Seventh Bride (2 page)

Sure, her aunt was a skinflint and could be grumpy, and sure, Rhea’s bedroom under the eaves echoed with the sounds of her dad snoring downstairs at night. Yes, there were chinks in the wall where the wind crept in, particularly in winter, and small crawling things were always falling out of the thatch and onto the head of anyone unlucky enough to be standing under them. But it was
her
house.
 

She knew all the tricks. She knew which rung of the ladder shifted under her feet, and which boards creaked and where the hot spots were in the oven if you were baking bread. She knew where the damp spots were in the garden that attracted slugs, and the dry spots where plants needed a little extra water to get them through the summers.
 

Having a new home, even if she was the lady of it, sounded depressing.
 

She brooded some more.
 

Movement caught her eye, and she looked up.
 

It was her mother, coming down the streamside path. Her face was pink, as it always was when she’d been cooking.

“Rhea? Dinner’s ready.”

“I’m not hungry,” Rhea said, which was mostly a lie.

“Uh-huh.”
 

Her mother stood by the stairs. After a minute, it became obvious she wasn’t going anywhere, and Rhea crawled out from behind the steps.

“It won’t be that bad,” her mother said, as they walked back up the path.

“How do
you
know?”

Her tone was surly, but her mother laughed, which surprised her. “Do you think I was never young once? I’d hardly met your father when our parents arranged for us to wed. It worked out well enough for us.”

“I’ve never even
seen
him,” said Rhea, aggrieved.

“Well,” said her mother, “that, at least, will be remedied. He told your father that he would come by in a few days for your answer.”

Rhea kicked a pebble in the path and watched it bounce into the grass. “He hasn’t had an answer yet? So I can still say no?”

There was a long silence from her mother.

“Honey—”

The gentle tone was all Rhea needed. She wiped at her face and found, to her immense annoyance, that there were tears.
 

“We don’t want you to be unhappy,” said her mother. “Not for the world. And you’ll be marrying above your station, much better than we ever hoped, and that’s a good thing, a
wonderful
thing—”

Rhea pinched the bridge of her nose. “Yes. I know. Aunt was very clear.”

Her mother sighed.

“Why me? Why not someone older or better or—or—
prettier?”

At this point, in Rhea’s experience, her mother should have said: “You’re as pretty as anyone!” or some variation on that theme. It was part of the job of mothers to assure their offspring that they were beautiful and worthy and it wasn’t surprising that anyone would want them.
 

Instead, her mother said, “I don’t know.”

And that was the most alarming thing of all.

Rhea finally met Lord Crevan on the day when she was lying in wait for the swan.
 

There was only one that claimed this stretch of the millrace. A bare patch over one eye gave it a perpetual glare, and its elegant neck arched over the heart of a born bully.
 

Every day, it came for her lunch.
 

Rhea couldn’t eat her lunch anywhere in the building, or she got dreadfully queasy from the vibrations. She also couldn’t leave the mill unattended. This left her entirely at the mercy of the swan.

Rhea had learned everything she knew about hate from her encounters with this swan.
 

A large clump of cattails grew downstream from the millrace, and she lurked behind it. Sharp leaves pricked through her clothes and left thin scrapes along her arms, but she didn’t care.
 

She wore breeches since flowing fabric was dangerous around all the machinery, a tightly belted tunic, and a light dusting of flour. The flour turned her coppery skin a muted clay color, and made her black hair prematurely grey, but she didn’t care about that either.
 

Today, she would have her revenge.

A flash of white glinted through the reeds. A moment later, there was a splash.

Rhea brandished her instrument of vengeance, and sank lower behind the reeds.

With a hiss, the swan waddled into view. It caught sight of her and spread its wings, like a cobra spreading its hood.
 

Rhea turned.

“Last chance,” she told the swan. “Last chance to call it quits, bird.” She felt positively dangerous. The fact that she’d sunk ankle deep in the mud and her toes were getting soggy barely registered.
 

