Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [129]
The poet-sage Eudorian had laid down the rules of domestic bliss at the Empire’s founding: A good wife was a delicate bird. She was not meant to fly wild among the brambles. A wise husband kept her safe inside his home, listening to the songs she sang only for him.
Molin wed his delicate bird on a warm summer’s day. He brought Rosanda home and within a week she’d taken over his life, replacing all of his servants, most of his wardrobe, and many of his campaign-days friends. Before she was finished, Rosanda had transformed her young husband from a battlefield priest into an Imperial confidant.
Rosanda asked only one thing in return for her labor: sons. Molin hadn’t objected—he was as adaptable as he’d been ambitious and truly grateful for the doors his wife had opened, doors no slave-born priest of Vashanka could have opened on his own. He performed his duty and gave his wife four babies in the first five years of their marriage, three sons and a daughter, each born with a shock of jet black hair and every one buried by the kitchen hearth before a month was out.
Molin’s lady wife took to her bed after they buried their fourth child. The best physicians in Ranke opined that if Rosanda’s fever didn’t kill her, a broken heart or another unfulfilled pregnancy would. They suggested a change of surroundings … and separate bedchambers. Lord Uralde went a step further: He spread the tale that his daughter’s misery was the tragic—but not surprising—consequence of a slave’s son marrying into the oldest, purest bloodline in the Empire.
Privately Molin agreed with his father-in-law’s conclusions, if not the logic behind them. The bloom was off Rosanda’s flower by then. She echoed her father’s prejudice, and blamed Molin for the pregnancies that had taken her beauty without leaving anything in return. Rosanda consoled herself with sweetmeats and gossip which, more than once, threatened to get both of them banished to the eastern provinces.
Hoping to end the hostilities, Molin offered to petition his brother-in-law, the emperor, for a divorce, a privilege the Empire granted husbands, not wives. He’d thought Rosanda would leap at a chance to return to her father’s household. He’d forgotten—or, more accurately, failed to consider until Rosanda, in full shriek, pointed out to him—that only men were freed by divorce. Divorced wives went home in shame, without hope of remarriage. It wasn’t unheard of for a divorced woman to live out her life as a servant to her brothers’ wives or, worse, to die in a “kitchen accident.”
Rosanda made it clear that sole hope for freedom was widowhood, and she’d made it very clear that she intended to live in her lawful husband’s home until he was tucked away in a crypt. Then she planned to live precisely as she wished, with no father, husband, brother, or son to stand in her way.
Siege became the way of life for Molin and his wife until the newly enthroned Emperor Abakithis had the notion to send his troublesome half brother to Sanctuary. Molin and Rosanda were natural choices to accompany the young prince. Molin had accepted not out of loyalty to Abakithis or love for his nephew, but to deprive his wife of the capital life she loved.
He should have been more suspicious when Rosanda agreed to exile without a single complaint, should have guessed she’d fallen into someone’s plot, should have known it would be abortive. As it turned out, she’d thrown in with disgruntled army commanders in a plot to disgrace Kadakithis and—not coincidentally—get her husband hung as a traitor. The prince himself had unraveled the plot before damage was done and properly doomed all save one of the conspirators.
Molin interceded to spare his wife’s neck. Lord Uralde never guessed the disgrace with which his daughter had almost burdened the oldest, purest bloodline in the Empire. Rosanda interpreted the reprieve as a warning that she’d never again have the upper hand in her household. The shrew became a mouse who catered to her husband’s every whim, real or imagined.
A man