7. N #5
“I had the speech, learned highborn accents well enough. Always had a good ear, but to make a good marriage meant bringing in enough rations that I could feed a child, and myself. Making milk is expensive. No rations meant no good marriage. So, I ….”
She trailed off, sniffled a bit, and took a deep breath.
Nora wouldn’t meet Triana’s eye, instead staring fixedly at the diminished plate of wafers.
“So, a recruiter came around looking for young women who were adept enough to learn the dialects for the main cities. Women who were willing to translate for powerful males, and whose wives were unlikely to be in attendance, or who did not have wives that were suitable to be in male company.
I was offered enough rations to afford the marriage and the baby.”
“And?” asked Triana, in a quiet voice, though she knew the answer.
“And, of course, sex was expected. I knew that. So, I became a contract concubine. Two years on my back, two years speaking someone else’s words for them, for enough rations to set me up for the life I wanted.”
Triana didn’t need to hear the music to know the score. “And it didn’t work out?”
Nora sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose with one hand to stop the tears.
“They did everything they said they would. A nice ration balance, more than I could ever eat. But, I was naive. I thought once I was done, I could put it behind me. Turns out, I was wrong … your world sounds pretty casual about who does what with whom. Here,
a girl had best keep her knees firmly pressed together until she’s in the marriage bed … or, she’s ‘ruint,’ to use the street word.”
“Now that my contract is up, any man I fancy for a husband won’t have me. And any man who wants me … probably already has a wife.”
Nora took a deep breath. “I can’t have a child out of wedlock, as birth records require both parents’ bloodlines to avoid inbreeding, and if I do, then it’s a scandal as the father has to take food out of the mouths of his rightful child and wife to give to me.
Best I could hope for is a wealthy lord who wants a mistress … but still no child, for threat of a challenge to his trueborn heirs.”
“So, I’m giving away the rations I earned, a few at a time, to those who really need them … the mothers whose husbands died defending the walls, the low-birth workers who can barely feed themselves, much less their children.”
Triana kept silent, unsure of how to respond.
Her initial thought had been poor peoples’ problems, but that was tactless.
She was grateful for two idiot brothers, her brainless daredevils whose fondness for risk-taking and alcohol put her in rare control over her own destiny.
All she had needed to do was keep the bar well stocked, and let nature take its course.
With a small assist from a cut bellyband.
So, perhaps she hadn’t been completely uninvolved in their deaths.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Triana said, “someone is passing up a fine woman.”
She knew the words were trite and a shameless pander.
Kind words remained a foreign land for her, one rarely visited.
Still, Nora’s story sounded just so damned elven.
Always about appearances. The facts never mattered as long as the appearances were kept up.
Triana made a little pursing-motion with her mouth, determined to say something besides a platitude, so she went with that thought.
“It’s always about appearances isn’t it?”
she tried again. “It doesn’t matter whether you can bear a child, or be any good at being its mother, even with the food business settled. For me, it doesn’t matter whether I am any good at running my estate, the moment I let a betrothed into my marriage bed,
he owns everything that is mine by birth, and he manages it all the way he wants, whether that impoverishes us or enriches us. I go from being a lord in my own right to someone’s lady, and if he wishes, he can expel me.”
She gave a cynical snort, “So, I am the most eligible elven lord in the land right now, I suspect.”
She caught Nora’s eye in her gaze, and held it steady. She let the casual banter drop.
“For us, the titles, the ‘long titles’ as you so flippantly put it, are our way of keeping score. They nail down who owns what. I am V’dann Triana Lord Falcion. My family has held those lands since my grandfather’s time, he who came from Evelon and founded the line.
Falcion is my holding as recognized by the Council, descended from sire and grandsire in line unbroken for over nine hundred years. Lord means I hold it in my own name. Not as a wedding gift from a husband, that can be taken away or taken back the moment he loses interest or I fail to please.
Falcion is skiving well mine, by right, and by birth. It is in my blood and my blood is in it.”
Both of Nora’s eyebrows went up. Triana’s speech had given her time to rally. “Nine hundred years? In sooth? Your family has held it for nine centuries?”
“Yes,” Triana replied. “Nine centuries. When do I go back?”
Nora paused long enough, and glanced away, unwilling to hold Triana’s gaze.
At that moment, Triana had her answer. You don’t.
Triana waited to hear what mealy-mouthed response Nora would give her to try and sugar that one over.
Triana had already been gone close to two, what was the word …
eight-days … she’d been here two eight-days.
Triana knew her kith and kin. It would be just a matter of time before word got out that Lord Triana had gone missing, and shortly after the scavengers would begin to circle her estates.
Too soon after that some jumped-up crony of Aelmarkin’s would plant his beautifully spell-sculpted fundament on her High Seat.
Unless Kyndrath called the estate forfeit and doled it out to one of his cronies, or took it for himself.
Triana worked to keep the frustration at bay, and bit down hard, grinding her teeth so that she didn’t start raging at Nora.
Nora took her time replying, shaping an answer. Triana could watch the calculations behind Nora’s eyes. Enough of an answer to keep hope alive, not enough to set an expectation, and nothing within an arrow shot of a promise.
Nora picked up her cup. Triana let the silence build, and the tension.
“Well,” Nora said at last, “I really couldn’t say. I know Haldeen is the Gatemaster, and this is his area of specialty, and he’s very interested in your case.”
Triana didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. That’s the best you could come up with? She raised her own skeptical eyebrow. Nora took the bait.
“Well, the accidental circumstance that brought you here. He’s trying to figure out how to re-create it.”
Triana nearly opened her mouth to scoff. There was nothing accidental about it! Triana read the tell again, saw the untruth, then a slight widening, a tiny smile of triumph. She had given away her own reaction!
Triana realized Nora had turned the tables on her, and baited her in.
This was why they were here, why Nora had brought her from the house, and on the excursion, in the public place with the noise and the bustle.
Then, Nora had worked the topic around to sensitive subjects to raise her emotions, and even the hot sauce had played a part, to distract and divide her attention.
Nora had brought her away from what Triana assumed were Haldeen’s prying eyes and ears, to ask her that one question.
And the one unguarded moment, before Triana locked her tongue away, gave Nora her answer, for whatever it was worth to her.
Why would it matter to Nora if she had come here by accident or been kidnapped?
Because the answer is worth something to someone else, of course.
Money—I mean, rations—power, leverage. The same games of power are played here as they are at home.
I shouldn’t be surprised. We’re the same people after all, even though we don’t look much alike anymore.
Nora is still playing for that husband and child, and she’s looking for something else to stake for it. Information on me.
“Of course,” Triana answered, widening her eyes to look guileless, and putting just a hint of a smile on her lips. “Obviously it was an accident. I certainly wouldn’t have”—she paused—“gone somewhere that there was something I knew was an unstable contrivance.”
Nora looked cool and politely sympathetic, but that expression stopped at the eyes.
Honors felt about even. Nora had confirmed to Triana what she suspected, that Haldeen would hold her as long as he could.
In exchange, Nora had learned that what Haldeen was doing was different than what he had told her.
Triana pondered this while she sipped her cold tea.
She glanced up and met Nora’s measuring eye.
Nora smiled, the tiniest of smiles. She returned it. They understood each other perfectly.
I’m trapped here, unless I can figure out how to get home.