Dewar found it humiliating to require assistance to use a chamber pot, though his rescuer was blasé about it. They glared at one another in grudging grey morning light from the wide-paned windows.
“You cannot stand up yet,” she told him, arms akimbo.
“Get me crutches. A cane will do.” He clenched his teeth against the pain that shot from his leg. His ribs ached and burned; his arm had felt well until he moved it, so now it too throbbed.
“You have a broken arm and ribs and a broken leg. Your precious dignity is going to have to suffer. If you make any more fuss about it I’ll leave and you can welter on your snapped bones alone.” Briskly spoken, without malice: a doctor’s threat to an immobilized client.
He glared at her. The hot-poker pain in his leg assured him that she was right, but he didn’t have to like it. “May you come to the same one day,” he muttered.
“I’d be ill-paid for helping you if I did,” she replied, turning away—but not before he saw her hurt expression.
Dewar bit his lip, regretting his hasty ill-wish, and drew on the Well, dulling his pain to discomfort. “And I hope there’s someone as kind as you’ve been to me, to help you then,” he added.
Startled, she glanced at him from the fireside, where she had begun taking clothes up and shaking them. Dewar smiled apologetically. “I’m not used to being laid up like this,” he said. “I never have been before. I’m no warrior.” He wondered how he had ever taken her for a man; her shape was obviously female, her rose-cheeked face young and wary. She wore a dress today, long full-skirted high-breasted brown wool, an apron too.
“Oh,” she said, not smiling back. “You’re much better today.” She lifted a dressing-gown and displayed it wordlessly, lifting her eyebrows.
To further smooth her temper, he said, “All your doing. The soup last night was restorative as well as delicious. Thank you.” Dewar, with her help in managing his splinted arm, shrugged into the dressing-gown, wool and silk.
“There are hen’s eggs for breakfast if you like them. The geese won’t let me near.”
“I am at your mercy insofar as cooking goes.” He smiled again, warmly, trying to elicit a smile in return. “And all else. Where are we?”
“A big house. There’s nobody else here.”
“Your house?” She might be a maid, or some servant of the folk who’d fled the battles and disorder.
She looked at him sidelong while she folded linen.
“You’re of Prospero’s army,” Dewar realized, and regretted saying that. “Let us not speak of the war,” he went on, to cover it. “It is done.”
“Done,” she repeated, staring down at the white fabric, stopping. “Is he dead?”
“No, not dead as far as I know. He escaped them after being taken. You did not know?”
“I was—away from here.”
“Oh. Yes. There was a great and mortal battle; he was captured and he surrendered, but made his escape that very night. I daresay the Fireduke was sparked by it.”
“You did not see it?”
“The battle? I saw. I was in it. Some of it.”
“And they left you in the ditch like that! They are—” She stopped herself. “I’ll fetch breakfast,” she said, and left the folded clothes to hurry out.
“Eat with me,” Dewar called after her.
She did, subdued. Dewar wished he had not mentioned Prospero. What could have been her role in the army? Perhaps a surgeon. She must have been at Ithellin, he thought, or perhaps caught out between one post and another. It would be more comfortable for both of them if they did not speak of the war and its ancillary issues. He would not bring it forward again.
As he ate an omelet, soft pungent cheese, and flat griddle-bread, he realized that she had given him no name, nor asked one, and he understood that she might not wish to know too much about him. Let there be a vacant space around them for a few days until he could maneuver on his own, and then they would go their ways separately. That was wisest.
“Are there books in this house?” he asked her.
“I saw some. I’ll bring them to you. Is your arm paining you?”
“A bit.” It throbbed and felt hot beneath the veil of the Well.
“You’re moving around too much,” she said. “I shall strap it so that you’ll keep it still and allow it to set.”
Meekly, Dewar submitted.
