Sitting in the front room of the Marsember house, the honorably retired Lionar Yeshua Raibeart kept glacial eyes on the almond-colored girl with short, puffy dark hair whose name refused to come to his mind. Her small hands slowly bound the porcelain white foot of his wife, Hanna. Hanna did her best to keep quiet, but couldn't avoid a whimper of discomfort when the girl pressed lightly against the swollen ankle to tie the decorative ribbon that would also keep the bandage from coming loose.
A jolt of helplessness, well-masked by annoyance, shot through the old soldier. "Be careful! Don't you know what you're doing?" he thundered.
The girl jumped at his bark, and the spool tumbled away from her hand. Everyone was silent for a moment, simply looking at it, as some of the ribbon came free of it and relaxed onto the chilly wooden floor.
"It's dusty now; are you satisfied? Pick it up, you sluggard," Yeshua admonished.
Taking a deep breath, the girl reclaimed the ribbon, rewound the bit that had gotten loose, and painstakingly cut it with the shears. She made sure to avoid leaving the "dirty" ribbon on the spool, taking a clipping and putting it into her pocket, but no comment was made about that.
"Good enough," Hanna said, her words warming the silence just slightly. "Now, Muki, put all these bindings away, and fetch me the correspondence to read."
"Where is it?" Yeshua demanded, shifting himself in preparation to rise from the hard-backed wooden chair. "I'll get it, since you can't be bothered to get it yourself."
"Leave those here and fetch the papers first, Muki," Hanna urged, laying a hand over the binding supplies. "My lord, the girl is here because I cannot tread upon this foot without pain; I don't neglect my duties when I'm able to complete them. You know that, don't you?"
And Yeshua's mind, backed into trying to remember any time his wife had done anything less than everything he'd expected of her, momentarily dodged off the war path against the young child.
Muki was of no mood to be any more gracious about being spared Yeshua's temper than he had been about her taking care with the ribbon. She wordlessly got up and turned around to get the few bits of correspondence that had been dropped off at different hours of that morning.
Yeshua grit his teeth as he watched the brown girl easily reclaim the papers from somewhere just beyond his edge of vision, but settled back into his chair and crossed his arms over his chest when she ambled back to Hanna and handed them over. "You would've avoided being hurt if you kept the place up properly. I do the outside work, and the order out there is noticeable. Take a lesson from it. Trinkets and clothing everywhere, as though there weren't any chests or dressers to put them into."
Muki, who had been purposefully biting her lips, turned incredulous eyes to Hanna, who wouldn't look back at her.
"Of course, my lord," Hanna sighed, snatching the mail from the girl's hand with all the irritation that she couldn't afford to allow her voice to betray. "I'll do my best to improve the matter."
Even the sigh didn't go unnoticed, unfortunately. Yeshua narrowed his eyes at his wife immediately. "Don't you make fun of me. I put up with enough of that from everyone else. Talking in circles around me as though I were daft. I know up from down and day from night- and speaking of that, I also know that it's close enough to dusk for there to at least be a few lamps lit. If we're going to keep this rag doll about, she could at least be useful. Go light the lamps, you bit of fluff."
"I needn't; 'tis bright midday," the young girl snapped back before Hanna had a chance to say anything. "An yer sun's dim, complain to Lathander."
Yeshua mounted up speedily into a wordless rage, and his hands slammed down onto the arms of his chair so hard that a bit of sawdust floated from them to the ground in response.
Far from withering or backing down, as all but one of his own children might have done at her age, Muki squared her shoulders, folded her own arms over her narrow chest, and leveled a steely stare worthy of her mother, whose stone hard hands had both given and taken plenty of beatings.
Hanna saw at once the danger looming over the child who could not properly perceive it. Reaching forward, she grabbed hold of the back of Muki's apron and dragged her back three steps. "Now, that's no way to speak to a master; I should send you home for a good hiding. As it is, I can't spare you, and you ought to thank Lathander for that," she fretted. "Go slice a few pieces of bread and put a bit of water in the kettle for soup. When the water's ready for the soup bone, put it in and bring me a bit of wine. Just a bit in one of the proper cups; not a scandalous amount in a flagon. Then you can start the washing, do you understand? Slice the bread, heat the soup water, put the soup bone in, bring me some wine, then start the washing. In that order; don't move tasks around because it seems right to you."
Muki muttered, more to herself than to her temporary mistress, as she all but stomped out of the room.
