The Duke of Parramind rose at the first bell and went out into the garden of his enormous crumbling mansion, his ancestors’ city home for the last ten generations. He fed the chickens and checked for eggs, bringing in a couple to the kitchen, then pumped water for his bath and cooking and returned to his bedroom to bathe, shave and dress before descending to the kitchen again. He had breakfast ready when his mother came down from her bedroom.
“Good morning, Mother, O jewel of the line of Suticarr,” he greeted her, as was the custom.
“Good morning, Son, O crown of the line of Parramind.”
With that, he took her arm and escorted her to her place at the long dining table. She sat down and he served them both their plates, using the gestures of the table-servants they no longer had, and then took his place as the head of the family. After the three blessings, they dug in.
“This is very good,” his mother said. She did not thank him, as that would be to point out that they no longer had a chef. Neither liked to be reminded of that.
“My compliments to the chef,” said the duke, as if he and the chef were not one and the same.
And finally, after those formalities, they could speak more freely.
“Did you sleep well, Mama?”
“Well to middling, Toamic. I dreamed about your father. We were dancing at the emperor’s Firstnight Ball.”
“A pleasant dream, then.”
“Until I woke.” And remembered that Toamic’s father had blown the last of their diminishing fortune on a desperate speculation, and then ended himself, she did not need to say.
“I’m sorry, Mama. The best dreams turn into nightmares when we wake, and daily life seems like a sweet relief when we wake from a nightmare.”
“How about you?”
“I slept very well. I only vaguely remember what I dreamt – something about a new client, but I can’t remember anything beyond that.”
She didn’t reply, just chewing one bite after another for a couple of minutes. Then: “Do you have any clients today?”
“Just one – Viscount Irindep.”
His mother scoffed. “Viscount! Another purchased title of yesterday’s minting. I wish you did not have to debase yourself so. Our ancestors earned their titles on the field of battle; the emperors did not sell titles in those days.”
It was a subject they had discussed many times, and which Toamic did not wish to discuss again. He bit back his instinctive reply, Viscount Irindep puts food on our table, or perhaps Viscount Irindep has fought for his life more often than any noble of ancient line we know, and said merely, “Alas. As I was saying, I will be seeing him for two hours today, including luncheon, so as to give him practice in meal etiquette. Two days from now I am meeting him for supper, ditto.”
“Be careful as you go.”
“I will, Mama.”
When they finished the meal, the formalities resumed, briefer than those at the beginning of the meal, and both rose. Toamic escorted his mother to the south parlor, where she sat down to resume mending one of her old dresses, while he returned to the dining room to take the dishes to the scullery and wash them. After that, he joined her in the parlor and read aloud to her until it was time to go to Viscount Irindep’s house.
Viscount Irindep did not live terribly far away. When he had decided to retire from adventuring in the city of his birth, he had purchased a title and a mansion similar to Toamic’s in the same wealthy quarter, whose former owner, once a friend of Toamic’s father, had sold his city property and retreated to his country estate, which could not be sold because of an entail. Toamic’s city mansion, alas, was also under an entail, as was his distant country house which was even bigger and more impossible to live in without servants. So it was a pleasant walk past beautiful old houses, most of them better maintained than Toamic’s, with old oaks and elms in their front gardens, their branches overhanging the street and shading him from the late morning sun. The summer festival was drawing near, and many of the trees were festooned with ribbons, some of them enchanted to cycle through iridescent colors.
He reached hid destination and rang the bell, and the door was opened by a manservant, who escorted him into the parlor and announced, “His Grace, the Duke of Parramind.”
Garic, Viscount Irindep, was not alone in the parlor. There was also a woman of about the same age as Garic, nearly twice Toamic’s twenty years; nearly as tall as Garic, black-haired, olive-skinned and well-muscled, judging from the part of her arms that were showing in her short-sleeved blue blouse. Matching blue trousers and leather boots completed her outfit; she wore no jewelry.
Garic rose from his seat and said, “I greet ye, Your grace. Have ye had a good journey?”
“I have, my lord. Hast thou fared well since last we met? – And it’s ‘you’, speaking to someone of higher rank than yourself, my lord. ‘Thee’ for someone of lower rank, and ‘ye’ only in informal speech.”
“Oh, right. Uh… Yes, I have fared very well. Lessee, introductions, what was the form for that…” he muttered under his breath, then smiled and said more loudly, “Your grace, I beg to introduce to you my old friend and adventuring companion, Saina of Three Towers. Saina, rejoice to meet Toamic, the Duke of Parramind, my etiquette teacher.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Saina said, not rising from her chair. She took another sip of whatever she had been drinking.
That was not the correct form for a commoner (Garic hadn’t give her a title) greeting a duke, but Toamic was not her etiquette teacher. “I am delighted to meet one so graceful. A friend of my lord must be one worth knowing.”
