“Oh, no.” My dismay was honest. I was picturing big bluff Verity paired with one of Regal’s sugar-crystal women. Whenever there was a festival of any kind in the keep, Spring’s Edge or Winterheart or Harvestday, here they came, from Chalced and Farrow and Beams, in carriages or on richly caparisoned palfreys or riding in litters. They wore gowns like butterflies’ wings, and ate as daintily as sparrows, and seemed to flutter about and perch always in Regal’s vicinity. And he would sit in their midst, in his own silk-and-velvet hues, and preen while their musical voices tinkled around him and their fans and fancywork trembled in their fingers. “Prince catchers,” I’d heard them called, noblewomen who displayed themselves like goods in a store window in the hopes of wedding one of the royals. Their behavior was not improper, not quite. But to me it seemed desperate, and Regal cruel as he smiled first on this one and then danced all evening with that one, only to rise to a late breakfast and walk yet another through the gardens. They were Regal’s worshipers. I tried to picture one on Verity’s arm as he stood watching the dancers at a ball, or quietly weaving in his study while Verity pondered and sketched at the maps he so loved. No garden strolls; Verity took his walks along the docks and through the crops, stopping often to talk to the seafolk and farmers behind their plows. Dainty slippers and embroidered skirts would surely not follow him there.
Molly slipped a penny into my hand.
“What’s this for?”
“To pay for whatever you’ve been thinking so hard that you’ve been sitting on the edge of my skirt while I’ve twice asked you to lift up. I don’t think you’ve heard a word I’ve said.”
I sighed. “Verity and Regal are so different, I cannot imagine one choosing a wife for the other.”
Molly looked puzzled.
“Regal will choose someone who is beautiful and wealthy and of good blood. She’ll be able to dance and sing and play the chimes. She’ll dress beautifully and have jewels in her hair at the breakfast table, and always smell of the flowers that grow in the Rain Wilds.”
“And Verity will not be glad of such a woman?” The confusion on Molly’s face was as if I were insisting the sea was soup.
“Verity deserves a companion, not an ornament to wear on his sleeve,” I protested in disdain. “Were I Verity, I’d want a woman who could do things. Not just select her jewelry or plait her own hair. She should be able to sew a shirt, or tend her own garden, and have something special she can do that is all her own, like scrollwork or herbery.”
“Newboy, the like of that is not for fine ladies,” Molly chided me. “They are meant to be pretty and ornamental. And they are rich. It isn’t for them to have to do such work.”
“Of course it is. Look at Lady Patience and her woman Lacey. They are always about and doing things. Their apartments are a jungle of the lady’s plants, and the cuffs of her gowns are sometimes a bit sticky from her paper making, or she will have bits of leaves in her hair from her herbery work, but she is still just as beautiful. And prettiness is not all that important in a woman. I’ve watched Lacey’s hands making one of the keep children a fishnet from a bit of jute string. Quick and clever as any webman’s fingers down on the dock are her fingers; now that’s a pretty thing that has nothing to do with her face. And Hod, who teaches weapons? She loves her silverwork and graving. She made a dagger for her father’s birthday, with a grip like a leaping stag, and yet done so cleverly that it’s a comfort in the hand, with not a jag or edge to catch on anything. Now, that’s a bit of beauty that will live on long after her hair grays or her cheeks wrinkle. Someday her grandchildren will look at that work and think what a clever woman she was.”
“Do you think so, really?”