Chapter 2: The Stable Boy in the Garden

Mira heard her brother before she saw the room. He had a way of talking with his boots.

He had come in off the Alderford road at dusk, two months to the day, and he had not sat down since. The door stood open the width of a hand. She stopped in the passage and looked in sideways. The lamp on the desk had been turned down to a bead, and the draft at the shutter made it lean and straighten, lean and straighten. The map lay flat under a lead weight, and her father was at the window with his back to the room and his hands behind him, watching the shutter and not the dark past it. Cedric crossed the map and stepped on it every fourth turn.

“Two months at Alderford,” Cedric said. “The only thing anyone asked me the whole time was whether it was true we were selling the Northmark.”

“Selling it to whom?”

“A man I’ve known since I was eight. In a courtyard, in front of four others. The best I had for him was that I would ask my father.”

“You could have said the offer is with Voss and Voss has not answered.”

“I could have said nobody in Alderford knows where the Northmark is. Half of them think it’s on the far side of the Sarrow. One of them asked me whether the Vosses were kin.”

Emeric said nothing.

“Say we’re not doing it,” Cedric said. “Say we’re still arguing. Say anything I can carry back.”

“To Alderford.”

“To anyone.”

“It was one ford,” Emeric said.

“It was the ford, and the grain behind it.”

“One bad month, and we lie down for the rest of our lives.” Cedric came back to the desk. “Uncle Osric is afraid of him. That’s all this is.”

“Your uncle is not afraid of Voss. Your uncle has counted.” Emeric turned from the window at last. He was fifty, and he had been up since before dawn, and it showed in how he stood rather than in his face. “Hask has thirty thousand men and a road that comes off his ground, over the water, and onto ours. Whether he comes down it in the spring is not a thing your uncle decides, or I do, or any man in that hall. What decides it is whether Voss’s riders are standing across the far end of it when he comes.”

“Voss hates us.”

“Yes.”

“So he lets Hask through and watches us burn.”

“Or he holds the road, because it’s his own march he’d be losing.” Emeric put one hand flat on the map. “He has no reason on this earth to spend a single rider on our account. Give him your sister and he has one.”

The lamp leaned, straightened.

“So we buy peace with a girl,” Cedric said, “and call it a bargain.”

“That’s what it is. Say it as plainly as you like.” Emeric lifted his hand off the map. “I have argued against it in the hall for a week. The hall weighed the river and the granaries and went the other way.”

“And what did the river say?”

“That it doesn’t stop anybody.”

Cedric’s hands closed. “I’d rather fight and lose than—”

“Don’t say that to me in this room.”

“It’s true.”

“Of course it’s true. It’s a true thing a boy can say who has never walked a field after a battle.” Emeric’s voice had not gone up at all. “Twenty thousand hearths between the Sarrow and the hills. Every hearth has a son in it and some have two. I can count. Your uncle can count. The difference between us is that I’d still be counting when the fires started.”

“Then let me fight.” Cedric’s voice went high. “Don’t put me with the horse. Put me in the line and let them see a Vale in it.”

“A boy in the front rank doesn’t make the rank longer.”

“Then don’t put me anywhere. Put me—”

“Which Vale?” Emeric said. “You? Your sister?”

Cedric’s face changed.

“She’s a coin to them,” he said. “That’s all she is.”

“Yes,” Emeric said. “And so is the crossing, and so am I, and so are you. That’s what a country is. Don’t say it in front of her.”

“I’ll say it to Uncle myself.”

“Stand still.”

Cedric was already at the door. “Stand still,” Emeric said again, and Cedric stopped with his hand on the frame, and that was when Mira came in.

She had heard most of it. She came through the door and went down on her knees on the cold tile, and her skirt pooled around her, and she put her hands flat on her thighs so they would not shake. The floor came up through the cloth and set her shins aching. Cedric looked at her, and something in his face gave way, and he came back and knelt down beside her.

Emeric turned from the window.

“Get up.”

“Once more,” Mira said. “Go to him once more.”

“You’re on the floor.”

“Then say yes and I’ll get up.”

“I’m not going to argue with my daughter on her knees.”

“Then don’t argue. Go to him.”

Emeric came away from the window and stepped over the corner of the map and stood looking down at the two of them. He picked up the lead weight and set it down again. Then he moved it a finger’s width along the paper, and moved it back, and laid his hand over it flat.

“Your uncle has heard everything I have to say.”

“He’ll hear it from you,” Mira said. “He never hears it from anyone else.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“I know he heard you in the hall, and I know he hears your voice differently from the others. Once more. That’s all.”

Emeric looked at her long enough that she began to feel the cold in her knees.

