Copyright © 2015 Naoko Smith
This is a re-edited version of Chapter 1. (I added to the chapter, and also cut it in half and put half after Chapter 2.) Thank you so much for the feedback, which I'm working hard to take on board.
Please leave comments for me. Thank you! (Diolch.)
Lady Arianna el Jien van Sietter opened her round blue eyes and stared dreamily at the cool early morning light dancing on her ceiling. Her windows were open, the shutters back and a light breeze lifted the muslin curtains against the exquisitely painted heavier curtains which she had neglected to draw over her windows the previous night.
Arianna lay with her large creamy breasts rolling free in the white lacy linen of her nightdress. Her blue eyes were clear beneath soft lids, her face warm and sleepy, her big body loose-limbed in the big bed.
She was still feeling sleepy so instead of reaching for the scroll she was currently working through, she snuggled back into her pillows, allowing a hand to creep over one big hip. She pulled at the linen covering her legs and fingered the soft warm flesh of her thigh. Slowly her own fingers came caressing her sex, poking through the short curled hair, parting the labia to find the soft wetness of the vulva and the excitable bump of flesh that was her clitoris. She fingered herself dreamily, going through images of a faceless man who might make love to her in ways she thought were so outrageous that she began blushing alone in her own bed.
But then she felt the yearning rising in her soft belly for the actual pressure of another body to her body, someone-else's hand to explore her sex (shyly she wriggled and blushed). She thought how no man seemed interested and became sad. She lost the wish to pleasure herself in the longing for someone-else to share pleasure.
Now she was not even in the mood for her favourite fantasy: the one in which she pictured two lean and hard-muscled young men enjoying each other's bodies -- one of them in military uniform! This totally inappropriate scenario could make her so excited it had surprisingly satisfying results.
Her brain started fretting about the housekeeping. 'Flour is so expensive, the accounts are out of balance. Clair must ask van Sietter for more money. Again! Such folly. van H'las is seeking an agreement that will free up trade and make wheat cheaper. If wheat is cheaper, surely the housekeeping budget will balance. If I am fretting over the price of wheat, what must the poor be feeling for it? van Sietter must heed the calls of the merchants this time and answer van H'las' appeals for accord.... Angels! I may as well get up.'
Arianna flung back the embroidered bedsheets and soft silk quilted covers and slid out of the comfortable hollow of warmth her body had made in the night. She reached up over her head and stretched her plump curving body in her lace and linen nightdress. Her arms stretched, her fingers spreading out, her eyes closed and her jaw stretched in a long yawn. Through the thin white cloth of her summer nightdress showed her milk-white waist and her back, her large breasts and her wide hips. Her warm body was as taut as a bow then she let herself go into her day.
She flung the white lace dressing-gown matching her nightdress around her shoulders and walked quickly out onto the open veranda around the inner courtyard of the family quarters. Strong white sunlight was falling into the leafy shade of the flowerbeds and the sparkling drops of a fountain dancing under the old pear tree.
Down the veranda all the bedroom doors were latched. Her father by marriage Lord van Sietter lived with his second wife, a Vilandian Princess, in a new palace he had built himself over the hills in the town of Arventa. Arianna had no idea where her husband currently was and she tried not to care. Her brother by marriage Captain-Lord Tashka el Maien van Sietter was out on summer manoeuvres.
Gently Arianna opened the door opposite her own. Light fell dimly in the nursery through the curtains patterned with dancing animals. She went to the little bed and stooped over, her face suddenly golden warm with tenderness.
Arkyll was still asleep. He had black curling hair like Clair's, his sturdy bone structure was from Arianna and his whole face was so mixed between her features and Clair's that you could not say whom he resembled. Only when he cried, the tears welling up in his exquisite slanted blue eyes, he looked like his Uncle Tashka.
Arianna left him sleeping and went back to her room where her maid-servant was laying out a pretty blue and white frock on a chair. Arianna caught sight of a faded cotton dress tossed on the bed and picked it up with a fond smile. "Oh um, that dress," Lisette said, "I was about to give it away ...." Lady Arianna said: "I am only going about the kitchens and whatever, this will do." She pressed the soft old cotton affectionately to her cheek. Lisette turned her head down with a rueful grimace.
Arianna sat down at the beautiful inlaid dressing table that had been her husband's wedding present to her. It was very elegant, someone had made an excellent choice of it for him. Her eyes slid to a pile of scrolls which lay to one side, pushing some delicate glass perfume flasks out of their place. She edged one of the scrolls further down round its wooden baton. Lisette made a grumble because she had moved her head and she frowned into the looking glass. An unattractive motionless pale visage frowned back at her. No wonder the men let her alone, what man would be interested in such a face? As Lisette finished, Arianna turned her head and smiled; her face broke suddenly into a mobile loveliness sweet as the summer dawn. The maid-servant could not forbear to lean closer to her, before leaning hurriedly away again.
Passing from the corridors into the big entrance hall, Arianna saw that the castle doors were open. She went through the dim echoing space out into the daylight and stood on the broad top step, with the new ramp on her left running down the side of the steps.
