12. Chapter 12
Chapter 12
A nother time, Julia would not have left the castle at such a late hour - at least, alone. She knew that, however much freer her movements now were compared to her life under her family’s roof, there were limits to recklessness.
However, tonight a little recklessness was precisely what was required of her.
Now she only had to make her husband understand it.
“Tell him you will only meet him in the broad daylight,” Athelstan Waite said curtly.
“I am planning to talk to a smuggler, not to summon a steward up to my study. He is not going to wait so. Besides, unless the customs of - their kind had changed terribly since I last sailed, their night back in port is going to be brief and brisk.”
“You have to take at least one man-at-arms with you.”
“Who then is going to believe my humble disguise?”
“Have him stay away and mix with the crowd, then.”
“Athelstan, I have seen your men-at-arms. They would not be able to mix with the crowd unnoticed any more than an oak is going to look native in a rose garden.”
He looked at her, long and intent. Her mouth went dry. Did she really just call him by his true name?
There was nothing terribly insulting about the fact - they were married, after all. On the other hand, many fine-blooded wedded couples called each other “my lady” and “my lord” until their dying day. Perhaps, Lord Waite was of a similar strict disposition.
“You don’t mind it, do you?” Julia ventured, her voice suddenly soft with fear. It was not her husband that she feared; not per se, at least. He was an honorable man, if a grim one. If he did not use any of his wide-ranging rights to hurt her after she had revealed her lies, he was not going to do so over an over-familiarity.
No; the fear was more akin to the feeling that assaulted one on the edge of a waterfall, the precipice making one’s head spin sweetly.
“Well,” he finally said, looking down and away. “I do call you Julia. I suppose it is - fair, that you would use my name too. Not in front of guests or servants,” he warned. “Neither would I use yours in such circumstances.”
Julia could not help but smile at this precaution to the over-tender sense of propriety. If the man she was to meet tonight had been told that the lords of Craerenth were this delicate with the use of their wives” first names, he would have shaken his head in disbelief.
“You are very correct,” she said, trying her best not to laugh. “I hope you don’t mind if I fulfil your own bidding and do talk to one of my former shipmates tonight?”
“You must take the sword I gave you with you.”
“There would be no scuffle. But if you insist...”
“I do.” He put one hand on her shoulder. “You are a great lady now. Who is to say this smuggler won’t use the opportunity to hold you for ransom?”
“What a fine opinion you have of the man I knew for years. Vittorio might not be a knight from chansons de geste, but he is no great scoundrel, either.”
“I see you have no scruples over calling him by his first name,” the tone was dry.
“I am not sure he even has the last one. He was born in the City of Lilies, in some Triad-forsaken slum. Besides, I’ve known him longer than I knew you - it would have been strange if I still held myself to the utmost formality with him”.
“That is true”. The corner of her husband’s mouth quirked for a second. “You have known him for longer than you had been married to me.”
“I do hope you are not jealous about a man you had never seen.”
“Naturally not,” came the gruff reply. “I was merely stating a fact.”
***
He was not merely stating a fact.
It was not that Athelstan Waite was unreasonable enough to seethe with jealousy like some young gallant, some song-drunk courtly popinjay, over the wife he had not wanted to marry and a man he had indeed never set eyes on.
He supposed for a second he was still ostensibly young, of course, but he had never felt so.
No; he was merely worried that Julia’s trust in the scum of the seas might be too great. Triad knows, he himself knew what those people were, and, despite his current plan, knew enough not to give them an inch.
His initial idea was to send some retainer to negotiate with the smuggler on his behalf, but Julia claimed he was not going to trust a face that was not hers. That did ring reasonable – after all, if Athelstan himself had been a man living by illicit trades, he would have thought such a thing a trap from the first moment.
That did not mean that he liked it all.
Therefore, when the hooves of Julia’s mare rang out upon the cobblestones of the yard and grew fainter and fainter as it galloped down the old road, he gave the order to saddle his own horse.
