Ripening

On the first morning Wren carried a mending basket into Corin's study as though she meant to darn something.

Nobody would believe it. She had never darned anything in her life. But a basket on a wife's arm was furniture, and a maid passing with the coal scuttle saw a wife and a basket and kept walking.

The tea on his desk had gone cold with a skin on it. Corin was reading a letter he had probably read before. He set it aside when she put the basket down and lifted out the grey purse.

"Tamsin kept every one," she said. "This is the first."

She turned it inside out and laid it flat under the window.

He did not touch it at first. He looked, and then kept looking long after there could be anything left to see. The clock on the mantel ticked. Out in the briar garden a gardener was raking gravel, a dry patient sound.

Then he reached into her basket, took a needle from the pincushion and held it up to the light. No thread. He made the stitch in the air above the purse: down, across, back under, and across again, his wrist turning neatly at the end.

"Where did you learn that?" Wren asked.

"Standing at my mother's elbow when I was too small to be thrown out." He made it again. "She ran the sewing room at Ashgrove herself. Eleven girls, sometimes twelve. Every one of them learned this stitch before they were allowed near good cloth. My mother said a seam that failed in a northern winter could kill a man."

"Every one of them."

"Every one." He set the needle down very precisely beside the purse. "And her head seamstress darned with her left thumb braced against the weave, like this, to keep the tension even. Nobody else did it. I used to copy her and get slapped for wasting thread."

He was already on his feet.

"The queen's wardrobe keeps forty menders," he said. "If one of them came out of my mother's room, she's been sewing three floors under me all this time and I never..."

"Sit down."

"I'm going to the wardrobe galleries."

"You're going to stand in a room full of women with needles and ask which of them betrayed your mother. In daylight. Where you are a hostage and your wife is a known thief." Wren picked up the purse and folded it back right side out. "Sit down, Corin. I'll go."

He looked at the door. His fingers moved once, a small stitch in the air with no needle at all.

He sat.

* * *

On the second evening the Long Table was laid for ninety, and Wren's card was three places below where a bride should sit.

She saw it from the doorway. A rose-court bride sat at her husband's right hand for the first month, she knew that much. Her card stood between a deaf old baron and a junior name-warden who had once held a lamp to her face in a cell.

The whole room had read it before she reached her chair. It was in the way the conversation dipped and rose again, a little brighter.

Corin was seated at the right place, with an empty space beside him.

Halfway through the soup a server in the queen's grey and silver set a small dish in front of Wren. Candied quince, cut into crescents, glistening.

The baron stopped chewing. The name-warden smiled into his wine.

"Ripening," he murmured, as if she might need it explained. "Her Majesty is attentive."

Wren ate one. It was very sweet and slightly bitter under the sugar. Seven weeks had become six and a half. Every person at this table now knew it was being counted, and had a view on which way it would go.

At the head of the steward's table the Master of the Long Table rose to call the second course. Corin rose with him.

He picked up his plate, his glass and his card, walked down three places with the whole hall turning to watch, and set them down on the far side of the junior warden.

"Move," he said pleasantly.

The warden moved.

"My lord Ashgrove," said the Master of the Long Table, red to the collar. "The seating is set by custom."

"So is the soup, and it's cold." Corin sat. "If my wife is three places down, I'm three places down. I'm sure custom can find a way to cope. It's managed worse." He lifted his glass toward the steward's table. "Your health. All of you. I'd say you've earned it."

Somebody at that table set a fork down hard.

"That was stupid," Wren said under her breath.

"Yes."

"They seat us. They pour for us. They decide whether our fires are lit."

"I know what the steward's table does." He took a crescent of quince from her dish without asking. "I've been cold before."

She watched him eat it. "Was that for the court, or for me?"

"Which answer would make you angrier?"

"The true one."

He considered that, chewing. "Then I'll keep it."

* * *

On the third day she stole an hour.

The wardrobe galleries ran under the queen's apartments, long vaulted rooms that smelled of cedar, camphor and pressed wool. Gowns hung shrouded in linen along both walls like a congregation with its heads covered. At the far end, under the windows, the menders sat in two rows with their work across their knees.

Wren kept her gloves on and a torn hem over her arm for an excuse. She walked the rows slowly, watching hands.

Most of the menders were young. Most held their work the southern way, flat on the knee.

The woman at the end of the second row was neither. She was grey to the roots, thin, with a dark wool shawl crossed and pinned in a way no Thornwake woman pinned anything. She was darning a stocking heel over a wooden egg. Her left thumb was braced hard against the weave, the nail white with pressure, keeping every thread taut.

Wren stood beside her until the woman looked up.

"I've a hem," Wren said.

"Leave it on the pile. Somebody will see to it."

"I was told to ask for you."

"Nobody tells anybody to ask for me." The needle went down, across, under. "What's your name, then?"

"Wren. And yours?"

"Ottilie Fenn, as everybody here knows." Her eyes dropped to Wren's gloved hands and stopped on the signet riding loose over the leather. The needle paused. Only for a breath, and then it went on. "You'll be the new one. The Ashgrove bride."

"Did you know them? The Ashgroves?"

"I know a great many people's stockings." Ottilie snipped her thread with her teeth. "Go back upstairs, my lady."

