Page 39 of Traitor Son

“It is, that’s why it might take me a while,” she said apologetically. “I have to stop reading to think about it sometimes, to make sure I understand.”

“That’s how it should be. Important ideas should take some thinking.” He leaned over to add a few branches to her fire, sending sparks into the sky. “What’s one that you had to think about?”

“I liked the part about how the divine perfect made room in the universe for imperfect creation,” she said, pointing to a passage in the chapter she was currently working through. “Here. Mr. Aubriolot explains that that was the purpose of the earth and the heavens, that the earth is an imperfect place for imperfect beings.”

“He said something of the sort in his first thesis. It seemed a rather self-evident contention,” Sir Justenin observed. “An excuse for bad behavior.”

“I guess so, but…but I didn’t take it that way,” she offered. “I thought they were doing us a kindness, so that we could have a place that wecouldbe imperfect while we try to learn better.”

“I will have to pay attention to that chapter,” he said, looking thoughtful. And while they were on the subject of imperfect beings, Ophele nerved herself to say what she had been wanting to say for more than a week.

“Sir Justenin,” she began, feeling color burn from her cheeks to her ears, “I have been wanting to say…not just to you, to all of you…I’m very sorry. About what happened after Granholme. And…everything else.”

Everything else,including the deaths of his parents, along with the rest of the duke’s House. But he didn’t know that she knew that, and she didn’t know how she could even begin to apologize.

His eyebrows went up in surprise.

“No one blames you for that, my lady,” he said firmly. “His Grace said you weren’t used to wine, and wine is a dangerous remedy. If anything, wefailed you. That man should never have gotten anywhere near you. It would shock anyone, waking up to find an assassin in the room.”

Her father’s assassin.

“That’s very kind of you.” She bobbed her head in a small bow. “I won’t ever do such a thing again. I…”

Will do my part, when we get to the valley.

Will make you proud.

Will spend the rest of my life making up for what you have lost.

“I won’t be a disgrace to you,” she finished, looking away. It seemed like the most she could aspire to, at present.

* * *

He should have gotten her a maid.

Remin thought this at least half a dozen times per day.

It wasn’t because the princess needed the help. On the contrary, now that she had books and simpler dresses that she could manage by herself, she was surprisingly self-sufficient. She knew where to get her own food and drink, she ate from the common stew pot, she competently tended her own fire, and from sunup to sundown her nose was buried in a book. She had even begun waking up on her own when the camp started moving, though she still stumbled around for the first half hour or so and, three times so far, walked into things.

A week out of Granholme, they were on the outer edge of the Empire and moving through rolling hills where wide swaths of forest were bursting into new leaves and flowers. Fast-running streams, icy and swollen with snowmelt, ran along the sides of the road, and every day was warmer than the last. They would pass through one more town before they came to the Brede, a little hamlet called Trema that was to Granholme what Granholme was to Celderline. There would be no inn there. The best they would find was a share of a cowshed.

He should have gotten her a maid, Remin thought again. Maybe that was the real purpose of servants: to serve as a buffer to avoid any unnecessary intimacy in this kind of political marriage. In the normal course of things, he and his wife would hardly have needed to communicate at all. They could have lived separate lives in the same vast house, coming together only to discuss household business and conceive children, in brief encounters as passionless as the mating between a prized stud and a mare.

He should have gotten her a maid, and a horse of her own, and taught her to ride it, because maddeningly, his bodyburnedfor her. He tried not to notice, but sometimes he thought she really might be a witch. All it took was the breeze wafting her scent to him and he flashed back to their nights together, every sound, every sigh, every touch. He touched her as little as possible and avoided her whenever they weren’t sharing a saddle, but no matter where she was, his eyes found her as if she were a lodestone.

It was worse than when he was a teenager. At least he hadn’t known what he was missing back then.

“Rem, you’re being an idiot.” Miche sat down at Remin’s fire one night, which was on the opposite side of the camp from his wife. “Remember what I told you before you got married?”

“Shut up, Miche.” Remin was eating his supper and not watching her. Every night she sat down to take her hair out of its plait and painstakingly brushed it from root to tip until it gleamed, an almost hypnotic ritual, like she was casting some feminine magic. She was just finishing, and turned to climb up onto the high wheel of the supply wagon to put away her brush. She really was as nimble as a squirrel.

“I told you not to do anything you don’t want to hear about for the next fifty years.” When Miche had something on his mind, nothing could shut him up. Remin could have threatened him at spearpoint and he would have cheerfully impaled himself and delivered his remarks with his dying breath. “When that girl finishes growing up, she’s never going to forgive you.”

“She’ll reach her majority this year, and she’s plenty old enough to marry. She’s not a child.” But watching the princess burrow into her usual nest of cloaks, she looked so vulnerable that Remin had to look away, his jaw clenching.A trick.“The sooner she understands her position, the better.”

“If you’re going to treat her like poison every day of your life, why did you marry her? If I’d known you were going to do that,Iwould have objected at your fucking wedding.”

“I asked for an Emperor’s daughter and I got one,” Remin snapped. “Don’t make it more than it is.”

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