Chapter 7 – Lady of the Household #3
He wanted to say no. She looked so ridiculously small atop the horse, even if the stablemaster swore to the stars that the beast was placid as a cow.
Until last week, he had been a plow horse, which meant he responded to vocal commands and was unlikely to be stirred out of a trudge unless a bear was chasing him.
Ophele had named him Brambles.
“Slowly,” Remin made himself say. “And sit up straight. Your spine should be right over the center of the saddle. Try to move with his motion.”
He was barking commands. Remin bit his tongue, though his eyes never left her as Brambles trudged up and down the stable yard, his platter- sized hooves clopping.
He had an entire separate mental to-do list for Ophele, to ensure she was safe and content while he was gone, but now he was wondering whether the horse riding lessons could have waited.
“I suppose we can try the road,” he said, once she had gone back and forth half a dozen times. “Do you want to?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind,” she said, brightening.
“All right. Come here.” He held out his hands to lift her down from the saddle, loathe to leave her up there even for the minutes it would take to saddle his horse. “You can make friends with him while I get my horse. He should be safe to pet and so forth, he was never a war horse. All right?”
“Yes.” Ophele’s hands squeezed his when they lingered on her waist, but Remin wasn’t fooled by her reassuring smile. That watchful look was back in her eyes again.
Ever since he had asked about her mother, things had been…off.
Not all the time. That would almost have been easier.
No, this vague sense of unease was elusive and frustrating, a ripple of discord like clouds passing over the sun.
Sometimes her smiles felt forced. Sometimes, when she didn’t know he was watching, there was a look in her eyes that made him worry.
But how was he supposed to ask her about that?
Every sentence he constructed in his head sounded like the complaints of a vaporous auntie.
For the dozenth time, he went over their conversation as he saddled his horse. He had said, what did your mother have to do with the fall of my House? Maybe that had been too blunt. But Ophele herself had said her mother regretted it, hadn’t she?
In any case, she had stiffened up like a board, stuttering and stumbling and repeating herself until Remin could do nothing but tell her it didn’t matter, he had only been curious.
He was sorry that he had asked. He had reassured her over and over since then, promising that he didn’t hold her responsible for anything her mother or father had done.
And then he had stopped bringing it up at all, because even his reassurances only seemed to distress her more.
Maybe she sensed he hadn’t been entirely truthful.
It did bother him. Even he didn’t know why his family had been slain.
The official charge against Remin’s House was grave insult against the line of the stars, which at the time had consisted solely of the Emperor.
Crown Princess Selenne had not yet even been conceived, and the pregnant Rache Pavot had been exiled to Aldeburke.
Remin had never heard of an attack on the Emperor, but what else could the charge mean?
Slinging the saddle onto his horse’s back, Remin reached for the girth strap and cinched it tight.
He wondered if it had ever occurred to Ophele that her mother’s death might have been the final note of the Conspiracy.
Lady Pavot might have been spared for the sake of the sacred celestial child in her belly, but once Ophele had been born, she was nothing but a liability.
There were dozens of slow-acting poisons that mimicked natural illness, most of them administered via food.
Had someone killed her mother? Wouldn’t Ophele want to know?
Maybe she didn’t. Maybe he would only upset her to no purpose by asking.
“Getting along with him?” he asked as he led his horse into the stable yard.
“Yes, all he wants to do is eat,” she replied as he boosted her up into the saddle. She took her place on his back easily, sitting very straight, as if to show Remin how carefully she was following his instructions.
Or maybe it was all in his mind, and he was the one overthinking things. Remin huffed internally and shoved the whole problem away.
“We’ll go slow,” he said, swinging up into his own saddle. “If you feel like you’re slipping, say something and we’ll stop.”
“I will.” The smile she flashed looked more or less real. Together they turned down Eugene Street, with Remin explaining how to hold and tug the reins and Brambles gradually angling like a huge ship slowly coming about.
“He’s not listening, he’s just following your horse,” Ophele said, tugging fruitlessly on the reins. “Brambles, gee. Why do I have to say gee? Why can’t I just say go right?”
