Page 116 of Stardust Child

There was an almost spiteful satisfaction in her voice, but it faded as she sank down onto a nearby rock, fanning her face.

“She was hiding in my room, as it turned out,” she went on. “I don’t know how she got there. Wouldn’t have guessed she knew where it was. But she was under my bed and covered in sick. Lord Hurrell struck her.” Azelma tapped her temple, a single, illustrative gesture. “She didn’t know anything, when I found her.”

“That’s a hanging offense.” Miche’s tongue felt strangely wooden. “He laid hands on a child of the stars? He made herbleed?And no one said anything? The whole household should be flogged for it, why did no one speak?”

“Who would we tell?” she asked acidly. “The Emperor? He’d never bothered with her before. Everyone on this estate swore an oath, sir knight. To keep our silence even unto death, lest we be exiled forever to the void between the stars.”

Miche looked down at his hands. He had accidentally torn one lemony-smelling shrub in half.

“I’m not excusing myself,” Azelma added, softer. “I should’ve done something sooner. But I expect if I’d tried contacting her father, I’d’ve been sent out the door that very moment, and done no good for me or her. And I think it gave them a fright. I didn’t tell them I had her, you see. They must have had a nasty few days, wondering if she’d gotten into a closet somewhere and died. The great bullies,” she flared. “A grown man, hitting a little girl. He might have killed her; she was wandering in her wits for days.”

There were so many kinds of cruelty in the world. Miche had seen more than his share, doled it out himself when it was necessary, and done his best to anesthetize himself to the rest. But the thought that even as he had been protecting Remin from the Emperor’s relentless cruelties, the Emperor’s daughter had been enduring a separate set of miseries almost made him laugh. Some cosmic balancing of scales? Rache Pavot’s daughter, paying for the crimes of her parents.

But Miche wasn’t like Juste, to seek rational explanations for the things people did, or look for comfort in the mysteries of the stars.

“I’m going to take everything,” he said finally. “Everything she’d want. You’d know best. Tell me which is which.”

He took the library. Not just the books. The whole library, chairs, lamps, tables, sofas, shelves, he swept it clean. Everything Azelma said the princess had liked, he took. Everything Rache Pavot had touched, he took. Vases. Paintings. The armchair where Rache had used to sit with her little daughter, reading together before the fire. Ophele’s cradle and other baby things, hidden in an attic. He turned the manor upside down, worked every servant in the place from sunup to sundown, packed every wagon in the carriage house full and emptied the stables of horses to pull them.

Every night, he set his men to watch all those precious items and then found his bed in one of the dozens of guest rooms, all of them finer by far than the princess’s miserable closet. He never had to wait long. In a few minutes, one of the maids would come tapping on the door, and Miche let her undress him and touch him and then lost himself in her sweet female flesh. Everyone had their own ways to seek oblivion.

He also made time to seek out Nenot and Leise, who had been trying very hard not to be noticed.

“You can leave. Now,” he told them, right there in the middle of the kitchen with half the servants watching. The two women were cold-eyed and hard-mouthed, and looked to him like they would have liked having a princess under their thumbs. “If you are wise, you’ll go somewhere far away.”

They packed before the eyes of all the other servants. A dozen people saw them leaving, walking out the gates of Aldeburke with valises in their hands and enough food to reach the nearest town, three days away.

They would never reach it. At nightfall, Miche slipped out to find their camp beside the road, killed them both, and buried them a short distance into the forest.

He did not expect anyone to protest. The penalty for laying violent hands on a child of the stars was death. But he also would not for the world cause trouble for Remin or any upset to Ophele, so he washed up in a stream afterward and was back at the manor before dawn, with only a couple of his own men the wiser. The security at Aldeburke had always been terribly lax.

In all that huge manor, Miche only left a few guest bedrooms untouched. He ransacked the office, but left the ledgers more or less in order. Ophele’s new steward would arrive soon and deserved better than to sleep on floorboards. But he put the fear of himself, Remin, and thewrath of the divine into the servants that week. His recommendation, the second he got back to Tresingale, was going to be to fire every single one of them. All of them had watched. Only one of them had done something about it.

“We have need of a cook, in Tresingale,” he said to Azelma, as they stood together in the kitchen and supervised the packing of the cookware. “Whatever you’re being paid, I guarantee we can pay more.”

“I followed Lady Pavot here,” Azelma said after a moment, and reached for her set of ladles over the stove. “I’ll follow Her Highness, too.”

* * *

“There’s still no sign of him?” Ophele asked Sir Edemir in the storehouse office, trying not to sound too worried.

“It is still early yet, my lady,” said Sir Edemir, reassuring. “There will be a signal when he’s about two days away, a column of green smoke. You can see it for fifty miles on a clear day. But the hunters say there’s been snow to the north, and everyone will travel slower in bad weather.”

“It has been so cold…” She trailed off. An autumn storm had come and gone over the last few days, leaving a persistent chill behind, so cold that she was wearing her cloak from Aldeburke again. How much colder Remin and his men must be, high in the mountains near the Spur.

Ophele had tracked the progress of their journey. Every day, she looked at her own maps, following the trail Remin had explained to her, guessing how far they might have gone. It was not good for her; sometimes it made her physically nauseous to imagine what they might find, all those dangerous miles away, and the only thing worse would be if they found nothing at all.

“We have all been colder, my lady,” Edemir said, and sat down at the table beside her. “For much longer, and with much less hope of remedy. Rem knows how to take care of himself, never doubt it.”

It was funny how both Sir Edemir and Sir Justenin were such calm, placid men, and yet so different. Sir Justenin was unfailingly kind and gentle to her, and yet somehow she always felt there was something hidden under those dark, still waters. Sir Edemir was clear all the way to the bottom.

“But perhaps I can divert you in the meantime,” he added, producing a thick stack of books. “My mother was kind enough to advise me onreputable sources for sewing, and even sent a few of her own things to help you begin. Will these suit?”

“Oh—oh, yes, thank you,” Ophele said, flustered. Her interest in embroidery was at an all-time low. It only made her feel guiltier to see the pretty skeins of silk thread and needlebooks that Countess Trecht had so thoughtfully provided. Real Rendevan steel, by the look of them.

Something else that she could do badly.

“It is my pleasure, my lady,” Sir Edemir was saying warmly. “Though perhaps you will oblige me for a little while longer, and help with these orders? We’ll soon be closing the ferries for the winter, so we need to note anything we have not yet received…”

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