“All right,” he said. “Once.” He reached down and lifted the corner of the map out from under Cedric’s boot. “Take your foot off my map.”

Cedric got up. The map curled back on itself with a papery snap.

“Once,” Emeric said, “and then it’s finished, and neither of you comes to me about it again as long as you live here. Get up, both of you, and go and sit somewhere I’m not.”

They went out. In the passage he called after them, “And Cedric—if you mean to go to your uncle yourself, wait until I’m dead. It’ll take about that long.”

The stair to the upper hall came up at the end of the passage, and beside it a bench against the wall. Mira sat. Cedric walked the length of the passage and back, and the length and back, and his boots knocked the boards in a rhythm that got on her nerves within five turns.

A candle stub in a dish, a dog’s bone against the baseboard, a chip out of the plaster where somebody had thrown something and never had it mended. She counted them twice.

“If he says no—” Cedric said.

“He won’t.”

“He might.”

“And then what?”

Cedric stopped walking. “Then I go up to the hall myself.”

“To say what?”

“To say there’s a man in this house who’d fight.”

“Send a boy to a hall full of men twice his age,” Mira said, “and see how far he gets.”

He looked at her. “We’re the same age.”

“Exactly.”

He was going to say something else, and then there were boots on the lower stair and both of them stood up. Emeric came up into the lamplight with his cloak still on, and his face told them before he shook his head.

“What did he say?” Cedric said.

“That it’s been decided. He said it twice, as though the second time would do it.”

There was a moment when Cedric’s whole body leaned toward the stairs. Mira caught his sleeve, and he jerked free, and their father said, “Stand still,” in a voice that had nothing in it, and Cedric stood still.

“Hear the rest of it,” Emeric said. “Nothing is settled until Voss answers. The offer has been on the road thirteen days and no one has said yes to it. He may look at what we’re offering and decide the dead are worth more to him than the crossing. He may not want a Vale in his house at all.”

“Then—”

“Then I’ll go back to your uncle with the eastern towns behind me, and the men who pay for the horses on my side of the room, and he can stand up and tell the hall why he’d rather send a girl north than ride out with men.”

Cedric lifted his head. “You’ll do it.”

“I’ll do it.”

Mira watched her father while he said it. He was looking at the lamp wick, and he reached over and pinched it, and the flame jumped and settled, and he did not look at either of them. He was saying it to put a boy to bed.

“Go on,” Emeric said. “Both of you.”

Cedric went, slowly, looking back twice. Mira did not.

“Not you,” her father said. “Mira. Go to your sister. Tell her the marriage isn’t made, and tell her I said it.” He paused. “And if it comes—he’s young, and what he has he made himself, and rumor makes him worse than he is. She could do worse.”

Mira said, “Yes, Father.”

She could have told him what she had seen in the fever. She walked down the passage with it in her mouth, all of it: the writ torn down the middle with the seal still whole on both halves, the cabinet on its face, the man dragged out from behind it, the boots. Ada in a northern chamber with a fire and a husband who never came, and long after that a cup, and nothing at all after the cup. He would have listened to her the way he listened now, kindly, from a great distance, and then he would have sent for the physician.

Ada was already in bed with the quilt to her chin and one arm out along the edge of the mattress, and her hair was loose across the pillow.

“Your brother’s back,” she said, to the ceiling.

“He is.”

“Is he still sleeping in his boots?”

“He’s sleeping in them now.”

Ada laughed, once, through her nose.

“How long has it been since you saw Auberon?”

Mira’s hand stopped on the quilt.

“Don’t,” Ada said. “You always do that.”

“I’m tired.”

“You’re not tired.” Ada rolled her head on the pillow. “In the spring he rode here from the east and you had Nell tell him you were ill, and he waited two days in a house full of people who wouldn’t say your name to him, and then he went home.”

“I was ill.”

“Maybe you were.”

Mira looked at the ceiling.

There was a thing that came into her at night, under the collarbone, a flat cold pressure that had been there two years, and she had never told anyone about it. She had seen Auberon kill her. She had seen his hand on the sword and the weight of him behind it, and she had never once seen what she did to him first; that part had not come. In those years he was kind to her twice before the wedding and once after it, and then there was the room with the boots in it, and then the cold. She could not call it a dream. She had never said it out loud.

“He’s not a bad man,” Ada said. “That’s all I’m saying. In a year you could be a great deal worse off than a man who rides eight days and waits two.”

“I know what he is.”

“Do you?”

They turned their faces away. The fire shifted in the grate and settled.

“His father turned him out,” Ada said. “When he was fifteen. His stepmother told the old man he’d come into her room at night. Perhaps he did. Nobody knows, and his father believed her, and why wouldn’t he—she’d given him two sons by then.”

