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Authors: T. Kingfisher

Seventh Bride

BOOK: Seventh Bride
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CONTENTS

Copyright Information

Praise for "Toad Words"

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Acknowledgments

Other Works

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, places, large waterfowl, events, or actual historical personages, living, dead, or trapped in a hellish afterlife is purely coincidental.
 

Copyright 2014
 
Ursula Vernon

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Red Wombat Tea Company

Artwork by Ursula Vernon

Praise for “Toad Words”

“…a book of re-told fairy tales, all in the quirky, matter-of-fact-in-the-face-of-total-nonsense style that I’ve always loved. They’re often dark, sometimes sad, but always endearing, even when they’re disturbing.”
 

—Pixelatedgeek.com

The

Seventh Bride

T. Kingfisher

For Brooke

(stone)

CHAPTER ONE

Her name was Rhea.

Her father said that she had been named after a great and powerful goddess of the old days, the queen of all the gods, but in that country at that time, there weren’t many books about gods. There were too many problems with wizards and fairies and odd things popping up in the corners of the potato field for anyone to want to invite more supernatural intervention. People prayed, when they prayed at all, to the old saints and heroes of the country—Saint Olio and Cullan the Archer and the Lady of Stones, saints who might be expected to understand the special trials of living in that land—and left the gods alone.

As a result, when Rhea tried to look up anything related to “rhea” in the few books available to a miller’s daughter, all she could find were pictures of a probably-mythical creature that looked like a giant, ill-tempered chicken with a very long neck. There was no reason that a goddess had to look human, of course—plenty of them had never been human, which was part of the reason that the saints were safer—but if one was immortal and had to pick a shape, a giant long-necked chicken seemed like an odd choice.
 

Rhea the girl felt that, had she been Rhea the goddess, she would have done a better job there. There were plenty of lovely and noble birds, like eagles and peacocks and phoenixes, which would have been a vast improvement over the rhea.

Probably not swans, though. Swans came sweeping down the millstream fairly regularly, and they looked beautiful, with their high, proud necks and dark eyes. But if you were sitting on the bank, minding your own business, with a bit of lunch, and the swans caught sight of it, they’d be out of the water and advancing before you knew it. They hissed like serpents, and those beautiful white wings could hit like a sledgehammer.

(And there is nothing quite like turning up at home, beaten and bloody and bruised, and having to explain that you’ve been abused up one side of the lawn and down the other by a flock of limpid-eyed waterfowl.)
 

Rhea had learned at a young age to beat a hasty retreat in the face of swans.
 

On the other hand, she had to admit that she had never met an eagle or a peacock or a phoenix, either, and it was entirely possible that they were just as obnoxious as swans. Rhea was not notably more cynical than the average fifteen year old, but she thought that this was likely.
 

She did not know many beautiful animals that had sweet tempers, except perhaps butterflies, and there wasn’t enough to a butterfly to properly be called a temper. What options did an angry butterfly have, anyway? Stamping eyelash-sized feet? Flapping its wings in a sarcastic manner?
 

In that regard, Rhea thought glumly, they weren’t much different from miller’s daughters. She could slam doors and drag her feet and feed the chickens in as furious a fashion as possible, but it didn’t help. Her anger was no more effective than a butterfly’s. No one was going to listen.

She was fifteen years old, and engaged.

That was more than enough to be angry about.

Sure, some girls
did
get married that young. Even younger, sometimes, but not often. There were stories that long ago, girls had married at twelve and thirteen, but that had been the bad old days. Nobody did that
now
—or rather, girls who got married at that age were making an arrangement, not really getting married—they might be married, but they lived at home, and they didn’t go and live with their husbands for years and years. It usually involved dowries and politics and sometimes lords and ladies.
 

Anyway, the point was, they weren’t
really
married. They were just kids who’d gotten some paperwork out of the way. Generally, if you married for real at fifteen, it was because you were doing something you shouldn’t have, and there had been consequences and your parents were determined that the young man was going to Do The Honorable Thing.
 

Rhea had always known she’d get married…at some point…but it had seemed a long way off, at some indefinable point in the future marked, “Later.”
 

She held up her hand in front of her face and stared at the ring on her finger. It did not have “Later” inscribed on it—it was a plain silver band, very delicate, very appropriate—but it might as well have.
 

She certainly hadn’t been doing something she shouldn’t have. There weren’t even any boys she liked. Most of them were stupid and some of them smelled weird.
 

Rhea sat on the bank of the millstream, picking at her bread and cheese and keeping an eye out for swans.

Lord Crevan hadn’t set a date yet. That was something. Quite a lot, actually. The notice of engagement had been posted on the meeting hall door, but she might not be expected to actually go before the priest for quite some time.

That helped.
 

The meeting hall door was black oak, and had once been carved with fantastic monsters, all three-headed wolves and griffins and dragons and elephants. (No rheas. She’d looked.) At one time, the doors had been a masterpiece. Unfortunately, that time had been about two centuries prior, and so many notices and wedding banns and wanted posters had been stuck there over the years that the monsters were full of nail holes.

