A Rose Point Holiday Read online

  “The chatelaine,” Felith said. “She reports to the lady and manages the staff, the stores, and makes sure anything the lady wishes done is done, from planning for large events to hiring for expansion of the grounds.”

  “Oh, good! So that’s you.”

  “I beg your pardon!” Felith exclaimed.

  “You’ve resisted my every effort to turn you into one of Laisrathera’s nobles,” Reese said, satisfied at the stare she’d shocked out of Felith. “Since, if I’m remembering right, you didn’t want to be far from the castle and accepting something like that would require you to go ride out to some village and take charge there. But you’re far too good at managing things to be wasted in a position with less responsibility. And you’re already doing all this for me, so… that makes you it, doesn’t it?”

  “But… but this is a position you should not bestow without careful consideration!”

  “I’ve considered it the only way it should be,” Reese said. “By saddling you with most of the job and seeing that you can handle it. So are you going to keep arguing or let me give you a ring of keys?”

  “A… a what?” Felith said, starting to laugh.

  “I read romances,” Reese said loftily. “I know what a chatelaine is. And she’s inevitably got a ring of keys on her belt.” She frowned, making a show of tapping her lip. “Of course, around here there aren’t going to be many doors that latch with physical keys, so I guess I’ll have to get someone to synthesize you a data wand. Those are antiquated compared to reading biometric fields, but God and Freedom know when we’re going to get those installed. The Tam-illee tell me the power plant isn’t ready for anything that strenuous.”

  “Lady! You are… you are outrageous!” Felith wiped her eyes and suppressed—poorly—another gurgle of mirth.

  “So are you done arguing with me? I know you feel obliged to pretend you’re not worthy of the honor, but maybe we can consider that done already and move on to the ‘thank you, Reese, I’d be glad to be Rose Point’s chatelaine and keep you from making any more ridiculous cultural faux pas for the rest of your natural life’ part?”

  Felith collapsed into another giggle and pressed her fingers to her mouth until she could control herself. Then, meekly, eyes dancing, she said, “Thank you, Lady, I’d be glad to be Rose Point’s chatelaine.”

  “What about the rest of it?” Reese said. “That part’s important!”

  “I can only commit to preventing you from making the problematic faux pas, I’m afraid. The ones I think necessary I may let you commit, the better to… rearrange… any problematic customs that might benefit from a fresh approach.”

  “See?” Reese said. “You’re already showing the discretion and wisdom necessary for the position. Now, here, this is the thing Taylor said the heaters would need! Let’s find at least four more.”

  Restraining the Tam-illee turned out to be more work than the actual preparation for the trip, because apparently Val had told Sascha which of the houses were abandoned and he’d snuck Taylor into one of them so she’d have a feel for the project facing them. Taylor had come back with a fire burning in her eyes: she wanted to rip all the houses down and start from scratch because it was “disgraceful” that anyone should be forced to live that way, and it was unsafe and unsanitary and a million other pejoratives that would have made an engineer take up arms and go to war.

  It became Reese’s job to explain, as someone who’d been poor most of her life, that you couldn’t just go in and rebuild someone’s house and have them thank you for it. That in fact, you couldn’t go in and make any substantial changes without their permission, or they would resent you until their dying breath for not only taking away one of the few things they had—control over their environment—but also humiliating them by showing them how backwards they were. This was not an argument that found much favor with Taylor. “Fine, they’re emotional about it. But aren’t they also emotional about their babies dying of pneumonia because it’s too cold in the house? I’d think that would matter more than whether their house looks exactly the same as it has for generations.”

  Reese had finally recruited Irine’s help and used the ultimate Harat-Shariin argument against the plan, which by then had mutated into the nuclear “swooping in and re-homing all the inhabitants of the village” option; confronted with the tigraine’s reminder—that consent had to matter, or how were they better than any two-bit despot?—Taylor gave in. But only because Reese promised her that given some time, she was sure they could bring the villagers around, and her army of Tam-illee would end up with permission to renovate the place to their heart’s content.

