43. The Barge Affair
It wasn't unusual for Val to have dreams, though she rarely remembered them for long after waking up. Divination dreams were a different matter - spurred by some strange connection with the powers and spirits that lay beyond the mortal world, they always left a sharp impression on Val's mind.
Thus far, her two clearest prophetic dreams had been after exhausting the spirit energies she used to power her magecraft, which left her passed out in a strange delirium and vulnerable to psychic intrusion. However, those weren't the only times. Usually, her dreams were only glimpses. In retrospect, it had been a dream of three bawdy men in a skeevy tavern that had spurred her into seeking out that location to find Jasil's dad. She'd also had a dream about Lord Terrian, who was Earl Gunthald's fifteen-year-old son, two days before she ever met the boy. And he was very much a boy, not a young man, even if his age and tall, wiry build were similar to Galvan's, for spoiled little lordlings turned into spoiled little man-children.
Her dream had shown Terrian as a little shriveled burr in Val's boot, a screaming little seedlet digging into her flesh, annoying her until she fished him out and tossed him into the wild weeds. Likewise, in real life, he proved to be an annoyance almost immediately.
He'd arrived for his training session with Sir Andrat a bit early and gawked at them practicing from the gallery. Then, once their little class had wrapped up, he strolled out, introduced himself, and waited for all of the girls to curtsy. And, when none of them did, he balked at it.
"I'm a noble and you're common. I would be within my rights to strike you for failure to curtsy," he stated.
"We're guests of your father," Niko told him.
Terrian turned toward the knight. "Tell them, Andrat."
"Strictly speaking, you would be within your rights, milord," Andrat agreed. "But you won't strike any of these young women, unless it is during sparring."
Young Lord Terrian huffed at that, but he didn't bother to press the issue, instead strutting about the practice field and trying to impress them with a few sword tricks that weren't even marginally impressive.
Then he had the audacity to make a ham-fisted pass at Niko, apparently mistaking her for Val. He was taken by the mystique of a girl descended from queens and kings and (not unreasonably) assumed that Niko, with her silvery blonde hair, crystal-blue eyes, and a posture that spoke of command was her. But Niko's intense gaze and regal posture was her way of suggesting that, should young Lord Terrian try to strike her for failure to curtsy, he would quickly discover what several highly-trained strikes actually felt like.
"You haven't really lived until you've lived a day as a lord. Come with me on my pleasure barge and you'll have the honor of being my lady for the day," he said.
"No thank you," Niko said.
"No thank you, my lord," he corrected her. "And you should rethink that."
"Noted. Have a fun practice, milord," Niko said.
"How does three this afternoon sound?" he asked.
Niko just rolled her eyes and walked away. Val glared at him for another few seconds before swiveling and going off to have a bath and then practice her magic in the palace crypt, where her connection to nature and the spirits was the strongest.
Later, when Terrian had learned that she, Val, was the one spiritually descended from Queen Friyja, he'd turned his attentions to her instead. Frankly, she wished he'd stuck to Niko, because Niko handled it better. He barged in on Val while she was in the middle of studying, no knock, no call to make sure she was decent, and he startled Violet from her nap. He peered down at Val, arms crossed, toes tapping, and perhaps waiting for her to stand up and curtsy to him. As far as Val was concerned, she was the queen of her own chamber, even if it was inside the earl's palace.
"Yes?" she said.
"What are you doing?"
"Studying," Val said. She gestured toward the pile of books she'd amassed - magic, of course, but also combat, tactics, law, the Valiant Epics of the Khasun, and a book on courtly etiquette and decorum that was, frankly, more informative than any amount of finishing school. "There are lots of things I need to know about."
"For what?"
For being queen, she thought. "I want to get better at the things I'll need to know."
He flipped through the Valiant Epics, which was written in Caphric, so he probably couldn't read it. Val could only read it a bit, but she was learning. He tossed the book down in a way that made Val cringe.
"If you were a lady, you wouldn't have to study all the time. You could just ask for whatever you liked and it would be there…"
"I'd like to be good at things," Val said.
Terrian snorted, as if she'd just made an unserious joke. "You should be polite to me, you know. I could make you a lady when I become earl. I could make you a lady earlier if we, you know… got married. How would you like to be married to a future earl?"
