Page 10 of Roses in Amber
"Tell me what you would do, Amber. Send Stewart and theSpidersilkback out? Try to recoup our losses, begin again? Or take what we have and return home a little wealthier, perhaps a little wiser?" His smile had bitter edges, all his mockery directed inward.
I sat across from him, hands steepled against my lips, and considered not only his question, but the other money: the coin from selling my perfumes, and the furs that had brought cash to us free and clear of Father's debts. "It's enough," I said behind my fingers. "Perhaps only just, but it's enough to refurbish theSpidersilkand send it out again." I lifted my eyes to his. "Or we could offer the ship to Stewart for a nominal cost, let him take on the repairs and the risk of future ventures, and take what we have home again. I meant what I said at midwinter, Father. We've done well enough, at the lodge, and both my perfumes and your furs will sell if we want to come to the city once a year with them. In autumn, not winter." I cast an eye toward the window. We had been in the city two weeks now, and it had snowed nearly every day. Even Beauty would be slow, pulling the wagon home on roads filled with snow.
"Farming is a hard life," Father said quietly. "Full of new risks every season—"
"Unlike mercantile investment," I said dryly, and he laughed, surprised.
"There is that. But if I could make back our fortune, you girls could marry well. Live a gentler life."
"This," I said with a gesture at our earnings, "is nothing, here. But itisa fortune at the lodge, Father. It could buy us a cow and pigs. If we come back with furs and perfumes for a few years, and no further debts to pay here, it could buy Flint horses to breed, and a future for the boys."
"But you girls."
"None of us will be outrageously old in another two or three years, Father. If we've done well and want to come back to the city to find suitors and marry, there will be time yet." I thought, but did not say,Pearl is a witch,and in the stories, witches never seem to marry, and I had hopes for Opal and Glover, even if I was the only one sporting them. "I think we're better off without theSpidersilk.And," I added, suddenly cheerful, "if the others disagree, in the end, you can blame me. I'm sure Pearl will enjoy eviscerating me."
To my surprise, Father laughed again, and said, ruefully, "Ah, Pearl. It's good she's so beautiful."
"Perhaps if she wasn't she wouldn't be quite so…Pearl-ish."
"But imagine if she was, without the beauty."
"I suppose we would love her anyway."
"But would anyone else?" Father took my hand and squeezed it. "Very well, Amber. I'll heed your advice, and tomorrow, offer theSpidersilkto Stewart, at whatever cost he can afford. Then as soon as the weather breaks we'll go home. I miss your mother." A furrow creased his forehead, and I breathed a smile.
"Maman is my mother," I said gently. "The only one I've ever known."
Father nodded, but after a moment, said, "I miss your mother, too. You look like her, you know."
I shook my head. "I don't. I've seen paintings. She looked like Opal."
"Paintings flatter where they shouldn't always. Her smile was like yours." He gestured at my mouth, at its slight unevenness and the way it made even my sweetest smile look like a smirk. "A little crooked. The painters gave her more even features, like Opal has, but she looked more like you. Ah, I see her in all of you, though. She was often kind, like Opal, but she could be so haughty and reserved that in comparison Pearl looks like the most approachable of women."
"You never talk about her," I said softly.
"I wasn't good enough for her." Father lifted a hand, stopping my protest, and chuckled. "In truth, I wasn't. I met her during the Border Wars, while she nursed for the army. Her family wouldn't come to the wedding. She said they were furious with me for taking her away from them, and her for marrying me."
"Mother had family?" The idea struck me like a gong, reverberating astonishingly in my mind. "We have other family?"
"Her family were friends of the queen, a long time ago. Felicity knew them, too. She came to make sure you girls were all right, after Eleanor died, and after a while we fell in love." The corner of his mouth pulled up. "Her family were also furious, though she still wrote—writes—to them, and they to her. I've been graced with women who are too good for me, Amber, and that includes you girls. I'm sorry I haven't done better by you."
"Thequeen?" Everything else Father had said fell by the wayside with that revelation. The Queen's War—the one commemorated in the Queen's Corridor mosaics—had been years ago, so many years that the number of decades was foggy in my mind, and half impossible to believe. "Our mother—Maman?—knew thequeen? But the queen is—is—"Ancientwas the only word that came to mind, and though it was by all appearances true, it still seemed rude to apply to our sovereign.
"I didn't say they were age-mates," Father pointed out. "But yes, Maman, and your birth mother, did both know the queen. And I suppose you do have other family, Amber. I don't know them at all, so it's hard to think of them that way." He pulled at his chin, a gesture that would look better if he'd grown a beard, but he had resolutely kept the city's clean-shaven look, even after a year in the country. "I never thought to contact them," he admitted. "Even at the worst of our travails, I never thought of it. Perhaps I should have. For your sake, Amber. For all of you children."
"Sooner salt the earth and curse the sun," I said, offended. "If they wouldn't have you, they've no right to us."
Father chuckled again, but said, "I wonder if your sisters would feel the same way," before letting it go. "Tomorrow, Amber. We'll talk with Stewart tomorrow, and leave for home as soon as we can."
The weather had broken in the morning: sunlight reflected brightly off banked snow and cast blue shadows in its depths. Father whistled merrily on his way out of the inn, and I, mindful of the stories he'd told the night before, went to visit the mosaics along the Queen's Corridor for the first time since before our house had burned.
The elegant frames told the story of our country's darkest hour, so long ago now that even the children of its war veterans were dead, and their grandchildren old. We had been ruled then by a king thought too gentle to rule well: he preferred diplomacy to warfare, and conceded too much, too often, to those who pressed at our borders. When illness struck him down, our enemies amassed, anticipating an easy conquest of a weak country with only a young queen on its throne.
They were not prepared for Irindala's ferocity. She gave her son, the prince and heir to the throne, to her closest friend to raise safely while she rode to war, and ride she did, with an army of the people at her back. Irindala fought alongside the people, bleeding for her country as they did; the first few panels of the mosaic, depicting the king's death and the gathered enemies, then Irindala leading her army, and finally a bloody battle, had frightened me as a child. The centermost, though, had inspired me then, and, a little to my embarrassment, still did: Irindala tall and strong with light all around her, her sword in one hand and the other open to the people, upon whose uplifted hands she stood, trusting them for her strength and balance. I knew now it was a cunning piece of propaganda, but its affect was no less for knowing that.
The next frame, though, broke my heart. Irindala returned to an empty castle, her trusted friend and her son both gone. In every remaining mosaic, Irindala wore a gown with a red slash across the breast, as she was said to every day, to show that her heart had been cut out and could never heal.
She did not become a cruel mistress, though. Despite her own heartbreak, she ruled fairly, and the next panel was broken into four smaller images, showing critical moments in her reign. The last of those reflected a battle from the Border Wars that Father had fought in, pushing back against an encroaching enemy said to be infused with faery blood, so relentless and powerful were they. But Irindala's army triumphed again, as it, and she, had done all through her long reign, save in the matter of her son.
