Isobel Read online

  She wandered for about an hour, looking in rooms and watching people, before she found herself back downstairs where a flow of people into and out of the house caught her attention.

  “Saul,” she said.

  “Hey, girlie,” he said. “You owe me a letter.”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah, I guess I do. How long are you staying?”

  “Just a day,” he said. “We’ll stay the night here, then go back through town and head south again.”

  “One day?” she asked. “All that for one day here?”

  He frowned at her.

  “I thought you’d learned better than that. It isn’t about getting here. It’s about the way here. I’ll take a different route south and get back in time for the stormy season. Keep going south, hit Egypt. Go north again at the season change, be back here around this time next year. Maybe spend a month at home, at some point. We don’t come to stay. We’re traders.”

  She swallowed, and he smiled.

  “You’ve cast your dice, child. They’ve got different gods here. Maybe there’s one or two of them smiling on strangers, these days.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll get cloth out of my bags.”

  It took her about an hour to track down her bags, and another hour after that to settle on words for her mother and father. By that point, the sun was headed for the horizon, and someone came up to find her. The girl intimated by motions that it was dinner time and she was expected downstairs. Andie rolled the letter and stuck it through the tie on her dress, then followed the girl downstairs. The grand room where she had first found Isobel was filled with a great table that was laden over with food. It appeared that many of the villagers had come up for the meal, and that certain members of the staff were also invited to eat. Andie was shown to the seat next to Isobel by a silent man with a bland face, and then she was sitting next to her childhood hero again.

  Who never spoke to her.

  “Where is Rafa?” she asked at one point, but Isobel ignored her. The conversation swirled around her, not with the boisterousness of a Greek table, but with a quiet formality. People spoke quietly to each other, then leaned over their plates to speak to people up or down the table from themselves. The great fireplace was empty; the table was lit by lampstands in the corners of the room and chandeliers overhead. The evenings grew cool here, and a Greek household would have had a rolling fire, especially when there was company.

  There was laughter, contained and polite, and Andie found herself inspecting clothing and mannerisms. The women wore cloaks rather than dresses after the Greek fashion, straight-cut cloth tied at the waist. Isobel’s dress was long and flowing, but still of the heavy, straight cloth. Andie faintly remembered her wearing such things in the first weeks after she and Rafa had arrived. She had eventually converted to Greek draped dresses, and Andie had thought at the time that they suited her. Now, though, the sternness of the cut seemed appropriate.

  The dishes were formed of stone and wood, but intricately cut and shaped. The glasses actually took a knack to use, as they were formed with a lip for drinking, and tended to spill at a different point in rotation than Andie was accustomed to. They used utensils for eating that Andie had never seen before, and she had to model her use of those on those around her. Saul and Eb had no problem with them; Andie was gratified to find that Ben, at least, was as at a loss as she was.

  The meal lasted several hours, and was amazing. Andie wanted to ask what several of the foods were, but no one would answer her.

  It was a long meal.

  At the end, servants came to clear the table and Saul winked at Andie. She walked around the table and handed him her letter.

  “Tell them…” she started, then looked back at Isobel. “Tell them that I arrived well and I’m excited about my prospects here.”

  “You wish you could come with us,” he said.

  “I’d hide in a bag if you offered to smuggle me out,” she said. “I’ve never had more fun.”

  “The trade routes are no place for young women,” he said. “I wouldn’t even think about it. You’ll do fine here. Just remember, she called for you to be here. She may not let it show, but she wants you here.”

  She nodded.

  “Thank you.”

  He winked again, and then he, Eb, and Ben were gone, escorted into another part of the house. The girl who had fetched her to dinner came and found her again and walked her back upstairs, though dark hallways, back to her room. The shutters were open to let moonlight in, as there was no fire, and no other source of light. Her bags were in a pile at the foot of the bed, but Andie left them for the morning, stripping her outer garments and laying in a bed for the first time in weeks. She fell asleep under a rising full moon.

  She didn’t know what woke her, but she found Rafa standing in the narrow sliver of moonlight that still found its way into her room that night, looking out over the forest. She knew it should have caused her to be uneasy, finding him like that, but she was relieved to see him, instead.

  “You came,” he said, not looking at her. “I doubted you would.”

  “You speak Greek to me,” she said. “Isobel said no one was allowed to.”

  The corner of his mouth turned up.

  “Even she has a hard time ordering me to do something,” he said, then looked over at her. Like Isobel, he was unchanged. Stern, stony, handsome. “She was different with you, all those years ago. Do you understand?”

  She shook her head.

  “She’s so cold. So unfeeling. But you melted her once. I need you to do it again. Melt my wife, Andie.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, to say she didn’t remember what she had done, and she didn’t know how to do it again. That if Isobel wouldn’t speak to her, she didn’t know what she was supposed to do, but he turned away, walking with silent feet out of the room.

