Nobody’s Son Read online

  “Well don’t blame me,” Gail said. “I never bother with that sort of thing. Sir William should have thought of it.”

  Lissa said, “Perhaps he did.”

  Mark stared at Lissa, startled, but her calm, elegant face revealed nothing.

  “Besides which, everyone in the family knows I won’t be Queen. I told them years ago. I won’t scheme against my sisters or creep around the Palace for that.” Snorting with contempt at the thought of scheming for something as base as the Crown, Gail flung aside a pile of wrappings until she found another package to heft. “More towels,” she grunted. “I can just tell.”

  At last all the gifts had been opened and duly noted in Lissa’s ledger; their velvet wrappings lay scattered across the floor like bodies on a battlefield. Still robed in her wedding gown, Gail retired to the next room. Like a surgeon bringing out her scalpel, Lissa produced a button-hook and followed.

  The women were gone a long time. Mark wandered through the room, gathering the velvet in one pile and the silk bows in another. There was a fireplace with wood already laid. Mark lit it from a rushlight on the wall.

  The room was dominated by a vast enclosed bed, with oak doors carved in a hunting scene, and overhead a canopy of lace. A real bed, with real walls, so no one walking through the room could see a sleeper sprawling there. Or doing summat else, for that matter.

  All this time, Mark knew, Lissa was in the next room, undoing button after button, slowly revealing Gail’s neck, shoulders, back…

  No use thinking on it, Mark told himself. But that didn’t get rid of the hollow feeling in his chest. It should be you in there with her, your fingers on her bare back. It should be your eyes she smiles for.

  Shite.

  He jumped off the bed and buckled Harvest to his belt to see how it hung. He practised drawing it as fast as he could, left hand pulling back on the scabbard while the right whipped out the glittering blade.

  Still the women did not return.

  Finally he took off his sword belt, threw the bed-doors wide and lay on his back under the white lace. Think of summat besides your wife, Shielder’s Mark…

  Flesh of your flesh, now. Yours for the taking.

  But not for the asking.

  When Gail returned she wore a simple black nightdress. The hem fluttered just above her ankles as she pattered to the doorway. She hugged Lissa and wished her good night.

  Lissa bowed to Mark, pressed Gail’s hand, lingered. Worried? Tired? Jealous?

  …And closed the door behind her as she left.

  Turning, Gail blew out a long sigh. “What a day.”

  “A day!” Mark said, rolling onto his side, head propped on one hand. “A week at least.”

  “Hah! Just be glad you weren’t wedged into what I was wearing!” Gail seemed subdued and anxious; in the shapeless nightgown she looked rather plain.

  “You were very beautiful,” Mark said.

  “That’s…that’s very nice of you to say.” Gail looked around the room, taking in the piles of velvet, the flickering rushlights, the fire. The bed. “I wish there were a window on the south wall. I like to see the moon at night. When we were little, Lissa and Willan and I would sometimes sleep together in my room. The moon would shine this magic silver light on us; we’d put out all the candles and tell ghost stories until we screamed into the pillows.”

  Something in her words, her voice, made Mark think of Husk, and the firelight flickering in her little hut of cedar-boughs, and the years lying in drifts behind her house. “I can’t imagine owt scaring you!” he said with a smile.

  Gail shivered. “Oh, you’re wrong. They could both scare me. Especially Lissa. Twenty times I ran to Mother’s room, and then felt like a fool when she asked me what was wrong.”

  Mark tried to imagine the demure Lissa telling bloodcurdling tales of terror. So much time, so many passions lay between these people, so many unexpected sides.

  He felt again how much he was a stranger.

  Lissa knows some parts of Gail that you will never, ever see, Shielder’s Mark.

  The thought made him jealous, and a little sad. “I’ll stick to the bargain, you know. I’ll not force myself on you.”

  “O no! O no, I know you wouldn’t. You would never do that,” Gail exclaimed. “It’s just…It sounds silly, but I miss my old room. I know that must seem stupid to a great traveller like you.”

  “It doesn’t seem stupid at all,” Mark said softly. How strange it was, to see this side of Gail. Not everybody sees her like this, he thought, honoured. Tired and quiet and thinking of the past.

