Chapter 2 – A Trial of Steel
“Get up,” said Remin, moving back a pace without shifting the ready angle of his sword. “Try again.”
He took no satisfaction in watching Davi and Leonin wobble back to their feet, their panting breaths rasping through the visors of their helmets.
Notionally, they had just secured an imaginary Ophele’s retreat through the door behind them, but they had had to resort to absorbing his bruising, bludgeoning attack with their armor rather than fighting back.
If he had wanted to kill them, he could have.
Wordlessly, the two men moved into position, Leonin in front and Davi slightly behind, where his greater reach could be used to best advantage.
“Are we guarding the door, each other, or another point, Your Grace?” asked Leonin, polite and breathless.
“Secure a route to a carriage,” Remin replied, and pointed to the gate on the other side of the paddock. “There.”
They barely had a chance to turn their heads and look at it before he attacked, chopping his sword toward Leonin’s head.
The other man swiftly pivoted to parry, the clash of steel ringing through the air.
Leonin had been the one to suggest these exercises, scenarios a guardsman might reasonably expect to encounter, and Remin was the most ferocious antagonist available.
They only had four months before they left for Segoile.
Though a lack of training was not their greatest concern. For now, and for the foreseeable future, Davi and Leonin were nothing but exceedingly devoted guardsmen.
Just thinking of last night’s argument with Ophele was like a heaping of coals into his gut.
Remin sucked in a breath and attacked again, pressing Davi and Leonin inexorably toward the paddock fence, constantly searching for a way to smash through the wall of their bodies to get to the imaginary Ophele on the other side.
He had been planning to practice with them anyway, but he took a vindictive pleasure in it today.
Stars, did she think he wanted her to be bound forever to two other men?
Did she think he enjoyed knowing that she spent a greater portion of her day with her guards than her husband?
Had it not occurred to her, when she worried that they would know all her secrets, that Remin worried about the same thing?
He had never thought he was a jealous man—though it was true, he had never before had an opportunity—but he could never like knowing that other men might know her better than he did.
He hated that his wife must have such guardians.
He was enduring it because he had no choice.
“Leonin, the gate,” Davi puffed, muffled through his helmet, a split second before Remin lunged to intercept them. Knocking Leonin’s sword aside, he smashed in with a shoulder charge, but the smaller man sidestepped just as Davi shoved forward, covering the gap between them. And they got the gate.
They were getting better. Neither of them would ever defeat Remin in a fight, but they weren’t trying to unseat him as Supreme Sword.
A good guardsman was a shield, an obstruction, and these two were learning to work very well together.
In time, they would do some of these exercises with Ophele, and teach her how to simultaneously move with them and stay out of their way.
The three of them were already learning how to maneuver around each other, apparently.
It had been Leonin who explained their vision of Andelin’s hallows the night before, once they had trooped into the solar for a more private conversation.
A noble tradition, in which the hallow and the soul-sworn endeavored all their lives to deserve each other.
Remin would have to think through the implications of such a scheme for his descendants, but he had to admit that this was normally the sort of thing he loved.
A blend of ancient tradition balanced against the needs of the present, with high expectations and uncompromising judgments.
“That will be excellent, in the long term,” Remin had told them, pulling up the new armchair he had gotten for his birthday. Even the buttery leather failed to soothe him. He was feeling blindsided and angry. “Explain how this will affect the short term. Beginning with March.”
“I cannot argue with you, Your Grace,” Leonin had replied coolly. “It is just as you said. When we go to Segoile, if the Emperor intends to harm Her Grace, then he will surely separate us from her, and we cannot protest if we are only guardsmen.”
“Does this content you, Davi?” Remin turned to the other man, his lanky body folded up into his chair and visibly unhappy. Remin got the feeling that Davi was nearest to sharing his own opinion.
“’Course not.” Davi glanced at Ophele apologetically.
“Truthfully, I’d do whatever it takes to protect the lady first, and bugger the rest. For me, my lady, I already want to swear so I can do what you said.
