Chapter 11 – Try #6
She fancied that the way he wrote was aggressive, the quill slashing rapidly away.
After a little while, the fingers of his left hand began to drum a soft accompaniment against the table.
Ophele watched through her eyelashes as he read, paused, drummed, and then wrote, and eventually she found herself craning her neck and counting the beats of his fingers, wondering if there was a pattern.
“Are you well, wife?” he asked, without looking up.
“Yes,” she said, retiring at once behind her book.
But Ophele had grown up with all of Aldeburke to wander and a vast library of books to read, and in a few minutes she was ready to throw the book off the side of the bed and kick her feet like a five year-old.
She wanted up. She wanted out. It was hot.
She was tired of being in bed. And the scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch of his quill was going to drive her crazy.
“Are you sure?” he asked, reaching for another page.
Setting her book in her lap, she looked at him, wondering if he really wanted to know. Was he just being polite? She hesitated, gathering her courage to lodge her first timid complaint.
“I’m bored.”
He glanced at her, one eyebrow lifting. “Bored?”
She nodded nervously. It was a child’s complaint and she wouldn’t blame him for telling her to go to sleep, or read another book, or anything else that boiled down to be quiet.
And if he had, it likely would have been the last complaint she ever uttered in his presence.
But instead, he glared at her forbiddingly.
“Would you like to see what I’m working on?”
“Could I?”
He dragged the second chair around the table beside him and she padded over barefoot, wondering at the mismatch between his face and his words.
“I’ve been working with Edemir on supply orders,” the duke explained, turning the piece of paper toward her.
“We have to keep track of the current population of the valley so we make sure we have enough rations, grains and vegetables especially. You can see here, these are Genon’s requirements for nutrition… ”
“Oh, you were counting,” she said, when she saw the long columns of figures. His eyebrows went up in surprise.
“On my fingers? Well, we can’t all of us do sums in our heads.
” His face was still stern, but after many hours of bored observation, she thought maybe he wasn’t offended or being sarcastic.
“We have to provision not just the current population, but also all the incoming craftsmen and builders, and Auber’s family, when they arrive.
So you see, we have to compare how much we need now and add the requirements for the new people to project how much we’re going to need then, and get the supply wagons moving. They don’t arrive overnight.”
“Can I help?” she asked, rapidly skimming the page. There wasn’t much to it, just lots of sums.
“Show your work until Edemir is satisfied.” The duke picked up a spare feather and pulled out his belt knife to trim a new quill. “He makes all his assistants pass a test before he lets them manage accounts.”
“Did you have to take it?” Ophele bent her head over the page.
She hadn’t had any formal education after her mother died, but there were books on mathematics in the Aldeburke library, and she had occasionally opened them to satisfy her curiosity on some point of geometry or economics.
Rou had once explained how he chose his routes through Firkane to visit as many villages as possible in the least number of miles, and she had spent the whole winter with an atlas, fascinated by the problem.
“Yes.” The duke sounded amused. He watched her work for a few minutes and then pulled a fresh document from the pile.
This was useful, wasn’t it? Ophele wouldn’t have called the many pages of arithmetic fun, but she was careful with her reckoning and showed her work in long, tidy columns, and there could be no doubt that every page she completed was a page the duke didn’t have to do.
“Does it help?” she asked shyly, handing him a sheaf of completed papers.
“Yes,” he said, rifling through them. “I hate such work. But it was time Edemir got out of his office, he was getting soft behind his worktable.” He bent his head and lowered his voice conspiratorially.
“He was counting on me making a hash of the accounts so he wouldn’t have to work on the palisade.
Won’t he be surprised when he sees these? ”
She had to cover her mouth to stifle a giggle, shocked by the mischief in his eyes. Never in her wildest dreams would she have imagined that Remin Grimjaw could look like a naughty boy.
“I’ll take them to the office now,” he said abruptly, pushing out of his seat, and left her staring after him as he ducked out the cottage door.
He often did that; he would make some small joke or tease her and then make an excuse to move away.
She didn’t understand why he seemed to reach out and withdraw in almost the same moment.
And it still seemed like too much to hope that this new friendly feeling between them wouldn’t evaporate the next time her father decided to remind the duke of his disfavor.
But the next night, the duke proved again that he was serious about mending things between them.
For the first week after her sun sickness, Ophele slept often and deeply, and it seemed like the moment the light faded behind the cottage shutters, her eyes slammed shut.
She had assumed that the duke was going out as he always did after she went to sleep, donning his armor to take his place among the watch.
She understood. He was the commander of the army of the Andelin, it was his responsibility to protect everyone.
But it still meant that she felt a growing knot of dread in her belly as she lay in bed that night and tried to will herself to sleep.
The curse of an active imagination was that she could summon the sounds of the devils at any moment, whether she wanted to or not, and Ophele’s creative mind presented her with dozens of fresh horrors every night.
Surprisingly, though, the duke showed no sign of getting ready to go out. All he did was light the pair of lamps on the table and then return to his papers. At the first cackling shriek of a strangler, she gave up all pretense of sleep and stood on the bed to pull a book from the shelf.
“It will never get anywhere near you,” said the duke from behind her.
She nodded, curling up in the corner of the bed behind her book and opening a page at random. She had read her books too many times. Her eyes skimmed over the words without absorbing a single one.
“Wife.” The duke came to sit on the edge of the bed and patted the place beside him. “Come speak with me.”
“Are you going out tonight?” she asked, moving beside him without hesitation. It was the safest place in the whole valley.
“No.”
“Is it because of me?” she asked, subdued.
“Yes,” he said bluntly. “But it’s not your fault. I haven’t done my duty to you. You never even had watch training.”
