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“Rain,” Morvran said sternly, “is no excuse to miss a riding lesson.”
Luliana quailed. “But it’s so miserable out here!”
“Do you think it is not going to rain at any point on any of your journeys with your mistress?” he asked, hands on hips. He was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, quite disreputable, and the rain was visibly soaking into his battered jacket.
Luliana grimaced. “No,” she admitted, “it will.”
“And the waterproof gear is not very comfortable,” Morvran said. “But we are going to practice with it, and then we are going to ride in the rain. Because rain will not kill us, not now while we have the comforts of home so near, and once we’ve practiced, not in future when one is traveling either.”
And so they did.
It was miserable. But, in its own way, fun. It was cold; it was still early enough in spring to be unpleasantly cold when wet. But the horses didn’t seem to care, and Morvran didn’t care.
“It was like this-- well, like this but much worse-- for two solid months in Temeria,” he said at one point. He was making her get on and off the horse in the horrible flappy oilskin they’d gotten from the Alba, making her adjust all the waterproof saddle covers and such, making her ride around obstacles. He had not put on much waterproof gear himself and was spending most of his time moving obstacles around for her to interact with, so he was completely sodden and covered in mud.
“Two months,” Lu said, disbelieving.
“Sometimes it was below freezing, and still somehow raining,” Morvran said grimly. He heaved a log into a puddle with a splash. “Now you’ve got to steer her over this.”
Luliana obeyed, with some difficulty as Honey didn’t really understand what she was asking. “Don’t let her refuse,” Morvran said sternly, and Lu grimaced and tried again. “Better,” Morvran said, relenting a little.
“This is going to be so much work for the stablehands afterward,” he said later. “Cleaning the tack. I should make you do it, my own instructor made me, but neither of us has the time.” He sighed. “It’s good for them. I’ll bring them sweets to make up for it.”
“Oh,” Lu said. It hadn’t occurred to her to bribe the stable hands. “I can do that. What do they like?”
He laughed. “I’ll give you my list,” he said.
He made her practice at a canter, just to get used to how the rain blew into her face. It was awful. But it was good to know. At length he let her walk the horse around to cool her, and she knew they were nearly done. She let the reins droop a bit, watching the water drip off her own broad-brimmed hat, and he squelched on foot around the arena putting away all the props and obstacles and things. He was visibly soaked through, and paused to stick his hands in his armpits, surveying the ring for things he’d forgotten.
“We did make a mess,” Lu said. There were drag marks and grooves and untidy marks all over the normally-smooth surface of the arena, which was fairly sandy but was holding the rain water a bit at the moment.
He laughed. “The rain will flatten it back out.”
“What ever have you been doing?” a new voice said, and Morvran startled like a horse, just a little jump, and spun around. Ciri was leaning on the fence, dressed for exercise, with an unfamiliar broad-brimmed hat of her own.
“Practicing,” Lu said.
“You said you were sure your ride was going to be cancelled,” Ciri teased.
“The world doesn’t stop for rain,” Morvran said, going to drag the last log back to the pile just outside the edge of the arena. He shoved it under the fence, then climbed nimbly over to drag it the rest of the way. “I thought it was valuable practice.”
Ciri strolled over to toe the log back into position after it tried to roll away. “You’re a mess,” she said.
“I didn’t want to have to dry my oilskins after,” he admitted. “Easier to just get wet. The luxury of actually b-being at home.” But he shivered as he spoke.
“You’ll catch your death,” she said.
He laughed. “Not in this,” he said. “I’m headed s-straight to the b-baths after this.”
“Oh,” Lu said, “good idea, I’ll go with you.”
“Let’s get that horse cleaned up first,” Morvran said, and went over to open the gate of the ring, so she could ride Honey back to the barn.
Ciri came with them, and helped Lu towel Honey off while Morvran took the tack back to the tackroom and, as he said, broke the news to the stablehands that it would all need drying and putting away. When they had finished, Ciri started to walk back to the Imperial residences, but Lu hesitated, looking at Morvran.
“Are you really going to the baths?” she asked.
“I am,” he said. “I was going to go to the neighborhood ones here, it’s a bit less crowded than the palace ones.”
“The palace ones are nice,” Lu said, “but you’re right, it would be nice to go somewhere a little more out of the way.”