Protect you so you can live and do whatever you’re going to do.
I want to see what that is. You’d have my sincere oath. ”
“I know.” Her glance took in both Leonin and Davi. “But I don’t think it’s right to take the oath just because it’s dangerous if we don’t.”
“That is why you are taking it at all, wife,” said Remin, with an edge.
“Then we shouldn’t do it,” she said stubbornly. The color was high in her face, but she was holding her ground. “It is the Emperor’s fault we’re forced to consider such a thing. To have to swear an oath that binds our souls for—”
“My first care is that you live long enough to contemplate the state of your soul,” Remin interrupted hotly, and Ophele flushed.
“It’s—blasphemous,” she said, her voice high and excited. “I think. I don’t know if the Temple would say it is, but this oath is sacred and I don’t want to…to…insult it, because we took it for the wrong reasons.”
She had never argued with him like this before. Remin bit his tongue.
“We know our souls are real,” she went on, frightened but stubborn.
“We saw our families’ spirits at the Feast of the Departed.
There is something after this life, and I don’t know what it is, so I don’t know what it will be to have both of you bound to me forever.
What if we do it wrong, and I can never find you there, for all time?
What if I can’t find my mother? What if I can never find a heaven at all?
And if I am—if I am really a child of the stars, wouldn’t it be even worse if I did such a thing?
Tied Leonin and Davi to me for my own convenience, or because I was scared, not because I am worthy of such companions? ”
These were not questions Remin had ever considered. He could not argue the reality of souls; he had felt them through the clouds of sacred incense. His dark brows drew together.
“Others did not wait so long,” he said slowly. It was a weak argument. His stomach knotted. “I read Juste’s book, too. I’m sure there’s something in what you say, but the reason hallows exist is to protect their masters in this life.”
“I don’t deserve them.” She lifted her eyes to his, clear and golden and shining. “The only reason they would swear is because of you and my father.”
He could not argue that. She would not need hallows if it were not for Remin Grimjaw. And he had promised he would not force her to take any oaths.
“It’s your decision,” he said, and rose, his face thunderous. At the door, he forced himself to stop and speak again. “We’ll go to supper soon.”
He needed to think. He needed to get a leash on the thing that was trying to thrash loose inside him. And all the next day, he had gone over and over the argument in his mind, as if some construct of logic would be sufficient to protect her.
He found no answers, but at least his exercise with Leonin and Davi had tired him enough to broach the subject rationally.
“I just want to keep you safe,” he told Ophele in bed that night. The moon was nearly full, and its light cast diamond-patterned shadows through their wide windows, glowing on her fair skin. “Wife. I don’t want to force you.”
“I know,” she said unhappily, closing her eyes as his fingers brushed her cheek. And that was all she said. Remin withdrew his hand.
“Then talk to Brother Oleare,” he murmured. “Juste is no clergyman. Perhaps Brother Oleare can reassure you.”
“I will.”
They were both naked under the covers. He had made love to her again after supper, hoping to forget himself inside her, and hoping even more to beget a child.
It would protect her, if she was visibly pregnant when they went to court.
But the feel of her small, vulnerable body beside him was too much. Remin rolled onto his side.
“I love you,” she whispered behind him.
“I love you,” he replied, shutting his eyes.
It would have been so much easier if he had not.
* * *
Within the freshly painted walls of the tailor’s shop in Tresingale, a polite war was underway.
On one side was Lady Verr, commanding with fierce and glittering gray eyes. Master Marin Tiffen, newly arrived from Belleme, led the opposing force, and somehow Ophele was the small, neutral nation between them that was about to be blown to bits.
“No, a double sleeve, inner and outer,” said Lady Verr, peering over Master Tiffen’s shoulder as he hunched at his worktable, making alterations to the current design.
“That was the fashion when I was last in the capital, a very wide outer sleeve and an inner sleeve that buttons down the forearm. Or perhaps, if it was a tippet, we—”
“I don’t hold with tippets,” the tailor said loudly, squinting up at her.
There were many things with which Master Tiffen did not hold.