  He took it like a gift, something of herself she dared to show him. He wanted to protect it, to hold her mood like a butterfly in his hands.

  “Childish,” Gail decided. She came and sat beside Mark on the bed, scowling sideways, as if he had done something wrong. “That’s all it is. It’s been easy for me to stay a child: you get your way when you’re a Princess. And Lissa was always so capable, so mature; I never had to bother. But I’m a married woman now.” Her small feet dangled over the edge of the high bed; she swung them in little circles. “I guess it’s time to grow up.”

  “You sound like we’re halfway dead! I’m too young to be a ghost just yet!” Then, greatly daring, Mark held a goosefeather pillow cocked overhead. “One more moan and I’ll have to thump you.”

  Gail giggled. “You must feel like a nanny, not a husband.”

  Like everyone else, Mark had always said he hated silly, giggling girls. He discovered he was wrong. Giggling made Gail infinitely prettier, like sunlight falling into water. “Well, an older brother maybe.”

  She looked archly at him. “I didn’t mean to kiss you like a sister this afternoon.”

  “No,” Mark admitted, looking again at her thin warm mouth, her gold-brown eyes. “I didn’t feel like your brother then.”

  Gail grinned and put a hand over her mouth. “We’d better change the subject.”

  “I liked it just—”

  “Really. I mean it.”

  Mark thumped her lightly on the head with his pillow and then slumped back, defeated. “So…” Ah! “Say: when I came to your room that first time, there was something on your worktable, a deerskin and a dead corset. You said that on our wedding night you’d tell me what it was.”

  Gail blushed.

  Blushed?

  “Oh, that was nothing,” she muttered.

  “Come on!”

  Gail mumbled something.

  “What? You sound like my friend that got his teeth kicked out while gelding the dyer’s mule.”

  “A present,” she snapped, glowering. “It was going to be a present for you. It didn’t work out.”

  “Oh. Can I see it?”

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s stupid,” Gail said fiercely. “It’s stupid and I’m embarrassed to show it to you, all right? Are you satisfied?”

  Mark paused to consider. “Nope,” he said at last. “I’d like to have a peek.”

  “Well you won’t, so get used to it.”

  “Princess,” Mark said gravely. “Do I have to remind you that you’re talking to a man who braved the Ghostwood? Who dared the Red Keep? Who crossed the moat where—”

  “O Mark, it really isn’t very good,” Gail cried. For a long moment she stared at the floor. “Will you promise not to laugh?”

  “Cross my heart

  And swear to God

  On pain of death

  and Aron’s rod,” Mark chanted.

  Blushing furiously, Gail shuffled into the far room. She returned a moment later and put something in Mark’s hand.

  “It’s made of leather,” he said, frowning and shaking the thing out. “There’s a kind of a bulge here: sort of hedgehog-shaped—”

  “It’s a hat, stupid.” Gail snatched it away and held it right ways up. “Here’s the brim and here’s the crown. You wear it on your head to keep the rain out. I made it for you. There: are you satisfied
?”

  Gently Mark retrieved the hat. It was without a doubt the most misshapen, lopsided abortion of a hat he’d ever seen. It looked like a tiny leather quilt with an upset stomach. “It’s so, so pink,” he said, trying to keep a straight face.

  And indeed pink was the word for it, though the dye was badly blotched and mottled; some parts of the brim were burgundy, while much of the crown was as pale as cherry blossom.

  “I wanted to make it myself,” Gail said, red with mortification. “I shot the deer and skinned it, I hung the leather to be cured, I gathered madder to do the dyeing and then I tried to sew it all together but it’s a horrible mess and you promised you wouldn’t laugh and I’m stupid and that’s all there is to it.”

  “You did all that?” Mark said wonderingly. “You skinned a deer? Princesses don’t skin deer.”

  “This one does. Very badly,” Gail added. Her eyes were bright; Mark couldn’t tell if she was going to cry or kill him. “It seems like it ought to be easy, but I was never very good at sewing and anyway it takes forever to get a needle through leather. I couldn’t figure out how to make the, you know, the crown stiff, so I thought I could use part of a corset to firm it up. And the dyer gave me the same mordant that he used to make your cinnamon tunic, but I guess it works differently on leather than it does on wool and anyway it’s all ruined.”