From Ciri’s expression, she didn’t know what they meant. And now that Lu thought about it, of course Ciri always used the ones that were between her quarters and the Emperor’s, which were very private and very fancy. Morvran never used those, as of course he was not of the household. “Nilfgaard has a robust tradition of public baths,” Morvran said to Ciri, clearly realizing something similar. “They’re not the same in other areas. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time in Nilfgaard proper outside of the palace.”
“I have not,” Ciri said.
“You could come with us,” Morvran said. “There is no qualification of how dirty you have to be in order to attend a bath.”
“You’re always going on about being chaperoned,” Ciri said, frowning slightly.
“The public baths are public,” Morvran said. “There is no need to be chaperoned in a public space.”
Ciri eyed him, then looked at Lu. “You should come with us,” Lu said, delighted. “Have you really not been to a proper Nilfgaardian bath house?”
“I have not,” Ciri said.
“You don’t need to bring anything with you,” Lu said. “And it only costs a few pennies. A couple extra to rent a towel and robe if you didn’t bring one.”
“I don’t think I have any money on me,” Ciri said.
“I do,” Morvran said. “Plenty. Don’t worry.”
Ciri considered that a moment, then said, “All right.”
Lu kept her oilskin on, and carried Morvran’s bag for him underneath it. He had dry clothes to change into, and had brought his own robe and towel, but the rain showed signs of letting up. “I had hoped it might stop raining,” he said.
“It might yet,” Ciri said.
The palace stables were at the edge of the palace compound, around the back, and the neighborhood outside the palace walls on this side was a very tidy middle-class sort of neighborhood, populated by the skilled crafts- and tradesmen who served the palace and served the upper-class neighborhoods on the other side of the palace compound. The streets were neatly laid out, with deliberately-planted trees, the houses had tidy kitchen gardens in front of them, and the bath house, at the end of the first street, was a nicely laid-out little compound with a yard behind it full of clothes lines, adjoining the neighborhood laundry. The lines were all empty today, dreary in the rain, and steam rose in the damp air from the rank of popped-up roof windows of one of the buildings.
“There are bath houses in a few places in the North,” Morvran was telling Lu as they walked, “but they’re not public like this, they’re normally catering to a particular audience of people. Some of them were controlled by gangs. I don’t know, I was never really able to discern what governed where they were and who they served. Most people seem to just sort of. Bathe at home, I suppose, and I never could get a clear notion of how often they would do that.”
“Most people just wash with a basin most of the time,” Ciri said. “It’s less untidy than you’re making it sound.”
“If you say so,” Lu said dubiously.
They went in, and the attendant was sitting amidst piles of laundry she had been folding, but hopped up to come see them. “Two with towels and robes,” Morvran said, “and one simple admission fee. I came prepared.”
“Ah,” the attendant said, “you always do. Good to see you with friends!”
He smiled at her. “It’s a messier day than usual,” he said.
“You come here often,” Ciri said to him, sounding surprised as she followed him through the door with her arms full of folded clean laundry. Lu had shed her oilskin in the entry and was now awkwardly carrying it, dripping, in one hand, and her folded robe and towel in the other.
He shrugged. “More when I was a kid,” he said. “Haven’t so much lately, but sometimes. When I have the time.”
“I admit I don’t know what the palace baths are like,” she said.
“They’re fine,” Morvran said. “It’s just--” He led them unerringly through one of several doors, into a change room. Luliana gratefully put her oilskin onto one of the pegs. There were a few things scattered around the room, people’s belongings; they weren’t the only people here. “It’s just that of course the gossips are there, and people who remark everything anyone does, and of course everyone there knows who I am, so my comings and goings are commented-upon.” He shrugged, hanging his hat and jacket on pegs, and setting his bag down to dig through it. “It’s not that no one here knows me, it’s just that they’re different people who know me in a different context, so.” He shrugged again.
Ciri hung her hat on a peg next to Lu’s oilskin, and watched them, clearly not sure what to do next. Lu sat down on the bench to take her damp boots off, and set them aside, so Ciri joined her to remove her own boots. Morvran had pulled out some folded cloth from inside his bag, and he shook out something that proved to be a robe in truly astonishing, eye-catching colors. Lu laughed in delight.
“What ever is that,” she said.
“Oh,” Morvran said, and unexpectedly Ciri laughed too.
“Oh, that robe,” she said. “I saw it once, that time Emhyr had us up in the middle of the night,” she explained to Lu. “It’s so ridiculous.”
