8. Chapter 8
Chapter 8
J ulia could not force herself to sleep, not even under the heavy woolen blanket. Somewhere beyond her dimly glazed window, the sea was roaring.
The Mearnt coastline was famous for its storms. The little tidbit surface in her memory, like some glowing fish from the bottom of the ocean.
She took a candle and quietly descended into the old-fashioned great hall that sprawled across most of the castle’s ground floor. Unlike in most rooms, here the fireplace was burning more or less continuously, despite the obvious expense. The place was great and unwieldy enough for every Lord Waite since the first one to know that, should the fire stop, the cold would be nigh-impossible to expel again. It was merely kept at bay as it was, the wet draughty tendrils creeping in from the corners and reaching out to her. Kept at bay, much like the sea raging against the cliffs.
Julia was not sure whether she was surprised or not when she saw a familiar figure silhouetted dark against the bright flames. On one hand, it was peculiar that her stoic husband lost sleep over anything; on the other, no one could deny him his habit of brooding.
“My lord,” she called out softly, approaching from behind.
He spun around quickly, his hand going to the absent sheath with its nonexistent sword. A reflex engraved upon his very muscles, clearly.
“My lady.” His voice was cold. “Forgive me. You have unsettled me”.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“It’s nothing. If it is my health that you are worried about, I am as well as it can be.”
“It’s you entire being that I am worried about. Come to bed. Tomorrow will be a brighter day.”
“Come to bed,” he repeated, looking at her as though she were the burning fire. “Mine or yours, my lady?”
“Whichever you wish.” Julia impulsively stepped closer to him. “You have saved my life. Even if you were not my husband, you would have certainly deserved a hero’s welcome for that”.
“Such things don’t need rewards. Especially not rewards of that sort.”
“Do you find me distasteful?”
“No.”
“Do you have no desire for me?”
“I know you have none for me, for all your catlike glances. You have desire for - for this marriage to be proper and right, for me to have no pretext for casting you aside - perhaps, for a legitimate heir.”
“It can still be pleasant. I’ve heard so, at least”. Julia did not deny his reasoning, even though it rankled to have its bare bones laid out before her so.
“A pleasure yielded through clenched teeth is no pleasure at all. Not for me, at any rate. My brother...” He took a long, steadying breath before continuing. “My brother saw nothing wrong in bedding sea-silk girls and the wives of fishermen, for all that their awe was born of fear and their compliments of a hope for reward. I am not my brother. I have no desire to be like my brother.”
Julia gazed at him, his cheekbones, his features drawn sharply against the golden firelight, and wondered who on earth taught this man - handsome in his own way, even though having all the charisma of a raincloud - that no one could want him.
She did not, that much was true. But surely someone else would have.
“I find you very admirable”, she said at least. “I’ve heard the stories about the battle at the pass. You were fighting ankle-deep in corpses, and the sun was drying you to the bone.”
“Not me alone.”
“But it was up to you whether or not to run, wasn’t it?”
“Who on earth would have run, with stakes like these?”
“Plenty of men. My father would, for instance,” Julia added without thinking.
“Your father would have run from a spaniel if it threatened him with social disapproval.”
Julia laughed at this, and without many compunctions.
“No outrage on behalf of your sire?” Lord Waite asked wryly.
“Not much, truth be told. Do you think me an unnatural daughter?”
“I think you a daughter with clear eyes. Few people appreciate the truth unvarnished.”
“But you do.”
“I always have.”
Julia’s breath caught in her throat.
Don’t be stupid , she reminded herself. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t even ask. It would be safer if it does stay this way. Your marriage is unconsummated, for Virgin’s sake - what are you going to do if he decides to set you aside as a result?
But the truth had been beating wildly in her thoughts like a captive bird, beating for months. It was a difficult thing, to scramble several years of her life out of sight, out of mind, make a dark secret out of them. Secret she was supposed to take to the grave.
It was hard. So hard. And today had been hard enough.
“There is something I must tell you.”
“Judging by your tone, my lady, the news are that the dead have risen from the ground.”
“No. Not quite. I... I suppose you’ve heard, while our marriage was being arranged, that my reputation is not as unblemished as that of a noble bride should be”.
“I’ve heard some rumours. A couple of times, perhaps. I rarely pay attention to rumours.”
“Well, I imagine the rumours hadn’t said anything good, but...” She paused. “The truth... if you want the truth... is much stranger than anything they could have invented.”
“Out with it, my lady. It had been a very long day. What, did you allow a neighbor’s son to kiss your neck in the garden?”