  “You did all that, to make me a present?”

  Gail nodded.

  Mark looked wonderingly at the ungainly heap of leather in his hand. A Princess skinned a deer for you. And that’s a bigger miracle than anything that happened in the Ghostwood, Shielder’s Mark. And what did you get her?

  Nowt. Just because they all seemed so rich, you never even thought to give something that was worthy of her.

  But she did not use her riches to make your gift. She made it with her own fine hands. While your hands, which you thought so hard and tough and clever, you left idle. You that are so smart wi’ knife or file or hammer didn’t make her so much as a wooden box to put her jewellery in.

  Mark felt like dirt. “Well I think it’s the best hat I’ve ever had,” he said, clapping Gail’s gift on his head. He could feel a ring of little ridges where the whalebones in the corset bulged through the inner lining. “I’ll wear it every weather.”

  Gail couldn’t stop a giggle. “Even in bed?”

  “In my bed, in my bath, in my grave!” Mark proclaimed. His heart leaped as he saw her grin despite herself. He marched over to the window and studied his reflection. As a courtier’s hat, it was a joke. But Mark was from the country, and as a plain, country hat, it could just barely pass.

  Mind you, it was pretty damn pink. “Why were all my gifts supposed to be red?” Mark asked.

  “Lissa says it’s your best colour. She’s clever with that sort of thing…I hope she likes the perfume. It’s so unfair that I should get all these clothes and things. They’re quite wasted on me. But Lissa is so beautiful. If she weren’t so tall I’d give her my whole wardrobe.”

  “Just because Lissa’s a swan doesn’t make you a duck, you know.”

  Gail shrugged. “You’re married to me: you have to say that. Besides, anyone walking around in a hat that pink can’t be trusted on matters of taste, Shielder’s Mark.”

  Mark held up an imperious finger. “Never insult this hat,” he warned. “Men have died for it.”

  “At least it will keep off the rain.” Gail studied the mound of presents that took up one corner of the room. “Can we have that all taken by wagon?” she said suddenly. “I don’t want to dawdle along with valets and grooms and cooks and the rest of it. Can’t we just go on our own? That would be wonderful!”

  “Just you and me?”

  “And Lissa.”

  Mark sighed. “And Lissa.” Which reminded him; he owed someone else a debt. “Would you mind if Valerian were to come wi’ me? I’d like another fellow about, to help me dress and all.”

  “Well, I suppose he can come. But I mean to set a hard pace!” Gail said gleefully. “Oh, for the open road! No more corsets and no more stupid skirts!”

  “No more feather beds and satin sheets,” Mark pointed out.

  “No more tiresome receptions, no more tedious ‘entertainments.’”

  “No more seven course dinners wi’ five kinds of wine.”

  “No more snake-hearted gossips and cruel scandal-mongers!”

  “No more baths, with all the hot water you want,” Mark sighed.

  Gail bounced with excitement on the edge of the bed. “No more servants waiting on you hand and foot!”

  Mark groaned and fell back upon his feather bed, feeling the bruises of a hundred nights of sleeping outside gather in his back. “Oh shite,” he groaned, pulling the brim of his hat down over his eyes.

  When he looked up Gail was dragging something in from the next room. With a grunt she threw it to the floor. It was a sleeping pallet. “There,” she said, shoving it over near the fire. “That should be plenty warm.”

  All the disappointments of this wedding night flooded back into Mark at once. “Ah: I see my bed is ready,” he said nastily.

  Gail’s thin lips pursed with anger. “What do you take me for? This is my bed, not yours.”

  Anger and shame, anger and shame. How many times can a prince turn into a frog? Mark wondered. Ribbit. “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped. “I sleep on the ground all the time; I’m used to it. Princesses don’t sleep on the floor.”

  “This one does.” Banging open a linen pantry Gail dragged out a pillow and a blanket.

