“That will be your last chain, unless you mean to start laying rubies yourself, like a Yezi goose,” said Tiffen around a mouthful of pins. “You ask me, you need it more on the black brocade.”
“Yes, it’s too dark, too dark…” Magne fretted, glancing from the offending garment to Remin’s glowering face. The black brocade had no slashed sleeves or lace or silver braid to enliven it, which was exactly why Remin liked it.
Ophele thought him handsome no matter what he wore. The final reason she attended these fittings was because when he was dressed as the Duke of Andelin, she could hardly take her eyes off him and frequently trailed off midsentence. Dressed in a dark blue doublet with a stiff collar framing his strong throat, she could sympathize with Master Didion; Reminlookedlike he belonged in a painting. He looked like someone’s ancestor that they would still be telling stories about, hundreds and hundreds of years from now.
“It itches,” he complained.
“But there won’t be anyone else in the whole capital who looks as nice,” she whispered back, smoothing the lace so it was a little less scratchy, and colored like a strawberry when he stole a kiss.
“There will be at least one other person,” he said with an approving glance at her ensemble, and unwittingly proved Mionet’s contention that even the most unpleasant prospect was more tolerable when one was wearing a pretty gown.
***
“It’s not possible for a live fish to carry poison, is it?”
Miche’s question emerged in white puffs, floating over the dark water of the Brede.
“I beg you not to repeat that question in His Grace’s presence,” replied Juste. The Coldest Knight did not allow his teeth to chatter. He kept them clenched instead, the hard bone of his jaw jutting as he cautiously moved the oars of their rowboat, testing his healing shoulder.
There were a dozen fish traps in the small inlet of the river west of Tresingale, the same place where Remin had taught Ophele to do laundry. It took three or four pounds of fishper mealto sate His Grace’s appetite, so twice a day Juste and Miche rowed out to haul in bass, trout, catfish, and walleye from the traps. There was one long, sharp-toothed specimen that kept getting into the traps and eating all the fish.
“I imagine if it can’t kill the fish, it’s not likely to hurt Rem,” Miche said, tossing the empty trap back into the water and tucking his reddened hands into his armpits. “I’m half-tempted to let him try one of the biting ones.”
“The last thing we need is for him to start thinking about where the fish are coming from,” Juste admonished. He had even less sense of humor about Remin’s food than Remin. And it wasn’t that Miche didn’t take the matter seriously, or he wouldn’t have kicked a woman out of his bed before dawn to wade out into an icy river to catch his lord’s breakfast.
Surely he was permitted to at least find it funny.
“If you were a fish, you’d be one of these,” he informed Juste, wrestling one of the long toothy ones out of the trap.
“The fishermen from Isigne say those are good eating.”
“Once you get past the fangs and armor plates,” Miche retorted, and smacked the fish against the prow before it could whip around and bite him.
It was a decent haul for the morning. The sky was just lightening as they trudged up the hill to the manor house, Miche clutching the bucket of fish while Juste led the way with a lantern. It would be weeks before Wen was on his feet—a man his age didn’t bounce back from eight stab wounds all at once—which meant the task of gutting and scaling the fish fell to them.
There were some downsides to being Knights of the Brede that no one ever talked about.
Sitting on a bench outside Juste’s cottage, the two men pulled out their belt knives and set to their smelly work. Usually, it was Remin himself who came out to collect his breakfast, but that morning Ophele appeared around the corner of the house, picking her way lightly over the treacherous, icy ground.
“You’re about early, my lady,” Miche remarked, rising to steer her safely to the bench. “Mind that icy bit there.”
“I woke up early,” she said, surveying the steaming pile of fish guts with wrinkle-nosed fascination. “I’ve never seen fish being…prepared.”
“I imagine most people would prefer to keep it that way,” observed Miche as he beheaded one. “We’re nearly done.”
“It is a simple dissection, my lady, as we did with the devil’s quill, and the goat,” explained Juste, extending his knife for her inspection. “This one was female. See the eggs?”
“The little red things?”
“Those are a delicacy in Navatsvi,” Miche remarked, watching with a strange and lonely contentment as Juste acquainted her with the anatomy of a trout. It reminded him of a similar lecture from his own father, when he was a boy. “You have to cut out the innards, or the fish will taste foul when you cook it.”
“Like chicken and sheep,” Ophele agreed. “I watched a sheep being butchered. Juomen at the cookhouse said it’s easier once their heads are off and they can’t look at you. Is that bit the heart?”
Miche had to look down to suppress a smile as she peppered Juste with questions, absorbing this new aquatic knowledge with the same earnestness she applied to all her other studies. Juste often bemoaned the deadly creature she might have been, if she had been properly raised, but Miche liked her just fine as she was.
And she was plenty hazardous already, in her own way.
“Thank you both for getting up so early, and in the cold,” she said when they were done, rising with the basket of fish filets in her hands. Juste had gone to dispose of the inedible portions. “Would you like to come up for supper tonight? Remin is doing so much better, and it only seems fair, if it’s the two of you having to go…col…lect…them…”
