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October 24, 1187
Sir Sidwein was a distant relation. His half-sister Imena was married to Rina's Uncle Mernolt. His own wife was first cousin to Rina's mother. If she went far back enough--and she didn't care to just now--he was some degree of cousin to her without factoring in marriage. But he wasn't so close that he was obliged to pretend he cared much about her father, and for that, she was relieved that he'd been the one sent.
It was an added bonus that he didn't seem to expect much of her either.
Sir Sidwein and Lady Celina had arrived the night before, staying at Veldora Keep. In the morning, he'd ridden to Tetran, and Rina and Arkon had shortly after received a summons from their grandmother. Uncle Garrett had already been told; he'd been and gone before they'd arrived. She supposed he'd gone to the university to tell Uncle Nythran and Pandora. None of them would be too shaken up about it.
She'd give Arkon credit for his half-hearted attempt.
"Does anyone have any idea as to who did it?"
"Not at the time of my departure, no--though the king will have to investigate." Have to. There was one more person who didn't give a damn. "In the mean time, you have been named Count of Tagrien. Your grandmother will act as regent until you complete your studies."
"I trust she'll do well."
Sir Sidwein nodded. He took his eyes off of Arkon for a second and shifted his gaze to Rina. He was far enough for the immediate family that he wouldn't have known her private business, even if he probably realized that Count Felron wouldn't have been much of a father, not even enough of one to be properly missed. Still, it might have been difficult to fathom--one grown child at least present enough to question, the other sitting there still and cold as a stone.
He didn't understand.
She hadn't felt like less of a stone in years.
NEXT CHAPTER:
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.
NEXT CHAPTER:
April 16, 1180
"...so, long story short, that's why all future inhabitants of this castle are banned from ever performing surgery on mice with mathematical instruments," concluded CeeCee matter-of-factually, as if her six-year-old mind believed that her uncle had been holding on to every word.
Judging by the profoundly bored look on Sidwein's face, though, Severin guessed this wasn't exactly true. That wasn't a surprise. Sidwein was only about Searle's age, after all, and paid his own son what was perhaps the minimum amount of attention required to call oneself a not-sub-par father; what use could he have possibly had for anyone else's children?
Then again, maybe it was CeeCee's age. She was only two years older than Sidwein's Haldred, after all--and meanwhile, Severin was not only twenty-five years older than his brother, but had two children who were also older than Sidwein and another who was only a couple weeks younger. It might not have occurred to the youngster--to think, the very age Severin himself had been when he'd arrived in Naroni!--that he himself might very well have a six-year-old daughter at the ripe old age of forty-seven. No doubt the Severin of all those years ago wouldn't have taken that realization so well either.
"But lucky for the mouse, Grandmama patched him up nicely and he now lives with Uncle Rifden and Auntie Aerina."
Sidwein squinted in some sort of vague disgust; at its root, Severin found it more amusing than offensive. "Your grandmother does have a certain talent for fixing things."
"Uh-huh. And I'm going to fix things too." CeeCee swayed from side to side in one of those short-lived bouts of childhood excitement that he'd grown used to over the years, what with nine other children ahead of her. "I already fix things. I fixed Roddie and Falidor's mathematics problems just yesterday."
"I... see." Severin suspected he didn't. He wouldn't claim to know his little brother well, having lived another country for the entire duration of the young man's life, but Sidwein had been staying with him long enough to suggest more than a few similarities to Rudolphus, whom Severin did know. Of course, it could have also been CeeCee. Some people just could not wrap their heads around such fully-embraced precocity. "Uh... they didn't bully you into it, did they?"
"Oh, no! They're much too afraid of Mama to bully me." Behind CeeCee's back, Severin nodded to confirm. "Consider it an act of mercy. Neither of them can ever remember what a factorial is."
Sidwein frowned. "Right."
"I know. It's got to be embarrassing for them." CeeCee spun the end of an unruly lock around her finger and sighed. "Anyway, I should probably go talk to Falidor before he leaves, just so I can remind him. See you at supper, Uncle Sidwein."
Severin slouched. "And I've been demoted to desk chair?"
Giggling, CeeCee spun about and beamed. "You too, Papa."
He returned the smile, then watched as she charged from the study, her apparent enthusiasm for correcting her brother at the level that most six-year-old girls reserved for new kittens. The Severin of a quarter-century ago might have preferred to leave a beautiful corpse, but at forty-seven, old age seemed a small price for the chance to see his younger children turn the world upside-down.
"They grow up too quickly."
"Say what you will. A year and a half later and I'm still recovering from that over-long diaper phase."
Not that you were the one actually changing them, I wager, but fair enough. "No one said fatherhood was without its downsides. But you're not going to find a great man or woman anywhere who didn't spend their first couple years shitting indiscriminately."
His brother's nose wrinkled. "You certainly got Father's crudeness."
"And perhaps you ought to thank me for taking it all before you came along," Severin chided with a wink.
"I don't know. Sometimes I think there are benefits to lack of tact."
"Oh?" Brow peaked, Severin leaned forward. He would admit it--he had not been overly impressed with his brother since his arrival, finding him rather dull, maybe even predictable. But it seemed that Sidwein was capable of more startling insight than he might have guessed. "Care to elaborate?"
Sidwein hesitated. Had he not, he might have gotten a word out, but the fact was that he never did, cut off preemptively by Falidor's entrance--his unheralded, unexpected entrance, an entrance that never even bothered with a knock.
"Er, my lord..." Falidor swallowed. Just this once, Severin opted to let the title slide. "We have a bit of a, uh... situation..."
NEXT CHAPTER:
November 14, 1161
It had been three months, Viridis found as she counted off the days in her head. Three whole months. She hadn't been stressed, nor had she been ill, nor had she slept with her husband within that period of time.
Three months. At this point, it was unlikely that it would ever return--not at her age. She was forty-nine years old, and she knew for a fact that there was no way she could be pregnant; now, she knew she never would be again.
Perhaps her son would see fit to give her another grandchild soon, she mused as gently bounced Camaline up and down. She loved the little girl like she would have loved a thousand of Rudolphus's children, of course, but she did hope that her son would, at the very least, stop abstaining from his wife at some point; she did not want Rudolphus to imitate his mother's mistake.
In the mean time, however, the twins were only four, only a year older than her granddaughter. It wasn't as if she no longer had the privilege of being a mother, she knew full well having believed for twenty-five years that Rudolphus would be her only child--she simply no longer had the chance of ever becoming a new mother again.
The twins, she assured herself, would be enough for her--and if they proved otherwise, then there was always Lonriad's year-old daughter. Viridis was already her mother in practice, as the girl's own had fled shortly after recovering from the birth, and she had to admit, she had become quite attached to the little girl. She had already raised and come to love one of Lonriad's bastards; why not do the same for another?
But in spite of it all, she did have her regrets. Maybe she should have eased up on the man, for her own sake; she had been young at the time, and had not known exactly what it was she wanted. It was cruelly ironic that now that she did, she was too old to aspire to it.
Ah, but such was life, Viridis supposed--just a collection of cruel ironies.
NEXT CHAPTER:
