Page 6 of Into the West

But it was hard not to drag her feet when she knew she was going back to another round of chores until well after dark. Her boat was in good order, and ready to be towed, but somehow the boys were managing to drag practically everything they could out of its proper place, and often out of the boat entirely. And she always seemed to be the one tasked to restore order out of chaos.

I swear, I will never, ever, ever have children.

Sure enough, as soon as she arrived back at the boats, Isla thrust a basket of clean clothing with mending materials on top of it into her hands and said, “Find a place to sit. These need to be mended before dinner,” and vanished into the boat she and Kordas shared with the boys.

With a sigh, she looked around. Her boat was full of the maids stowing everything away in the most economic way possible, so she opted for a spot on the stern, where there was full sun and a nice warm spot on the decking. On top of the basket was a keeper made of felt with three precious needles in it, and a single spool of thread. At this point, no one was paying any attention to the color of thread clothing was mended with, or even the kind of thread it was. This looked like light wool, the kind you mended stockings with. And it was gray; the clothing in the basket was literally every color except gray.

But at least when I am doing this I am not trying to chase down those boys.

I wish I was home . . .

Her hands stilled for a moment, and she was startled by the tight feeling in her throat and an upwelling of tears. With her back to everything and everyone, and no one to see her and ask her sharply what on earth she was crying about, she let the tears spill over her cheeks, mourning her past life. Mourning her home. Mourning the little room that had been hers, and hers alone. Mourning a world where “needlework” meant working beautiful images in thread, not sewing on a patch to cover a hole in the seat of someone’s trews. Where every meal was carefully prepared and full of variety, not pottage for breakfast, bread and cheese for the midday meal, and the same stew, either fish or meat, served in a small round loaf you were supposed to eat when you finished. She’d helped in the communal kitchens; every possible scrap, from peel to leaves, from bones to organs, was chopped up and put in that stew, and the Healers had said to chew up the softened bones and eat them, which was . . . ugh. Nothing was wasted. Nothing.

And things will probably get worse from here. Food would run out, until they were left with nothing but grain pottage, flavored with herbs and salt or maybe some dried fruit if she was lucky. Winter was on the way, and she was sure there was no way that a boat could be made as cozy as a sturdy building. And who knew what was out there? Her imagination was quite good at populating the blank map with all manner of horrors.

Well, no one was going to know how she felt, if anyone even cared. She might as well just let the sadness and the frustration have their way. So the tears fell on her mending, and she cried in silence, as her hands worked.

Kordas could hardly believe his luck when he got back to the family barges and found Isla—astonishingly!—alone. Isla was working, of course; everyone worked now, often from dawn to dusk, but her ears were certainly free, and he spied her through the rearmost windows of the barge. She was all the way back in their personal barge sitting on their bed. The boys were elsewhere, and since she was making ordinary shirts into quilted shirts for winter, that was something he could actually help her with. He couldn’t sew, but any fool could pick rags apart into tiny bits of thread for stuffing, so he eeled his way to their “bedroom.” He sat down without a word beside her and began doing just that with the tiny rags, stuffing the resulting frizz into a rough bag she had for the purpose. She had turned a shirt inside out and, with the padding and carefully cut patches, all of identical size and shape, was doing the quilting in small squares in a neat pattern, not unlike the “checked” pattern in heraldry. The resultant quilted shirt could be worn with the original side out, or the patchwork side out, if the original got too stained to be presentable. It would be infinitely warmer than two simple shirts.

“I heard some rumors you were beating someone,” she said casually, sewing a brown square down onto the padding, then carefully turning the edges under and sewing it in place next to a beige square.

“Rumor flies faster than a bird,” he said ruefully. “It’s quite true. Doll Rose came to get me because someone was deliberately torturing another Doll. By the time I got there, he’d broken every limb with a sledgehammer.”

She stopped sewing for a moment with a swift intake of breath. “I’d have done worse than beat him,” she said flatly, looking up at him. “Perhaps it’s just as well Rose came for you instead of me.”

He didn’t ask her what she would have done, because he already had a shrewd idea of what it would have been, and besides being exiled, the idiot would probably have been singing soprano for the rest of his days. “Well, he had the bad sense to resist me with his face,” was all he said. “And I took my temper out on him.”

“If you are having trouble with your temper, it’s best to find a target worthy of getting it in the face,” she agreed.

He snorted. “In the face, and the gut, and the face again. The face a lot, actually. I broke his jaw. And I exiled him. He’ll be going through the Gate on no pass before we take it down. The evilest part of me hopes he ends up in the Capital.”

Isla side-glanced at Kordas’s bound-up hand. “And broke your hand doing it, it appears. Healed?” Kordas nodded and held it up. She nodded slowly. “You did the right thing. Next time it could have been a child, or someone else who couldn’t defend themselves. I assume there is going to be a speech?”