  “I hope I’m right about that,” Reese said glumly to Irine. “Knowing how stubborn Eldritch are, it’s just as likely they’ll decide never to speak to us again.”

  “On the bright side, if they do, they’ll probably move out in search of some purer Eldritch noble family to serve,” Irine said. “Then you really can flatten the entire place and redo it from scratch.”

  Reese rubbed her head. Initially, she’d greeted the revelation of Lady’s Day’s existence with enthusiasm, as a way to give useful things to people who needed them. It was only after thinking it through that she’d realized how fraught the whole thing was: not only did these Eldritch not know her, but they hadn’t been consulted on whether they wanted their hereditary jobs back at the castle, and now there was the challenge of figuring how to give them what they needed without offending their pride or dignity, both of which the Eldritch had. In spades.

  This would be her first real piece of diplomacy as Firilith’s new noble keeper... and she would have to do it through a translator. It was probably going to be a disaster. But, looking around her study, Reese thought that her disasters had found ways of working themselves out, so maybe this one would too. Mistakes could be fixed. Nothing, though, came from not making an effort.

  CHAPTER 6

  Lady’s Day dawned cold, and it was a wet cold that crawled all the way down her throat into her lungs. It was at least sunny, Reese thought as the horses were coaxed onto the back of the ground transport. As blessings went, that had to be a major one, because she couldn’t imagine making her first appearance in town in a cold rain, snowstorm, or even under a sky cloudy enough to make any superstitious tenants decide she was some sort of demon. Blood, she’d be superstitious at that point.

  “This is a lot of trouble,” Kis’eh’t said, arms folded. She was overseeing the assembly of the cavalcade in the Rose Point courtyard with a jaundiced eye. “Don’t the Eldritch say you should start things the way you mean them to continue? You are starting this with a lie.”

  “It is not a lie!” Irine exclaimed as she joined them. “It’s a story!”

  “It’s not a lie or a story,” Reese said. “It’s the truth, which is that under Laisrathera’s management, we’re going to have a hybrid of Alliance and Eldritch ways. I’m going to ride a horse into the village, because that’s what you do. And because horses are kind of pretty, once you get over their bad points. But I’m going to get the horses most of the way there on a flatbed because it’s faster, and easier on them, and because we’ve got baggage in tow.”

  Studying the gifts already stowed on the truck, Kis’eh’t said, “Taylor’s not happy.”

  “Taylor wants to remake the world in a Tam-illee engineer’s image,” Reese said. “If I was an Eldritch living here, I’d take up arms to keep her off my property. The Eldritch are right about one thing, arii: we have to start things off on the right foot, or we’ll have to clear the wreckage before we get started on the real work.”

  “Hey, Boss!” Sascha yelled from the flatbed’s door. “We’re about ready to go!”

  Reese sucked in a breath and opened her arms. “How do I look?”

  Irine adjusted the fillet and brushed off the shoulders of the new coat. “You look wonderful.”

  “And warm!” Kis’eh’t said. “I will watch over Allacazam for you. I promise, no rolling into trouble.�
��

  “Or the firebowl, or the glass...”

  “Or any of those things.” Kis’eh’t grinned. “Go. You too, fluffy.”

  Irine grinned and hugged her, then bounded off to join her brother.

  “You’ll do well,” Kis’eh’t said to Reese.

  “God, I hope so.”

  The flatbed cab was more than large enough for their entire party: Hirianthial, of course, as future consort of the noble House, and Felith to translate, and the twins because they’d insisted, and, oddly, Bryer, who’d said, “I am so strange-looking, you will look normal.”

  …which was… hard to argue, really. The priests had stayed behind, and Reese guessed that made sense: you couldn’t have male priests hanging around on a day devoted to the Goddess and Lady, particularly since they had a female priest waiting for them in the village to officiate at the ceremony. Reese looked at the paper in her lap and recited the responses for the Mass until Irine plucked it out of her hands.

  “It’s like a test,” Irine said. “If you study too hard, you’ll forget everything.”

