“I hope you are well, Your Grace,” he said in his quavering old man’s voice as he sat back down, settling his luxuriant white beard. He had gotten a little meat on his bones over the last month under Genon’s care, and Ophele said the brother had been very helpful with the refugees from Meinhem.
“I am,” Remin replied, producing the books he had borrowed from under the safety of his cloak. “Thank you for these. Her Grace had many questions.”
And objections.
“I will be pleased to answer them, as best I may,” Brother Oleare replied.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Remin braced himself. “There was no cleric in Aldeburke. She would like some regular instruction. From the beginning.”
“The lady hadnoinstruction?” The brother’s scanty eyebrows went up. It was quite shocking, especially for a daughter of the House of Agnephus; very nearly blasphemous all by itself.
“No.”
“There…there are many these days who do not revere the stars,” Brother Oleare said, with a visible effort to hide his dismay. “I will offer my humble best, Your Grace.”
“I will be with you when you do,” Remin replied. It was partly to see that the cleric didn’t fill Ophele’s head with a lot of nonsense, and partly to make sure that Ophele didn’t shock the old man too badly with her questions. But in the spirit of full disclosure… “The people of this valley deserve a properly pious lord. I have never had a close relationship with the Temple.”
That was an understatement. For most of his life, representatives of the Temple had actively shunned him. Remin’s frown deepened as he met Brother Oleare’s dark gaze, daring him to offer some excuse, or worse yet, some polite evasion to avoid the subject entirely. He would have respected the Temple more if they had had the courage to just excommunicate him. It was cowardly to tell him he was a child of heaven and then deny him support at every turn.
“I will aspire to bring you both closer to the stars, Your Grace,” said Brother Oleare, which was a distinction Remin greatly appreciated.
Most of his other work was concentrated in the vicinity of the North Gate, speaking to the men on guard, observing the progress of construction on the gatehouse—temporarily suspended by snow—and reviewing Master Guisse’s plans for additional reinforcements to the wall, to ensure that no new devils were likely to come bursting through it, come spring. He lent his own hands to shoveling again, to keep the men from complaining about it, and when he could no longer feel his fingers, he went to visit Auber, who kept his cottage among the farmers of the still-nameless north road.
“We’re all doing well enough. I’ll put on a kettle,” Auber added as Remin sneezed. “It’s good that we had so much forest to clear over the summer and fall; there’s enough firewood to last the winter and then some. I’ve had some of the boys hauling it nearer to the cottages, and we’ve been taking it in turns to fetch food from the stores for the day’s cooking. That is a bit of ahassle, Rem. If the soldiers weren’t digging us out twice a day, I don’t know how we’d manage it.”
“We’ve had some carpenters making sledges,” Remin mused. It was a fair complaint; a mile was a long way to walk in a blizzard, and that was just one way. “They could make a few more. And Miche brought back more than two dozen horses from Aldeburke, we could spare a few to pull them.”
“Some of those horses might have seen him hanged for a horse thief,” Auber replied with a flicker of humor. “I don’t have Huber’s eye, but there’s some good blood there, unless I’m much mistaken.”
“Be careful with the blooded ones, then.” It was a good thought. They were working to improve the quality of their livestock in general, and in time, Remin meant for Andelin horses, cattle, and sheep to be the envy of the Empire. There was good grazing in the valley.
Auber updated him on the activities of the farmers while Remin warmed his hands around a hot toddy, and then they went to look in on the neighbors themselves. Dimly, Remin remembered his father making similar unannounced visits to his smallfolk; he had always said there was nothing like looking with his own eyes.
Though now that he was trying it himself, Remin wondered if his father had really lingered. Most of them looked so nervous to find the Duke of Andelin on their doorsteps, it seemed only merciful to refuse the offer of tea.
“There are a half-dozen widows living in these cottages,” Auber explained as they crunched through the snow, breaking a path from the cottage doors to the road. “I’ve had some of the older boys looking in on them to make sure they’ve enough firewood and have help for heavy work, like hauling water. Another well nearby wouldn’t have gone amiss, but we were in a hurry, building the cottages…”
So saying, he knocked on the next door, and gave courteous greetings to the young woman who answered, with two little ones clinging to her skirts.
“No, sir knight, we are quite well, thank you,” she said, opening the door a little wider to offer Remin a curtsy. “Your Grace.”
“Madam.” Remin tried not to frown, but the two children instantly hid behind her anyway, and the smaller one started to cry.
They received a warmer reception at the next house. A boy of seven or so cracked the door open, looked upward, and flung it wide with a shout.
“Auber!” He catapulted at Auber, who caught him handily enough that Remin suspected it was not the first time. “Did you come here to see mama again? Mama!”
“No, no, His Grace is here,” Auber said quickly as Remin eyed him. It seemed Auber’s doom to be betrayed by children. “Careful, Vinzetin, you know you’re not well yet. I thought you were meant to be helping the boys next door.”
“We were gonna, but then Mistress Chenet said—” the boy began, but Remin would never find out what Mistress Chenet had said, because a thin but very pretty woman appeared behind the boy, with the look of a fresh scrub about her face.
“Sir knight,” she said, looking up at Auber, then spotted Remin and flushed, dropping a curtsy and pressing the boy into a bow. “Good afternoon, Your Grace. Vinzetin, this is the duke, you must mind your manners.”
“Good afternoon,” said Remin, immensely interested, and glad to sit by another fire. Auber and the woman exchanged only the most banal possible conversation, enlivened by colorful interjections from the boy, and it lasted exactly the duration of a teacup. But Remin watched the interaction with amusement,nonetheless. There was a remarkable amount of blushing and stuttering going on.
“We had better continue, if we wish to check on everyone else, Your Grace,” Auber said in desperation, and Remin allowed himself to be shepherded back into the cold, pausing to offer a farewell to Vinzetin’s mother. Both Auber and the lady had been too flustered for an introduction, and Remin had wanted to see how long it would take for one of them to realize it.
“They were very pleasant,” he observed as soon as they were safely back on the road, and the door to the cottage shut behind them. “The boy seemed to know you well.”
