Chapter 8: An Apple in Her Lap

The water came up in cans, two women to a can, and by the last can it was barely warm. Mira stood in the tub with her hair pinned off her neck and her arms crossed while they went over her with the cloth and the soft soap, and the steam came off her shoulders and hung under the ceiling in the cold, going nowhere. She was eighteen years old. She had been bathed four times in twelve days, and the women who gave her the baths had asked her nothing at all except whether the water was warm enough.

“Road’s frozen,” said the one with the jug. “Frozen hard. The carters were saying it. You’ll want the wool underneath, my lady, not the—“

“I know what I want underneath.”

“Yes, my lady.”

They dried her at the fire behind the screen while a boy came and went with wood. The shift was new and cold. The stockings were wool up over the knee, and the dress was the gray wool with the high collar whose seams she had watched a woman finish the day before, and over it went the darker wool her aunt had sent up. Not a thread of it was silk, and nobody had thought to ask her about that either.

The hair took longer. The woman who did it had good hands and had been told, in Mira’s hearing, not to talk, and she did not talk. She coiled and pinned and coiled and pinned, and set the veil over the whole of it, and stepped back with her comb in her hand.

The brooch was her father’s grandmother’s: silver, a tower over a river, the hollows gone black from a hundred years of thumbs. Enid pinned it at her throat. Her hands were steady until the pin went in, and then they were not.

“There,” she said.

“You’ll start crying in the hall and then I’ll start, and we’ll never get out the door.”

“I’m not starting anything.”

“You are.”

“I’m not.” Enid flattened the shoulder seam with her palm. “Your grandmother’s veil, this is. Did you know that? Your aunt has kept it in the linen press since before you were born.”

“I know.”

“Well.” Enid’s chin came up. “Then you know more than most brides do.”

The door opened and Meret came in, and the maids went out without being told, which meant somebody had arranged it. Her aunt had been drinking something for her head for a month and more; she smelled faintly of it, sweet and dusty. She came across to the stool by the fire in the good dress she had not worn since the night Ada left, and the walk from the door had cost her more than she wanted watched.

“Stand still,” she said. “I want to look at you.”

Mira stood still.

“Before the heralds came,” her aunt said, “you came to me in the little room off the stillroom and told me a thing from beginning to end, and I heard all of it, and I said, Well, it’s done, then.” Her hands were folded in her lap. “That was a fortnight and more ago, and I’ve been carrying it since. I want to say the rest now, because there won’t be another chance that isn’t in front of people.”

“All right.”

“When you hear where she is—“ Her aunt stopped. “No. Not if. When. You’re the one who got her out. Whatever else I don’t know, I know that.”

Mira said nothing.

“When you hear,” Meret said, “send me word. Not your uncle. Me.” She looked at the fire. “I’m asking you to keep something from my husband. I know exactly what I’m asking, and I’m asking it anyway. He’d have her brought back and married off inside a month to whatever man would take the shame along with the land, and he’d call it mercy, and I will not have it.”

“It would have to come by a hand I trust,” Mira said.

“Then find one.” Her aunt’s eyes had gone red at the rims and nothing spilled. “You’ll be far off in a great house and you’ll have money of your own now and you’ll know people. When you hear, send it to me and no one else.”

“I will.”

Meret looked at her a moment longer, then got up and took her by the shoulders and kissed her on the side of the mouth the veil did not cover.

“Your brother is still in that room,” she said from the door. “The lock came off at first light. He hasn’t come down.”

Her uncle Osric was in the hall with the chain of his office over his coat, and her father beside him in his good coat, and the household behind them in theirs, and the doors standing open onto the cold with the music coming in through them.

“Come here,” her uncle said.

She came.

“You go north as Vale’s pledge,” he said. “Whatever else you are in that house, you are that first. A hall runs on keys and accounts before it runs on affection, and any woman who learns the accounts in her first year is never contradicted in her tenth.” He paused, and something crossed his face and went. “And do not write to your father about quarrels you can settle yourself. He will ride north with forty men and make it worse.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“You have done,” he said, and then did not finish it, and put his hand on her head instead, briefly, the way a man puts a hand on a horse’s neck to check that it is warm.

Her father said nothing at all until she came to him, and then he took her arm above the elbow and held it.

“If the wool isn’t enough,” he said, “buy more. Don’t ask me first. Don’t ask anyone.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“There’s a man at Brenmoor who—“ He stopped. “No. It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, Papa.”

He held on. Behind them the music changed and the doors were opened wider, and his hand did not move.

Last night she had gone along the corridor to the room over the buttery and stood outside it with a candle. There had been light under the door. Cedric had talked to her through the wood for the better part of an hour without once sitting down, from the sound of it.

I told him what I thought of him. I’d tell him again.

Don’t tell him again.

They can’t keep me in here forever. The wedding’s in the morning and I’m the only son of this house. They’ll have to let me out.

They will. And then you’ll come down and stand beside Papa and not say a word to anybody, and that will be your revenge, and it will be worse than shouting.

A pause, and then, through the door, in a voice that had not settled yet: Mira. You don’t have to do this.

I know.

That’s not— The wood had taken the rest of it.

Now the crowd outside began to call for the bride, and Giles came out from behind Osric’s shoulder and turned so that he was speaking to her father, with his hands open and his rings on.

“My lord of Vale,” he said, “the margrave is young, he is a soldier, and there is no house in the north or the south that does not know what he is worth in the field. And there is no man alive who has looked at your daughter and not known what she is worth. Any man with the keeping of a border would have made this match.” He let the hall hear that, then dropped his voice a little. “The horses are standing, my lord. The hour’s come.”

The hall murmured, well pleased with him, and he turned his head a quarter inch to see whether she had heard.