“No. It was much more... grievous than that.”
The wry, softened expression vanished.
“More grievous than kisses. I see”.
“No, you don’t”, Julia replied with sudden fierceness. “I have never allowed anyone liberties. My escapade was of a different nature. I...” There was only way now, and that was the way forward. “I ran away from home. I dressed as a young man - thank the Triad my figure has never been generous enough to belie my true nature. I begged for a passage on a ship in Cimera. Except the captain turned out to be... well. I imagine you could call him a mercenary. There is far less specialized divide between the wolves of the sea than most people on green land imagine, it’s not like different guilds. He could hunt over-bold pirates for a good payment, he could rob merchant ships himself. He could smuggle cumin and cloves into our ports, or good wine out of it when one of the princelings beyond the Glittering Sea laid down too high a tariff for it.”
“And you did all that, too.” It was a statement, not a question. Her husband asked it in a whisper so quiet one could almost mistake his tone for one of dazed gentleness.
“Of course I did all that. I wanted to eat, after all.”
“That is...”
“Unnatural? Well. Unwomanly for sure.” She was shaking with some sickly premonition now.
“I wanted to say, highly unlawful. Did you not know what the punishment for smuggling was?”
“Branding on the first time. Hanging by the neck on the second. But I also knew what the price of staying at home in my soft bed was.”
“I do remember what it was like, to live under the usurper’s reign. But...”
“No. With all due respect, my lord, you don’t remember it, because you cannot possibly know it. You are a man; you have- you have ways in the world that I would have never discovered had I not chopped off my hair and donned my father’s shirt that night. I do not only mean knowing how to fight with a sword. I mean - Triad, I don’t even know where to begin. A thousand things! As a little Lady Julia, I could not even take a walk unchaperoned. But that is not all.”
Julia could not stop talking now, not if she tried. It was as though she did fall into the sea after all, and was now borne by its mighty currents:
“For all that I pretended within my parents’ home, for all that I lowered my eyes and affected contrition after their paid henchmen found me and dragged me back, I was never truly sorry for what I had done. I liked the sailing. I liked evading the patrols. I liked the moonless nights and the secret coves.” She smiled then, a febrile and doomed smile. “My swordplay was not half bad. And I liked it too. So, now you know the truth, my lord. Are you going to brand my skin or hang me by my neck?”
There was an eternity pressed within the next moments, for all that she knew they could not have, in truth, lasted all that long. Athelstan Waite’s uncanny grey eyes were gazing at her, and yet clearly not seeing her - not seeing the figure in a white nightgown, her cheeks hot and no doubt bright.
What was he seeing? The ink-dark expanse of the sea, illicit vessels drifting by the coast? A blood-slick deck of the kind he had had to walk more than once since he was very young? The perfumed spring garden where he first saw his deceitful bride-to-be?
A thought flew through Julia’s head – a thought to tug her nightgown from her shoulders and down her body, a flimsy pretext of asking him just where was she supposed to be branded, in his opinion; a crass, desperate throw for seduction, for deflection.
But it felt somehow distasteful now, the way her intimate whispers did not on their empty wedding night. As though she would degrade herself by trying, and him by thinking it can work.
So, instead, Julia stood motionless, a white pillar, watching anxiously the expression of Lord Waite’s grey eyes.
Finally, he spoke:
“I would advise you to go to bed, my lady.”
“Is that all you are going to say?”
“I think you have said enough for the two of us,” came the curt reply.
Julia turned away, her breath catching in her throat.
Her feet carried her to her bedchamber, but sleep refused to claim her for hours. The sickly fear that gripped her heart was such that she would have gladly exchanged it for the stark terror of the drowning causeway.
***
When Julia opened her eyes the next day, she was almost blinded by a sharp glint of light on metal.
She raised herself upon her elbow, and stared. Across the chest standing in the feet of her bed, there lay a sword. The sun streaming from the window was falling upon the blade, reflecting off it in merciless brightness.
She swallowed. Long-ago lessons in history came to her – those about the ancient senators and sinful patrician ladies of the old empires. These men and women were too highborn to butcher, and were instead offered a weapon with which to kill themselves honorably and save everyone the trouble.
Surely, for all his unbending nature, her husband was not that much of a brutal lover of antique virtue?
Julia rose from her bed, the floor stone-cold under her bare feet. She touched the weapon, more out of horrified curiosity than anything. The hilt of the sword fit well into her hand.