  “I’m already forgetting everything!”

  “That’s why you have me and Felith to remind you with well-timed whispers.” Irine looped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “Stop worrying so much. It’ll go fine.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Reese asked.

  “Then it goes badly, they all leave in an offended huff, and we repopulate Firilith with Tam-illee.”

  “And Harat-Shar,” Sascha said absently from the driver’s seat.

  The idea of being trapped between the Tam-illee’s zeal to renovate and the Harat-Shar’s passion for partying made Reese dizzy. “Blood. Let’s hope everything goes perfect.”

  Sascha stopped the flatbed a credible distance from town so Reese could climb up on her horse—with help this time, because while she could get into a saddle in pants, doing so while managing a coat was beyond her—and ride the final stretch the way a lady was supposed to, with an entourage carrying all her offerings. She didn’t let herself linger on Taylor’s opinion of literally carting those gifts into the town square; personally, she thought there was something satisfying about bringing the modernization of the Eldritch world on its own old-fashioned conveyances.

  And she liked the town. A lot. Not because she recognized the architecture or felt any affinity for the countryside, but because the dilapidation spoke to roots deeper than any of those things. She’d come from a place that had sagged at the corners, and she remembered the pride she and her fellow Martians had taken in the fact that they’d clung to their settlement despite its challenges. These Eldritch, too, had persevered in the face of increasing hardships. They’d been abandoned, whittled to the bone, and left to fend for themselves, and they’d stayed alive and kept their church bells tuned... something she could hear for herself after the youngest member of the community spotted her and dashed back to warn everyone they were coming.

  Reese squared her shoulders and exhaled a plume of white breath into the moist, cold air. “This is it,” she muttered.

  “You faced down pirates, slavers, and traitors,” Hirianthial reminded her, his voice a low murmur.

  “Fleet took care of the slavers, you killed the pirates, and they were someone else’s traitors,” Reese said, but her mouth was quirking.

  “Ah, I see. You were just bystanding. War tourism. Very fashionable.”

  Reese sat on her burble of mirth and settled for glaring at him. As expected, he was wearing a bland expression, fit for a haloed saint, so she ended up snickering after all.

  “Much better!” Irine said from behind them.

  “Hush, fluffy.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  But if she worried that she’d be unable to shake off an unbecoming levity before she reached the square, she soon threw that concern off. As they gained the main thoroughfare and their party passed through the crumbled remains of what had once been proud houses, her thoughts turned again to the Sol system, and the spaceports there that had seen better days, or that were falling prey to entropy for lack of time, money, manpower. Reese loved the Pelted... loved them in the abstract, as the family that had adopted her when her own had failed to nurture the dreams she’d needed to thrive, and in specific, in the individuals she’d embraced on the Earthrise. But the longer she stayed on the Eldritch’s nameless world, the more she felt these people were blood kin, estranged but familiar.

  The Pelted wanted her, but didn’t need her. The Eldritch, though... they needed her, and didn’t want her. And she knew how that felt in her bones.

  The center of town was the only part of it that showed upkeep, and Reese could only imagine how much trouble it had cost. She’d been imagining a literal square when Felith explained the ceremony to her, like an enormous plaza faced with buildings. Instead, the small church opened onto a stone circle, and from it spread a village green complete with small pond and what had probably once been charming shops and public halls. They were abandoned hulks now, painstakingly maintained but hollow where they should have been filled with laughter and light. Only three buildings were obviously tenanted, festooned with garlands for the holiday, but surrounded by so many derelicts they looked vulnerable and lonely. Reese cast her eye around the village as she guided her mare toward the small crowd awaiting her by the church. Fully inhabited this place had probably not seen more than five hundred residents, but that was a far cry from the twenty-eight that remained.

