Chapter 7 – The Council of the Well #7
Rewrapping the muffler around his face, he went outside again. He was roasting under the many layers of clothing and fur, but it was better than taking a chill as he moved from one cottage to the next.
“I’m sorry, my lord,” Leonin said the moment he opened the door. “I know I should be with Her Grace, but she…strongly opposed the idea of my accompanying her.”
“What did she say?”
Leonin shifted.
“She said if I came outside, she would take off her cloak and sit in the snow until I went back in,” he said stiffly, and Remin could very easily imagine Ophele issuing this threat, no doubt with a stomp of her small foot.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to risk that,” Remin replied, torn between anger and pride. “Thank you, Leonin.”
He could not be easy in his mind until he had checked on everyone else, amused by the horror of his servants as they realized their lord was at the door.
What Juste had said was true. Almost all of them were sick, in various levels of croaking, feverish discomfort, but someone answered every door except one.
Hell.
“Lady Verr,” he repeated, knocking again.
Her cottage was between Miche’s and the maids’, and was the only one where smoke was not rising from the chimney.
For a moment, he hesitated, glowering, but he was not about to leave the lady’s corpse to be discovered by Ophele, the manners of Segoile be damned. “Lady Verr. I’m coming in.”
Well, she wasn’t dead. Like Juste, she was burrowed into a nest of furs pulled up to her chin, her auburn hair loose around her head, but she stirred when poked, and then her eyes flew open.
“Your Grace,” she gasped, and went at once into a fit of coughing.
“Your fire’s out,” Remin said accusingly, and handed her a cup of water. “And I couldn’t find that dratted Emi. Never mind, just lie there, I’ll be gone in a minute.”
“A gentleman…in a lady’s chambers…” she tried to say between coughs, and Remin shot her a black glance as he squatted by the hearth.
“This is a cottage on the edge of civilization,” he noted, cracking kindling apart in his hands. “Allowances must be made.”
“Emi has been looking in often,” the lady managed, with a painful effort. Remin couldn’t help a twinge of sympathy; he knew exactly how much those coughs hurt. “She is still well. You needn’t trouble yourself, my lord.”
“That’s a relief. That she is well,” Remin added, though both of them knew exactly what he had meant. “But you didn’t answer, so I had to check. The sickness is bad this year. We can’t afford to worry about etiquette.”
“You have made that very clear,” she said, with a glint of feverish gray eyes. “There is a reason for it, you know. Manners, graces…”
“I am aware of that.” Remin pulled down his scarf and puffed on the coals of the fire, grimacing. This was the part that made him feel most like coughing.
“It’s what puts everyone in their place…and comfortable together…” The words slurred together. Remin eyed her warily, hoping he wasn’t going to have to actually look at her.
“I know what manners are,” he said.
“They are the reason I can politely misunderstand what you said about Emi, for example, my lord.”
“You mean, they’re the reason you have to smile when I insult you to your face,” Remin retorted, and then pulled up his scarf to muffle a cough.
“That is a privilege…of rank…” Lady Verr turned her face away, coughing right back.
That would be an amusing farce, two sick people sparring about rank and etiquette until one of them expired. Remin swallowed, buttoning in another cough, and swiped at the sickly sweat on his forehead with his sleeve.
“Are you badly fevered?” he asked, once he was certain his chest wouldn’t instantly explode.
“Yes,” she said hoarsely. “But I need nothing else, Your Grace. Please take care of yourself. Her Grace was very worried for you.”
The lady had spine, Remin admitted grudgingly as he made his way back to the house.
There was no question that he was not well yet himself, and Juste’s admonitions were still ringing in his ears.
It would be foolish and dangerous to go charging off into town when he had only to wait a few hours, and Ophele would return.
But he hated it. Had anyone died? How bad was the sickness this year?
The last thing he wanted in this world was to leave her to manage this by herself.
What could Genon be thinking, involving her in it?
Locking the doors of his chamber behind him, he had another wash to get rid of the sick sweat and then stoked the fire in the bedchamber and sat down, eying the jug of Genon’s tonic.
He did not want to sleep anymore. He wanted out.
If he was being fair, he knew he could trust Genon, Auber, and Jinmin to keep things in hand, and the stars only knew what Ophele might have been doing; she was always a wild card in the operations of the valley.
Wrapping himself in a blanket, Remin glared at his medicine, gulped it down, and then sat back and plotted what he would do the instant he was well.
And then he fell asleep. He woke with a crick in his neck as the lock rattled in the door, and Ophele appeared in the shadows, wrapped so that only her golden eyes showed through the slit in her scarf. She was sniffling.
“Wife,” he said, sitting up and trying to focus. “What’s happened?”
“Oh. Oh, you’re awake?” she said, and quickly wiped her eyes, as if she thought he might not notice. “I’ll get supper, there’s chicken with dumplings tonight—”
“That can wait. Come here, tell me what’s wrong,” he ordered, with something like his usual strength and only a little tickle in his throat.
For a moment, she hesitated, and then her shoulders sagged.
“Master Sharrenot is dead,” she whispered, and looked up at him, more tears welling.
“I’m sorry. And Berren Sekrost, Mathie Campagne, and Gustere Neloe.
He was six. From Meinhem. I saw them bring him out, I’m sorry.
I didn’t think of them, but I should have.
