From a Loyal Knight

This story is © copyrighted to Adrienne Wolter in 2003 and onwards. It was written on Saturday, April 3rd, 2004. Do not take this story.

This story was the random product of a Saturday's boredom without Ara, as well as about 10 poems (including 5 haikus). Heh. Anyway, as you can tell, I suck at writing in historical settings. *Runs around in circles like a chicken with no ehad - that's, uhm, right, no ehad* I am a disgrace to the world of medieval fiction! Ahh!

From a Loyal Knight

“It makes sense.”
Doubtful words. This girl was such an innocent. I was already starting to regret bringing her along.
She is to be Trimont’s next queen. She’s still a lass, though, or at least gives off the energy of one. Not nearly as calm as a proper princess. She is to marry when she reached the age of sixteen–in just ten months. So skinny and bounding with childlike energy that you’d never think her to be fifteen already.
“No it doesn’t,” I replied finally, patting my mount, giving her permission to drink from the brook that we had stopped at. “It makes sense for your elders to choose.” I dipped and plucked a daisy from the bank and carefully slid the end into the princess’ braid, making her grin. “Now, princesses don’t smile like that, my lady. Close your mouth. There we go,” I patted her on the head before turning to see if my mount was done drinking. She’d moved on further downstream to seek the perfect patch of grass.
“Stop calling me a lady, I don’t have to be one yet,” the princess called. She’d lifted her skirts and crossed the brook, and I frowned after her. “And I think I should choose my husband. How do my parents know what kind of husband I want?”
“They know what’s best for you,” I growled back half-heartedly. As a knight, I’d never marry, unless a high maiden’s kin took a liking to me. Our kingdoms, the united three, hadn’t ever believed in noble knights marrying anyone less noble.
“They don’t know what I cherish,” she answered, sizing up a tree. “They never speak to me at any times other than dinner. I speak to the maids. I speak to the butler. I do not speak to the king and queen. They’re much too busy to have a daughter,” the princess told me, not trying to hold back the bitterness she felt for her statement.
“And me?” I teased.
“Of course.” By now, she was already several branches up the tree. I’d learned before not to interfere with her climbing, be it on rocks, trees, or castle walls.
“If I am not to call you a lady, what am I to call you?”
“Call me Ecka.”
I had a bad feeling about this.
“You know as well as I that if someone were to hear me call you by your name that they’d think–”
“I mean in private, oh brilliant one,” she said with a grin and a hint of sarcasm.
“Alright, my–Ecka.”
“Your Ecka? A little possessive, aren’t we?”
Her eyebrows waggled. Exasperated, I just shook my head and went after my mount, who had wandered away since I’d let her go.

Once we had started back to the castle, the trees slowly thinned and gave way to a valley, filled with the Trimont kingdoms. They had been jointly ruled for a century, by three best friends who had, over the century, become one family. So many princes and princesses were married from different kingdoms that it was more common than not.
I had, over the year and a half that the king and queen of Ecka’s kingdom had entrusted her to my care, gotten to know the girl quite well. Maybe I was harboring some affection for the lass that I should not have. But if I was, I should try naught but destroy it. I am too old to even be considered as a suitor. They would want a ripe lad of seventeen or eighteen, not an experienced knight of twenty. It just wasn’t how things worked in Trimont.
I know I shouldn’t steal glances at her as often as I do, but she is the prettiest thing. She is not the most beautiful lady of all, but she doesn’t have to be. She has the softest red-brown locks and the imagination of many children together. And such a mind for matters of the kingdoms she has! Always a new idea to put across another kingdom’s rulers for improving something. They thought of her as invaluable.
She is invaluable to me, also. I cannot imagine what life will be like once her parents withdraw her from my care in the days before the wedding.

Nine months lay ahead until her sixteenth birthday and marriage. She was born in the final month of the year, when snow and ice coat the world, so that will be the month she is wed.
It is the end of the third month, when snow fuels the brooks that fill the forests, crisscrossing in every direction.
The king and queen have begun looking for a suitor. The other two kingdoms have been presenting their finest. I won’t be presented. It is too uncommon for someone from the same kingdom as the lady being wed to actually marry.
Ecka seems more wonderful every time I look at her. Soon she will be someone else’s wonder.

Six months. It is the season that the sun begins to glow, spreading its warmth. The king and queen have their eye on a yellow-haired lad of seventeen years. The boy seems very high-strung and proper for my Ecka.
I shan’t call her my Ecka, for she isn’t mine.

Now there are four months until the wedlock. They have chosen the yellow-topped lad. Ecka knows. She looks very unhappy about it.
Something odd happened this eve. When she helped me put my mount back into the stables, empty of anyone besides us, I felt her hand in the dark. He had run her hand across my cheek, lighter than the touch of a feather. She did not speak of it afterward, though. Was it a mistake? Was it intentional?
Does she maybe love me too?

I cannot believe what I am hearing! So many words of hate for this lad! It is three months until they are wedlock, but he is already courting her. She has told me she wants to throw a rock at him, so angry is she.
I asked Ecka if she sometimes wanted to throw a rock at me. She grinned in the way that I love, even though it is not ladylike in the least, and told me, “no, never.”

A month remains. Guests are already being invited from the far reaches of the kingdoms, for Trimont does spread far out in the valley and into the mountains. Now things cannot be changed.
I thought Ecka was going to kiss me yesterday, but she was reaching behind me for something. I did not see what. She looked embarrassed.

Guests are arriving. The wedding is in one week.

She kissed me.
I cannot believe what had happened when she did so, and so my feet had been rooted to the floor. I didn’t move as she ran out. She has been avoiding me since, always getting measurements for clothing. So many dresses! She could not wear half of them in one lifetime.

The wedding is set for tomorrow, but she came to my rooms this evening.
“Daniel?”
I had been reading when she had entered, without as much as a knock. But I knew it was her from the sound of her slippers on the stones. I have memorized the sound of them, so many times have I walked her back to her room when she has come to visit me at night.
“Yes, my lady?”
“I do not love Charles Risene. I don’t want to get married.”
And she was crying. I didn’t know how to comfort her. She’d never cried in front of me before. But she ran to me and put her arms around me, weeping into my shoulder.
I had held her still, wishing her to feel better. I wished that I could have been her suitor, not the yellow-haired lad.
But when her choking sobs had slowed down, she’d whispered something that I think I mistook for “I love you.” She can’t be saying that to me, not with a husband waiting for her.
“I love you!” she cried, pulling back. “I’ve loved you! I do not love Charles Risene, I love you! I want you to be my husband! Why can I not choose my own husband, who I know and care for already?”
“My lady?”
“Ecka....”
“Ecka?”
She leaned close to me, lips just catching mine. Her beautiful hands, fingernails painted a dazzling gold for the morning, pulled at my nightgown, and I ignored the instincts telling me to not let her unbutton it.
And that is why, my king, when she gave the suggestion that we run away together, I could not refuse. You see, your system of choosing the suitors of your daughters may be “the way,” but it must have torn apart so many more loves than just Ecka’s and mine.
I remain faithful to your Trimont. But my king, I will not bring your daughter back. I will not lose her. Rest assured that she is quite safe and happy with me.

Your loyal knight,
Daniel Mishire