The Book Eaters(11)
4
A KNIGHT’S TALE
SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO
“What do you fear, lady?” he asked.
“A cage,” she said. “To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
The whispers were everywhere: babies made from science.
The Six Families struggled with fertility. Few girls were born, and those who were born could only carry two children before early menopause set in. Sometimes three, at a stretch.
Out in the wider world, human scientists had begun trying to cure infertility in their own kind, and that excited the Families very much, in case that knowledge could be adapted to book eater women, too.
Devon wasn’t supposed to know things like that, since she was still only twelve years old and kept apart from adult business. But Devon also liked to listen at doors and was very good at sneaking around, so she found out anyway.
She told Ramsey all about it while they were playing on the parapets of Fairweather Manor, climbing the sloped tiling as they had so many dozens of times. A mother-bride was arriving that afternoon, after many long years of no new marriages at Fairweather Manor, and they both wanted to catch sight of the procession.
“You’re being daft. Devon the Daft,” Ramsey said, bracing against the roof. He was always doing that with her name: assigning her a singsong title to go with it. Devon the Distracted. Devon the Dizzy. Or today, Devon the Daft. “Whoever heard of such a stupid thing? Babies born in a test tube? Have you seen those things?” He held up a thumb and finger, illustrating the size of a test tube.
“They don’t grow inside the tube, stupid head,” Devon said, edging along the gutter. “They just use the test tubes to help. Like a magical baby-potion.” She was guessing, didn’t want to admit ignorance.
He laughed. “If you say so!” Ramsey clambered atop the east wing chimney, its flues long since sealed off. “Sounds made-up to me.”
“It’s not made-up!” Devon perched next to him, fully exasperated by his arrogance. “Everyone’s talking about it, and if it works for the humans, then one day, it’ll work for us. And if it works for us, then we won’t need the knights anymore to arrange all the marriages.”
The aunts discussed that a lot, in their private quarters. No more knights. No more dragons. Women marrying who they please. And other things that Devon didn’t really understand, although she could sense the cautious hope in their words.
Ramsey wasn’t listening. “Ey, look! There they are!” He grabbed her arm and pointed.
Devon squinted. A loose knot of vehicles approached in the distance, winding through the moors on the potholed roads toward their manor. The bride was arriving.
Women did not leave home except for marriages, and sometimes parties. Even within the manor, the aunts never seemed to do anything except manage the household or do other tasks that Uncle Aike referred to as women’s work. And since the Fairweathers had been too poor to afford a wedding during Devon’s twelve years of life, this arriving mother-bride would be the first non-Fairweather woman she had ever met.
The procession drew up in a glistening limo, painted the color of chalk.
“It’d have been a horse, back in the day,” Ramsey said with a confidence that came from being three years older. “A big white horse with a saddle and…” He gestured vaguely. “All that. You know.”
“Do you think she could be one of our mothers?” Devon had never seen so much as a picture of her own mother, only heard the name Amberly Blackwood murmured in passing gossip.
“Don’t be silly,” Ramsey said. “Our mothers have been and gone, all of them. Nobody gets married to the same house more than once.”
He was right. She felt chagrined for forgetting.
On the front drive below, the limo door opened with electronic grace and the newest mother-bride of Fairweather Manor stepped daintily from her metal chariot. Pale hair had been teased into a formal style, more suited to a woman twice her age—for she was young, around twenty-two. A white frilled tunic threatened to drown slender shoulders in fabric, and the blue skirt, overwhelmed with embroidery, seemed to weigh more than she did.
“You can tell she’s a Gladstone, with that hair,” Ramsey said, chin jutted out. “She isn’t proper Old Country stock, like us.”
Devon rolled her eyes. Ramsey had developed a zealous pride in their heritage lately, even though neither of them had ever been to Romania.
To her mind, Romania, or the Old Country, as their elders referred to it, was embroidered dresses on special occasions; it was singing “Star Carol” at Christmas, while one of her brothers ran around them wearing a goat mask; it was offering gifts to the Fate Fairies when new children were born; it was Midsomer parties and harvest celebrations even though they didn’t farm or care about solstice; it was strange flower rituals to welcome in the rainy English spring.
But Old Country stock, as Ramsey meant it now, was also dark hair and dark eyes; towering height, strong legs, and broad shoulders. Those traits persevered even as the ethnic heritages of the book eaters had diverged and interwoven over the decades. The palette of their skin tones had broadened, but the Fairweathers remained stocky and looming, strong of build—and nothing like the pale, frail, five-foot-nothing Gladstone girl who had just arrived.