Elmwood #2
“It’s impossible to know for certain. There are no written mentions of Charms or Charmers until about two hundred years after the Myran Empire fell and the first high king had united Eldmere.”
“But you do think that the magic in fireside tales and the saints’ miracles might be different ways of talking about what we now call Charms?”
“I’m afraid I’m not certain,” he said, which was true.
He hadn’t thought about his thesis since the day he walked out of his advisor’s office.
It had been too personal a rejection, and it was better not to dwell on it.
Now he was regretting mentioning it. He certainly hadn’t meant to bring Charms into the conversation, lest she use the opening to badger him about her husband.
But he was absolutely dying to ask her about her own Charm and find out what she could do with it.
Wanting to know itched his curiosity like fleas in a feather bolster. “Lady Croft, I’ve been meaning to ask…”
“Will you Ruckus?”
With his vision hindered by the headpiece, Elmwood had to pivot his whole body to see the person who had come up beside them.
It was a girl, maybe twenty, with auburn hair braided in a style that closely resembled the way Hilde often wore hers.
She had bunches of the little white flowers Elmwood had seen growing along the forest path tucked up into the crevices of her braids, and she was very pretty in a wide-eyed, snub-nosed sort of way that was all very wholesome but held no allure for Elmwood.
“Francie,” said Lady Croft. “I don’t think…”
“I know you’re not really one for dancing, Han, but will you do me one spin about, please? Ian wouldn’t tell his ma we were coming together, so I want to make him jealous,” said Francie, grinning at him.
Elmwood eyed the dancers. The Ruckuscloaks made it impossible for them to move with much grace, and he thought that even with his limp, he could do a respectable imitation of their cavorting.
He’d likely pay for it in pain later, but he hated to turn down anyone who had the courage to ask for a dance.
He looked to Lady Croft to see if she would answer for him and found her smiling bemusedly at Francie.
“I think Ian may be too drunk to remember to be jealous, Francie,” she said.
“Well, it’s worth a try!” said Francie, offering Elmwood her arm.
Elmwood shrugged at Lady Croft, then let Francie pull him into the fray.
Elmwood realized rather quickly that he had miscalculated, and the amount of cavorting his hip could withstand was significantly less than he had hoped, but fortunately, Ian was not at all too drunk to be jealous and came trundling over almost immediately to reestablish his claim on Francie’s affections.
At least, Elmwood assumed that the Ruckuscloaked figure (with even more horns than Elmwood) was the Ian of speculation, given how pleased Francie seemed when she danced away with him.
Elmwood stood in the swirling mass of dancers, peering through them as well as his headpiece to try to spot Lady Croft. It was getting quite dark, and outside the light of the fire, it was difficult to see faces.
There she was, standing nearby, with plates and mugs carefully arranged in her arms. She made a little gesture with her chin at him, which he understood to be a beckoning, and it should not have thrilled him to be beckoned by her so casually, but it did.
Shaking his head at his own folly, he made his way to her and then followed as she led him to a bench that leaned up against the wall of a building, well away from the bonfire light. She was just a shadowy form as he settled beside her.
“Here,” she said, “hold these and I’ll help get your head free.
” She handed him the plates, set the mugs on the bench, and then got back up and stepped between his legs to grasp the headpiece and lift it up and off, leaving him face-to-face with her magnificent cleavage.
He swallowed hard, and she mercifully took a step back, taking one of the plates from him.
Desperate to look at anything but her while he got a handle on himself, he directed his eyes to the plate. There was a bready thing, which he supposed was the birch cake, as well as a slice of some sort of savory pie and some curvy bits that resembled caterpillars. He poked at them suspiciously.
“They’re ferns,” she said. “Haven’t you had fern blades before?”
“I can’t say that I have.” He picked one up, still rather put off by its decidedly invertebrate aspect.
But he was nothing if not game for trying new things, so he popped it into his mouth and discovered that it had a delightful crunch and a very fresh, green taste.
Actually, it was exactly the way one might expect a fern to taste, if one had ever given thought to eating a fern.
“Do you like it?” she asked, chewing on one of her own.