“Ada.”

“He came here with a horse and a boy and nothing else, because his uncle had married Mother’s cousin, and that was kin enough to ask for a bed. Then the old man got old and wanted his first son back, and Auberon went, and the year after that there was an envoy at our gate with a ring in a box.”

“Ada.”

“What? I’m not saying a word against him. If he were a fool he’d have stayed here and sulked and been nothing at forty. He went back.” She pulled the quilt higher. “Come here. I want to show you something before I lose the light.”

“Don’t get up.”

“I’ve had Nell at your sewing.”

“Ada.”

“Don’t Ada me. You’re worse with a needle than you were at ten, which I would not have believed if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. There’s a tablecloth and six napkins and a set of collars, all finished, all in Nell’s chest.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“Someone had to. Everything’s done but a pair of shoes for Auberon’s father.” Ada pushed herself up on one elbow. “That’s slow work. I started the left one in the spring. The colors are wrong, or one of them is, and I can’t tell which, and if you’d look at it with me for an hour—”

Mira put her hand flat on her sister’s shoulder and pushed her back down onto the mattress.

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I know what time it is.” Ada lay looking at the ceiling. “I keep thinking I’ll run out of—”

The sentence stopped, and neither of them picked it up.

“Tomorrow,” Ada said. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”

She turned on her side, away. In a little while her breathing evened out, and Mira lay in the dark with her eyes open. The fire had gone to ash, and the cold had come down the chimney and lay along the floor.

She must have slept, because when she opened her eyes the room was darker and the moon had climbed past the window, and there was a shape standing by the bed.

Ada, in her shift and her dark overdress, pulling the laces tight.

Mira lay still and watched her through her lashes. Ada crossed the room with her boots in her hand and went past the screen where the maid slept with her mouth open, and lifted the latch with two fingers, and was gone.

She waited to see whether her sister would come back. Then she remembered the stable. In the years she had seen, after Ada went north, the green-eyed man in the stables had gone out of the world. They had searched for him a while and then stopped searching, and that was all there was of him. She had not thought about him once until this moment.

Mira got up and put her boots on without stockings and took the cloak off the hook by the door—Ada’s, it turned out, when it was over her shoulders, blue instead of gray, and it smelled of her—and went out past the sleeping maid and down the back stair with one hand on the wall.

The moon was cold and high. The frost lay white along the paths and in the gravel between them.

She knew who her sister was going out to meet. The stables had named him Bram; a bastard got the one name he was given, and his had come from whoever found him first. The house said he had been found in a pen beside the horse field in the winter he was born, with one green eye in his head and a sow that would not let him die.

When she came out past the kitchen wall the stable end of the garden reached her before anything else did: wet straw, horses, dung, the low cold smell that sits on the ground when the ground has frozen.

The garden had a lattice of brick at its far end, pierced through in a pattern of branches, and she stopped there with her shoulder against the cold brick and looked through.

The wall was two men high. He had come over it. He was in the corner where the moon did not reach, and he did not move, and he wore a patched hemp coat that was thin at the elbows and must have been cold long before he crossed.

Ada came around the corner of the hedge.

He stepped out of the dark and took her, both arms, and got her up against his chest, and for a moment she let herself be held. Then she put her hands on his arms and pushed, and he let go. She talked fast and low, and Mira caught the shape of it and none of the words. He answered once. Ada pushed free again, and this time she went on pushing until she was clear of him, and then she walked back along the path with her arms crossed over her chest and her head down, and he did not go after her.

He went down on both knees in the frost, on the gravel, and stayed there.

Mira stood at the lattice until the cold came through the soles of her boots and her toes had gone numb. Then she went back, and closed the door, and got out of the blue cloak, and into bed, and pulled the quilt up.

Not long after, the door opened again. The stool beside the maid’s bed went over with a knock that sounded, in the quiet, like the roof coming down. The maid sat up with her mouth open.

“It’s me,” Ada said.

“My lady—”

“The privy,” Ada said. “Only the privy. Go back to sleep.”

The maid got down and set the stool upright and said nothing more, and Ada got into bed with her back to Mira and her face to the wall.

For a while she lay perfectly still. Her breathing had gone shallow and even, on purpose. Then her shoulders started, small and slow, twice and then three times, and there was a sound that was not quite in the room, because she had her face in the pillow and both hands over her mouth. Once the crying got up into her throat and she swallowed it back down and her shoulders took the whole of it instead. She was crying the way a person cries who does not want to be heard, and she was not good at it.

Mira lay with her eyes open and listened to her sister swallow her own breath.

“Ada,” she said.