  It was like being five again, in some ways. She learned new words, but they came to her slowly, like a child. People frustrated her when they spoke too quickly with their strange words and their strange accents, and she filched fruits and vegetables out of the kitchen and spent a lot of time in the barn with Valerie. The other horses came to recognize her as the one with food, and she was at least popular there.

  In the house, the staff were respectful, but not friendly, and her maid struggled with the lack of communication. Andie wanted nothing more than to hear a friendly voice speak Greek.

  Rafa disappeared again, not returning from wherever it was he went for several weeks, and by then Andie, out of a sense of desperation and inevitability, had finally picked up enough household words and common phrases to at least be polite in her ignorance. At dinner, a much smaller event, though a number of the staff still joined them each night, Rafa commented on her acquired vocabulary.

  “Thank you,” she said in Samb. She was told it was a local dialect, that the broader language was called Gutton. She’d asked what it meant, but hadn’t understood the answer.

  Isobel said something about ‘never learn’ in Samb, and Rafa made a face at her.

  “Of all of the languages you’ve learned, you’ve never learned one willingly,” he said. She glared at him and didn’t answer.

  “How do you like it here?” he asked Andie.

  “Why don’t you light fires at night?” she asked. Isobel snorted and Rafa covered a smile with his hand.

  “Because they still think it’s hot at night. It will get much, much colder later in the year.”

  “Everything gets wet at night, if you don’t have a fire,” she said.

  She caught ‘windows’ and ‘open’ from Isobel and Rafa nodded.

  “It will help if you close them.”

  “But the forest is so pretty,” she said. He laughed.

  “You obviously haven’t woken up to bats in your room, yet.”

  “Are they lost?”

  “They live in caves around here. They make their way into the building from time to time, looking for a new p
lace to nest. In certain seasons, they’re impossible to keep out.”

  Another part of the conversation at the table drew him away, and Andie didn’t try to get his attention back. She was picking up more and more of the language, and she was almost able to keep up with simple topics. She didn’t want to seem like she wasn’t trying.

  There were raids on the southern border, and men coming in from the sea, killing fishermen and trying to raid settlements, but apparently the Samb men were hardy, and they fought them back as part of normal life. Rafa took particular interest in these raids, his face darkening as he spoke with one of the soldiers who lived at the castle. Isobel spoke up with strong, dark opinions of her own that Andie was secretly glad she couldn’t understand.

  Her maid collected her at the end of the meal and she went back up to her room, lighting the lampstands with a torch from the hallway and going through her things from the trip from Greece. The girl sat with her, awkward but friendly, and asked questions about a few of them. Andie gave them their Greek names, and the girl told her what they were called in Samb. They laughed over the bad pronunciations and the difficulty they had understanding each other, and too soon the girl told her good night and left. Andie felt like it was the best night she’d had since Saul left.

  She closed the windows before she went to bed, that night.

  She went riding. She did chores. She listened. She learned.

  Galinda, her maid, slowly changed over her wardrobe from the mix of Greek fashion and trail-worthy clothing to Sambian style. At first she found the dress constricting and tight, but with time she came to recognize it as functional and much less difficult to manage than her Greek drapery. It emphasized the individual shape of her body, rather than forming it into a single, socially approved shape with layer upon layer of fabric.

  In her own way, she was happy. She had hoped that she and Isobel would be friends, now that she was no longer a child, and she found the disappointment of that bitter, but Galinda was friendly, and she and Valerie spoke infrequently but for hours about the time they had spent in Greece. Andie told her about her brothers and her sister, telling stories about the trouble the twins got into and how precious her relationship had been with her youngest brother.

  “Why did you come, when Isobel sent for you?” Valerie asked one day.

  Andie shrugged.

  “Because I didn’t want to be assigned a man to marry, and then move into his house and raise his children, without ever having done anything,” she said.

  “And now you’ve done something?” Valerie asked.

  “I’ve done something, I guess,” Andie answered. She shrugged. Valerie gave her a sympathetic look and moved off to make sure that the kitchen was ready for a feast they were holding that night. They were coming to the end of their summer growing season - much shorter here than in Greece - and there was a festival for harvest that Isobel celebrated with the locals. There would be food in abundance, as it had been a good year, and a number of people from town and the surrounding lands would come who Andie had net yet met.

  Galinda found her early in the afternoon and dragged her back to her room to dress and style her hair. Andie hadn’t prepared herself for the amount of attention Galinda intended to give her appearance.

  “Is this night that special?” Andie asked.

  “This is our highest holiday,” Galinda told her. “And the princes will be here.”

  “The princes?”

  “That is why you came, is it not?” Galinda asked, tugging at her hair playfully. “To pick one of them? Some of the local women are furious that Isobel imported a pretty Greek girl to compete with their daughters for them.”

  “Saul brings all kinds of goods, doesn’t he?” Andie mused. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “We’ve been talking about it for weeks,” Galinda said. “It’s been years since we’ve had an eligible woman living here.”

  “Why is that?” Andie asked. “Where are all the children?”

