Chapter 4 – A Cheerful Busybody #6
“His horses have come,” Juste reported, rousing. “Twenty of them. They were to come back in August, but one of the mares was late in foal and he would have no others. Another noble lineage, like that blasted bull—”
“Sometimes you don’t want another,” Tounot retorted. He was as adept as any nobleman at concealing his feelings, but the pain surfaced now, his voice ragged. “I have told her and told her, I don’t want anyone else, and all she will say is that there’s plenty of stars in the sky…”
“There are,” Remin agreed, his eyes weaving upward until his head fell backward. “Lots.”
“I wanted that one.”
“We are not talking about horses,” Miche realized. Reaching for one of the curving wooden jugs, he sloshed another measure of clear liquor into the cups and distributed them. “Drink it,” he ordered Juste, who was gently contemplating the grain of the wood.
“Lady Bourdevane went to the capital,” Auber explained as he took his own cup, lifting it in a sardonic toast. Mild Auber could drink them all under the table. “Thanks.”
Ysmeine Bourdevane had been Tounot’s intended, until the Emperor’s machinations had severed them from each other.
A true love match, for all that they had been betrothed since they were children, and now she was bound to the capital to seek another.
No self-respecting family would allow a match to Sir Tounot of Tresingale; a man of no House, no lineage, with none of the protections of his kin and all of Remin’s enemies.
It was the last gasp of all Tounot’s hopes, which explained why he seemed inclined to let himself slip beneath the surface of the water and let nature take its course.
There was no consolation for the problem, and it would have been insulting to invent a silver lining.
Miche frowned. Normally, he would have recommended solace between the thighs of another woman, as many as it took to numb the wound, but Tounot had kept himself for Ysmeine all these years, and Bram’s rough prostitutes were not great consolers.
“She would sing for me,” Tounot was saying. “You have never heard such a song—”
“Forget her,” advised Juste, turning his head toward Tounot without actually lifting it. “There is no point in thinking of things you cannot have.”
“No, you—you go get her,” Remin argued. “If you love her, you go, you go find her and tell her. And bring her back. And tell her—you have to go after the things you want…”
It was a secret known only to the Knights of the Brede that Remin Grimjaw had no tolerance at all for spirits.
“He has to think what’s best for her,” Auber contradicted. “It’s hard to ask a woman to come all the way here, an’ live inna cottage with devils howling outside…”
“My wife did it,” Remin said smugly. “And you should bring her, Tounot, anyone can come. She can be Ophele’s friend.”
“It isn’ just that,” Tounot said unhappily. “She’d be cut off from her family. Give up everything. Like me. I can’ ask her to do that...”
There was a silence in which Miche eyed Tounot, whose face was a mask of tragedy.
“Drink,” he decided, and dosed the other man thoroughly, then helped himself to another cup.
By the time Master Balad suggested they ought to seek their beds, Miche had a fair idea of everything that had happened while he was gone, which included many problems for which there was no solution.
Nothing was likely to restore Tounot to his family or his sweetheart to his side, Auber had unwisely offered an opinion on his sister-in-laws’ cooking that had gotten him barred from supper in two houses, Juste was a stodgy, miserable bastard, and Remin…
Weighed a ton.
“I have him, I have him,” said Juste as they maneuvered their duke into the house on top of the hill, staggering under Remin’s weight. “Close the door, quick.”
“Don’ s’pose there’s a key for it.” Miche squinted at the heavy brass plates. There were four of them.
“Never mind, there are guards outside. Help me get him up the steps.”
“Boots off in the house,” said Remin suddenly, rousing.
“I’ll scrub the steps myself in the morning,” Miche promised, though some deep, honest part of himself thought he would be more likely contemplating the bottom of a chamber pot. That Benkki Desan liquor was potent stuff. “C’mon, Your Grace, there’s the stairs. Damn them.”
If Remin had been entirely unconscious, their options would have been to winch him upstairs with a crane or let him sleep it off on the floor of the grand entry.