“I can’t leave this at rumor. And I want to make sure everyone knows where they stand on this—and on some other things. That way anyone who is having second and third thoughts about staying with the migration can use what I am about to tell them as an excuse to leave without looking like a coward.” He half smiled at her, and she chuckled.

He relaxed all over. Truth to be told, he liked this version of Isla rather more than “Lady Isla, Duchess Valdemar.” She was a lot closer to his old childhood friend than she had been in years. All the fancy gowns and every bit of jewelry had been stowed in the most inaccessible places in the storage barges or in this one, and these days you were just as likely to find her in a heavy knitted tunic and a pair of soft canvas trews or breeches as you were a gown. And if it was a gown, it would be a sturdy thing, meant to take abuse and dirt and be washed clean in the lake and dried on a bush. She wore her hair in a single braid down her back, though unruly dark tendrils inevitably escaped around her ears.

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think you need to do that. In fact, you’re right to, and this is exactly the right moment for you to make a speech about it. People here have never seen you in a fury until now—and—” She shrugged. “You know people. There are probably some who think you’re soft, or too busy with other things to pay attention to what’s going on below you. And without a shadow of a doubt there are quarrels brewing quietly, people looking to take advantage of you, or what they see as your inattention, and—well—it’s like balancing all that among the manor staff, only on a vastly larger scale. I think it’s definitely time for them to learn that there are things you won’t put up with, and that the penalty for doing those things is serious. People have already grouped together with people they knew before, and you’ve already appointed leaders for each group, and you have those leaders reporting to your new Guard officers, so not only will you establish a proper code of conduct, this will be telling those leaders what you expect them to do.”

“I need to think about what I am going to say, so if you don’t mind, I’ll keep making stuffing for you.” He paused a moment. “I told Rose that I was sorry we hadn’t found a way to free them yet. But the truth is, right now—we need them too much, and if the Mender ever does figure out how to get the vrondi out of those shells—can we afford to let them go?”

“Have you asked them how they feel about it?” she replied sensibly, as the boat rocked ever so gently with the small movements they were making and the wavelets of the lake. It was still warm enough during the day that the shutters were open on the windows, and the hum of voices up and down the shore combined with the sound of the waves and the rising and falling of the boats’ hulls was quite soothing. It made a lovely sound to go to sleep to—although he had to admit that the times there had been a storm on the lake and the barges had rocked violently and banged together had not been so pleasant. It was a good thing that the material they were made of was as tough as steel.

“Well, not in so many words,” he admitted.

“Then remember what you tell me all the time. When you want to know what people are thinking, don’t spin yourself into knots about it, just ask them.” The sound of footsteps—the peculiar, too-even, too-precise, too-measured steps that only a Doll took—echoed off the hull from the front of the barge, and they both stopped what they were doing. Kordas felt a dim sense of apprehension. Now what? he thought.

But it was Rose; like the three Dolls who had assigned themselves to him, Rose wore trews of stiff canvas and a shirt of the same coarse cloth grain-sacks were made of, both of which would have been scratchy and supremely uncomfortable for a human, but which the Dolls assured him caused them no problems. Clothing was mostly to make them fit in with the humans, Rose had said; they did not feel cold or heat, and didn’t actually need covering. Over the outfit, Rose wore the blue-painted canvas tabard with the Valdemar “V” and horse head that had always been associated with his family, rather than the more elaborate Ducal crest of the winged horse. Rose’s once-bare head was now covered in a crop of woolen curls that had taken Isla the better part of three evenings to knot into Rose’s canvas “scalp,” and she had been painted with a rather sweet face by Jonaton. Rose no longer needed that little rose sketched into her forehead for him to tell her from the other Dolls. Though she did wear a rose that someone had made for her out of a scrap of red ribbon in her wooly hair.

And—he was thinking of Rose as “her,” not “it.”

“The Doll who was injured is fully mended, has taken the name ‘Dern,’ and has tied themselves to the Mender,” Rose said. “Rumors are spreading about what happened. Fundamentally, people approve of your actions, Lord Baron.”

“Then I should definitely make that speech tonight while they haven’t had a chance to think too much about it,” he said. Then took a deep breath. “Rose, I am sorry we have not been able to find a way to free you. But—I am also not sorry, not entirely. This is very selfish of me, but we need you. You can do things humans can’t, you don’t need food or sleep, and you can tolerate things and conditions humans would fold under. I—”

To his astonishment, Rose actually held up a hand to stop him from saying anything further. “We are of one mind in this, Lord Baron. Regardless of when you find a way to free us, we will serve you until you no longer need us. That is a promise from all of us. Hopefully, that will occur before you become too accustomed to depending upon us.”

“Hopefully,” he said hesitantly. We don’t dare become dependent on them, or I’ll never get people to allow them to go, and they’ll just be enslaved all over again. We can’t have that. That will start us down the road to replicating the Empire.