“Some of my officers found it,” Morvran said, “in some godforsaken abandoned country villa in Temeria or somewhere, and they insisted upon giving it to me, and I wore it to humor them, and it turns out it’s quite a good bathrobe, so I’ve hung onto it.” He held it up, and Lu stared at it. It was crimson, and yellow, and black, and startlingly patterned, here in checks, there in some other repeating pattern.
“It’s somebody’s coat-of-arms-in-law,” Ciri said. “I could probably find out who in very little research.”
“My sole piece of Nordling plunder,” Morvran said. He removed his boots without needing to sit down to do so, pulling them off with practiced ease.
Lu stripped off her jacket and hung it carefully away from the oilskin so it wouldn’t get wet. Morvran shucked his without as much care, as it was visibly dripping; he stuck it under his hat, on the same peg. Ciri took hers off a bit hesitantly.
“Do you really,” Ciri said to Lu, “just--”
Lu shed her trousers and shook them out before hanging them on the peg with her jacket, and then she thought to look at the pile of folded fabric she’d been handed. The robe was the same thick coarse linen as the towel, and it was generously-sized. Good. “Yeah,” she said to Ciri, unhooking her stays, and then she pulled her shift off, stepped out of her drawers, and wrapped herself in the robe.
Morvran peeled himself out of his damp shirt and shrugged delicately into his robe, which left Ciri alone still clothed. She blushed a little, charmingly, and shed the rest of her clothes. Morvran collected his towel and moved toward the door. “Some people have sandals they use just for the baths,” he said, “but I don’t currently have any, and they’re not universal. Other than that, no, you don’t wear anything in the baths themselves. But it’s polite to move around the corridors in a robe.”
“People really don’t do this in the North?” Lu wondered, fixing her braids to be on top of her head. She wasn’t going to wash her hair, that sort of thing was normally done separately if your hair was long enough to need dressing, like hers was. Ciri’s was short enough she could wash it here, though.
“No,” Ciri said. “Well-- there are some baths kind of like this in Skellige I think. Well but I don’t know what’s on the other side of that doorway.” She had undressed quite unselfconsciously in front of Lu before, and before they’d been lovers even, but it was obviously different for her to do it-- oh, she wasn’t that close with Morvran.
“In some places, it’s customary to have the bathhouse be for men at some hours of the day, women at others, and families at yet others,” Morvran said. “There is some notion that it’s not seemly for young single men to bathe with young single women, for example. But in a neighborhood place like this, in this modern day, they don’t bother-- it would only be like that in a busy neighborhood of a city, where there were a lot of people who were strangers to each other. And like I said, we’re not unchaperoned, it’s a public place and there are not only attendants but also just neighborhood folk around, we couldn’t get up to any real mischief even if we wanted to.”
“Oh,” Lu said, as Ciri wrapped her robe around herself. “So first we go to the showers-- there are a few different cubicles, you can fit one or two people in at a time and it’s more normal to wait your turn than to cram in with someone you don’t know well. Those are just whatever water temperature they have, probably cold here, and you want to scrub off as much dirt as you can. You can wash your hair or not-- I won’t, because I have a whole method I like to use and I do it at home in private with a basin, so I can do all my normal dressing of it after-- and you can scrub as much or little as you like. But then you go into the big bath when you’re mostly clean, to soak with the oils they put in there, and then you get out and rinse off in the showers again. So you can leave your robe right there and pick it up again when you come out.”
“Thank you for telling me what to expect,” Ciri said. “I feel silly not knowing, but I haven’t been to a place quite like this before.”
“Oh that robe suits you,” Lu said to Morvran, following him down the hallway. “I hadn’t expected it to, but--”
“Are you blind,” Ciri said. “It’s so ugly!”
“On him it nearly works, though,” Lu said. “Look! Well, the shape of it at least.” It was a solid but not stiff fabric, worn in nicely, and with it belted snugly it did suit him, perhaps aided by the dimness of the light. It was not terribly bright in here, with the winter covers still on some of the ventilation windows. At any rate it showed off his narrow waist and hips flatteringly, she thought.
“Generally, etiquette prohibits making comments on anyone’s body in polite company at the baths,” Morvran said primly without turning around.
“Oh nobody ever told my stepmother that,” Luliana said. “I was forever finding excuses to go with my friends instead, and not just because she’d make me mind my baby half-brothers all the time. Do you know how hard those little shits worked on drowning themselves?”
“I can imagine,” Ciri laughed. Then, “You never talk about your family.”