“I don’t know,” Remin said, blinking. Draft animals were always trained to obey haw and gee.
His own horse was scarcely more cooperative; the black brute kept tossing his head and bouncing his hindquarters, irked by the slow pace and the presence of the other horse, with Remin clinging like a burr to his back.
“He’s mad that you won’t let him run,” Ophele observed. “Usually, you gallop everywhere you go.”
“We are not galloping now.” Remin dug in his heels to prompt a full buck from the horse, and the beast subsided, blowing.
“Charger,” Ophele offered, watching the exercise with admiration. “I should have named this one Ambles.”
That made him laugh, and Remin relaxed.
“He doesn’t look like he’s going any faster, does he?” he said, giving her a half-smile. “But it’s still faster than going on your own feet, wife.”
“What about Dash? For yours.”
“That sounds like a foal’s name,” he replied, though he had no idea why.
“Dancer?” Ophele chewed her lower lip thoughtfully and then her eyes lit up. “No! Oh, I know, I know. Lancer!”
“Lancer…” Remin echoed. It was pure coincidence that the horse’s ears flicked at that moment, but Ophele gave a muffled squeal of delight. Part of him wanted to please her and part of him wanted to tease her, drag it out some more, but there was no way he could resist that look in her eyes.
“I guess that’s his name,” he agreed, the corners of his mouth tugging upward. “It’s a good name.”
“Even for a noble warhorse?” she teased, and it seemed a fine day indeed when they came to the eastward curve of the road and she managed to prod Brambles into something like a trot, her hair flying.
He watched her because he couldn’t help watching her when she had that glow in her bright eyes, and together they rode all the way to the bridge gate and turned around before Brambles decided he had worked enough for one day and dropped back to a trudge.
Should he say something now? She looked happy. Maybe this was the right moment to dispel any lingering misunderstandings. He would never inquire about her mother again, if it hurt her so. The thoughtful look in her eyes as they passed the distant mason’s camp gave him an opening.
“What are you thinking about, wife?” he asked in his gentlest voice, drawing Lancer up beside her. Maybe she was even thinking about whatever was bothering her.
“Prostitutes,” she said, and only then remembered to look around to make sure there was no one nearby to overhear.
“I—you are?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it, since that day,” she explained. “Remember, when I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know more about such things? And I have questions, but I can’t ask Sir Justenin or Sir Edemir…”
“You can ask me,” he suggested, floundering. This was not at all what he had expected her to say.
“Well, I thought they must be doing a bad thing, if I shouldn’t even talk about it,” she began.
“But I don’t understand exactly why it’s bad.
Is it only because they’re not married? Or is it because they want money for it?
Is it only bad because it’s gold, or is it bad if they take anything at all in exchange for doing…
that? Because that made me think of dowries, and political marriages, and I don’t see how it’s much different except for the…
service provided and the duration. And if it’s bad to accept barter for it, then…
well, we were strangers when we got married and you married me for my blood even though you love me now and I love you, but as a practical matter, does that mean—”
“No,” interrupted a thunderstruck Remin, with no logic whatsoever. “Marriage is different. Marriage is sacred. You said you had no cleric in Aldeburke?”
“We did when I was little, I think,” Ophele said, completely oblivious to the outrageousness of her comments and apparently unaware that she had implied one of them had prostituted themselves, and Remin had the uncomfortable suspicion that by her logic, it was him.
“Do they teach about…this sort of thing?”
“Yes,” he said vehemently. He himself was not overly pious, but he still knew the basics; the sanctity of marriage was something he couldn’t even remember how he had learned. He had just absorbed it, like air. How did she not know this? What the hell was wrong with the Hurrells?
“Oh,” Ophele said, small. “I do know…that marriage is different,” she said anxiously, looking away from him with color rising in her cheeks. “I just wondered, on philosophical principles…why do you think that it’s bad? What they do?”
The flick of her eyes toward the mason’s camp identified the they. Remin let himself frown as he thought it over. He had never been one to deeply ponder such things, but he had been listening to Ophele, Juste, Edemir, and Bram at supper for months and was willing to stretch himself.