Chapter 5 – An Imperfect Creation #2
“Sir Justenin,” she began, feeling color burn from her cheeks to her ears, “I have been wanting to say…not just to you, to all of you…I’m very sorry. About what happened after Granholme. And…everything else.”
Everything else, including the deaths of his parents, along with the rest of the duke’s House. But he didn’t know that she knew that, and she didn’t know how she could even begin to apologize.
His eyebrows went up in surprise.
“No one blames you for that, my lady,” he said firmly. “His Grace said you weren’t used to wine, and wine is a dangerous remedy. If anything, we failed you. That man should never have gotten anywhere near you. It would shock anyone, waking up to find an assassin in the room.”
Her father’s assassin.
“That’s very kind of you.” She bobbed her head in a small bow. “I won’t ever do such a thing again. I…”
Will do my part, when we get to the valley.
Will make you proud.
Will spend the rest of my life making up for what you have lost.
“I won’t be a disgrace to you,” she finished, looking away. It seemed like the most she could aspire to, at present.
* * *
He should have gotten her a maid.
Remin thought this at least half a dozen times per day.
It wasn’t because the princess needed the help.
On the contrary, now that she had books and simpler dresses that she could manage by herself, she was surprisingly self-sufficient.
She knew where to get her own food and drink, she ate from the common stew pot, she competently tended her own fire, and from sunup to sundown her nose was buried in a book.
She had even begun waking up on her own when the camp started moving, though she still stumbled around for the first half hour or so and, three times so far, walked into things.
A week out of Granholme, they were on the outer edge of the Empire and moving through rolling hills where wide swaths of forest were bursting into new leaves and flowers.
Fast-running streams, icy and swollen with snowmelt, ran along the sides of the road, and every day was warmer than the last. They would pass through one more town before they came to the Brede, a little hamlet called Trema that was to Granholme what Granholme was to Celderline.
There would be no inn there. The best they would find was a share of a cowshed.
He should have gotten her a maid, Remin thought again.
Maybe that was the real purpose of servants: to serve as a buffer to avoid any unnecessary intimacy in this kind of political marriage.
In the normal course of things, he and his wife would hardly have needed to communicate at all.
They could have lived separate lives in the same vast house, coming together only to discuss household business and conceive children, in brief encounters as passionless as the mating between a prized stud and a mare.
He should have gotten her a maid, and a horse of her own, and taught her to ride it, because maddeningly, his body burned for her.
He tried not to notice, but sometimes he thought she really might be a witch.
All it took was the breeze wafting her scent to him and he flashed back to their nights together, every sound, every sigh, every touch.
He touched her as little as possible and avoided her whenever they weren’t sharing a saddle, but no matter where she was, his eyes found her as if she were a lodestone.
It was worse than when he was a teenager. At least he hadn’t known what he was missing back then.
“Rem, you’re being an idiot.” Miche sat down at Remin’s fire one night, which was on the opposite side of the camp from his wife. “Remember what I told you before you got married?”
“Shut up, Miche.” Remin was eating his supper and not watching her.
Every night she sat down to take her hair out of its plait and painstakingly brushed it from root to tip until it gleamed, an almost hypnotic ritual, like she was casting some feminine magic.
She was just finishing, and turned to climb up onto the high wheel of the supply wagon to put away her brush. She really was as nimble as a squirrel.
“I told you not to do anything you don’t want to hear about for the next fifty years.
” When Miche had something on his mind, nothing could shut him up.
Remin could have threatened him at spearpoint and he would have cheerfully impaled himself and delivered his remarks with his dying breath.
“When that girl finishes growing up, she’s never going to forgive you. ”
“She’ll reach her majority this year, and she’s plenty old enough to marry. She’s not a child.” But watching the princess burrow into her usual nest of cloaks, she looked so vulnerable that Remin had to look away, his jaw clenching. A trick. “The sooner she understands her position, the better.”
“If you’re going to treat her like poison every day of your life, why did you marry her? If I’d known you were going to do that, I would have objected at your fucking wedding.”
