Isabelle’s thoughts slowly came unstuck, and she assembled all she had seen. People had been calling her names as long as she could remember—worm child, Breaker’s get—but no one had ever tried to kill her before. Her skin felt cold and she was shaking like a leaf. Marie was breathing heavily and her grip on her knife was so white knuckled that Isabelle thought her fingers might fuse like that.
Jean-Claude finished his search of the downed men, then faced Isabelle and Marie. A somber look darkened his face, but there was no sign of the drunkard about him. “I think I should get you two home.”
“Are we in trouble?” Marie asked shakily, as if the fire that had sustained her had now burned out.
“I should think not,” Jean-Claude said. “At least, not if you get changed into clean clothes and put yourself back where you are supposed to be before a general alarm goes up.”
Stunned and subdued, the girls followed Jean-Claude up the long, winding cart road toward the manor, but even the brisk pace he set could not entirely quell Isabelle’s curiosity. “Who were those men?” she asked after she got used to his rolling rhythm. “Iconates?”
Jean-Claude did not answer immediately, and his face was screwed up like Isabelle’s brother’s whenever he was dealing with a tricky bit of arithmetic or grammar. Finally Jean-Claude said, “The man who attacked you is named Tallie. He used to be a fisherman until he took his boat too deep into the Miasma, brought up a catch of the galfesters, and passed it around to his family. That broke his mind and drove him into the embrace of the Iconates.”
“Oh,” Isabelle said, flustered by the humanity of her erstwhile assailant. “But you said someone ordered them to attack us.”
“It’s one of the possibilities I’m investigating,” he said. “I doubt those three were part of an organized plan, but someone may have put a worm in their ear.”
“But … why?” She knew people thought she was a witch, but she couldn’t get her mind around Galfesters’s hatred. It had been spilling off him like heat from the Solar.
“Because the world is full of men who think that Her Highness Princess Isabelle des Zephyrs, cousin once removed to Grand Leon, should have more fingers and less intelligence. They think she should be beautiful, brainless, beatific—”
“Boring,” Isabelle supplied. “Barmy.”
Jean-Claude smiled down at her fondly. “And a bounty of other brevities beginning with ‘B.’ Yes. Fortunately for you, I find their arguments unconvincing.”
Isabelle forged into new territory. “You said you were my hellhound.”
“Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words. Say rather that I am His Majesty’s sheepdog. I wander around distant fields, stick my nose in other people’s privates, and growl at curs.”
Emboldened by Jean-Claude’s frankness, Marie said, “My mother says you’re a disgraced uniform.”
“Only on Templedays. The rest of the week I am a sot, a drunkard, a reprobate, a clown, a fool, a dolt, and a dullard. Except, of course, on Feastdays, when I take upon myself the duties and responsibilities of chief glutton, and on Fastdays, when I indulge in inestimable digestible, comestible heresy.”
Isabelle untangled Jean-Claude’s meaning from his sideways words. He was playing with her, an adult game of everything-means-something-else, but he wasn’t playing it in the same way her father did, with words full of cutting traps. This was more like a puzzle she was meant to solve.
“So you’re just pretending,” Isabelle said. “Why?”
“Because no one is afraid of the village idiot.”
Isabelle’s mind was still swimming from these revelations when Jean-Claude guided them into a narrow lane between the pickers’ tenement and the bluffs below the manor yard. He took them straight to the old millrace that provided Isabelle’s and Marie’s usual method of secret egress from the manor grounds … or maybe not so secret after all, since Jean-Claude apparently knew exactly where it was.
Jean-Claude shooed them toward the steep, narrow channel. “You two should stay away from town for a few days. This is a dangerous time, and I need you to be alert for anything strange or unusual. If you do that for me, I’ll let you know when it’s safe to sneak out again. Do we have a bargain?”
Isabelle was surprised. A bargain? No adult had ever made a deal with her before. They just told her what to do and then mostly pretended she wasn’t there. But would he keep his end of the bargain? Adults were always failing to keep promises, but Jean-Claude had apparently been aware of their excursions for … how long? And he had done nothing to stop them thus far. And she had a great many questions for him, just as soon as she could figure out how to put them into words.
She put on her best princess voice, which was rusty from disuse, and said, “We have a bargain, monsieur.”
Marie held out her hand palm up. “Builder keep you.”
“Until the Savior comes,” Jean-Claude replied, completing the traditional farewell. He doffed his hat to her and swept a low bow. He waited until she and Marie squirmed through the curtain of vines overhanging the millrace before turning and sauntering away. By the time they’d climbed ten feet, they could hear him singing a bawdy drinking song. They did not understand all the words, but it made them blush anyway.
The long, familiar ascent of the millrace gave Isabelle time to think of other things, such as how brave Marie had been. How had she done that? Isabelle’s whole mind had gone blank, white with fear. Even now, she didn’t feel normal. It was like she was running on a bog. As long as she kept going she’d stay on top, but the minute she stopped, she’d sink and be drowned.
The girls scrambled out of the hole in the roof of the old millhouse at the corner of the edgeward cow pasture and had just about reached the stile leading to the paddock behind the stables when a shrill voice caught them by the scruffs of their necks.
“Isabelle!” shouted the head governess. “Where have you been? And you!” She jabbed a knobby finger at Marie. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t have you whipped to the bone.”
Isabelle and Marie cringed. The governess was not so foolish as to disfigure them, but there were punishments that didn’t leave a mark.
“Come here,” the governess said, even while storming toward them. “I have been looking for you two for an hour! The comte has summoned you both, and look at you. You’re filthy! I’d strip you down and send you in there naked if I thought you had any sense of shame, but you’d enjoy humiliating your father in front of his guests. Builder do us all a favor and turn you into a pig. You’d be cleaner.”
She grabbed Isabelle by the ear, much too hard, and dragged her back to the manor house. “Stop mewling. You will learn to behave as a proper lady, or I will break you.”
The berating went on through the entire process of being stripped out of layers of clothing, scrubbed like a dirty pot, scraped dry, and stuffed into her most formal gown, rose pink with a spray of white lace at the throat. The double knot in the silver cincture around her waist announced her maiden status to anyone who cared.