The Proxy Bride

Chapter 13: The Tower Before Dawn

The stair inside Pine Tower turned with the wall, ninety-one steps, and he had been climbing it since he was a boy, so his feet knew where the twelfth had a c***k across the nose of it and where the forty-second had been reset after the fire with a stone a finger wider than its neighbors. He counted them without deciding to, as he counted horse-lines and arrows and the days left in a siege.

There was ice in the joints of the stone tonight. He kept one hand on the wall going up.

At the top the stair opened onto a platform ringed with a rail. The wind came out of the north with frost in it and went through the wool at his shoulders as if the wool were a thing he had heard about and not a thing he was wearing. He stood at the rail and looked down.

Vauntholm lay under him, the wedding fires burned down to red in the yard: trestles still up, benches pushed back, a barrel on its side with a man asleep against it, or a coat bundled to look like one. Beyond the yard the roofs went down in steps to the wall, and the wall went round, and the gate was shut for the night with the bar dropped. Past the gate was the black country — the Sarrow frozen at its bends and showing a dull gray in the starlight where the ice lay flat, the north road going out of it, the fields beyond rising in long swells toward the hills, and the hills going up into nothing at all.

There was a man at the rail already, twenty paces off, standing with his hands behind him and his head tipped back.

Aldric had known the shape of those shoulders for ten years. He walked down the platform without hurrying.

“My lord.” Fenn turned and gave him a bow, not a deep one, the way he bowed when he meant to go on talking afterward. “Of all the nights in the year.”

“You’re up here looking at the sky.”

“I am.”

“On my wedding night.”

“That is the night in question, my lord, yes.”

Aldric put his hands on the rail. The frost on it was thick enough to hold the print of them.

Fenn had come out of Alderford with a scrivener’s shop behind him and nothing else. He had carried letters for Aldric’s father and then written them, and in a hall full of men with better names and better horses he had been nobody at all. Then the Vaskiri came down out of the grass, and the margrave and his heir both came home dead, and the house that was left had enemies on four sides of it and a boy of twelve in the chair. Fenn had spent that year in other men’s halls, eating their bread, finding the one thing two frightened men both wanted and calling it by a single name until they agreed it was the same thing. The Dowager had kept him for that. Aldric had kept him after.

And when the Vale offer had come up the road with a man in Vale colors and a chest of paper, Aldric had been three days gone into the north after cattle thieves, and his grandmother had answered the offer in his name before anyone could ask him. He had come home meaning to put riders on the road after that envoy and bring him back with his chest and his terms. Fenn had taken one evening to talk him out of it, and that evening had been worth more to the house than the years on either side of it, and it was one reason the man still had his tower room.

“You should be in a bed,” Aldric said. “There’s still a few left in this house.”

“I drank my share at your table and went to bed at the second hour.” Fenn rubbed his hands together and put them back behind him. “Then I woke at the turn of the night with my heart going like a boy’s and no sleep anywhere in me, and I came up here to see whether the sky had anything to say. It did not. So I have been standing in the cold looking at a great many stars and thinking about my own affairs, which is a poor use of a good sky.”

“Fenn.”

“My lord.”

“Say what you came up here to say and let me go down. It’s cold.”

Fenn laughed, one syllable, and turned to face the wind with his elbows on the rail. “I’ll say it, then. It is a piece of advice, and you will not care for it, and you will take it anyway, because you always do, once you have made a show of not taking it. This marriage is not a night or a month. Treat it as a thing that will last longer than your patience. Give it what a thing needs to be believed in — a face kept, a courtesy paid where men can see it, her people answered when they write. Nobody asks you to be fond.”

“She goes north in the morning,” Aldric said.

Fenn was quiet a moment. Down in the yard the man by the barrel rolled over and made a sound and stopped.

“Ah,” Fenn said. “That is what we are doing.”

“That is what we are doing.”

“You have thought about how it reads.”

