Taressi and Marquaise followed the page to their master’s chambers in silence, it had appeared obvious to them both that Count Tomas was needed by her majesty. They had retired from the hall to prepare his chamber for him. As they filtered through the darkly lit halls of the palace, the only noise was the footfalls of the page and occasional rustle of the diathermanous skirts they both wore.
Taressi could not believe such opulence as they passed through the gilded halls of royalty. She could never have imagined so much wealth could be so vainly displayed. In a strange way, she was in awe of her new circumstance as she shuffled along. Trying to not be obvious in her quick glances side to side, forcing her lips to remain stoic and not reveal how dazzled she was. It was on these occasions that she relished her new life as her father’s tax to the count. The objects of beauty and depths of depravity she had experienced far surpassed anything that she could have imagined in that long forgotten life as a common.
Marquaise’s powder blue eyes watched only the slow passing of the great tiled floor in front of her gown. The feel of the long dark hair on her head as driving her mad, she had not felt hair on her neck or scalp for three years now, and this wig for public was quite uncomfortable. He would not even allow her own natural color. All must be of his choosing, that was the price she would pay for the rest of her life for the sins of her father. Marquaise blinked her long lashes trying to suppress the memories and regrets as she passed through the halls of Ostingham Palace.
She had once as a very young girl accompanied her father here, never leaving the side of his bodyguards. At the time she did not know why, but now, now that she was a woman she knew why her father had tried so hard to shield her from the world of the nobility. Shield her from men like, like Count Tomas of Aquee. Her tiny hands balled into fists clutching at her gown as a single tear began to slip from her eye and onto her cheek, as memories of a more recent time, a time when she was last home, a time when...
Marquaise remembered the day her life ended only so well that she could never quite keep the day from her mind for long. She remembered passing through her father’s private office, he was discussing the news that his lord, the late Count Geffroy of Aquee had died. He was speaking loudly about not serving the son of a pauper monk and a whore. He would see the rampant dragon of the House of Marchone down trodden and slain before he would pay full tribute to the loin spring of a consort and a priest. His red beard was flying about and he was rising his hands over his head and shouting loudly as Marquaise slid into he shadows of the doorway to listen to the business of men.
“I will be damned!” spat the flushed face Baron of Marchone to his assembled men, his son, Gunther the younger, the captain of his guard, Rasption, and a few other soldiers that Marquaise could not recognize from her secreted vantage point. “Since, his, excellency,” Gunther the elder, let the formal title slide from his tongue like sparks from steel, “the young Count of Aquee demands tribute, I say we send him one half his annual due, since he has but one half the blood of his title!” The old man whose red hair as beginning to fade bellowed to his lackeys. One of the hidden men began to speak, “Sir, are you not concerned about...” An overweight and past its prime fist landed hard upon a table cutting the man off abruptly. “No! I will not let myself, a Marchone, fear a man with the blood of a whore consort and an adulterous monk! What can a bastard do to threaten a man of proven ancestry? No, sir, we send half the tribute and see what this bastard is capable of!”
How prophetic those words her father spat had been, Marquaise thought as she watched a drop of tear fall to her tightly pushed and barely covered bosom. It as not a fortnight after she had slipped quickly away from her father’s office to avoid discovery that she and the world learned just what the bastard count was capable of.
She heard the echoing screams of her stepmother from down the hall of Marchone Manor. She could still feel how cold the stones were on her bare feet as she raced into the hall to find her stepmother collapsing in a fit before the open door of her father’s bedchamber in the dark of the hall. Marquaise ran though it as if she was hardly moving at all, her breasts seemed to move in slow, heavy motions as she ran, bouncing slowly with every motionless step beneath her thin chemise. It seemed hours before she reached the door and looked in.
The sight on the floor of her father’s chamber was abject horror made real. Her father lay wide-eyed on the cold stones. Dressed in only skin biting ropes, hips lips thickly gagged to stifle the sounds of his murder. His nude form lay on a gathering pool of blood that spilled about a shaft of iron, that still glowed from its baptism in the overly bursting flames from the bedchamber hearth. Marquaise could not take her blue eyes off the display of her father, stabbed without a piercing of his skin. That cruelly glowing shaft having been driven deep into his bowels from his exit. The sight of her father having been savaged was even more overcoming than the fact that he had been murdered. Marquaise tried to faint but could not. Her brother tried hard to pull her from the doorway had broke three of her nails on the heavy oak of the door before passing her off to a flock of nannies and guards and her own inconsolable sobs.