“Well, because it’s dead boring,” Lu said. “It’s all either my stepmother being horrible or my half-siblings being idiots. Morvran, what was your family like on bath day?”
He sighed, but more thoughtfully than moodily. “We actually had our own bathhouse, in the country estate where we mostly spent our summers. But here in the city we used a neighborhood bathhouse.” He shrugged. “I don’t know, it wasn’t terribly memorable. I remember bathing my little brother a lot, especially once my baby sister was born and my mother was busy.”
They came to the end of the corridor, and into the room with the little cubicles for the showers. There was an alcove with pegs to hang up robes, next to another alcove with shelves where the towels were meant to be kept. There were three or four robes hanging up, and a stack of towels. Someone’s sandals were resting underneath the shelf-- two pairs, one adult sized and one child-sized.
“And you really just--” Ciri said hesitantly. Luliana knew exactly what her hesitation was; she herself hated being naked anywhere anyone could see. But in the baths it was different. You didn’t look, in the baths. It wasn’t--
“It’s the context,” Morvran said. “It’s normal to be nude here, there’s nothing strange about it. But, yes, I would be mortified to find myself completely unclothed in your presence in most other contexts.”
“Because it’s-- well, you don’t look, in the bath,” Lu said. Now she was self-conscious. “Don’t look,” she said to Ciri, frowning.
“People look, sometimes,” Morvran said. He shed his robe, hung it on a hook, and went into one of the alcoves, pulling the handle to release the water. His body was long and narrow, pale in the dim light, and Lu looked at Ciri, who was staring at him.
“I’m watching how the handle works,” she said to Lu, her tone a touch defensive. “Don’t give me that look!” Morvran glanced back at them and laughed, seeming entirely un-selfconscious. He did just look like any naked person would, thin and pale and not very hairy.
“It’s simple,” he said, “and if you pull on it, enough comes out and then it drips for a while, so you can get wet.”
“Here, I can show you,” Lu said, and put her robe on the peg. She led Ciri into another alcove, and pulled on the handle, which led to a chain in the ceiling connected to a lever that opened a little valve, and let the water run out on a small spillway so it showered down in droplets rather than in a big gout like from a bucket.
Ciri gasped a little at how cold it was, and Lu laughed and let more out. “Here,” she said, “there’s the jar of soap, and here’s the scraper you use. I’ll get your back if you get mine.”
“Oh it’s so cold,” Ciri said, and laughed as the dripping water sleeked her hair down. Lu was mostly keeping her head out of the direct spray of it. She had a kerchief she normally wore, to keep her hair more dry, but she hadn’t come prepared for this.
Lu soaped her back, and turned around and let her return the favor, and then peered around the edge of the alcove. “Morvran, want me to do your back?”
“No,” he said, “it’s all right, I’ve got plenty of practice seeing to myself.” He had rinsed off already, and was pushing his hair out of his face. “I might go to the warm room now.”
She laughed, and drew back into her own alcove. “Well, then,” she said. “Are we nearly finished here?”
“I’m certainly ready to be warmer,” Ciri said, arms crossed over her chest.
Morvran had already left the room, but it wasn’t complicated to figure out where to go; steam was wafting through the far door, and Ciri followed Lu through into a dim room with several big wooden tubs. A woman was coming the other direction, herding a small child-- the owners of the sandals from the other room. In the last tub by the far door, two elderly women were sitting and talking quietly, hair wrapped in kerchiefs like the one Lu normally wore. One had dark coloring like she did, the other was pale, their forms indistinct in the steamy room.
“I’ve just topped this one up, loves,” said the attendant, pointing to the second tub, where Morvran was already. “Should be extra hot.” One of the tubs was empty, Lu noted, which wasn’t uncommon; most people bathed either at morning or evening, and this was an unusual time of day. A second tub had a metal pipe hooked over the edge, and there was a long oilcloth hose attached to it, leading out of the room; it was being drained, the water pulled out by gravity as the other end of the hose was unrolled somewhere downhill.
Lu carefully climbed the steps, holding to the rail, and eased herself into the water, which was quite hot. “Ooh,” she said, “it’s lovely.”
Morvran was sitting along the far edge, submerged to his shoulders. Lu was short enough that she knew she’d have to kneel. Ciri climbed in, and Lu got a good view of the rose tattoo on her inner thigh as she stepped over the edge of the tub, but she quickly sank down under the water, which was cloudy with the pleasantly-scented bathing oils they used here. “This isn’t bad at all,” she said.
