Seventh Bride (3 page)

And then a spark jumped to her fingers, or something that felt like a spark. She twitched, and stared stupidly down at her hand, and when she looked up again, Crevan was smiling.
 

It was a smug smile. Rhea didn’t like it at all.
 

“I’ll send for you,” said Lord Crevan, and turned away to his horse.
 

Miller and miller’s daughter stood and watched him ride away. The horse was ridiculously pink in the afternoon light, and kicked up puffs of dust from the road.
 

 
“A fine gentleman,” said her father, nodding to her. “You see?”

Rhea looked down at her hand. It looked perfectly normal, but there was a nasty tingling at the fingertips. She felt like her hand had fallen asleep.
 

It faded almost as soon as she noticed it. The sensation lingered longest around the silver ring.
 

She shook her hand once or twice, and then it was perfectly normal again.
 

“Huh,” she said, and could think of nothing more to say.

The basics of milling went like this: there was a waterwheel, and as the stream flowed by, the current turned the waterwheel, which turned another wheel on a shaft, which turned a few other things hooked together, which ultimately turned a millstone. The millstone was very large and very heavy and set onto another stone, and if you dumped grain under it, it would grind the grain into flour.
 

The millstone was quite indiscriminate and would also grind your fingers, toes, and other available bits of anatomy into flour. In order to cut down on the loss of extremities among millworkers, the grain was dumped into a hopper, which fed to the grinder through a sloped trough.
 

Rhea’s father ran the mill, and watched the various complicated turning bits to make sure nothing broke. He oiled things and occasionally replaced other things. He collected the milled flour into sacks, and twice a week, he loaded the sacks into his wagon and drove the flour around to the farmers who owned the grain.
 

Rhea’s aunt, who had the eyes of an eagle and the heart of a miser, supervised the weighing out of the grain.
 

Rhea’s mother, who had a fine, neat hand, noted down the weights of each sack of grain, and who it belonged to, and who had paid for milling and who hadn’t.
 

Rhea’s job, which was utterly boring, was to thump the trough every few minutes to make sure the grain was sliding down at the proper rate, and to make sure the hoppers didn’t jam.
 

Where you got a lot of grain, you got a lot of mice, and where you got a lot of mice, sooner or later, you got dead mice. It wasn’t as bad as it could be, but every now and then a dead mouse would fall in one of the hoppers and somebody with small hands had to reach way down in there and pull it out, or the whole system would back up. This was not a pleasant job, but at least it wasn’t a regular one. No more than a few times a week. Really.

Anyway, you cooked bread before you ate it, so if there were some little mousey fragments ground in with the flour, it wasn’t like it would hurt anything.

A couple of times a year, a gremlin would get into the mill. The mechanisms, with their big grinding gears and turning wheels and rotating shafts, were irresistible to gremlins. They looked more or less like big mice wearing little tool-belts, and it wasn’t until you actually caught one stuck in the hopper and hauled it out that you saw the mouth full of small pointed teeth and the stubby little hand on the end of the tail.
 

Unlike the mice, gremlins really were a problem. If you ground one into flour on accident, the bread had a tendency to explode in the oven, or bleed when you cut into it, or turn into a flock of starlings and tear around the cottage shrieking, and then people came around and had words with the miller, many of which had only four letters and involved hand gestures.
 

So as soon as you caught a gremlin, or heard them giggling together in the rafters, you had to run quick to the conjure wife, who lived outside the village in a hut that looked like it had been assembled from the less desirable bits of a goat.
 