She’d always assumed that someday there’d be a notice nailed to the wolf’s middle forehead about her engagement. Just not
yet.
 

Marriage was like death. You knew it’d happen eventually, but it wasn’t something you dwelt on.

Mind you, if you were going to get married, a miller’s daughter could do a lot worse than a minor noble, one who was not bad looking, with money, particularly if you were a miller’s daughter of no particular beauty and a less-than-thorough mastery of the domestic arts.

And Lord Crevan had been very understanding about her being so young, and he had left her a gift, a dress dyed in a spectacular shade of red, the sort of dress a lady wore in her manor house, and not at all the kind a miller’s daughter wore to the mill. If you tried to wear a red dress in a room filled with flour, it would be dusty pink by the end of the day. Her aunt had suffered heart palpitations at the sight of it and had to go have a lie down.
 

Really, he was an ideal suitor.
 

She picked at her bread and cheese some more. Her mouth was dry, and it took a long time to chew the cheese. The silver ring on her finger seemed heavier than it ought to be.

She hadn’t expected to love her husband. That sort of thing almost never happened outside of ballads anyway, and it didn’t really bother her. You married well and you were polite to each other, and if you were lucky, you became relatively good friends because after all, you were both stuck in this together. That was all she’d ever hoped for.

It was just… just…

Something was nagging at the back of her brain, a niggling little itch, as if she had a mosquito bite on the inside of her skull. It was like a whisper, just below what she could quite hear, and what it was whispering was:
Something isn’t quite right, here. Something is going on…

I wonder what it is…

CHAPTER TWO

Her father had informed her of Lord Crevan’s intentions by listing the facts in order of importance.

“He’s very rich,” said her father. “He’s a noble. And he’s interested in you.”

Rhea had been sitting on the wobbly stool, rocking back and forth and enjoying the slightly uneasy sensation as the short leg went
thunk
against the floor. When her father got to the last bit, she was in mid-wobble, forgot to catch herself, and nearly fell sideways onto the cat.

“What?”

“He wants to make an offer for you,” her father said patiently.

For a rather absurd moment, all Rhea could think of was that he wanted to buy her like a horse, or a sack of flour, and she wondered how much she’d be worth.
 

Quite a bit more than a sack of flour. Probably not as much as a good horse. Several goats, at least, I should think.
“Wait—
what?

“He wants to marry you,” said her mother gently, from where she was stirring the soup.

“Marry me?”

“This is going to take awhile,” her aunt muttered, punctuating each word with the chop of a knife on the cutting board.
 

“You all knew about this?” Rhea asked, rising to her feet. She wasn’t sure which was more infuriating—that some stranger was interested in marrying her, or that her whole family had apparently known all about this and hadn’t told her.
 

At the moment, the second one was the only thing she could focus on. Marriage was some far-off, foreign country, possibly with elephants.

“A noble?”

“He’s a friend of the Viscount’s,” said her father. “He has lands…well, I’m not quite sure where. I think he has a hunting lodge nearby.”

Rhea tried to absorb this and failed utterly. “But you knew about this?” she said to her mother.
 

“Do you not want to get married, then?” asked her mother.

“No!” And then, when the blatant untruth of that hung in the air, “Well—eventually. I hadn’t thought about it.”

 
“Well, why don’t you take a few days to think about it?” said her mother, still in that gentle, implacable voice.

Which meant:
This is going to happen, but I don’t want to argue about it.
Which meant:
Take a few days to resign yourself.

It wasn’t fair when her mother used that voice. Trying to resist it was like trying to kick a blizzard.
 

“But—”

“You’ll have a whole house to yourself! And servants!” put in her aunt.

Faced with this united front, Rhea did the only thing she could think of, which was to storm out of the cottage and slam the door behind her.

It would have been a lot easier if her parents had been wicked, she thought later.
 

It wasn’t that she particularly
wanted
to be fattened up and eaten, or turned into a donkey, or forced to wear hair shirts and ashes, like children of wicked parents in fairy-tales. But if your parents were wicked, it was something you could catch them on. When they were doing what they thought was best for you, you had no traction at all.

She sat under the stairs at the mill and brooded.

It was a good spot. You could see the stream go by between the steps, but were unlikely to attract the attention of any passing swans.
 

Mills are full of grinding gears and grinding grain, so they tend to vibrate a great deal. It took two separate foundations to keep the mill from shaking itself apart. So the cottage where Rhea lived with her parents and her aunt was not attached to the mill, but lay on the other side of a broad field, a little ways upstream. She could just see it, if she leaned out sideways and craned her neck.

 
It was a large, neatly kept cottage, with a well-tended yard full of chickens. Hollyhocks grew along the side, in shades of red and violet, unless magic had gotten into them again, in which case they had a tendency to go plaid.
 

Rhea loved living there. She hadn’t realized that, not until her aunt had said she’d have a whole house to herself, and it suddenly occurred to her that she wouldn’t be at the cottage any more.

BOOK: Seventh Bride
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