“I asked for an Emperor’s daughter and I got one,” Remin snapped. “Don’t make it more than it is.”
“You’re making a big mistake.” Miche met his eyes, flat and angry. “I told you I’d tell you if you were. She can’t help who her father is. If you just gave her a chance—”
“Drop it, Miche,” he said shortly, and walked away.
Remin was not prepared for this. He had expected a spoiled, haughty noblewoman, sly and conniving, the Emperor with breasts.
It would have given him immense satisfaction to use the Emperor’s blood for his own ends, to defeat whatever machinations she might attempt and get heirs on her that would establish his House for all time.
There was no possible vengeance so complete or enduring.
But the princess refused to play her role.
He kept giving her opportunities to reveal her true colors, so he could catch her in some lie, some deception, but every time it failed to manifest. Perversely, it only made him more determined to trap her.
It could only mean that she was more cunning than he had expected, more subtle, more patient.
It meant, when she inevitably betrayed him, that it would devastate him.
It was his own fault. He had almost been taken in by her. He had let her get too close, close enough to hurt him. It would be a painful correction, but soon they would both get used to it and understand what lines should not be crossed, and then they would…
He didn’t know how to end that sentence.
At any rate, soon they would be back in the valley and working too hard to care.
The matter of the bandits was his biggest concern, but until they got back to Tresingale and saw how things stood, there wasn’t much he could do about it.
But as the Andelin drew near and they left Trema behind, he and his men often sat up late at night, planning everything that would have to be done.
“The surveyor sent a preliminary map,” said Edemir, spreading a large piece of parchment in the space they had cleared between lamps.
He had collected the messages waiting for them at Trema’s small garrison.
“This is the proposed town site, and he’s even included the grade of the hills and their elevation.
Here’s the river, and here’s that hill you suggested for the manor, Rem.
It’ll be a steep climb for horses unless you circle the road around the back. ”
“Daitians do a terracing thing to manage steep terrain,” said Bram, who was the most well-traveled among them. “If you don’t mind climbing a lot of stairs yourself.”
“Not if it means we’ll have a view of the town.
The city,” Remin corrected. Tresingale would be a city in his lifetime.
On the far side of the fire, he didn’t notice the princess turn slightly toward them, listening.
“The hill to the east would be good for a training yard. And the barracks could go here.”
“With a view of the sheep,” observed Tounot. It was true that the hills Remin had designated as grazing land were immediately adjacent.
“What you do with your time off is your own business,” he said, to a rumble of laughter.
“But I won’t force any of you to stay,” he added, looking at the map.
Specifically, the blank space that lay beyond the borders of the town: the mountains to the north and east, the Talfel Plateau northwest, the moors to the west. It was a lot of land.
“I told you I’d give you all lands and titles of your own. ”
“What sort of bannerman leaves their lord sleeping in a croft?” Tounot asked lightly. “Which, if I recall correctly, was located about here. Next to Tounot Boulevard.”
“Auber Avenue,” Auber corrected. “His Grace said everything had to be alliterative.”
This was true, though Remin had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol at the time.
“If that’s the main road going to the new bridge, it can only be Harnost Highway,” said Miche loftily.
“Miche Marke is going to be on the bad side of town. Where the brothels are,” Tounot retorted.
“How dare you, sir.”
“There will be no bad side of Tresingale,” Remin decreed, putting an end to the argument.
He was glad that they were all steadfast in their desire to stay.
Eventually they would have to go and begin settling those wider lands, or someone else would beat them to it.
But he wasn’t quite ready to give up his knights yet.
Each of them had a task, according to their own inclinations and aptitudes.
Juste, who had lived in an orphanage run by the Brothers of the Shepherd Star, had learned how to manage sheep, cows, and goats.
Auber was a farmer’s son, and several of his many siblings—including the older brother that had made the error of buying wedding rings without a single diamond to shine for the stars—would be arriving in autumn, to farm lands more vast than the niggling acres in Engleberg.