The conjure wife kept a flock of bone-white quail, and when you’d told her your problem, she’d send you out to the yard to catch one. Then she’d wring its neck, clean it, tie the bones and the feathers up in a little bag with a few herbs, and send you home with it. It looked the same every time, a grisly little package topped with a quail skull, no matter what the problem was—fever or gremlins or fits, cows not giving milk or goats getting the staggers, or potatoes hauling themselves out of the ground and sulking in the corner of the field. (Potatoes were, for some reason, more prone to fits of random magic than most other vegetables. It would take a remarkable magic to affect turnips or kale. No one bothered planting eggplant—it’d be off and running into the woods or flying away on a leafy kite as soon as your back was turned.) But the conjure woman’s quail-charms worked, every time. You hung the sad little package in the doorway, and pretty soon, there wasn’t a gremlin anywhere to be found.

Gremlin infestations were rare excitements. Mostly, Rhea thumped the grain trough, and occasionally checked the hoppers for mice.

This occupied her hands, but left her mind entirely free. She spent a lot of time thinking, and this week had been no exception. She had a lot to think about, and even if the world had been turned upside down, the flour still had to get milled.

That was actually one of the things she thought about. It did not seem fair. She was unwillingly engaged to a strange man. A strange man who had kissed her hand and ridden away on a big pink horse. That this could take place in a world that still, stubbornly, included flour sacks and grain and millstones and dead mice seemed like a poor job of management. She could understand why people didn’t have much truck with gods.
 

Saints didn’t seem to be much more help. She tried praying to the Lady of Stones—even stretched down and trailed her fingers along the millstone as she did it, since if you held a stone while you prayed to her, it made the prayers work better—and then waited all day for word to come that Lord Crevan had fallen off his horse and broken his neck. It didn’t happen. In fact, she saw him riding that evening, far off across the hillside, on the unmistakable roan horse.
 

So much for prayer, then. What was the point of saints that wouldn’t kick someone off a horse when you asked them to?

“Feh,” muttered Rhea, and thumped a fist into the trough, making the kernels rattle. “Stupid lord. Stupid saints. Stupid pink horse.”

Suppose he was a magician.
 

This was the main thing that had occupied her thoughts.
 

Suppose that odd tingle in her hand had been magic. It hadn’t seemed like static, and the way he had smiled—no, she’d have laid money he was responsible for it.

 
Well, and what if he was? There was nothing inherently
wrong
with being magicky. Every village had its conjure wife, who could do the little charms and simple spells and take down any stray bits of magic that made mischief. Barrelridge, forty miles away, even had a clockmaker who was a ratspeaker, and they said his clocks were the best because he gave his familiars tiny tools and they made gears and mechanisms too small for human hands.

And lots of people could do little things, whether from a few drops of magician’s blood, or from having gotten in the way of a bit of loose magic. Her friend Susannah, whose mother ran the inn, could tell if beer had foxed while it was still in the keg. One of Rhea’s cousins could call frogs, which wasn’t much good unless you had far too many insects in the garden, although she’d been a terror as a small child.

One of her other cousins had an extra toe, but there was probably nothing magical about that.
 

It wasn’t that anyone looked down on magicians, but—well, you wanted to know where they were. It was fine to be magicky, but if you were, and you hid it—that was suspicious.
 

Magic didn’t make you a bad person, but it didn’t necessarily make you a
good
one, either. People got antsy when you had a power they didn’t have.
 

And if Lord Crevan was a magician, he really should have said something before getting engaged. That was a lot more significant than having an extra toe.
 

Maybe that was his way of saying something. Maybe he was letting you know—
you
, and not your father.
 

This thought alarmed her enough that she missed her next swipe at the trough and banged her knuckles on the hopper instead. The silver ring went “clink!” as it struck.
 

“Ow!”
 

She rubbed her sore knuckles and thumped the trough with her shoulder instead.
 

Well. Suppose he
was
a magician?

Rhea stuck a knuckle in her mouth and considered.

Well. Suppose he was.

It seemed like it should matter. It seemed like it should matter a
lot.
 

More grain thumped down into the hopper.
 

Reluctantly, she decided that it didn’t.

If she went to her parents and said “Hey, I think Lord Crevan is a magician!” they would look at her and say “Well, isn’t that nice?” and absolutely nothing would change.

