Seventh Bride Read online

  The words meant nothing to Rhea. They were in some foreign language. People did not have more than one wife at a time. Lord Crevan was—technically—her betrothed. You didn’t get betrothed to people who still had wives. Certainly not to people who had three of them!

  I am very tired. I am not hearing things correctly. That’s all.

  “I’m sorry,” said Rhea carefully, “but I think I must have misheard you.”

  The cook’s eyes danced with a kind of jovial malice. “No, you didn’t. Wives. Wives, wives, wives. As in married. As in more than one. As in me, and Sylvie, and Ingeth, and the clock-wife and the golem-wife and the Lady Elegans, who is lying out in the graveyard.”

  “Six of us,” said Sylvie. “Except Lady Elegans, because she’s dead. But she’s still one of us. And you, now, of course.” She sat up very straight. “You’re welcome. You should be welcome. We’re glad to have you. I mean, not glad that you’re here, because that’s not very nice for you, but…” She trailed off in some confusion, knotting her fingers together. “It’s nice to have someone else to talk to,” she said finally.

  Maria sighed. “Poor child,” she said, without any malice now. “I don’t suppose you were in love with Himself, were you?”

  “What?” asked Rhea blankly. Sylvie’s words had filled her with vague dread. Not very nice for you was much more menacing than it should have been.

  “Lord Crevan,” said Maria patiently. “Your husband-to-be. Himself.”

  “Oh! No!” Rhea shook her head. “Um. It was all very strange. He talked to my father—you can’t say no to lords, not if they’re wanting to marry your daughter—not if you’re the miller—you know—”

  Maria nodded. “Oh, aye. I know it well. Why do you think I married him? I wouldn’t have set my cap for him by choice. I’d had three husbands already and his magic wasn’t a patch on mine.”

  “You were a magician?” asked Rhea.

  “I was a witch,” said Maria. “Hearth and heath and heartwood. I could call the great beasts out of the earth and wire them together with silver chain.” She tipped another egg onto Rhea’s plate. “Ah, well. That was longer ago than I’d like to admit.”

  “You shouldn’t brag,” whispered Sylvie. “It isn’t nice. It’s vain. We can’t be vain, Maria.”

  The blind woman’s hands trembled when she spoke. Maria reached over and took her hand firmly. “Don’t fret yourself, dear. It’s late and he’s away and we’re all a bit tired. Isn’t that right, Rhea?”

  “Absolutely,” said Rhea, who was very, very tired. The hedgehog had finished its raisins and was curled up in a small prickly ball against her plate. “Um—you said he was away?”

  “Off on business,” said Maria. “Nobody here but us.”

  “Can I leave, then?” asked Rhea. “If he’s not here—I was supposed to meet him—”

  Hope didn’t even have time to flower. Maria was already shaking her head. “Back down the white road? I don’t recommend it, unless you’re looking for a painful death. He called up things on the white road and didn’t have wit or will enough to put them down again. I don’t think he knows what’s down there himself.” Her smile was oddly satisfied.

  “He told me to come here, and he knew he wasn’t going to be here?” Rhea scowled into her eggs.

  “Very like him,” said Maria. “He’ll set you tasks merely to prove that you have to do them.” She patted Rhea’s shoulder. “Best get some sleep. Ingeth!”

  Ingeth appeared in the doorway, looking sour. Rhea tried not to look at the terrifying wound across her throat.

  “Show Rhea here back to her room, Ingeth—and take the short way, damn you. It’s late, and no one’s soul is being saved tonight.”

  Ingeth bared her teeth at Maria. Then she turned away, jerking her head at Rhea to follow. Rhea scooped up the hedgehog and hurried after her.

  The way did seem shorter. Ingeth’s back was a hard line in the dimness. She pointed to the door of Rhea’s room, then turned on her heel and stalked away.

  Rhea wanted time to think, but she was so tired that the moment she climbed into bed, she fell down into a dark and dreamless sleep.

  She woke and for a moment she could not think of where she was.

