Chapter 11 – Try #3
“You have to take medicine.” He sprang up and went to mix the honey and water and bitter powders. It looked as if her head was hurting her. He had to help her sit up, and Remin sat on the bed beside her and propped her against his body. “Sip. Slowly.”
It was too much to take in. He was having to apply this new knowledge to everything he knew of her, to every single interaction they’d ever had.
Suddenly he was thinking of questions he should have asked long ago, going all the way back to that first day in Aldeburke.
Miche, finding the remains of a fire under a pine tree.
But why had she been there in the first place?
Why did a princess know how to make and conceal a campfire?
How had House Hurrell dared to openly conspire against the Emperor’s sacred child?
What did it say about her father’s protection, that they did?
And the wedding. Who let their daughter walk down the aisle by herself?
What sort of father couldn’t be bothered to send a representative to ensure she was treated with honor?
A man who valued the loyalty of his child did not abandon her that way.
And Ophele had said it herself, the first time Remin had given her wine and loosened her tongue: she’d never had so much as a message from the Emperor. Not even on her birthday.
“I’m sorry,” he said as she sipped at her medicine. “Wife, I am so sorry. I have wronged you.”
He had not yet begun to calculate the magnitude of the apology he owed her.
“I’m the Emperor’s daughter.” She turned her face away from the cup. “No more.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Remin was really beginning to believe that. There was just no evidence, none, to prove otherwise. Turning, he laid her on the bed, brushing her hair back to coil on the pillows. Her face was faintly green. “Do you feel sick?”
“A little.” Her arms crept up to hide her breasts. “And…clothes?”
Even half-dead from sun sickness, color still rose to her cheeks.
Remin squeezed her hand and turned away, fighting to master himself.
He had known nothing. He understood nothing.
He had refused to learn or understand, and he had almost lost her, all her blushes and her soft voice and those extraordinary searching eyes.
He had tried to blind himself to her because everything he saw only made him like her more.
“You had sun sickness,” he said gruffly as he opened her trunk and pulled out a fresh chemise. “We had to keep you cool. If you start to feel warm again, then we’ll have to take it back off. Sometimes it can take a while for the fire in your body to bal—”
She was asleep.
“—lance,” he finished. He set the chemise aside and sank down beside the bed, controlling himself only with a colossal effort. It was too much. His breath was squeezed too tight in his chest and he didn’t know what to do. Stars, that had happened, hadn’t it? She had awakened, and she had spoken.
He would be so careful with her now. Everything she needed, anything she wanted. He wouldn’t wake her up to dress. Her skin needed air and water, as much as it could get. Food, and rest, and then…
He didn’t know.
He didn’t know anything.
* * *
The axe struck the tree with a ringing vibration that shivered all the way up to Remin’s shoulders, and it felt good.
This was what he needed. Hard, physical work, the sort that made it impossible to think of anything but the burn of his muscles.
Stripped to the waist, splinters and sawdust stuck to his sweating skin as his borrowed axe slammed into the tree, testing himself to see how precisely he could strike, how deep he could make the blade bite.
If he moved a distance away from the rest of the work crew, he didn’t even need to speak to anyone.
“If you keel over, I’m not dragging you down to the river,” drawled a voice behind him, and Remin looked back to find Miche slouching against a tree, watching him work. Miche rarely stood under his own power. “It’s murder out here, Rem, are you trying to kill yourself?”
“It’s fine.” But he did drink from the waterskin Miche offered, then poured more on his head, his shaggy black hair dripping with sweat. “Why aren’t you on the wall?”
“Gen says we have to let the men rest this time of day, unless we want to risk losing them to sun sickness,” Miche said pointedly. “You know they’re taking bets over there on how much forest Remin Grimjaw can clear by himself.”
“Are they?” Remin glanced at the swath of downed trees behind him, as if a very localized windstorm had swept past, and shrugged wide shoulders.
His skin was browned from years in the sun, and though he felt the heat the same as anyone else, he had worked much harder on much hotter days than this, often in full armor.
He picked up his axe. “Guess I better make it exciting for them.”
For a while, Miche just watched, arms crossed over his chest. The blond knight was looking unusually scruffy, with several days’ stubble on his jaw and his long hair tied back with a rough thong.