She always felt bad at heart when she saw the ramp. Her husband had wanted it built for soldiers he brought back from the war who were now in wheelchairs but the work was delayed for several months because Lord van Sietter quibbled over the cost. Arianna felt guilty that it had taken her so long to understand what was to do. Her brother by marriage Tashka had finally brought the problem to her attention, then she had made the money surreptitiously available for the ramp from her own finances. She felt it that her quarrel with Clair had caused her to ignore what it was he was about with this and other projects for those of his people who were in need.
Early morning light fell brightly over the cobbled courtyard. They were opening up the castle gates. Arianna saw through the gates the road from the castle running into the rolling low hills to the left, splitting to the right to go down to Sietter town.
Through hills now green with summer, the River Arven carved out the passage that was the Maier Pass. Flowing down to the river port Paviat on the border with H'las and Vail, the snow-fed river which started as tumbling streams in the Northern Mountains, ran on to the sea at Port H'las. Arianna looked to the West, where the Maier Pass led to Arventa and to court.
Far to the South lay her childhood home Iarve, through many other regions; so far that it was easier to bring goods from Iarve across the sea and up the Maier Pass to Sietter and thence to court. Arianna thought of all the regions scattered between the fields of Iarve and the hills of Sietter, through which the merchants wove their webs of industry and trade. She thought of the bickering aristocrats bound together by marriages, of her own marriage which had brought the sunny lands of Iarve rich in wheat and flax and silk into accord with Sietter, with its weaving factories on the plains in the town of Arventa.
Arianna thought of the disastrous collapse of van Sietter's marriage to Lady Anastelle el F'lara. Lady el F'lara came down the river from the harsh rocky territory of the Northern mountains to live in these quiet hills. People did not of course speak of her in Castle Sietter but Arianna had heard whispers at court of how this seemingly perfect Lady had finished by flouting the code of honour in spectacular fashion. The scandalous breaking of her marriage threatened the bond between the V'ta region and Sietter. There was some extraordinary demand the el F'lara family were still making about which even her brother by marriage would say casually: "it is the Northern code, my dear." Arianna knew better than to interfere: a mere younger child, a woman to be moved about like a chess piece, not choose what part she might play in the game. Her lip curled. At least by remaining a chaste maiden in her husband's castle, she was not threatening political relations between her home and her marital regions. Yet.
She looked to the East where the scattered regions were not in secure alliance: the grassy plains of Vail, the woodland and fields of Thiel and the vineyards of Athagine. Her own first cousin, the young Lord who would inherit Vail, had served alongside Clair and Tashka el Maien: brother officers, but this close bond of honour was undermined by her marriage. Her cousin had once hoped for her hand himself even though their families were already inter-married. He had cut his friendship with Clair although he remained intimately close to Tashka.
The son of the infamous el V'lairs van Athagine was her husband's friend, they were reputed to hunt ladies together, but this was not enough to guarantee an accord in trade. High taxes on wines brought through Sietter from Athagine and Vail had led to bands of desperate smugglers roaming the hills. Arianna frowned as she thought of the dwindling numbers of flotillas of barges and caravans of horses travelling the Arven River and Maier Pass, of trade driven to the long overland route through other regions instead of coming the easier route to court from the port cities in H'las because the high taxes and costs of security made the Maier Pass too expensive.
Arianna's frown hardened. She turned from the view of the rolling low Sietter hills, bitterness clouding her blue eyes. She had heard it said that Tarra el V'lair van Athagine refused to offer Clair el Maien a glove for spending the night with his then wife, he said would offer it to his wife for taking up time he could have spent with his friend. That was not the worst of the stories told about el V'lair and el Maien and their play in the pink-fingered set at court. But those other stories did not involve a Lady of great beauty and high intelligence, who had escaped a tyrannical marriage arrangement and gone back to her home region to re-marry happily and resume her interests in poetry and literature.
Poetry! what was that. Did it feed the poor? Could it address the violence which Arianna was obliged to witness between the menfolk of the high nobility. If it was not warfare, it was duelling. They lived in a web of violence as the merchants lived in a web of trade. There was barely a Lord she knew of who was not scarred by it: her own younger brother had had his face and one leg completely ruined by wardogs in a peacetime exercise. Here in Sietter she was in the worst of it, there were so many men who had come back from the war with H'las devastated in body and mind. Guiltily she looked over at the ramp down the side of the steps again.
Even a brief friendship she had once enjoyed had been brutally ended when her husband challenged el Parva van Selaine over a poem foolishly dedicated to herself. That was what poetry did, it led to some silly young man being slashed in the face for the sake of a code of honour that brought neither profit nor prosperity. Honour! What was honour? Arianna flattered herself she was at the least of it no stupid languishing poet to believe her husband might do such a terrible thing out of love. Her upper lip curled in scorn as she turned back into the big echoing entrance hall.
Then she smiled indulgently, seeing the two footmen who used wheelchairs racing each other through to the kitchens. They braked sharply on seeing her, nearly shooting the trays of crockery on their laps onto the stone floor.
She loved to see the two young men enjoying themselves and only shook her head, going to walk with them to the stone-flagged kitchens. She rested a hand on the shoulder of one of them as she went.