  But twenty-eight did remain, and they had turned out in what was probably their finest, the women in embroidered woolen gowns—those sheep!—and the men in tunics edged in ribbon. Even men regarded as little more than peasants by Eldritch standards still wove trinkets into their hair, Reese noticed, though they kept their hair much shorter than the Eldritch she’d seen at Liolesa’s court. The one teenager who served as the village’s youngest child was already old enough to be dressed in a man’s raiment, and while Reese had never thought of herself as a maternal woman, the lack of any children or babies felt ominous and sad to her. It felt like endings.

  Well. She was here to change that.

  The priestess was standing in the forefront of this gathering. Reese supposed she was old, but until they were almost senescent all the Eldritch were uniformly tall, elegant, thin, and ageless. It would be easy to resent them if she didn’t know they were washing with cold water in unheated homes that didn’t have real bathrooms.

  As Reese halted her horse, this dignitary stepped forth, her rose and white robes swaying around her. Touching her fingers together, she curtseyed and said something in a clear, carrying soprano.

  “She is welcoming you,” Felith murmured. “And asking the Lady’s blessings on this day, dawning so favorably after the ending of the men’s Vigil night. She is adding something now about how particularly fortunate this year finds them, because it has finally brought a new lady to Rose Point to oversee long-neglected Firilith.”

  “Did she actually say ‘long-neglected’?” Reese whispered, surprised.

  Felith wrinkled her nose. “It is a nuance, Lady. But... yes. More or less.”

  Reese studied her new priestess, wary but intrigued. There was no rule that said a priestess couldn’t look a noblewoman in the face so boldly, but somehow Reese doubted most priestesses did. Was it the fact that Reese wasn’t Eldritch that was inspiring the defiant look? Or was it too long spent ministering to a flock no one had cared enough to help in centuries? If Reese had been abandoned that long, wouldn’t she have an attitude too?

  Silly question.

  “Her name is Ijiliin, Lady.”

  Of course it was. Because nothing rolled off the tongue like four identical vowels, all separately voiced.

  Reese scanned her newest tenants. They were staring at her with those supernal Eldritch masks, the ones they retreated behind because showing excessive emotion was vulgar. They’d been assigned a new lady without warning, and she was an outworld freak, small and dark and strange, a mortal
who couldn’t even speak their language. After clinging to the remains of their dignity and their lives in this town, to suffer this newest injury: to be forced to give themselves into the hands of a stranger.... oh yes. She had no doubt they were hiding any number of unruly emotions behind those expressionless faces.

  “Tell her that we are ready to observe the mass,” Reese said, because that was the next step... and she was glad, because she needed to think.

  The inside of the church reminded Reese of Rose Point’s chapel, with a low ceiling but walls of stained glass windows depicting scenes Reese didn’t need a scripture to interpret: beautiful men spearing monsters, beautiful women bathing their wounds, elegant mothers with their new babies, stern fathers with adolescent sons wielding their first weapons. The back of the church, though, had the most stunning window of all, a man bent over the body of a woman bleeding among a profusion of roses, all ruby and frosted glass. Reese glanced at Hirianthial, who managed a faint smile at this monument to the story of Corel. She managed not to scowl. She would have thought the extremely matriarchal Eldritch wouldn’t be interested in enshrining a woman’s wilting sacrifice to save a man’s soul, but she guessed if their love for common sense had outweighed their worship of tragedy and high drama, they wouldn’t have reached this impasse in the first place.

  Reese settled on the pillow assigned to her, to the right of the altar and in front of the congregation, and prepared to wait out the ceremony without her translator, who’d been relegated to the audience with everyone else. Her participation in the rite was thankfully minimal, and involved her joining the congregation in response to five different exhortations from the priestess. Despite Irine’s warning she did not, in fact, forget the phrases. She did find herself wondering when, if ever, she’d be able to understand the language. She wasn’t one of those people who took to languages, and supposedly the Eldritch tongue had been designed to be twisty and hard to learn. On purpose. Naturally. There was no translator function for it in the Alliance u-banks, nor would there be unless something changed, because one of the treaty stipulations involved a fleet of patrolling codebits that swept the entire Alliance computer network for anything relating to the Eldritch so that it could be deleted. Instantly and permanently.