“Not at all,” Morvran said. “I feel it’s one of our more civilized customs.”
“Nordlings bathe,” Ciri said, settling herself. She was tall enough to sit down as well, the water coming up to her neck.
“I’m sure they do,” Morvran said. He had gotten his hair wet, and pushed it back out of his eyes. Ciri watched the gesture, and sat forward suddenly, reaching to take his arm. Bewildered, he let her pull it toward him, and she tilted her neck to look at the underside.
“It’s rude to comment on people’s bodies in the bath,” Lu reminded her quietly.
“Oh,” she said, and let go of Morvran’s arm. “It’s just-- something Tiron said.”
“Oh,” Morvran said, and pulled his arm back to himself, putting it under the water. But then he relented, and held it back out to her.
“He said if I look at the undersides of your arms what will I see,” Ciri said.
Morvran turned his arm, so the underside of it was visible. He was winter-pale, not much difference in the color of his skin from one surface to another, but there were more freckles on the upper side of his arm than the underside. The underside was also scored here and there by little scars, some of them strangely regular. And there were a few bruises dotted and dashed along the length, some faded and some fresh. He got knocked about more than it would seem, from the lifestyle of his that Lu had observed, but then she knew he wasn’t really just a clerk like he seemed to mostly be. He had a more active lifestyle than that, and his battered hands showed it. As did the muscles of his arms; he wasn’t quite as densely-muscled, as whipcord-taut as Ciri, but the contours of muscle and tendon moved under his skin and showed that he used his arms for more than carrying that beat-up old folio around all the time.
“In the past I’ve had… situations where the only way I felt I could get control over myself was by… using pain,” Morvran said quietly. “And I used to hurt myself in little spots on my arms. By the time I realized it was leaving permanent marks I’d already left a lot of them. So I don’t do that anymore. But Tiron noticed the marks, when he was my aide. And he worried I’d do it more.”
“But the bruises,” Ciri said.
Morvran was quiet for a moment. “Mostly those are just accidental,” he said. “I don’t do it anymore.”
Ciri held out her hand, and he looked warily at her for a moment before extending his arm. She took his hand, and held it in hers. “Don’t,” she said finally.
“What?” he said, hesitant.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” she said.
“I won’t,” he said. “I don’t do it anymore.”
That didn’t seem to satisfy her, but after a moment she let go of his hand, and he pulled his arms back to himself and folded them around his body. His chest wasn’t very hairy, Lu noted again, despite herself; she was used to men being hairier, but then mostly she’d only seen her own family. Well, and laborers sometimes. It might just be that Morvran was still quite young, and his hair was pale. Ciri was watching him thoughtfully.
“It is nice to come here at the end of the day, when one has a little time to just sit and soak,” Lu said.
“But chilled as we were, this seemed wiser,” Morvran said.
“It’s not like you have much spare time at any time of day,” Ciri pointed out.
“That’s true,” he conceded. He sighed. “I left my watch in my rooms but probably I need to get back to work.” He rubbed his face with his wet hands, pushing the hair back. He hadn’t had any court makeup on in the first place. With the heat of the water, he was flushed pink, and so was Ciri; it suited them both, made them both look younger and more alive. Ciri had scrubbed her eye makeup off and she looked very young indeed. Lu rarely saw her completely without it.
“You do too much,” Ciri said. “If no one else will get you an assistant, I will.”
He sighed, and looked defeated. “There’s no one with the requisite security clearances,” he said.
“Surely someone could take on some of your duties,” she said.
He smiled, polite, a little regretful. “The only ones I could give up are the ones I actually like doing,” he said, “so I’m not eager to do it.” He moved to the edge of the bath, and swung himself up and out gracefully. He had marks on his back that looked like scars from caning, Lu was slightly shocked to realize-- they were faint, and only showed because his skin was ruddy from the hot water. They were on his buttocks and thighs as well. He moved fairly briskly, and was out and away before she had a good look. It’s rude to comment on people’s bodies in the bath, Lu reminded herself.
Ciri was staring too, but as soon as he was down the ladder and away she stood up too, and then Lu was distracted looking at her body. She was still lithe and muscular, but she’d put on a little weight now, was a little sleeker and less sharp. Lu watched her admiringly, and then followed them out, and back to rinse off and then put on the warm robe and go dry herself and dress again.