Chapter 2 – A Wedding #5
“I will ask my wife to personally attend her,” the man replied, presenting a sturdy woman with an astonishing white bonnet. She too prostrated herself.
“Delaide Goel, if it please Your Grace. Blessed Highness, I will consider myself honored the rest of my days.”
“Thank you.” Setting the princess down, Remin transferred his cloak to her shoulders, tugging the hood over her tangled curls. “Stay with Mistress Goel, Princess. You’ll be fine. Auber.”
Auber nodded and trailed after the women into the inn. He was an unobtrusive sort with light brown hair and unremarkable features, and he had made an art of being overlooked.
With the girl off his hands, Remin went about the rest of his work with good will.
His company occupied the entire third floor of the inn, luxurious accommodation in a part of the city renowned for their mineral baths.
His own room was as opulent as anything he had seen in Segoile, with stained glass windows and a deep balcony that overlooked the river and the market on the other side.
It would have been an outrageous expense under any other circumstances, but sometimes spending money was as good as flexing muscle.
Before supper, he and Edemir were ensconced at a worktable to deal with piles of correspondence, everything from invitations to balls that had already happened to reports of troop movements on the border with Valleth.
Remin did not fear another war. Yet. The wounds of the last were too recent, and he had harrowed every last Eagle Knight out of his valley, inflicting staggering losses that would take Valleth a generation to recover.
With Hara Vos pressing from their east and certain other measures from Remin to compel their obedience, it would be decades before they needed another lesson.
But Remin was hardly going to leave his borders undefended, and he planned to break the remaining units of his army into small local militias, lightly armed and mounted to respond quickly to reports of banditry and the like.
There were many other reports, less dire but all urgent in their own way.
Some of it was good news; while he was in the capital, Remin had made the acquaintance of an earl from Leinbruke and persuaded him to part with a few head of his prized breeding rams, renowned for the quality of their wool.
A dozen of them had arrived and were being duly coddled on some good grazing east of Tresingale.
All reports of Tresingale were of absorbing interest. It might be a few dozen huts on a muddy lane right now, but one day it would be a beautiful city, the seat of his duchy.
It had everything: access to the Brede on two sides, rolling hillsides to the east for grazing, and acres of flat, rich farmland to the north, left fallow for nearly a century.
In spring, work would begin on the network of roads that would connect Tresingale to the rest of the Empire.
He could have happily spent whole days planning his new city, if Miche hadn’t insisted on interrupting every half hour with some question about the wedding.
The ceremony had taken on undreamed levels of complexity, and Remin seriously doubted fifty sovereigns had stretched so far as a choir, but long experience with Miche had taught him sometimes it was better not to look too close.
“Your Grace, the tailor is here,” said the irrepressible man, sticking his head through the door.
“What for?”
“To measure Your Grace for Your Grace’s wedding clothes.”
“I don’t remember putting that on my list of requirements.”
Miche stepped into the room. “With respect, Your Grace, you smell like a horse’s ass. And you look like you’ve been sleeping on the side of the road for a month.”
Edemir glanced at him with pity. “He’s not wrong, Rem.”
With the exception of their sojourn at Aldeburke, he had been sleeping by the side of the road for the last month.
Sighing, Remin allowed himself to be measured for a new doublet and jerkin, stubbornly refused breeches in any color but black, and then submitted to the ministrations of a barber while Edemir read off more reports and noted down Remin’s orders. But the jeweler was the last straw.
“I told you to take care of it, Miche,” he flared. “I don’t give a fuck whether you stick a sapphire or a lump of coal on my brooch. Don’t bother me about it again.”
He was silent at dinner, an excellent meal with hearty joints of beef and pork, thick crusty bread, and platters of turnips, beans, potatoes, and a variety of green things.
It was pleasant to be clean, and clean-shaven, after so many weeks in the saddle, and his men were loud and boisterous.
Seated at a long table beside a massive stone fireplace, the innkeeper rolled in cask after cask of excellent wine and ale, and their laughter rang to the ceiling.
Ordinarily, he would have been roaring and singing and exchanging insults right along with them.