It was quite light, as far as she could judge – and she could judge these things now. It was not something a knight wielded during melee at the third day of a tourney; it was more of a blade the leader of a boarding party at sea could carry.
A flutter in the air attracted her attention. Julia knelt, searching for whatever it was that she just saw falling upon the ground.
Finally, she found it.
A piece of paper – not a cheap paper, either. A few lines.
I would have roused you in the morning, but yesterday’s events evidently left you senseless. Please, meet me in the courtyard once the bell rings for midday. Take the sword, and wear something that is more comfortable than your gown from yesterday.
At first, Julia felt lightheaded. Then a smile spread upon her lips.
She was not exactly sure of her husband’s motivations, and even less sure of his wishes; but it seemed that her eviction from the land of the living was being postponed.
If she understood his intentions correctly – and there were not that many options – then she could be sure that pretty much any gown would be unsuitable. Julia had a mischievous thought of raiding her spouse’s own chests and looking for trousers and shirt and doublet that would fit her and her purpose – but, of course, she knew that none would. Their height was too different – not to mention that, although not as burly as his celebrated brother, Lord Waite was certainly broad-shouldered and well-muscled, which she was naturally not.
She would have to find a better-worn riding habit, Julia decided. It was a prosaic option, but one that would serve for now.
***
“You clearly did not hurry,” Lord Waite said, looking at her.
Julia made a mental note to sew him a better shirt than the one he was wearing for this. Maybe with something embroidered. Blackwork, or even something scarlet in silken thread. In order to see his expression, among other things.
Provided she survived the fallout of yesterday’s confession.
“I came as soon as I could,” Julia shrugged, trying to still her shivering. From fear or the excitement of holding a sword again, she was not sure. “I was quite surprised.”
“By what?”
“I would have thought that your response to learning of my exploits with foreign swords would be to lock even the kitchen knives away from me.”
“This is a dangerous place.” No my lady for her now. “You have seen the exchange. You have noticed what we have to deal with. This is not the capital. Nor the lordlings’ courts of Ielthe. If I locked away the knives and treated you like a blossom shaken by every wind, who would defend this keep if the worst comes to worst?”
“Very pragmatic.”
“My mother left sharp blades to her husband, naturally. But when the castle was under siege, she poured boiling oil on the heads of the attackers as any good lady of the household would. If the raiders come, and the gate falls, I’d rather you could hold your own at least for five minutes if I am a corpse and unable to protect you”.
“I flatter myself by thinking I can hold my own for a good while longer than five minutes. I did take part in ship-boardings, after all. A combat in close quarters while the ground is lurching under your feet is a great deal harder than any scuffle on land.”
“You are telling me about it.” There was almost a kind of relief in his voice, however, if for a moment only. The tension between them lessened, unseen like the promise of thunder in the air.
Perhaps, it occurred to Julia, he was rather glad to hear someone speaking the same language as him. Even if it was someone who was not supposed to know this language at all.
“But you had not held a blade in your hand for several years,” Lord Waite continued. “Mastery rusts like metal, if left unused.”
“I suppose so,” Julia admitted grudgingly. “But I must have retained at least something of it.”
“Let us see.” Without any further warning, he shifted into the fencing stance, and Julia barely evaded the lunge that came a heartbeat later.
It was clumsy on her part, but at least her reflexes were still swift enough. A good legacy of her time on the high seas - after all, the blades she had to avoid there had not been blunted.
Julia’s feet half-recalled the right footwork, even if her mind could barely remember the right names and the order of things.
Another retreat, but at least this time it was a quick and graceful one, and did not make her muscles explode with belated fire.
“You really are good at using your limbs,” her husband noted, and went after her.
“From any other man, I would have thought it a compliment,” Julia teased, pretending a flashy stab at her chest, then going for his knees at the last possible moment.
“It was a compliment. I would have thought that clear.” He stepped away, but not before the blunted tip of her weapon grazed his leg.
“Not in the sense I mean. And this would have been the end of you had I coated my blade with poison”.
“Except you wouldn’t have. Quick-acting poisons are more expensive than the vials Lady’s blood. No run-of-a-mill pirate would spend his precious part of the loot on that.”
“Harder to find than the vials of Lady’s blood, too. Those, at least, can be bought in most great temples and half the roadside shrines.”
“I see your piety hardly exceeds mine.” A slashing movement.
“I have naught against the Triad.” She blocked it at the last possible moment, her wrist singing with pressure-pain, then disengaged. “It is their human servants that I have little good to say about.”