“I have thought about nothing else since the hall,” Aldric said, which was not true of the last hour and was true of the four before it. “I want your thinking on this, not your face. She came up my own hall with two hundred men in it tonight. Every man there saw her, and half of them will be telling the other half what it means by breakfast. Do you know what it would mean if I kept her in this house for a month and she came out of it with a hand on my arm and a smile? It would mean the Vale has a hand on my arm. It would mean the marriage is a thing I wanted.”

“And if you put her on the road at dawn,” Fenn said, “what does that mean?”

“That it is a piece of business. That is what it is. She is the paper the bargain is written on, and the bargain is the road south, and nobody at that table thinks otherwise except the women.”

Fenn looked at the sky again, unhurried, and let the quiet run on past the point where a man would fill it. Aldric had learned to watch for that. What came after the quiet was usually worse than anything Fenn might have said straight out.

“The south is not a thing to be hurried,” Fenn said at last. “That’s a piece of my own wisdom, and it is worth what you paid for it. Take the south slowly and it costs you less than taking it fast. In the meantime — since the marriage is made and no one in the world can unmake it by dawn, and since you do not want the lady at your table — there is a decent arrangement to be made out of this, and I would make it before some other man makes an indecent one.”

“Go on.”

“She goes north to your grandmother’s house at Vosshelm, to serve the elder women there in your place.” Fenn turned his head. “The old house, where the Dowager keeps her household. A wife doing her husband’s duty for him where he cannot be, in his own family’s hall, under his own grandmother’s eye. There is not a man in the north who could say a word against it. It is dutiful. It is proper. It is the sort of thing the singers put in songs about women who never once complained.”

Aldric looked out at the road going north. He could not see it in the dark, past the bend where the Sarrow cut in, but he knew where it ran.

“I told her Brenmoor,” he said.

Fenn did not so much as shift his elbows. “I know it. The house knew it before the hall was swept.”

Brenmoor had not been a plan. He had said it at the door of that room in the fourth hour, with the sword still in his hand, because a man who gives an order wants the order to be a finished thing; and because Brenmoor was four walls and a granary and a captain, and a place where a woman could be put and not thought about again. It was the sort of thing a man said to be done with saying.

“Brenmoor is a storehouse with a wall round it,” Fenn said. “Put her there and what is said by noon is that the margrave has lodged his wife in a granary and set a captain over her. Put her at Vosshelm and what is said is that she is doing his duty for him at his own hearth, under his own grandmother’s eye. The first is a thing a man does to a woman he is finished with. The second is a thing a man does who has a use for her.”

“Vosshelm, then,” Aldric said. “And word to Brenmoor before the household is up, so that nobody there is left standing at a gate.”

“It will be done before the kitchens are lit.”

“She’ll be at Vosshelm before the month turns,” Aldric said. “Write the steward tonight. She goes with an escort out of my own household, not the Vale men, and she goes as my wife, and she is not to be given to understand otherwise.”

“No,” Fenn said. “She should not be given to understand otherwise.”

“Say it plainly.”

“I have said it plainly. It is a good arrangement.” Fenn turned and put his back to the rail and his elbows on it and his head back, looking up. “It is a good arrangement for everyone except the girl, and the girl is not my affair, so I am content.”

Aldric did not answer that. After a while Fenn let it go and looked at the sky.

“There is a saying out of the river country,” Fenn said. “The Vale grows three crops — wool, barley, and daughters — and the daughters are the fairest of the three. I have always taken it for a seller’s boast. I took it so again tonight, until your wife came up the hall.”

Aldric watched the yard.

“Two hundred men at the tables,” Fenn said, “and she never once looked for the door. I will not say it again.”

“Speaking of the sky,” Aldric said.

Fenn laughed at that. “It is as good a change of subject as I have had from a man all year. Speaking of the sky, then. There is a thing up there I do not like, and it is the reason I am standing on a cold platform at the turn of the night instead of lying down like a man with sense.”

