“My lady, please forgive me if I overstep,” she said as she went to bar the door, resisting the urge to stick a chair under the knob. “But I was married for quite some time, and I must say, I found that if I allowed certain behaviors to persist in my husband, they only grew worse.”
Duchess Andelin blinked.
“You mean Remin?”
“Yes.” Mionet sat down and added an aggressive spoonful of sugar to her tea. “We are hardly likely to be attacked here in broad daylight, with servants and builders all over the house and the whole hilltop crawling with people devoted to His Grace.”
“Oh, I know,” the lady said unexpectedly, as if she were surprised that Mionet thought otherwise. “They’re not for me. The guards, I mean.”
“I—beg pardon?”
“I don’t mind,” Duchess Andelin said, and there was a curious look on her young face, unhappy and too wise. “This is what he needs right now.”
Chapter 4 – A Cheerful Busybody
“It’s the same shape as the one in the other book,” Ophele said from her place in Remin’s arms, leaning comfortably against his bare chest as they read together by candlelight. “It just looks so familiar…”
Her eyes gleamed in the soft light, shuttling back and forth over the page to absorb the rather graphic details. Remin had had doubts about delivering such a…frank text, particularly with the illustrations, but his first attempt at explaining procreation had not been a smashing success. Ophele had listened with rapt attention to the scriptures Brother Oleare had lent them, a rather romantic description of her lower abdomen as a garden with two large flowers that blossomed every month, and Remin himself the very large bee coming to fertilize them, and then ungratefully demanded anatomical diagrams.
“It wasn’twrong,”Remin remarked, examining them with her. “In a metaphorical sense.”
“No, but I saw the chickens in the kitchen after Azelmawas done with them,” Ophele replied, with a scathing glance at her own flat belly. “Iknewthere wasn’t a garden in there.”
Even with all his worries, she still made him laugh. Remin laid his palm on the metaphorical garden, where, if the stars granted it, a child might have been planted.
“It’s not a bad thought,” he said, tracing the shapes of the relevant objects with his finger. It was an exaggeratedushape, the curve of her ovaries and womb, though even the anatomical diagrams still relied on Ospret Far-Eyes’ sacred metaphors to explain their function. Every month, the fertile soil of her womb would till itself, so that the seed he planted within her would grow into a child. His lips brushed her temple. “You’re not sore at all?”
“No.” She granted him an absent kiss, her attention on the book. “IknowI’ve seen this symbol before. Does it look familiar to you? Look, it’s in the other book Brother Oleare gave us, too.”
“Then isn’t that where you saw it?” Remin asked reasonably, glancing at the two books and returning to his previous occupation, trailing a line of kisses down her jaw and over the smooth skin of her neck. Lately she had taken to dabbing on the perfume he liked at night, a warm and spicy invitation that was very hard to resist.
“I don’t think so…” She nibbled her lower lip. Obligingly, he turned his head to help her, and saw the smile curve her soft mouth.
“You said you weren’t tired,” he reminded her, as his hand slid downward from her belly to the opening between her legs.
“Well, I’m not,” she whispered back, setting the books aside, and then her eyes widened and she snatched one back up and slipped out of his arms, lithe as a cat.
“Ophele—”
“It’s here,” she said excitedly, pattering over to the washstand, cloaked in nothing but the clouds of her hair. “Look, Remin!”
“What is?”
“The tapestry,” she said, pulling it away from the wall and turning it toward him. “Look, see the shape of the swans? Their heads curve outward in opposite directions, and their necks, and their bodies together, it’s the exact shape as the one in Ospret’s garden, and oh—look! It’s all along the border too, and in the leaves…”
Tugging the sheet over his hips, Remin sat up and turned to the page with Ospret’s garden, with that symbol meticulously illuminated in gold paint.
“It is,” he said, looking from the page to the swans. He wasn’t entirely sure what to think of it.
“It’s a fertility tapestry,” she said, awed. “That was our wedding gift…”
“Come back to bed before you take a chill,” Remin said, raking a hand through his hair that made it stand up in black tufts. It was disconcerting to realize that the tapestry lovingly given by Duke and Duchess Ereguil effectively hadmake babies make babies make babieswritten all over it, but he couldn’t repress a smile as Ophele returned to him, delighted with her discovery. As soon as she was near enough, his hand shot out to seize her and drag her back under the sheets, giggling and squirming away from him for the delight of being subdued.
Inevitably, this turned into play of another sort, and soon she was sighing beneath him, her body rising into his hands as he caressed her curves, squeezing the satisfying roundness of her hips.
“Remin,” she breathed, her hands gliding along his sides, urging him over her.
“Wife,” he whispered back, and sheathed himself inside her.
