CASPIAN #3
A blush stains her cheeks and she nods, a strained smile on her face. So she doesn’t like the prospect either— good, that makes two of us .
“About that,” she says carefully. “Will you prefer our residence be here at the palace or at one of my family estates? ”
The wine is warming my blood fairly well by now and I meet her gaze which is carefully blank. I can tell she’s very invested in my answer but doesn’t want to appear so.
“Frankly, I don’t care where you reside, my dear,” I state.
“This is a political marriage, nothing more. You can do whatever you want—fly your falcons, drink your wine, have an affair—skies the limit, literally.” I hold up my glass, having just thought of something.
“On second thought, be sure to send me wine shipments, that’ll be your only responsibility. ”
She looks disappointed for a moment before she hides it. “Is it because I’m—” she stops abruptly, her face growing even more red.
“Because what?” I prompt.
She leans into me. “Because I’m not a man ?” She whispers.
I laugh out loud and look at her in amusement. “Goodness no, I don’t have a preference when it comes to gender, darling.” I tilt my head at her. “You don’t seem like someone taken by fairytale notions…”
“I don’t want this anymore than you do, Your Highness—”
“Caspian.”
“Caspian—but I did have hope that one day it wouldn’t be such a burden,” she peers at me out of the corner of her eye. “That we could at least grow to be friends.”
“I don’t have friends,” I say automatically.
“You should prepare yourself, Annika. I have never been anything more than a disappointment to my family, and I don’t plan on changing that anytime soon.
Your house can attempt to use this marriage for whatever gain they think they can garner but I will have no part in any of it. ”
Her mouth presses into a thin line in displeasure but my comment has my desired outcome when she turns away to end the conversation.
The less she expects of me, the better. The last thing I need, besides having to suffer through whatever hell this marriage will be, is a shadow pining after me on top of that.
By the time the main course is served, I’m several glasses deep and the wine haze has hit me.
Lady Annika made a gallant second attempt to engage me in conversation but the only topics she brought up were birds and wine—not interested at all in birds and only marginally about wine.
She even attempted to find out what my interests are, bless her, but after I once more deflected the question with a drunken comment, she realized it was futile and turned to talk to her dinner companion on her other side.
“I heard Teal is about to fall.” I turn to my left to see Lady Annika’s father, Lord Glibben, directing the comment to my father.
“Yes,” My father says loudly. “All thanks to Aldric. His leadership has been instrumental to expanding our eastern border.”
“And with Lord Haldon’s help, we’ll be able to achieve even more success on that front,” Aldric replies. He raises his glass to the older man sitting next to him. I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes but I can’t seem to hold my tongue.
“I expect it’s rather easy to win when your opposition has nothing more than sharpened sticks to defend themselves,” I say bitterly.
Our half of the table falls silent as the attention turns to me. I grab the wine and refill my glass.
“Seems more like a slaughter than any sort of real victory,” I shrug and take a large sip. I slouch back, meeting Aldric’s eyes over the rim of my glass.
“Those backwood towns breed unrest,” Lord Haldon states. “Better to tax them ruthlessly or simply eliminate them and move our own landholders in.”
“You mean give the land to the Houses to build estates and then enslave the previous inhabitants.” I state.
“Do you sympathize with the commoners then?” Lord Haldon asks.
“Well, when you’re paraded around the aftermath as a child, the horrors tend to stick with you,” I say, referencing our lovely childhood where father would take Aldric and I out to a town his army had just leveled and force us to walk among the wreckage.
Usually talking of the benefits of some such tactical maneuver or taxation method.
“Or at least for those of us with a soul.”
“One must have a certain constitution for such things,” Aldric says condescendingly. “The wine and revelry must have weakened yours, brother.”
“God, I hope so—I’d hate to be sober for all of this,” I jest.
Uncomfortable laughs echo around the table.
“Quite.” Aldric’s eyes slide to me with a smirk. “Sober men tend to remember what they’ve done. I imagine that’s inconvenient for you.”
The atmosphere in the room plummets and I have to bite back the snarl threatening to escape.
“Oh? And what is it I should be remembering, brother?”
My tone is low, threatening, daring him to bring up the past—a dangerous, provocative current that is constantly the source of contention between us and always in the forefront of both our minds.
My father clears his throat loudly—an explicit warning.
After a tense moment, Aldric seems to remember his present company and takes a sip of wine, shaking his head.
“It’s a tragedy isn’t it? Lacking responsibility you hide behind cowardice and call it the moral high ground.” Silence descends upon the table. “You drown your guilt in wine and sarcasm like it makes you better than us,” Aldric says. “But the truth is—you’re not—you’re just… irrelevant .”
My hand tightens around my glass so hard it’s a miracle the stem doesn’t shatter.
I throw back the wine and aggressively shove my chair away from the table as I get to my feet.
Painful memories feel like knives in my chest and I want nothing more than to wipe that smug smile off Aldric’s fucking face but I can’t.
I have to sit here and take the abuse because there are people who are counting on me.
People who rely on me. And none of these wastes of space know a goddamn thing about it.
The thought pushes through the violent haze enough to steady my impulse to lunge at him.
I slam the empty glass down on the table so hard the dishes rattle.
“If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ve had enough moral decay for one evening.”
I don’t dare look at my father—I can already feel the rage emanating from him. Instead, I fix Aldric with one more scathing look before storming away from the table.
“You’ll have to excuse my brother—he’s always had a flare for the dramatic—”
I don’t bother listening to whatever else Aldric is saying before the heavy doors close behind me. My relationship with my brother has always been tenuous but now it’s downright hostile. He blames me for what happened— the scandal that rocked the De’Vero rule.
Scandal —the word grates on me. An oversimplification of the actual horror of what happened to our family.
But it’s a shadow Aldric will have to rule under one day and he blames me for it.
Even though it was my father’s idea to push it all under the rug and move on despite the pain we were all feeling in the aftermath.
Get over it. Man up. Forget it ever happened.
Until the day he’d said those words to me, I think I had deceived myself into justifying what our House did in the name of the crown.
But after what I went through and his blatant disregard for my pain, I realized the truth.
Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, and the sooner I learned how to spot them under all the guises, the better chance I had at taking them all down.