Ruins of Camelot

Chapter 2

As it turned out, the wedding ceremony was to take place in the castle.

Gabriella awoke at dawn and found herself completely unable to get back to sleep. She rolled over and blinked slowly at the linen curtains that surrounded her bed, glowing pink with the day's first light.

This is my last night in the bed I grew up in, she thought to herself. It seemed ridiculous and absurd, and yet she knew it was the truth. She imagined Darrick lying awake in his parents' cottage on the other side of the village, imagined him thinking of her, and felt a tremor of nervous exhilaration.

Gabriella was a sensible girl. She knew that marriage did not usually mean happily ever after, regardless of what the fairy books said. She'd been around enough married people to know that even the best relationships were often fraught with challenges, disagreements, and even that most poisonous of all marital realities, boredom. She was not like Constance, who had grown up to be rather vain and silly, convinced that matrimony was the cure for all ills. She, Gabriella, knew that after the thrill of the honeymoon wore off, the work of marriage would occasionally be difficult.

And yet she also knew that, for reasons she did not fully comprehend, she had been granted a luxury not afforded to many princesses: she had been allowed to marry for love and not politics. After all, Darrick was the son of a common blacksmith, himself from a long line of pot-makers. There was no royalty in her fiancé's blood whatsoever. For this reason, Gabriella had spent years refusing to acknowledge what everyone else had known immediately: that they were meant for each other. As a girl, she had merely seen a dirty common boy, only permitted into the royal school because his parents had made a hefty tithe toward his education. Despite the sacrificial gesture of his parents, the boy had been insolent and brash, completely unimpressed by Her Royal Highness, Princess Gabriella. This had infuriated her, of course, and launched a rivalry that burnt (on her part) until they'd been sixteen years old.

It had all changed on the day that Darrick had defeated Gabriella in a practice duel. This had left her speechless with fury, since none of the other boys had ever bested her before. She had stormed outside, her face brick red with embarrassed indignation, and thrown her wooden practice sword into the grass. When Constance had tried to soothe her, Gabriella had nearly pushed her down the brook hill. Finally, unable to control herself, she had cornered Darrick between the bell tower and the castle wall and demanded that he show her the proper respect.

"I am the Princess of Camelot!" she had rasped hoarsely, leaning into his face. "Bow to me! Show me the respect that I deserve!"

She had known even then that it was a pathetic, stupid thing to say. No true princess ever had to command her subjects to bow to her. Darrick didn't bow, but he didn't mock her either.

"You want me to let you win the duels every time like all the other blokes just because you're the Princess?" he'd asked, squinting seriously at her. "Because if I were you, I'd want a better kind of respect than that. I'd want to be honoured for who I am, not just for my last name."

"How dare you?!" Gabriella had seethed. "You're just a blacksmith's son!"

"I'm the son of the best blacksmith in Camelot," Darrick had replied, lifting his chin. "That's no small feat. There's pride in that, you should know. If my father hadn't worked so hard to get me into the Royal Academy, I'd have been content to become a blacksmith like him and earn the same honour for my skills. What about you, Princess? You wish for me to respect you like all the rest, bowing to you in class but laughing at you behind your back? Or do you want me to honour you for true, for the girl you are and the woman you're becoming?"

Gabriella had not known what to say to that. It had never even occurred to her that the others had let her win duels simply because she was the Princess, or that their respect for her was anything but genuine. She'd wanted to argue with Darrick, but suddenly, horribly, she saw that he was right. As far as the rest of her classmates were concerned, there was nothing to her but a title. She'd simply stared at him, first with affronted anger, and then with shocked dismay. Finally, shamefully, she had turned and stalked away from him.