“I will if I find a town that wants me, and if I can persuade him to stay in one place for more than a week,” Alea said, smiling.
“Till then, though, you’ll have to do the thinking for your father.” A woman blinked tears away. “Oh, do be wise and wait for other travelers!”
“That could be a month or more,” Alea answered. “What can they take from us if we have nothing to steal?”
“Nothing but your bodies and your lives,” the villager said darkly.
“You would be forced to serve General Malachi’s bandits.” The woman shuddered. “Beware of that man, sister! If ever there was an ogre from out of the old tales, it is he!”
The patrols were still on the roads, but Gar heard their thoughts before they came into sight, giving himself and Alea time to hide—and they didn’t try to spy on the soldiers as they went past any more, but concentrated on the soldiers not spying them.
Their welcome in the next village was as joyous as ever, but Gar decided to be a smart old man instead of a foolish one and drove bargains with every bit as much zeal as Alea. They traded the porcelains of their first village for uncut gemstones, though they had to add a few wedges of copper to make their hosts happy.
Once Again Gar noticed people putting bits of metal in a collection box. This time, though, he was sure another one had put in a chip of something white.
Alea settled down to tell a story to the village children and their parents naturally stayed, too—only to keep an eye on their little ones, of course.
“Once upon a time, long ago and far away, there lived a man whose wife had died, leaving him with only one daughter…”
Murmurs of sympathy.
“After a few years, the man married again…”
“What is ‘married’? ” a young man asked.
Taken aback, Alea explained, “They lived together and reared a family.”
“Oh, bonding.” The man nodded; everyone else did, too, understanding. “ ‘Married…’ an odd word. How many children did the new wife have?”
“Two daughters.”
“The poor woman—only two. She must have loved having a third.”
“Well, she seemed to, until her husband died,” Alea said. “Then she made her stepdaughter do all the cooking and sweeping and scrubbing, and throwing out the garbage and tending the kitchen garden, while her own two girls slept as late as they wanted and spent the day amusing themselves.”
She hadn’t been prepared for the loud and instant protest, and the adults were almost as vociferous as the children.
“Her own daughters? They were all three her own daughters!” a woman said indignantly.
“And doubly precious if her husband had died,” said an older woman who looked as though she knew.
“She really made the poor lass do all the housekeeping?” one mother asked indignantly. “Well, I never! ”
“And all the cooking, too,” another woman said, shaking her head with a dark frown. “Shameful, I call it.”
But both of them were glancing out of the corners of their eyes at another older woman who reddened with anger but stood her ground, tilting up her chin. Gar wondered which child she favored.
“Now, in that country, there lived a…” Alea paused, remembering what had happened the last time she had referred to a king. “…a duke whose son was twenty-five and hadn’t married yet…”
“What’s a duke?” one of the children piped up. The parents nodded, equally puzzled.
“It’s … um … a man who owns the land that the people of a hundred villages farm,” Alea said, with a sinking feeling that already this was not going well.
“He tells them all what work to do, and when.” There, that didn’t sound quite so bad as ordering them about.
It was bad enough.
“The very idea!” one woman said indignantly. “That one man could dare to tell the people of a hundred villages what to do and not do!” a man said, equally indignant.
“Or even a dozen villages,” another man chimed in. “What a villain!” a second woman said.
“Well, every good tale must have a villain, must it not?” Alea tried not to look as nervous as she felt. That silenced them for a minute. Brows bent, faces frowned while they mulled it over, darting dark suspicious glances at Gar and Alea. Then an old woman pronounced, “No. I know tales about folk braving natural hazards, such as clashing rocks and arid deserts—or monsters such as one-eyed giants, or manticores with a thousand shark teeth and stingers in their tails.”
“Then think of a duke as a monster,” Alea said, and inspiration struck. “Think of him as a bully who lords it over other bullies.”
Their faces cleared; that, they could understand. “Like this General Malachi we’ve heard of?” the first woman asked.
“The very thing!” Alea said with relief. “He’s nothing but a bully who has herded a bunch of bandits together and made them fight for him.”
The villagers looked around nervously, but nodded with energy.
Alea decided it was time to get back to the story. “Let’s forget that the father was a duke—just think of him as a very rich man.”
The villagers turned to one another in consternation, exchanging questions and a lack of answers. Alea reined in exasperation and explained, “A rich man is one who has a great deal of…” No, they didn’t seem to use money here. “…a great number of possessions.”
“You mean he was the son of a priest?” a woman asked.
“Well … he lived with his family in a great house and wore beautiful clothes,” Alea temporized, “and never had to plow or hoe.”
“A priest indeed,” the woman said, satisfied, and everyone else nodded, chorusing agreement.
“But he did learn to reap, of course,” a man said. “Of course,” Alea said, a little unnerved. “Doesn’t everybody?”
They all nodded, agreeing with that.
“Anyway,” Alea said, “the priest decided that his son was old enough to mar … uh, to bond with a woman, past old enough, really, and told him that he must see to finding a wife, and sent messengers throughout the district for all the maidens to come to a grand feast he would give, so that his son might choose among them.”
“Why would he do that?” one of the men asked, frowning.
“Aye!” said the woman by his side. “It’s no good trying to find the right mate—these things simply happen.”
“Or fail to,” grunted one older man. He was rather ugly, and the woman’s tone softened.
“Aye, some of us must wait longer than others, Holdar. But love comes to all someday.”
“And it’s worth the waiting for,” said another man with a warm glance at the woman by his side. She returned the look, beaming, and took his hand.
“Um … Well, it may have been silly, but there are always people who have to prove for themselves what everybody knows,” Alea said.
“Well, that’s so, I suppose,” a man allowed, and the neighbors set up another chorus of agreement. Alea relaxed again, but not much, as she explained, “The son had been a bit wild, you see, and the priest wanted him tied to one woman, to settle him down.”
“He what?” a man cried, aghast.
“You don’t mean a priest would want a boy bonded to a girl for life!” a woman gasped.
“They might have fallen out of love!” another woman protested. “This priest wouldn’t have them tied together when they didn’t love one another, would he?”
Alea was stunned—here were ordinary villagers, most of them living as husband and wife with families, and they were frankly shocked at the idea of a man and woman bonding to live together for life.