Isobel Read online

“I found it,” Andie said.

  “What would you have done with it?”

  Andie wasn’t sure what the right answer was. She waited to see if Isobel would give her a clue, then shrugged.

  “Played with it and let it go.”

  “Have you ever killed anything?”

  Andie nodded. Bugs mostly, things that bit and pinched and startled her. She killed a mouse once that the cat was playing with. She’d hidden it in her room until it had begun to stink and Korinna had found it. The girl had thought it had just died, and Andie had avoided being punished for keeping it. She might have offered that as an explanation, come to think of it.

  “You have very pretty things,” Isobel said finally, then looked over at the nest Andie had built for them. “And you take very good care of them.”

  Andie grinned. It had taken her a while to figure out how to build a cave for them that wouldn’t fill in with sand in the weeks between her visits. She’d lost a bit of purple corral that way.

  “You should put them away, now, to keep them safe,” Isobel said, standing. “I want to swim.”

  Andie nestled the treasures back into their hole and covered them, then stood aside as Isobel pulled off her long dress, revealing the light chiton she wore under her draped dress. She looked up and down the beach, then unbuttoned and unbelted that, glancing at Andie with an amused defiance, then went running into the waves. Andie stripped and ran after her.

  They played in the water until Andie’s fingers had pruned and her teeth chattered. At some point, Isobel’s hair pins came loose, and she threw them up onto the beach, letting her hair drift around her as Andie dove for shells. Andie thought she looked like a water nymph, with her hair drifting around her like that. Finally, Isobel marched back out of the water and collected her hair pins, redressing as Andie hugged herself and shivered. She took a length of cloth out of the basket and wrapped Andie in it, rubbing her dry.

  “Valerie is going to be upset with me,” Isobel said, piling her hair back up on top of her head.

  “Valerie?” Andie asked.

  “The girl who did your hair. I’ve made a mess of mine.”

  Her hair had taken on a frantic shape, but Andie kind of liked it. She looked over at the sun as it headed for the mountains, and her stomach grumbled.

  “What do you think is for dinner?” Andie asked.

  “Let’s go see,” Isobel answered, arranging the pile of flowers and stones back on top of the used linens and standing. Andie walked at her side all the way back to the house.

  “She’s a witch, I tell you,” Charis said.

  “She’s just a good woman,” Helene answered, “though a stern one. Have you ever seen her smile?”

  Andie wondered at that. She didn’t think Isobel was stern so much as sad, though when she thought about it, she couldn’t figure out what the woman had to be sad about. She had a beautiful husband, beautiful hair, and the tallest, prettiest horse Andie had ever seen. Grown ups were funny.

  Andie resolved that she was going to try to make Isobel smile. Every day. For as long as she and Rafa stayed.

  They went back to the beach a dozen times that summer, during the heat of the day when Isobel couldn’t stand the sweltering humidity at the house any longer. Elissa’s fevers finally broke late that summer and she would sit in the great room by the fire, looking thin and pale, but very much in charge of her household. The neighbors stopped coming by for days at a time, and the household regained some regularity.

  The raids increased in frequency, though.

  Rafa recruited men from other nearby estates and formed a militia that did rounds each night. Rafa was always at the head of the bands of de facto soldiers, hunting down the pillaging men and cleaning up the messes when they were too late. Someone said that fires and drought had driven lions and wolves down out of the high mountains and the central plains to the feed on the mountain men’s flocks. The nearby estates had their shepherds keeping the flocks low much earlier in the season than normal. Many days, the yard would be a chaos of sheep and goats as the shepherds stopped in for a meal or to have one of their charges seen to.

  In the fall, as the harvest was coming in and Rafa continued to lead his nightly raids, Isobel would help Elissa see to the operation of the household in the mornings, and then she and Andie would ride into town, Andie on her pony and Isobel on her great black charger, and sit above the docks, watching the horizon.

  If it was just going to be a season’s war, they would be home any day. Otherwise, Lykos wouldn’t be home until at least spring. They would encamp and settle in for a long, wet winter and attack again in the spring, keeping their enemies from planting their crops for the following year.