Now they could speak a little more freely, and Garic did so, saying, “Toamic’s here for my etiquette lesson. You want to sit in? Maybe some of it will rub off on you.”
“Even when I thought I was a man, I had more natural refinement than you’ll have after ten years of etiquette lessons, you old scoundrel,” she replied with a smile.
Toamic startled for a moment, but calmed himself and said, “As I recall, we left off last time with the greetings and blessings to be used at midday meals. Are you ready to begin?”
“Sure, let’s get started – I mean yes, your grace.”
So the lesson began. Saina watched, sometimes smiling in amusement, and continued to sip at her drink until she finished it. Toamic got through the lesson somehow, but he could not stop thinking about Saina’s ‘even when I thought I was a man’. He remembered Garic telling him during previous visits about his old adventuring companions, the people he had traveled around with, fighting monsters and exploring ruined temples and tombs, for many years before they had struck it rich on their last venture and settled down in various places. He had already met one of them, the wizard Orram, who lived here in the capital. From what he remembered, Saina lived in another city, and had been the group’s stealth specialist. And something else came to mind – once, when speaking of his companions and their adventures, Garic had started to say one name, and then corrected himself and said, “I mean, Saina,” and continued.
Very curious.
Their lesson was drawing to a close when one of Garic’s servants announced that lunch was ready to be served.
“Will you do me the honor of remaining to share my repast, your grace?” Garic asked, using one of the forms he had just been learning and practicing.
“I would indeed, my lord.”
“Then feel free to avail yourself of the wine, bread and oil until I join you. I must, uh…” He frowned, apparently trying to think of the right phrase, and finally said, “I must do a necessary thing before I join you at table.”
Go to the privy, he meant. Toamic smiled in approval and said, “I thank you, my lord. I will see you soon.” As Garic bowed and left the room, Toamic said to Saina, “Would you like me to escort you to the dining room, madam?”
“Of course,” Saina said. “It’s not every day I get escorted to lunch by a duke.” She took his arm and they walked into the dining room together, sitting down at the table. Saina tore off a piece of bread and dipped it in the bowl of olive oil, but before she bit into it, she said, “Go on. I can tell you have questions.”
“My lord Garic has told me of many of his adventures,” Toamic said, thinking carefully how to satisfy his curiosity without violating protocol. “If you care to tell me of an incident that particularly concerns yourself, I would be delighted to hear.”
"But there’s one particular story you want to hear more than most, I can guess. Well, we were out beyond the boundaries of the empire one time, going through the jungles of Tesh and looking for an abandoned temple that was rumored to be in the area, hoping to find something worth taking. We found it, and there was nothing left that was worth anything. You could tell that the big idol used to be gilt and have jeweled eyes, but the gilt had been almost all scraped off and the jewels were gone, and so on for the rest of the place. We decided to camp there for the night before heading to our next possible target, since the walls would limit the directions most predators could come at us.
"I woke up in the night and needed to, ah, ‘do a necessary thing’ as Garic said. So I went off into a corner of the temple to do that, and no sooner had I begun to take care of the necessary than I started feeling really weird, and – well, to cut the story short, it didn’t take me long to figure out I’d been changed into a woman.
“My yelps brought Seljen, he was on sentry duty at the entrance to the temple, and woke up the others, and once Orram cast a light spell and they saw what had happened to me, we started trying to figure out why it had happened. And clearing away the dead leaves at the spot where I’d started doing the necessary, we found a small idol, about eight inches tall, with a big – ah, male part.”
“We usually say ‘sword of generation,’ if we must talk about it at table,” Toamic said.
“I’ll keep that in mind. Well, Seljen, he was a friar of some outland god, looked at it and said it had some lingering traces of divine magic. And the nearly-dead god it was connected to was still strong enough to curse someone who peed on – I mean, defiled it. So long story short, we went on a quest to find the components Orram would need for a spell to break the curse, and well before we found them all, I realized I liked being a woman a hell of a lot – sorry, a great deal more than being a man. There was no comparison.”
Toamic could well imagine. In the greatly diminished library of his ancestral home, consisting of only a few of his and his mother’s favorite books plus a couple hundred more which the book dealer was unwilling to pay for, there were two adventure stories where something similar had happened, a man encountering some sort of magic that changed him into a woman. Toamic had read them again and again until they were nearly falling to pieces.
“That is an amazing and wonderful story,” he said. “I am glad to hear that you are so much happier as you are now.”
Saina seemed to see something in his eyes, something she might have seen when he glanced at her now and then during Garic’s etiquette lesson. After another bite of the bread, she asked, “What would you do with that idol, if you came across it?”
Toamic was saved from having to answer, as Garic returned just then from the privy. The servants brought the food, Garic went through the greetings and blessings Toamic had coached him on, and they began to eat.
Always look forward to your stories, in part for your writing style, but also due to such details as an entail preventing an impovrished duke selling valuable property.
Thanks for sharing this, and all your other stories scattered round the web! :-)