The swan eyed her. Somewhere in its tiny, savage brain, it knew that she wasn’t acting normal. They had a ritual. It went for her lunch, and she screamed and ran away. Then it pecked the lunch out of her hands, taking as much finger with it as possible, and whacked her with a wing if she retaliated.
 

That was how this was supposed to go. They had refined it to an art.
 

She wasn’t supposed to stand her ground and make noises.

It hissed uncertainly.

“I don’t want to do this,” Rhea said. The sandwich seemed to burn in her hands.

It took another step forward, then two. Its eyes locked on the sandwich.

“On your beak be it!”
 

She hurled the sandwich at the bird. The
special
sandwich.
 

The sandwich that she had spent yesterday evening carefully hollowing out, so as to contain the largest horse turd she had been able to find.

The swan snapped it out of the air and began gulping it down as rapidly as possible.
 

Rhea leaned forward.

Just when she was afraid that the swan’s appetite had defeated her best efforts, the bird slowed down.

It kept eating for a moment or two, apparently out of sheer disbelief, while green bits dropped from the sides of its beak. Olive streaks drooled down the white feathers. The swan hissed again, awkwardly, and began shaking its head. Bread crumbs sprayed. Rhea stepped back.

The swan’s wings drooped. It dropped its head and began frantically wiping the sides of its bill along the grass.

“That’ll teach you,” said Rhea, with deep satisfaction.

The swan turned and waddled away. It staggered into the millstream, dipping its head underwater and making odd snorting sounds one didn’t usually associate with swans.
 

“Hmmph!” Rhea dusted her hands off, as the gargling swan swept away out of sight.

She hadn’t wanted to hurt the swan. Sure, she could have laid hands on a pitchfork or a reaping scythe easily enough, but it just wasn’t in her nature. She cringed when her mother killed a chicken for dinner. You just didn’t bring a pitchfork to a swan fight.

Something had snapped the other day, though. She couldn’t do anything about Lord Crevan, she couldn’t do anything about getting married, she couldn’t do anything about being fifteen, but two days ago, when the swan had snagged her lunch, she’d realized that here was
something
she could do.
 

And she’d done it.

She probably couldn’t get out of marriage by feeding Crevan a horse manure sandwich, but maybe there were other options.

She turned away from the stream, her head held high.

When she caught a flash of white out of the corner of her eye, her first thought was that the swan had mounted a treacherous rear assault. She bolted to her feet, sandwich held over her head, ready to break and run.
 

The man in white cleared his throat.

“You’re not a swan,” she said.

He raised both eyebrows. “I’ve been accused of many things, but never swanhood.”

He wore a flowing white shirt, which had caught Rhea’s eye, and a long, sweeping blue cloak. His boots were pointed and had elegantly cut cuffs. They were not boots that had to stomp around a farmyard for a living. His hair and skin were as dark as Rhea’s own, but considerably better groomed.

Behind him, reins thrown carelessly over its neck, stood a large roan horse. Its coat shone the almost-pink of strawberry roan, and it had hooves the size of dinner plates. Rhea realized that she must have been very intent on her vengeance on the swan not to have heard the approaching hoof beats.

Oh, hell
, thought Rhea,
I’ve just insulted a noble
.
If “You’re not a swan,” is really an insult, which I’m not sure about.

“Err,” she said.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I wasn’t expecting…” she began, and then realized she was very close to babbling and clamped her teeth together.

“Neither was I,” he said agreeably. “I am Lord Crevan.”

Ah. Yes. Of course.
She felt very stupid for not having guessed, but of course the odds of
two
nobles stopping by to talk to her were…well, actually not that much lower than the odds of
one
noble talking to her, and here he was and dear god, he was
old
, he was at least as old as her father and she didn’t
want
to marry him and—

Easy. First things first. Don’t just stand here and stare at him as if he were a viper.
 

She dropped a curtsey, remembered too late that she was wearing breeches, and had to make do.
Damn.
 

