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358 M.E.
The gate seemed smaller than she remembered. But then, she didn’t remember it very well. She had been away for nine years, after all. The entry to the outer barbican was narrow and off-center. Beyond it, she found fine horses tethered, and merchants’ carts, and barrels of mead on the packed earth, and servants rushing back and forth. Then came the dry moat and the old drawbridge, which was far less grand than her childhood eyes had made it. And finally, there was the castle. A fine castle, to be sure, but not a very comfortable home. A fortress trying to dress up and pretend to be a palace. Especially with a wedding fast approaching.
Morwen Byrne had been back to the city of Keneburg several times. Never back to the castle where she’d been born, though. Even so, it had been there, hulking in the river mist, or glimmering in the spring sunlight. She hadn’t had the courage to return, in spite of the repeated and vociferous invitations. But now she had to go, because of the wedding. And if she didn’t go in and see the family, what on earth was she even doing here? The abbey had plenty of other work that needed done in the outside world, and she could get right to it, if she turned around under this mossy, dripping stone arch and turned her back on her old life, once and forever.
No. She couldn’t do that. Not after she’d been given a special dispensation to be here. Morwen took a deep breath and started over the bridge toward the inner gate. That was when the sergeant of the guard swung out of his guard shack to intercept her, politely but massively.
“Pardon me, sister. Could I help you, perhaps?” Then he knew her, and he laughed. “Well, bless the Light! If it isn’t Lady Morwen!”
“Sister Morwen, now,” she corrected him. “Hello, Sergeant Arran. We walked over from the hostel to see if there was anything we could do.”
The big sergeant wrinkled his brow and looked around her. “Um... ‘we,’ your ladyship? I mean, your sistership?”
For the first time in ten minutes, since she’d paused in the square outside the barbican to cast a critical eye over her family’s ancestral home, she looked behind her. No one was there.
“Oh, no,” she sighed. “Sergeant, have you seen another girl in Leofine habit? She would have been younger than me. Blonde.” Morwen paused. If Lillian had her wimple and veil arranged properly, the guards shouldn’t have seen her hair at all. Although, with Lillian, you never knew. “Yes. Blonde hair, round face, freckles.”
It turned out Sergeant Arran had just come on duty. He asked around, and another guard said he thought he’d seen a Leofine nun in the Court of Honor five minutes earlier. But he couldn’t say where she’d gone.
After bidding the guards farewell, Morwen crossed the Court of Honor, pausing to search the forge and the arcades for a familiar shape in gray and white. But Lillian wasn’t there.
At the far side, she headed for the entrance to the great hall, only to find her way suddenly blocked by sweating and shouting servants, carrying some massive lump of tangled wedding decorations. The traditional green boughs and the painted silk ribbons and such were all twisted into a knot, because someone had had the bright idea of bringing them all in together.
Morwen hesitated only a moment—as long as it took for her to work out the solution to the puzzle in her mind—and then she went over and took charge. Someone clearly had to. “Look, if you there—yes, the housemaids—will bring that part around here. Yes, take the holly garland with you, please. And the footmen, now. Pull back on that bough there. No, lower, so it doesn’t snag the doorway.” She pointed. “The doorway. Gentlemen? The doorway? Look where I’m pointing. Yes, exactly. You need to go lower.”
It went much quicker once they all accepted that they had to do what she told them and stop asking pointless questions like, “Who are you?” or “Who put you in charge?” Finally they had everything untangled, and Morwen went into the hall with them to make sure they put it up on the walls properly.
After another ten minutes, when it looked as if they had the decorations in hand, Morwen remembered that she was looking for Lillian. She asked the housemaids and learned that another nun had been seen upstairs. “Why on earth would she go there?” wondered Morwen.
But she had a duty to collect the girl, so she went up the old back stairs—the way she’d gone to bed long ago. The stairs were still worn, the floors still creaked. She knew the pattern of the mosaics, the ripples of the glass in the windows. She hadn’t even remembered that she knew these things, but it all came back to her.