"I'm not marrying a…" she almost said boy, which would have been a miscalculation… "a man. I don't even know if I want to get married ever, but I know I don't care for men, no matter how fantastically rich they are. Please just leave me alone. Milord."
"This isn't over," Terrian said. He stalked out of her room, slamming the door behind himself. The boy was a real charmer.
So Val's dreams were sometimes prophetic, but they weren't necessarily helpful. For instance, about a week later, on the night before Izzy's twelfth birthday, Val had a dream where she spotted her mother (or some apparition who included her mother) in the palace halls in the dead of night. She called out, but her mother didn't answer. Instead, she ambled through the corridors, pale and faintly-glowing, and descended the cramped steps into the palace crypt.
There, she waited in the dark, standing in front of one of the twenty-odd statues down there. Only this wasn't a familiar statue - it was the bust of an attractive young woman, her stone hair soft and cascading, her pouty lips drawn up into a faint smile. Somebody had wrapped dark silk around the statue's eyes, so Val unwrapped it…
Aleida. It was a statue of the duchess.
"Yes, my daughter, this is her," her mother said, and then Val woke up, tangled in her sheets an hour before dawn.
+++++
The next day was Izzy's birthday party, nine days before Val's birthday and two days after Izzy's actual birthday, since that was when they could get the barge. None of the girls had ever had a birthday party before - a year ago, they'd all been in orphanages - and they wanted Izzy's to be special. They requisitioned a small barge and took it out to the reef, a stretch of water a mile long and two hundred yards wide where you could see straight down to a flat sandy bottom, or else to colorful explosions of coral teeming with little flitting fish.
Val had practiced swimming for several days before-hand, so as not to make a fool of herself. She'd only been able to paddle (and Niko was of a similar skill level), but could now dip under and move around without making a complete fool of herself. For her part, Izzy was like a little seal, leaping off the barge head-first and diving fifteen feet down to scoop up urchins, sea stars, and cowries.
There were six of them in all on the barge - the three girls from Monkey Squad, obviously, plus Aisling and Aoife (the twin daughters of the noble wing's housekeeper), plus Bianque (the younger daughter of Lady Mundrott, who was the earl's cousin and a regular inhabitant of the palace in Port Rumm). Bianque Mundrott subtly thought herself better than the others, the twins subtly thought themselves worse, and Val tried to keep everybody's technical social status a non-issue. Mostly, she succeeded.
"I know a fun game we can play," Bianque said. "I've got about two dozen pfennigs on me. I could toss them into the ocean and see who can find them. My mother sometimes does that with the servant children…"
"Nobody here is the servant of anybody else," Val stated. "Why don't we toss Izzy's shells over and see who can find the most?"
"Those are my birthday shells," Izzy stated.
Val shrugged. "Ok. Then show me how to dive like you do. My birthday's coming up and I'd like to get some birthday shells of my own."
"I want to learn to dive, too," Niko said.
Val let her scoot past. Val could still picture Niko fresh in her mind, pulling on one of the oars to get the barge out past the pier. The barge had six oars and a big square sail, which could then be lowered to form a canopy for lounging in relative shade. Val and Niko had taken turns using magic to push the sail until they were out at the reef.
Swimming gear for the girls consisted of tank tops that showed just a bit of belly, plus form-fitting bottoms that were scarcely bigger than underpants and had a little skirt that buttoned onto the front while leaving the back bare. Val could remember Niko's strong shoulders flexing as they pulled the oars to ease the barge out from the pier. And now she could see that Niko's butt had a Shape. It wasn't a sad little girl butt, and it did Things for Val. She wanted to squeeze it, but she wasn't about to do so in front of the others. Later. There would be time for that later. For now, she cooled herself off by diving into the water after Izzy. She managed something half-way between Izzy's graceful swan dives and a belly-flop. There was room for improvement.
They swam and chatted and snacked on the barge, lazing out over the reef, and they sang to Izzy and handed out cupcakes that Val had Mrs. Niedler in the kitchen bake for the occasion. They were having a wonderful time up until Lord Terrian crashed their party, coasting along under the power of eight oarsmen on a pleasure barge twice the size of the ones the girls were enjoying.
"Do you girls want to see the earl's pleasure barge?" he called out.