“Go on.”

“In the north quarter the King Star has gone out. Not dimmed — out, or as near out as a man can see with his own eyes, and there is a white haze spread over that whole quarter of the heavens, thin as breath on glass, and I have watched it four nights running and it does not move off.” Fenn’s voice had changed; it was not the voice he used for advice. “The schools will tell you it signifies nothing, that a star is a fire and fires go out, and I have some respect for the schools. But the old men will tell you what it has always meant, and the old men have the weight of a great many centuries behind them. The seat is empty. When the seat is empty, the men with horses find out how empty, and then the roads fill up. Not with armies at first. With people. With carts.”

Aldric tipped his head back and looked.

Stars, in their thousands, in the cold, over the wall and the frozen river and the black fields. The same stars that had been over his father’s hall. He found the north quarter and looked at it and could not tell one part of it from another, and the white haze, if it was there, was the kind of thing a man could see if he had been told to see it.

“I have looked up at that all my life,” he said, “and it has never once told me anything but that it is night. I’ll take your word for the rest of it.”

“My lord is generous,” Fenn said, “and it is misplaced, and I will take it anyway, since a man gets little enough.” He shook his head. “I am not the one worth listening to. I have a good memory and a loud voice and I have read a great many books, and that is the whole of my learning. There is one man alive I would call wise, and he is not here, and I do not know where he is.”

“Who?”

“He calls himself the White Stone.” Fenn said it the way a man says the name of a place he has been happy in. “He will not give another name, and I have asked. He was a physician before he was anything else, and he reads the sky the old way, before the schools got their hands on it and made a list of what is permitted to be seen. When I was young I walked half this country looking for a man to teach me, and I found him by accident at a ford below Alderford with his feet in the water, and he kept me three months and then told me to go home. Everything I have, I had out of those three months. Ten years ago I came on him again on the road north of Brenmoor, going the other way, into the world, to look at the sick. He had a mule and a bag of knives and a boy to carry the bag.” Fenn’s mouth moved. “If he is alive he is past seventy, and he will not be sitting still.”

“And where is he now?”

“If I knew that, I would be there, and you would be short a marshal.”

The wind came round the tower then and took Fenn in the chest, and he coughed. It started small and got its hands into him, and he turned his face into his shoulder and held the rail and coughed until it was done, and the sound of it went out over the yard and came back off the wall.

It was an old thing. There was a Vaskiri arrow in a trunk in his room and a scar under his left arm where the shaft had gone in, from a summer when the house had been short of men and had put a scrivener on a horse. The wound had closed and the cough had not.

“That’s a bad one,” Aldric said.

“It is the weather and it is my age and it is nothing.” Fenn wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “I’ll go down. I can find my own stairs; I have been finding them for ten years.”

Aldric took his cloak off and put it round the man’s shoulders and pulled it straight at the collar.

Fenn stood still under it. “My lord—”

“Go down,” Aldric said. “And the road and the stops on paper before you sleep, under my hand before the household is up.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Fenn took the lamp down off the bracket at the head of the stair and went down with one hand on the wall, and Aldric stood at the top and listened to him go: nine steps, then the long turn, then the scuff at the thirty-fourth where the tread had worked loose, then nothing.

Aldric put his hands back on the rail. The frost had kept the print of them, and he set his hands in the same two places. The cloak was gone and the cold was in his shoulders now, and he stood in it and let it come, because the cold was a thing he could hold onto while he thought, and the thinking needed holding.

The north first. Orrin Chelle’s country, up where the two rivers came together and the grain went into pits by the thousand, so that a man could feed an army off the ground it stood on — Chelle, who had held that country six years against better men than himself and would not hold it forever, because a man who holds a granary eventually has to come out and defend it in the open. Take the granaries and the north is a thing that has happened. Then the Sarrow behind him as a wall instead of a border, and the long descent south where the country opened up and the rivers ran the right way for boats, and after that, at the end of it, the west, and whatever was left of the old crown sitting in its empty city and calling itself a court.

