Chapter 9 – Dangerous Creatures #4
“What happened? Is someone hurt?” she asked anxiously as a couple men raced up the hill from the bridge construction site.
She was still forbidden to go near it herself, but Sir Miche had taken her to see the massive walls of the caissons stretching all the way to the bottom of a very deep river, so deep in places that men became ill if they ascended too quickly.
It was a monumental undertaking, more impressive than a dozen walls.
“No, lady, for a wonder,” said one of the engineers. “Lad just dragged himself up on the bank, he swam the width of the river. He’s fine, but tired, as you might expect. Says he’s come to be a page for the Knights of the Brede.”
“I can go get Sir Miche,” she said, wide-eyed at the feat. She couldn’t swim a stroke herself, and she had seen exactly how deep the river was.
“Would you? That’d be kind of you, lady.”
Sir Miche was just as happy to have an excuse to abandon his digging.
“I suppose our first successful swimmer deserves some notice,” he said when Ophele hurried to the other end of the wall to tell him.
Normally pages were the business of squires, but the shortage of pages made any prospect worth considering.
“Of course, it’ll be up to Rem as to whether he gets rewarded or punished. ”
“Why would he get punished?”
“Don’t want to encourage this kind of thing,” Sir Miche said bluntly. “He’s lucky he survived. The river’s not just wide. The current is fast and uncertain, you never know when it might yank you under. We tried it ourselves, believe me, before Rem finally decided to charge the Gresein.”
Remin Grimjaw, hero of the Gresein Bridge, had become so separate in her mind from the duke her husband that it was always a shock when someone reminded her they were the same person.
“Because other people who try to cross might not be as lucky,” she said.
“We’ve already found some who tried,” he said grimly. “It might sound cold-hearted, but we’ve got our hands full right now. We don’t have men to spare cleaning corpses off the riverbank.”
She shuddered.
“I want to see His Lordship,” a high-pitched voice was saying stubbornly as they approached the river. “I come all the way from Caillmar to be a knight, I ain’t leaving ’less Remin Grimjaw tells me no himself.”
The boy was bedraggled and dripping in a too-large jerkin, his skinny arms bare and his hair plastered around a rather pretty face. It was a source of consternation to Ophele that a boy whose voice hadn’t even broken yet could be so much taller than herself.
“You’re leaving if I tell you no.” Sir Miche had an uncanny knack for finding the perfect cue to enter a conversation. “What’s your name, boy?”
The boy’s head tilted back, and his nostrils flared.
“Jacot,” he said. “Jacot of Caillmar, as I ain’t got no father’s name to bless me. I know you, you’re Sir Miche of Harnost, the one what they call the maidenslayer.”
Sir Miche’s hard hand clipped him across the mouth.
“You’ll keep a civil tongue,” he snapped. And to his credit, the boy glanced at Ophele and blanched.
“Sorry, m’lady.” He sounded like he meant it. “Ain’t you the princess, eh? Or Her Grace now, sorry. They’re still singing songs about you in Celderline, I thought they was all lies.”
Songs? About her?
“Pages do not address a noble lady until spoken to,” Sir Miche said, as if anyone in the valley had once enforced aristocratic etiquette since Ophele had arrived. But the boy nodded as if he were inscribing the words on his soul.
“I won’t forget. Didn’t mean no offense. But I still ain’t going back ’less His Grace tells me so himself. You can chuck me on the other side of the river and I’ll just swim back again.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, but His Grace is only accepting guests by invitation.” Sir Miche crossed his arms and glanced back at Ophele. “This is likely to take a few minutes, if you’d like to get back to Eugene, my lady. Let Guisse know I’ll be along, would you?”
Ophele nodded, sparing another curious glance for the boy before she climbed back to the top of the hill where Eugene was napping. The little donkey was an efficient creature; he ate and napped at every possible opportunity.
It wasn’t often she saw someone younger than herself.
Most boys her age were squires and far too busy working toward their knighthood to spare her more than a bow.
The stable boys were a few years younger, usually around fourteen, and while rank was less strictly observed in the Andelin than anywhere else in the Empire, it would still be unthinkable for them to speak to the duke’s wife no matter how young she was.
This boy certainly knew how to say what was on his mind, though. Ophele wished she could be so fearless.
