Wisdom's Kiss (7 page)

—Tips

T
HE
S
TORY OF
F
ORTITUDE OF
B
ACIO
, C
OMMONLY
K
NOWN AS
T
RUDY
,
AS
T
OLD TO
H
ER
D
AUGHTER

Privately Printed and Circulated

TRUDY COULD HARDLY shut her eyes that night, she was so exhausted and worried and—for goodness' sake, they had a queen at the Duke's Arms! A
queen!
Sleeping in the second-best room!

Which, Trudy could not help but note with a satisfied nod, was precisely how a queen should act, giving the best room to her suffering ladies-in-waiting. Truly, as Trudy pondered it, this old woman did everything as a queen should. She didn't even call herself queen! Her traveling companions—those fit enough to speak, anyway—called her Nonna Ben, an insolence that had stunned Trudy when first she heard it. To think that the queen of a country—or in this case the queen mother—enjoyed the same endearment as Bacio grannies, with that commonplace "Ben" tacked on the end ... remarkable. The queen had scurried for hours about the inn just like a grannie too, verifying that every member of her entourage was comfortable. Trudy hoped she herself would always be as solicitous, particularly (should such an anomaly ever come to pass) to those beneath her.

Princess Wisdom, on the other hand, was ... different. The featherbrained farm girls had described her as graceful and lovely and the best princess they'd ever met—which wasn't saying much given their life experience. They found it astonishing that a young woman of royal blood would enjoy currying manes and polishing harnesses. Hurrying across the courtyard, Trudy at last caught a glimpse of this celebrity laughing with the grooms as though they'd been friends all their lives. Trudy's reaction, however, wasn't amusement or awe or even dismay: it was horror. Misery flooded her so violently that she clawed at her throat for breath. It was her own misery that she saw, looking at the princess. Her own future unhappiness.

She fled the stable yard at once. However charming the princess might appear to others, Trudy wanted nothing to do with her.

So that night, while preparing the second-best room for sleep, Trudy deflected the suggestion that she join the Montagne contingent, much as it hurt to disappoint the queen. Simply standing near the princess—who by the way appeared quite unaware of Trudy's existence—made Trudy quake. She excused herself quick as she could and kept busy with countless other crucial tasks until she fell into bed.

No, she could not go galavanting off with these foreigners, no matter how much she enjoyed dear Nonna Ben, how desperately they required assistance, or how pleasant it was (when she permitted herself such vanity) to imagine herself a lady-in-waiting. She needed to stay as far from Princess Wisdom as possible; her sight made that fact abundantly clear. Besides, the Duke's Arms needed her too. Eds needed her, however infrequently he expressed his gratitude. Most of all, Tips needed her. She'd made a promise to wait for him, and wait she would: in Bacio. In two years' time he'd finish his apprenticeship and return to her. And if by some miracle he finished early, she would be here for him, as she'd vowed. Comforted beyond measure by the certainty of this logic, and by the peace of mind that came from knowing she would never, ever in her life eat an oyster, she drifted off to sleep.

***

The next morning, Trudy awoke before dawn. There was so much to do! Could she possibly turn six-month-old pumpkins into a dish fit for royalty—or at the very least a dish fit for breakfast? And the second-best tablecloths (the best had been used at dinner)—what if the mice had gotten into them? She hadn't thought to check! What about the lunch roasts, broth for the invalids, flowers for the tables...

Trudy was pondering pudding recipes with the cook and attempting to get some labor out of the featherbrains—had none of these girls ever folded a napkin?—when the mail rider arrived from Froglock. Normally Trudy would drop every task, but today she was far too busy even to pay the man notice. He, however, sought her out especially and extracted from his greatcoat a soiled, much-stamped package no larger than his cupped palm—a package from Tips!

Almost quivering in frustration, Trudy diligently verified that the cook understood the task before her and that the featherbrains weren't making too great a hash of the linens before she slipped outside for a moment of peace.

