13. Chapter 13
Chapter 13
J ulia wondered, sleepless and giddy, if people who were not her – even the people who knew her husband all his life – would detect any great change in him had they sat down with them for this breakfast. The softening of features that at times made him seem as young as his actual age, the shadow of a smile touching the corners of his mouth from time to time.
She hoped yes, wanting to proclaim her happiness and her victory both to the world.
She hoped no, so that the change in question belonged to her alone.
“It’s a fine thing, isn’t it”, Julia said softy, “that the Midsummer Feast is so soon upon us. We can celebrate it as husband and wife.”
“I wonder how else we would have celebrated it otherwise, Julia.” There was no sharp archness to the question, not this time.
“We might as well have been good neighbors, no more, a month ago. There is not much left to prepare, I’ve agreed with some craftsmen in the town about lending a helping hand with the entremets, and…” Julia did not finish her sentence, as she heard footsteps. A footman, a nervous lad in the household’s livery, approached her with a folded piece of paper in his hands.
“Forgive me, my lady,” he stammered, “But it only just arrived – it is from the capital, from the court, I thought, perhaps, it must not wait. But if you are still –”
“Worry not,” Julia hoped her voice sounded soothing enough. “You did well. Let me take a look.”
A hope, wild as a bird, flared up in her chest for a second – King Orwyn having heard of their troubles from sources of intelligence of his own, and promising them assistance.
But that was an empty hope, and a fairly ridiculous one, too. For one thing, a letter from him would have borne a royal seal.
For another, it would have been addressed to his brother, not to Julia herself.
No. There was only one person – or, rather, two people – at court who could have cause to be writing to Julia.
There was a sickly heaviness to her heart even before she opened the letter. Even before she saw her father’s handwriting.
Even before she read the contents.
“It” s my parents”, she told her husband, the morning’s wine-light feeling in her blood evaporating. “They want to come for the celebrations.”
“Gods above.”
“Indeed. They…”
“They won’t be able to harm you, Julia. You are a married woman now. What do you have to be afraid of, rationally?”
This was not about being rational. This was about the fear that gripped the throat, the bone-etched fear of footsteps outside one’s room, the habit to shiver at loud voices.
She had escaped it, escaped her confinement. She was indeed a married lady now, a Lady Waite, the king’s own good-sister.
But she would also forever remain her parents’ daughter. There was no ritual on earth that could break those bonds of blood, however poisonous they’ve grown.
“Rationally? Nothing,” Julia said. “But I am afraid nonetheless.”
“You’ve braved worse things in your years on the seas”, Athelstan pointed out. “Here, too, I suppose.”
“Do you mean the causeway?”
“I mean our marriage. I might have as well turned out to be a brute, for all you knew.”
“That’s different. The sea was a wild element, the human enemies were clear-cut and easy to cut, too, and you... you were an unknown quality. But my family – “
“That is the thing about the family, I suppose. When it’s good, it’s a fodder for poets to sing of inseparable brothers and mothers willing to sacrifice their heart’s blood for their children. When it’s not, it turns into a noose.”
“Into a venom.”
“Into a dagger in your back.”
They looked at each other across the dining table in grim, silent understanding, like battered comrades on a battlefield.
Julia felt the fear relaxing its grip a little. Only a little, and, she suspected, not for long. But relax it did.
“I imagine it won’t be half as bad as I think,” she tried her best to sound breezy. “And if it will, I will simply have to go through it.”
“It” s not as though they can drag you back to the home of your birth. Not while I am alive. I can promise you that. Besides, even if I predecease you and we have no sons before that,” he added with his usual dark thoroughness, “you will have a good enough dower settlement that you will never have to throw yourself upon their mercy.”
“Romantic as always,” Julia teased him. “I don’t think many courtly love poems concern dower settlements in the case of a widowhood.”
“Well, they should.”
***
Athelstan Waite was not sure what exactly did he expect from his brother apart from what he received. It was a good trick, as far as he knew - if you don’t expect life to throw roses in your path, you are not disappointed when it hurls stones at you instead.