Aisling, Aoife, and Bianque all wanted to see it, and Val felt bad about leaving them with the young lord unattended, so she went out with them, which meant they dropped anchor and everybody went out with them. There was certainly room on the barge for all six girls. It was just Terrian and two young (but older than Val) nobles, the son and daughter of one of the barons under the earl's banner. Well… them, plus their eight servants on the oars, but those servants remained seated and spoke not a word. Frankly, it was a little creepy. If Val had done all the hard work of rowing out to a reef, she'd certainly have wanted to get up and about and into the water.
They swam over to the barge, climbing up the chrome ladder onto a sumptuous platform, all bronzed, aged wood, soft cushions, and brassy fixtures beneath a silken canopy affixed to the mainmast. Terrian sipped from a little flute of sparkling wine and smiled as they climbed onto his barge, not bothering to help anybody aboard. Aisling, Aoife, and Bianque all curtsied - a bit surreal, given they were all in swimming attire - whereas Val, Niko and Izzy had all already established that they would not be curtsying to anybody outside of official functions, which this was not. Indeed, Val's reading of the law suggested that this was acceptable - unless you were officially summoned or were meeting a noble for things regarding military matters or affairs of state, there was nothing illegal about treating them like anybody else.
"Val, would you like a little bubbly?" Terrian asked.
"Sure. Thanks." She accepted a small glass of the stuff. She took an experimental sip - she didn't care for it. Mead was a lot better, even the slightly tart stuff.
"See? It's not so hard to be civil," he chuckled. "What do you think of my barge?"
"It's very nice," she agreed.
"Come here, look at the food the kitchen's prepared for our trip…" he showed her to a big chest built in to the back of the barge. You could fit a meal for twenty in there - and, in all likelihood, twenty people could fit on the boat, though it would be a bit crowded. "You could come out here every day if you were my wife," he said. "You don't have to play hard to get. It's not becoming."
"I'm already with Niko…"
"What has he got that I haven't?" Terrian snorted. Then he swiveled to position himself in front of Val and kissed her right on the lips.
Val froze for a full second and a half, shocked an confused that the earl's son had just kissed her. Wondering what in the world to do, part of her brain finally registered that she was being assaulted. Terrian brought his hand to the small of her back, started to open his mouth.
Earl's son or not, Val was having none of it. She spun out of the young lord's light hold, pulling away from his lips, punched him right in the nose, and then shoved him off the barge.
"What part of 'I don't like boys' do you not understand, you entitled horse's arse?" Val shouted. Part of her wanted to jump off the barge and continue her attack.
Terrian sputtered to the surface, screaming as blood oozed out his nose. Val didn't think she'd broken it, unfortunately, as the punch had been a bit low. But he was bleeding out from his nose and lip, a little red cloud slowly dispersing in the clear waters of the reef. Val hoped a shark would eat him.
"Help! Help me! She attacked me!" Terrian screamed.
"We should probably go back to our barge," Niko said.
Val nodded. "Yeah…"
Val hoped what she'd done wouldn't come back to hurt her.
+++++
Val awoke the next morning to the guard knocking on her door. It wasn't the full-fisted pounding of irate guards coming to drag her away, but neither was it the polite rapping of somebody who was apologetic about waking her. Val rolled out of bed, plodded over to the door, and opened it. She checked her wall clock: half-past six.
"It's early," she said.
"His excellency requests your presence at once," the Leftenant Bassa said. Val was quite familiar by now with the sorts of requests that weren't requests.
"Can I dress?"
She nodded. "If you do it quickly."
So Val dressed quickly and then accompanied the four guards through the noble wing, across the big central courtyard, and into the sizable spire that was Earl Gunthald's personal residence. She kept glancing back at the guards, who looked just a bit too energetic for her liking.
The earl preferred to do his business in a large office taking up half a floor in his tower. He glanced over his spectacles as Val entered and shooed his guards away. After Val curtsied - she'd been summoned, after all - he nodded and indicated that she should sit. She did so. He stared at her for a long minute, perhaps hoping it would make her nervous or force her into talking. Val had long since learned to just wait the awkwardness out.
"Do you know why I called you here?"
"I can hazard a guess, your excellency," Val said.
Gunthald nodded. "Terrian told me that you spurned his overtures to courtship… vigorously, shall we say?"
"He kissed me without asking, and I'll punch somebody ten times out of ten for that," Val said. "I tried not to break anything."