But he was just conscious enough for Juste to pull and Miche to push him up the stairs, though there was a dangerous moment when his fingers slipped off the railing and he teetered backwards.
If he’d gone over, all three of them might have broken their necks.
Grunting, Juste hauled him the rest of the way upward, then sat down hard on the landing and kept going straight over onto his back. His eyes closed.
“Juste?” Remin poked him, concerned. “Miche, whass wrong with Juste?”
“He is drunk,” Miche explained, with an air of authority. The door at the far end of the landing was flung open, casting a long, flickering line of light into the hall.
“Who is there?” demanded a female voice, and even while wildly intoxicated, this had a bracing effect on Sir Miche of Harnost.
“Rem, leave ’im be,” he said, reeling upright.
“Remin?” came Ophele’s anxious voice, and her small shadow appeared in the door, dressed in a robe and slippers with her hair cascading loose around her. That meant the other one was Lady Something that started with V. Or B.
“He’s all right,” Miche said, making a massive effort to become instantly sober. “We had…a bit to drink.”
“Lots,” corrected Remin, painfully honest. “Wife?”
“Is that Justenin on the floor?” Ophele sounded fascinated.
“I will manage him, my lady,” said Lady Something, and her tall, slender shadow drifted past Miche in a cloud of disapproval.
“My thanks, my lady,” Miche managed, in indiscriminate gratitude to both women as Ophele darted forward to prop up Remin on his other side.
“Remin, are you really drunk?” she asked, and the tall man swept her up in an unsteady embrace and kissed her soundly.
“Wife, I am sooooooooo drunk…”
“Best if we just get him to bed, my lady,” Miche said, giving Remin a pull to get him going.
He was acquiring a certain dangerous bonelessness that meant he was minutes from passing out.
Miche had no qualms about leaving Juste to the lady.
Juste would cut off his own arm before he did anything inappropriate to a woman.
And Juste’s mind was clearly on other things.
“I hate that bull,” he was telling Lady Something as Miche and Ophele staggered off to the bedroom under the twenty-two stone Remin, who certainly felt like a bull.
Ophele was bearing up under her share of the load, though from her occasional squeaks, Miche suspected the lord was not entirely unconscious.
“Remin,” she hissed, and when they finally flopped him onto the mattress in the bedchamber, she went with him, sprawled over his chest with a length of shins and ankles showing that made Miche hastily cast his eyes to the ceiling.
“Wife,” Remin said affectionately. “So pretty. Don’ be scared, I’ll never…let anything…”
His voice trailed off and terminated in a single stentorian snore.
“I know,” she said softly as she escaped, eeling backward under his crushing arms. Her eyes went to Miche. “How much did he have?”
“You would actually be surprised how little,” Miche told her, and shook himself. “Sorry to bring him back like this, my lady. I’ll scrounge up a bucket, best to put it where he can find it, just in case. But he’s more like to just sleep it off.”
“All right,” she said, glancing worriedly at the fallen giant.
“He told me…about the Emperor summoning you,” Miche added, fumbling about for what he wanted to say. Dimly, he knew there was a great deal he wanted to tell her, and much that he should not say, but his tongue felt dangerously loose. “And—Juste is teaching you. Because you don’t know.”
“Oh. Yes,” she said, with a blink of surprise, and her slim shoulders drew together in an embarrassed cringe. “I’m sorry. I…lied to all of you.”
“There is nothing to forgive.” Miche laid a hand on her head, bending to look into her eyes.
There was a bitter taste in his mouth and the feel of acid in his throat.
“My lady. You did nothing wrong, at all. It is—so many people failed you. I am sorry that you had to endure that, alone. If I had—if there is anything I can ever do, you have only to name it.”
“You have done so much for us,” she said, with a wry smile that included her drunken husband. “How could I ever thank you?”
“It’s little enough,” Miche said, with a final pat of her head, and then went to see a man about a bucket.