Another great snowstorm battered the house. Dewar’s chapped-faced surgeon sat sewing at the end of his featherbed, a blanket around her shoulders, and Dewar, bundled in blankets too, read to her. The house was cold; the chamber was drafty. She thought it was because only the single room was heated. “And the kitchen,” she had said that morning when she shivered in with his breakfast of salt-fish hash, stewed fruits, and griddle-bread, “even with the fire there, yet that’s colder. The pump’s frozen,” she had said.
Dewar had said, “We can melt snow.”
“Plenty of that. I’m glad I tied a rope to the barn yesterday when it clouded over. I’d have been blown away.” She had a mount in the barn, she had said.
“You could put him in the kitchen,” Dewar had suggested.
“I think not,” she had demurred; and, “Anyway, we’re housebound.”
“You’re not. I am definitely housebound for another ten days.”
“True.” She had not promised, but all indications were that she’d stay till he could get around on his own. Besides, the weather was prohibitive.
“Would you consider selling me your horse then?”
She had shaken her head. “I’ve no horse to sell you.”
“Oh, well. Would you consider finding one for me?”
“They left nothing behind. I wonder when the people who live in this house will come back.”
“Spring I suspect,” Dewar had said, twisting his mouth.
“That’s true.” She’d brightened.
“Do you like chess?” he’d asked hopefully.
“I’m told I’m an execrably bad player. —I think I shall bring up food so we can hole up here.”
“And wood.”
“I filled the hall with that already,” she had said. After she had provisioned them, putting food in the hall with the wood, she sat down in front of the low fire with sewing in her cold hands. Dewar read a book that he had found beside his bed.
“What’s that book about?” she asked when they ate lunch.
It was a Madanese account of the Flange Wars, written in Madanese by one of the admirals. “History,” he said.
“Oh.”
After a moment, she said, “I saw it had maps.”
Dewar nodded, and then he understood. “Would you like me to read aloud to you while you sew?” he suggested.
A smile, the first he had gotten from her, was his reward, and a warm body cozily tucked at the other end of the bed who listened with wide-eyed flattering attention as he read and who fetched him other books, a tall stack of them, epics and histories and chronicles. All were written in Chenaran, the old local tongue, instead of the King’s tongue of Lannach, which Dewar found curious; and their perspectives and subjects were Chenaran as well. The house and its library were antiques. Finding history dry, he abandoned it for a lush romance with beauteous princesses, noble and base knights, improbably powerful magicians, and unlikely coincidences. The cadence of his voice gave measure to the storm outside, and the time and the storm passed in chapters and verses.
Dewar had had nothing to do but observe the young woman for several days now, and he thought he knew her better than she meant. He also supposed she was hoarding notes on him. It wasn’t worth being worried about; it was a game, to see how many sound conclusions he could draw on accidental evidence.
She was not of the upper classes; she had said, “Oh, no lady I,” once and had amused him enormously with a couple of straight-faced indelicate remarks, one on a plump juicy sausage which had spurted heroically when pierced in the pan. She cooked very well, and that and her medicinal knowl
edge made him think her some camp follower of Prospero’s army, left behind accidentally. She was practical and efficient, neat and quick with her needle, and accustomed to being self-reliant. She was sober of mind and not quick to laugh; often his jests passed her utterly. And she was generous and humane, having dragged him half-alive out of the ditch and succored him here.
He did not know how she felt about being here nor why she had come with the army nor what her plans were.
She was not worn and frayed as the camp followers of Landuc had been. Providing the services of laundresses, nurses, cooks, general heavy labor, and sexual accessories for the armies, these lackluster women had been pathetic, anything but exciting to Dewar. He supposed that if a passive vessel for release were all that was required, one would do, but he preferred more engaging encounters and had ignored the pack of them. Prince Josquin was under his uncles’ eyes and had been a model of princely decorum and restraint, by Josquin’s standards, anyway. Neither of them had acknowledged their brief prior acquaintance, though Dewar was certain the Prince Heir had recognized him. Their friendship in the army camp had included fencing together in practice-sessions, there exchanging a few unguarded heated glances, but nothing more intimate than that.
