magnus_andersens
There is a particular kind of grief that is considered unworthy of sympathy. It is the grief of a person who was given a choice and made it, and must now live inside the consequences of their own making like a house they built themselves and cannot leave. It is, of all griefs, the loneliest. Nobody mourns on your behalf. You chose this, they say, as though choosing makes it hurt less.
Donna Lucia Maria chose.
She was a princess, which is to say she was an ornament that had developed the inconvenient habit of thinking. She was not permitted bread, was expected to love a prince she found deeply uninteresting, and had done what beautiful, starving, intelligent women so often do when left with too much feeling and nowhere to put it - she had fallen, completely and without dignity, in love.
The object of her affection was a knight. The knight was not, technically, a knight. This distinction mattered enormously to everyone except Donna Lucia Maria, which tells you nearly everything you need to know about her.
There is a tiger in this story, as there always is. There is also a wedding, a dungeon, a courtesan of devastating loveliness, and a pope who appeared briefly and with great efficiency.
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