  It would also mean that it would be up to the household staff to get the crops planted the following spring by themselves, with the greater portion of the men away.

  Isobel would buy Andie fruit at the market and they would sit on rocks and wait. Lykos had only been home for two of Andie’s winters.

  “Why a man like that, with all his prestige and all his money, goes to war, I will never know,” Isobel said.

  “He likes it,” Andie said. “He says that the battlefield is where men are men.”

  “We say that men are men in the bedroom,” Isobel said. Andie frowned at her, and Isobel covered her mouth as she smiled. Even if Andie didn’t understand why she had smiled, it counted.

  “Rafa likes war, too,” Isobel said.

  “Why? Does he leave you like my father leaves Mama?”

  “Not when I can help it,” Isobel murmured.

  Andie had wondered for a long time.

  “Why did you come?”

  “Rafa fought with Lykos in a war far, far away from here, before Lykos met your mother. When he heard that Lykos was going out again, he decided we should come help Elissa run the house.”

  Andie chewed her apple thoughtfully, throwing the core over to Lily.

  “What is your house like?” Andie asked.

  “The forests are very old,” Isobel said. “And dark. It’s quieter than here, and cold.”

  Andie shivered.

  “It must be scary, with all the bears.”

  “Bears?”

  “White ones?” Andie reminded her, and Isobel laughed. It was an amazing, hearty noise that startled Andie. She wasn’t accustomed to Isobel making anything but subtle happy noises.

  “I’ve never seen one,” Isobel told her.

  “That’s sad,” Andie said, turning to look out at the ocean again.

  Lykos didn’t come home that day, or the next.

  Or the next.

  The seasons changed, the storms came, the seas grew rough, and Andie found herself stranded in the house again. No one would question her if Isobel were going with her, but the frequent, cold rain kept everyone in, camped around fires telling stories.

  Andie liked winter. There was little work to be done, so most everyone had free time, and there was lots of talking. Lots to listen to, lots of rumors and secrets and stories of things that happened long ago before she was born.

  Isobel sat by the fire in her room and played music or embroidered linen while Andie lay on the bed or played with a doll. Rafa would be there, occasionally, listening to them talk while he did his work. Andie looked, once, to see what he had on his desk, but the writing was a scrawl that made no sense to her, and she abandoned it.

  The raids had stopped as the mountain men were stuck up in the mountains in the snow, and Rafa disbanded his troupe of men, staying in in the evenings and telling stories Andie had never heard.

  Everyone forgot which stories they had told her, or thought she was dumb and forgot that they’d told her, so Andie heard the same stories over and over again most winters, especially from Charis, but Rafa had all new ones, and he never told the same one twice. There were heroes and giants and clever little girls, the same as the stories she was used to, but they were set, always, in a great white world where giant bears were always lurking behind
trees. Andie asked lots of questions, and Rafa would nod as he sharpened the edge on his sword or repaired fishing nets, and give her very thoughtful, very grown-up answers to her questions. Sometimes she thought he was teasing her, from the smiles passed around among the adults at the fire, but mostly she thought he treated her like a grown-up, rather than a child. She grew less and less afraid of him, spending many evenings in the late winter sitting in his lap, drifting to sleep as he hummed.

  In due course, Talos and Rhesus started to crawl. They were fat babies, now, all smiles and vomit, and Andie would roll them over on their backs and blow raspberries on their soft baby stomachs to make them laugh. The wet nurse eyed her always with suspicion, and it wasn’t entirely uncalled for. When she got bored and the babies were getting too much attention, she would pinch them under their armpits to make them cry, and then run to Isobel’s room. She also developed a habit - which even she couldn’t explain - of blaming the boys when she got caught red-handed stealing food before dinner or being somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be.

  “The babies did it,” she would say and dash away. Charis was quick, and she got a lot of spankings that winter, but Helene let her go. She heard the woman saying that Andie got little enough attention as it was, for that much to go to the boys.