"Only his pride," the earl said. "With the healing potion, he's probably no worse than a bit tender this morning. I'm upset about this, Val, but I'm sure blame lies on both sides of the equation here. I've brought you here because I have a proposal that will be to our mutual benefit, and my son need not bother you after you agree."
"A deal?"
"A deal," Gunthald repeated. His dark eyes bore into Val, a subtle smile creeping across his pudgy cheeks. "You have something I want - an unimpeachable royal lineage. And I have a great many things to offer you… things that will help you become the queen you are destined to be. And the small price I ask is that you marry my son and bear him an heir."
"As I told Terrian, your excellency, repeatedly, I don't like boys," Val said.
Gunthald's stare didn't waver, nor did he express any particular emotion to Val's revelation - she knew that some people (particularly Pale Order folks) had a strong opinion on who should be attracted to whom. Gunthald, it seemed, didn't care one whit. "I care not one whit whom you're attracted to," he said, "nor whom you share your bed with, when you're ready to do so. Noble marriages aren't about love or attraction, but about political necessity and advantage. It is advantageous to you to have formal ties to nobility and to bear an heir with noble lineage… you and Terrian can get the unsavory fornication business over with and spend the rest of your lives having only enough contact to maintain appearances. Lords and ladies have done so since time immemorial, and I applaud them for both recognizing their political duty and managing to eke out tolerable private lives. If you wish to some day become a great woman, Val, you must trust me and follow my lead on this. I've been doing this for longer than you've been alive… probably close to as long as your parents have been alive."
"My birth parents are dead…"
"Indeed," Gunthald said. "And so your blood will die with you no matter the circumstance, unless you find a man who will accept your unusual proclivity and bother you no more than biologically necessary. With Duke Ansibald dead, you will get no finer offer than this. I am one of four earls in the Duchy of Aurilicht and the only one descended from ancient kings and the only one willing to grant so generous an offer."
Val bit her lip. She knew it was a generous offer. If the strings attached were as minimal as the earl was suggesting, then she'd only have to be with Terrian a handful of times, have a child, and never have to speak with him outside of public occasions. And, out of that, she'd get to be a countess, which would give her a good shot at being queen, should Aurilicht win the war against Boreales (which seemed more and more unlikely as news came in from the east). Even so, her gut told her it was the wrong move…
"Can I think about it?" she asked.
"No," the earl said.
"Then thank you, but I'll pass," Val said. "Ask me again when the war's over…"
The earl stood, his brow finally furrowing into an expression of deep consternation. "I don't make my offers twice, girl." He reached for his quill and scribbled his signature on a piece of paper, folding and then sealing it with a daub of blue wax. "I have completed my investigation and concluded that, as per the duchess's suspicions, you are guilty of sedition and are to be arrested. When the dowager duchess arrives in a week's time, she can decide your final fate… but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Lieutenant!"
Leftenant Bassa opened the door immediately. "Your excellency?"
"This girl is under arrest. Take her to the dungeon…"
"My lord… she's just a girl…"
"Then put a teddy and a lollipop in her cell. A seditious child is just as dangerous as a seditious grandmama. Do it."
The lieutenant curtsied. "Yes, your excellency."
Val made a run for the door - if only she'd dressed in her jacket and carried her knife, she might have been able to fight past the guards and made her way out of the palace. Instead, she had only one of her nice dresses, the cream yellow one with lilac embroidery, and it provided no protection against blows, nor against being grabbed by the strong, gauntleted arms waiting outside the doorway.
"You bastard!" Val shouted at the earl, struggling to break free. "You know I didn't do anything! I'm innocent!"
Smirking, the earl strolled to his doorway as Val struggled to wrench free from her captors. "Try anything stupid and I'll arrest your family, too," he said.
"She's… very active," Bassa noted, trying to block Val's kicks and only occasionally succeeding. Eventually, she produced a sleep cloth from a cylinder and pressed it against Val's screaming mouth.
Val's head swam. She fought it, but against four large and reasonably well-trained people and without any weapons of her own, Val was hopelessly outmatched. She held her breath, but was forced to take in great, gasping breaths after ten seconds of struggle. Eventually, her limbs grew leaden, her vision swam, and everything went black.