Nonetheless, despite his stern schooling of his own heart in this resolve, the letter stung. Quite painfully.
“I suspect His Majesty’s response was not a positive one?” Despite her grave tone, Julia did not look like a woman who rose from her bed in sorrow. Indeed, she was positively radiant, her cheeks bright, the summer linen clinging to her frame.
She evidently did not want to wait until the reply came, and simply looked over his shoulder.
Athelstan knew what she was going to find. Lines not just of indifference, but of stern rebuke, not simply those of an elder brother to a younger one, but those of a king to his vassal. The sentiment was writ in ink without much subtext between the lines. He, Athelstan Waite, had overstepped the mark. He had not been given a permission, much less an order, to start gathering intelligence on the northmen in the first place. If the results of that self-willed adventure were supposedly urgent letters to his brother and monarch bothering him about the mirages of eldritch magic, it would be better if he abandons the pursuit altogether.
“He is not that wrong about the expense,” Julia observed, her gaze skimming to the end of the letter. “It really would be ruinously expensive to equip and send the royal fleet to a punitive expedition against them. I don’t know the state of the royal treasury these days, but I can guess it is not too brilliant”.
“You would be right,” Athelstan answered grimly, trying not to get distracted by her proximity. The warmth of her cheek inches from his, the warmth of her body only a touch away. “Except there is likely more than unwillingness to see displeasing things.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I will have to fight with the local sea-levies alone, Orwyn would be able to claim the credit for my victory without the bother of expending either gold or blood upon it.”
“What if there will be no victory?”
“That is out of the question.”
“Now who is unwilling to see displeasing things?” There was more nervousness in her blue eyes than humor at this.
“As a clever woman of good memory once told me, I have held the Redstone Pass for days”. He turned to her, their lips almost touching, as though they were speaking of love and of violets blooming in the spring. “With a meagre force, too. If I will have to vanquish the bastards with sea-levies, that is what I will do. I won’t have you forced to hold the courtyard of Greyharbor, sword in hand”.
“I would not fall easily, if it comes to that”.
“Perhaps. But it won’t. You are my wife, and it is my duty to protect you.”
“Your duty alone?” Her breath was warm against his lips.
“My duty, and my greatest desire.”
***
Ostensibly, there was nothing strange about her visit, Julia reasoned. Plenty of ladies of high birth paid respect to great convents; some even remained there for a while to recuperate from illness or a bout of black melancholy.
The Convent of the Lady’s Mercy was not the wealthiest one in the land; not one of those places where noble-born novices wore chemises of silk beneath their habits.
They did, however, likely wear those of fine linen at the very least. Julia could bet on that.
She was surrounded by the ancient walls that clearly predates the worship of the Triad. She was completely sure that at least the lowest, darkest stones there belonged to the cairns of those who came before, whose faith was one in darker creeds and gods with names lost to chroniclers.
Such was the nature of the land, she thought. So many bones of the past were sleeping in the earth, moldering silently, waiting to be unearthed and put to use again like a sleeping lady in a tale.
“The Elder Sister will see you now”, one of the middle-aged priestesses murmured. Julia stood up immediately, smoothing her skirts - she had been left waiting for a long time. An insistence on one’s own dignity, or a pointed insult?
The study was a practical place - a devotional mural decorated one wall, the well-known parable of the Lady rescuing a repentant sinner from the dungeon. Her robes were a blazing-white light, and a dark-haired man was kneeling at her feet, looking up with breathless devotion.
“Lady Waite?” The Elder Sister asked politely, her hair tight under the requisite coif.
“Indeed,” Julia nodded, waiting politely until being asked to sit.
The older woman motioned for her to do so.
“I have come with a goodly donation,” Julia started.
“How kind of you, my lady.”
“And a request.”
“I suppose I should not be surprised”, a note of wryness crept into the Elder Sister”s voice. “Great ladies and lords alike rarely show their generosity without an expectation of something in return. Is it prayers for your deceased relatives that you wish to ensure?”
