Havoc's Daughters

Chapter 1 - Diannah on Day 1: part II - Dread Secret

  Diannah would sooner have accepted a viper from his hands. She stared as if hypnotized as the small sack dangled, swaying slightly, on a drawstring long enough to hang as a pendant from one’s neck. Such a small thing, yet it amounted to his last will and testiment.

“No,” she said. 

“Diannah,” Da began.

“Da,” she interrupted, before he could say anything more, before she could be forced to argue with him in front of witnesses. “I respectfully request a private audience.” While she’d inherited the duchy from her maternal grandfather when she came of age two years past, and technically outranked a margrave, he’d always be her father.

Silence reigned. Diannah fought to keep her breaths slow and measured. Of the inhabitants in the room, only Da looked at her. Da…and the Roenish captain.

Her father’s eyes were haunted by sadness, as they’d been the past two years. She felt, inexplicably, that she had betrayed him.

“I have always encouraged the children of my house to be strong of will, and independent. Do you defy me now?”

“I request a private audience,” she repeated, feeling mulish. 

The councilmen and city watch officers shuffled their feet, not meeting anyone’s eyes as they began to make their ways toward the front entrance.

But Da stopped them.

“No,” he said. “Stay. We will return momentarily.” He turned from the table and Diannah led the way out to the back court. 

The matron was stirring up the banked fire in the outdoor kitchen. Sausage patties and chopped onions waited on the sideboard, and the air now smelled of woodsmoke and baking bread. Da sent her inside, promising not to be long.

At the center of the dun stone flagging of the yard, well beyond the range of other ears, Diannah turned to face her father. “I’m not going, Da,” she told him, keeping her voice low. “Don’t tell me to, not in front of them. ‘Never give an order you know won’t be obeyed’,” she quoted.

He smiled sadly, and reached out his left hand to touch her hair, pulling a single curl from the heavy mass cascading down her back. It struggled like a landed fish between his fingertips. “You have my mother’s hair. Did I ever tell you? I missed her so much.”

Hoofbeats drummed in Diannah’s chest. No, he had never told her that. She had always assumed the tint had been a watered version of her own mother’s magenta locks, the curls happenstance. 

The depiction of the Empress on gaming cards suddenly took on alarming conotations.

Da let the ringlet wriggle free, allowing it to rejoin its fellows fluffed on her back and shoulders. His voice dropped. Not even the buzzing flies could have heard him. “For those of our blood, belief can shape reality,” he reminded. “Sometimes even a stray desire can be enough. Always be aware of your feelings, or they’ll manifest in ways you don’t intend.”

A movement at the corner of her eye caught her attention in time to see a cinder cat rise from the ashes raked from the fire. The phantom was a large one, with patches of gleaming black amidst the powder grey. Diannah swallowed dryly at the timely reinforcement of her father’s words.

His hand brushed her cheek then, and for the first time she realized his quill callus was more pronounced than those gained from any hilts. In the two years since that exquisite, awful summer, Da’d been spending more and more time buried in books, documents and cases of law. The tenacity and ingenuity of the border scout who’d won fame as Havoc had been changing over the last two decades. He now fought his battles in Council and Court rather than in the forests.