Halfway down the hall, at the turn, a familiar door was open, and Morwen stopped to glance in. “Sister Lillian?” Her voice came out in a breathless whisper. “Lillian? Are you here?”
There was no answer, and Morwen was alone with her past. She turned slowly in place, taking in the cloth-of-gold bed curtains and the ivory washbasin and the gold mirror. All the books, too, on the sagging shelves. Books she hadn’t remembered owning, and blushed now to think she had read. The silk drapes—rich enough for a king’s robes. The massive carpet—thick enough for a mattress, practically. The paintings in their gilt frames—amateur efforts by a conceited little girl who had thought she was an artistic genius.
Morwen took a second look. Actually, that one landscape of the Colwinn Valley wasn’t bad.
They had kept it all. Her parents had kept it precisely where she had left it. Almost as if she had died. Or more exactly, as if they expected her to come back. She had explicitly told them that they should sell it all and give the money to the poor. They had both written—separately—to assure her it had been done. But they’d lied. Blast them both.
Morwen heaved a sigh and said a quick prayer that Earstien would forgive those sinfully un-filial thoughts.
The side door to the privy banged open. “Oh, there you are!” cried Sister Lillian, skipping over to join Morwen. “I thought you were walking with me, and then we were separated, and I asked where to find you, and someone said I should go up here!”
Morwen smiled. “Listen, I need to see the chamberlain, so we know where we’ll be seated at the cathedral, and then we can go back to the hostel for prayers. Won’t that be lovely?”
Lillian didn’t seem to hear her. The girl wandered around the room, looking at the tapestries, gawking up at the painted ceiling, and gazing in rapturous wonder at the massive bed. “Oh, Sister Morwen, was all this really yours?”
“Yes,” said Morwen, feeling heartily ashamed of herself and her family.
“It’s beautiful,” said Lillian.
“It’s unnecessary luxury.”
“Oh, but not everything luxurious is unnecessary. Is it?”
Lillian had an uncomfortable way of asking those questions—the questions that left you wondering if she was a born philosopher of rare perception, or if she had somehow misunderstood the basic point of monastic life.
“Yes, Lillian,” said Morwen firmly. “Luxuries are unnecessary. At least for you and me.”
There was a knock at the door, then a little squeal, and running feet. Before Morwen could look completely around, she was seized in a tight hug. She knew, even before she saw the face, that it was her sister Lauren. The one getting married.
Her little sister, in fact, though Lauren now stood half a head taller than her. Morwen stepped back at arm’s length to take the girl in. They had seen each other, now and again, over the past nine years. And they wrote regularly. But it didn’t seem possible that this graceful, fluttering court lady, with all her lace and jewels, could possibly be little Lauren.
She guessed at Morwen’s thoughts, and guessed poorly. “You’re thinking my clothes are sinfully decadent, aren’t you?”
“No. I was thinking I can’t believe you’re the girl who used to rescue frogs and bring them into the tapestry room whenever it rained.”
“I had it on good authority that one of them might be a prince in magysk disguise,” said Lauren.
They spoke for a few minutes about the old days, and Morwen introduced Lillian. Then Morwen asked how things were going with the wedding, and Lauren’s smile faded. With an apologetic glance at Lillian, she said, “I’m sorry, but could we have a word...um, alone?”
No one back at the abbey had ever accused Lillian Dunster of being the sharpest quill in the inkwell, but the girl saw Lauren’s point instantly. “I think I’ll go see if I can find a snack in the buttery,” she said, bustling out.
When she was gone, Morwen closed the door. Leading her sister over to the window seat, she asked, “What’s wrong? Has Wallace done something?”
Lauren’s face flushed. “Er...no. Wallace is...um, fine.” She took a long, slow breath. “Listen, Morwen, that’s the whole problem. He seems fine. No, he’s lovely. He really is. No, that’s not true. I mean, maybe he is. My point is....”
“Your point is that you don’t know,” said Morwen.
