Page 6 of Beyond

“If ‘that bumpkin’ is what they both think of me, we can all live with that,” Kordas replied. “Better to be inconsequential in the Emperor’s eyes. I am grateful to be small and poor.”

That was not quite true, although it was true that Valdemar was by far the smallest Duchy in all of the vast Empire. In fact, truth to tell, Valdemar was smaller than many Baronies. And Valdemar was not precisely poor; it just was not rich. They produced enough from the farms to feed the Duchy and store back a bit against bad years, but not more than that. The real wealth of Valdemar was in its horses, all the more especially because the Ducal lands were more suited to grazing and mowing than tilling and farming. Money from the sale of those horses was what had gone into filling all those storage rooms here at the manor.

And it was going to be a good year in the Valdemar meadows, as long as there were no problem births. Every mare above the age of four and below the age of sixteen was in foal. There were five different lines that Kordas sold outside of the Duchy—the Valdemar Golds (rarely), the Charger line (which were heavy horses favored by knights for tourneys), the Tow-Beasts that pulled the barges along the vast Imperial network of canals that handled almost all of the cargo of the Empire, the Sweetfoot palfreys, and the Fleetfoot racehorses. Valdemar paid its tribute to the Emperor in horses, all of them as four-year-old, tamed and trained beasts. And until now, none of those had ever been Valdemar Golds. The Golds were the rarest, in part because of the color, but mostly because he was so careful about his breeding and bloodlines.

“Are the Emperor’s fake Golds ready?” Isla asked. “Because if he actually reads the dispatch, being told about a Gold foaling is going to make him want the ones you promised him.”

“All this year’s tribute horses are ready,” he assured her. “The two I earmarked for him as Chargers have shed their coats four times, and each time, they grew back gold. At four, I know they won’t change their coat-color. The magical work Cestin and I put in on them when their mothers ‘caught’ took hold perfectly. Ridiculously detailed spell—takes forever. But it would take a mage with expert knowledge of horse anatomy to even think to look for it, much less find signs of it.”

“And it won’t matter if they don’t breed true?” she asked anxiously.

“He doesn’t have any Golds to breed to,” Kordas pointed out. “He won’t be able to determine if they breed true or not. Not,” he added, “that he’ll care. He pays no attention to his stud book, or to his breeding farms, much less anyone else’s. All he knows is that when there’s a parade, he has the most impressive horse in the Empire to ride, and a bonus if it’s rare. And even better if he has a pair of them that can pull a carriage three times as big as anything anyone else has. There’s nothing in the Empire rarer than a Valdemar Gold, and nothing more impressive than one of my Chargers. Combine the color with an impressive horse, and he’ll be happy. Chances are he’ll keep them in the Imperial stables at the Capital, and never breed them at all. After all, if he wants another, he knows where he can get it. We’ve made sure I have more Chargers in that color coming up.”

“But you’re giving him a warhorse,” she objected. “And you have no idea whether or not he can handle it.”

Now he laughed, and tossed down the last of his drink. “Actually I have a very good idea of what he can handle as a rider. Remember, I was a hostage at the Imperial Court until I was eighteen. He’s a terrible rider. And the two Chargers are from an entirely new line I started for my farmers here, crossed with Tow-Beasts. They have the looks, strength, and stamina of the warhorses, but they have the tempers of a good, steady dog, and their preferred gait is a walk. He’ll probably have a new, gaudy carriage built, one with gilding everywhere, and he’ll have them pull it rather than riding them.”

“When did you start that line? And why didn’t you tell me about them?” Isla asked, a little surprised.

“They’re not all that interesting, and I didn’t think you’d care,” he admitted, and gave her a pointed look. “The number of times you’ve put on that expression of ‘yes, dear, I am listening to you’ when I’m droning on about the horses has not been lost on me.”

She shrugged apologetically. “Well …why another line? I should think that five are enough to handle.”

“I’m breeding them as an alternative to oxen, for heavy plowing. Thick hides, broad feet, smart enough to read what’s around them. Won’t win any races, but could pull for a week. The first lot is trained and waiting in the Westfields, ready to be loaned out any time.”