  The ceiling was white, not thatch. She was in the wrong place. She had woken up, every day of her life, looking up at the thatched roof (or occasionally at the beams of the mill, although sleeping near a grinding mill is not easy).

  This was not thatch. It was white beadboard, thin lines and thick ones, running over her head.

  What—where—why—

  And then she turned her head and saw the hedgehog curled into a neat ball on the chair, and she remembered everything.

  It seemed like a strange and horrible dream—the white road, the bird-golems, the falling floor. Impossible to believe in during daylight hours. But Maria the cook, blind Sylvie—the other wives—

  That Rhea could believe in.

  Lord Crevan has six wives, Maria said. Five, I suppose, if you don’t count the dead one.

  Dead wives were automatically respectable, but not if you had five others who were alive.

  And me. The seventh.

  Not that I have to marry him now, do I? I mean, he’s got wives already! He shouldn’t even have asked me!

  But he had asked. And if she went back to her father saying that he had a half-dozen wives, a full house of them…

  Would anyone believe her?

  She chewed on her lower lip. The blankets were coarse grey wool, very clean, rough against her fingers. She scraped her fingertips over the hem, back and forth, thinking.

  You’d think we’d have heard that he had wives already. People would have talked.

  Wouldn’t they?

  Although some of them…the golem-wife? What’s that? And the clock-wife? You can’t marry a clock. Maybe he’s only got the three. And the dead one.

  Three living wives were not significantly better than seven. Really, any number over none was pretty bad.

  Somebody should have said something!

  Still…it wasn’t like there was a lot of gossip in town about Lord Crevan. Maybe nobody knew. Gossip about lords was mostly limited to the local squires and the peccadillos of their teenage sons.

  They didn’t talk about Lord Crevan. Not in a horrible-dark-secret-way—villages ran on horrible dark secrets, they were as good as currency—but in a vague “Oh, is that the name of the lord who owns that stretch of forest?” way. He did nothing. He wasn’t interesting. He had no scandals, he had no teenage sons, the estate was all wildwood and there were no stewards to manage it. People undoubtedly poached deer out of the forest, and there was no gamekeeper who cared.

  Until he had shown up to marry Rhea, there was nothing to gossip about.

  Nobody knew he had extra wives. I could go home—I could tell everyone—

  The hedgehog sat up and yawned.

  —and it would be my word against his. A peasant girl against a lord. Do I expect my father to storm his house and drag out the cook and get her to testify?

  She thought of what was likely to happen to a man who did that. Even if he was right, the mill would undoubtedly change hands. The old Lord—the one who owned the village—would not like someone who embarrassed a peer of his. Even if that person was absolutely right. And when the time came to renew the leases—the leases that had been merely a formality for generations—

  Rhea sat up. Her heart was a dragging weight in her chest. Nothing had changed.

  She was still going to get married.

  It was just going to be worse than she thought.

  She went downstairs and found the kitchen by following the smell of bread baking. The black-and-grey tile floor was quiet underfoot. She stamped her foot on a tile, and it was as solid as the foundations of the mill.

  There was a clock in a corner of the hall. It was enormous, as wide as the altar of the village church and twice as tall. A glass door enclosed the mechanism which looked, to
Rhea’s practiced eye, rather like a dozen interlocking millwheels.

  No one in town had a clock like this. Big clocks were expensive. Waterclocks and marked hour-candles were still more common in town. The rat-speaker in Barrelridge was famous for his clocks, but she’d never met anyone who could afford one.

  She wondered if this clock was one of his. She thought not. The gears were small, but still on a scale made by humans, not by rats.

  At the moment, the hands stood at nine-thirty, comfortably far off from midnight. Also nowhere near four in the afternoon.

  Maria said it was the clock-wife. Is this what she meant? Is it a real wife at all? Lord Crevan can’t have married a clock. That’s…I mean…normal people don’t marry clocks.

  Normal people don’t marry seven wives at a time, either. Normal people don’t marry fifteen-year-old peasant girls.

  Rhea scowled. Her reflection in the glass scowled back.

  Maybe that wife makes clocks. Maybe this is her clock. That doesn’t explain the thing with the floor…

  Is there anything that could explain the thing with the floor?

