LITMIR.BIZ

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finally said. “I cannot believe that I am not returning to our hovel, but to a beautiful house with a real garden. My sisters will be so envious of me. How they mocked me when I prepared to wed your father, scorning him because he was a humble mercenary. Now they shall see! He has risen high, and I with him.”

      Lara laughed. “Why, stepmother,” she said, “I have never seen this side of you!”

      Susanna grinned back at the girl. “They were very mean, Lara. They never saw what a good man your father was. The matchmaker gave me the choice of three men, but I wanted only your father. They said a mercenary would amount to naught.”

      “Do you love my father?” Lara wondered aloud.

      “I do!” her stepmother said enthusiastically.

      “I’m glad,” the girl replied. “It makes it easier for me to go away.”

      Susanna sighed. “‘Thank you’ seems like two small words in light of what you have done for your father. For Mikhail and for me. I do not know if you will be permitted to come home once you have been purchased.” She stopped, and then her eyes filled with tears. “It is not fair,” she sobbed.

      “Susanna, you are older than I, and should know that life is often unfair,” Lara gently chided her stepmother. “You were wise to suggest I be sold. We will all have a much better life because of it, especially Mikhail. He will never remember the Quarter, or the hovel in which he was born. My father’s soft heart will be the undoing of him but that you are there for him. I am glad for it!”

      “I know I am five years older than you,” Susanna said. “But sometimes you seem so much older. Even than your father.”

      Lara laughed. “I expect that is my faerie blood,” she said. “I am told they are different from…from…well, you know what I mean, Susanna. Being both faerie and human I have no idea really where I belong. I always thought I belonged in the human world, but now with all this fuss being made over what is called my faerie beauty, I do not know at all where I belong.”

      The litter came to a halt and was set down. Immediately the curtains were opened up, and Nels helped Susanna from the vehicle.

      “Welcome home, mistress,” he said. “Ove! Take the little master from the girl.”

      “The girl,” Susanna said sharply, “is Sir John’s daughter and will be treated with courtesy, Nels. Help my stepdaughter from the litter.”

      Grudgingly, the slave man obeyed his new mistress. The girl was known to be half faerie, and would be shortly entering a Pleasure House. Faeries were not to be tolerated. He was glad the girl would be gone on the morrow. He was startled when Lara thanked him for his service, and wondered if she had put a spell on him.

      Inside her new house Susanna began giving orders. Her husband would want a bath when he arrived home. They were to begin their preparations immediately. Mikhail was to be bathed at once, brought to her for feeding and then put to bed. Dinner, a simple meal she had discussed with Yera the day before, was to be served in the first hour of the twilight. Wine would be served as well, for they would be celebrating.

      The new knight arrived just before sunset. He was slightly drunk, for the order had been celebrating the induction of its new members. His bath was waiting, Susanna ready with her scrubbing brush. Mikhail was already in his bed. Lara smiled at the splashing and laughter she heard coming from the bathing room. From the first day of the tournament when he had won all his matches she had seen a great change in her father. All the weariness and care that had been weighing him down lifted from his shoulders. He looked young again, and in these past months with the scarcity of work he had looked so worried and worn.

      Part of Lara was happy that her life was taking this new turn, but another part of her was slightly apprehensive. She was leaving her family. She was leaving everything she had ever known. And for what? The unknown. She would be a vessel for a man’s desires. Men, it seemed, got pleasure from putting their manroot into a female’s body. This knowledge was hardly a secret among girls her age. She had listened, secreting herself about the edges of groups of giggling girls in the Quarter, learning what friends, had she had any, might have shared with her. Susanna had been willing finally to answer all her questions with Gaius Prospero’s permission. Ignorance in such matters was not to be tolerated. Hetarian girls were supposed to be prepared to please their husbands and their lovers.

      Finally her father and stepmother joined her in the garden where a table was set up for them to dine. John Swiftsword kissed his daughter’s brow. “I am glad that we can have this evening together,” he said as he seated her at the dining table.

      “I have questions that I beg you answer me before I leave you,” Lara said quietly. “Questions about my mother, and my birth. You have never spoken on it, but you must tell me now, Da. Mistress Mildred said things to me today before we left the Quarter, and she told me I must ask you before I could not. Will you tell me?”

      “Aye, I will tell you all, but let us have our meal first,” he responded. “And I will speak only with you, for Ilona warned me that should I ever speak of her before another woman I love, that woman would cease to love me, and so Susanna can hear naught of what I would say to you this night.” He turned to his wife.

      Lara looked anxiously toward her stepmother.

      “I will leave you after the meal,” Susanna promised. “I do not choose to hear of Lara’s mother,” she said. “But nothing you say, John, could make me stop loving you.”

      “You do not understand faerie magic, wife,” was his cryptic reply.

      Nels served them the meal Yera had prepared. They began with a delicate cold soup of pureed peaches and plums topped with sour cream. Next came a salad of baby lettuces and herbs to be followed by a juicy capon that had been roasted golden, and a platter of ham slices as well as fresh warm small breads that had been twisted into graceful shapes. There was sweet butter on the table and a small dish of salt. Salt had always been a rarity in the Quarter. When the fine pottery plates had been cleared away smaller plates were placed before them, and a bowl of fruit was set in the center of the table. Lara had never in her life seen fruit other than oranges. Fruits were reserved for the privileged classes. Nels, to his credit, had explained everything to them as they ate.

      The wine in their crystal goblets was sweet, and heady with the aroma of its grapes. Lara felt sleepy, but she forced herself back from the brink, remembering that Gaius Prospero’s people would come early for her, and she must speak with her father before she slept. “Da?” she said softly.

      John Swiftsword was looking at his nubile wife, and considering how much he was going to enjoy futtering her in that fine new bed in their bedchamber very shortly. His first act as a Crusader Knight would be to get Susanna with child again. Another son for the order. And then his daughter’s gentle voice pierced his consciousness. “I have not forgotten,” he told her.

      Susanna arose from the dining table. Walking around the table she kissed Lara tenderly. “Good night,” she said simply, and left the room. She could not bring herself to say goodbye.

      “Let us walk in the garden,” the new knight said to his daughter. “What I have to say is for your ears alone, daughter.” He led her not to the inner courtyard, where someone might have secreted themselves in the shadows of the portico, but rather out into the small walled garden with its apple tree. There they sat upon a rustic wooden bench. “Now tell me what it is you would know, Lara, and I will answer.”

      “Begin at the beginning,” she replied. “I would know all.”

      “There is really not that much,” her father answered her. “It was shortly after my fifteenth birthday. Midsummer’s Eve. My friends and I were gathered about our fire flirting with the girls we knew, dancing and drinking, and lying about our adventures with those same girls. And then, for the briefest moment, it seemed as if the whole world was frozen in time, and I saw Ilona, standing in the shadows at the edge of a woodland. I remember my mouth falling open. I had never in all my days seen such beauty. The long golden gilt hair. The eyes as green as new leaves in

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