“Loaned?” she said. “Why ‘loaned’?”

“Because it’s unlikely any of my farmers could afford one,” he said frankly. “And they’re horses, not oxen. They need more particular care than an ox or a mule. So I’ll be loaning them out with a drover who will also act as groom and keeper, and we’ll see how that goes. One horse, one drover, to a village in each sort of terrain. It’s early days yet, and I don’t have so many of them that I can’t absorb them all into the Duchy farms, then sell the rest to my lords and end the experiment, except for the ones I’ll keep around to send to the Emperor.”

This was all small talk, really. He was not asking the question he really wanted her to answer, which was “How are the children?”

It was a question fraught with pitfalls, because officially, he and Isla were childless.

Neither of them had been prepared to surrender one or more of their children into the Emperor’s household where they would become, as Kordas himself had been, hostages for their parents’ behavior. So all three of Isla’s pregnancies and births had been conducted in absolute secrecy, with only three people being aware of the truth: Cestin, Delia, and Kordas’s cousin, Hakkon Indal. The last was a necessity because the children were supposed to be Hakkon’s bastards. And they were being raised not by Isla and Kordas, but (officially) by a nursemaid, a tutor, and a body-servant hired by Kordas to tend to all of the children in the manor. There was quite a little pod of those children, and Kordas was doing as his father and grandfather and all those who had come before had done: rearing all the children in the Ducal household with the same education, whether they were the offspring of servants or those with nobler blood, with the eye to putting them in training for positions of responsibility in the Duchy when they were old enough.

Mind, he and Isla were not absent from the boys’ lives. He saw them often, and made a point to visit the nursery where they all lived. Isla spent some time with all of the children, every day.

She probably spends more time with them than the parents of other nobles spend with their offspring.

But he knew it hurt her that she couldn’t be their mother. She knew this was how things had to be in order to safeguard them, but she didn’t want to be like the parents of other noble children. She wanted, sometimes so much that it drove her to tears, to be as closely involved in their growing up as any ordinary farmwife. There were so many things she had never gotten to experience. She had not seen their first steps, nor heard their first words.

They had never called her “Mama.”

But doing that …would only end in her losing them. They both knew that. And so he hesitated to ever bring them up before she did, for fear that mentioning them would make her unhappy.

“Hakkon wants to know if we’re ready for Restil to take his place with the pages,” she said, as if she had read his mind.

He was about to say “Isn’t that really Hakkon’s decision to make?” but he stopped himself before he did. This wasn’t the lady of the manor speaking. This was the mother of his child, and Hakkon had been exactly right to ask her. Instead, he thought about it for a moment, recalling his own childhood. “I was only a little older than Restil when I was made a page, and Hakkon was younger.” He pulled on his beard a moment while he thought. “You know, Restil could be assigned as your page …”

Her eyes closed, and she bit her lip. “I was hoping you would suggest that. But is it safe?”

“Not only is it safe, you can get away with showering him with affection and no one will think twice about it,” he promised her with relief. “He’s a handsome little lad, if I do say so myself, and most ladies of rank are inclined to spoil their pretty little pages. You’ll be no different.”

She sniffed, signaling that she was holding back tears, which was not unexpected; he moved over in his chair, which was quite big enough for two, and patted the seat beside him.

She joined him, resting her head on his shoulder, with his arm around her. For a while, they just sat together; quiet on the surface, but mentally he was trying to pick up every detail that might signal her state of mind. Did she just want comfort? Or was she amorous? If the latter, he could certainly throw off his fatigue, but if lovemaking wasn’t what she wanted—

Their relationship was a trifle complicated. Oh, not in the fact that they were husband and wife, nor that it was an arranged marriage. That was normal enough. No, it was due to his own upbringing, which was decidedly not normal, at least insofar as his own experience deeper in Imperial territory went. His father and his grandfather had both been adamant that sex was not a husband’s “right,” no matter what other people in the Empire said. Nor was it his right to order women about as if they were pet dogs. This, of course, was in direct contradiction to all the examples he’d had at the Emperor’s Court. But—