“My relatives are alive and well.” Unfortunately , Julia allowed herself an uncharitable thought. “It is your library that I am after.”
“Forgive me?”
“I would like the permission to peruse your library. I am not talking about a permission to take any scrolls or codices home, of course,” she hastened to add. “I merely want to look for something.”
“May I ask what this something is?”
Julia wished she could answer this question herself. It was a madcap plan, conceived during that last conversation with her husband, the pause over the fatal letter. She was not sure not telling Athelstan about her idea was the right course of action; but then, on the other hand, what if it came to nothing - just as her idea to run away from home eventually brought little but sorrow and confinement? How was she going to look in his eyes then? No, Julia decided; if she does manage to unearth some hint to the knowledge of the ancients in a rich convent library, she would be able to return in triumph. If not... if not, she could always pretend she was making her trips to make peace with the local servants of the Triad.
“It is a hard question to answer.”
“Yours is a hard request to fulfill. Our library is like our treasury. The sisters had been laboring for centuries to copy these works cleanly. In a way, I would rather let a stranger into our treasury unsupervised than there.”
“Am I a stranger? To my knowledge, we had been introduced.” Julia gave her a deferential smile - and was shot down like a duck on a hunt:
“So we have. It was not an especially pleasant evening.”
“Elder Sister...”
“You and your husband had responded to my offer to bring up Lady Roxane as though I had suggested to abandon her at a leper colony. It had been decades upon decades since the dignity of this place had been so insulted, Lady Waite.”
“You must understand, Lady Roxane has not the temper for the life consisting solely of piety...”
“Perhaps she does not. She is not the only young lady in the kingdom to be so. But Lord Waite’s reaction is the first such I have encountered”.
“My husband’s opinions are not always my own”.
“So I can surmise, given certain events of your past”.
“What do you mean?” Julia’s blood ran cold.
She felt, suddenly, as though she were once again a child, about to be scolded by her mother. She felt small. Inconsequential.
Helpless.
“I have heard rumours. The escapade that brought about the state from which Lord Waite rescued you. An elopement attempt, was it?”
Julia carefully breathed out with relief. That was a better version than the truth. She could not help but note the poverty of imagination of the moral guardians, though. Could they really imagine no other misdeed a young woman could commit but one to do with a bedchamber, marital or otherwise?
“Yes. An ill-advised elopement attempt.”
“I am not surprised that a lady so disregarding the good opinion and advice of her parents who reared her would be defiant of her own husband, too.”
It was not even the logic leap from the earlier accusations that infuriated Julia so, and plucked her out of the flooding tide-waters of panic and abjection. It was the mention of the good advice of her parents.
Whose advice mostly boiled down for her to be so silent and invisible that, followed to the letter, it would have made her very existence an enigma.
“Do you know what is it that I need your library for?” Julia asked, new fury flooding her veins and igniting what had lain dormant for years.
“How can I? You have declined to tell me”.
“I need your library to find something that would help us prepare for the coming raids from the northmen.”
“The northmen?” For the first time since Julia entered this room, the Elder Sister”s voice betrayed anything but steely conviction.
“The northmen”, Julia repeated almost viciously. “For raid they will, and bloodily so. The local sea-levies are no royal fleet, they are not going to be able to withstand the assault all by themselves. Especially if the rumours of the their greatest yarl gathering the lore on magic of old are true.”
“Even if that is true, the Lady had performed great miracles in the past, Her word dispersing heathen forces or sinking their ships. If what you speak is true, this vile sorcery you mention will only attract Her wrath upon their flesh.”
“Perhaps. Or, perhaps, they are going to overrun your convent without a trouble. What do you think is going to happen to your treasury then? Your library? Your Sisters” virtue?”
“We are not the cowering doves you seem to think us to be.” She was blanching, however, however slightly. “We have an armory as well as a treasury, and our Sisters know from their older predecessors that knowing how to wield a blade in defense of the holy places is no breaking of divine laws”.
