Hilde #2
She lifted her hands, looking down at them in the dim light.
Hilde had never Charmed anything more sentient than a beetroot. Keeping things fresh was all very well for vegetables in the cellar, but it had never occurred to her to Charm a person. There was no point to it. It wouldn’t bring them back.
Except now there was a point. It might not even work, but she had to try. She needed time—time to figure out what to do and how to preserve what she and Thorgoode had been building together.
He would want that.
She placed her Charmed hands upon her dead husband.
“Fuck,” said Han.
She hadn’t said anything when Hilde had returned to the manor alone and pale-faced and had wordlessly led her to the barn to fetch the ox and wagon.
Han had driven in silence through the falling night.
She had taken in the shadowy picture of Thorgoode dead on his back in the laneway, then helped Hilde haul him into the wagon.
She had covered him with a horse blanket and driven them all back to the manor, still silent.
She and Hilde had dragged him out of the cart and down into the root cellar.
Now that the task was done, they stood there staring at him in the flickering lamplight.
“Fuck,” Han said again, more loudly. “How did he die?”
Hilde let out a manic little laugh.
Han looked at her sharply.
Han rarely put her feelings on display. She expected the same behavior from others and generally withdrew when faced with the fact that not everyone could manage it.
Just a few days past, Hilde had watched as Elisa from the mill had broken down in tears in front of Han while delivering sacks of flour.
Her beau had broken things off with her when she had expected a proposal, poor girl.
Han had taken three steps back from her, clearly stymied, and Hilde had stepped in to comfort Elisa and offer her one of Cook’s cherry tarts, which were always a balm to a troubled heart.
Hilde doubted that an emotional outburst on her part would be any better received, so she did her best to pull herself together.
“Sorry,” she said. “It isn’t funny. I’m not laughing because it’s funny.”
“I know,” said Han. She paused, frowning. “He’s young for this. People may talk.”
“His father died young, too, and his brother, Germain. It was their hearts. Everyone knows that.”
“There were no marks on him?”
“No. No blood. No bruises—not even before I…”
Hilde trailed off. Han knew she had a Charm.
It had manifested when Hilde was very young, before she could even remember, and she had not known to keep it from her little sister, who at that time had followed her everywhere like a shadow.
She couldn’t even recall telling or showing her; Han just knew.
But that didn’t mean they ever discussed it. On the contrary, whenever Hilde had tried to talk to Han about her Charm, Han immediately closed up tighter than a knot, and the conversation ended before it began.
“Why? Why would you do that?” The look of horror on Han’s face made acid roil up and burn at Hilde’s throat.
Han had taken in Thorgoode’s death without showing any emotion whatsoever, or any sign that she understood what it meant and how much trouble they were in.
But this, this small and ultimately harmless action that Hilde had taken to try to save them all, this was what finally made her sister upset.
“If he dies now, everything will be a terrible mess!” she said.
“If he dies? He’s already dead.”
“No one needs to know that yet. We need time, and my Charm will give it to us.”
Han winced at the word Charm. “What good is time going to do? You planning to prop him up in the window like a poppet at the fair?”
“Of course not! I…I need to think. I can still find a way to make things right. In the meantime, no one will find him down here. I have the only key.”
She pressed her fingers against the cold iron that hung on the chatelaine at her waist.
Han sighed heavily. She liked rules, and once she had them set in her mind, she followed them with an intensity that often irritated Hilde, who understood that life sometimes required a bit of flexibility.
What if Han wouldn’t keep this secret? What if she insisted that they immediately tell everyone that Thorgoode had died? What if asking for her help had been a mistake?
But there had been no one else to ask. Hilde couldn’t burden the other staff, and there was certainly no one in the village she could confide in, not with this. Thorgoode had been the person she shared her troubles with, and now he was gone, and her own sister wasn’t going to agree to help her—
“I’ll tell Cook and Ed and Francie that he was called away to Neck,” said Han, and Hilde felt faint with relief.
Saying he was in Neck made good sense, as he traveled there at least quarterly to do business.
Neck was the capital of Eldmere. It had once been called something else, but centuries earlier, the first high king had built a grand castle there, which everyone called the Crown Palace, and then people began to refer to the city as the King’s Neck, seeing as it supported the Crown.
Soon it became simply Neck, and it remained so forever after—an unserious name for an important place.
“Hilde?” said Han, startling her. “Are you well?”
“Yes. Thank you. I’m sorry. I…I’ll spend a little time with him, I think.”
“Why?”
“I just…I need to.”
Han frowned but nodded.
She stood there looking at Hilde, and Hilde wondered if maybe she was contemplating offering her an embrace. It would be so unlike her, and Hilde wasn’t certain she’d be able to bear it.
Then Han turned and mounted the stairs, leaving Hilde alone in the dark with her dead husband, swallowing back tears and facing the certainty that no matter what she did now, nothing was ever going to be the same.
There were moments in the days that followed when Hilde managed to pretend that Thorgoode truly was away in Neck.
The original week of the lie turned into a fortnight, and in the drowsy haze before sleep, she often allowed herself the comforting thought that he’d come home from Neck tomorrow.
They would talk about the lambing and the new retaining wall and the accounts.
She would unpack his trunk and scold him for ripping a hole in the elbow of his best coat, and then she would fall asleep with her head on his shoulder, listening to the echoing thud of his heart.
It frightened her how comforting the delusion was.
It was always shattered when she and Han locked eyes and her sister glanced away, as if the weight of their shared secret made looking at her impossible.
She kept expecting Han to ask her for some sort of plan, was painfully relieved when she avoided her instead, and then felt guilty about the entire thing.
Each day, she would force herself to go down into the root cellar to visit Thorgoode, laid out on the floor, still fresh but also still dead.
She stared at him and tried to come up with a solution that would allow her to lay him to rest. He deserved a proper wake and burial.
He deserved to retire to the peaceful grave field by the apple orchards, not to linger in the cellar with the vegetables.
He deserved to be mourned—by her and by everyone else who had cared for him.
The problem was that the two of them had made a plan.
It was conceived by Hilde in the early days of their marriage, when she was still a dewy-eyed girl, intimidated by her lord-turned-husband but eager to prove her worth to him.
She had begun reading the political broadsides and pamphlets that arrived from Neck aloud to him in the evenings, to entertain him while he cleaned his musket or bathed by firelight in their chambers.
Then, after he’d dozed off with his heavy hand draped across her belly, she’d keep one precious candle burning—it had taken her years of being Lady Croft to not fret over the cost of every candle—beside the bed to finish reading.
The broadsides were filled with the news of the war with Relance, of course—a parade of victories and losses that never seemed to amount to much beyond grinding up Relancian and Eldmerish lives alike.
Hilde imagined that after the first hundred years of fighting, events had simply repeated themselves over and over again for centuries.
She hoped that someone remembered what the war had been about in the first place, but five hundred years on, she certainly had no idea.
Croftholde was about as far as it was possible to get from the war without leaving Eldmere altogether, but that didn’t mean they were untouched by it.
Periodically the king issued an order and all workingmen between the ages of eighteen and five-and-twenty were enlisted.
The last such order had been when Hilde was barely eighteen herself, and she’d watched as all the boys she’d grown up with marched away to their deaths.
There was also the war tithe, which had to be paid in goods.
Some years, the Croft struggled to pay its due and still have enough to get everyone through the winter.