The Border Village

Isolde had a woman’s entire kitchen balanced against her hip, an iron pot nested inside a basket of jarred preserves, when the old man on the porch above her raised his cudgel. He told her plainly he’d use it before he’d leave the house his father built.

“Then you’ll use it on your queen, Tam Ferris, because I’m not leaving without you either.” She set the basket down at the base of the steps, unhurried, the way she’d learned to move around a frightened animal at Thornmoor rather than a frightened man. She suspected the two weren’t so different when it came to it. “I buried three winters of turnips with hands no softer than yours. I’m not above digging you out of this house myself if it comes to that. I’d rather not, because my back’s had enough of digging to last a lifetime.”

Cressida’s maps, delivered two nights before with a note in her cousin’s careful hand, had shown the old river channel running directly beneath Aldwick’s western quarter. That was why the water here had turned first and fastest. It was also why Thane’s engineers were even now diverting what clean flow remained toward the eastern wells instead. The maps had been, infuriatingly, exactly as useful as Cressida promised. Isolde had not yet decided what to do with that.

Tam lowered the cudgel an inch, not in surrender, only in the calculation of a man deciding whether the woman in front of him was bluffing. “They tell me you were dead, girl. Or as good as. Three years in a border keep and now you’re carrying my Nessa’s good pot down my own front steps like you’ve a right to it.”

“I have exactly the right you’re about to give me. In an hour this street won’t hold water fit to drink, and I’d rather argue with you alive than bury you clean.” She held out a hand, not to touch him, only to offer it. “Come down, Tam. Bring what you can carry. Leave the rest, and I’ll see it’s replaced from the crown’s own stores once this is over. Every jar and every pot, on my word rather than a promise you’ve no reason yet to trust.”

He came down eventually, muttering the whole way about a queen with dirt still under her nails giving orders like a fishwife. She chose, deliberately, to hear it as something closer to affection than insult.

She found the sick boy’s mother not long after, kneeling in the mud outside a cart already loaded past sense. She was pressing a wet cloth to a child’s forehead with hands that had clearly stopped believing it would help, some hours before. The boy’s lips had gone a gray-white Isolde remembered from a fever that had taken two children at Thornmoor her first winter there. She knelt without thinking twice about the mud or the gown.

“Let me see him.” She didn’t ask permission so much as make room for it to be given, easing the cloth from the woman’s hand and testing the boy’s forehead herself. The heat of it was worse than she’d braced for. “How long since he drank from the well.”

“Two days, Majesty. Before anyone knew. I’ve given him what clean water I had, and it isn’t enough, it’s never been enough—“ The woman’s voice broke entirely, the exhaustion of days finally finding its way out through the one door fear had left open. “I don’t know how to fix what the water’s done to him. Nobody’s told me how to fix it.”

“Then we’ll find someone who can. Until we do, you’ll let me carry him to the physician’s cart myself. You’ve been carrying him alone long enough for one day.” Isolde lifted the boy before the woman could protest, light as fever always made a child feel, wrong in the hand the way sickness always was. She did not let the tremor in her own arms show in her voice. “You’re not alone in this tonight. Whatever else this crown has failed to give your family, it will not fail you in this.”

She delivered him to the physician’s cart herself, stayed long enough to see the fever draught go down and the boy’s breathing ease from ragged to merely labored. She was wiping river mud from her hands with a rag someone had pressed on her without being asked when she found Thane at the edge of the square. He had a child of his own balanced against one shoulder — the sick boy’s older sister, too frightened to walk the crowded street alone. He was speaking to her in a low, steady voice Isolde had never once heard him use in a council chamber. It was the voice of a man who had clearly done this before, somewhere, long before he’d ever worn a crown he didn’t want.

“You’re good with her,” Isolde said, once he’d handed the girl off to her mother at the cart line and come to stand beside Isolde, both of them watching the square empty by careful degrees.

“I had younger sisters, before the levies took me.” He said it plainly, no weight added to it, though something in his face suggested the plainness cost him something to maintain. “I don’t talk about them often. There’s not much left to say that doesn’t end somewhere I’d rather not take you today, of all days.”

“Another time, then.” She let it sit there, an offer rather than a demand, and watched something in his shoulders ease at being given the choice rather than the question. “The physician says the boy will live, if the fever breaks by morning. His mother’s asking after you specifically. Apparently word’s already traveled that the General carried her daughter himself rather than send a soldier to do it.”

“Word travels faster than water in this town, it seems.” He looked out over the square: carts loading, Hollan’s men forming the column that would walk these people clear of the river’s reach before nightfall. Something in his expression had gone, for a moment, entirely unguarded, no calculation in it at all. “I keep thinking of Aldermarsh. The child’s toy horse, half-swallowed. I told myself, riding here, that I wouldn’t let this town end the same way. I know that’s not entirely within my power to promise. I made the promise anyway.”