She ducked into the laundry shed. No one would dare follow her there—they might get put to work! But laundry had not yet begun that morn, and Trudy, alone at last, studied the small package tied with string, neatly knotted (oh, Tips), and addressed in his schoolboy hand.

Using the wee scissors she carried always for a thousand different emergencies, Trudy cut the string and drew open the paper. Nestled inside, like an egg in a nest, was a dark wooden box carved with leaves and berries. What a lovely, lovely gift! Trudy cradled it tenderly, and it took her some time to realize that the box had a hinge and clasp.

Slowly she lifted the lid. Rich velvet of the deepest blue lined the inside, cupping the most beautiful earrings Trudy had ever seen. Had ever even imagined. Fine-spun gold, so delicate it could be the work of fairies, clasped two tear-dropped jade stones. Trudy held one to a sunbeam to study it more clearly, then exclaimed as the polished facets captured the light, glowing with the brilliant, depthless green of life, and spring.

The stones were not jade. They were—they had to be—emeralds.

Overcome, she crumpled down on a bucket. The bucket, luckily, was inverted, though she probably wouldn't have noticed if she'd ended up hip deep in suds. What girl in Bacio—in all of Alpsburg—had ever been so privileged? Emerald earrings! She would save them—hide them away where no one could ever find them!—and wear them for Tips's return.

Tucking the earrings back into their elegant little case, Trudy noticed at last the scrap of notepaper folded beneath the velvet: he was returning! Not to Bacio, to be sure (though simply thinking these words set Trudy's heart beating), but at least to the empire. Oh, to know he would be that much closer.

If only Hans and Jens weren't so absolutely horrid! Tips had every right to fear being seized; his brothers were lazy and stupid and utterly unsuited to someone as wonderful as he. No wonder Tips never wrote them; it was bad enough that Trudy had to pass along his gifts, which they treated
so
rudely, and her as well ... At least this time Tips wasted no words on them. Trudy had enough responsibility today without a trip to the mill.

She should return to work; she'd squandered too much time already. But she lingered a moment more. Blushing at her immodesty, she released a curl of hair from her kerchief and held it beside the gem. Red and green did go together; she'd heard this before. But her hair, with emeralds? It was hard to tell. If Tips said it, though, then it must be true. Tips knew everything.

Tucking the letter and box into a deep pocket, and her hair beneath its cloth, she hurried back to the inn.

The disorder she had left not ten minutes earlier was now thrice as loud, the small kitchen seething with people ... Trudy elbowed her way through the crowd, angry now at those silly, stupid farm girls. What had they done, on today of all days, to cause such a ruckus?

The commotion did not center, however, on the featherbrains, who stood to one side with gaping mouths, but—Trudy would never have believed it were she not observing it with her own eyes—on Princess Wisdom and old Nonna Ben, yet in their dressing gowns, looming over the mail rider, who sat huddled on a stool like a snared truant.

"Tell me!" The princess shook the man. "Where is he
exactly,
and when did he get there? Speak, man!"

The mail rider stuttered, overwhelmed by this onslaught.

Trudy's eyes met the queen's, and in that instant she knew what the mail rider had told them, what the queen would ask of her, and what—inevitably—her answer would be.

Well! My frail nerves cannot—simply cannot—survive such
trauma!
—I would collapse were it not
abundantly
clear that without my firm hand this duchy would dissolve into chaos.

The emperor—Rudiger IV himself!—has appeared at the gates of Froglock with his entire ridiculous menagerie!—which Farina is expected to feed!

Tigers and elephants—and soldiers!—and accountants! And we're to feed them!

All those prying men with their prying questions—as though the wealth moving through my duchy belongs to anyone but myself !

I am of course already on tenterhooks awaiting Roger's betrothed—who has
still
not arrived—she cares not a whit for the lengths to which I have gone to prepare Phraugheloch for
royalty.

Poor Handsome is so overcome that he was finally provoked into a small nip—and while the surgeons assure me they can reattach the boy's finger, my son had the nerve to demand that my poor little dog be locked up!—and furthermore claimed that he had been
inspired
to this
insolence
by the thought of Princess Wisdom!