OvidLemma
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-Ovid
43. The Barge Affair
It wasn't unusual for Val to have dreams, though she rarely remembered them for long after waking up. Divination dreams were a different matter - spurred by some strange connection with the powers and spirits that lay beyond the mortal world, they always left a sharp impression on Val's mind.
Thus far, her two clearest prophetic dreams had been after exhausting the spirit energies she used to power her magecraft, which left her passed out in a strange delirium and vulnerable to psychic intrusion. However, those weren't the only times. Usually, her dreams were only glimpses. In retrospect, it had been a dream of three bawdy men in a skeevy tavern that had spurred her into seeking out that location to find Jasil's dad. She'd also had a dream about Lord Terrian, who was Earl Gunthald's fifteen-year-old son, two days before she ever met the boy. And he was very much a boy, not a young man, even if his age and tall, wiry build were similar to Galvan's, for spoiled little lordlings turned into spoiled little man-children.
Her dream had shown Terrian as a little shriveled burr in Val's boot, a screaming little seedlet digging into her flesh, annoying her until she fished him out and tossed him into the wild weeds. Likewise, in real life, he proved to be an annoyance almost immediately.
He'd arrived for his training session with Sir Andrat a bit early and gawked at them practicing from the gallery. Then, once their little class had wrapped up, he strolled out, introduced himself, and waited for all of the girls to curtsy. And, when none of them did, he balked at it.
"I'm a noble and you're common. I would be within my rights to strike you for failure to curtsy," he stated.
"We're guests of your father," Niko told him.
Terrian turned toward the knight. "Tell them, Andrat."
"Strictly speaking, you would be within your rights, milord," Andrat agreed. "But you won't strike any of these young women, unless it is during sparring."
Young Lord Terrian huffed at that, but he didn't bother to press the issue, instead strutting about the practice field and trying to impress them with a few sword tricks that weren't even marginally impressive.
Then he had the audacity to make a ham-fisted pass at Niko, apparently mistaking her for Val. He was taken by the mystique of a girl descended from queens and kings and (not unreasonably) assumed that Niko, with her silvery blonde hair, crystal-blue eyes, and a posture that spoke of command was her. But Niko's intense gaze and regal posture was her way of suggesting that, should young Lord Terrian try to strike her for failure to curtsy, he would quickly discover what several highly-trained strikes actually felt like.
"You haven't really lived until you've lived a day as a lord. Come with me on my pleasure barge and you'll have the honor of being my lady for the day," he said.
"No thank you," Niko said.
"No thank you, my lord," he corrected her. "And you should rethink that."
"Noted. Have a fun practice, milord," Niko said.
"How does three this afternoon sound?" he asked.
Niko just rolled her eyes and walked away. Val glared at him for another few seconds before swiveling and going off to have a bath and then practice her magic in the palace crypt, where her connection to nature and the spirits was the strongest.
Later, when Terrian had learned that she, Val, was the one spiritually descended from Queen Friyja, he'd turned his attentions to her instead. Frankly, she wished he'd stuck to Niko, because Niko handled it better. He barged in on Val while she was in the middle of studying, no knock, no call to make sure she was decent, and he startled Violet from her nap. He peered down at Val, arms crossed, toes tapping, and perhaps waiting for her to stand up and curtsy to him. As far as Val was concerned, she was the queen of her own chamber, even if it was inside the earl's palace.
"Yes?" she said.
"What are you doing?"
"Studying," Val said. She gestured toward the pile of books she'd amassed - magic, of course, but also combat, tactics, law, the Valiant Epics of the Khasun, and a book on courtly etiquette and decorum that was, frankly, more informative than any amount of finishing school. "There are lots of things I need to know about."
"For what?"
For being queen, she thought. "I want to get better at the things I'll need to know."
He flipped through the Valiant Epics, which was written in Caphric, so he probably couldn't read it. Val could only read it a bit, but she was learning. He tossed the book down in a way that made Val cringe.
"If you were a lady, you wouldn't have to study all the time. You could just ask for whatever you liked and it would be there…"
"I'd like to be good at things," Val said.
Terrian snorted, as if she'd just made an unserious joke. "You should be polite to me, you know. I could make you a lady when I become earl. I could make you a lady earlier if we, you know… got married. How would you like to be married to a future earl?"