“I feel so stupid,” said Lauren, her eyes starting to glisten. “I never said ‘yes’ to any of this. But I never said ‘no,’ either. Mother started talking about it one day, and next thing I knew, there was Wallace. I’ve had...I don’t know...maybe an hour’s conversation with him in my whole life! And Andras says he’s a wonderful fellow, and Father likes him, too. And the marriage is good for the Sigor cause, now that we’re supporting King Edwin in the war. And yet....” Lauren rubbed her eyes. She took Morwen’s hand. “I’m being stupid about this, aren’t I? Please tell me I’m being stupid to hesitate. I should be happy about this, shouldn’t I? If you say it, it’ll have the full weight of the Leafa church.”
“You’re being stupid,” Morwen confirmed. Then she sat up straighter and added, “But not about being happy. If you read Ovida’s Second Epistle, you’ll see that a marriage isn’t really a marriage without consent. It’s your moral duty to make certain that you really want to go through with this.”
She had expected that to be reassuring, but Lauren shook her head. “You’re so lucky you got out of this.”
The door from the corridor opened, and Duchess Flora Byrne, mother of Morwen and Lauren, poked her head in.
“Oh, there you are!” she said, opening the door all the way. Her dress was even finer than Lauren’s. Made of bright white silk, it had pearls in the bodice and strips of ermine on the sleeves. She swept them both into a tight hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you both like this.” She let them go and looked around Morwen’s old suite, smiling. “Together, like the old days.”
Lauren was younger by seven years. As far as Morwen could remember, anytime Lauren had dared come in this room, Morwen had shoved her back into the hall. Morwen was fully prepared to confess that she had been a monstrous adolescent.
“So,” the duchess continued, “did I interrupt anything good? A little—ha, ha—girl talk, perhaps?”
“N-no,” stammered Lauren. “I was, er...talking to Morwen about...um...marriage.”
Their mother burst out laughing. “You asked her about marriage? Oh, Earstien!” The look she gave Morwen was not entirely kind. “What did you tell her?”
“Nothing.” Morwen shrugged. As she hunched her shoulders, she realized she was adopting the posture she always used around her mother, and she forced herself to straighten up.
“Of course you told her nothing.” A condescending pat to Morwen’s shoulder, and then a bright, beaming smile for Lauren. “Now, what’s the trouble? Why do you need advice?” Even as she said it, though, a reason seemed to occur to her. Like Lauren, however, she was never particularly good at guessing what other people were thinking. “Oh! You want to know what will happen on your wedding night!”
“Mother!” gasped Lauren. Her face reddened again. “I’ve read...I mean, I know in theory....”
“You’ve read your romances, dear,” said their mother. “That’s all well and good. But you need practical advice. Poets and novelists always leave that out.”
Morwen felt it her duty to make a contribution. “Should we discuss what the Halig Leoth says about the duties of husbands and wives?”
The duchess let out a snort. “Oh, yes. I’m sure that will stoke Wallace’s fires.” Turning back to her youngest daughter, she went on. “Listen: I could tell you all day that embroidery is lovely, that it fills me with glimmering joy, that it paints a summer sun in my heart and makes the winter stars shine. But if I didn’t show you the pattern to sew, and if I didn’t tell you how to thread your needle and where to stick it, you’d have no idea what to do, would you?”
Lauren’s eyes went even wider than normal. “Um...what do you mean by ‘where to stick it,’ Mother?”
“That’s an excellent place to start,” said the duchess cheerfully. “Now, this might not be something that you ever covered in those little romances you and Princess Donella are always trading, but if you want a man inside you, there are three options. There are plusses and minuses to each, of course, but it’s very much a matter of personal—”
“Mother!” cried Morwen, feeling her whole face burn. “Perhaps we should stick to discussing the scriptures.”
“If we all learned to fuck from the scriptures,” said her mother, “then the human race would have died out long ago. Here, now. Why don’t you go see your father?” She put an arm around a rather frightened-looking Lauren. “Leave this talk to married women, and those who are about to become married.”
Morwen left with as much dignity as she could, and she shut the door behind her, but she could still hear her mother’s laughter halfway down the stairs.