In Which Sidwein Is Frightened For

**Trigger Warning

September 12, 1182

With the body in Naroni and the family in Dovia, Searle of Hoprine had not been given a proper funeral. Haldred had arranged a memorial service shortly after receiving word from Sidwein's brother Severin, and that memorial service had been half a day prior. Afterwards, Sidwein and Celina and their children had returned to Sidwein's childhood home with his parents, and the hour had grown late enough that heading home was no longer practical. They would be spending the night.

Knowing that, Sidwein had indulged his father with a long night of raunchy jokes and rambling anecdotes, though he'd scarcely paid attention. His thoughts had been with his wife, supposedly nestled in his boyhood bed, a few soft tears for her brother before she drifted off to sleep. He wasn't sure if he loved her, but he did care, and he'd always found her relationship with her brother to be a bit... odd. Not especially close, yet oddly intimate, more like spy and mark than brother and sister. He sometimes wondered if Celina had thought herself Searle's guardian angel. If so, then she thought his death her failing.

Perhaps that was why, when he returned, he found her still awake, still dressed in her black mourning gown, twiddling her thumbs in her chair by the hearth instead of burrowing beneath the covers of the bed.

"You all right?"

"No." She shivered. It wasn't her predominant concern, but he could help with that.

"Do you want a fire?"

Celina nodded. Sidwein shuffled to the hearth and sparked the logs with the flint. The newborn flames glowed the color of the his wife's hair. Her brother's hair. He swapped the flint for the poker and turned one log over another. "Do you want to talk?"

"About my brother?" He didn't need to nod. Celina sighed. "He saved my life."

"I don't remember you almost dying."

"I didn't almost die. I almost killed myself." Sidwein's arm jerked. The top log slipped, a splash of sparks spattering. "Some part of me never forgave him for stopping me. I saw that he was miserable, so I tried to pay him back. Tried to keep him alive when he didn't want to be. Then by the time he wasn't miserable any more, it was just a habit."

Sidwein swallowed. It was a bare-bones explanation and it was wrong to dismiss the dead, but he didn't care about Searle any more. "Why did you try to kill yourself?"

"Because I wanted to die. Is that not enough for you?" Would it have been insensitive of him to shake his head? "How old was I when we married?"

He couldn't guess what that had to do with anything. He answered anyway. "You were seventeen. You wore a red dress, and lilies in your hair." And I saw every emotion in your eyes, each flitting to the next too quickly for me to register. "We were betrothed a week before the wedding."

"I was seventeen. Lileina was thirteen. Riona was fourteen. Learianna was fifteen, and only because her man was younger." What did that have to do with anything? Celina had never seemed the type who was desperate to be married. Certainly not to the point where she would have wished herself dead. "The day our fathers arranged our betrothal was the day after I first bled."

First? "You were seventeen."

"And not one of my sisters was over twelve. You have no idea what that means for a girl, do you?" That she ruined fewer gowns in her lifetime? "At least, a girl with parents like mine? Surely you've heard that phrase before. 'Your little girl is a woman now'. Because apparently bleeding out of your vagina is the only thing that makes you an adult."

But Celina had been an adult long before seventeen. If he remembered much about their childhoods at all, Celina had been born an adult. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that it wasn't the fact that I wasn't married. It was the fact that my parents treated me like a child and refused to stop even when I proved otherwise. When my sisters started their courses, my mother help them dress their dolls and put them away for their own daughters. Guess what I got for my sixteenth birthday?" She let out a dry laugh even though it wasn't funny. Sidwein wasn't sure if he'd ever seen Celina playing with a doll. "My little sister got her talk about the facts of life before I did, while I had to go behind my parents' backs to Aunt Renata for mine. Even after, Learianna would always look at me when someone made some naughty joke, that embarrassed 'You'll know when you're older' look, even though I was older than her and nine times out of ten I caught it before she did.

"But Learianna was a good girl. She only did as our parents wished. They would have sat me at the children's table at feasts if they hadn't thought it would cause a scandal." She tore a loose scrap of lace from the trim of her dress and flicked it into the flames. "How's this for scandal? I've fucked over a hundred men. And four or five women."

Not one lash around her violet eyes twitched as she stared him down, almost daring him to answer. He was supposed to be offended.

For whatever reason, he wasn't. "That's not very childish."

"That was the point. I was fourteen. Some of the girls were having a slumber party. My little sister was allowed to go, but my mother told me I couldn't, because slumber parties were for young ladies, and I was a little girl. But a little girl wouldn't have tracked down that stable boy who'd always had eyes for her and made wild girl-on-top love to him in the loft. A little girl wouldn't have pulled her brother's valet into the wine cellar and let him press her against the wall as he took her from behind. A little girl wouldn't have hid beneath the servants' dinner table and wound her tongue around the steward's cock as he ate.

"Sometimes I enjoyed it, lived it. Others, I just lay there like a stone, looking at the door. It was never locked. It was sometimes wide open. I wanted to be caught, and I never was. They were never any good at paying attention.

"My little sister's wedding day arrived. She asked if I would be one of her ladies, but my mother forbade it, because I wasn't a lady. This when she'd allowed poor Claddie to tend to Riona, because Claddie was a woman flowered even if she always screamed and cried when she saw the blood on her sheets. That was the last straw. I couldn't take it any more. I let my sister have her wedding night. I planned my suicide for the next. I would be in bed, legs spread, naked. My dress would be torn on the floor. There would be roses and candles and a blade lodged in my breast. I told a guard of rumored illicit passions about my plan in hopes that he'd come along as the rigor set and my parents would find him with his cock in my cold dead cunt.

"But Searle walked in, just minutes before it would have been over, even though he was supposed to have left hours earlier. He took one look at me and pried the dagger out of my hand. He snuffed the candles and stole my flint and left. And I abandoned my pursuit of death for one of revenge."

She slumped forward, the barely-there bulge of their third child collapsing to her thighs. Celina had always seemed a force of nature to Sidwein, he who'd always drifted through life like a limp leaf on a river, to the point where he may have always been a little frightened of her. He'd never expected to be frightened for her. "Celina..."

"And now he's gone. And so is my mother, and all of my sisters. And here I am, pregnant again when they'd intended to keep me in the nursery forever. And you're staring at me like I might throw myself into the fire any minute now."

Was he? "I'm sorry they made you go through that."

"Why?" She straightened up again, that curve once again besting the velvet dress for full view. "You never did that."

No. And though he didn't say a word, he promised her--and their daughter, and their son, and their baby of yet undetermined sex--in his heart that he never would. If his daughters carried on intelligent conversations and showed complex thought and good judgment at fourteen, they would be women, even if they never bled until thirty. If his sons knew right from wrong and when to fight and when to hold back, they would be men, even if their chins remained hairless and their voices high. When his children grew up--truly grew up--he would not deny it.

But at the same time, he hoped nothing forced them to grow up too quickly.

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