She might not like being followed.
But, by the Virgin, the Lady, and the Fate, he did not like plenty of situations she put him through, and he did not complain.
Almost.
***
Julia’s habits of the last years made her swallow nervously as she stepped over the threshold of the Kraken’s Nest .
Despite her muted and simple garb, she drew stares as she walked in once more. That was also expected – rare female outlaw captains notwithstanding, women in such places were usually serving girls.
Vittorio, he of the City of Lilies, was a figure very hard to miss. Seated at a table right in the middle of the place, he glittered with rings of gold and earrings of coral, and his velvet hat would not have disgraced a merchant prince from his home city-state.
At first, he looked straight through Julia as she made her way through the throng. Then he blinked, and smiled with amazement.
“Gods of all the lands, here you are!” he exclaimed. “Quite a fine thing now, I see. Do grace me with your company, my fair lady”, he grinned. Playing at courtesy snatched from other people’s lives was still his beloved pastime, it seemed.
“Gladly so, Signor Ubaldi,” she teased, using the name of one of the major families of his homeland. “I do hope your fleet is faring well?”
“Fragrant with spices and red with kermes-dyed sails, as usual.” Vittorio grimaced then. “In truth, we are not doing all that out-and-out.”
“I hope it’s because of the loss of my priceless expertise”.
“Oh, naturally. You’ve always brought us luck, too-pretty boy that you were. But our luck’s wearing thinner than the blouses on those serving-girls”.
“Why is that?” Julia had a suspicion she had a good guess, and a worse suspicion that he had meant for her to think of it. “It is because of the northmen and their yarl, isn’t it? Are they prowling the seas once more, extracting tolls on every inlet?”
“I can say no more, sea-flower. As I’ve said, we are down on our luck now. A man has to live by his wits”.
“A sea-flower is just weed.”
“Not at all. A lordling in the City of Canals once told me that the ancients called the waves sea-flowers, reaching as they did for the sun.”
“Very poetic. How on earth did you even know a lordling of any kind?”
“He had a taste for smuggled wine and wanted to shock his father by keeping low company. I was happy to oblige.”
“No doubt you were. How much do your words cost?”
He named a breathtaking sum.
“All that, for some quiet listening and quieter talk?” Julia did not spend years in the company of men like him without acquiring some ear for their tricks.
“And quietude total. My silence costs even more than my words, sea-flower.”
Julia couldn’t help but grumble. However, after haggling for the sum to lose its astonishing heights, she also couldn’t help but pay, and not just because she and her husband needed the intelligence.
She also understood Vittorio well – better, perhaps, than most of her new peers would. He was neither joking nor being arch when he claimed to have no choice but to live by his wits. She had a castle to return to. He? If all failed, there would not even be a shack in the City of Lilies waiting to welcome him home.
“Take it, Triad damn you,” she passed the silver-bulging purse to him in the darkness under the table. The curse lacked the sharpness of a true anger.
“Blasphemy, too? What a curious lady you must have made to his lordship.”
“My husband seems satisfied.”
Does he, though? A voice whispered in her brain. He tolerates your presence well enough, and doesn’t mind extending an offer of help when it is truly needed, but you are deceiving yourself if you think that he would not have preferred to stay unmarried.
“He must be unusually broad-minded”, her old shipmate noted, “if he embraces a wife with such a salt-hide as yours”.
“He doesn’t want a silken court lady.” Which was true enough. He did not exactly want her, either, though, and his reaction to her revelations had been anything but glad. “Besides, we are not here to discuss my new marriage. Tell me of the movements of the northmen.”
“Well, I’ll keep an eye on them, of course, as I hadn’t thought to watch them closely before…”
“Do stop playing these games with me.” With an effort, for she enjoyed his company immensely, Julia made her voice drop into ice. Enjoyment was one thing; a task to accomplish another. “You never miss a thing.”