  It’s not fair she should be most beautiful when she’s bitchy. “Look, I—”

  “Mark, shut up.” Gail lay down on the pallet. Softly she said, “Don’t let’s fight about this. I’m the one who’s denying you your…husband’s rights. It isn’t fair for you to suffer any more than that. I have to feel I’m doing something to make up for it, however small. All right?”

  Slowly Mark nodded. “All right.”

  Lissa’s slim fingers, unlacing one button at a time. Gail’s narrow vixen face, her tiny feet pattering on the cold flagstones. Her wedding dress rucked up to her knees, sitting amidst a wreckage of presents. Her fire-brown eyes, sparking with anger.

  Her childhood, awake with ghosts, cupped in his hands like a butterfly.

  ’Til death do us part, Mark thought. For the first time he felt the years before him, piled in drifts as deep as those behind.

  ’Til death do us part.

  6

  Lullaby

  The next day they prepared to set off from Swangard. Gail stalked around her old rooms, badgering the servants to be careful with her brushes and bottles. Her knives and hunting gear she packed herself.

  Mark’s duty was to stand by and look as if he were really in charge, even though everyone knew that it was neither the Duke nor the Duchess, but Lissa who ran the show.

  Mark’s only slip came early on, when four servants moved to take out Gail’s huge panelled bed, and he started forward to help them heft it.

  The lightest brush against his arm held him in place. “I never cease to wonder at the canniness of craftsmen,” Lissa remarked. As she spoke, a pair of cabinet-makers’ ’prentices began to take the massive bed apart.

  Mark, who’d slept on straw pallets and never seen a wooden bed, laughed out loud. “That’s bloody clever!” he marvelled. And ignoring Lissa’s wince he crouched down beside the ’prentices to see how the cunning bed had been made, that it could so easily be moved. By the time the whole canopied monster had come down, Mark’s carpenter curiosity was well-satisfied, and two patches of wear showed on the knees of his new silk breeches.

  Someone snickered as he brushed them off. “I hope you find yourself improved by study,” Lissa remarked coolly.

  Uh oh. Let me guess: the Duke is not supposed to muck about on the floor and rub shoulders wi’ the servants. He risked a quick glance at his wife. The embarrassment Lissa managed to conceal was clear on Gail’s face.

&n
bsp; Shite.

  “I like, uh, a neat bit of woodwork,” Mark mumbled. A blush was crawling up from his lacy collar. You’re a Duke now, not a handyjack. Now you’ve shamed us all again, even the servants. What are they to make of their master sweating onside of them?

  For the rest of the day he nodded gravely, said as little as possible, and kept well out of Lissa’s way. He was relieved when the endless parting ceremonies drew to a close and they left Swangard at last.

  On their first night out of the capital they stabled their entourage in a pair of inns along the road. After dinner Gail summoned the steward in charge of the movables and informed him that on the morrow she, Mark, Lissa and Valerian would walk ahead. “I do not want a wagon closer than two hours behind,” she warned. “I mean to walk unheralded and unattended, without horses to fuss about or servants underfoot at every step.”

  “But Princess! You won’t be safe on the road alone!”

  Gail snorted. “Pshaw, Davin! You sound like an old woman. Will I not be travelling with the man who broke the Ghostwood’s spell, the greatest hero of our time?”

  “Oh.” The steward nodded. “I had forgotten,” he said, bowing deeply to Mark. “Of course you will be well. Forgive my impertinence.” Gail sent him off with a flick of her fingers.

  “Gail!” Lissa hissed. She didn’t sound convinced that the Hero of the Ghostwood could shield them all from harm.

  She’s bloody right too, Mark thought unhappily. O Lord.

  But Gail could not be swayed. The next morning she got them up before dawn and marched them from the inn before their retinue was stirring.

  A first pink seam ran along the eastern horizon; overhead stars still glittered in a night-blue sky. “I never knew how cold this hour could be in spring,” Valerian remarked through chattering teeth. His breath steamed from him. Fog gathered in the ditches on either side of the road.

  Mark smirked. “Bracing, isn’t it?” It was nothing new to him to be up before the sun, but Valerian kept Court time. I’ll bet every swan I own he’s been up for hours, primping an’ preening, knowing he would pass the day wi’ the Divine Lissa.