Curse her! Still, it was better than nothing. I set off at a run.
BACK AT THE house, I panted round to the bathhouse, hoping to wash off the mud and smoke and get warm. Alas, it was occupied. The village wheelwright was on his back on the warm boards near the stove being fiercely ridden by a woman retainer mage. Another lad crouched behind her, stroking her breasts and kissing her neck. The wheelwright was a very virile lover—I’d enjoyed him myself—but from the clenched look around his mouth, he was doing his best to last as long as possible and not enjoying it too much. I closed the door as softly as I could and went round to the kitchen.
Thomas was sitting at the kitchen table with Hilly and Jenna. All of them were wearing the long hooded robes of mundanes who did not want to take part in Blessing congress. I was still shaken by my brush with the Mooncat and considered telling them about it. Then I thought better of it. A confession would cause a fuss. Hilly would cover me in sacred amulets and everyone would get anxious about what it meant. And maybe it’d been nothing. Maybe I’d been affected by puffball spores drifting out of the forest and had simply had a vision.
“The women of the family retired to rest some time ago,” Thomas told me. “Lord Impavidus and the boys are back. Lord Bright and a mysterious woman escaped—so they say.”
“Has he gone over to the right path, Marm?” asked Hilly. Hilly, who had been our nurse, always hoped that Bright would ‘come good.’ As if he wasn’t good enough as he was.
“I don’t think that’s what it means. Did Impi ask after me?”
“I don’t think he noticed,” said Thomas. “Though he berated your aunt about letting Bright visit her. In front of everyone. But Lady Glisten defended her, so I don’t think she’ll lose her allowance.”
“If only I could get her away from here,” I sighed. No chance of that. Eff had been exiled to Willow for her political activities before I had been born. She wasn’t even supposed to leave the estate.
Thomas shrugged. “Give me your shoes, Shine. I’ll clean them. Then there’ll be nothing to find if they do look.”
Dear Thomas. When he’d been young, a cart accident had crippled his leg and, seeing that he had no future in farm work, Eff had taken him on as a houseman. One of Eff’s flashes of brilliance. He would have been wasted hoeing weeds anyway, for he was very clever, managed to learn letters and figures with only a little help from Eff, and had been a better uncle to me and Bright than anyone in the family. And unlike Eff, he always remembered to see there was enough food in the place. He drew me two pails of hot water from the water tank and I carried them up the stairs. Not much chance of getting any help. The servants from the village would all be in with the mages. That was the real reason they were here. Our pay was lousy.
Through the half-open door of the great hall came laughter and the sound of the village band playing sultry music. I saw the shadows of people dancing on the table in the dim light. The night before a Blessing ceremony was one of stern chastity for the women of the family as they conserved their energy to bless the crops, but the rule didn’t apply to the men or to any of the retainers. Soon a trail of half-drunk couples would be wending their way up into the Eyrie bedrooms to try for the next crop of Blessing babies.
The last thing I wanted was to witness the village girls working their charms on Scintillant. I went on upstairs. As I was heading down the upper hallway towards my room, the door of Eff’s bedroom opened and the nice-looking fellow who’d caught my eye on the steps came out. His eyes widened when he saw me, but that was the only sign of guilt he gave.
“What are you doing?” I asked sternly, knowing that Eff was up at prayers with the rest of the Lucheyart women. Surely this fellow wasn’t a thief? A spy for the Elders, perhaps. My aunt read, and secretly wrote, a lot of radical mundane-rights articles.
“Forgive me, lady. I was lost.”
The ‘lady’ confirmed my suspicions. People only call a mundane ‘lady’ when they want to get around her.
“It’s Marm, as well you know,” I snapped. “Who are you and who is your lord?”
“I am Hagen Stellason and I have the honour to attend the Avunculus as a secretary, Marm.”
A secretary? Rubbish. What would Great Uncle Nate be doing with a secretary?
Hagen bowed again and gave me a smile full of meaning as he rose from the bow. “Might I have the great pleasure of asking for a flower from you, Marm?
Cheek of the fellow. Did he think lust was going to blind me to his lies? Yet I love an audacious man, and he was handsome.
“Not tonight,” I said, suppressing a smile. I turned and pointed up the hall to the staircase that led to the servants’ quarters. “You’re on the wrong floor. That is the way to your room. Or”—I pointed to the closed door of the great hall—“back to the great hall if you wish to win a flower tonight.”
“Yes, Marm. Thank you, Marm,” I sensed irony in his tone, the rooster. I watched him climb all the way up the stairs to the attic before I went into my own room.
“Shadow,” I called softly as I put the buckets down on the floor. “Where are you, ghost?” There came a knocking on the wall under the window and when I pushed open the panel, the ghost tumbled out at my feet.
“You did not tell me how to open it,” he panted. “I couldn’t get out.”
I made soothing noises and showed him where to press the inside of the panel.
“I don’t suppose you saw who came in, did you?” I asked, wondering if Hagen had searched my room and why. I often wondered if they thought I was a radical too. Sometimes I even wondered that myself—though I preferred to think that I was simply practical. Let’s face facts; serfdom makes for rubbish farm work.
“No,” snapped Shadow. “There was more than one. The first one was tapping on the walls and I think he found that Lover’s Hide thing. The second scared him off. He was much quieter. I suppose it was lucky I was trapped, because I couldn’t be sure when he left.”
So handsome Hagen had probably been in my room as well. How very thorough of him.
I wondered who the other one was. My heart twitched at the (unlikely, and I knew it was unlikely) thought that Scintillant might have been one of my visitors.
“More action in my bedchamber than I would have expected,” I said, lighting a candle. “Pity I was away. Well I’m going to wash and go to bed. Undo me, will you?”
“No party?” he asked, pulling out the lacing at the back of my body shaper. “I can hear music downstairs.”
“No party,” I said. “Blessing time is really about mundanes seducing mages. Gentry like me are kind of irrelevant. To everything, really.”
“So tell me about this Blessing festival. From your cousin, I got the impression that people have a lot of... um... sexual intercourse during Blessing time.”
“Sexual intercourse,” I echoed, unable to help laughing at the prissy way he’d put it. “You mean they pleasure themselves stupid.” Then I felt mean for laughing, because, after all, he was speaking a language foreign to him, which must be why he often seemed over-formal. So I added, “The Blessing is a fertility festival. People believe it’s easier to conceive a child at this time of year. Certainly this is when the peasants eat the most meat and when they’ve got the best chance of mating with a mage and breeding another mage.” I pulled the shirt over my head. “Do you want any of this water? Where have you gone?”