  Galinda shrugged, pulling the brush through Andie’s hair thoughtfully.

  “I grew up here,” she said. “There just came a point where all of us were grown up, and there weren’t any kids younger than us. I don’t know.”

  “Isobel told me that she had a daughter once,” Andie said. Galinda shook her head.

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  Andie followed Galinda back downstairs as the sun began to set, finding the great room transformed with food and decorations. A fire roared in the fireplace, giving the place a cheer that was out of character.

  “Come,” Galinda said, pulling her through the room and toward the front door. “Come watch everyone as they get here.”

  Galinda’s excitement wasn’t unfounded. The guests arrived in good cheer, carrying various gifts of food and decoration, some with pitchers of mead and ale. Andie missed wine, but she wasn’t complaining. The diversity of food they had was still novel to her. Galinda was more taken with what the women wore. Saul apparently did good business here, selling things that would only be worn on this evening and a few like it each year. Andie recognized things she had seen in markets from her trip, many of which she could put a reasonable price to. They were all much more expensive here, and Andie gathered that it took a large quantity of their resources to be able to dress up like this. They laid a spread that rivaled anything her parents had ever assembled, even for the king, and yet the ribbons in their hair and the simple bits of fabric and pottery and stone that they wore on their clothing were aspirational. One thing that they did have in excess was amber.

  “It shouldn’t be this way,” she murmured to Galinda.

  “What’s that?” she asked. Andie shook her head, thinking. At the very tail end of the stream of guests, as Andie’s stomach was beginning to grumble, four men entered, each very distinct from the others, but bearing an unmistakable family resemblance, even to Andie’s foreign eye. Galinda stiffened, and Andie inferred who they were.

  Isobel and Rafa came to the front room to greet the king and his sons. The king was gray-haired and heavyset, a man who had seen work in his day, and whose body was appreciating the ease of late age. The oldest son was tall and thin, with a carefully trimmed beard that revealed sections of his jawline. He walked with a certain sense of intent that reminded Andie of her father and Rafa.

  “It’s traditional,” Galinda whispered to her, “for the sons of the king to take the traditional roles. The soldier, the farmer, and the priest.”

  The middle son, the farmer, had wide shoulders and a beard that covered his entire face. It wasn’t wild like the men in the woods to the south, nor was it trimmed like his older brother’s. His hands, when he offered them to Isobel in greeting, were worn like a workman’s. Andie smiled. She was glad that the sons of the king were something other than warriors and kings-to-be.

  The youngest son was clean-shaven with short hair and quick eyes. He nodded to Isobel but didn’t get too close, fear if Andie read it right, and his eyes darted over at her. He read her face quickly and looked away again and Andie smiled.

  “He looks like an interesting person,” she observed.

  “Aistin?” Galinda asked, shaking her head. “He and Elbing are too serious. I like Laukas better.”

  She motioned at the farmer who was speaking to his father. They glanced up at Andie, and she turned away.

  “Can we go sit?”

  Galinda looked like she was at a loss, but she took Andie’s hand and led her back into the great room and let a steward seat her. The three princes sat directly across from her.

  There was conversation about the harvest and recent raids, and Laukas and Elbing were festive, drinking and toasting in their own ways. Andie could understand why a lot of women would favor Laukas. He had an honesty that men never knew how to fake. Aistin was quiet, watching the table and only speaking when someone asked him a direct question, and then with as few words as possible.

  Attention eventually came to Andie.
/>   “So this is the Greek flower you’ve been hiding away here all summer,” the king said. All three boys turned to look at her and she glanced at Isobel.

  “My command of the language isn’t what it should be,” she said. “I’ve spent the summer learning it.”

  “It’s very good,” Laukas said. “Your accent is very interesting.”

  “How did you get here?” Elbing asked.

  “With a merchant,” she said.

  “Saul brought her,” Isobel said.

  “You had no other escort?” Elbing asked. “Those are dangerous woods to come through without soldiers.”

  “More dangerous if there had been soldiers,” Aistin said. He made eye contact with Andie and looked away, and she grinned.

  “It’s true. They may be rough, but they treated us as…” she paused, looking for the word. Gates, windows, sky. “Guests.”

  Elbing took a drink and nodded.

  “I should be angry that he’s trading with our enemies, but knowing him, he’d simply stop coming here.”

  Andie nodded.

  “In places where they had known thieves watching the roads, they would send guards with us, or send word ahead that we were coming so that the next region…” she paused again, losing the thread of her story in the difficulty of summoning the words.

  “So the next king could escort you from the landline?” Laukas asked, nodding. “I’ve heard of that.”

  She gave him a grateful smile and he bobbed his head to her.

  “Tell us about Greek,” the king said.

  “Greece,” Andie said. “Greeks live in Greece.” It was one of her practice sentences and came across wooden and childish. She rushed on. “They say in Greece that every man is a sailor, whether or not he’s ever seen a …” she looked at Isobel. The woman sighed.