  She spent a lot of time in the barn, pulling a comb through Lily’s mane and letting stable boys show her how to clean her feet and look at her teeth. They were nice to her because she stole bread from the kitchen and brought it out to them while she fed Lily vegetables swiped out of the cellar. The pony was naturally rolly, but she put on an extra layer of fat over the winter with the special treatment she got from Andie and her lack of exercise.

  On fine days Andie went out into the woods, exploring and turning over rocks. She’d come back with muddy feet and hands, and smears of dirt across her face and usually on her dress. Elissa was perpetually exasperated, but Andie got more than one smile out of Isobel when she came back, once because she’d fallen into a pond that hadn’t been there weeks before, and another time when she’d had to come home early because she’d gotten a tree branch stuck in her hair and couldn’t work it loose and kept catching it on things. After the normal length of time standing in front of Elissa and Charis, listening to what was expected of her as a young lady and Charis’ dark premonitions of Andie as an old maid - what kind of man wants to marry a woman who gets trees stuck in her hair? - Isobel had taken her back to her room and she and Valerie had brushed her hair flat and then braided it in a forest of interwoven plats that lay flat against her head. Valerie snapped several of the smaller twigs off of the branch and wove them into the braids at Andie’s temples, calling her the forest princess.

  “Go change your clothes now, so Helene will serve you dinner,” Isobel had said. Andie wore the braids to bed and found the twigs on her pillow the next morning. She put them in her box of treasures that she kept under her bed.

  Spring was her favorite season.

  The mountains were still cold and snowy, so the herds were nearby, and lambs and goat kids were everywhere. Lykos had bred Elissa’s mare and her foal came out splashed with color, but with her mother’s beautiful head.

  “What will you name her?” Elissa asked Andie, bouncing Talos on her hip the morning after the birth. Andie went into the stall with the exhausted mare and wobbly foal, sitting in the straw and stroking the mare’s head. The animal whickered, looking for carrots. Andie hadn’t come empty-handed; Lily would just have to go without, this trip.

  “It’s a girl?” she asked.

  “It’s a filly,” Elissa answered.

  She wanted to call the tiny animal Isobel, but it didn’t seem to suit her. She was too small and frail, and would likely never be tall, though she would be slight, like her dam. Andie ran her hand down the filly’s thin front leg and picked up her foot, holding her up as the motion unbalanced her, then setting the hoof back down in the straw.

  “Can I call her Valerie?” she asked her mother.

  “Who is Valerie?” Elissa asked.

  “Isobel’s maid,” Andie said.

  “The girl with the blond hair?” Elissa asked. Andie realized that the girl hardly spoke in the common room, and she ate with the servants; Elissa may have never met her.

  “Yes.”

  Elissa smiled.

  “I think you should ask her, but I think it’s a lovely idea.”

  The foal snuffled Andie’s hair, then went to nurse, and Andie ran into the house.

  “Valerie!” she called from the front room, then darted down the hallway to toward Isobel’s rooms. “Valerie!”

  The girl stepped into the hallway, frowning as she wiped her hands dry on her apron.

  “What is it?” she asked, her accent still thick.

  “Mama’s mare had a baby and she’s beautiful and mama asked me what I wanted to name her and I think you’re beautiful, and I think I didn’t know what to name her, but she made me think of you and she’s so pretty, and she has these tiny little legs, and you have to see her, you have to see her, you have to see her,” Andie said, grabbing Valerie’s hand. The girl slid away and returned with Isobel.

  “She says you don’t make any sense,” Isobel said.

  Andie dragged Isobel out to the barn and stood with her chin resting on the chest bar enclosing the stall. Someone had stacked lumber outside of the stall to keep the foal from wandering out, and as Isobel and Valerie came to stand behind her, Andie squatted, folding her arms across the pile of wood to watch the foal.

  “That’s a small horse,” Isobel said.

  “Mama said I can name her,” Andie said. Valerie made a questioning noise, and Isobel answered in her strange language.

