Armour and Silk

ONE

"She's refusing to get out of bed. Just plain refusing." Linna's face was a flushed picture of agitation as she burst out of the princess' room, looking expectantly at me as I leaned back against the wall at my post, one foot raised back against it.

"I'd refuse too if I were her." Our task for today was to escort the princess on the first leg of a five-day journey northward to meet the man her mother intended her to marry. The Queen's order was for Kalona to be promised to him before we even thought about bringing her back to the capital. Judging by her refusal to get out of bed, I'd done well to mentally prepare myself to see out the rest of my days up at Brightavon.

Linna folded her arms at me.

"What do you expect me to do?"

"Go and try to talk some sense into her! We can't wait all day."

"I thought you were her lady-in-waiting? Isn't that what you do best?" On another day, Linna might have gracefully humoured me with a chuckle, but the tension that had built up over the past weeks in the lead-up to this trip had all of us on our last nerve. Kalona had always been unofficially renowned as the Queen's most 'difficult' child, and she'd been putting in work owning that title ever since her mother's announcement of her intention to pair her off with the Lord of Brightavon.

***

"Perhaps the young Lord Rovan?" The House Advisor had suggested. I'd accompanied Kalona to the meeting where her hand in marriage had been discussed as though it was an antique to be auctioned off. "He is newly twenty-one, and recently completed his knight's campaign, I hear. I'm sure he'd be perfectly suitable-"

"Perfectly suitable?" Queen Ilana interjected. She rarely raised her voice, but she had a practiced ability to lace her tone with a poison that left you feeling ailed even if it wasn't aimed at you. The House Advisor blanched, wringing his hands nervously together over the table. "You wish to disgrace me by marrying my daughter to someone perfectly suitable?"

Of course Ilana's concern was her own reputation. It took everything in me to keep from rolling my eyes. I was concealed in the shadows near the heavy oaken door of the conferencing hall, but I'd heard myriad stories about the things Ilana was capable of. I didn't want to risk the one about her having eyes in the back of her head being true.

I risked a glance at Kalona, whose usual sword-straight posture had deflated further and further into a sullen slouch as the meeting had urged ahead. I remarked that she had yet to say a word. In a meeting that was to decide her future, who reigned alongside her when she herself eventually became Queen, she had said nothing. She didn't need to. Her sentiments regarding the issue were as plain on her face as spilled ink in snow. The conversation continued irregardless.

"I meant no offence, my Queen, simply that-"

"Might I remind you, Wallen, that ours is one of the most ancient bloodlines of our world, and that I will not have it tarnished by the likes of Lord Rovan. You know as well as I do that he's known as The Hornet for the amount of pollinating he does. Or perhaps your eyes and ears don't work as they used to?"

Wallen was ancient. His face had succumbed to gravity many years ago, giving him the look of a melting bust of clay draped in the Queen's colours. His once vivid blue eyes had acquired a rheumy wanness, and he walked with such labour that it seemed a wonder when he roused from his chamber each morning. Yet the queen refused to replace him. He had been her mother's advisor, and her mother's before her, and was one of the last living witnesses to the glory days of old that Ilona so keenly sought to reclaim. Instead, our once peaceful country was due to emerge limping into its tenth consecutive year of war, and despite an unwavering show of fear-inspired fealty from each of her own courts, cracks were beginning to emerge. I wondered if Ilana had even a modicum of the self-awareness required to acknowledge that each of those ten long years of war had been under her reign, and hers alone.