Stopping Eugene by the next well, Ophele dropped the bucket and then cranked the windlass to draw it back up again, her slim body swaying with the effort.
It took a while to fill all three barrels; she saved herself some walking with the water wagon, but she still had to pull and pour all those buckets, fifteen per barrel.
Once they were full, she had to sit down and rest a bit.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she told Eugene gratefully, stroking the donkey’s nose as he lowered his head to investigate her.
“Maybe one day I can introduce you to my friend Anzel. You could talk together about donkey things. Like carrots. And whose wagon is heavier. You’d hate Rou’s wagon, I bet.
He says he doesn’t mind the rattling, but I think he’s just gone deaf from hearing it for thirty years. ”
Thirty years. She would still be here in thirty years.
The duke had been explicit that even if the river rose up and swallowed every other person in the valley, she would survive, so she could bear his children.
On this side of the Brede, she was trapped as effectively as if she were in prison.
No one even needed to guard her. There was the river on two sides, Valleth to the north, and the Berlawe Mountains to the east, filled with wolf demons and ghouls and stranglers.
The question was, which death did she dislike least. And she was still not unhappy enough to die.
“I wish you could pull me in a wagon,” she said, pushing herself back to her feet. She kept a small store of carrot pieces in her pocket and fed Eugene one, stroking his ears as they walked together.
The route along the foot of the wall was a familiar one, and if she hadn’t been so tired and sore, she wouldn’t have minded this part of her life at all.
It was a good thing to bring water to thirsty men, and all of them were so nice to her.
They greeted her as they passed, offering gruff compliments, silly jokes, and terrible puns.
She was happy to fetch and carry when needed, or even—when Sir Miche wasn’t looking—return the odd dropped tool.
There were usually a few of those each day, and even as she watched, one of the scaffolders dropped his hammer and cursed.
Ophele had finally learned what word started with fu-.
“I’ll get it,” she said, hurrying forward to retrieve it and scampering easily into the scaffolding.
There was an unspoken conspiracy between her and the workers; she pretended she had never climbed anything in her life, and the men thanked the kindly spirit that had come to dwell upon the scaffold and returned trowels, hammers, chisels, and similar small objects.
“Thank you, O Lady of the Wall,” the man said loudly to the sky, and Ophele giggled as she slid easily back to the ground. She didn’t see why she shouldn’t help, if she could, and climbing in the scaffolding reminded her of climbing the old and beautiful trees of Aldeburke.
“My lady,” said a stern voice behind her, with an emphasis on lady. She turned guiltily.
“Oh, Sir Miche,” she said, too cheerfully. “What happened with the boy?”
“I threw him back in the river. You know if Rem ever catches you up there, there may be actual bodies dangling from the scaffolding at the end of the day.”
“I was just helping.”
“I know.” Sir Miche fell into step with her as she led Eugene on to the next set of buckets, the small wagon creaking.
“Why doesn’t he want me to do anything?” she asked plaintively. It had been bothering her for weeks.
“In this particular case, he’s afraid you’ll get hurt. And I agree with him.”
“He’s not afraid of anything,” she said, looking at her feet. No doubt he didn’t want his princess to get hurt; he wanted heirs from her. But she objected to the word afraid. That implied a level of emotional engagement that did not exist.
“You’d be surprised what scares him,” Sir Miche said dryly. “Here, let me do that. I’ve never seen a spring so hot, no wonder every devil in the Berlawes has decided to come out early.”
“It’s almost summer,” she pointed out, lifting the masses of hair off the back of her neck and fanning herself. Dark clouds had been hovering all day, like a lid on the steaming stewpot of the valley.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he agreed, winching up a full bucket with such ease that she sighed inside. Thunder rumbled. “Stars, it’s going to rain again,” he said, frowning up at the sky. “Best get under cover, my lady. I’ll start getting the men off the wall.”
Sir Miche often said he was useless, as if he wanted to make it clear up front that no one should expect anything from him. But it wasn’t true. He had quietly taken over many of the practical complexities of the wall, and he had an eye for detail that spotted disasters before they could occur.
It was oddly…comforting to watch him. Charming, handsome, with that long golden hair, he was like a knight from a storybook.
For all the men’s jokes about his reputation with women—Ophele could guess what maidenslayer meant—Ophele had never seen the least sign of it.
He had never been anything but kind and considerate of her.