“I am sorry to lose you, my dear,” said Mrs. Blessingham, with a pang she herself thought unwarranted. Girls were always going away, why should she anguish over this one? Nonetheless, she did anguish.
“I don’t want to go,” whispered Genevieve, admitting it for the first time to someone other than herself. “Oh, I do not want to go, Mrs. Blessingham. I would so much rather stay here.”
“Do you think this journey is possibly what your mother meant?”
Genevieve looked up, spilling tears. “I’ve thought . . . perhaps it is. Though . . . I’m not sure.”
“Think on it, dear.” Mrs. Blessingham actually wrung her hands. “Please, Genevieve, it will be wise for you to take a great deal of notice of what’s going on around you. You must be alert in Havenor.”
So Genevieve went home, all at doubts and dithers, with no idea what Havenor had to offer or what she should take with her. Soon, however, the post packet that plied the River Reusel stopped at Sabique, a Wantresse County village in the valley below Langmarsh House, and from there a fast rider brought up a letter from the Marshal saying he had acquired a large and partially furnished house with a garden and stable, one left tenantless by the recent death of its owner.
The day before they left, Genevieve slipped away from the busy company of packers and folders to sneak down through the cellars of Havenor to that same remote, deep-pooled cavern where her mother had taken her. She shut the doors behind her, as her mother had always done, and then she memorialized her mother by doing the things her mother had taught her to do. Though the exercise was itself uncomfortable—she had become unpracticed—she was comforted that she still remembered how.
The journey to Havenor was made by carriage, with wagons behind bringing Genevieve’s clothing, books, and other belongings. Their route took them down the hill road to Sabique, and thence northward along the Reusel road, which climbed easily but steadily toward the pass leading into the cupped valley of High Haven. Five outriders accompanied them, to help with the wagon in the likely event of snow or the less likely one of brigands. Though brigands were endemic in Dania—stealing women seemed to be their main occupation—they rarely crossed the Reusel into Wantresse.
Genevieve had chosen to bring her own maid, the Langmarshian woman who had tended her since she was a child: ruddy, red-haired Delia whose strong arms had comforted Genevieve as they had her own children, long since grown and scattered. Genevieve, behaving most unlike herself, had insisted to the Marshal that she would have Delia, not a maid hired in Havenor, since Delia’s husband was one of the horsemen accompanying the Marshal. Delia cared more about joining her John than going for any other reason, and Genevieve was well aware of this. Since Genevieve preferred a known quantity to an unknown one, however, the arrangement satisfied them both.
The journey was accomplished before the first snows, just before, the last miles of it beset by freezing squalls that blew scattered needles of ice into their faces. From the top of the pass above Sabique, High Haven lay before them: a wide dun grassland with ivory Havenor set distantly upon it, like a fancy cake upon a platter. For a moment the sun broke through, and Havenor became an ephemeral toy, a play city full of sugary towers and icing plazas, all glittering in the cold light, and for that moment Genevieve regarded it with something like hope.
They spent the night uncomfortably at the only available inn. On the morrow, as they came closer to the city, Genevieve found the view less auspicious than she had hoped. The chill wind had driven everyone indoors, leaving the streets untenanted, dim and dreamlike behind shifting veils of snow. As they went through the residential area, Genevieve regarded the stern lines of city houses on either side of them with dismay. Their faces were shut up tight, the windows lidded with heavy curtains, the iron-bound doors locked-lip and stern. These forbidding visages became even more dour when they turned onto a broader boulevard where the houses were farther separated and set deeply behind walled and gated gardens beneath bare, black-branched trees. Dusk had come by this time, and though the wind had ceased, the snow was falling hard.