"I'm not marrying a…" she almost said boy, which would have been a miscalculation… "a man. I don't even know if I want to get married ever, but I know I don't care for men, no matter how fantastically rich they are. Please just leave me alone. Milord."
"This isn't over," Terrian said. He stalked out of her room, slamming the door behind himself. The boy was a real charmer.
So Val's dreams were sometimes prophetic, but they weren't necessarily helpful. For instance, about a week later, on the night before Izzy's twelfth birthday, Val had a dream where she spotted her mother (or some apparition who included her mother) in the palace halls in the dead of night. She called out, but her mother didn't answer. Instead, she ambled through the corridors, pale and faintly-glowing, and descended the cramped steps into the palace crypt.
There, she waited in the dark, standing in front of one of the twenty-odd statues down there. Only this wasn't a familiar statue - it was the bust of an attractive young woman, her stone hair soft and cascading, her pouty lips drawn up into a faint smile. Somebody had wrapped dark silk around the statue's eyes, so Val unwrapped it…
Aleida. It was a statue of the duchess.
"Yes, my daughter, this is her," her mother said, and then Val woke up, tangled in her sheets an hour before dawn.
+++++
The next day was Izzy's birthday party, nine days before Val's birthday and two days after Izzy's actual birthday, since that was when they could get the barge. None of the girls had ever had a birthday party before - a year ago, they'd all been in orphanages - and they wanted Izzy's to be special. They requisitioned a small barge and took it out to the reef, a stretch of water a mile long and two hundred yards wide where you could see straight down to a flat sandy bottom, or else to colorful explosions of coral teeming with little flitting fish.
Val had practiced swimming for several days before-hand, so as not to make a fool of herself. She'd only been able to paddle (and Niko was of a similar skill level), but could now dip under and move around without making a complete fool of herself. For her part, Izzy was like a little seal, leaping off the barge head-first and diving fifteen feet down to scoop up urchins, sea stars, and cowries.
There were six of them in all on the barge - the three girls from Monkey Squad, obviously, plus Aisling and Aoife (the twin daughters of the noble wing's housekeeper), plus Bianque (the younger daughter of Lady Mundrott, who was the earl's cousin and a regular inhabitant of the palace in Port Rumm). Bianque Mundrott subtly thought herself better than the others, the twins subtly thought themselves worse, and Val tried to keep everybody's technical social status a non-issue. Mostly, she succeeded.
"I know a fun game we can play," Bianque said. "I've got about two dozen pfennigs on me. I could toss them into the ocean and see who can find them. My mother sometimes does that with the servant children…"
"Nobody here is the servant of anybody else," Val stated. "Why don't we toss Izzy's shells over and see who can find the most?"
"Those are my birthday shells," Izzy stated.
Val shrugged. "Ok. Then show me how to dive like you do. My birthday's coming up and I'd like to get some birthday shells of my own."
"I want to learn to dive, too," Niko said.
Val let her scoot past. Val could still picture Niko fresh in her mind, pulling on one of the oars to get the barge out past the pier. The barge had six oars and a big square sail, which could then be lowered to form a canopy for lounging in relative shade. Val and Niko had taken turns using magic to push the sail until they were out at the reef.
Swimming gear for the girls consisted of tank tops that showed just a bit of belly, plus form-fitting bottoms that were scarcely bigger than underpants and had a little skirt that buttoned onto the front while leaving the back bare. Val could remember Niko's strong shoulders flexing as they pulled the oars to ease the barge out from the pier. And now she could see that Niko's butt had a Shape. It wasn't a sad little girl butt, and it did Things for Val. She wanted to squeeze it, but she wasn't about to do so in front of the others. Later. There would be time for that later. For now, she cooled herself off by diving into the water after Izzy. She managed something half-way between Izzy's graceful swan dives and a belly-flop. There was room for improvement.
They swam and chatted and snacked on the barge, lazing out over the reef, and they sang to Izzy and handed out cupcakes that Val had Mrs. Niedler in the kitchen bake for the occasion. They were having a wonderful time up until Lord Terrian crashed their party, coasting along under the power of eight oarsmen on a pleasure barge twice the size of the ones the girls were enjoying.
"Do you girls want to see the earl's pleasure barge?" he called out.