His companion in the hollow manor-house was sexually neuter. She treated his body without noticing it, and she dressed and undressed in the bedroom’s dressing-room, out of sight. Her skin was fair, though wind-chapped, her hands lightly callused, her arms stronger than most women’s. Dewar thought she was pretty enough when she smiled, but that otherwise she was unremarkable: an innkeeper’s wife, perhaps, or a craftsman’s, or a sea-captain’s pragmatic and durable helpmeet.
She wore plain gowns scavenged out of the cupboards of the house; they showed little of her uncorseted form save that it was female. Sometimes a soft breast would press his arm as she helped him move, but there was no spice of flirtation in it.
She slept on the floor in front of the fire, bundled in blankets, and did not snore.
But all in all, Dewar thought, he knew very little about her, and he admired her caution. Her speech was accented, which was queer; having passed the Well’s fire, he should not have heard an accent on her tongue. He knew nothing of her family, her home, her estate; he did not know what she had been doing in Prospero’s army; he did not know her origin, and he did not know her wishes in anything but that the snow might stop. She slogged out to the barn where her mount was stabled (whose name he also did not know) daily, and reported the height of the snow on her return.
“Waist-deep,” she said, holding her hand at her ribs.
“I wonder if there is a tunnel to the barn. Places that get such heavy snow often include that as a routine convenience.”
“I thought these storms were unusual.”
“Why?”
“You said something about how they had been delayed,” she said.
He had? Yes, he had. “They were late, for the region,” he said. “I suppose they may be unusually severe as a result of that. Pent-up.” With a sorcerer who commanded his Element as Prospero did, Binding the winds, it was as close to a sure thing as one could come, but Dewar thought he would not get into a discussion of the defeated Prince’s strategies and abilities with his partisan.
The storm abated after five days, leaving snow shoulder-deep at its shallowest.
“I won’t need a horse,” Dewar said dolorously, when she reported this.
“The drifts are at the windowsills on this floor! The first floor’s covered right up, except on the lee side and the windows are half-covered there.”
Dewar wanted to see. She allowed him to hop, leaning on her, to the window, to peer out at the white glittering featureless plain that covered the landscape, and then made him return to his bed.
“I can get up—” he protested, despite the pains moving had started.
“Please, not yet. You must give that leg a little more time to set. Three days. And where will you go in such a hurry?” she asked him. “Sliding on boards like the hairy mountain-men you told me about?”
“I suppose,” he conceded.
Dewar had thought about this, as her reports of the weather came in day by day. He was in no condition to ride, nor even to mount; though his ribs felt nearly healed, the leg and arm must take longer, even aided by his drawing on the Well. He would leave by other means, after her. Which meant he must encourage her to abandon him here after he could get about reliably by himself—
His thoughts on promoting her departure pulled up abruptly. If the snow lay so deep, then she could hardly ride out and away herself, no more than he could.
She herself seemed to reach a similar conclusion after ploughing out to the barn again and back after breakfast.
“How’s your faithful friend?” he inquired.
“Wanting to stretch her—legs,” the woman replied, gnawing her lip abstractedly.
“Something wrong?”
“I cannot open the big barn doors,” she said. “The snow’s too high; it has covered them, and the winds blow more on every hour.”
The wind had been moaning disagreeably at the chimney, plaintive without the rattle of ice, all day.
“Ah,” said Dewar. “And it’s rather deep for riding anyway.”
She nodded, morose, and went to stare out the window, around the curtain. “Trapped,” she said, shoulders down. “Useless.”
Neither of them had mentioned the war.
“Come sit down,” Dewar said, “make us some tea, and let’s think about it. Certainly there’s more than one barn door.”
“None’s big enough, and most are blocked. Do you want tea?”
Dewar nodded.
“We’re going to get fat as pigeons, eating out the winter here,” she said crossly, and went to fill the kettle from a barrel of melted snow-water.
“Make less for us to eat.”
“If you like.”