“What would the congregation at that temple say, I wonder? You’ve butchered those doves so prettily.” His blade went around hers in a swift, perfect semi-circle, and landed square in the middle of her chest. “Just as you yourself would have been butchered now, had this been a real fight.”
“Hardly butchered”, Julia whispered. The loss rankled, but she had expected little else after those long years. It was the anger in her husband’s storm-grey eyes, anger that, she knew, had nothing to do with the rivalries of a spar, that worried her. “I think you would have finished me with a quick and clean stab to the heart.”
“Maybe I would have, had we met years ago under different circumstances. Had I been the one commanding one of those sea-patrols. Had you been less crafty.”
“I prefer to think I’ve been skillful. Do you regret it, my lord? That we did not have our fight in the dark?”
A pause. He raised his blade, tipped her chin up, so she had no choice but to look in his face, unable to turn away.
“No”, Lord Waite finally admitted. “But, by gods, I would have preferred an honest combat to yesterday’s revelations”.
“I did not intend to hurt you. It wasn’t a calculated blow”.
“Do you think for a moment, Julia, that it renders my being made a fool any better?” He leaned closer to her. “You came to me in that garden a vision of sweet damsel. Your family must have laughed at me behind my back.”
“They didn’t. I can assure you. They were blessing your name as one who would rid them of their troublesome daughter.” She swallowed. “You called me Julia.”
A pause. Him finding the words, or bridling his resentment?
“That is what you had been called those years on the waves, hadn’t you?” He finally said. “I doubt anyone there addressed you as their lady.”
“Different names. Male ones. But I... I suppose you’re not wrong”.
“I only wanted honesty. I’ve never expected my wife to be a great beauty or an adoring lover. But I hoped I would at least know her life’s story and her character without it turning out to be a pack of lies one summer evening. ”
“I am sorry,” Julia said quietly. The words did not come easy. She was not sorry for running away from home that moonless night; nor for the years spent haunting the seas. She did, however, feel sorry for deceiving this man, even though it had been the price of her survival. “But would you have married me if I told you everything in that garden?”
Pause.
“Likely not.” His tone was reluctant.
“Well, then.”
“I wonder if my brother knew, or at least suspected. It would have been in his fashion to set me up to being played for a fool like this”.
“Your brother did not strike me as a man much given to elaborate scheming.”
“That he is not. But it doesn’t mean he can’t take advantage of a circumstance. And he did find the notion of me taking a wife utterly hilarious, even though he himself thought the union necessary.”
“How wrong he was”, she whispered, looking up at him. He looked paler and younger, dressed down as he was to his white shirt. “I find nothing hilarious in the arrangement, after all. And I would never mock you.”
“Never again, you mean?” The smile was grim and rueful.
“It was not about mockery, my lord. It was about fear.”
“What fear?”
She looked at him with exasperation:
“You are my husband! My lord and master, by custom and by law. You could do anything with me short of murder, and both would be on your side.”
“I could, yes. But did you truly think I would?”
“I have little notion of what to think! You are not a man easily given to showing his hand.”
“And yet you claimed to consider me a hero. Or was that a fib?”
“No. That part was true. But - there are men who are heroes on the battlefield and forget to put their sword down when they come home.” Julia wanted to say, who are brutes at home , but supposed that the cumbersome metaphor would be less wounding.
“In a way I am one of them, then. But only because I know threats to one’s home never entirely go away. I would never direct a weapon against those inside my home.”
“I... I believe you.” That was not easy to say, either. Even less easy to feel deep down. “I want to make you believe me, too. Trust me again, if ever you trusted me.”
“I have no map for these sorts of paths. But there is something you could do.”
“Yes?” Julia asked.
“The Midsummer celebrations,” an unexpected blunt reply came. “I have always found preparations for them utterly excruciating to the point that I would rather face a pirate fleet than worry about pageants and entremets. Now that you are the lady of the castle, you could take over.”
“I would be delighted to,” Julia replied, and gave him an exaggerated ceremonious bow. “Shall we shake our hands?”
“To cement this agreement?” Lord Waite raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t that a bit too much?”
“No, to cement the end of our bout. Isn’t it customary, to shake hands after a duel?”
“If both combatants still have hands and can stand upright to shake them, yes,” he replied, deadpan. However, after a moment’s hesitation, he extended his arm. “It was a pleasure and an honor”.
“It had been likewise for me,” Julia accepted the shake. There was a firmness in it that was almost painful to her hand, but she detected no viciousness in it.