Chapter 12 – Lady of the Wall #5
Dipping her quill in an ink pot, Ophele bent over the first page, adding the first column with her eyes.
Sir Edemir had come to the cottage a few days ago to give her a few math problems and let her do them in her head, and had looked so surprised that she wondered uncomfortably whether she had done something strange.
Her reward was more accounts to manage, but at least she didn’t have to show her work anymore.
If she could do that, maybe she could do this.
She heard him coming even before he knocked on the door, some time before supper.
“Wife?”
“Yes,” she said, sitting up very straight.
He kicked the dust off his boots before he ducked through the low door, his face set in its customary frowning lines.
“You’ve been working?” he asked, sitting down at the table beside her.
Ophele nodded, suddenly anxious.
“What have you been working on? No, tell me,” he said, when she moved to hand him the stack of papers. “I want to hear you talk.”
“Orders for the kitchen,” she said, looking up at him and wondering what this was about. “And medicines, for Genon? And I answered some of the letters we talked about yesterday. From the weavers and dyers. And the man who wanted to know about mining. And a few others.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes? There were a lot of orders for the kitchen,” she said, apologetic.
“No, I’m sure you did plenty of work,” he said dryly, looking at the stack by her elbow. “But I want you to tell me about all of it. I want you to get used to talking to me.”
He was wearing his stubborn face again.
“Oh.” Her eyes flicked up to his, surprised. “Oh. Well, I also answered a few more letters, people asking if they could come live here, and I told them what you said about not letting anyone else come until next year…”
The duke listened patiently as she explained the other letters she had written, and then they looked through the food orders for the kitchen, speculating about what earthly use Master Wen might have for a bushel of dried persimmons.
Though she felt embarrassed that he was going to such trouble, she knew better than to resist; he would sit at the table all night if that was what it took to make her talk. He was so stubborn.
And thinking that, for some reason she had to look down to hide a smile.
“So let me tell you about the caravan,” he said when she was done, and described what she had already deduced about trying to get a team of men and horses to Ferrede.
“The hard part is the horses,” he explained.
“We can hardly put them in the wagon, so we have to come up with something to protect them overnight that they can haul. The carpenters are calling it a mobile palisade. But if it’s too heavy, we need more horses to pull it, which means the palisade needs to be bigger to protect them, which means more horses… ”
He spread his hands and Ophele nodded. It was an interesting problem.
“But we have to go help Ferrede, and the other villages,” he went on. “I guess you’ve figured that out. I didn’t tell you because I still don’t know who will actually go, or when. I didn’t want you worrying about it in the meantime.”
“I’ll be all right,” she made herself say. But this time his frown was a real frown.
“Stop saying you’re fine when you aren’t,” he said sternly. “It makes it hard for me to tell what to do. Tell me what you’re thinking, not what you think I want to hear.”
“I’m thinking that they’re your people. My people,” she said, which was still an incredibly bizarre thought, but was nonetheless true. “Because I’m the Duchess of Andelin. Ferrede, Meinhem, Raida, Isigne, and Selgin. Is that all of them?”
“Nandre. And Raida is fine, they’re by the border wall.”
“Nandre,” she repeated, giving him her own version of a stubborn face. “I didn’t think about what might be happening to them, all this time. But they don’t have knights, do they? Or soldiers.”
“No, they don’t,” he agreed.
“And they swore to obey you as their lord. They swore to the stars.”
“Yes.”
“Then you have to go.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” he replied slowly.
“I was thinking about it. It bothered me, even before. I swore to protect the people of Tresingale, and I thought I was doing my duty, standing guard for them. But I only swore the protection of my body to you. Not the protection of someone else’s body.
I thought it was the same thing as long as you were safe, but Juste would disagree, I expect. ”
“But you said I’m safe,” she said, refusing to be diverted even with such tempting intellectual fodder.
“You don’t sleep when the devils are about,” he said bluntly. “You’re always awake when I come back.”
She flushed.
“It’s not as bad as being out there with no guards at all,” she said, her ears pink. The people of the valley shouldn’t have to suffer because she was a coward.
