Chapter 12 – The Wrong Kind of Quiet #5
“I don’t remember when the guards left,” Ophele said, her brows furrowing. “There was one guard I liked, he used to play with me and called me little starling. He said he was sorry they had to leave, and they had been called away, but he never said why.”
“Perhaps to hide you better,” Justenin mused. “A guard corps in a place like Aldeburke would attract unwanted attention.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, but she did not meet his eyes.
Indeed, the more he questioned her, the more evasive she became.
Oh, she answered his questions willingly enough, but anything about her childhood or the Hurrell family was vague, and all irregularities excused by her exile.
As if an eight year-old child had decided all on her own to live in a library and forage in the forest for food.
Juste caught Edemir’s gaze, a silent instruction for him to take over, and sat back to listen. It didn’t take long to start poking holes.
“You said, Lisabe’s tutor,” he noted, a few minutes later. “Did you have no tutor of your own, my lady?”
The way she blanched was as good as a confession.
“N-not of my own,” she stammered, and it was telling that her eyes went to Leonin, her cheeks reddening. “I was younger than Lisabe, so her teacher came first…I think in spring? After the guards left?”
It was a good excuse. Likely true, too, if only because Ophele was an absolutely abysmal liar.
Juste let her talk a little while longer, noting the places where she hesitated, where she deflected the question, and where she glanced at Leonin and changed the subject, or rephrased Edemir’s questions into something she was more willing to answer.
He might have confronted her directly, and ended this little dance, but Juste was learning a great deal about his duchess this afternoon, who was much cleverer than even he had suspected.
“Leonin. Davi. Perhaps you will guard the other side of the door,” he said, rising with the excuse of pouring more tea. “Will you have a cup, my lady?”
“Yes. Thank you,” she said, so miserably that he added a dollop of honey to her cup as an apology for the interrogation.
“Your office will be unbearable in another month, Edemir,” he said conversationally as Leonin and Davi exited, shutting the door.
His eyes went back to Ophele. “I will not press you for confidences, my lady, but it is important that we understand the nature of your relationship with House Hurrell, so we may guess what might come next. Did Lady Hurrell ever give a reason why you had no teachers? ”
“No,” Ophele said reluctantly. “I guess—I thought it was because it would cost money. And my mother had already cost them everything.”
“So it was vindictiveness?” Juste’s voice was quiet, outwardly calm. “Punishing you for your mother’s crimes?”
“Yes,” she whispered, a whole story laid bare in a single, wavering syllable. Well, Juste had suspected as much.
“It is likewise curious that she retained some ambitions for Lady Lisabe,” he observed, choosing to leave that line of questioning alone. “A tutor and a dancing master? I don’t suppose you were allowed to attend lessons.”
“No.”
“And yet, Lady Hurrell bore the risk and expense of summoning them to her place of exile,” Juste said, prompting her to ask the question.
“Yes? She did,” Ophele replied, her brows furrowing. “I thought…I thought it was what a lady should have. But it would have been a risk, wouldn’t it? For them, and for her, since we were banished.”
“Unless she believed she would not be punished,” Juste agreed. “Perhaps there was some other game she played. A scheme that ended badly, which forced them to flee? Or perhaps there came a summons, once her task was done.”
Her eyes lifted to his, stricken.
“But she was exiled,” Ophele managed. “Her task—you mean me? You think my father summoned them?”
“We know a messenger was dispatched to Aldeburke last winter,” Juste replied. “Unofficially. We followed him. At first we thought the message might have gone to you, but His Grace said you had no correspondence with your divine father.”
“No. He never wrote to me,” she whispered.
“Then who else would receive it, if all his guards had departed?” Juste asked. “Anything official would be directed to the lord, but what about something more clandestine?”
“Lady Hurrell.” She was clutching her teacup in her hands.
“But…my father couldn’t have known, could he?
Everything they did? She meant to give me to Julot, Lady Hurrell said my mother had cast them so low, they must accept even a star-cursed bastard.
But she would not dare tell that to my father… ”
There wasn’t much room to pace in Edemir’s closet, but she tried anyway, jerking to her feet with hands fluttering in agitation.
“But she must have planned it for so long,” she said, almost to herself.
“It was two years ago when she hired the dancing-master, after His Grace had won through the mountains into Valleth. We had a letter about it. And isn’t that curious, too, that exiles had regular letters about the war?