“Oh! A lady of the castle-tone, is it?” He pretended to be wounded.
“No, it’s the tone of my disliking being taken for a fool. I know you, Vittorio, whatever I am now. You have always measured out information like a merchant measures out ells of cloth.”
“That’s because I don’t have cloth to measure out, sea-flower.” He smiled. “All that I can sell is what I can see with my own eyes, which is at times so, so meagre…”
“But not in this case. Is it?”
“Perhaps not.”
A moment passed in silence.
“Triad and every other god in existence damn you, Julia,” Vittorio of the City of Lilies sighed. “You’ve always been a stubborn thing. Yes, the northmen are stirring.”
“Assaults on harbors?”
“Nothing so grand as that. But there are talks. Their traders seen in the coastal towns on the other side of the Glittering Sea more often that they’ve been in the memory of – pretty much anyone but the oldest men”.
“What are they offering for sale?”
“The usual things. Amber from the east, furs from the north, ivory from the further north still. It’s what they want to buy that… stirs some fears”.
“Not just dry supplies for sea-voyages, I take it.”
“That, too. But there are other requests. Whispered requests.” Vittorio leaned over the table a little, lowering his voice. “For books and scrolls that had been buried and most forgotten for many decades, and a for a good reason.”
The tavern was a warm, wine-tanged place, and there was a smell of roasted rabbit from the kitchen. But a shiver ran down Julia’s spine as though she were standing on a frozen coast under a gathering storm.
She did not ask him the names of the books, for the fear that, for all the din of the place, someone can overhear them.
“So, the yarl’s peaceful intentions were nothing but a gauze curtain”.
“Looks this way.”
Vittorio did not look especially sorrowful. After all, if and when the attack came, it would not come on his home and coast – he had neither. Besides, he could even coax his captain into turning a good profit out of the conflict.
Julia could not share his nonchalance, not even if she tried. She did have a home now, even if it was not hers by the right of birth and blood. She had little Roxane to think of, and – and, however much of a pain her arranged husband was sometimes, she would never, never want to see him going down with a wrecked ship.
Or worse. After all, judging by her old shipmate’s words, it was something worse than a regular sea-attack that the Northmen were planning.
“Thank you,” she made herself say. “When are you likely to be here again?”
“In two months, perhaps. Can be three. I’ll let you know.”
“What if you will have something vital to impart in the meantime?”
“I don’t think I will. Things happen faster on the sea than for you landlubbers, but not that much faster.”
“Vittorio.”
“Very well, I’ll pass it on by a letter”.
“A coded one, I dearly hope.”
“Don’t take me for a fool, sea-flower. You know the codes we’ve used back then. They hadn’t changed. Much”, he added with a mischievous smile. “But I’m sure you’re clever enough to decipher whatever alterations time made to them.”
***
A hand clamped down on Julia’s wrist with iron grip as soon as she stepped outside the tavern.
Her reflexes were quick. She freed the sword lightning-fast, raised it – only for it to be blocked by a blade of pale steel.
A blade she knew, even if the face of its owner was shrouded in the darkness.
“Athelstan,” she breathed, lowering the weapon. “What in the name of the Triad?”
“I couldn’t allow you to go on your own.”
“Why on earth not? It was not as though I was going into battle.”
“I’ve given you my reasoning already before you set out.”
“Were you inside all the time I’ve been talking to him?” She demanded.
“Of course.”
“The Fate and her loom – someone might have recognized you! And –”
“Do you think every fisherman and smuggler along this coast has a copy of my portrait in oils?” He asked with dry archness.
“No, but some might have seen you before.”
“Highly unlikely.”
“Who is being reckless now, my lord?”
“Both of us, standing outside Kraken’s Nest with good blades out in the open, apparently waiting for someone to hit us over the head and take out weapons for a different sort of fencing”. Lord Waite took her hand, not ungently. “I propose we discuss your findings somewhere it’s less likely to happen”.