"I only want to ask..."

"And I only want to finish this heel before the light goes." She did not raise her voice. She set the darning egg in her lap and looked at Wren directly, pale northern eyes in a face folded fine as old paper. "No. Whatever it is. No. I'm old, and I mean to get older, and you've a dish of quince in front of you that the whole palace has heard about. I'll not be seen talking to you."

Wren held her look. Ottilie held it back.

Then the mender picked up the next stocking and turned her shoulder, and that was all the answer Wren was going to get.

* * *

On the fourth day they walked the briar garden at dusk, because married people did, and because the colonnade along its west side was the most watched stretch of stone in Thornwake.

Two of Voss's secretaries were leaning there in green and gold, not even pretending to talk to each other.

"Ottilie Fenn," Wren said quietly. "She braces with her left thumb. She looked at your ring as though it had bitten her. And she said no."

Corin stopped walking.

"Fenn." He said it as if testing the weight of a stone. "There was a Fenn woman. Mother's head seamstress. Marrick, we called her. She'd be old now. She'd be..." He turned toward the house. "I'm going down there tonight."

Wren caught his sleeve. Not his hand, his sleeve. "No."

"She knew my mother."

"Probably. And if she's the payer, you'll warn her. And if she isn't, you'll get her killed by being seen at her elbow." Wren kept her voice low and her face pleasant for the colonnade. "Listen to me. When it's about Greyfold, or your mother, or your sister, you stop counting. You did it at the steward's office. You did it at dinner. You'd have walked straight past the Master of the Long Table into the queen's own wardrobe and asked a mender to her face whether she sold your family. You don't plan when you grieve. You spend."

His jaw worked. Over his shoulder, one of the secretaries tilted his head toward the other.

"I'm not careless," Corin said.

"You're the least careless man I've ever met, until somebody says her name. Then you'd burn the house down to warm your hands."

He was quiet. The light had gone copper across the gravel, and the briars threw long hooked shadows.

"They're watching," he said at last. His voice had changed. Lower, almost formal. "They're waiting to see a besotted bride or a failing thief. After the quince they're leaning toward thief. If you'd allow it, I could kiss you. It would give them something else to write down." A pause. "I'm asking."

She looked at the colonnade. At the green and gold. At the quince, which she could still taste if she thought about it.

"No," she said.

He nodded at once and stepped back half a pace.

"Not for them," Wren said.

Then she put her gloved hand flat on his chest, where his coat hid the blank disc she had given him, and kissed him.

It was not graceful. She had to rise on her toes and he had to bend, and for a moment neither of them knew where to put their hands. Then his found her back and hers found his collar and the rest of the garden went somewhere else. He tasted of the cold air and faintly of quince. He kissed her as though he were still asking.

It was Wren who drew back, and he let her go the moment she did.

They stood very close. His odd eyes, blue and grey, were not mocking anything.

"For the record," she said, and was annoyed to hear her own voice unsteady, "that wasn't for them."

"I gathered."

"Good. Write it down somewhere they can't read it."

Behind him one of Voss's secretaries was already walking away briskly toward the chancellor's wing.

* * *

They went back along the long path by the fountain, not touching, slow.

She had meant to say nothing. The debt sat between them where Tamsin had put it, a lie let go for free. She could pay it in favours, in information, in silence. She knew a dozen coins that would do.

She chose the expensive one.

"I've caught myself planning," she said, "for a Midwinter where I don't bring her your name."

He did not stop walking. That was how she knew he had heard it properly.

"Exits," she went on, because now it was out she might as well empty the purse. "Which gate. Which warden drinks. What I'd carry. And none of the plans have your name in my pocket. I didn't decide that. I just noticed it was missing."

The fountain ran on. A gardener's barrow creaked somewhere behind the hedges.

Corin did not make a joke. He walked three more steps, and four, and then he said, "Thank you for telling me."

"It's not a promise."

"I know what it is." He looked at her, and away. "It's the first thing you've given me that I can't hang you with."

She found she had no answer for that, and they went in.

* * *

The fire in their sitting room had not been lit. The steward's table remembered dinner.

Wren sat in her cloak with her boots on the cold fender while Corin knelt and built the fire himself, badly, swearing at the kindling. It was nearly ten when the knock came.

A page stood in the corridor, a boy of about twelve in grey and silver with the small embroidered rose of the queen's household at his breast. He held a tray with a domed cover, carried level and careful.

"For the Lady Ashgrove," he said. "A returned item."

Corin rose from the hearth with ash on his hands.

"Returned by whom?" Wren asked.

"I was told to say, returned, my lady. That's all I was told." He held the tray out until she took it, then bowed and was gone down the corridor, quick on the boards.

She set it on the table by the window. The cover was cold silver. Corin came to stand at her shoulder and did not touch it, and neither did she, for a moment.

Then she lifted the lid.

A sprig of white briar lay across the tray: three thorns, one closed bud, so freshly cut the stem still beaded green at the end. Laid on top of it, folded once, was a sheet of ledger paper in the steward's brown ink.

She did not need to open it. It had been folded so the line showed.

Bolster ticking, one, mildew. And beside it, in her own careful counterfeit of a tired man's hand, tomorrow's date.