One of the bedrooms had a few personal effects, clothes, and loaned books of the dead dragoneer Heem Zwollen placed in a wicker chest, light but surprisingly stout. Galia lifted a flying cap from within. The leather wasn’t quite black. It had a sort of steely blue color to it that reminded Ileth of a predawn sky just before the sun appears.
“I am sorry for your loss, sir,” Galia said, reverently returning the cap. “I understand he trained you.”
“He was the best dragoneer I’ve ever known,” Dun Huss said, his voice heavy. “I’ve tried to follow his example ever since. Just as I hope you will follow mine. None of us know the number of our days—it’s why we have to do everything we can to see that those following us are ready to take our place in turn and prepare others to do the same. I’m glad you have Ileth on your wing in the same manner you’re on mine.”
“I don’t know how I could go on if you—” Galia said.
Dun Huss smiled. “None of that. I am certain you could, and will. You’ve triumphed over greater losses than one wind-burned old soldier. With Heem Zwollen gone, I suppose I should start thinking of myself as one of the old wings.”
“How long before you return to the Serpentine with Mnasmanus?” Ileth asked, trying to find a happier subject.
“When I am satisfied I can do no more here. Then I shall return.”
“What is there to do?” Galia asked.
“Heem Zwollen was murdered. Careful when you speak, even in our own tongue. Trust no one in this place.”
A young man called for them as the sun touched the western mountains. “My father the Baron Hryasmess of Chapalaine and its lands hopes you will join him for dinner,” he said, with the gravity of a thirteen-year-old charged with escorting prisoners of war. “He understands that formal dress in your circumstances is impossible and will therefore greet you in clothes ordinary.”
They bowed to him, and only then did he return the courtesy in a perfunctory manner.
“Little swine,” Galia muttered.
“Is there some difficulty with the unsexed prisoner?” the youth barked.
“I’ve praised the roast pig the kitchen productions in the commanding of your father,” Dun Huss said after a moment’s thought. “She is entirety an appetite in anticipation. Lead on, bastard.”
The boy’s eyes widened in shock.
Ileth supplied in Galantine to Dun Huss, “Boy in precedence or son of a noble father.”
“Oh, have I erred?” Dun Huss said. “Son of a noble father. I am still the clumsy with your elegance language.”
The Baron Hryasmess had a thriving and innumerable family. Ileth met only a few that night at dinner, which, the Baron said, perforce had to be intimate and limited to sixteen. There was awkwardness at first, with the family eyeing Galia’s and Ileth’s clothing in disbelief. Galia wore an ill-fitting uniform of a wingman that she had purchased used from a man and altered, and it looked every inch the tragic story it was, with clogs of the sort worn by a fisherman’s wife when she was out haggling for vegetables. Ileth’s only clothes were her same old men’s work shirt, rough overdress, cotton hose, and homemade canvas slippers.
But once the visit-by-destitute-relations awkwardness was over, the introductions proceeded, and the dinner party found each other interesting company. The Galantine women had bright bold eyes and great skill at making the best of whatever beauty, great or small, they had, and managed to make the visitors feel their sisterhood, whatever their poor dress, odd accents, and foreign ways of arranging their hair.
The Baron, introducing his wife, noted that she had produced twelve children (as of the date of Ileth’s arrival) and ten of those lived past infancy. He had two younger brothers living alongside him at Chapalaine, along with their wives and their combined children, and some adoptees from a widowed sister who died in childbed. They were attentive and affectionate to the entire population no matter which pair produced them. Ileth never did, in her time there, get an accurate count of the throng or quite straighten out the nieces and nephews. If they’d all been lined up in a field like soldiers, babes in arms to near-adults, she could have done it with the aid of a tally sheet, but they would never be still and there always seemed to be neighboring children over visiting, or members of the combined brood departing for some party. Somehow the mothers and nannies and governesses kept it all straight. It would have been interesting to set Rapoto and his page skills against the task of tracking their presence, comings, and goings, just to see if he could accomplish it without being driven mad.
The house that accommodated this small army consisted of two long wings jutting out from a domed central social area they called the Gallery. The Gallery was open between all three floors, and the dome above was made of frosted glass supported by wrought iron. It admitted a great deal of light. Lamps on chains could be lowered to whatever height the Baron and his (expecting again! Ileth surmised, when the Baroness stood in profile) wife desired. The Baron’s family had one long wing with its own dining room, his brothers and their throng the other, and the chief adults of the family often met in the Gallery to play cards or hear singing at night once the children retired, along with anyone over fifteen who did not have other occupations such as studies or duties around the house.
Unlike the Vales, where one tended to retire indoors once the sun went down, the Galantines enjoyed their evenings outside if at all possible, even if it did bring bugs only partially discouraged by foul-smelling tallow lights placed at the edges of the verandas. On this first night the family and their guests wandered in and out at will.
Later, she came to know the Baron’s grounds as well as she did the Beehive. In the Vales such an estate would have pheasants or possibly deer in the woods for hunting, but the Baron hated such sports, though his few other “significant” neighbors indulged in them (just not on his grounds). The Baron rose early, accomplished his work in time to have a midday meal with one of the local officials who seemed to visit almost daily bearing letters and other matters for his attention, and then he would walk about in his woods and gardens with a pocket full of nuts and seeds that he would distribute to the squirrels, birds, raccoons, and groundhogs that found his garden and lands as congenial as he did. About every third day he would mount his cart and ride about his tenants’ lands or visit the homes of his neighbors of significance.
Ileth learned that the word significant was something of a shining line in Galantine society. You had significant wealth or you did not. You owned significant lands or business concerns, or you did not. You came from a significant family or you did not. There was no contempt for the insignificant; she never heard the word uttered. But the significant only mixed with other significants.
The two significant—at least to Galia and Ileth—members of the Baron’s brood were his senior daughter but one (she hardly spoke to his eldest daughter, as she was eternally involved in the younger children’s care and education), a raven-haired girl named Tafista, or Taf as she preferred to be called. Her rich dark hair reminded Ileth of Peak’s, but Taf’s was straight as a plumb line and almost always hanging free. Ileth wondered if a servant brushed it every time she sat down, for it always looked tended. The hair matched the girclass="underline" well-tended, free, and spirited. The other Galantine girls and women only traveled in groups with their own sex, but Taf liked to wander about on her own. The other notable youth was the eldest son but one (the eldest was at a military academy), a shy and soft-spoken young man who had the duty of seeing to the more mundane needs of the “guests” such as fresh breakfast eggs and soap for their linens. He was more errand boy than jailer, and Ileth judged him to be about her age. He had a long and distinctive name full of tongue-tripping consonants she could only get out of her mouth with great difficulty, so he let her call him Young Azal of Chapalaine (by Galantine custom, young women could be on a first-name basis with young men only if they were siblings, cousins, or being formally courted, an impossibility in this case; otherwise the youth’s name had to be accompanied by chaperones of title and geography).