  “You’re up early,” said Maria, as Rhea entered. “I expected you to sleep the sun round.”

  Rhea shrugged.

  “Oh, to be young again,” said the cook. “Well, you’re here now, so you can make yourself useful. Eggs and potatoes again?”

  “Yes, please!”

  “Good.” Maria slid a pair of shears across the scarred tabletop. “Go out in the garden and cut a bouquet of herbs, and it’ll be done when you are.”

  “What sort of herbs do you need?” asked Rhea.

  “Anything that smells strongly,” said Maria. “They’re for Sylvie. She can’t see flowers any more, so we make do.” She smiled faintly. “They don’t even have to smell completely good, just long as she can smell them.”

  Rhea nodded, and slipped out the door into the garden.

  There were high walls around the garden. Over the tops of the walls, Rhea could see branches. The wood pressed up close against the house here. Some of the branches had apples.

  An overgrown orchard, then. Judging by the shapes of the trees, nobody had tended it for a long time.

  It looked as if her Aunt’s dreams of an army of servants were going to be thwarted. Rhea took a small, grumpy satisfaction in that fact.

  It was a damp morning. Fog hung in tatters from the trees. The kitchen garden was organized in squares, with broad rows of radishes and cabbages and lettuce. Herbs stood in a wheel at the center.

  Through an archway in the wall, she could see the wood. The leaves lay thick under the apples, the ground choked with grass and brambles. A few of the apple trees had their trunks half-buried in blackberry thickets.

  She let the hedgehog out of her pocket and it immediately trundled off into the beds. “I’ll…um…come back for you later?” Rhea called.

  The hedgehog nodded over its shoulder to her.

  Well, it’ll take care of any slugs they may have, I suppose…

  She cut the bouquet carefully, taking her time among the herbs. Rosemary of course, and a short length of oregano. Hyssop and fennel. One late rose, missing half its petals but still producing a sweet, rounded fragrance. The rest had gone to rose hips. She wrapped it all in thin stems of chickweed, which smelled like nothing except green.

  Rhea went back inside. Maria looked over her bouquet and nodded approval. “Good. The chickweed’s a nice touch. She won’t know that one right off, and it’ll make her happy guessing.”

  “Shall I cut off the thorns?” asked Rhea. “So Sylvie doesn’t prick herself?”

  Maria shook her head. “Roses have thorns,” she said. “That’s the price of roses. When you start to forget that, that’s when things go wrong.” She set Rhea’s breakfast down in front of her, and Rhea ate it slowly, trying to figure out what that meant and if there was any message in it that she could take away.

  She eventually decided that there wasn’t. She scraped the last bits of egg yolk up on the side of her fork. “Are there many people here to cook for?”

  Maria shook her head. She was pummeling dough into submission. “No more than you’ve seen. The golem-wife don’t eat and the clock-wife can’t. Himself comes out every few months, and he don’t mind plain cooking while he’s here.”

  Rhea looked up, startled. “Every few months? Where is he the rest of the time?”

  “In the city, child,” said Maria. Flour rose up in great gusts as she slapped the dough against the board. “He comes out here to do his experiments and play with his magic. There’s little enough here to interest him but solitude.”

  Rhea digested this. Did that mean that if she married him, she would be expected to go into town? Or that she would be staying here, in the house?

  The notion of being in the house with Maria and Ingeth and Sylvie and whatever horrible thing was going on with the tile floor was not terribly appealing.

  On the other hand, she might be able to go and visit her family for weeks at a time. That wouldn’t be so bad. And a husband who wasn’t there…well, that wouldn’t be that bad…would it?

  If he wasn’t around, he couldn’t expect her to do…things. The sort of things that led to babies. Rhea knew perfectly well what those things entailed, and had a certain intellectual curiosity about them, but had not pictured doing them with an older man who admitted to being a sorcerer.

  It occurred to her that if he had a great many wives, Lord Crevan had possibly done those things with Sylvie and grim Ingeth, and Maria as well.

