Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [19]
Margrethe felt herself stiffen. “What do you mean?” she asked, an edge creeping into her voice. “We have been at peace for three years.”
The abbess answered in the same clear tone, defiant. “There have been years of fighting, with many losses. Even during this peacetime, your father has been steadily building ships, and amassing an army, filling it with new blood. How do you think he’s paid for this? He’s raised taxes on the people so much that they can barely live.”
“But, I thought …” Margrethe stopped. She had not thought anything, she realized. Suddenly she was angry about having been kept so far from the world—angry at the abbess, at her father. At everyone.
“I am sorry to speak ill against your father. But I only tell you the truth. Life is very hard right now, for many people,” the abbess went on. “I know that you meant well, to give so much. But there are many in need here.”
She had been naïve, Margrethe realized, assuming that everyone lived … if not as well as she did, then at least almost as well. With enough to eat. With a warm place to sleep.
She straightened her back and looked into the abbess’s wise, weathered face. She would do well to learn from this woman, she thought. “I understand,” she said, “and I appreciate your directness.” She paused, then spoke again. “But I am here because the South is planning to attack us again. If anything, my father is rebuilding his army to protect us.”
The abbess hesitated. “Yes. It is only a matter of time before the fighting begins again. But it is … Many people doubt these reports about the South, and believe it is your father who is hungry for war. Your father who has never really been committed to peace. Understand that it is illegal to speak against the war. I tell you this only so you will understand what happened here, and why the people suffer as they do.”
Margrethe nodded, swallowing hard.
“Though, lest we forget, there is a Southern man lying in our abbey. We do not know if he was part of a planned attack that went wrong, even if he claims otherwise. On both sides, the resentment runs very deep.”
“Yes,” Margrethe said. She could not deny it.
They walked in silence to the next house, each lost in her own thoughts, past the main line of shops, near the fields and woods that opened behind the village, where many of the peasants lived. The abbess nodded to a house by the trees. It seemed just as dark and grim as the first. Ice dripped from the edges of the roof as they walked to the front door.
They knocked, and a man appeared and bowed to the abbess. Margrethe almost didn’t recognize Lens, her father’s favorite guardsman. He was dirty, disguised as a village fisherman. When Margrethe had last seen him, the night they fled the castle, he’d been a strapping man with bright blond hair and the neat blue and white costume of the castle guard.
“Your Highness!” he said, whispering and ushering her into the house. He smiled and bowed deeply. It was strange and wonderful to feel, for a moment, like herself again, back in the world as she’d known it before. They were joined by the other guardsman, Henri, who had been similarly transformed—his skin weathered, his clothes ragged and dirty.
“We are worried for you,” Lens said, showing them to the kitchen table. “We want to know more about this man who washed up to shore. But you have assured us, Mother, that he is harmless, no matter who he is.”
The abbess looked quickly to Margrethe and then back at Lens. “Yes,” she said. “He claims he was on an expedition to the islands up north. He has no weapons.”
“What islands?” Henri asked.
“There are rumors that land exists to the north, that no man has ever set foot on.”
The two guardsmen nodded but looked unconvinced.
“How long will he stay?” Lens asked. “How close is he to recovery?”
“He has made an extraordinary recovery,” the abbess said, “and will soon leave. I have promised him the loan of a horse and provisions. He may leave as early as