Chapter 260: You Have a Fountain! [1]

After the dinner, Ulrich retreated to his office.

He did not light more than one lamp. He sat behind the broad oak desk with the half-finished training schedule still lying face down where he had left it that afternoon, and for a while he did not turn it over.

He was thinking.

Not about the Sea Lords, or the winter term, or the thousand men Fabian would have to find on the rolls. Those were problems with edges. He knew where to take hold of them.

He was thinking about the dinner.

Ordinarily, a table was the easiest ground in the world to hold. Ulrich had sat across all kinds of people, and he had never once left a table without the conversation having gone where he wished it to go. His presence did most of the work. The rest was done by a voice that did not rise, arguments that did not bend, and the simple fact that in nearly every domain a noble could be tested in, from tariffs to swordsmanship to the finer points of rune theory, he knew more than the person across from him and was willing to let them discover it.

Put five nobles at that table tonight and he would have carved the evening to his liking without setting down his fork.

But it had not been five nobles.

It had been three witches, a half-Elf, and Meera.

And Meera, alone, he could manage. He had known what she would do the moment she rose from the settee that afternoon, and he had known she would take the far chair at dinner, and he had known she would say something at that table designed to make him regret inviting her to it.

What he had not known was what the girls would do.

And he still didn’t know what had been happening during the whole dinner.

So, finding himself on ground he did not know, he had done the only sensible thing.

He had stopped speaking and watched.

It had not helped. If anything, the longer he watched, the less he understood.

The single thing that had been perfectly clear, from the first spoonful of broth to the last frown, was that Meera possessed a considerable talent for provoking the girls. She had never once dropped that pleasant, aristocratic tone. She had not said a single word a chaperone could have objected to. And she had, with great precision and evident enjoyment, made three of the four of them turn colors.

She had been teasing them.

That much even he could see.

What he could not see was why the teasing had landed so hard. He did not have the whole of it. But he could gather the shape of a few reasons, and he turned them over now in the lamplight.

He gave Meera a great deal of credit, and he gave it openly. He listened to her. He let her sit at the end of his table and speak as she pleased.

And there was the other thing. The simpler thing.

Meera was older. She was, by any honest measure, at the height of her beauty, and she carried it the way she carried everything else, as though it were a ship under her feet. The sisters were fifteen and fourteen and twelve. Ceres was fourteen. When one was that age, one looked at a woman like that and wished, with a strength that had no words, to be grown already.

Ceres had said as much to her plate.

That, at least, Ulrich understood. That was ordinary. Every squire who had ever watched a knight ride past had felt it. It would pass with time, the way most things did, and he saw no reason to worry over it.

If anything, it made more sense to him than Airam and Hermione hating on Ceres.

Ceres was their age. She was, in every way that mattered to the world outside these walls, their kind, a witch’s daughter with nowhere else to go. She had done nothing to them. She had reattached his arm and nearly killed herself doing it, and she had thanked Hermione for scolding her about being late.

And still Airam looked at her as though she were a rival, and Hermione as though she were a thief.

Ulrich frowned at the lamp.

He was aware, distantly, that he was spending a great deal more thought on the moods of four girls than the matter warranted. There were ten Sea Lords to consider. There was the Crown. There were the demons, silent now for a long week.

His thoughts were then interrupted by a knock.

“Enter.”

Fabian stepped in and bowed.

“My lord. Lady Meera is preparing to depart. Her carriage is being brought round to the east gate. She asks whether you would join her in the courtyard before she leaves. She wishes to speak with you.”

“About what.”

“She did not say, my lord.”

Of course she had not.

Ulrich rose.

The courtyard was silver.

The moon had climbed clear of the eastern woods while he sat in his office, and it hung now above the Estate nearly full, pouring light down across the wide paved yard, the stone balustrades, the long rows of dark windows. The gravel paths were pale as bone. The clipped hedges cast short black shadows. Beyond the outer wall, the vineyards ran away in ordered rows toward a horizon that was only a slightly darker blue than the sky above it.

It was very quiet.

Far off, by the east gate, lanterns moved. He could make out the dark shape of a carriage, and beside it, a shape too large to be anything but Edmar.

Meera was alone in the middle of the yard.

She stood with her head tilted back and her face turned up to the moon, and the light lay along her bare arms and the white silk of her gown and the long fall of her hair, so that for a moment she looked like a statue someone had put there and forgotten. She had taken off her gloves. She was holding them loosely in one hand.

She heard his boots on the gravel and turned.

“I am truly about to leave this place,” she said, and smiled. “I keep saying it and then not doing it. I love the sea, Ulrich. I love the way the sky goes on forever and the water goes on beneath it and nothing on either of them belongs to anyone. That is freedom, and I would not trade it for a kingdom. But this place is not so bad either.”

She looked around the moonlit yard.