  “We’re both still confused,” Isobel said. Andie licked her lips and stood up, tangling her fingers behind her back.

  “I’d like to name her Valerie,” she said. She turned. “She’s so pretty.”

  There was another quick exchange of foreign words, and Isobel spoke again.

  “Valerie says she’d be honored, as long as the small horse isn’t a boy.”

  Andie laughed, then slid under the bar to go into the stall with the foal. Valerie said something urgent-sounding, and Isobel answered in a soothing tone as Andie picked up each of the foal’s feet the way the stable boys had shown her, then pulled a comb out of her pocket and ran it down the foal’s tuft of mane. The filly darted away, careening into the wall of the stable, and Andie ran to hide behind the mare, peeking around the Arabian’s narrow chest to see the foal. She dropped her head and bobbed it several times, then cantered around behind the mare. Andie ducked under the mare’s neck and peeked around to find the foal confused. She giggled, and the foal wiggled its ears and chased her again.

  They played for a few minutes, and then the mare nudged Andie away and wouldn’t let her near the foal again. Andie retreated and walked back to the house with Isobel and Valerie. Isobel and Valerie spoke in their language, and Andie danced and made up a song.

  Spring was a good season.

  As the heat of summer descended, Elissa told Andie that the half-Arabian foal was to be hers, but that if she was going to have a young lady’s horse, she would have to start behaving like a young lady. She was given household responsibilities, particularly ones involving caring for the twins. At nine months old, they had a habit of making a break for it on all fours when the wet nurse wasn’t looking, and they needed someone to entertain them at mealtimes. When they were together, they didn’t care for Andie; they were the best of friends and gave every indication that they would be holy terrors when they got their feet underneath them, but they quickly got lonely when the other was eating. Andie would make noises at them and wiggle her fingers, or blow raspberries on their bellies and laugh with their delicious baby laughs, but she often couldn’t wait to be done with them, so she could finish the rest of her chores and seek out Isobel.

  Isobel was no happier with the heat than she had been the previous year, and they ofte
n went swimming or walking along the ocean. Elissa and Charis disapproved, but neither of them were willing to argue with Isobel.

  No one was willing to argue with Isobel.

  A few times, Rafa joined them, and he and Isobel would talk about long-ago days, before Andie was born.

  “We were here for a long time,” Rafa said one day. “I’ve missed it.”

  “It’s too hot,” Isobel said flatly.

  “Did you live in town?” Andie asked. Rafa shook his head, eyes scanning the horizon in an unseeing kind of way.

  “No, we lived a long way from here, but the people haven’t changed. As different as they think they are, they haven’t changed.”

  A crab scuttled down the beach toward the water and Andie squealed, running after it. She heard Isobel and Rafa speak softly after that, but she was taken with her new small friend. She gave it bits of shell or seaweed to hold, carrying it by a stray length of twine for a bit until it let go and dropped back into the sand. Andie picked it back up and, eyeing a seagull, carried it down to the water and threw it a short distance into the waves. She ran back up the beach where Isobel and Rafa had found a fallen tree to sit on.

  “Are you hungry, little one?” Rafa asked. Andie frowned. She didn’t like it when he called her little one, but her stomach was grumbling. She went with food over dignity.

  “Yes.”

  “You want a ride back to the house?”

  She grinned and laughed, climbing up onto his back. He took off at a trot down the beach as she laughed, the sound of it coming in hiccups as she bounced. He slowed when they hit the treeline to let Isobel catch up.

  “Do you have kids, Rafa?” Andie asked.

  “No,” he said. “Not really.”

  She looked at Isobel.

  “Why not?”

  “I had a daughter, once, before I met Rafa, but she died with her father,” Isobel said. “I’m not interested in starting over.”

  Andie put her head down on Rafa’s shoulder, overwhelmed briefly with a sense of sadness for the woman, but quickly distracted by the warmth of Rafa’s shoulder under her face. He wore soft linen compared to her father, and he had a nice gait across the uncleared ground. He started to hum, and she drifted off to sleep.