“Even so, how long are they going to stand before a mass of northmen? How many are going to meet their death, or fate worse than death? This is what you are calling upon their heads when refusing to help me and my husband. Perhaps, you are seeking a great martyrdom. That is the matter of your own soul and conscience, although, as far as I recall, the Triad dislike vanity of any kind.”
“You are coming here, insulting me to my face - “
“I came here not to insult you, but to ask you to save your own convent. Your own sisterhood. I’ve noticed the ancient stones in your walls. I might know little about Greyharbor, but I can see that this convent is a centuries-old place. Would you fling all of this, the piety and the learning and the stained glass, into the flames for the sake of your insulted dignity?”
For a second, distantly, Julia imagined how would it had been had the Elder Sister made the unlikely journey and came as an honored guest to her parents’ castle during the years of Julia’s own captivity. Most likely, Julia would not have been able to bring herself to unseal her own lips during dinner, or to raise her eyes, wary to offend the unshakable holiness of such a woman with her own hopelessly sinful self.
Not to mention the fear of what would have awaited her once the guest departed, should she have slighted her somehow.
But Athelstan was right. She was a married woman now, and a lady of her own household, the mistress of a bulwark by the sea. Whatever the misdeeds of her past, this was what mattered here.
The Elder Sister gave her a long stare of her iron-grey eyes, such as she must have often given noble-born novices who disliked the severity of the place too loudly.
But when her lips opened, it was not words of scolding that emerged.
“I will allow you access to our library,” the Elder Sister said, with deliberately slow dignity. “But I will hold you to your promise of not taking anything out; and, should any codex, any scroll go missing, I will not hesitate the ring your perfidy where I can. I might be a cloistered woman, and your husband a great lord, but us cloistered women have routes of our own.”
***
The library was a small, quiet place, a chamber of dark wood. The windows were great, as befitted a place where manuscripts were copied as well as perused, but today’s heavy clouds only let through a scant and silvery light.
Julia touched the spines of the later-made codices reverently. As for the genuinely ancient scrolls, made before there was a word for a book, she was not sure how she was going to even open them without wreaking destruction.
She had never been an especially studious girl - she was too restless for that, her flesh and sinews aching for exercise, her hands for doing rather than page-turning. But she was no so philistine as to feel no respect for the antiquity of the lore, or the richness of the manuscripts here.
For rich they were. When Julia unhooked the first few tomes from their chains, the metal clinging, she could not help but notice the exquisite softness of their bindings. Inside, many of them were adorned with jewel-like illustrations: lapis-lazuli cloaks, verdigris grass, carmine lips of long-dead queens.
Devoted to her task, Julia read every line of the small tomes that looked ancient enough to be of use. They were as diverse as leaves on a branch: some talked about the vagaries of love, some about the best ways to rear bees, some contained advice for the princes of empires that had fallen long ago.
Not one author wrote anything about naval war-craft, however, or the secrets of construction of ships.
The light beyond the window grew dimmer. The day was waning. This evidence of time passing shocked Julia into action like a blow of a whip shocks a horse, and she abandoned her thoroughness, turning to skim-reading instead.
Laments of the conquered, poems praising the conquerors, letters between friends talking about philosophy.
Once or twice - or was it several times? - Julia slipped back into reading every word, so tight was the grip of fear upon her heart. What if she misses something, something vital, and thus unknowingly renders the whole mission fruitless?
She replaced the last codex she read upon its shelf, the old chain rattling - as though it were shaking around her ankles. Then she circled the bookcase, willing, despite her growing exhaustion, to start on the other side - and froze.
On that other side, now that she could see it, lines upon lines of bookcases and chests were standing, stretching out into the growing murk.
Julia’s fear hardened into a panic. How was she going to cover all of this? She won’t be able to sift through this desert to find one grain of sand; she won’t be able to finish the task even before the inevitable invasion, let alone in time to do something about it.
Her old loathing towards her own feebleness came crushing down on her. How madcap her plan had been; how laughable her confidence! To think that she really could make a change in the world. To think that she really could do anything to protect her new home, her new life.