Somewhere else turned out to be horseback. Now that night was deep and dark upon the land, they had to make their horses trot slowly in any case, finding their way along the cliffs, and Julia thought it as good a time as any. She was bursting at the seams with her desire to share her findings.
That was part of the reason. The other being that her husband’s silence made the soundless, wave-haunted midnight seem more oppressive than before.
“I like not one bit of it,” was Athelstan’s verdict when she finished speaking.
“Neither do I. Let us see what Vittorio is going to tell us come his next visit.”
“It is highly unlikely going to be a news that the northern yarl had decided to dispense with his notions and embrace peace after all, is it?”
“What do you propose?” Julia asked after a pause.
“We prepare for war.”
“And write to your brother. His Majesty, I mean,” she corrected herself. It was strange, even now, to think of the erstwhile lord of a middling keep, if a strategically located one, as the royal master of them all.
“You can call him my brother. This is, after all, what he is. He is your good-brother now, too”.
“Is it going to set him out of joint if say any of that aloud?” Julia asked innocently.
“Not overtly so. Orwyn does love to pretend a common touch.”
“I am hardly common.” If I were, he would have never had you marry me.
“Now we all are, next to his newfound magnificence.”
“Which is all the more reason to ask for his help in the coming war.”
The last word was heavy on her tongue, and bitter as a bitten wormwood.
“He is unlikely to give it.”
“It’s his land we are talking about. I know there is bad blood between you, but he cannot be completely unreasonable.”
“First of all, you clearly have a lot to learn about your good-brother. Second, he put this land in my hands precisely because he hoped to put it out of his mind.”
“Wasn’t he supposed to be the heir of Greyharbor, originally?”
“He was. And he had never been particularly enthused about it. He dreamt of a life unfolding as a series of chansons de geste, not a series of ledgers.”
“Not him alone,” Julia reminded him. “Given your dreams of becoming a stowaway.”
“It’s hardly the same”.
“You did both want an escape. The difference is that…”
“That he did get his songs and his deeds of valor. His golden reward, too. He was lifted up into a legend. Me and Roxane were left here, on this sinful earth.”
From another man’s mouth, such words would have sounded overwrought and maddening. From his, they were drenched with sarcasm as though he thought little of each lofty metaphor and less of the man praised by them.
Julia only saw one route out of this oppressive gloom, and that was a cheerful disregard – a manner that used to serve her in good stead in the days past:
“We might be worrying ourselves over nothing. Vittorio is a cunning little man, for all the flounces on his shirts. He knew I would have hardly paid him if he flat-out told me there had been nothing suspicious afoot. He might have well invented the whole sorry tale from start to finish.”
“Do you believe it, my lady?” Athelstan Waite asked. His profile was pale against the starless sky.
“I cannot be sure.”
“You can. I’ve never believed in the obscure wonders of female intuition, but I do believe you are as capable of piercing together facts and making an educated guess as I am, and infinitely more so than my brother is. Do you truly think your old friend had been trying to hoodwink you?”
Cormorants cried in the darkness, and the waves hit the shore with the indifference of the ancient.
“No,” Julia confessed. “I do not think so. I wouldn’t discount that possibility entirely, but I don’t think it to be that great”.
“We can only hope that your old companion would prove to be trustworthy.”
“He would. He might be a scoundrel, but a traitor he is not.”
“Do you know him well?” The mildness of the question was not convincing. Her husband was honestly not particularly proficient at such dissembling.
“Well enough to make a judgement. But the friendship between us in the old days had been just that – a friendship. Worry not… Athelstan. I have lied about many things before our wedding day, that is true, but not about being a maiden.”
“It was not your maidenhead that occupies my thoughts. It is the ease of your conversation with a man such as him.”
“You must have heard us well enough, to draw such conclusions.”
“I did.”