But tonight, for some reason he felt as if he were standing on the edge of a precipice, the same feeling he had had the night before the charge on the Gresein, and the day before he went to accept the surrender of Valleth.
His men glanced at him, glanced at each other, and poured more wine into his cup.
“Your health, my lord,” said Justenin, knocking his cup into Remin’s. “We’ll return to the Andelin in time for the spring planting.”
“Sir Juste is eager to meet his sheep,” said Bram knowingly. Justenin had taken charge of His Grace’s livestock. “Think you’ll find a bride of your own?”
“Better than the woolly sort of prostitutes you favor, Bram,” Justenin replied placidly, to a round of laughter.
It was late when Remin finally stumbled out onto the balcony, breathing in huge draughts of the freezing air. The sting of it felt good on his hot cheeks.
“I wouldn’t advise any more wine,” said a voice from the darkness, and he turned to find Miche lounging on the stone railing against the side of the inn, holding a wineskin in one hand and a cup in the other. Miche always counseled against the vices in which he was indulging.
“I wasn’t planning to.” He wasn’t drunk, but Remin was unpleasantly hot, and flapped the neck of his loose white shirt. “I just wanted some air. Why aren’t you inside?”
“The same reason, more or less. I was quite busy today, on behalf of my liege.”
“How did you get the whole city to turn out?” Remin wanted to know. “I figured out the rest, but you could hardly have bribed half of Celderline to show up.”
“I bought minstrels.” Miche smirked. “When Huber wasn’t looking. A few rounds of The Battle of the Brede and The Lady’s Courting-Song and they were lining the streets. It puts a nice finish on the war, doesn’t it? And then His Grace married a princess and lived happily ever after.”
“It’s not like that.” For some reason, hearing that made him angry.
As if all of it, all those years of blood and dirt and misery had just been the lead-up to an hour in the temple of Celderline.
“It was our land. The Andelin was part of the Empire for almost a thousand years. When Valleth invaded, the people—”
“Didn’t give a shit.” Miche poured himself more wine. “Neither do you, Your Grace. It’s a rich land, but if the Emperor hadn’t destroyed your House—”
“Miche.”
“If you had grown up a proper nobleman’s son, the Andelin Valley would still belong to Valleth and you wouldn’t care,” Miche said stubbornly.
“I’m not judging, Rem. It’s also true that they attacked us, and you likely would have been sent with all the other blue-blooded sons to lead an army and drive them out, one day.
But that’s not what we were fighting for.
We were fighting because the Emperor took everything from you, and we had to go through the Andelin Valley to take it back. ”
Remin didn’t want to hear that. It was easier to bear if he thought the dead men of the Andelin had given their lives in service of the Empire, not himself.
“Give me a cup.”
“No. You’re getting married tomorrow; you can’t be nursing a hangover.” The other man noisily drained his cup, because that was the sort of bastard he was. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to marry the daughter of a man you hate.”
“You know my reasons.”
“Yes.” Miche’s breath curled up white as he sighed. “But I was thinking. That’s not good enough, Rem.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not what they’d want.”
There was only one they among the Knights of the Brede.
Even with the wine warming his veins and mazing his mind, Remin could see their faces as clearly as if he had spoken to them at supper.
Rasiphe, Bon, Ludovin, Clement and Victorin.
Rasiphe had died at the Gresein Bridge. Bon died of poison meant for Remin; Ludovin had been captured as a spy and fed to the Lord of Tales.
Clement and Victorin had died together holding a narrow place in the Berlawe Mountains, slowing the arrival of enemy reinforcements.
Victorin had taken twenty-six stab wounds before he succumbed.
“I was thinking,” Miche repeated doggedly, “that they’d want the Duke of Andelin in new clothes for his wedding.
They’d want to see you in a temple with a crowd of people smiling for you, and a pretty girl in silk next to you, with flowers in her hair.
And they’d want you to be happy together, Rem.
I know who she is. But she seems like a nice girl.
Give her a chance. Give both of you a chance. ”
Remin was silent for so long that Miche finally relented and poured him half a cup of wine, setting it beside his hand with a click of metal on stone.
“Why me,” Remin said finally, looking over the dark river. “Why should I have all that?”