Seventh Bride Read Free Page B

and true and fair. Rhea figured she was one for three on that list, since she mostly didn’t lie unless it was really important. You probably couldn’t count “brave” for someone who lived in terror of swans.
    She wanted to pull her hand away, but she didn’t, because even if lords don’t do things like this, miller’s daughters definitely didn’t snub lords.
    It didn’t feel romantic. It felt like that moment in a conversation where someone has just said the wrong thing, and everyone is standing around trying to figure out how to gloss it over and get past it. She felt embarrassed for everyone involved—for the lord, for herself, and for her father, who was watching all this.  
    And then a spark jumped to her fingers, or something that felt like a spark. She twitched, and stared stupidly down at her hand, and when she looked up again, Crevan was smiling.  
    It was a smug smile. Rhea didn’t like it at all.  
    “I’ll send for you,” said Lord Crevan, and turned away to his horse.  
    Miller and miller’s daughter stood and watched him ride away. The horse was ridiculously pink in the afternoon light, and kicked up puffs of dust from the road.  
      “A fine gentleman,” said her father, nodding to her. “You see?”
    Rhea looked down at her hand. It looked perfectly normal, but there was a nasty tingling at the fingertips. She felt like her hand had fallen asleep.  
    It faded almost as soon as she noticed it. The sensation lingered longest around the silver ring.  
    She shook her hand once or twice, and then it was perfectly normal again.  
    “Huh,” she said, and could think of nothing more to say.

CHAPTER FOUR

    The basics of milling went like this: there was a waterwheel, and as the stream flowed by, the current turned the waterwheel, which turned another wheel on a shaft, which turned a few other things hooked together, which ultimately turned a millstone. The millstone was very large and very heavy and set onto another stone, and if you dumped grain under it, it would grind the grain into flour.  
    The millstone was quite indiscriminate and would also grind your fingers, toes, and other available bits of anatomy into flour. In order to cut down on the loss of extremities among millworkers, the grain was dumped into a hopper, which fed to the grinder through a sloped trough.  
    Rhea’s father ran the mill, and watched the various complicated turning bits to make sure nothing broke. He oiled things and occasionally replaced other things. He collected the milled flour into sacks, and twice a week, he loaded the sacks into his wagon and drove the flour around to the farmers who owned the grain.  
    Rhea’s aunt, who had the eyes of an eagle and the heart of a miser, supervised the weighing out of the grain.  
    Rhea’s mother, who had a fine, neat hand, noted down the weights of each sack of grain, and who it belonged to, and who had paid for milling and who hadn’t.  
    Rhea’s job, which was utterly boring, was to thump the trough every few minutes to make sure the grain was sliding down at the proper rate, and to make sure the hoppers didn’t jam.  
    Where you got a lot of grain, you got a lot of mice, and where you got a lot of mice, sooner or later, you got dead mice. It wasn’t as bad as it could be, but every now and then a dead mouse would fall in one of the hoppers and somebody with small hands had to reach way down in there and pull it out, or the whole system would back up. This was not a pleasant job, but at least it wasn’t a regular one. No more than a few times a week. Really.
    Anyway, you cooked bread before you ate it, so if there were some little mousey fragments ground in with the flour, it wasn’t like it would hurt anything.
    A couple of times a year, a gremlin would get into the mill. The mechanisms, with their big grinding gears and turning wheels and rotating shafts, were irresistible to gremlins. They looked more or less like big mice wearing little