Aisling, Aoife, and Bianque all wanted to see it, and Val felt bad about leaving them with the young lord unattended, so she went out with them, which meant they dropped anchor and everybody went out with them. There was certainly room on the barge for all six girls. It was just Terrian and two young (but older than Val) nobles, the son and daughter of one of the barons under the earl's banner. Well… them, plus their eight servants on the oars, but those servants remained seated and spoke not a word. Frankly, it was a little creepy. If Val had done all the hard work of rowing out to a reef, she'd certainly have wanted to get up and about and into the water.
They swam over to the barge, climbing up the chrome ladder onto a sumptuous platform, all bronzed, aged wood, soft cushions, and brassy fixtures beneath a silken canopy affixed to the mainmast. Terrian sipped from a little flute of sparkling wine and smiled as they climbed onto his barge, not bothering to help anybody aboard. Aisling, Aoife, and Bianque all curtsied - a bit surreal, given they were all in swimming attire - whereas Val, Niko and Izzy had all already established that they would not be curtsying to anybody outside of official functions, which this was not. Indeed, Val's reading of the law suggested that this was acceptable - unless you were officially summoned or were meeting a noble for things regarding military matters or affairs of state, there was nothing illegal about treating them like anybody else.
"Val, would you like a little bubbly?" Terrian asked.
"Sure. Thanks." She accepted a small glass of the stuff. She took an experimental sip - she didn't care for it. Mead was a lot better, even the slightly tart stuff.
"See? It's not so hard to be civil," he chuckled. "What do you think of my barge?"
"It's very nice," she agreed.
"Come here, look at the food the kitchen's prepared for our trip…" he showed her to a big chest built in to the back of the barge. You could fit a meal for twenty in there - and, in all likelihood, twenty people could fit on the boat, though it would be a bit crowded. "You could come out here every day if you were my wife," he said. "You don't have to play hard to get. It's not becoming."
"I'm already with Niko…"
"What has he got that I haven't?" Terrian snorted. Then he swiveled to position himself in front of Val and kissed her right on the lips.
Val froze for a full second and a half, shocked an confused that the earl's son had just kissed her. Wondering what in the world to do, part of her brain finally registered that she was being assaulted. Terrian brought his hand to the small of her back, started to open his mouth.
Earl's son or not, Val was having none of it. She spun out of the young lord's light hold, pulling away from his lips, punched him right in the nose, and then shoved him off the barge.
"What part of 'I don't like boys' do you not understand, you entitled horse's arse?" Val shouted. Part of her wanted to jump off the barge and continue her attack.
Terrian sputtered to the surface, screaming as blood oozed out his nose. Val didn't think she'd broken it, unfortunately, as the punch had been a bit low. But he was bleeding out from his nose and lip, a little red cloud slowly dispersing in the clear waters of the reef. Val hoped a shark would eat him.
"Help! Help me! She attacked me!" Terrian screamed.
"We should probably go back to our barge," Niko said.
Val nodded. "Yeah…"
Val hoped what she'd done wouldn't come back to hurt her.
+++++
Val awoke the next morning to the guard knocking on her door. It wasn't the full-fisted pounding of irate guards coming to drag her away, but neither was it the polite rapping of somebody who was apologetic about waking her. Val rolled out of bed, plodded over to the door, and opened it. She checked her wall clock: half-past six.
"It's early," she said.
"His excellency requests your presence at once," the Leftenant Bassa said. Val was quite familiar by now with the sorts of requests that weren't requests.
"Can I dress?"
She nodded. "If you do it quickly."
So Val dressed quickly and then accompanied the four guards through the noble wing, across the big central courtyard, and into the sizable spire that was Earl Gunthald's personal residence. She kept glancing back at the guards, who looked just a bit too energetic for her liking.
The earl preferred to do his business in a large office taking up half a floor in his tower. He glanced over his spectacles as Val entered and shooed his guards away. After Val curtsied - she'd been summoned, after all - he nodded and indicated that she should sit. She did so. He stared at her for a long minute, perhaps hoping it would make her nervous or force her into talking. Val had long since learned to just wait the awkwardness out.
"Do you know why I called you here?"
"I can hazard a guess, your excellency," Val said.
Gunthald nodded. "Terrian told me that you spurned his overtures to courtship… vigorously, shall we say?"
"He kissed me without asking, and I'll punch somebody ten times out of ten for that," Val said. "I tried not to break anything."