“Watch training?” she echoed doubtfully.
“Yes. Everyone that comes to the valley, even Sousten Didion, is taught about the devils. My soldiers aren’t allowed to stand guard until we’ve told them what to look for,” he explained.
“You can’t expect a man to keep calm when he’s sitting alone in the dark and doesn’t know what’s out there. Anyone would be scared.”
“Even you?”
“Of course, even me.” He frowned, and she looked down at her lap, her fingers knotting together until his big hand closed over them, quelling the anxious motion.
“I was afraid, the first time I saw one. And that was just a ghoul. At the time we weren’t sure what they were or if they were even real.
Some of us thought they were big wolves, or some new hairless bear, or any damned thing but a conjuring from a Vallethi sorcerer. ”
“What did it look like?” she asked, torn between interest and prickling awareness of his warm hand on hers. “The first one you saw?”
“It was a ghoul, so sort of human.” He frowned again, but he didn’t seem angry.
“But stringy and starved, like its skin was on too tight. Ghouls run on all fours, but their hands and feet are mostly like ours. That confused us, too, we thought it might be some weird cannibal mercenary Valleth hired. They were desperate in the end. Hired mercenaries from everywhere.”
“Why didn’t they have to worry about the devils?” she asked, her forehead crinkling as she thought about it. “Valleth.”
His eyebrows lifted, surprised. “It’s less of a concern in Valleth itself.
They have magic there, I’m told the devils are only a problem for the smaller villages.
But some of the deserters we talked to during the war said they weren’t terribly careful with the common soldiers.
They ended up copying us, shell curtains and guards and so on. ”
“How horrible. I guess that’s why—” Outside, there was a long, ululating cackle from somewhere to the east, and Ophele realized she was pressed very nearly into his lap, her heart galloping, and the duke was sitting so stiffly upright he might have been part of the palisade.
Forcing herself to detach her hand from his arm, she moved away.
It took an effort to keep her voice steady as she asked, “What—what about stranglers?”
“Hate them,” he said, his dark head cocked as he listened to the racket outside. “They’re tall. Almost my height. Gray skin, bony-looking, but their arms and legs are…hard to describe. They’re squishy, when they get hold of you. They wind around you somehow.”
“One of them grabbed you before?” she asked, looking up at him with huge eyes.
“Several. And I’m still here,” he added, as if this were reassuring. Of course he was, he was Remin Grimjaw.
“How did you get away?”
He opened his mouth to speak, and then paused and reflected.
“Normally when one gets hold of you, that’s it. Even for my strongest men. So you know what we do?”
She shook her head.
“Call for help. Make noise. No one fights alone, in an army. If something happened to Dol, he’d bang on his shield so Yvain would know to come and get the strangler off him.
They don’t kill you right away,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Takes time to strangle someone, longer than you’d think.
And no strangler’s going to make it this far into camp.
But it’s good for you to know. So if one ever did get to your guards, what would you hear? ”
“Banging on a shield,” she repeated, feeling much better about the whole thing. “What are wolf demons like?”
“Big, black, like they’re made of shadows,” he began, and as he patiently answered her questions, she forgot to be afraid of the noises outside or nervous about talking to him because it was all so very interesting.
The more he told her, the more questions she had.
Were the devils magic? If they were, how were they coming into the Empire, which was anathema to magic?
If they hired a Vallethi sorcerer, could they get him to send the devils back?
Or maybe a Bhumi shaman could do something, had anyone asked? Where did—
“I don’t know, and that’s enough questions,” the duke said, when it was evident that the night would run out before her questions did.
But he didn’t sound annoyed; he was looking down at her and the corner of his mouth was twitching again.
“It’s late, and you ought to sleep.” He hesitated. “Did this…help?”
She nodded automatically, flushing as she realized that all this time, he had just been trying to calm her down, like soothing a frightened child. But he caught her before she could slide away.
“Tell me if you hear something that worries you,” he said, tilting her chin up with a finger to meet her eyes. “Even if you have to wake me. Like one of my men on watch. We have to look out for each other.”
“I will,” she said softly. She felt both touched and foolish.
It was obviously an attempt to make her feel better about disturbing him, but with enough truth in it that it was hard to argue.
There was always a chance that she really might hear something dangerous.
And he was trying so hard not to overlook a single thing that might frighten or trouble her.
Would it last? The next time one of her father’s assassins came, would he blame her again? What would happen when he discovered how useless she really was? Could she learn, somehow? And hide it until then?
But then she would be deceiving him.
These thoughts troubled her more than the noises of the devils.
The kinder he was, the more she feared that he would come to hate her again.
Lying in bed, Ophele hugged her pillow close, wondering if this was what Lady Hurrell had meant.
Bastards were the seeds of treachery. It was inherent to their natures, and none so much as an Imperial bastard, whose existence was an affront to the Emperor and the stars.
She couldn’t help deceiving him, she was born of deceit.
Of course he wouldn’t trust her. But she liked it so much, when he was being this way…
On the other side of the small cottage, Remin paused for a long moment as he laid out his bedroll, looking at the slender back of the girl on the bed, her creamy skin glowing in the hearth light, her long hair streaming over the side of the mattress.
He did not smile at the sight. The feel of her body against his lingered, a soft and tormenting warmth, the merest taste of the delights he knew awaited, if only he could reach out to her.
If he wanted, he could go wake her right now. She wouldn’t refuse him.
But if he did, it wouldn’t end in the morning light. Once he had her again, he would never be able to let her go.
And though Remin could not know it, the first of his enemy’s agents had already arrived in Tresingale.