Genon says the fever is too much for them when they’re still so weak and I even made a list of people that needed extra care, but I never thought—”
“Slow down. Come sit down,” Remin admonished, his jaw tightening as he refused to cough. Rising, he gestured her to her chair and set a kettle over the fire. “Tell me from the beginning, wife. I’m well enough to listen.”
He wanted to know anyway. And though normally he would have pulled her into his lap and consoled her at once, today he sat down in his own chair across the table, listening as she explained everything that had happened and everything she had done.
Today, she was not just his wife. She was Squire Rollon, returned from Ferrede and struggling to explain why twenty people had died there.
She was Sir Ortaire, who hadn’t noticed the small, fatal hill outside his camp, just high enough for a wolf demon to spring inside and tear a dozen men to pieces.
Today, he was taking a report from her, just as he would have done from any of his young commanders.
“And now Azelma is sick too,” she said miserably, fresh tears soaking into her scarf.
“She’s not…dry the way Genon said Master Sharrenot was, but she’s so old, and what if she’s come all this way for me and she dies?
I keep trying to think what we can do, and Genon says more people are going to die tonight, and I don’t know what to do, I can’t think of anything—”
“Sometimes people die.” Wearily, he wondered what sort of hellish garden he was really building for her. It was so hard to focus, he had to admit that perhaps his own fever was not completely gone. “What are you doing to help them tonight?”
“There are people watching the Meinhem refugees now,” she said, her fingers knotting together.
“Auber is managing them. There are four people who will be checking on the sickest overnight, making sure they have fire and medicine and cooling them if they get too hot or are coughing too terribly. That is one trouble, how can we tell if someone is too hot until they’re wandering in their wits?
You never did, but Genon said your fever was so high, and there must be a way… ”
“If Genon doesn’t know it, you can’t be expected to invent it,” Remin pointed out reasonably, and waved at her to continue.
That was all he did, over tea and eventually supper.
He listened. The chicken and dumplings might as well have been wet straw, but he forced them down, absorbing every word as she described everything they had done, every problem she had tried to anticipate, every measure she had taken.
Setting her clever mind against the world and frustrated that it would not conform to even the most carefully laid plans.
And though there were a few errors and areas where she had been excessively cautious, as Remin listened, he realized with a swell of pride and amazement that she had done well.
She still had much to learn. No doubt Jinmin and Auber had saved her from a few mistakes. But this…this was what she was supposed to do. She was his duchess. Not only his wife, and one day the mother of his children. She was his other half, bound to him for eternity, his partner in all things.
“If you thought Master Sharrenot needed watching, then you ought to have ordered someone to watch him,” he said, and lifted a hand as he stifled a cough, scowling.
She lacked self-confidence, and this was a good opportunity for his clever wife to learn a lesson.
“Did you truly think he needed it, at the time? Hindsight doesn’t count. ”
“Well…Lady Verr thought he was dangerously ill,” she said, picking at a bit of chicken. Her delicate eyebrows knotted together. “I thought of having Aubin watch him that night, but…”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Well, I was afraid he wouldn’t get enough sleep, himself. He was already getting up once in the middle of the night to look in on a dozen cottages, and looking after Master Didion besides. And Genon says if people don’t sleep, then they haven’t the fire to fight off illness.”
“What would happen if Aubin got sick?” Remin asked, and listened patiently as she talked it through.
How many times had Duke Ereguil walked him through exactly this exercise?
Remin was twelve when he became a squire, and began learning the business of leading men.
Ophele had not had any lessons at all. All she had was her sharp, methodical mind and her determination to do her best, and this was a far more bitter test than he would ever have wished for her.
But that was his fault. He had never planned for what would happen if he fell ill.
“Those are called second- and third-order effects,” he explained, with some appreciation for the irony.
“I think Juste confiscated my books on such things, I’ll have him look them up.
You need to consider those, too, when you’re making decisions.
Not just the immediate, obvious impacts, but the ones that will follow down the line.
If Genon didn’t think it would help, and you might have risked Aubin falling sick by spreading him too thin, would you change what you did? ”
“No,” she said after a long moment, and looked up at him. “But…Master Sharrenot…”
“Died,” Remin answered quietly. “People die. He was a good man. I’m sorry for it, for I will miss him.”
“That’s what Genon and Auber kept saying,” she said, with a flash of frustration. “People die, just like that. But there must be something, why isn’t there—”
“Come here.” He held out his arms with a mingling of relief and pity as she came at once, settling into his lap to cry. It did no good to tell her there was nothing she could have done. She would always feel this burden. He knew.
“I’m sorry,” she sniffed as he wrapped his arms around her, wishing she could pull off her scarf. He missed her face. “I guess I should get used to it, after the devils and everything…”
“Maybe we are all too used to it,” Remin said soothingly, and then wondered if it was true.
He had experienced so much death, it had lost its power to shock and horrify him, unless that death was hers.
“I don’t know if it’s a good thing,” he added reflectively.
“Juste always says to learn what you can, and send their spirits to the stars. You can’t take all that weight on yourself. ”
“Hurry up and get better,” she whispered. “I am always wondering what you would do.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there.” He rested his forehead against hers and found her blessedly cool. “I would never have chosen this test for you, little owl. But do you know, I think the stars were very good, when they gave you to me for my duchess.”