《Flatlander》04 - LILIAN - CASTLE GREENTREE

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From the third story of Greentree Keep, looking out a plate-glass window, Lilian watched as a party of horses rode through the castle gates. She brought up her hand and put the group between her thumb and index finger. If the Fates were just, she could pinch them right now, make them all go away. But when she pinched, and the horsemen remained, it further proved her theory that the Fates were not just and that she needed House wine.

But her father sent a man into the library, where she so often claimed to read and so often did not do more than drink, and had him remove all the wine he could find. She hadn’t expected that. She hadn’t expected that her father, Lord Halpern Bilt, knew her so well. Or maybe it wasn’t her father at all, but her mother. No matter. In either case, what they knew of her wasn’t enough to stop them from sending her away.

The riders meant marriage, and by the bannerman riding up to Greentree, House Bilt and House Jorbert were to join as one. That meant that she would go to Master Lance Jorbert of Redforest. She grimaced. Might as well throw her from the hoverstone now.

It was an advantageous match for her father. House Bilt’s ancestral hoverstone was the lowest of all hoverstones, its base floating two hundred hand-lengths above the Flatland. That was why he’d always been on the outskirts of political life; why he needed to marry off his daughter to gain some sense of status. The problem was that very few wanted to marry a girl whose dowry would be small and who, behind the grooms back, would be talket about--how the groom was wedding down. Literally, as all hoverstones were higher in height than hers. Not much better than Flatlanders, they would say; even the Highlands were higher, as their name implied.

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Yes, it would be advantageous for her father, but she didn’t much care. He was a weasel and her mother--well, she’d been made to marry a weasel, make love to a weasel, have his children. A weasel’s wife. And yet, she thought bitterly, what does that make you?

“Daughter to a weasel,” she said aloud. She started at the sound of her own voice. It was over-strained, unwell. The library was empty, thank the Fates. She didn’t want anyone to hear her weak disposition. To combat her inner-self, she said, “But I won’t be for long.”

No, you’ll be a Jorbert.

She shuddered.

“Lilian,” her mother said sternly. She appeared at the door; or had she been there a while. “Your father requests you presence.”

“Requests? Tell him I will not go.”

“Demands.”

Lilian turned, curtsied. “Then who am I to deny him the honor of my presence.” She met her mothers eyes and did not drop her gaze until she had walked all the way past. She left her mother standing at the edge of the library door, huffing and puffing, as was her way. Yes, Lady Bilt had married a weasel. But Lilian supposed that in one way her mother was lucky: at least she had not been made to marry a young Jorbert.

A Jorbert. Monsters, all of them.

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