"Impertinent rodent," Yeshua said, spitting the words as though they were hot metal. "And she smells badly, too- did you get her from Old Arn? That wasn't Common she was mumbling in, I'll tell you that."
"What did she say?" Hanna asked grimly as she broke the two wax seals on the letters, nearly afraid of what her husband's answer would be.
"All I could make out was that in her opinion, you asked for the wine so that you could bear it. 'It' being me," Yeshua replied bitterly. "Everyone whispers, everyone laughs behind their hands, even common midden floaters like that. Would that I'd died on the battlefield."
"Don't say that, please," Hanna pleaded genuinely, closing her eyes for a moment. "I never wish that. I have never wished that. Please."
"Well, I have, and I do," Yeshua huffed. "I have a right, so don't moan at me. I served crown and crest for years, to come home and be treated like some tiresome beast. If Lathander had any mercy, he'd strike me down this minute, put us all out of my misery. Now, aren't you going to actually read the papers you asked that pestilential rag doll to hand you?"
Hanna opened her eyes and looked at the sealed papers in her hands, shuffling them briefly. "One 'monies due' letter from the temple, and one rather short letter from Susanna. Stephen's wife. Which do you want to hear first?"
"I already know how much coin I plan to give the priests, and they'll not get a copper more," Yeshua pronounced, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest again. "What does the little hedge witch say?"
"My lord, remember that Stephen will continue to refuse to allow us to see his children if we keep referring to their mother as though she were some evil hag," Hanna said, striving valiantly to keep the weariness out of her tone. "She was a priestess of Chauntea, and-"
"And lost her blessing by sitting on our eldest's lap like a paid whore," Yeshua argued. "Look at the results, then tell me whether or not I'm right. A wisp of a boy with all the sense and talent of a bent, rusty cart nail, and an idiot girl whose daintiest whisper is like the yowl of a cat skinned and fried alive. Go on, tell me a good and benevolent goddess attends that useless woman. Go on, I dare you."
"Saul and Sarai have always reminded me of Aaron and Adassa," Hanna reminded gently as she glanced over Susanna's letter. "Remember, my lord, how master after master sent Aaron home, because he was only interested in their crafts until he felt that he understood them? And remember how Adassa bucked against your will when you kept her from the Blue Dragons? I pray to all that's good that Susanna keeps both her girl children near her, safely, at home, because with all the faithfulness with which we have served Lathander, he did not keep any of our children within my handreach, did he?"
Yeshua gave a muted grunt. The mention of Adassa didn't ring any bells in the distant, darkened towers of his memories, but for the first time in a few years, he felt that it should, and the feeling rankled irksomely.
"And if my lord will remember," Hanna pressed, taking advantage of her husband's momentary weakness, "his eldest son has four children."
"Four...?" Yeshua asked, bewildered.
"Yes; Saul, Sarai, Sylvester, and Salone. All with names beginning with 'S', because the two of them seemed to think it would be great sport to have all of their initials be the same," Hanna stated, her tone as flat as a freshly made tabletop. "Of all of them, Saul alone has a proper apprenticeship; he's going to be a blacksmith, like his father. Sarai hasn't been placed yet, Sylvester seems to be... interested in becoming a priest or an official of some sort, and Salone has barely said more than ten words together since she was able to speak at all. Were it my choice to make, I'd put that girl in a temple, or a rich woman's kitchen, before some coven snatches her off, but Susanna is the mother in that house. As I said, I pray that her goddess would be kinder to her with her girl children than Lathander was to us with ours."
Yeshua searched his mind for any flicker of familiarity with the names his wife had rattled off, but the sounds simply swirled around his head like dissipating smoke, leaving nothing but frustration in their wake. He got up from his seat suddenly and began resolutely heading toward the rear of the house.
"What? Wait, my lord, where are you-" Hanna began, alarmed. She shifted herself to get up, but the pain that shot from the inside of her ankle up to her hip nearly brought a curse out of her normally pious mouth.
"I'm going to split wood, woman," Yeshua spat without slowing down or turning around.
"My lord- wait!" Hanna called, utterly desperate. "Yeshua, please wait! There's... there's no wood to split!"
Only about five steps away from the door, the old soldier did indeed stop. A silence waited behind his heels like a hound with raised hackles.
"It's spring, Yeshua," Hanna said, her tone nearly apologetic. "I... I didn't order any more wood than we have, because it'll only sit and rot in the damp and heat. And you've split all of what he have already. It's here, next to the fireplace, every stick of it."