  She felt her face get hot, and buried that thought as fastidiously as a cat burying its own droppings.

  “Is he going to stay away for months this time, do you think?”

  That wouldn’t be so bad. She could stay for a few days, then make her apologies and go home. If not by the white road—well, perhaps there was another way. She was needed at the mill. He hadn’t married her yet. Somebody had to thump the hopper and check for gremlins.

  “Not hardly,” said Maria. “There’s a bag of sugar and a gallon of cream in the pantry.”

  Rhea raised her eyebrows.

  “We get deliveries regular,” said Maria. “A lad with a cart, and don’t ask me what road he takes to get here, ‘cos I don’t believe it’s a canny one. Still, Himself won’t let us starve out here, though we run a bit low on the luxuries if he’s in town for the season.” She jerked her chin toward the pantry door. “But we’ve been getting the good stuff, and that means he’ll be here for a few weeks. He don’t expect me to produce roast peacock, but he wants white flour and clotted cream, at least.”

  “Oh,” said Rhea.

  Her hopes hadn’t risen far enough to dash. She sighed.

  “There’s dishes in the scullery need washing,” said Maria. “Don’t tell me that you’re one of those fine ladies too good to wash dishes?”

  Rhea shook her head. “My father’s the miller. I can wash dishes. I’m better with milling, though.”

  “No mill out here. We get the flour already ground.” She tossed Rhea an apron. It fell most of the way to the floor and Rhea had to tie it up around herself twice. Maria shook her head. “Well, since you’ll be staying, we’ll see if we can’t sew you up new clothes. Sylvie was a dab hand at it, when she could see, but now…”

  “It’s okay,” said Rhea. “I’m sure I don’t need them. I mean—not yet.” The notion of getting new clothes filled her with immediate dread. New clothes for this place meant that she was staying, that it wasn’t just a visit, that it mattered.

  Maria put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. It was brief and comforting; the woman’s large forearm as heavy as a hug. “As you wish, child. As you wish.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  At dinner, Rhea summoned her courage and asked “Why does Lord Crevan get six wives?”

  Sylvie turned her head toward Rhea’s voice. Ingeth glared, her drawstring mouth drawing tighter.

  “Look around,” said Maria. “Who’s goi
ng to stop him?”

  “But—I mean—legally—”

  “Laws for the gentry aren’t laws for us,” said Maria. “You know that, child.”

  “But that can’t be right,” said Rhea. “I mean—yes, okay, obviously. Most laws, sure. But they don’t let the king have six wives!” She paused, scowling down at her mashed potatoes. “Well…not all at the same time, anyway.”

  Ingeth pushed her food away, and walked out of the room.

  “Don’t mind her,” said Maria. “She’s still angry for being taken in.” She gestured with a piece of bread. “Think it through. A king can’t have six wives—but if a peasant girl turned up and swore that she’d been married to the king in a secret ceremony, how far do you think she’d get?”

  Rhea nodded glumly.

  Well, it was no more than she’d worked out for herself. Although—

  “Why does he want six wives?”

  “Bit of a collector, isn’t he?” said the cook, and snickered.

  Rhea felt the tips of her ears getting hot.

  “Don’t tease,” said Sylvie suddenly. “He marries us because he can make better use of our gifts than we can.”

  Rhea blinked.

  “Don’t start that crap again, Sylvie—”

  “Oh, but we deserved it!” said the blind woman, nodding.

  “Hush,” said the cook heavily.

  “We did! When did we do anything of use with our gifts, but please ourselves? I was vain, so vain, like a young peacock. I spent hours before my mirror. And what did Ingeth ever do with her voice but pray and sermonize at all hours until she drove everyone half mad around her?”

  “They were our failings,” said Maria. She stood up and began slamming down pans. “Our gifts to waste or not, as we chose. Whether we used them well or not, he had no right to be judge and jury and executioner.”

  Maria dropped a cast-iron pan on the stove. Sylvie flinched. Her shoulders shook and she made a small, thin noise into her hands.

  It took Rhea a few minutes to realize that the other woman was crying. Wet splotches formed on the cloth over her eyes.