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At the Lawschool, Brid spends rather more time than she should contemplating her very first case. It would be something splendid, of course; a murder, perhaps, that she solved only with her keen eye and precise attention to detail—oh, or a legislation about equality for all that would make its way down to the South and change their awful close-minded ways forever. By her last year at school, she was prepared for all eventualities, except, quite unfortunately:
“Flour?”
“Flour,” confirms the farmhand earnestly. “And I wouldn’t have dreamed to disturb you, truly, but Karet promised me a fair price for the use of his mill and now he’s asking for at least twice what any man should charge!”
Flour. Brid shakes her head and does her best to prove that she remembers at least something from Master Egilsson’s monotonous lectures on verbal contracts and the responsibilities therein.
”It was meant to be splendid,” she grumbles at Kialan that night in the small rickety bedroom that’s meant to serve as the quarters of the Lawwoman-in-residence. Her head is on his shoulder, his nose is in one of her books, and he is stroking her hair rather absent-mindedly.
”I’m sure it was,” he replies, and yawns, “for your farmhand, at least.”
Brid snorts.
”Chin up,” Kialan says, and kisses her. “Tomorrow will be better.”
The next day her case concerns a flock of goats that escaped from their pasture and devoured a neighbor’s vegetable garden.
”A step up, to be sure,” Brid says waspishly, “at least they’re capable of moving around on their own four feet.”
”I was only trying to help,” Kialan replies, sounding wounded.
By the end of her term, Brid has decided cases about: flour, fish, goats, property divisions, chickens, a very angry cow (she has to keep biting back the urge to hum her cow-calling song at inopportune moments the whole week she works on that case) marriage and legitimacy disputes, more chickens, and at least one unsupervised child who managed to cause a series of catastrophes, including lacing the local inn’s bathwater with itchwort (actually she rather enjoyed that one). At least the people of Loviath seem to like her and find her fair-minded and just; Kialan, when he visits, reports that even the most jaundiced and old-fashioned among them have no complaints about her performance.
”They’d hardly tell the Adon if they did,” Brid has to point out, “particularly when he’s the Lawwoman’s own sweetheart”; but Kialan won’t listen, determined as he is to be fiercely proud of her, so Brid lets him, not very reluctantly at all.
When Kialan asks if they can’t be married at last, Brid jokes that she’s saying yes, if only to get away while she still can.
By the time Amil the King visits Hannart, Brid has almost become accustomed to going about her days without the thousand pressing demands for a Lawwoman’s time about her. Not that being the Countess of Hannart isn’t difficult; it is, but in so drastically different a way that sometimes Brid feels quite at sea with all. Now she even has the luxury of enough time to properly ponder the question of why the King’s only getting around to visiting his earldoms, only it isn’t a luxury anymore, but rather a necessity.
Moril thinks it’s because of Earl Keril. He’s even good enough to give her a long, drawn-out explanation of why this so, absolutely ignoring Brid’s terribly patient interjections about how she knows this, Moril, Kialan told her everything long ago.
”But he can’t keep ignoring us,” Brid says crossly, and Moril huffs impatiently.
”You wouldn’t understand,” Moril tells her, and wanders off, but Brid frowns. She thinks she does understand, quite a bit. Even if she’s wrong, though, it’s been a while since she had the sort of conversation that kept her on her toes, the sort she had every day as a Lawwoman of Loviath. She finds she almost misses it.
Fortunately, King Amil—Moril calls him Mitt, but Brid can’t seem to think of him as anything but Amil— is far quicker to see good sense than her dunderheaded brother. He frowns and hems and haws when she points out that of course he’d not want to give her father-in-law any more power than he should, and looks rather uncomfortable when she reminds him that any neglect of Hannart affects Kialan more than his father, but he starts to smile when she spells out that there’s always a way to destroy the power of an earldom without destroying the earldom itself.
By the end of the afternoon, Brid has a charter to open a royal academy in her hand, one she drafted and signed herself. With any luck, three or so generations down the line no one will remember Hannart for nothing less than its music. And she will have one more chance to make sure her name goes down in history.
It’s a stratagem worthy of Brid Clennensdaughter, the finest Lawwoman Loviath has had in generations.
“Your sister’s brilliant,” Amil tells Moril as they clamber onto their horses. “Biffa told me, but I didn’t believe her.”
“Ha,” says Brid at the look on Moril’s face and blows noisy kisses at her brother as the visitors ride out the gate.
”You know,” Kialan says, pulling her close, “I daresay that was rather splendid.”
Brid smirks. “I daresay I always was.”