Lord Hurrell said it was all but won, and that’s when Lady Hurrell sent for them all, the dressmakers and the shoemakers and the jewelers, I never knew it took so many people to dress a lady, and Lady Hurrell always said we were poor.
But she was planning it even then, wasn’t she?
She knew my father would protect Selenne, and give me away.
That he thought so little of me, she could even dare to offer Lisabe to Remin in my place. ”
Her voice had been rising with each dreadful new supposition, and now she looked between them beseechingly, as if begging them to deny it. But Edemir was too shocked even to try.
“Lady Lisabe…Rem thought you were being kept from us on purpose,” he said, outraged. “That was a scheme of the lady’s?”
“Which you thwarted,” said Juste grimly, addressing Ophele.
“Which makes it clear to me that Lady Hurrell always planned to go back to the capital. And she meant to do it with a Daughter of the Stars for her daughter-in-law, and the Duke of Andelin for her son. She very nearly achieved it. She will not wish you well, Your Grace.”
“She never did,” Ophele choked, and turned away.
Well. That painted a much clearer picture of their enemies, but Juste would have spared her this knowledge, if he could.
Silently, he fetched her cloak and waved Leonin and Davi back into the room.
It was one thing to know that her divine father had chosen to protect his legitimate child over his bastard: hurtful, but hardly unexpected.
It was something else to think he might have known her guardians were abusing her, and chose to abandon her to them anyway.
“All those roads led you here, my lady,” Juste said quietly as he laid her cloak over her shoulders, and dared a single squeeze. It was all the comfort he could offer.
He did not speak again until they were ahorse and headed back to the manor, under gray skies and a snapping breeze. It would take time to think through all the implications of what she had told him, but there was one that seemed critical to him, and he nudged his horse forward alongside hers.
“My lady,” he began gently. “In light of this information, I urge you again to accept the oaths of your hallows. If there is some deeper game we do not know, there may be dangers we cannot see.”
“Sir Leonin and Sir Davi are always with me,” she replied. Her face was brittle as a mask. “I forgot to tell Sir Edemir, but please do not say anything to His Grace about what I told you. I will tell him myself.”
“Of course.” Juste was nothing if not agreeable. “And I hope you do not take my request to speak to you without your hallows as an indication of distrust. I have no doubt that they will be as careful of your honor as their own.”
“The oath will only bind us more deeply to silence,” said Leonin, who had spurred closer on her other side. “But Sir Justenin is correct. We would respect your privacy and secrets regardless, my lady.”
“I know you will.” Ophele’s hands tightened on Bramble’s reins.
“It just means that we could protect you better, even from the Divinity himself,” Leonin explained. “If we are sworn as your hallows, then even defiance of the Divine Emperor could not be accounted blasphemous—”
“I don’t want you to defy the Divine Emperor.”
“They may have to, my lady.” Juste was torn between irritation at her stubbornness and pleasant surprise that their meek lady could be stubborn. “Hallows or not, if they must defend you—”
“I don’t want them to be my hallows!” she burst out. “None of you even asked if I wanted any, if I even deserve them! I don’t want hallows, I don’t—Brambles, git up!”
Wonder of wonders, the horse actually obeyed. Davi gave a shout of surprise as the big horse sprang away, his platter-sized hooves drumming through the dry leaves as he raced up the road to the manor, leaving her astonished guards behind.
* * *
They came to the Spur in the midst of a howling blizzard .
It hadn’t been bad, in the early stages of the climb. A brief warm spell might have tempted Remin to think it would be a pleasant journey, and the sky was clear enough that he could see the smoke rising all the way from the camp. Proof that they still lived.
In some ways, the mountains were safer than the valley.
The devils could not attack in a mass on those narrow paths: wolf demons were too big to pursue them there, and ghouls were too cowardly to attack so many men.
As night fell, Remin ordered everyone to don their helmets and tighten steel gorgets around their throats, forming a living palisade with their own shivering bodies.
Bonfires blazed behind them, heating their backs, and every other man shut his eyes and leaned on his neighbor, dozing while he could.
“Strangler!” someone shouted down the line, and Remin heard the wet thud of steel into flesh, and then a high, rasping screech as the creature was flung off the mountain.