“The contact was your idea. You cannot fault me for carrying it out well.”
“I am not faulting you for anything. But I am no fool, either. I can see the difference between your conduct with the man you’ve shared years and secrets with, the man you think you can trust, and with – others”.
“With you, you mean,” Julia replied quietly.
“Perhaps,” Athelstan Waite said with reluctance. “I’ve told you of my dreams of escape, that much is true. You’ve had your escape, even if it was brief. That scoundrel was a part of it, and me – well, again, I am no fool. I know that, if the stone-walls of a gaol had a name and the iron bars upon its windows had a face, it would have been me and mine.”
“That’s not true”.
“I would be grateful if you refrain from insincere flattery, my lady.”
“I wanted this marriage. I wouldn’t lie and claim it was because I fell for you without having ever seen you, but – I wanted it. It was not a gaol, it was a salvation from a prison much worse than anything you can imagine right now. I’ve never thought of Greyharbor as my jail, Athelstan. In fact, I was surprised by how much freedom it afforded me.”
“I did ask for no flattery…” His voice, however, was quieter now, and trailed away.
“I am offering you none. In fact, I would like to tell you the truth unvarnished, since you hunger for it so. You are not the incarnation of iron bars, you are the incarnation of an almighty headache. You are stubborn as a mule, and talking to you at times holds all the pleasures of dancing across hot coals. But you are a better husband than any other my parents could have chosen for me.” She paused, and delivered what she knew would be the truest strike of all. “A much better husband than your brother could have ever been to me.”
At this, he turned to her. His normally impassive face was stricken with amazement – and with something else, something unnamed and tender as a wound.
“Swear by everything you hold sacred that you are telling the truth,” Athelstan Waite asked her quietly.
“I swear by the Virgin, the Lady, and the Fate – but this is a conventional oath, and I don’t know how much store do you set by it. I swear by the sea and the wind and the stars, and the freedom all three had granted me once. I swear that, across all of Craerenth, there is no other man I would have rather chosen to be my husband”.
He moved closer to her, the mount obeying silently. Close enough to touch.
The air was sharp with the scent of wild sea-salt.
Lord Waite put his hand upon her cheek. It was ungloved – he must have known, when he went to follow her, that no man of modest means would be seen wearing out gloves on a warm summer night, that it would give him away.
The thought made her smile, and say softly:
“You are not as stubborn and heedless as I have thought, then.”
Then he leaned down and kissed her.
The moment that followed was a tangle of sensations – the tension in her limbs as Julia leaned towards him from her saddle, her white grip on the reins slackening, the warmth of his hand upon the side of her face, the heat of his mouth.
It was a kiss both insistent and clumsy, but she felt herself responding before she could think. Her own must have been even more unpracticed than this. But then he stroked her simply braided hair, ran his hand down her slightly arched back, and whatever self-conscious shame Julia felt at the awkwardness of her skills evaporated like sea-water in the sun.
“We could…” she breathed as soon as their lips parted. She did not finish the sentence. For all her boldness, the want stirring beneath her skin was too much to acknowledge aloud.
There was no reply for a second, and she wondered if the want had been hers alone, with no answering heat from him. But then he rid her of any need for awkward elaboration, because her feelings must have been obvious, and their meaning, and whatever words she was going to say.
He murmured against her lips:
“We shall.”
The road back to the castle was a blur, her heart hammering. The courtyard was dark like the deep abyss beneath the waves, for no one knew of this excursion. For all that Father Telmen and the others knew, the master and the mistress have long since gone to bed.
He kissed her again on the second turn of the stairs, the world around them unlit and primordial. This time, no fear of fall to grip her, Julia could allow herself to respond with all the buried passion she felt.
It seemed an eternity until the winding corridors of the ancient castle ended, and the door of the master’s bedchamber was closed behind them, and she could have her limbs melt against his. But eternity it was not, and their wait was finally at an end.