The Vale was the road south. He had known it before the paper was unfolded. The Vale lands lay along the only good crossing for two hundred miles, and the Vale had held that crossing longer than any man living could remember and would hold it against anything that came at it from the north — which meant that while the marriage stood, the Vale held his road for him and paid for the holding out of its own purse.

His grandmother had seen it in an afternoon. She had answered for him while he was off after cattle thieves and had not troubled to explain herself afterward, and when he had come home meaning to send riders after the envoy she had said, from her chair, without lifting her eyes from the fire, *You are not the first man in this family who has had to swallow something.* Then she had said nothing else for three days.

He had been ten the first time he rode out with his father’s riders against the Vaskiri. He had gone as far as the far side of the grass where the maps stopped being any use, and come back with a cut on his thigh and a fever, and his father had come into the tent and sat down on the ground beside him and talked about the country east of the grass, where the rivers ran the wrong way and men built their houses out of the ground because there was no wood, and had talked until the fever went off him. There had never been a man like him. There had not been a day since the Sarrow ford, ten years ago, when Aldric had not known exactly where his father’s body was lying.

Ten years ago the Vale riders had stood on the left of the line. They had come up in the night under a flag of truce and taken the place his father gave them, and at first light, before the horns, they had turned off the field and gone back up the road — without a rider sent to say so, without a horn, without one man left behind to tell anyone what was afoot. The gap they left was two hundred paces wide. His father and his brother Halvard had gone into it because there was nothing else to go into.

The Vale had a story. The story was that the rider carrying the word had been killed on the road, and the word never came, and the Vale riders had been standing on an empty field waiting for an order that was already dead in a ditch somewhere between the two camps. They had told that story at the burial, and again at the peace, and had sent a man with a chest of paper to tell it a third time.

A man who means to come does not need a messenger to tell him the hour. He looks at the sun, and he looks at the line, and he comes.

He intended to see the end of them. Not this year — he had learned to say not this year, and to say it without the roof coming down. But the Vale had put a daughter in his hall to buy quiet, and he had taken the quiet, and the daughter with it, and one day he would come back down that road and let them see what they had sold.

He turned and walked down the platform to the head of the stair and looked back once, over the wall and the roofs, at the red room.

The window was still lit. In a house gone dark it was the one thing that showed, like a coal left in a cold hearth: one tall window with the shutter part open and the candlelight coming through the red hangings so that it came out red, and behind it a girl who had been sitting or standing in it for two hours in a gown she would never wear again.

She had held her voice level. That was the thing he kept coming back to and did not want. He had put the point of his sword under her jaw in the dark and she had said *I was cold* as if she were reporting the weather to a servant, and her eyes had not moved off his. He did not believe anyone had taught her that between the proxy and the hall. It had been taught earlier, and slowly, by somebody who knew what she was being sold into, and it had taken.

Which was the Vale family entire, he supposed: a good face, a good manner, and a bill behind it. They had schooled her and dressed her and sent her up the road, and they expected him to be grateful for the trouble they had taken.

Not much to look at, in any case. There had been nothing to her in that hall but cloth — six layers of it, every layer costing more than a household guard’s year — and under it a girl with wrists like a bird’s legs and no more flesh on her than would fill a glove.

He worked his jaw once and turned away from it.

She had been born a Vale. That was the whole of the case, and it had been decided before she was born.

He went down the ninety-one steps with one hand on the wall, counting them without meaning to, and crossed the yard where the fires were red and the man by the barrel had woken and was being helped up by two others, and the three of them got their feet under them and stood straight when they saw him, and he told them to go to bed. The east was coming up gray behind the wall. In the study the fire was still burning and the letters from the north were where he had left them, and he sat down and pulled the first one over and broke the seal.