“Away from your city. Quiet. All this open space and no one in it.”

“That is called an estate,” Ulrich said. “Every noble house is built away from its town. At the very least, out of reach of the populace.”

Meera rolled her eyes.

“How charmingly harsh. And haughty.”

“That is nobility. A separation is necessary, for both sides.”

“It sounds childish to me.” She began to walk, along the pale gravel, and turned her head to look at him as she went. “You build a great house far from everyone so that you can stand on the steps and show them how much bigger you are. Or is it that your blood is purer, and you fear it might be diluted if a farmer stood too near?”

“My blood is purer,” Ulrich said.

He said it quite seriously.

It was, after all, simply true. His father had been a high noble of Skargardia, a Count by right of a line older than the Keep. His mother had been a Daughter of House Flameheart, one of the four Houses of Arcadia that traced themselves back to the Saint God himself.

He was not boasting, it was simply the truth for him.

Meera stopped walking.

She looked at him for a moment with her mouth slightly open.

Then she giggled, put a hand to her face, and turned in a slow, delighted circle on the gravel.

“My goodness, Ulrich.”

She walked off.

Ulrich stood where he was and watched her go, and considered, briefly, returning to his office and letting her find her own way to her carriage.

Then he followed her.

He did not have a great deal of choice. She was heading in the wrong direction.

“So,” Meera said, without looking back, “who is she? The new one. Ceres. The very pretty girl with the green hair whose father was a lesser lord in the south with an Arcadian wife.”

“I have already told you.”

“That was a lie.”

“Shall I pay you to find out the truth? You have a rate for that, I recall.”

Meera sulked.

She did it beautifully. Her lower lip pushed out and her brows drew down and she looked, for a moment, very much like Esther when she had been told she could not eat the whole cake during breakfast. Then she sighed, long and put-upon, and glanced sideways at him beneath her lashes.

“I confess I do not entirely understand this fetish of yours,” she said. “For collecting young girls, and grooming them under your roof. First three, now a fourth. Where does it end, Ulrich? A dozen? A school?”

Ulrich winced.

It was a small movement, but she saw it.

“Your mind has arrived where I would have expected it to,” he said. “In the gutter. I should not have hoped for better.”

He heard the edge in his own voice and did not trouble to smooth it.

He knew what she was gesturing at. Everyone in Skargardia knew. There were nobles, more than a few, who took in orphaned girls of good blood and called it charity, and everyone at court knew exactly what kind of charity it was and no one said a word. It was practised. It was tolerated. It was one of the things about this world that Silas’s memories had never quite stopped recoiling from.

To be counted among those men, even lightly, even as a jest, by her, was a thing he found he did not care for at all.

Meera giggled.

“Oh, do not be so upset.” She waved her gloves at him. “I know you are not like that. You are a great many unpleasant things, Ulrich Van Rubenhart, but you are not that, and I have known it since the Blue Wind. I only meant that I have noticed the damage you have done to those poor girls.”

Ulrich’s eyes darkened.

“What.”

Damages? He had literally given them everything.

Meera stopped walking.

She turned to face him fully, in the moonlight, and looked up at his face for a long moment, and then she let out a soft sigh that had no mockery in it at all.

“Good lord,” she said. “You really have no idea.”

She shook her head slowly.

Ulrich was not a fool. He knew the girls had come to care for him. He had sat in his office not half an hour ago and told himself as much, and told himself it was to the good, and told himself that trust would make them listen when it mattered.

He knew all of that.

He simply believed that was all it was.

What he did not see, and what Meera saw as plainly as she saw the moon, was the seed beneath it. The thing that had been planted in four lonely girls the day a man stood between them and the world and did not move, and had been watered every day since, and was no longer only made of gratitude.

It was a dangerous seed.

Not tonight. Not for a year or two.

But it was growing.

“Ignorance is bliss, Ulrich,” Meera said, and her voice had brightened again into something almost eager. “I shall look forward very much to seeing how you handle it in a couple of years. I may even sail back specially.”

Ulrich did not understand a word of what she was talking about.

He considered asking.

Then he considered who he would be asking, and what she would do with the question, and chose, wisely, to say nothing at all.

They had come around the north corner of the house, where the gravel path opened into a smaller court that Ulrich rarely visited, a square of flagstones enclosed by hedges where his mother had once liked to sit in the afternoons.

“Oh!”

Meera stopped dead.

“You have a fountain!”

In the middle of the court, silver under the moon, stood a great basin of pale stone. Rising from its center was the figure of a man carved larger than life, bearded, robed, his arms lifted to hold a wide-mouthed vessel above his head. Water poured from it in a glittering fall, over his hands and shoulders and into the basin below, and the sound of it filled the small court like a voice.

Meera had already gathered her skirts in both hands.

She ran toward it.