And the women of Gunter’s steading stared.
None of them had seen Joscelin, save for a brief glimpse that first night, when he’d been brought in at the end of a line, half-wild and snow-covered. They got a good look at him now. Filthy and disheveled, smelling of the kennels, Joscelin was still, undeniably, a D’Angeline.
"He must be a prince in your land!" Hedwig whispered to me, awed, watching him emerge from the kitchen with his buckets empty. "Surely all the men do not look so!"
"Not all, no," I said wryly, wondering how Gunter would contend with this reaction. One of the younger women-Ailsa, her name was-contrived to brush into Joscelin, giggling when he blushed and dropped his buckets. Of the two men, I reflected, Joscelin might have a harder time of it.
Gunter and his thanes returned from the hunt flushed and triumphant, dragging a good-sized hart with them. He was minded to celebrate and we had a feast that night. Gunter got roaring-drunk, but not so drunk he didn’t have the presence of mind to have Joscelin chained by the ankle to a great stone bench by the hearth. At least, I thought, both admiring and despising his foresight, it was warm and indoors. Joscelin curled up in the rushes on the floor, exhausted beyond caring. Even if it hadn’t been for his oath, I don’t think he would have fled that night if Gunter had left him free with the door standing wide open.
As the cold winter days passed and Joscelin gave no indication of untrustworthiness, matters settled into a routine. One day, when Gunter and his thanes were out, Hedwig and I conspired to see Joscelin bathed. If I had been grateful for my first bath in the steading, I cannot even begin to fathom how much more so Joscelin was. We emptied the water twice, so filthy was it. And if I thought my bath had been well-attended, it was nothing to his. Women of all ages, from the giggling Ailsa to dour old Romilde, whom I’d never seen smile, crowded into the bath-room to peek at him.
The Joscelin of my earliest acquaintance would have died of mortification; now, he merely blushed and looked politely away, trying to preserve what little dignity they allowed him. Even the most retiring of the women, dark-eyed Thurid, came to see, shyly offering a clean woolen jerkin and hose that had belonged to her brother, killed in a raid.
He looked dismayed to see his grey Cassiline rags piled for discard, so I gathered them carefully. I understood; it was all he had left of home. "Don’t worry," I promised him. "I’ll see them washed and mended if I have to do it myself."
I spoke to him in Skaldic, as I tried always to do when others were about. His understanding had improved, and his speech. "I would thank you," he grinned at me, "only I hear talk of your sewing."
The women giggled. It was true, Hedwig had been teaching me, that I might help with the endless mending, and my skills were thusfar deplorable.
"I will mend them," Ailsa said slyly, taking the clothing from me and making eyes at Joscelin. "There is virtue in a kindness dealt to strangers."
Joscelin blinked helplessly at me, drawing his knees up further in the bathing tub to hide his privates. "Serves you right," I said to him in D’Angeline, then in Skaldic to our putative mistress of the steading, "Hedwig, I would see him groomed, if you would loan me your comb."
She eyed him doubtfully. "See that he is soaped and dunked once more," she said. "I’m not minded to share fleas with Gunter’s dogs. 'Tis hard enough to contend with them as it is." For all that, she brought the comb, and had the grace to order the others out of the bathing room so Joscelin could dress in peace. I combed his hair then, taking pains to ease through the mats and snarls.
It was strangely soothing, putting me in mind of my childhood at Cereus House. Properly washed and combed, Joscelin’s hair fell, blond and shining, halfway down his back. I didn’t try to bother with the Cassiline club, but twined it in one thick braid, binding it with thong. He endured the process with patience, for it was the closest thing to luxury either of us had known in a long time.
"There," I said, unconsciously falling back into D’Angeline. "Let them see you now!"
He made a face, but went out from the bathing room. If the women had stared before, now they gaped. I could understand why. Clean and groomed, he shone like a candle in the rude, timbered interior of the great hall. Seeing him among the Skaldi women, I thought, it was no wonder Gunter’s thanes made of me what they did, if I looked so to them.
Having nigh emptied them with his bath, it was Joscelin’s job to refill the house cisterns. He did it with quiet grace, making trek after trek with the yolked buckets across his shoulders, stamping the snow from his boots before he entered the hall.
Ailsa, sewing in a corner, watched him and smiled.
If Gunter had not noticed before, he noticed it that night. He remarked on it to me as we lay in bed, afterward. It had surprised me, that he liked to talk after pleasure, when he’d not drunk heavily before it.
"He is pleasing to the women, your D’Angeline," he mused. "What do they see, so, in a beardless boy?"
So that was why he thought Joscelin a boy still. "We do not grow hair like the Skaldi," I said to him. "Some of the old lines, where the blood of Elua and his Companions runs strong, grow none on the face. Joscelin is a man grown. Perhaps women are less easily misled than men in this," I added, smiling.
But Gunter was in no mood to be teased. "Does Hedwig find him pleasing?" he asked me, yellow brows scowling in thought.
"She finds him pleasing to behold," I said honestly, "but she does not make eyes at him, as does Ailsa, my lord."
"Ailsa is a trial," he muttered. "Tell me, is the D’Angeline trained as you are? Kilberhaar’s men did not say so."
I nearly laughed, but smothered it, as he was minded to take it wrong. "No, my lord," I said instead. "He is sworn to lie with no woman. It is part of his oath."
At that, his brows shot up. "Truly?"
"Yes, my lord. It is true that he is a lord’s son, but he is a priest, first; a kind of priest, as you know it. That is the nature of his oath."
"So he is not trained to please women, as you are to please men," Gunter said thoughtfully.
"No, my lord. Joscelin is trained to be a warrior and companion, as I was trained to please in bed," I said, adding, "Men and women both."
"Women!" His voice rumbled with surprise. "Where is the sense in that?"
"If my lord has to ask," I said, somewhat offended, "there is no merit in answering."
I thought perhaps I had annoyed him then, and he would turn over and speak no more that evening, but Gunter was considering something. He lay gazing at the ceiling, running one finger beneath the cord of Melisande’s diamond. "I please you," he said eventually. "But you say it is the gift of your patron-god."
"A gift, or betimes a curse," I muttered.
"All the gifts of the gods are like that," he said dismissively, pinning me with his shrewd look. "But I thought maybe you only said it that I would let you see the D’Angeline boy, eh?"
It was hard, sometimes, to remember that he was a clever man, for all his Skaldi ways. I shook my head. "What I said was true, my lord." It wasn’t, of course, exactly true; I’d no idea if Kushiel’s Dart could be unstricken. But of a surety, it was true that I was its victim.
"So you say that I would not be pleasing to a D’Angeline woman who lacked your curse of a gift?"
"I am the only one with this gift," I murmured. "Does my lord wish me to answer him truly?"
"Yes," he said bluntly.
I remembered what Cecilie had said about Childric d’Essoms. "My lord makes love as if he is hunting boar," I said; it was not as much of an insult to a Skaldi as it would be to a D’Angeline. "It is a heroic act, but not necessarily pleasing to women."