After a few moments, Yeshua walked back into the room and looked at the cache of wood next to the fireplace. Surely enough, the finely made copper cradle was completely full. Some of the wood that would not fit had actually been stacked behind it, and when his eyes lit upon it, he suddenly remembered stacking that extra wood himself.
"I'd be better off fishing, then," Yeshua commented without moving or taking his eyes away from the wood.
"With what boat, my lord?" Hanna asked delicately, unsure of the phase of emotion into which her husband may have been straying.
"What, did we sell it?" Yeshua asked. Unlike his previous growls and roars, the question came out small and calm.
"No, my lord, but... it is damaged," Hanna replied with the lightest touch of amusement, having noted her husband's change. "Susanna claims that Stephen said that he will fix it the next time they manage to visit, if Aaron hasn't come home and fixed it himself before then."
"Aaron fixing anything," Yeshua scoffed. For a blessed moment, he felt the passage of time between the stripling that he had watched disappear on a ship's stern and the adult to whom his wife was referring. "Does he have children?" he asked after a long pause, wearied by the fact that he simply didn't know.
"Not yet," Hanna chuckled in spite of the situation. "We have yet to receive word that he and his dear Taricia have been married, one way or another. Only Ielena and Stephen have children."
"Ielena has children," Yeshua mused, wandering slowly to the back of Hanna's chair. "I wondered if she would come to anything. So quiet. And angry. Always angry, wasn't she? What're her children?"
"Don't laugh, but... Rhian and Ori," Hanna answered, choosing not to recall whether or not her eldest daughter seemed to always be upset. "Remember, Finn McCreigh is a mountain man, and he saddled her poor boys with names anyone with sense would use for a mule or a cow. She bore them alive, but without any word since then, I don't know if she's managed to keep them that way. Don't you want to hear Susanna's letter, my lord?"
"Oh, we can't trust what that heretic puts to paper," Yeshua spat, turning away from his wife's chair. "The years we spent, raising that blockhead to be a servant of Lathander, only for her to drag him down into the worst of sins while calling herself an acolyte. Wicked bitch."
"Oh!" Hanna cried in feigned offense at the curse, as she Yeshua move toward the stairs with real concern. "Where are you going now, my lord?"
"To pack our things so that we might go to Suzail and see for ourselves how it is with Stephen... and however many children he's got."
"As sure as I am that you could carry me to Suzail, I'd rather you didn't try," Hanna advised with a coy half-smile that she'd learned long ago from her own mother. "Remember, I can't go anywhere without being able to walk on this foot. Come sit, and we can parse Susanna's lies together."
"Ah, that foot of yours," Yeshua complained weakly. "You should watch where you're putting yourself; that's why you hurt it."
"I know, my lord," Hanna agreed simply.
"And I wish that boy would write to us himself! Did I not take my hard-earned coin and hire him a tutor?" the retired lionar continued as he stalked back to his chair and sat down heavily.
"You did," Hanna nodded, inwardly trembling with relief.
"He, Aaron, and Iordyn were all taught to read as though they were born nobles, didn't they? And how do they thank me for it? By not once setting pen to parchment. Ungrateful little barnacles."
"Iordyn must still be getting adjusted to his post in the Dragons; it's quite a change to go from the study of priestly matters to martial training. And Aaron is burning out pirates, my lord," Hanna noted. "He sent us a fine cask of wine about a month ago; that's what I asked Muki to fetch me."
"If it's any good, I'll bet she's sitting right at the table and drinking it herself," Yeshua huffed. "I might go check."
"My lord, the child is all of eight years old, loaned us by the neighbors two plots over the road," Hanna smirked, noticing that this time, her husband hadn't shifted an inch in his chair. "Her daily fare was bread, boiled potatoes, and milk until she came here, and she was never left alone in a kitchen before. She's likely taking her time because she's not accustomed to all that running a kitchen by herself requires. We'll know if she's been at the wine if she starts screaming about a sliced thumb or a burned arm."
"Half breeds like that don't feel pain properly, and they're useless both at resisting and tolerating strong drink," Yeshua snorted. "Go ahead and read; I'll listen for a dropped utensil or pot."
"Good enough," Hanna said firmly. "Now, for the parade of falsehoods. 'Our dear, beloved father and mother-' Oh, not wasting a moment, but hurrying to lie most flatteringly; you were right, my lord."
No comments:
Post a Comment