Page 43 of Stardust Child

“In the hallway in the women’s bathhouse, they have landscapes,” she explained, and did a rather good job of describing the scrolling rivers, the stark silhouettes of the pines, and the extravagantly curving fins of the pink and red carp.

“Moveable murals,” Sousten breathed. His hands went to his mouth as he pictured it. “Paper is a natural material, softer than plaster, pleasant under light, that could be changed seasonally and replaced easily if damaged…it wouldn’t be practical throughout the whole house, no, no, but as accent walls…Your Grace, this is all but unheard of elsewhere in the Empire…”

“The Andelin Valley isn’t like anywhere else.” The duke was fairly bursting with pride as he looked down at his wife.

“A natural palette.” To Sousten, it was like lightning striking. The most unlikely thing could trigger this reaction, thevision,and it was very important to him that it originated fromthem,not his own notions. He felt a surge of energy. “Yes. Yes, an exceptional idea, my lady! Landscapes of the Andelin valley, its flora and fauna, its colors for our palette, leaf green, pine green, and berry colors for warmth, all of it supported with beautiful, natural wood, polished, never painted. A warm, tawny brown…”

Sousten looked down into the duchess’s arresting eyes, and his heart almost stopped.

“In Sachar Veche, my lord,” he said, looking pointedly from the duke to the duchess, “there is an olive wood of particular beauty. A specific soft and golden hue.”

The duke followed his gaze as the duchess looked between them, perplexed. By now, Sousten knew her well enough to know it would embarrass her to be told that the wood throughout the entire house was going to be chosen to match her singular eyes.

“Yes,” the duke said instantly. “Do that. That’s what you meant, about making the house my size, and this…the warmth of the wood? So it’s ours?”

At last, the duke understood.

“Yes,” Sousten breathed, with the euphoria of an artist who had at last communicated his vision to the world. And to this man, of all people, who Sousten had believed had not one ounce of poetry in his wooden soul. “Yes, Your Grace. That is it, precisely.”

* * *

This might be what it was like when she had her own solar. A little.

Sitting in her cottage with Elodie with the windows and doors flung open to the afternoon, Ophele imagined it with far more pleasure than she had expected. Master Didion was very good at painting pictures with his words, and in her mind’s eye she could see the warm, sunny room with its diamond-paned windows, and Remin sitting in a huge armchair, like the soft chair in her mother’s bedchamber at Aldeburke. Natural colors, she thought, charmed by the vision of leaves and berries.

The idea of being mistress of so vast a manor was daunting, but it was easier to cope when it was one room at a time. Her solar, and the rooms for Sir Miche and Sir Justenin and Lady Verr, and then the offices,and the dining room, which would only hold a dozen people at most. She could do that. The high table in the cookhouse had more than that every night, and she wasn’t the least bit nervous there anymore.

“And they’re already digging out the hill, too,” she told Elodie, who devoured stories of the Big House like they were sweets. “I didn’t know what that huge pile of dirt was, it’s so big it looks like Master Didion means to add another hill on the river, but do you know what he’s doing? Inside the hill, there will be the kitchen, the pantries, the larders and butteries and scullery and servants’ quarters, storehouses and cellars, even an icehouse. All of the servants will live and work inside the hill. Like rabbits.”

“With tunnels?” Elodie asked, her eyes bright with interest.

“Very big tunnels.” Really, huge sections of the southern face of the hill would vanish altogether, with many tiers of entrances and windows and varying levels of security, every floor insulated with earth to prevent fires from spreading. Remin was fanatical on the issue of safety. “On the back of the house, there will be a tunnel so big, horses and buggies can drive into it.”

“You should have little ones too. Secret ones,” the girl said, nodding sagely. “Me and Pirot are digging one under our house, just in case we have to hide from devils. Mama doesn’t know though.”

“Maybe you ought to tell her,” Ophele suggested, wondering if she had some grown-up obligation to warn her.

She and her erstwhile page spent a few hours of every afternoon in the cottage, where the ever-growing pile of Remin’s torn clothes threatened to rage out of control. Talking to Elodie was a pleasant diversion from the frustration of sewing, but Ophele couldn’t help sighing as she turned his shirt right-side out and saw the mend was every bit as messy as she feared. She always hoped that by some magic, her straggling stitches might look better from the outside.

“You ought to use a hem stitch, m’lady,” Elodie said, leaning over the table to examine her work with a judicious eye. Ophele froze.

“You know what hem stitches are?” she asked carefully, mindful of the open doors and windows. Sir Leonin and Sir Davi were right outside.

“’Course, I’m great at sewing,” the girl boasted. “Mama makes me do all my samplers, otherwise I can’t come see Your Grace.”

“Well, if you want,” Ophele began, feeling as if her fingers had just brushed a rope in the midst of drowning, “you could bring them here and do them with me?”

“Could I?!” Elodie was delighted.

“Yes!” Ophele was even more delighted. “If your mama says it’s all right, you can bring them next time you come.”

Not long after that, she sent Elodie home rejoicing, and Ophele rinsed out the teacups and hung them over the fire, then collected her oilskin of papers. She had begun carrying the whole pile of interviews and reports home with her every day to work on whenever she had a spare moment, so absorbed in her project that sometimes she dreamed of it.

“To the storehouse, my lady?” asked Sir Davi as she shut the cottage door, making an effort to mind his speech. Sir Leonin had been at him about it.

“Yes, one of the sawyers is coming in for an interview,” she said, falling into step between the two men. It was still a little awkward; she nominally set their course, but for the first few days she had been all but tripping over them. “He fought in the mountains, too. I can’t help but think there is something to the belief that the devils come from the mountains. But there can’t be enough caverns for all of them to hibernate over the winter, can there?”

“We never found a nest of the creatures,” Sir Leonin replied, only a little reluctantly. He took his vocation seriously and felt that even casual conversation was a dangerous distraction from guarding her. His eyes scanned the nearby area as if he thought an assassin might leap out of the gorse bushes. “Half the difficulty of mountain fighting was extracting the Vallethi from the caves. But there weren’t really that many,” he added thoughtfully. “There are six mines in the Berlawes and only one natural cavern of significance, the Aven Bede. And half of that is underwater.”

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