Flora shook her head, and Lorrie almost lost control of the reins as she gaped.
They were going along at a slow trot: Aunt Cleora’s carriage-horse was a big glossy gelding, far finer than poor old Horace, but not noticeably faster. Leather slings gave the dog-cart an odd greasy sway too, not like the forthright jouncing and jolting of a farm-cart, but she had to admit it was easy on her leg, which pained her little more than it would have done while she lay on a featherbed in her friend’s house.
‘Never seen hay cut?’ she cried.
‘Well, you’ve never seen the Prince’s men parading through the streets of Krondor,’ Flora said.
‘Oh, I wasn’t mocking you,’ Lorrie assured her. ‘It’s just . . . well, I’ve never met anyone who’s not seen haying, before. That’s all.’ She sighed. ‘That’s when Bram kissed me first,’ she said shyly. ‘At a dance at the end of a haying-day, last year.’
‘So you’re going to marry Bram?’ Flora asked, plainly glad to change the subject.
‘Well, I think he wants to,’ Lorrie said shyly, keeping her attention on the reins and the horse.
‘Gods of love, he’s handsome enough!’ said Flora with a giggle.
Lorrie giggled in return. ‘He is, isn’t he?’
She felt a spurt of happiness, absurd under the worry. He isn’t dead, she thought. He cant be dead! But if her mother and father could die, the pillars of all her life, what was safe? Resolutely she pushed that aside, enjoying the day. She looked at Flora. ‘Flora,’ she said suddenly. ‘Why are you helping me?’ Then, hastily: ‘Not that I mind! But you and your foster-brother, you’ve treated me like your own kin—and I’m just a girl from a farm with four cows and one horse, not a fine lady like you.’
Flora had been frowning, slightly thoughtful. At that she laughed. There was an edge of bitterness to it. ‘Fine lady!’ she said.
Lorrie blinked at her, confused. ‘Well, you are,’ she pointed out.
The furnishings in Aunt Cleora’s house alone were worth a decade’s rent for any ten farms in her home valley, with the inn at Relling ford thrown in, and possibly the gristmill.
‘I’m Aunt Cleora’s sister’s daughter,’ Flora said slowly. ‘But she ran off with a baker. Ran off to Krondor.’
‘Ah!’ Lorrie said, understanding. ‘And your father’s Da cut him off?’
That happened sometimes back home, too. Young men seemed made to quarrel with their fathers about the time their beards sprouted, and sometimes it grew hot. Even Bram, good-hearted and willing, butted heads with Ossrey sometimes, like rams in spring. That was one reason he had hired himself out to merchants’ caravans as a guard and wrangler now and then, besides the cash.
‘Right. And then the baker . . . my father proved his judgment right and my mother’s wrong when he crawled into a brandy-barrel, and stayed there.’
Lorrie nodded. That certainly happened back home, too. ‘Ah, you’ll have had to work out,’ she said. ‘Do laundry and sewing and suchlike.’
Vaguely, she knew that was one of the things poor women in towns did; she didn’t suppose they could hire themselves out as maids of all work or dairy-hands.
‘Yes, suchlike,’ Flora said shortly, then chuckled. ‘A town can be a hard place for a young girl. All alone, and everyone a stranger. I . . . came back to Land’s End, and things worked out for me, but you didn’t have anybody.’
They drove on in companionable silence. After a while the land rose; they went through a patch of forest, cool grateful shade that reminded Lorrie painfully of her day hunting. Beyond that there was a man bent nearly double under a load of faggots, his axe on top thrust through the loop of twisted bark that held it together. The woodsman set it down as they passed, rising to rub the small of his back and look—a dog-cart and fine horse with two pretty girls in it wasn’t something that he saw every day. He took off his shapeless wool cap. ‘Missies,’ he said respectfully, bowing slightly.
Lorrie felt embarrassed by that: if she’d been walking by the road in her own clothes and met him back home, he’d have called her ‘lass’ and waved instead.
‘We’re looking for a young man,’ she said.
At the sound of her voice the man relaxed a bit; they were twenty miles from Relling and his own accent was slightly different from hers, but nobody could hear her speak and doubt she was a commoner too—perhaps a well-to-do farmer’s daughter, at most. Just as he would have placed Flora as city-born and gentlefolk, if she’d opened her mouth.
He not only relaxed, but also grinned as he straightened. ‘Not a young man any more m’self, miss, but I could wish I were, seein’ the two of you pretty as the spring daisies,’ he said. ‘From over to Relling, are you then?’