“Surprisingly pleasant.”
“They’re my favorite,” she admitted, then took a sip from her mug. Elmwood followed suit and discovered it was very dry, very strong cider.
“This is delicious. Is it chilled somehow?”
“They keep the barrels in the stream to cool it.”
“Very clever.”
They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, eating and watching the dancers, who seemed to be winding down a bit.
“Is the young lady I danced with a friend of yours?” he asked. “Francie?”
“She’s a maidservant at the Croft. She’s supposed to be a maid of all work, like I was, but she’s very clever with clothing and hair and things of that nature, so I’m trying to let her be a ladies’ maid.
I wish I could offer her actual training, but I’ve very little idea what a ladies’ maid is supposed to do and I still dress like a maidservant myself, most of the time.
She knows more about it than I from corresponding with her cousin, who works in a big house in the south. ”
“I see. Does she plan to follow in her cousin’s footsteps and leave for more frilly, fashionable pastures?”
The corner of her mouth quirked up.
“I thought so for a while, but lately she’s been very taken with young Ian, as you saw.
We’re a bit of a strange place, in that very few of our young people go off to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Where most little villages get emptier as their children go for soldiers in Relance or into service in Neck, ours mostly choose to stay here, on the land.
It’s not always an easy place to live, but it is a good one. ”
“Is that why you and your sister never went out to seek your fortunes elsewhere?”
She shrugged, and there was something a little defensive about it that both interested him and made him sorry for asking.
“It never occurred to me to leave. I know this place inside and out, and I love every bit of it. And as for Han…well, she’s a creature of habit.
If left to her own devices, she’d eat the same breakfast every morning, put on the same shirt and breeches, exchange the same words with the same people, and do the same work at the same time day after day.
When we were children, I had to argue with everyone to make sure she wasn’t asked to divert from her routine too much, otherwise she’d have these terrible fits of temper that almost made her a danger to herself.
I honestly can’t imagine her striking out in the world and having to endure the newness of everything she encountered there. ”
“And are you a creature of habit, Lady Croft?”
She seemed to think about this.
“I am a creature of practicality,” she finally said.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. What about the greencreep?”
She snorted.
He leaned back, stretching out his furry, Ruckuscloaked legs.
“I haven’t any siblings, but my friend Win has often orated upon the perils of growing up with an excessive number of sisters, so I do have some inkling that it is all very contentious but also full of ineffable joy.”
“Hmm,” she said, and it sounded sad. He waited. “Han and I have been together our whole lives, but I would not say that we are the sort of sisters your friend described. We don’t fight, generally speaking, but we also don’t share confidences.” She paused. “At least, not unless it is unavoidable.”
“Why is that?”
“You have most certainly been monopolizing the questions, Lord Elmwood. You must let me have a turn. Tell me more about this friend, Win.”
Hmm, clearly this was a touchy subject for her, which only sparked his curiosity further. But he was, after all, a gentleman, so he would indulge her curiosity. Besides, he liked talking about Win.
“What do you want to know? He’s my lawyer as well as my friend, and he’s shockingly brilliant at both.
We met at the university, and he was the only person I knew there who seemed to enjoy me for who I really was and not for what I could do for him, as the future Lord Elmwood, or as a sort of spectacle of foolish amusement.
I would do almost anything for him, if he asked me. ”
“That sounds like a very good friend, indeed.”
“Yes. But sometimes…” He paused, uncertain why he was going to confess his anxieties to her, but then decided he didn’t care why. “Sometimes, I wonder why he bothers with me.”
She smiled at him then, and it made his heart do something funny, though perhaps it was just the dancing and all the weight of the Ruckuscloak making him dizzy.
“I expect you make his life a good deal more exciting than it would be otherwise,” she said.
He was quite certain that she was being sarcastic, but his body didn’t seem to know it.
Something in his throat had become rather lumpy, and he clenched his hands in his lap to keep them from reaching out for hers.
Lacking anything appropriate to say or the ability to say it without becoming embarrassingly emotional, he busied himself with his cider, and they sat quietly, watching the fire as it burned down to coals.