingered the medallion. “Well, the Dowager Mollala gave it to me. It’s a Michael; the archangel, you know. Grand Constable of the Heavenly Host. Said if I wanted to be a warrior I needed a saint that could do more than just be a target and end up a holy pincushion.”
Yseult nodded. “Bernadette and Lourdes have been a great help to me.” “You always loved them.”
She nodded again, suddenly tired. All the tension that had been holding her together for the last five days drained out of her body and surprisingly, she found herself very sleepy but content as she hugged her brother. It seemed like a long time later when a thought floated up in her exhausted brain.
“I… it’s horrible, but I was… not glad, but, but, I wish I knew what words to use… when I saw Uncle Guelf’s body in the courtyard, I wasn’t angry he was dead. I felt like he’d deserved it and I was safer with him dead. How awful is that?”
Her brother sighed. “We probably are much safer with him dead and Mother under house arrest somewhere. They say to get out of a pit first you have to stop digging, and now he’s buried himself and Mother can’t do anything to make things worse. Where is Fen House? People just whisper about it when some noble really screws up and disappears.”
“Sir Garrick said we didn’t need to know. Do you know Sir Garrick?”
Huon looked down at her and shook his head. “The Protectorate is a big place, bigger than I realized. There’s a lot more empty space between the baronies than I realized, too. The Betancourts live in Bethany, up near Portland, a little west. It’s prime farmland, I think they have about a dozen manors, and vineyards in their demesne, too. A rich estate. But all the kids are a lot older than we are. Roderick and Garrick are the grandsons. I think old Lord Betancourt, the first of the line, is either dead or dying; though I might not have heard. They were Society people like Mother, but on both sides.”
Huon was quiet for a time. Then: “I can understand your not being sad that he died. I’ll bet the headless body gave you a shock, though.”
Yseult shuddered. “I don’t think it was the body. I’ve seen executions, after all. I think it was the unexpected sight, and knowing him. And he never used his head for anything but a helmet-rack anyway.”
She knew that the words were just bravado, but Huon laughed in approval and hugged her and she relaxed.
I’ve missed him; missed being able to share my feelings and thoughts. Missed it so much.
Huon pulled her closer. “It could be. He just knew he was smarter and better than Mother was and that he was supposed to be the regent for Odard, even though he loved Mother. And Mama loved Guelf, but she hated it when he tried to tell her what to do. I went to Loiston to be his page, remember? It was just for three months and I was only seven. Mother made me come home when I swore at her. And she and Guelf had one of their fights over his teaching me bad language.”
Yseult gave a watery chuckle. “The kind where we were scared they’d pull each other’s hair out by the roots? I remember that fight!”
“I do, too. But I saw that he truly loved Layella and cared for Aunt Theresa. He was really hard on Terry and Odo, but then I realized that he was really stupid about how he showed how much he cared, but he really cared. So, I understand your not being unhappy he’s dead. But I’m sorry; he did love us. I wish I knew what happened, that he abandoned his post.”
“Did he? Did he really? He ran away?”
That shocked her to the very core. You could forgive an Associate most things except cowardice.
And treason, her mind added.
“Yes, but that’s all I know. Walked out on all the men; just left them and headed back home… I don’t think it was cowardice, really. He was a fighter, at least. Everyone agrees he fought like a lion at Pendleton! Why? ”
“I was really sorry for Aunt Layella. I don’t know if she cared for him, but she was a good aunt to us and Chatelaine for him.”
She licked her lips; she was dancing around the most important question of all:
“Huon, why did Mama do this? What made her so mad all the time? She hates me. She’s always after me, always irritated, always angry. And Uncle’s… was… so much worse than he used to be, too.”
Huon started, eyes focusing on her again. “But she didn’t hate you!” he protested. “Mama loves you so very much. Don’t you remember the silk violet dress with the eyelet surcoat she made for you that Easter you led all the girls into church? And the flowered drapes and hangings for your bed she embroidered… all your ‘special’ flowers?”
“Oh,” breathed Yse
ult. “I’d forgotten.”
Remembering Mary’s tender hands dressing her and carefully braiding her hair in a complicated pattern. She’d been eight and so proud to be old enough to lead the girls with their baskets of flowers up to the altar.
“She did the white work herself. I still have it, carefully put away. Or, I did. She changed. She changed… when?” she asked, puzzled.
“Some when our father died, Lord Chaka says. I was just a baby. He told me she became obsessed with revenge. But it was the fortunes of war, for heaven’s sake! He wasn’t slain by treachery, that would be grounds for a feud. He died sword in hand with his face to the enemy. What better can you hope for? A man drops it once the war is over. But she was just a woman widowed and grieving.”
“Hummmphf!” Yseult snorted, and Huon waved it aside. “Then, then Uncle Jason died in Corvallis and she had to struggle along with just Sir Richart Reddings to help her besides Guelf, and he kept thinking he should be in charge. And Sir Harold’s father; but he was already old and sick. And he didn’t like her very much.”
“Was it then?”
“Later, I don’t know. I know that she wouldn’t let me leave to become a page, again. There were at least five offers that I heard of, good ones, Houses it would be smart to have links to, but she wouldn’t even discuss them. That was three years ago, but I never knew why. I think, I think that was the start of a… a… worse change, but even Lord Chaka didn’t know the true answer. He only had guesses.”
Yseult pondered, picking at the crusty scabs on her cheek, before giving up on the conundrum.
“I wish I knew. It hurts to think of Mama being a traitor. It hurts the honor of House Liu and I don’t know how we’re going to make it clean.”
Huon nodded. “Yes. But she never really accepted that the Lady Regent was her ruler. She felt… I’ve heard her say… that Gervais was an independent Barony, or should be, after the Lord Protector died.”
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