He had come a step out of his place to say it and had not gone back.

Mira went to her father and put her arms around him. The dress was wide and heavy and the hall had its eyes on the two of them, and the business of the embrace was cover enough: she set her heel down on the front of Giles’s foot, across the toes, and put her weight through it, the way you put a spade into frozen ground.

He made a sound he could not keep in. It came out high and short, and half the hall turned, and he said, “An old thing — a horse, my lord, one of the horses stood on me in the yard this morning, forgive me, forgive me—“ already going red, already bowing, backing away from her with his rings flashing.

And he looked up as he went, and she was smiling at him over her father’s shoulder, and she watched him understand it. He went on bowing.

The doors were open and the cold came in and the music went out ahead of her.

Two lines of people stood in the road on either side, and they had put on their good clothes, every one of them, and their breath went up in a cloud over the whole street. When she came out they went down on the cobbles, all of them at once, and shouted — one long shout that went up the fronts of the houses and came back off them.

Her father put her into the carriage himself and then stood back with his hand still half raised.

They had hung the inside with wool against the cold, and there was a brazier on a chain, and she sat down on the bench with her hands in her lap and her heart going too fast for sitting still. The wheels turned. Somewhere behind her a woman started singing, and the singing went along the street ahead of the carriage and stayed ahead of it.

Then a woman’s voice close to the window said, “Take it, take it,” and the first apple came in through the window and hit the wool on the far side. Then a pear. Then more than could be counted, from both sides at once, with the driver shouting good-naturedly and a boy running alongside to catch what bounced back out so it could be thrown again.

The captain of the escort had not looked at her once since the yard.

He was called Rolf, and he had been standing about in the yard since the gifts came, in the way of a man who likes to be able to see all the doors. He rode at the carriage’s left shoulder now with forty riders behind him, in a good plain coat cut for weather rather than for a wedding, and when she looked out at him he looked at the road ahead until she had stopped.

Out of the gate the crowd did not thin. They went along the causeway after the carriage on foot, ten deep in places, and the singing had words to it now that she could not quite hear, and more people knelt as she passed than had knelt in the street, and somebody had brought a stool out for an old woman so she could kneel higher.

The carriage was full of fruit by then.

Mira sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes stinging.

They were not sending her off. They were paying. Nothing between here and the Sarrow would burn this winter, and she was what that had been bought with.

Her sister had understood it before she did. Ada had shut herself in for a week over it. Getting her out had taken a night, a locked door, and a great deal of arguing, and Bram had been waiting behind the abbey the whole time, where he had said he would be.

They were past the last of the houses now, and there were still people at the roadside, and Rolf had turned his head twice.

The road went out of the valley and up, and the fields on either side were bare and frost-bitten, and after a while the singing was behind them and the wheels were the only thing.

At the top of the rise a rider came up behind at a gallop.

The men had their steel out before she had her head through the curtain. Rolf had turned his horse across the road and his hand was up.

“That’s my brother,” Mira said.

“Get inside.”

“Stop the horse.”

For a moment he did not. Then he looked back along the road, once, and lifted his hand, and the steel went away.

Cedric came off his horse badly and nearly went down, and then he was at the carriage with both hands on her arm.

“I forgot to say it.” His voice went up and cracked in the middle of the word and he pushed on through it. “I hate that I’m no use. I hate that I have to stand in a yard and watch this. But listen — I swear it in front of these men and I’ll swear it in front of any man. I’ll make myself worth something. I’ll be somebody you can stand behind, and if he uses you badly I’ll come and take you out of that house, and no one will stop me, I don’t care who he is.”

He was fourteen. There was down on his lip that he had not learned to shave yet, and his hands were shaking, and he said all of it with his chin up.

Behind them, Rolf laughed. It was not a loud laugh. He did not say anything after it, and he did not look away either.

Mira found that she was crying, and had been for some time.

“I know,” she said. “I know. Go home.”

“I meant it.”

“I know you meant it.” She got her hand free and put it flat on his chest and pushed him back a step, because she could not look at him with her eyes full for much longer. “Go home and be good to Papa. He’ll be alone in that hall. Sit with him. Don’t shout at your uncle for a year, not once, not even when he deserves it. Can you do that?”

“I can do it for a year.”

“Then do it for a year.”

He nodded and did not move. She got her hand on the curtain.

“Go home, Cedric.”

He went.

She watched him through the little window at the back until the road bent. He had got back on his horse and he was not riding; he was sitting there in the middle of the road with his face toward her, and then he was a mark on the white road, and then a smaller mark, and then there was nothing on the road but the road.

She had seen him dead.

Nothing else. Not the road, or the winter, or the men who did it; she had never had any of that. What she had was a thing she could not tell apart from memory: her brother dead, and dead for her, and she alive after him. And with it, out of the same hour, a room she did not know, and her own hand pressed to her side with the blood coming up between her fingers, and a name she had said over and over — Auberon, whom she had never met — and none of it dated, none of it placed.

She had been fourteen and ill when it came. She was eighteen now. Some days the seeing was a thing that had been told to her; other days it was the only hour of her life that had happened, and the four years since were the story.

She sat back against the wool.

The brazier had gone out. There was fruit all over the floor of the carriage, and she moved her foot so as not to crush it, and there was an apple in her lap that she did not remember picking up. A child had put it in her hands at the gate, a small girl held up by her father, and Mira had taken it and said thank you, and the child had not let go until she said it twice.

The afternoon grayed. The hedges were black with frost, and the sky over the far ridge had a low white seam in it that meant snow, and the road went on north, and the wheels turned, and somewhere ahead of them, out over the fallow fields, a bird was going south, alone, low, working hard into the wind.