Triad, it seemed like everything she ever built was doomed to rickety foundations, to death at the first blow of a gale. It seemed…
Julia saw the twin shadow stretching by her side before her ears could register the soft sound of footsteps. Her old reflexes did not let her down: she turned around sharply, as she had done many times upon the blood-slick deck of a ship, her hand going, by habit, to where her sword would have been hanging.
But the figure behind her was not an enemy bristling with weapons. Of course it was not. It was a young woman in a soft grey robe. After a second, Julia recognized her as the Sister who had brought her to the head of the convent innumerable hours before. Now, in the near-darkness, the Sister’s features were covered in gentle murk, amber-illuminated by the candle she was holding in her hand.
“Forgive me,” the young woman murmured, “I frightened you”.
“Hardly,” Julia lied. “I suppose the Elder Sister sent you to tell me that I have outstayed my welcome for today? I can imagine I did. Worry not, I...”
“No one had sent me. I came of my own accord.”
“For what purpose?”
“For the purpose of aiding you. I know there was little chance of someone unfamiliar with our library to find a needle in this haystack. I took upon myself to gather some tomes for you.” The Sister started moving, her figure weaving its path like a shadow in between the bookcases, and Julia followed. “I cannot know if these would contain anything useful for your purpose, but I think they might.”
“I am not even going to ask how do you know of my purpose. I imagine the art of listening at keyholes is not confined to castles.” Julia joked, not without some nerves shot through the words.
“Curiosity is not a sin.”
They ended up in the great shadowy expanse of the scriptorium that was unfolding beyond the bookcases and the book-chests. All desks were empty, the manuscripts-in-progress and the precious inks long since removed.
All desks but one.
A dozen books and a few scrolls were towering in two piles upon the last one, the one the furthest in the shadows.
Julia imagined the known Sister quietly working in the darkness, unseen by her in this grand place, gathering the texts like the bee gathers honey.
“Why did you do this?” Julia whispered, turning to her. “I am grateful, of course. Most grateful. But why?”
“As you’ve guessed, I have heard plenty by the Elder Sister’s door. I am no fool, either. People do say , Sister Ennys is ugly , but never Sister Ennys is a fool . I know what the northmen do to the convents they capture. Plunder would be the easiest trial to bear. I know the sterner Sisters would say that such sufferings are sent to test our resolve, but I would rather serve the Triad in some other way. Some more useful way than expiring after a tenfold violation, or else after ten years in thralldom if they deem me useful enough.”
“My gratitude will always be with you. So would my husband’s”.
“I know you cannot take a book out of the library...”
“I gave a promise. I don’t break them”.
“But you gave no promise of not having it copied.”
“I am not very proficient at that,” Julia confessed. “I know how to write, of course. But I have rarely employed the skill.”
“I have. I am the one Elder Sister puts in charge of the scriptorium; I have to.”
“Aren’t you a little young for such a role? You are barely an older woman than I am.”
“Truth be told, she did not know where else to put me. I am not pretty enough for mystery plays on great festivals; the choir sings for the rich visitors behind a grill, so that would have been suitable, but my voice is not sweet enough for it. Scriptorium - well, no one much wants to spend their time here. No one young, no one comely.”
“Not much of a competition, in other words.”
“But there is quite a competition in other matters.”
“Such as what?”
In truth, a seedling of a guess was already there, in Julia’s mind. However, she wanted to hear the words from the woman’s mouth.
“The Elder Sister is elder indeed. When she goes beyond the Radiant Bridge to the land of warm milk and heather honey, the fight for succession is going to be great. I would put my candidature forward, and I would be very grateful if you and your husband support it.”
Julia knew she was going beyond what was allowed - she could not make such promises on Athelstan’s behalf, not behind his back. But the leather-bound tomes that could contain their salvation were so close she could touch their covers with her fingertips.
“We would be happy to,” she said, and dearly hoped that the convent would still be here then to have an Elder Sister. That she and her husband would be here. That Greyharbor would be.