“You’ll keep more of it than you think.” Isolde surprised herself with how easily the reassurance came, unrehearsed, offered before she’d fully decided to offer it. “I’ve watched you work this square for three hours, General. You haven’t once managed anyone in it. You’ve helped, the way you did with the farmer on the road to Aldermarsh. I find I no longer know how to hold that against you the way I once managed to hold everything against you at once.”

· · ·Scene break

They ate that evening on an overturned cart at the edge of the evacuation camp: bread and hard cheese and a thin soup. One of the townswomen had insisted on sharing it, despite having far less of it than she could spare. Isolde watched Thane eat without complaint the same meager ration every displaced family in the camp was eating. She found that she had stopped, somewhere in the course of the day, keeping careful count of the distance between them.

He sat close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, and didn’t move away when the cart’s uneven surface tipped them another inch closer. She noted it with the particular clarity that came from a day too exhausted to keep its usual guards fully raised: he had chosen the space beside her rather than the space nearest the fire’s edge. For a man who defaulted to the nearest door in every room she’d ever watched him enter, that was its own quiet admission.

“You didn’t stand by the door tonight,” she said, testing the observation aloud before she’d decided whether she wanted an answer to it.

He went still for a moment, surprised, she thought, that she’d noticed something he likely hadn’t examined closely enough himself to know it showed. “I don’t know that I’ve thought about it in those terms. I suppose I’ve spent three years making sure I could leave any room quickly, in case leaving quickly was what the room needed of me.” He turned the thought over visibly before he finished it. “I don’t feel the same need tonight.”

“No,” she agreed, quiet, and didn’t examine too closely why the admission settled somewhere warm beneath the day’s exhaustion rather than somewhere wary. “Neither, it seems, do I.”

They sat a while in a silence that had stopped, somewhere in the last three hours, being the careful, armed silence of the first weeks of the marriage. It had become something closer to simple company: two people too tired to perform anything for each other. They watched firelight move across a camp full of people who had, for one more night, been kept ahead of the water rather than caught by it. Garrick passed once, close enough to note the distance, or the lack of it, between them, and said nothing at all. That told Isolde more clearly than any comment could have that he’d already noticed something worth not remarking on.

“Tam Ferris asked me, once his temper cooled, whether the queen who dug turnips for three years meant to keep doing this kind of work now that she’s got a crown to hide behind instead.” Isolde watched the fire rather than him, easier that way to say the rest of it plainly. “I told him I hadn’t decided yet what kind of queen I meant to be, only what kind I refused to become. I find that’s still true tonight, though I’ve a clearer sense of the second half of it than I did a month ago.”

“What kind do you refuse to become.”

“The kind who solves a kingdom from behind a desk and never learns the names of the people the solving is meant to save.” She glanced at him then, found him already watching her, no careful distance left in it at all. “I don’t think you’ve become that kind either, General, whatever the court still says about the manner of your rising. I watched you carry a frightened girl through a crowded street today because it needed doing, not because anyone would think to praise you for it.”

His expression opened at that. Not the quick, guarded flicker she’d grown used to reading and dismissing, but something slower, allowed to stay a moment longer before he answered. “I’ve been called a great many things by this court in three years. No one’s called me that in longer than I can remember.”

“Then I’ll say it again, so you know it wasn’t an accident of the hour.” She held his gaze, steady, aware of how close his shoulder sat to hers, and chose, deliberately, not to move away from it. “You did well today, Thane. Not as a general. As a man doing the actual work of saving people, one frightened child and one stubborn old man at a time. I don’t offer that kind of thing lightly, so don’t waste it wondering whether I meant it.”

“I won’t waste it.” His voice had gone rough, low, pitched for her alone against the noise of the camp settling around them. “I don’t think I’ve earned very much of what you’ve given me tonight. I mean to be careful with it regardless.”

Neither of them moved to close the last small distance between them, though for one held breath it felt entirely possible that either might. Isolde looked back to the fire instead, and let the moment pass unclaimed rather than spent. Some part of her understood, with a certainty she hadn’t expected to feel this early or this plainly, that whatever this had become was worth waiting to be sure of before either of them reached for it.

“Tomorrow,” she said instead, “we finish moving what’s left of Aldwick’s stores before the water reaches the eastern wells too. Sleep, General. I find I’d rather have you useful in the morning than sentimental tonight.”

“Understood,” he said, and the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile — the closest thing to one she’d seen from him since the wedding. Neither of them said anything further. They sat shoulder to shoulder at the edge of a saved town, watching a fire burn down toward morning.