“Why do they scare you so much?” he wanted to know. “If you explain it to me, maybe there’s something we can do about it. Is it just the noises?”
It was the noises, but Ophele thought that wasn’t all. And he was asking so directly, and had been so patient, she thought she owed it to him to at least try.
“Where do they come from?” she began, her fingers twisting together. “The devils.”
“Vallethi sorcerers.”
“I know that, but from where,” she said, voicing one of the many questions she had asked herself so many times. It felt good to say it out loud. “Are they from the underworld? Or somewhere else in this world? Or somewhere in Valleth?”
“We don’t know,” he admitted.
“Why do they go away in the winter?”
His lips twisted. He was an intelligent man, he likely already knew where she was going. “We don’t know.”
“Why are there more this year than there were last year?”
“No idea.” He looked at her expectantly.
“Then how do you know there won’t be more tonight than there were last night?” she asked softly. “A lot more, maybe. Too many.”
“I can’t know. But we’ve planned for it,” he said, to her surprise.
“You have?”
“Of course. The Vallethi army showed up in places we didn’t expect, and often with more people than we expected.
Though I can’t send out scouts against the devils,” he said, in a tone that let her know he was treating her question seriously.
“Huber brought it up. He’s always the one with the questions that keep me up at night.
But after that last expedition outside the walls, we made plans, just in case we were ever overrun. ”
Ophele’s expression very clearly said, do go on.
“We’ve drilled organized retreats from three main areas.
Here, let me have your quill, I’ll show you,” he said, reaching for a blank piece of paper.
“Here’s the palisade. It only admits stranglers, but that’s still a vulnerability.
Then here, northeast, is the gap between the palisade and the wall, and the gap between the north and south sections of the wall.
” The quill slashed briskly between his large brown fingers.
“There are barricades here, mostly for the wolves…”
In a few minutes he had sketched out the defenses for the town, then showed her how it folded inward, and how the masons would be evacuated to the unfinished barracks while the people in town would be moved to the cookhouse and storehouse.
As Yvain and Dol had said, she herself would go to the storehouse, but in Ophele’s mind it had been a chaos of screaming men and devils running in all directions, not this well-ordered retreat.
“It wouldn’t be fun,” he said, looking down at the finished diagram, with its many arrows and dotted lines.
“And we could likely tighten this up, there’s a hill here that would slow down the retreat, another barricade would buy them more time…
anyway,” he said, returning his attention to her.
“We can’t prepare for everything, but we have prepared for this.
You’re not likely to wake up one night with a mob of devils surrounding the cottage. ”
“I was more worried about the storehouse,” she confessed. “I thought—it sounds silly, but I thought of Yvain and Dol taking me there and locking me inside, and then in the morning I would come out and find I was the only person left.”
Her voice faded as she spoke her worst fear, and the duke’s stern face softened.
“I guess that would scare anyone,” he said, and hesitated only a second before he covered both her hands with his. “But I’d say that’s very, very unlikely, wife.”
It wasn’t magic. Her heart didn’t pound any less frantically later that night, when he went out to guard the road and she heard a strangler cackling in the distance.
But when she went to sit by the fire, thinking she would read, she found that he had left the plans for retreat in the center of the table, with all the buildings in town neatly labeled and the path from the cottage to the storehouse marked.
And in the storehouse, he had added two figures, labeled in his slashing, jagged script: Ophele. Remin.
She didn’t hear him come in that night. She was already asleep.
A few days later, she plucked up her courage to ask him whether or not a decision had been made about the caravan.
“Well, I won’t be going,” he said. His face was as austere as ever, but she was learning to see the humor in his eyes. “Remember how I told you they were trying to figure out how to keep the size of the caravan down, to compensate for the palisade?”
She nodded.
“They succeeded.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “I won’t be going, and neither will Jinmin. Can you guess why?”
She thought about it, and it actually startled a laugh out of her.
“Nooo…” she said, looking up at him with wide eyes. “You can’t fit?”
“They’d have to grease me up to get me in there,” he said, and gave her something very close to a smile as she burst into giggles.
* * *
With the caravan finished, and the gaps between the city walls being whittled down daily, Remin judged that it was time to take another chance.