“Yes, perfectly.” In her way . . .
“Nothing of dy Lutez?”
“Nothing . . . remarkable.” Nothing he cared to remark upon, certainly.
The attendant breathed relief and passed on, fixing a smile on her face. Ista regarded her with bored tolerance as she began chattering about all the items that she’d had to overturn and hunt through to find her strayed thread. It crossed Cazaril’s mind that no daughter of the Provincara’s, nor mother of Iselle’s, could possibly be short of wit.
If Ista spoke to very many of her duller company with the cryptic leaps of thought she’d sprung on him, it was little wonder rumors circulated of madness, and yet . . . her occasional opacity of discourse felt more like cipher than babble to him. Of an elusive internal consistency, if only one held the key to it. Which, granted, he did not. Not that that wasn’t also true of some sorts of madness he had seen . . .
Cazaril clutched his book and went off to seek some less disturbing shade.
Summer advanced at a lazy pace that eased Cazaril’s mind and body both. Only poor Teidez chafed at the inactivity, hunting being curtailed by the heat, the season, and his tutor. He did pot rabbits with a crossbow in the dawn mists around the castle, to the earnest applause and approval of all the castle’s gardeners. The boy was so out-of-season—hot and restless and plump—if ever there was a born dedicat to the Son of Autumn, god of the hunt, war, and cooler weather, Cazaril judged it was surely Teidez.
Cazaril was a little surprised to be accosted on the way to nuncheon one warm noon by Teidez and his tutor. Judging by both their reddened faces, they were in the middle of another of their tearing arguments.
“Lord Caz!” Teidez hailed him breathlessly. “Didn’t the old provincar’s swordmaster too take the pages to the abattoir, to slay the young bulls—to teach them courage, in a real fight, not this, this, dancing about in the dueling ring!”
“Well, yes . . .”
“See, what did I tell you!” Teidez cried to dy Sanda.
“We practiced in the ring, too,” Cazaril added immediately, for the sake of solidarity, should dy Sanda need it.
The tutor grimaced. “Bull-baiting is an old country practice, Royse. Not befitting training for the highborn. You are destined to be a gentleman—at the least!—not a butcher’s apprentice.”
The Provincara kept no swordmaster in her household these days, so she’d made sure the royse’s tutor was a trained man. Cazaril, who had occasionally watched his practice sessions with Teidez, respected dy Sanda’s precision. Dy Sanda’s swordsmanship was pretty enough, if not quite brilliant. Sporting. Honorable. But if dy Sanda also knew the desperate brutal tricks that kept men alive on the field, he had not shown them to Teidez.
Cazaril grinned wryly. “The swordmaster wasn’t training us to be gentlemen. He was training us to be soldiers. I’ll give his old method this credit—any battlefield I was ever on was a lot more like a butcher’s yard than it was like a dueling ring. It was ugly, but it taught us our business. And there was no waste to it. I can’t think it mattered at the end of the day to the bulls whether they died after being chased around for an hour by a fool with a sword, or were simply stalled and thwacked on the head with a mallet.” Though Cazaril had not cared to stretch the business out, as some of the young men had, making macabre and dangerous play with the maddened animals. With a little practice he had learned to dispatch his beast with a sword thrust nearly as quickly as the butcher might. “Grant you, on the battlefield we didn’t eat what we killed, except sometimes the horses.”
Dy Sanda sniffed disapproval at his wit. He offered placatingly to Teidez, “We might take the hawks out tomorrow morning, my lord, if the weather holds fine. And if you finish your cartography problems.”
“A ladies’ sport—with hawks and pigeons—pigeons! What do I care for pigeons!” In a voice of longing Teidez added, “At the roya’s court at Cardegoss, they hunt wild boar in the oak forests in the fall. That’s a real sport, a man’s sport. They say those pigs are dangerous!”
“Very true,” said Cazaril. “The big tuskers can disembowel a dog—or a horse. Or a man. They’re much faster than you expect.”
“Did you ever hunt at Cardegoss?” Teidez asked him eagerly.
“I followed my lord dy Guarida a few times there.”
“Valenda has no boars.” Teidez sighed. “But we do have bulls! At least it’s something. Better than pigeons—or rabbits!”
“Oh, potting rabbits is a useful soldier’s training, too,” Cazaril offered consolingly. “In case you ever have to hunt rats for table. It’s much the same skill.”
Dy Sanda glared at him. Cazaril smiled and bowed out of the argument, leaving Teidez to his badgering.
Over nuncheon, Iselle took up a descant version of a similar song, though the authority she assailed was her grandmother and not her tutor.
“Grandmama, it’s so hot. Can’t we go swimming in the river as Teidez does?”
As the summer simmered on, the royse’s afternoon rides with his gentleman-tutor and his grooms and the pages had been exchanged for afternoon swims at a sheltered pool in the river upstream of Valenda—the same spot overheated denizens of the castle had frequented when Cazaril had been a page. The ladies were, of course, excluded from these excursions. Cazaril had politely declined invitations to join the party, pleading his duties to Iselle. The true reason was that stripping naked to swim would display all the old disasters written in his flesh, a history he did not care to expound upon. The misunderstanding with the bath man still mortified him, in memory.
“Certainly not!” said the Provincara. “That would be entirely immodest.”
“Not with him,” said Iselle. “Make up our own party, a ladies’ party.” She turned to Cazaril. “You said the ladies of the castle swam when you were a page!”
“Servants, Iselle,” said her grandmother wearily. “Lesser folk. It’s not a pastime for you.”
Iselle slumped, hot and red and pouting. Betriz, spared the unbecoming flush, drooped at her place, looking pale and wilted instead. Soup was served. Everyone sat eyeing their steaming bowls with revulsion. Maintaining the standards—as always—the Provincara picked up her spoon and took a determined sip.
Cazaril said suddenly, “But the Lady Iselle can swim, can she not, your grace? I mean, she presumably was taught, when she was younger?”
“Certainly not,” said the Provincara.
“Oh,” said Cazaril. “Oh, dear.” He glanced around the table. Royina Ista was not with them, this meal; relieved of concern for a certain obsessive subject, he decided that he dared. “That puts me in mind of a most horrible tragedy.”
The Provincara’s eyes narrowed; she did not take the bait. Betriz, however, did. “Oh, what?”
“It was when I was riding for the provincar of Guarida, during a skirmish with the Roknari prince Olus. Olus’s troops came raiding over the border under the cover of night, and a storm. I was told off to evacuate the ladies of dy Guarida’s household before the town was encircled. Near dawn, after riding half the night, we crossed a high freshet. One of his provincara’s ladies-in-waiting was swept off when her horse fell, and was carried away by the force of the waters, together with the page who went after her. By the time I’d got my horse turned around, they were out of sight . . . We found the bodies downstream next morning. The river was not that deep, but she panicked, not having any idea how to swim. A little training might have turned a fatal accident into merely a frightening one, and three lives saved.”
“Three lives?” said Iselle. “The lady, the page . . .”