It is a woman's duty not to
inspire
a man but to
submit
to him, and a man's duty to command his wife—a dictum which I was forever commanding of my late husband, and which he was utterly incapable of enforcing—I will not see that Montagne minx dominate my son so!

That the
Kingdom
of Montagne lords itself over the
Duchy
of Farina—though we have ten times the land and peoples—burns me like a brand.

I will have that throne.

8
TH EDITION

Printed in the Capital City of Rigorus
by Hazelnut & Filbert, Publishers to the Crown

RÜDIGER IV

The rule of Rüdiger IV, the Spindle Kaiser, culminated the struggle between the Empire of Lax and its most powerful domains. The grandson of Wilhelm VIII on his mother's side, Rüdiger had no aspirations to the throne and was declared heir only after Wilhelm's sons—the Three Disappointers, as they were subsequently known—fathered nineteen girls. Rüdiger took the throne at age thirty-two and ruled for fifty-eight years. While maintaining a permanent campaign on the northern frontier and leading his empire in multiple wars, Rüdiger made significant advances in diplomacy. He formalized relations with the Sultanate of Ahmb, surveyed Lax's eastern boundary, and negotiated with his many subject states to reduce the tolls that jeopardized imperial trade. The widespread popularity of the names Roger, Ruggiero, Rutger, Hrothgar, Rogelio, Rufiger, and similar derivates of Rüdiger speaks to the nobility's efforts to curry favor within the imperial court and should in no way be considered a demonstration of affection. In his later years, Rüdiger IV traveled throughout the empire and beyond with his private circus and military escort. It is not unthinkable that this "Circus Primus" may have served as a façade for covert proceedings, as the emperor and his troupe were present for the Feldspar Assumption, the Mar y Muntanya Border Crusade, and the Fourth Altercation of Scampi; Rüdiger's role in Wisdom's Kiss, much parsed by scholars, exemplifies the tumult that often shadowed the Circus Primus ensemble. Perhaps not surprisingly, his later reign was tainted by charges of irresponsibility, even senility, accusations that Rüdiger did not or could not dispute, and his legacy does not adequately reflect his earlier achievements.

T
HE
S
TORY OF
F
ORTITUDE OF
B
ACIO
, C
OMMONLY
K
NOWN AS
T
RUDY
,
AS
T
OLD TO
H
ER
D
AUGHTER

Privately Printed and Circulated

TO THINK! For so many years Trudy had burned to reunite with Tips, and now it was about to happen. And not sitting in lonesome Bacio twiddling her thumbs, but by traveling to Froglock—where Tips was this very minute, guarding the emperor with the other soldiers!—and she was traveling in a
coach,
with a
queen,
as (Trudy could pinch herself!) a veritable
lady-in-waiting!

Although Trudy didn't need a pinch: pain came easily enough simply by glancing at the young woman who sat across from her scowling out the window. Every time she looked at Princess Wisdom, Trudy shuddered. Fortunately the princess did not seem to notice. In fact, she did not acknowledge Trudy's presence at all, and rarely spoke. This, Trudy comforted herself, must have been what her sight had warned her of: an inexplicable royal snubbing. If so, Trudy would tolerate it with dignity, and instead focus her attention, happily, on the queen.

All her life Trudy had longed for a grandmother. Not the fairy version found in stories, but a real old lady who would praise and treasure her. At last she had chanced upon this marvelous species of human, and while Nonna Ben, to be sure, was not
her
grandmother, nonetheless she rejoiced in the woman's presence as a sunflower, turning its head to follow the path of the sun across the sky, absorbs every warming ray.

Trudy was supremely fortunate (so Nonna Ben informed her) to have learned to sew, for she now had the unenviable task, within this rocking carriage ere it drew to a halt at the imposing front doors of Phraughloch Palace, of fitting herself in one of Lady Modesty's gowns, the blue silk so lovely that Trudy winced to pierce the fabric, no matter how Nonna Ben chuckled, and repeated that her beautiful stitching would only improve it.