In Which Mona Is Given Her Part

October 9, 1178

At fourteen, Mona had no delusions about her father. She knew what people thought of him, what people said about him when they thought no one could hear, and she knew it wasn't far from the truth. She knew he was pompous, pretentious, and excessive. She knew he was arrogant and self-serving and more than a tad incompetent. She knew what little right he had to call himself a ruler, and how he wasted every last bit of it.

But his eyes were the hard steel grey of kings come and gone, and if her father knew one thing, it was how to use them. When Mona was sitting and her father was standing, those eyes made damn sure that she listened to every word the mouth beneath them had to say--no matter how ridiculous or downright stupid they were.

That wasn't to say that she had qualms about arguing. "I can't say I see the problem. Lady Leonora wears her hair a similar way."

Her father's lip twitched, as it always did when Lord Severin's wife was brought up. It might have been nice not to get such a guilty pleasure out of such things. "That vassal slut is not a lady; you're well aware of my stance on the validity of that marriage. Besides, a glorified commoner in that hedonistic cesspit of a shire is hardly the same thing as a future queen. I won't have you sent off to Carvallon looking like less than a princess. What would Queen Devidra think if you showed up with all those uneven lengths and flyaway strands?"

From what Mona had heard of Queen Devidra, she had no doubt that the woman wore her own hair chopped hastily to chin-length like some salty old sea captain. But her father's idea of a queen was her mother, and all other queens would be measured with that stick. It was precisely why Mona had never desired a crown, and it figured that of all her siblings, she would be the first to don one, possibly the only one aside from Ietrin. All those years of wishing to get away had backfired. "Would she care? The Carvalli are a bit--"

"Savage?" She'd meant to say 'fancy-free', but it was a synonym so far as her father was concerned. "Well, yes, but that's part of it. The Carvalli haven't had a real princess in decades; they ought to know what one looks like."

"Then perhaps you should have sent Riona."

And oh--how he would have, he couldn't deny it. Her perfect older sister would have been, in his mind, the queen every queen aspired to be. Pity she couldn't have gone instead. "We've been over this. She wanted to marry sooner than Devidra would agree to, and your mother and aunt wanted her to marry one of your cousins--"

"Yes, a cousin who's a father and two brothers and two nephews away from the throne." And while she knew little else about her cousin Lonriad, that one thing would have made him perfect for Mona herself. It was tiresome enough to be a princess; it would only be moreso, being a queen.

Her father glared at her. "I should hope you won't talk back like that to your husband."

"If he dares talk forth to me in the first place. He's supposed to be some sort of stuttering bookworm, isn't he?"

"And it will be up to you to make a king of him." He folded one arm beneath the other, matter of fact, as if someone had once bothered to do the same for him. "That is part of what a queen does."

Then it was a pity for Adrius that Mona was no queen.

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