Bess had read the tale, shedding a few tears for the poor, lonely mother and her simpleton daughter. She had some notion of how they must have felt, outcast and ignored. Now, though, she could tell Magistrate Kerren these bare bones of a life, sure that if he thought to send to Milorga to confirm her tale, he would indeed find a widow whose daughter had left town, and if the local magistrate there had no record of her going, why, such things could be easily lost—an absentminded clerk forgetting to jot an entry in a book, or a preoccupied magistrate forgetting this particular detail. In any event, he would probably not want to admit that one of his villagers had left without his leave and not been caught. As to Raymond, if Kerren did indeed learn his fate, there would be no one to contradict Bess’s version of it.
So she prattled on, telling him of her own growing-up, and filling the tale with amusing little anecdotes, some of which had really happened, using all the graces and artifices she had learned during the glittering dinners of mock lords and ladies. Kerren laughed, and asked questions and made comments; she could almost see the tension leaving him in wave after wave.
Fish followed soup, and meat followed fish. Gradually, Bess became the questioner, and Kerren’s answers became longer. Bess threw in the occasional observation of her own: “Surely the Protector can’t have an endless supply of magistrates, Your Honor.”
“No, there are only a thousand fifty-three of us,” Kerren replied, looking surprised; most peasants assumed the Protector’s men were infinite in number. “But there are two hundred twelve reeves to whom they answer.”
The conversation ranged over politics, history, and literature, even making forays into art. Kerren seemed to grow more and more surprised with every answer.
“Where did you learn to read, lass?”
“Oh, the magistrate’s clerk was good enough to teach me, sir, so that I could read to my grandmother when she could no longer get about much. I’ve read all his books to her in the last few years—except the ones about law, of course.”
“Of course.” The magistrate looked dazed. Pleased, but dazed.
Over an after-dinner cordial, the two of them grew quite philosophical, speculating about how the world might have come to be, how people had grown upon its surface, and whether there could be any kernel of truth underlying the myth that all their forebears had really come down from the stars above.
When it was quite dark outside, and both of them were feeling a bit dazed, the butler came in and said, “The maiden’s chamber is ready, Your Honor.”
“My chamber!” Bess sat bolt upright in wide-eyed surprise and open alarm—and secret elation. “Your Honor, I can’t impose on your hospitality!”
“Where else will you stay?” Kerren pointed out. “You have no relatives here, and you must stay two months, so you surely won’t have money enough for an inn.”
“I can find work…”
“I shall not forbid it, but I don’t think you’ll find many openings just now. In any event, the courthouse has a guest wing, and you shall surely be one of my guests until you can make other arrangements.”
“Well … if I really will not be putting you out…”
“The Protector provides.”
“But I must do something to earn my keep.”
“Why, yes.” The young magistrate smiled and caught her hand. “You shall dine with me every night.”
Bess smiled and dropped her gaze, blushing. “Magistrate, I shall be honored!”
“And I shall take great pleasure in your company.” Magistrate Kerren dropped her hand with a smile. “Of course, we might run out of conversation. Do you think two months will be long enough?”
Two months was more than enough.
Dilana listened with full concentration as Magistrate Gorlin told her about the case that had come before him that morning. He didn’t look at her, only gazed at the garden while he spoke, his brow furrowed, and Dilana’s heart went out to him because of the pain in his voice. She made sympathetic noises from time to time, and couldn’t help noticing, with the back of her mind, how dear Gorlin’s profile had become to her in the last few months.
He certainly wasn’t handsome, though she could see that he might have been in his youth. For a man in the fullness of middle age, though; his chin was too small for the fleshiness his face had taken on, his nose too big, his lips too full. But they were sensitive, those lips, showing every trace of the pain he was feeling; staring at them raised familiar sensations within her, and she was delighted to find that she could feel them still.
From their conversations—almost daily—she had come to know how deeply he cared for the people he’d been sent to govern, how much he shared their pains, but how cautious he was about sharing their joys. He was a lonely man, and seemed determined to remain so for fear of the grief of parting that he knew must come in a few years. He hadn’t remarried yet, and was dangerously close to the end of his first six months in this assignment, at the end of which he had to marry somebody, anybody.
Dilana had already pondered the riddle of why he had never been promoted to reeve, then found that he had only applied once. He could have been afraid to try again, not wanting to be turned down—but she thought it more likely that he wanted to work directly with the people of a single village, not order fifty other magistrates, only seeing the actual people he governed when they appealed a legal case to him.
She was becoming impossibly fond of the man. Why couldn’t he see it!
“That two sisters should be ready to tear each other apart over a single cow their father left, the one thing of all his belongings that he didn’t will to one or the other!” Gorlin shook his head with sorrow approaching grief. “It makes me glad magistrates can’t own their own houses or furniture, and not much else but the clothes on our backs and the money we’ve saved!”
“It’s certainly not what their father could have wanted,” Dilana agreed. “Of course, I suppose he could have been one of the cruel ones who delights in causing trouble, one of the few who die cackling with delight over the way people will fight over their estates.”
Gorlin shook his head again. “From all I hear about him, he was a good man who prided himself on providing for his wife and children. What could have set them against each other so?”
“I have found,” Dilana said slowly, “that when such quarrels grow so tall, their roots are deep in the past.”
Gorlin looked up in surprise. “What an insight! But what manner of roots could they be?”
“Jealousy,” Dilana said, “and envy.” She remembered her own childhood and shivered. “He might have favored the one over the other, so that the first grew steadily prouder of his regard and more jealous in not wanting to share it, while the worm of envy bored deeper and deeper into the other’s heart.” In her own case, she now knew, that worm had bred the delusion that she wasn’t her father’s daughter at all, but the cuckoochild of a distant prince.
Gorlin nodded, his eyes glowing. “Of course that would explain the bitterness within them! The first is trying to hold on to everything of her father’s that she can, thinking them to be signs of his love, while the other is frantically trying to grasp whatever last shreds of him she may!”