“I have to thank you,” Remin said abruptly, and turned to lower his head to his friend. His bow was elegant even when he was shirtless and sticky with sap. “Gen said you saved Ophele’s life. I’ll never be able to repay you.”
Miche flicked this away with his fingertips. “I’m not keeping count. How is she?”
“Sleeping.” Remin swung his axe, the blade biting with an echoing thwack. It had been two days, and she was still only waking up long enough to eat, drink, and perform the necessary ablutions. “Still sleeping. Gen’s keeping an eye on her.”
Actually, Gen had shoved an axe in Remin’s hand and kicked him out of the cottage.
“Must be tired.” Miche moved out of the way as Remin set the axe down and shoved the tree over, the muscles flexing in his bare back and shoulders.
“I don’t think she’s been sleeping.” He moved onto the next tree, a sturdy elm. “Before now, I mean. I talked to her guards this morning.” Thwack. “They said they’ve seen lamps burning until almost dawn, some nights.” Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. “Because she was too scared to sleep.”
Miche said nothing.
“You warned me. I thought, if she’s scared, she just needs to get over it.
I didn’t think, she’s going to sit up every night listening to the devils, frightened out of her wits.
” The axe swung again, sinking five inches into the elm.
“I did wonder why she kept falling asleep. I pulled her out of the bath three—no, five times. That’s not normal, right? ”
“No,” the other man said quietly.
“I thought so.” Remin jabbed the axe in Miche’s direction. “I thought so. But I told myself that she knows better than I do, surely she’d say something if she was sick or something.”
“Most people would.”
“Not her. Gen said she wouldn’t ask me for a bandage if she was bleeding to death, and I ignored him.
She doesn’t complain, ever. Stars, I tried to do things to get her to complain, because I was so sure she was lying, and eventually she’d break.
” Remin slammed the axe into the tree, slicing a wedge, and then kicked the wedge loose with a heavy boot.
“You remember the women at Iverlach? The ones that wintered with Juste?”
“Through the siege?”
“Gen said she looks like one of them.” Another tree went down.
Remin went on to the next. “I knew she was skinny. Too skinny. You couldn’t tell it, the way she usually covers up, but I knew.
Did you know that when women starve, or if they’re under too much stress, their bleeding will stop? I didn’t know that.”
“I have heard of it.” Miche’s face hardened.
“Well, you were the one that taught me about such things.” Remin delivered three ringing swings to a sturdy sapling and shoved it over with one huge hand. “Gen said they almost always recover. But it’ll be a while before she’ll be able to get with child.”
There was no one else to whom he would have confided something so personal. Not even Tounot or Juste, who regarded him as their liege first and their friend second. Miche was always just Miche.
“It would be a fitting punishment if she couldn’t give me children, wouldn’t it?
It was the only reason I wanted her, and she knows it.
That was the first thing she said to me, after Gen talked to her.
She said she was sorry, she would eat and rest and get better.
Not for herself. For me, so she can give me heirs. ”
Remin shoved the last tree over and stood, panting. Sweat streamed down his sides and back, soaking his thick leather belt.
“She’s sorry,” he repeated bitterly. “She said she was sorry for everything her father did, and she wants to make up for it, so she’ll have children by a man who wouldn’t even comfort her when she was scared. The stars as my witness, Miche, I never meant to do that. How could I do that?”
Sitting down with a thump, he swiped at his sweaty face with a sweaty arm. Wordlessly, Miche handed him the waterskin, and he drank. It tasted salty.
“She said she’s sorry for what the Emperor did?” The other man echoed.
“That’s what she said when she woke up. She was sorry.
She wanted to apologize to all of us for the things the Emperor did.
That’s why she was working so hard. That’s why she never complained.
She’s trying to give back what he took.” It was another bit of supreme irony that the entire time Remin had been punishing her for her father’s crimes, she had been quietly trying to pay the debt in her own way.
“And she didn’t do a fucking thing. Was she even alive when my parents were killed?
Why would she think she owes me anything? ”
“I would,” Miche said quietly. “Put yourself in her shoes, Rem. What if it was you? What if it was your family that wiped out hers, had her parents executed, burned down her home, and made her an orphan? You wouldn’t feel like you needed to make it right?”