Surly and silent, she made tea and poured it, scalding, and ignored hers, glaring at the fire. Dewar read to himself, not aloud. The wind keened. The woman jumped up abruptly and left the room with a bang of the door.
Oh, no, thought Dewar. She’d been a pleasantly bland companion thus far. If she were going to become snarling and unsociable on realizing her snowbound predicament, he’d take the first opportunity to leave her. In a few days when she went out to the barn, he could build up the fire, open his Way, and be through it ere she returned.
A simple solution to an otherwise uncomfortable and tedious situation. He tucked it away in his thoughts and read about the Lucin War, fifteen centuries past, in which Prince Marshal Gaston had distinguished himself for his great mercy toward the defeated.
She left him alone all day and returned long after the brief sunset. No luncheon. Dinner was a plain dried-vegetable stew and bread. Dewar supposed he was being penalized for suggesting they eat less and made no comment nor complaint. His companion said not a word and, soon after the meal was ended and the dishes cleaned, she unrolled her bedroll and curled up in it with her back to him.
Dewar hoped she’d be in better temper in the morning.
She was not. The temperature had dropped again, and the cold drove her in to huddle by the fire and work distractedly at something that involved many needles sticking out in different directions—an apt analogy, thought Dewar, for her spiky mood.
The screaming of the wind in the chimney was maddening, and it batted and fanned the flames and blew ashes and cinders into the room gustily from time to time.
Her crossness made him fidgety, and he could not keep his mind on his book.
That day went slowly and dumbly to its grim close.
On returning from her visit to the barn the next day, Dewar’s companion presented him diffidently with a pair of crutches.
“Here. Try one under your left arm. You can’t use the right yet.”
He blinked. They were new-made; they smelled of fresh-cut, cold wood.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so snappy,”
she added, looking down. “I don’t like winter.”
Dewar nodded and accepted a crutch. With her help, he got up and hopped awkwardly, then less so, across the room and back.
“A great improvement. I can make it to the jakes alone,” he joked.
She left him to practice shifting and moving his weight without hurting his broken arm and leg or still-sore ribs. Dewar limped to the door as she closed it and followed her into the hall. It was long and narrow, panelled with dark wood and unlit.
“Wait, wait,” she called, unseen, “there’s lumber all over, I’ll make you a light—” and a moment later a light flared and settled halfway up the wall, some distance down the hall ahead of him, and showed him that the hall was an obstacle course of boxes, barrels, piled wood, and cans of water. She had laid all this up here, he guessed, to wait out the siege of the storms.
“There. Be careful.”
“I will.”
“Mind the stairs, around there. Three down, and then a big flight, but you’ll see the window. I must go back to the barn.” She lit another wall-sconce from the first and thumped off around the corner and down.
Dewar, hissing when he jarred his leg, made slow progress down the hall to the light and paused there, staring at it.
It was shaped like a flower, the candle rising from the half-open petals at its base, polished silver leaves behind forming a reflector.
Dewar looked up and down the hall swiftly. Yes, the lights were the same, the panelling patterned at the top with a chequering of light and dark wood, the carpet soiled now but the same. Disregarding the flaring pain in his leg, he hastened to a door, opened it, tried another beyond it, thumped back past the chamber where he had been confined, and at the other end found a T-intersection beyond a door.
“Ah,” he muttered, and at one end, indeed, was the lavatory and jakes and at the other was the room where he had dined with Prospero.
Dewar summoned an ignis-spark and kindled a five-light candelabrum. The place had been ransacked since his dinner there. A draped brocade curtain had been pulled right down off its rail at one window; the window itself gaped through a shard-edged opening at the top. The desk was overturned, its drawers emptied; a sideboard had been tipped over, and there was broken glass in the fireplace. Dewar pegged slowly forward. Snow and rain had come in through the window, staining the lovely carpet; the table where he’d sat was still there, though the chair had been hurled at a mirror to break both.
A Sorcerer and a Gentleman Page 30
