“Who, then?” I demanded impatiently.
She picked up her baby, kissed the little girl with a flourish, and then announced to me, “Caulder Stiet. There. What do you think of that?”
For a moment my mouth hung open. Then I replied darkly, “I fear she has played right into his hands.”
“Then you would be mistaken,” Epiny told me snippily. “For it was a conspiracy between the two of them, to get the samples to the Queen without letting Caulder’s uncle know that they had obtained them.”
“What?”
“Yaril saw it as a chance for them to build something, for themselves, perhaps together, perhaps not. They are both, she wrote, tired of being pawns in their elders’ games. Caulder is quite certain he wishes to marry her, but she has honestly told him that she is uncertain and does not wish to be married for many years yet. Still, they are friends enough to conspire. She and Caulder feigned a monstrous quarrel, with shrieking and broken crockery! You know, from the way she writes of it, I think she enjoyed it! She mentions she smashed enough cups from the old china that her father will have to let her buy a whole new set now.”
“That sounds like Yaril,” I admitted with reluctant admiration. I knew those cups. She had always hated the dogwood-blossom pattern.
“Well, it was enough of a to-do that your father finally ordered both of them to leave his house. And so of course, off they went, back to Old Thares, with Caulder taking the rocks in his baggage. He had quite a time getting them to Her Majesty, but he prevailed, and guess what? For service to the Crown, the Crown has issued another grant of land to your father, more than doubling his holdings, and adjacent land to Caulder Stiet himself, to be held in trust for him by his father, his real father, until Caulder reaches his majority. It’s almost like the Crown forcing him to take Caulder back as his son. No title for Caulder, more’s the pity, but he will at least join the landed gentry when he comes of age.”
“How nice for him,” I said dryly. The news of my father’s holdings increasing was good news, for it made Yaril an even more desirable bride. She would have better choices than Caulder Stiet, I hoped. The idea of the Stiet family having a holding adjacent to Widevale appealed to me far less.
“Oh, you sound so sour and old, Nevare! But let me finish.” The baby fussed again and she spent a moment hushing her. “The gold strike, once the King announced it, has completely changed Widevale. Yaril wrote pages and pages about it. The King has sent in his engineers and they have designed and built housing for the workers, and they are setting up the mining and the refining and all of those things right in the area of the find. In time, there will be a large town there, if not a city. And Burvelle’s Landing is the closest river port, and the nearest inn and shops and all of that! So it has absolutely boomed with population. Yaril writes that it has tripled in size, and of course the taxes and landing fees from the Landing all go into your father’s coffers, so the family wealth is suddenly quite spectacular. In fact, your part of the family is so wealthy that even my beloved mother suddenly finds her husband’s brother quite respectable and worthy of a visit. When Yaril wrote, my father had arrived and had just spent the day with your father, and Yaril said your father was up and walking about with a cane and almost acting like his old self. He planned to take his brother out on horseback the next day to look over the new land grant, and he hadn’t been on a horse for months! And Yaril and my sister, Purissa, find each other’s company very agreeable! Yaril is very excited that my mother has even hinted at taking her back to Old Thares for a season, so that she may be properly presented to society. I suspect that my mother will attempt to find her a better marriage offer than Caulder Stiet, but somehow I think that your little sister is more than capable of dealing with Lady Burvelle. I suspect that, if anything, Yaril will make a better match, but it will be someone of her own choosing. So what could be better?”
Her mention of her mother triggered another concern of mine. I tried not to sound accusing as I said, “You sent my soldier-son journal to your father, didn’t you?”
She paused, then faced me squarely. “I did. It seemed wisest to me then. I didn’t think Yaril was old enough to deal with the very frank things you’d written in it.” Here, despite all her aplomb, she flushed slightly. “And I feared that your father might destroy it. I believed there was too much valuable information in it to allow that to happen to it. So I sent it to my father, with a request that he leave it sealed. He is an honorable man, Nevare. I knew that he would respect my wishes, and I never, ever thought that my mother, of all people, would be interested in a soldier-son’s journal. I’m so sorry.”