“I’m Rhea. The, uh, miller’s daughter. My lord.”
Your fiancée, but we won’t talk about that.

“A pleasure to meet you,” he said, inclining his head.
 

They stood in awkward silence for a moment. Rhea’s hands were sweating, and she tried to rub them unobtrusively on the sides of her legs. He was studying her closely, and she was acutely aware of her coating of flour dust, and the mud coating one foot, and the ring around her left ankle where the flour had met the mud and hardened into a grey paste.

“Have you given any thought to my proposal?” he asked, as calmly as if he was asking for a bag of flour, and not for the rest of her life.

“Errrr,” she said.
 

Young women married much older men all the time. It happened a lot. Childbearing was dangerous business, and there were a lot of widowers out there. There was nothing unusual about it.
 

So why was she so convinced that this was wrong?

“You have a choice,” said Crevan.
 

She should tell him no. If she told him no, he’d go away. It would all have been a mistake. Aunt would never forgive her, but Aunt never forgave anything. She still hadn’t forgiven Rhea for giving a beggar a loaf of bread five years ago, and brought it up on special occasions.
 

Rhea opened her mouth, and her father came around the side of the building.

“My lord!” he said. “My lord, I saw your horse—forgive me, can we offer you any refreshment? Wine or ale?”

“No, indeed,” said Lord Crevan, nodding to the miller. “I was just making the acquaintance of your daughter, in fact.”

“Ah—er—yes,” said her father. “This is Rhea, then.”

Rhea was slightly gratified to see that she wasn’t the only one who babbled in front of the lord, but she still wished he wouldn’t. He was her father, after all, and the miller, one of the most respected men in town. She wanted him to do better.

“Well?” asked Lord Crevan, a smile playing around his lips.

It took Rhea a moment to remember what he had asked, and then her heart, already sinking, seemed to settle in her toes.

“I—uh—I’m not sure—”

The smile deepened. Rhea shot her father a pleading look.

“She’s very flattered by yer offer, my lord,” said her father firmly.

“Is she?”
 

Rhea felt like a mouse caught in the mill gears. No matter what she did, they were going to grind her to bits. “Yes, very flattered,” she said faintly.

“I am certain she will be worth it,” said Crevan, and held out a hand.

Automatically, she held hers out to shake, and instead he caught it.

He looked at the silver ring on her finger—the engagement ring, the ring that said Rhea was now his—and he smiled.
 

Then he brought her hand to his lips, and kissed the back of it.

Rhea watched this with the expression of someone who has just been handed a dead flounder.

She had read about hand kissing. She knew it happened. It had always struck her as sort of romantic, and yes, she’d had a few daydreams about meeting a man who would kiss her hand, and it would be like a lightning bolt through both of them, and then he’d tell her that he was really a prince wandering the land in search of the maiden of his heart, and now he’d found her, and he would sweep her off her feet and take her back to his castle and
she would never have to help dig an outhouse again.

Rhea’s imagination tended to get a little fuzzy after the bit where they got back to the castle, but was very clear about the outhouses.
 

But this…this was not like a daydream.
 

It wasn’t that he slobbered or anything, but it was rather desperately embarrassing. It was
wrong.
Lords do not ride up on giant roan horses and kiss the hands of miller’s daughters. Well, sometimes they did, but only ravishingly beautiful miller’s daughters, like the ones in the stories, who were brave and true and fair. Rhea figured she was one for three on that list, since she mostly didn’t lie unless it was really important. You probably couldn’t count “brave” for someone who lived in terror of swans.

She wanted to pull her hand away, but she didn’t, because even if lords don’t do things like this, miller’s daughters
definitely
didn’t snub lords.

It didn’t feel romantic. It felt like that moment in a conversation where someone has just said the wrong thing, and everyone is standing around trying to figure out how to gloss it over and get past it. She felt embarrassed for everyone involved—for the lord, for herself, and for her father, who was watching all this.