"Only his pride," the earl said. "With the healing potion, he's probably no worse than a bit tender this morning. I'm upset about this, Val, but I'm sure blame lies on both sides of the equation here. I've brought you here because I have a proposal that will be to our mutual benefit, and my son need not bother you after you agree."
"A deal?"
"A deal," Gunthald repeated. His dark eyes bore into Val, a subtle smile creeping across his pudgy cheeks. "You have something I want - an unimpeachable royal lineage. And I have a great many things to offer you… things that will help you become the queen you are destined to be. And the small price I ask is that you marry my son and bear him an heir."
"As I told Terrian, your excellency, repeatedly, I don't like boys," Val said.
Gunthald's stare didn't waver, nor did he express any particular emotion to Val's revelation - she knew that some people (particularly Pale Order folks) had a strong opinion on who should be attracted to whom. Gunthald, it seemed, didn't care one whit. "I care not one whit whom you're attracted to," he said, "nor whom you share your bed with, when you're ready to do so. Noble marriages aren't about love or attraction, but about political necessity and advantage. It is advantageous to you to have formal ties to nobility and to bear an heir with noble lineage… you and Terrian can get the unsavory fornication business over with and spend the rest of your lives having only enough contact to maintain appearances. Lords and ladies have done so since time immemorial, and I applaud them for both recognizing their political duty and managing to eke out tolerable private lives. If you wish to some day become a great woman, Val, you must trust me and follow my lead on this. I've been doing this for longer than you've been alive… probably close to as long as your parents have been alive."
"My birth parents are dead…"
"Indeed," Gunthald said. "And so your blood will die with you no matter the circumstance, unless you find a man who will accept your unusual proclivity and bother you no more than biologically necessary. With Duke Ansibald dead, you will get no finer offer than this. I am one of four earls in the Duchy of Aurilicht and the only one descended from ancient kings and the only one willing to grant so generous an offer."
Val bit her lip. She knew it was a generous offer. If the strings attached were as minimal as the earl was suggesting, then she'd only have to be with Terrian a handful of times, have a child, and never have to speak with him outside of public occasions. And, out of that, she'd get to be a countess, which would give her a good shot at being queen, should Aurilicht win the war against Boreales (which seemed more and more unlikely as news came in from the east). Even so, her gut told her it was the wrong move…
"Can I think about it?" she asked.
"No," the earl said.
"Then thank you, but I'll pass," Val said. "Ask me again when the war's over…"
The earl stood, his brow finally furrowing into an expression of deep consternation. "I don't make my offers twice, girl." He reached for his quill and scribbled his signature on a piece of paper, folding and then sealing it with a daub of blue wax. "I have completed my investigation and concluded that, as per the duchess's suspicions, you are guilty of sedition and are to be arrested. When the dowager duchess arrives in a week's time, she can decide your final fate… but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Lieutenant!"
Leftenant Bassa opened the door immediately. "Your excellency?"
"This girl is under arrest. Take her to the dungeon…"
"My lord… she's just a girl…"
"Then put a teddy and a lollipop in her cell. A seditious child is just as dangerous as a seditious grandmama. Do it."
The lieutenant curtsied. "Yes, your excellency."
Val made a run for the door - if only she'd dressed in her jacket and carried her knife, she might have been able to fight past the guards and made her way out of the palace. Instead, she had only one of her nice dresses, the cream yellow one with lilac embroidery, and it provided no protection against blows, nor against being grabbed by the strong, gauntleted arms waiting outside the doorway.
"You bastard!" Val shouted at the earl, struggling to break free. "You know I didn't do anything! I'm innocent!"
Smirking, the earl strolled to his doorway as Val struggled to wrench free from her captors. "Try anything stupid and I'll arrest your family, too," he said.
"She's… very active," Bassa noted, trying to block Val's kicks and only occasionally succeeding. Eventually, she produced a sleep cloth from a cylinder and pressed it against Val's screaming mouth.
Val's head swam. She fought it, but against four large and reasonably well-trained people and without any weapons of her own, Val was hopelessly outmatched. She held her breath, but was forced to take in great, gasping breaths after ten seconds of struggle. Eventually, her limbs grew leaden, her vision swam, and everything went black.
OvidLemma
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-Ovid
