Chapter 6 – The Feast of the Departed
Ophele was anything but peaceful when she undertook her own small quest the next day.
Clutching her stack of papers to her breast, she hurried across the street, feeling as if she were offering up her firstborn child.
In a moment of wildest insanity, she had confided to Justenin that she had nearly finished her work on the devils, or at least that part Remin wanted to present to the scholars.
Sir Justenin had offered to read it.
What else could she say but thank you? Not just because he was kind enough to make the offer, but if it turned out her work was embarrassing drivel, it was best to find out before she shamed Remin before the Tower of Scholars.
Her stomach gave a slippery, nauseating roll.
She had truly done her best, but effort did not equal outcome.
Nothing plus nothing did not equal something.
Making her way through the maze of worktables in the offices above the storehouse, she found Sir Justenin talking with Sir Edemir and stiffened her spine. Her face felt hot.
“This is it, my lady?” Sir Justenin turned politely toward her, holding out his hand. Right up until the moment his fingers touched the pages, she was an instant from snatching them back and saying no, it wasn’t ready after all, so sorry for troubling you.
“Yes,” she made herself say. “Everything about the devils I learned. I’m sure you already know it. It’s probably not very good. I’ve never…”
It was strange how many endeavors ended with this stack of paper.
By now, she had interviewed hundreds of Remin’s men.
Men who had heard the first howls of the wolf demons.
Men who had stood those long, lonely watches.
She had tried to capture their experience in pages upon pages of notes, so messy even she could barely decipher them, and then spent pages more thinking about them, organizing them, presenting her new knowledge as clearly as she could.
She had rewritten it a dozen times. She had laid awake at night arguing with herself, testing her own logic and conclusions.
And ultimately, she had produced her own version of The Will Immanent, first defining the nature of the devils, and then providing her own speculations and conclusions about what that nature implied.
“…never done anything like this before,” she finished, looking up into Sir Justenin’s pale, placid eyes.
“Are they your honest conclusions?” he asked. It was a question he had asked more than once over supper, when he thought Ophele was insufficiently confident in her assertions.
“Yes,” she said truthfully.
“Then we will make sure they impress the scholars of the Tower,” he said, inclining his head and riffling through the pages. Something about the way he said that made her prickle with alarm.
“We have word that they will be arriving next month, Your Grace,” Edemir explained kindly. “A Master Forgess from the Library of Beasts and Master Torigne, of the Library of Alchemy. With others to follow, if all goes well.”
“Oh. Good,” she said, her hands knotting at her sides as she resisted the urge to snatch her papers from Sir Justenin and run.
She had known they might come. She had known that if they did not, a copy of her research would be sent to the Tower anyway, as a Remin-style rebuke for their neglect.
But she actually felt light-headed as she forced herself away, turning toward the steps with every word she had written flashing before her eyes.
“Sorry for dragging you about,” she said as she descended the steps with Sir Davi before her and Sir Leonin behind .
“It’s our job, my lady,” Davi repeated, holding the door for her. It was a fine, warm afternoon, a gentle autumn warmth with a vibrant blue sky. “And if what you wrote is anything like the stuff you’ve been saying, I’m sure it’s fine.”
“Do you really think so?” she asked anxiously, falling into step between the two men. Sir Leonin always pretended that he wasn’t there and hadn’t heard anything, even when he was interested in the conversation, but Davi was perfectly willing to comment on her activities.
“I do. I hadn’t thought about how we never saw the buggers breed til you said so, but you’re right,” he replied. “Ain’t never seen devil eggs, nor little baby buggers, nor even tell of one devil covering ano—”
“This is hardly a proper topic for conversation on a public street,” interceded Sir Leonin, who was a bit of a wet blanket.
“Ain’t no different than sows and mares,” said Davi, a farmer through and through. “They’re beasts, they all make little beasties the same way. Except for the devils.”
“It’s not a subject to be discussed in polite company, much less with a lady,” the younger man replied, his words cool and crisp and somehow all the more biting for it. “We are meant to be guards, not companions.”