 
“I bet he’s not a nice magician,” she said aloud, while the mill machinery ground on around her. “I hope he’s not like the conjure wife.” The conjure wife was nice enough, but she was more than a little mad, and while you were glad to have her around the village, you certainly wouldn’t want to marry her.
 

“The term is sorcerer,” said Lord Crevan from the doorway, raising his voice to be heard over the machinery. “And I am nothing like the conjure wife.”

Rhea yelped, flung herself backwards, and very nearly fell off the ladder. She got one arm hooked through it, and that brought her up short while her feet slithered down the rungs. Fortunately the ladder was bolted down, like everything else in the mill, or she would have fallen off and probably broken her neck.

“I—uh—Lord Crevan—”

She tried to curtsey, which is nearly impossible on a ladder.
 

“Perhaps you could come down,” said Lord Crevan, smiling faintly. Rhea was starting to dislike that smile a lot. It was the smile of a man who found nothing funny and everything amusing.

“Um.” Rhea had a mad urge to climb back up to the hopper platform and refuse to budge, but what good would that do?
 

“What’s a sorcerer?” she asked, climbing down. She concentrated on the rungs in front of her, and not the tall man in the doorway.

“One who practices magic with deliberation,” he said. “Not one of the minor little talents that abound.”

“Oh.” The ladder was very short. Rhea was at the bottom much faster than she wanted to be. She wondered what “with deliberation” meant. “Er. That’s nice?”

Crevan smiled again.
 

Rhea shuffled out from behind the ladder, feeling small and dusty and grubby. Crevan was wearing white again. His clothes shone like a swan’s feathers.

She made it as far as one of the wooden pillars, fetched up against it, and couldn’t make herself go any farther. Through the open doorway, she could see the back end of Crevan’s big pink horse.

You’d think if he was that good a magician, he’d be able to turn his horse some color other than pink…

“Come to my house,” he said abruptly. “Three days from now.”

“What?”
 

“Are you hard of hearing? I can speak more loudly if you are.”
 

Rhea flushed. She felt blood rushing into her face, her cheeks tingly, then hot. Her head ached.
 

There were so many things she wanted to say, and she could not think of any of them. Except
No
, and that was the one thing she couldn’t say.

“How will I find your house?” she asked instead.
 

“North, from the spring, into the wildwood. There’s a road. Set out at dusk,” he said. “The road is very white in the moonlight. You will not go astray.”

“North
of the spring?” Rhea had been to that spring a hundred times and knew perfectly well that there was no road.

“There is a road,” he said again.
 

“At
night?
” said Rhea, who didn’t quite dare to argue.
 

“Are you afraid?” he asked. His smile was lazy and cruel and she didn’t like it at all.

“No—yes! The woods are full of wild animals, and bandits, and—and—who knows what—”

“Not these woods,” he said. “Not along the white road. I should not leave it, if I were you, though.”

“But—”

“Until then,” he said. He moved closer, and Rhea wanted to back up, but couldn’t. You didn’t back away from your fiancé, and anyway, the ladder was in her way.
 

He bowed, and kissed her hand again.

The pink horse’s hooves clattered merrily along the road as he rode away. Rhea wiped her hand against her breeches. His lips hadn’t been particularly damp, but there seemed to be a weight where they had touched, as if her skin was heavier.

“Set out at night?” said her aunt. “Well, that’s unusual, but doubtless there’s a good reason.”
 

They were in the cottage, and Rhea was having a bath in the copper tub before the fire. She was not enjoying it, but she had not enjoyed anything since Lord Crevan had come, three days ago, and told her to where to find his house.

“Good reason? What possible reason could there
be
?”

Her aunt dumped an ewer of hot water over her head, while Rhea spluttered. “Perhaps he’ll be away until late that day, on business.”

“Then—pfffbt! spleh!—why not have me come the next day, or the day before?”