Page 35 of Stardust Child

“I would just say I’m sorry again.” His arms tightened around her.

“Love you,” she mumbled, a reassurance so familiar she could literally say it in her sleep. Ophele was incapable of holding a grudge.

Maybe he should talk to Miche. He wasn’t sure what to do, or if he should do anything at all. Destroying their happiness with his guilt seemed foolish, but it also didn’t seem right to just accept that he had benefited so richly from wronging her. Even after he married her, there had been a few precious months when the valley was closed and filled with people he trusted, when she might have enjoyed real freedom. And he had squandered it because he was afraid of her.

He had always hated the thought that he had taken her from one prison to another, and now he had just put guards on her.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked her the next day as he lifted her into the saddle. It was a beautiful clear morning, with lingering coolness from yesterday’s rain. “We’re not due anywhere in particular.”

“Outside the wall?” she asked eagerly.

“If that’s what you want.” He clicked his tongue to urge his horse along, wrapping his arm around her waist. It was cool enough that she was wearing another of her wool gowns, this one pale blue with pink ribbons, fresh as a periwinkle.

“Abner.” Ophele settled into the crook of his shoulder and looked up at him expectantly. The black stallion’s ears flattened.

“That sounds like a donkey’s name.” Remin did not need to ask. Ever since Ophele learned that he hadn’t named his horse, she had been attempting to remedy the oversight.

“Stormcloud.”

He couldn’t imagine saying that out loud.

“I don’t know,” he said dubiously.

“Sooty?”

“No,” he said, suppressing a smile.

She chewed her lip. “Nightshade?”

“That’s a good one,” he said, impressed. “It sounds like a mare’s name, though.”

“How is that a mare’s name? Henbane,” she suggested vengefully, and gripped his arm as he gave her a deliberate bounce.

“He’s a warhorse, wife, spare his dignity.”

“Paprika.”

This was so unexpected that he nearly laughed aloud, especially with the naughty expression she gave him. But alert as always for watching eyes, Remin throttled it.

“No,” he said, his black eyes glinting with humor, and endured a series of increasingly bizarre suggestions as they rode out the north gate. The fact that she so often asked to go riding outside the walls seemed to echo his own feelings. It felt freer there, as if adventure waited just beyond the horizon, and he wanted nothing more than to let her gambol like a kitten, and explore to her heart’s content.

“We’ll start harvesting next week,” he said, looking out at the golden fields rolling northward, rippling in the morning breeze. “It’ll be rough on Wen’s boys; they’re going to be hand-milling the wheat all winter.”

“Are the winters really so terrible?” she asked. “Everyone keeps talking about the snow.”

“You never had snow in Aldeburke?”

“Not much. I remember once it snowed enough to cover the grass, and Tam showed me how to make a snowman. A very small one,” she added.

“You’ll have enough for an army of snowmen here,” he replied. “The clouds hit the mountains and then stay for days. I hope that tailor from Abory gets here before the cold.”

“There’s a tailor coming?”

“I thought I told you,” he said, surprised. “A man named Tiffen.”

The man was supposed to be practical and creative, though at this point Remin was mostly concerned about keeping the Duchess of Andelin from freezing to death this winter.

“Oh, the one Lady Belleme recommended?” She brightened. “I liked what he said, about how the first test of a lady’s clothing should be whether the lady can move in it.”

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