“So you say.” Davi drew himself up to his full, gangling height. “You’re right to say I ought to mend my manners, Leonin, and so I will, so I don’t shame the lady. But I ain’t having her drag me about like a block of wood behind her. That ain’t what the oath means.”
“We can discuss it later.” Leonin showed a few teeth.
Ophele looked from one to the other, alarmed.
Leonin had often admonished that they were supposed to guard, not talk, but it was the first time she had seen how strongly they disagreed about it.
Leonin glanced down at her and inclined his head, his face polite and blank.
“We apologize, my lady. It is unseemly to discuss this before you.”
“Don’t apologize for me.” Davi spoke before Ophele could, looking annoyed. “If we mean to be her hallows, she’s bound to hear us squabbling sooner or later.”
“Our job is to protect her from hearing such things. The lady is not one of your little sisters, Sir Davi.”
“After I give my oath, she’ll be the only little sister I’ve got,” Davi retorted hotly. “That’s what the bloody oath means. But you’re right, I got things to say that ain’t for the lady’s ears. ”
“Aren’t,” Sir Leonin said frostily. Ophele bit her lip, her shoulders hunching. There were a great many questions she would have liked to ask them, starting with the specifics of their oath, but the last thing she wanted was to provoke a quarrel.
“Thank you,” she said at the door of the cottage, subdued. They were still glaring at each other.
Putting a kettle on to boil, Ophele set about making a fresh cup of tea, though the familiar ritual did not soothe her.
She had completed the task Remin had set her, and it was beyond recall now, in Sir Justenin’s hands.
But she still had her own self-appointed task, and it was tedious work.
The small table was laden with stacks of almanacs and even taller stacks of interviews, all of them waiting to be cross-referenced against each other to try to pin the devils to places and times.
1 st sighting quarter moon spring mtn pass fighting against blue and gold eagle banners, was a typical example from her notes.
Deciphering this meant reviewing all the notes she had taken on the history of the war to figure out what Vallethi mountain war-band had carried blue and gold eagle banners, then figuring out when and where that fight had taken place at least as far as the month, and then consulting the almanac to find out when exactly the quarter moon had been.
It allowed her to place the time of the devil sighting within a week.
This was not fun. In no universe could this be considered fun.
Even her formidable memory couldn’t record every detail of hundreds of interviews, and Ophele was often left with the frustration of knowing she had read some helpful scrap of information somewhere, but unable to remember where.
There were so many interviews, she was having to read them over and over and over before she found the one she had half-remembered.
Ophele objected to this on an almost spiritual level. It was the same grumbling dissatisfaction that had spurred her to reorganize Wen’s kitchen and propose improvements to water distribution at the wall. This was sloppy. It wasted time. It was inefficient.
And though she could feel the date of Remin’s departure for the mountains bearing down on her like a charging bull, Ophele grimly paused in her endless cross-referencing to remedy the problem.
There was no point in doing this at all if she wasn’t going to do it right.
And even if she was a liar and a sham of a princess and a poisoned sweet, she was going to give Remin one thing to be proud of.
Seven hours later, when Remin came home, she was nearly finished.
* * *
“Do not throw your life away needlessly,” Remin told the new-made Sir Rollon of Hollisey, standing outside the east gate in the gray pre-dawn.
It was so early, the stranglers were still cackling in the trees.
“Nor the lives of your men. A knight is responsible for every life in his command, and it is your duty to spend them with care.”
He might have been talking to himself. Stars, Rollon was so young. He looked a little less starved after a few days of good eating, but the mountain air would strip the flesh from his bones.
“Yes, Your Grace.” Rollon’s brown eyes were shining. “I am sure there are people alive in Nandre. I will bring them back, I swear.”
“Then go with the blessing of the stars.” Remin stepped back.
His sole consolation was the number of older men among Rollon’s twelve, men of judgment and experience, men that Remin knew well.
They planned to forage on the march for their food and take to the trees by night, trusting to their armor and stealth to keep the worst of the devils off them.
In theory, that would be enough to keep them from being slain the first night.
“Your Grace,” they said together, and marched away into the trees.