July 20, 1198
As for Celina and the visiting King Oswald, they were probably still in conference with Lorn. They'd be back soon, and not without Lorn's branch of the family in tow... but as unused as Cladelia was to being alone with her dead husband's dead sister's widower, she didn't want to guess at what her sweet, loving mother-in-law would have thought of that musing.
Nythran shrugged. "I know that's her intention, but it doesn't always play out that way. My father and Camaline rarely see each other if they don't have a reason to see each other, and he only sees much of Nata because my stepmother is her grandmother. I won't even get into the mess with Karlspan."
"Well, Karlspan did that to himself--practically abandoning your niece like that. You'd never do that to your children." Nor, if her cousin Ren's latest letter implied what she thought it implied, would Nythran had taken to sniffing out hints about Ren and Searle's twin nieces, who'd at least been spared those visits by virtue of being at the university. Those girls couldn't have been older than Karlspan's own daughter--if they were even as old.
"Perhaps it's different with men; the lot of you do seem to take pride in pretending you don't feel much." The weight of the band around her finger might have been that of a cannonball. Searle, in that sense, had been different. Wonderfully different--to the point where she shouldn't have been surprised that they hadn't had long, because not many things of such beauty dared risk outliving their own perfection. "Celina is a woman, and she and you are the two who loved her daughter best. Riona is at her most alive when the two of you are together."
"Hmm." Thoughtful--oddly enough for a man of their age, most of them so unwilling to heed a woman's opinion--Nythran's lips eased into a faint smile. "I never thought of it that way. Thank you, for that."
Cladelia nodded. He'd been without his love longer than she'd been without hers. If such a realization had been lost on him, regardless of whether or not he'd outgrown the need to stroke his own ego, then what hope could she have had for herself, a few years down the road? "It wasn't any trouble."
Once some time had passed.
Six more months, another year, another five... the word 'some' could have meant as little as a few weeks, or as long as the rest of her life, and it would have been pointless to venture a guess. Whenever a mind thought it had a formula for the speed of grief, life would throw a new factor into the equation, and Cladelia had never been one for complex mathematics anyway. She preferred words. She would have preferred a better word than 'some'.
1 comment:
1198 has sort of been a year of Auto-Naronis so far. :S
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